My Life on the Road (7 page)

Though I had imagined my life would be that of a journalist and observer, sure that I didn’t want to be responsible for the welfare of others as I had been for my mother, I found myself committed to colleagues and a magazine that made me lie awake at night wondering if we could make the payroll. Yet this responsibility had become a community, not a burden.

I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us—which is both the good and the bad news.

Finally, I could see that the love of independence and possibilities that I absorbed from my father now had a purpose. All movements need a few people who can’t be fired. When you’re dependent, it’s very hard not to be worried about the approval of whoever and whatever you’re dependent on. For me, a mix of freedom and insecurity felt like home and allowed me to become an itinerant organizer.

This is not a calling you will learn about from a career counselor, or get recruited for, or even see in a movie. It’s unpredictable and often means patching together a livelihood from speaking fees, writing, foundations, odd jobs, friends, and savings. But other than becoming a rock musician or a troubadour, nothing else allows you to be a full-time part of social change. It satisfies my addiction to freedom that came from my father, and my love of community that came from seeing the price my mother paid for having none. That’s why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change. Following them has given me a road that isn’t solitary like my father’s, or unsupported like my mother’s. They taught me to talk as well as listen. They also showed me that writing, which is solitary, is fine company for organizing, which is communal. It just took me a while to discover that both can happen wherever you are.

In 1963 I was making a living as a freelance journalist, writing profiles of celebrities and style pieces—not the kind of reporting I had imagined when I came home from India. I read that Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading a March on Washington, a massive campaign for jobs, justice, new legislation, and federal protection for civil rights marchers who were being beaten, jailed, and sometimes murdered in the South, all with police collusion. However, I couldn’t get an assignment to write about it.

True, I did have a long-sought assignment to write a profile of James Baldwin—who would be speaking at the march—but following him around amid multitudes seemed impossible, intrusive, or both. Plus I could see and hear his speech better on television. Also the press was full of dire warnings about too few people and failure, or too many people and violence. This march was being called too dangerous by a White House worried that it could turn off moderates in Congress who were needed to pass the Civil Rights Act, and too tame by Malcolm X, who said that asking for help from Washington was too needy, not self-sufficient, and unlikely to succeed.

For all those reasons, I decided not to go to the march—right up until I found myself on my way. All I can say years later is: If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.

On that hot August day, I was just one person being carried slowly along in a sea of humanity. I washed up next to “Mrs. Greene with an e,” an older, plump woman wearing a straw hat, who was marching with her grown-up, elegant daughter. As Mrs. Greene explained, she had worked in Washington during the Truman administration, in the same big room as white clerks, but segregated behind a screen. She hadn’t been able to protest then, so she was protesting now.

As we neared the Lincoln Memorial, she pointed out that the only woman seated on the speakers’ platform was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that had been doing the work of racial justice since the 1930s, yet even she hadn’t been asked to speak. Mrs. Greene wanted to know:
Where is Ella Baker? She trained all those SNCC young people. What about Fannie Lou Hamer? She got beaten up in jail and sterilized in a Mississippi hospital when she went in for something else entirely. That’s what happens—we’re supposed to give birth to field hands when they need them, and not when they don’t. My grandmother was dirt poor and was paid seventy-five dollars for every live birth. The difference between her and Fannie Lou? Farm equipment. They didn’t need so many field hands anymore. These are black women’s stories, who will tell them?

I hadn’t even noticed the absence of women speakers. Also I’d never thought about the racist reasons for controlling women’s bodies. I felt a gear click into place in my mind. It was like India, where high-caste women were sexually restricted and women at the bottom were sexually exploited. This march was magnetic because living in India had made me aware of how segregated my own country was. But only Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste—and how women’s bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

Mrs. Greene’s daughter rolled her eyes as her mother told me about complaining to their state delegation leader. He had countered that Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson were singing.
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Singing isn’t speaking,
she told him in no uncertain terms.

I was impressed. Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously.
You white women,
Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind,
if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

As streams of people surged toward the Lincoln Memorial and the speakers’ platform, the three of us got separated. I used my press credentials to climb the steps, hoping to see them. But when I turned around, all I could see was an ocean of upturned faces. It was a scene I will never forget. Stretching over the expanse of green, past the reflecting pool, past the Washington Monument, all the way to the Capitol, there were a quarter of a million people. The sea of humanity looked calm, peaceful, not even pressing to come closer to the speakers, as if each one felt responsible for proving that the fears of violence and disorder were wrong. We were like a nation within a nation. From nowhere, a thought rose up:
I wouldn’t be anywhere else on this earth.

Martin Luther King, Jr., read his much-anticipated speech in a deep and familiar voice. I’d always imagined that if I were present at the creation of history, I would know it only long afterward, yet this was history in the moment.

