Saturday's Child (38 page)

As for my political development, a voice from the past speaks out to remind me: my own, interviewed by Peter Babcox for his February 9, 1969, article in the
New York Times
(Sunday)
Magazine
, “Meet the Women of the Revolution.” In the piece I pompously refer to Kenneth and myself as a “two-member commune,” doubtless in a silly attempt to co-opt emerging criticism of such “bourgeois” institutions as marriage or coupledom. On the whole I sound like the deadly earnest twenty-eight-year-old I was, prematurely reminiscing: “My first approach to politics had been that of the artistic community. Most of the actors and artists I knew were Fifties artists who had just barely survived the McCarthy years. They were either apolitical ivory-tower types or superficially political in the best liberal tradition. During the Death Valley days of the Eisenhower years when nothing was possible, nothing imagined, about the most political act you could commit was participating in a benefit for the UJA.”

Subtext: those childhood benefits still rankled like hell
.

The article mentions a brief experience with the Democratic Reform movement, but rushes past it. Yet it was an important episode in teaching me what I
didn't
want to do. Early in our marriage, Ken and I had flirted with Reform Democratic Party insurgency, opposing the party bosses and their political-machine ward politics. Their bully boys roughed us up physically when we did volunteer poll-watching at a local election, which had a radicalizing effect—the first of what would be many—inspiring me to run for county committeewoman on the Reform Democratic ticket. (I was forced to run as “Robin M. Pitchford,” because although I continued to use my own name after our marriage, legally it was then still required that a ballot, as well as a bank account, driver's license, and other legal documents, reflect a woman's “legal,” i.e., “married,” name.) Fortunately, I lost even that humble race. It was the only time I've been remotely
tempted to run for political office, having learned I lack the sanctitude to suffer fools gladly. I admit to being amused at having received party overtures on two occasions since, and to being flattered over the years when women have urged me to seek various candidacies. Certainly I'm relieved that there are quite a few smart, good-hearted women (and men) who
are
willing to tread that necessary route, and I support them every way I can. But for me, seeking or holding office has the appeal of having to be a child star all over again though now old enough to know there are better ways to live.

The
Times
interview goes on about my involvement in the civil-rights movement by 1964. It was indeed as I depicted it—a frightening, exhilarating period, from the mass marches to the quiet, grinding, dangerous work in the hells of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia. That era flaunted some of the most sadistic faculties of the human brain and illumined some of the most invincible capacities of the human spirit. But I did
not
share with the
Times
any “backstage” stories—say, about how many black radical men had hit on white radical women with the inventive line “If you're serious about fighting racism, gimme a little of my civil-rights tonight, Baby,”
and
how many of the white women had guiltily caved in,
and
how many of the black women—rejected, ignored, or exploited by both these so-called brothers and sisters—dried their eyes and went back to work on the next voter-registration drive.
³
And I did
not
tell the
Times
another story from that period, one I did subsequently relate in
The Demon Lover
but choose to repeat here because it's so devastatingly symptomatic of the entire New Left's attitude toward women.

I was one of seven women—three of us white—at a joint meeting in the CORE (Congress on Racial Equality) office with members of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—which later was to renounce nonviolence but retain its anagram). More than twenty men, black and white, were present, running the meeting. Three young CORE
workers—one black man and two white men—had disappeared in Mississippi, and the groups had met over this crisis. The lynched bodies of the three men—James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were later found, hideously tortured to death. Meanwhile, the FBI, local police, and National Guard had been dredging lakes and rivers in search of the bodies. During the search, the mutilated parts of an estimated seventeen different bodies of African Americans were found. All of us in the CORE office were in a state of shock. As word filtered in about the difficulty of identifying mutilated bodies long decomposed, we also learned that all but one of the unidentified bodies were female. Incensed, a male CORE leader muttered, “There's been a whole goddamned lynching we never even
knew
about. There's been some brother disappeared who never even got
reported
.”

My brain went into spasm. Had I heard him correctly? Had he meant what I
thought
he'd meant? If so, then was my racism showing itself in that I was horrified? Finally, I managed, nervously, to hazard a tentative question. Why
one
lynching? What about the sixteen unidentified female bodies? There was total silence. Every man in the room, white and black, stared at me. Every woman in the room, black and white, stared at the floor, more embarrassed by my question than by the situation in which I felt forced to ask it. Finally the answer came, in a tone of marked impatience, as if the speaker were addressing a political moron: “Those were obviously
sex
murders. They weren't
political
.”

I sometimes think that women are the last true keepers of the flame that called itself the New Left. At least we're still at it. As a few examples out of thousands: Eleanor Holmes Norton who, fresh out of law school, was special counsel to our women's caucus in SNCC, is wonderfully, consistently active, as a feminist leader, an African-American leader, and the congressional representative for Washington, D.C. So is Elizabeth Martinez, civil-rights organizer who founded
El Grito del Norte
newspaper and is still going strong, working with Chicana and other Latina women. So is Nancy Kurshan, one of the few European-American counterculture leaders I can think of who's still doing serious political work, in her case with women in prison.

The men? They virtually collapsed—maybe from deflation of ego, because once women began to shift energy into our own groups there was
no one around to do what we inelegantly but accurately termed “shitwork.” When the men resurface at all, they're mostly an embarrassment. They either wax misty-eyed like veterans about World War II, nod off into a druggy or religious daze, or affirm their recently acquired right-wing conversions. A disturbing number of New Left male leaders veered precipitously off the edge into looniness or to the Right, which may be a redundancy. Jerry Rubin traded his head bandanna for a bowler and tried to morph into a Wall Street entrepreneur. Abbie Hoffman—so notorious for his sexist behavior that his later claim to have founded feminism stands as one of the more surreal statements of the era—became a drug dealer, went underground after being busted, and wound up committing suicide. Stokely Carmichael (he of the infamous announcement “The only position for women in SNCC is prone”) moved to Africa and lived off the singer Miriam Makeba until she ditched him. Tom Hayden at least turned into a vaguely progressive California state senator, but Rennie “the Fox” Davis ohhhmmed toward ashrams and gurus. And Eldridge Cleaver—having already shifted from being a convicted rapist to a Black Panther leader—moved through wife-battering into promoting velvet codpieces as a fashion fad (
honest
, could I make this stuff up?), then to being born again in Jesus and realizing that the Pentagon was one helluva grand place after all.