As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” And he did begin the “I have a dream” litany from memory, with the crowd calling out to him after each image—
Tell it!
What would be most remembered had been least planned.

I hoped Mrs. Greene heard a woman speak up—and make all the difference.

F
IFTY YEARS LATER
I
stood again with thousands who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the anniversary of that first march—and this time there were women’s voices. Bernice King, who had been an infant at home when her father gave that first speech, spoke about the absence of women in 1963. There was also Oprah Winfrey, who had been a nine-year-old girl in Mississippi when Dr. King spoke, and Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy, the president who the marchers had hoped would disobey his political advisers, leave the White House, and just appear—but he never did. Finally, there was President Barack Obama, twice elected president of the United States, a possibility even Dr. King hadn’t dreamed of.

This was huge progress, yet nothing can make up for truths untold. As Dr. King once said, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” If Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer and others had been heard fifty years ago—if women had been half the speakers in 1963—we might have heard that the civil rights movement was partly a protest against the ritualistic rape and terrorizing of black women by white men.
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We might have known that Rosa Parks had been assigned by the NAACP to investigate the gang rape of a black woman by white men—who had left her for dead near a Montgomery bus stop—before that famous boycott. We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.
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Mrs. Greene knew that. She also knew it was all about keeping women from controlling their own bodies. It has been part of the history of this country ever since Columbus captured Native women as sex slaves for his crew, and expressed surprise when they fought back.
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I knew Mrs. Greene couldn’t possibly be alive to see women speaking a half-century later, but I hoped her daughter was watching. Back then, she had been impatient with her mother’s complaints, but I bet now she would be proud.

After these fiftieth anniversary speeches, I found myself standing with a group of young African American women, some wearing Smith College T-shirts. Yolanda King, Martin and Coretta King’s daughter, had gone there, and these women knew I had, too. We took photos with our cell phones. I told them that my class of 1956 included not one African American student—or Negro girl, as everyone then would have said—and when I asked a man in the Smith admissions office why, he said, “We have to be very careful about educating Negro girls because there aren’t enough educated Negro men to go around.”

The young women laughed at this sexist/racist double whammy—and hugged me with sympathy, as if I had been the wronged one—and in a way, they were partly right. White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.

These young women were not looking to Washington, as Malcolm X might have feared, nor were they waiting to be asked to speak. They were complete unto themselves, as in the line from one of Alice Walker’s poems in
Revolutionary Petunias:

Blooming Gloriously

For its Self

Malcolm X would have been proud of them, too. I knew the oldest of his six daughters, Attallah Shabazz, an elegant and experienced version of those self-possessed young women. She was a writer, speaker, activist, and, by then, a grandmother herself. Getting to know her had been a gift of the road.

When we talked again, she told me something I’d never heard or read. Malcolm X had been in Washington for that historic 1963 march. He stayed in the hotel suite of actor and activist Ossie Davis, who spoke at the march, and made sure Dr. King knew he was there in support. But as his daughter explained, “He also knew his presence would have disrupted or split the focus—and he was a supporter of the big picture.”

Somehow I found this little-known fact very moving. These two men seemed to be growing toward each other. Dr. King was becoming more radical by speaking out on issues like the Vietnam War, and Malcolm X was beginning to talk about a bloodless revolution. Some tragedies become more tragic. They might have become part of the same talking circle.

Thanks to Mrs. Greene—and many others brave enough to stand up for themselves and other women—I began to understand that females were an out-group, too. That realization solved such mysteries as why the face of Congress was male but the face of welfare was female; why homemakers were called women who “don’t work,” though they worked longer, harder, and for less pay than any other class of worker; why women did 70 percent of the productive labor in the world, paid and unpaid, yet owned only 1 percent of the property; why
masculinity
meant leading and
femininity
meant following in the odd dance of daily life.

More than ever, I found myself wanting to report on this new view of the world as if everyone mattered. But it was still the 1960s, and even my most open-minded editor explained that if he published an article saying women were equal, he would have to publish one next to it saying women were not—in order to be objective.

I had retreated into writing profiles of Margot Fonteyn, the dancer I couldn’t be, or Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, and other authors I admired—which seemed as close as I would ever get to being an author myself. Then two women from a lecture bureau wrote to ask if I would speak to groups who had expressed curiosity about this new thing called women’s liberation. I’d recently written a piece for my column in
New York
magazine, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” It had been triggered by my own click of consciousness—namely, that I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I’d had years before. Like many women, I’d been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies.

I was intrigued by the offer, but I had a big problem: I was terrified of public speaking. I’d so often canceled at the last minute when magazines booked me on television to publicize this or that article—as writers were often expected to do—that some shows had blacklisted me. Fortunately, I had a friend named Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneer of nonsexist, multiracial child care in New York, a fearless speaker, a mother, and a member of an extended black family in rural Georgia—all things I was not.

We had met when I wrote about her community child care center for
New York
magazine
.
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As we sat on child-size chairs, sharing lunch on paper plates, her one assistant, a young Italian radical, told us he was sad: the girl he loved wouldn’t marry him because he wouldn’t allow her to work after marriage. Dorothy and I didn’t know each other, but we went to work pointing out parallels between equality for women and the rest of his radical politics. It actually worked.

Since we had been successful one on one, Dorothy suggested we speak to audiences as a team. Then we could each talk about our different but parallel experiences, and she could take over if I froze or flagged.

Right away we discovered that a white woman and a black woman speaking together attracted far more diverse audiences than either one of us would have done on our own. I also found that if I confessed my fear of public speaking, audiences were not only tolerant but sympathetic. Public opinion polls showed that many people fear public speaking even more than death. I had company.

We started in school basements with a few people on folding chairs, and progressed to community centers, union halls, suburban theaters, welfare rights groups, high school gyms, YWCAs, and even a football stadium or two. Soon we discovered the intensity of interest in the simple idea that each person’s shared humanity and individual uniqueness far outweighed any label by group of birth, whether sex, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religious heritage, or anything else. That’s why my first decade or so on the road wasn’t spent going to meetings of the Business and Professional Women or the American Association of University Women or even the National Organization for Women. I was traveling to campuses, meetings of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the United Farm Workers, 9-to-5, which was a new group of and for clerical workers, lesbian groups sometimes excluded both by mainstream feminists and by gay men, and the political campaigns of anti–Vietnam War and new feminist candidates.

We came to see our job as creating a context in which audiences themselves could become one big talking circle, and discover they were neither crazy nor alone in their experiences of unfairness or efforts to be both their unique selves and to find a community. As in India all those years earlier, they told their own stories. Often, these talking circles went on twice as long as our talks.

When we first started speaking at the very end of the 1960s, the war in Vietnam was the main cause of activism. Buildings were being occupied and draft cards burned. At the same time, the gay and lesbian movement was moving out of the underground and into a public arena, and the Native American movement was trying to stop the purposeful obliterating of their languages, culture, and history. As always, the idea of freedom was contagious.

A few years earlier in the 1960s, women a decade or so older than I had begun to reject the “feminine mystique” of the suburbs, as brilliantly and lethally described by Betty Friedan in her best seller, and to demand women’s rightful place in the paid workforce. Friedan had dared to name this glorified consumer role that women’s magazines were forcing on readers—though to be fair, advertisers were forcing it on editors—but younger and more radical women didn’t want just a job and a piece of the existing pie. They wanted to bake a new pie altogether.

Eventually these more conservative women came to agree that feminism had to include all women—lesbians, women on welfare, the intertwining of sex and race for women of color; everyone—and the more radical women of diverse races and classes no longer turned up their noses at the idea of making change from inside the system as well as outside. Though the starting places of these various activist groups had been very different and had created pain and misunderstanding, by the end of the 1970s they came together as fractious, idealistic, diverse, and effective parts of the same movement.

Given my age of just over thirty, I was in between these two groups of women—one trying to integrate and the other to transform. But because of my experience, I was drawn to the more radical and younger ones. I wasn’t married and living in the suburbs. I’d always been in the workforce, but the gender ghetto in journalism was not just a glass ceiling, it was a glass box. Also India had taught me that change grows from the bottom, like a tree, and that caste or race can double or triple women’s oppression.

Soon feminism became a brushfire that spread coast to coast—and some people viewed it with the same alarm. To the religious right wing and much of the mainstream, we were defying God, family, and the patriarchy they decreed. To the left wing and some in the mainstream, bringing up bias against females was a distraction from struggles over class, race, and other issues that were taken more seriously, because they also affected men. Nonetheless, the idea of equality was so contagious that the right wing would soon rate feminism as a danger right up there with secular humanism and godless Communism. The American mainstream began to support issues of equality in public opinion polls, even when some of those issues were still thought of simply as “life”—think of sexual harassment or domestic violence.

After Dorothy had a baby and decided to travel less, my partners became friends and colleagues like Margaret Sloan, a black feminist poet and activist from Chicago’s South Side, and Florynce Kennedy, a civil rights lawyer and an infinitely quotable and charismatic speaker. Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. “If you’re lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,” she said patiently, “you don’t send somebody to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!”