Who
were
these men? Not that it matters. Every time I've granted permission to reprint my notoriously furious 1970 essay “Goodbye to All That,”
⁴
I've had to expand the footnotes identifying sexist male Leftist leaders I polemically attacked by name. At the time I wrote the piece, they seemed to bestride the world like proverbial colossi, but they made themselves so irrelevant that with each intervening year fewer people had any clue as to who they were. It will be poetic justice if they squeak into history as footnotes because they were once lucky enough to have been denounced by an angry woman writer.

Meanwhile, back at the revolution, Ken and I had done the usual letter-writing and petition-signing, gone on the occasional march or picket line, then become interested in organizations with which literary friends
like Marge Piercy and Ira Wood were becoming involved. One such group was Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), “the SDS for adults.” Writers (or “word workers,” as some of the Marxians obnoxiously termed us) were welcome volunteers, since press releases, manifestos, and leaflets didn't pen themselves, and we were a writing pair: a two-fer. But petitions and polite demonstrations were having a zero effect on policy—which gets forgotten by those who think that we all leapt at radicalism overnight because it was fun or chic. We didn't and it wasn't. Being ignored by our own government drove us there, in heartsick disbelief.

A leisurely pace regarding political principles was a luxury fast disappearing. The nation was beginning to boil. Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963, the same year of the Birmingham, Alabama, church-bombing slayings of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, four little black girls at Sunday school. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Three years later, 1968 would witness the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The TV screen flickered news nightmares each evening. Protesting the war, Buddhist monks sat calmly in the lotus position and immolated themselves, their silhouettes outlined amid triangular pillars of flame. Shots of wailing, bleeding women and napalm-seared children became as commonplace as those of body bags filled with the corpses of U.S. soldiers.

Kenneth and I were changing, along with everyone else. The
Times
article reminds me that in 1966 we “participated in Angry Arts Week, reading National Liberation Front poetry on flat-bed trucks around the city.”
⁵
But soon our protest chants were shifting from “Peace Now!” to “Bring the war home!” and from “Freedom and Equality!” to “Black Power!” Slogans like “Make love, not war” were giving way to pronouncements like “Level everything;
then
we'll talk politics.” The
Times
proceeds to chart my shift
from opposition to insurgency in terms of a fashion statement: “On the [April 1967] peace march to the United Nations, I wore a conservative skirt to show that I was a member of the law-abiding but morally outraged middle class. … Since the Pentagon [demonstration], I never go into the streets without jeans and boots. … [In MDS, we had] thought there must be something we could do as artists and writers. But there wasn't, and we were beginning to get a little disillusioned by what seemed to be a joylessness in the movement, an over-ritualized ideological seriousness. Then I walked into the Yippee [Youth International Party, YIP] office one day. There was this hysterical loft with the groovy posters and people sitting around rapping, and coffee spilled on the floor, and whoever picked up the phone would yell ‘Yippee!' It seemed life-affirming, myth-making, just beautiful! It was … a real feeling of
communitas
.”

Well, that's a bit over the top. I didn't tell the
Times
that counterculture style began annoying me within days: “Shake a chick's tit instead of her hand” was one Yippee lifestyle rubric, and their postrevolutionary vision of an ideal society consisted of “free grass, free food, free shelter, free chicks.” Besides, the dirty-feet-in-sandals, bearded-and-beaded look never quite cut it with me, who had only recently been contending for Superwife and who still took visceral if secret pleasure from a well-waxed floor. But Ken truly enjoyed YIP's style, which chimed with his own capacity for genuine bohemianism; he grew a beard and Fu Manchu mustache, and the two of us tie-dyed almost everything we owned. Kenneth was never totally accepted by the Yippies, because he was almost ten years older than most of them but even more because he was open and proud about being gay well before that was chic or a political position—but he was at least
male
, and that counted for a lot in the New Left and the counterculture. In YIP as in MDS, the anti-war groups, and the civil-rights organizations, men made policy while women made coffee. We were expected to make havoc, too—but only on directions from the men. We were to be traditional nurturers, serene commune types, sexy foxes, and fearless militants. It was tiring.

I opted for the one other role, which was open to only a few female persons: the “heavy.” This referred neither to weight nor villainy, but to being “a tough chick,” i.e., the token woman who could barter her way into inner circles by means of some bargaining chip—usually by being the
appendage of a powerful man or, if unattached, donating substantial cash to the group. In my case, the chip was verbal and writing skills. A heavy would not roll joints for the men, bring them more beer, schlep water from the well in a commune, rise at 4:00
A.M.
to cook for the Panther Breakfast Program, or be relied on as an object for sexual sharing. (I was saved from having to sleep around because I was already spoken for, and, based on the previous debacle in the marriage, both Kenneth and I gave off the clear message that we “weren't into group stuff anymore.”)

But being a heavy was frightening, because you had to out-tough the guys. The
Times
again: “Once, I was a pacifist. I had such a strong, self-righteous feeling then. Now, as each day goes by I get more scared. It's the kind of terror that comes with the realization that with each passing day I am a little more willing to fight and to die.”