I always spoke first—especially after Flo, I would have been an anticlimax—and we each talked about our own experience of seeing talent wasted by imaginary limits of race, gender, class, sexuality, and so on—including the prison of “masculinity” that limits men. To make a balance between speakers and audience, we did our best to split the time equally between our talk and an audience free-for-all. I knew this was working when, say, someone on one side of the hall asked a question, and someone on the other side answered it. People stood up and spoke about ideas and experiences they might never have brought up even with a friend.

Together and separately, we as speakers disproved another description used to disqualify feminists: that we were all “whitemiddleclass,” a phrase used by the media then (and academics who believe those media clippings now) as if it were a single adjective to describe the women’s movement. In fact, the first-ever nationwide poll of women’s opinions on issues of gender equality showed that African American women were twice as likely as white women to support them.
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If the poll had included Latinas, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other women of color, the result might well have been even more dramatic. After all, if you’ve experienced discrimination in one form, you’re more likely to recognize it in another. Also racism and sexism are intertwined—as Mrs. Greene and millions of others experienced—and cannot be uprooted separately.

Traveling in an interracial team taught me some important and unsettling truths about this country. Though we were both speaking about women’s liberation, for instance, reporters would ask me questions about women, and then ask Dorothy or Flo or Margaret about civil rights. This was true even though Flo was eighteen years older than I and had been very public as a feminist lawyer. We learned to let this effort to divide us go for a while before naming it—whether with anger and humor, as in Flo’s case, or with history, as in the case of Margaret, who recited Sojourner Truth’s “But Ain’t I a Woman?” This was a small taste of a general problem: the invisibility in the media of the many women of color who pioneered the women’s movement. In the way that image can overwhelm reality, nothing but struggle for decades would keep this from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sometimes sexual politics took petty and odd forms. For example, I had been called a “pretty girl” before I was identified as a feminist in my mid-thirties. Then suddenly I found myself being called “beautiful.” Not only was I described by my appearance more than ever before, but I was told that how I looked was the only reason I got any attention at all. In 1971
The St. Petersburg Times
headlined, “Gloria’s Beauty Belies Her Purpose.”
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It took me a few years to figure out this sudden change in response to the same person. I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense—and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was:
If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay?

This grew into an accusation that I was listened to
only
because of how I looked, and a corollary that the media had created me. Though I’d been a freelance writer all my professional life without being told that my appearance was the reason I got published, it now became the explanation for everything, no matter how hard I worked. Never mind that the opposite was sometimes the case, as when my literary agent had sent me to an editor at a major national magazine, who dismissed me by saying, “We don’t want a pretty girl—we want a writer.” The idea that whatever I had accomplished was all about looks would remain a biased and hurtful accusation even into my old age.

Fortunately, traveling and speaking took me to audiencess full of down-home common sense. When a reporter raised the question of my looks as more important than anything I could possibly have to say, for example, an older woman rose in the audience. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said to me comfortingly, “it’s important for someone who could play the game—and win—to say: ‘The game isn’t worth shit.’ ”

I also learned from my speaking partners. When we were in the South especially, some man in the audience might assume that a black woman and a white woman traveling together must be lesbians. Florynce Kennedy modeled the perfect response: “Are you my alternative?”

If someone called me a lesbian—in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians—I learned just to say, “Thank you.” It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.

I also came to appreciate this two-way understanding that happens only when we’re all in the same space. It gradually made me less reluctant to go out on my own. Nervousness might still return, like malaria, but mostly I’d learned that audiences turn into partners if you just listen to them as much as you talk.

After I joined with a group of writers and editors to start
Ms.
magazine, I was traveling not only for stories, but also to sell ads to reluctant makers of cars who were convinced that men made that buying decision; to explain to makers of women’s products why
Ms.
didn’t publish fashion, beauty, or cooking articles that praised and promoted the products of advertisers; and to persuade newsstand dealers to carry a new kind of women’s magazine whose cover looked nothing like the others. I remember going from city to city, buying doughnuts and coffee for men who loaded boxes of magazines onto the trucks at dawn, hoping they would persuade newsstand dealers to at least open our boxes.

Soon I was also traveling state by state to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, or for new women candidates who represented women’s majority needs and views, or for male candidates who were doing this, too, or to fund-raise for various parts of this movement that I cared about so much.

In the 1980s, I published my first real book,
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,
and discovered the author’s tour as a new kind of road trip. There were actually author’s escorts—often freelancers themselves—who knew each city and schlepped authors around to book signings and media appearances. That plus two more books and tours in the 1990s made me realize that bookstores were the great community centers. Anybody could come, whether they could afford a book or not, and the spaces reserved for talks and signings invited talking circles. Since no computer can provide this companionship, the more personal the store, the more likely it is to survive.