Saturday's Child (45 page)

⁸
“The Politics of Housework,” by Patricia Mainardi, for example, and “Resistances to Consciousness,” by Irene Peslikis—both of which I included when compiling
Sisterhood Is Powerful
.

⁹
An impressive number of attendees would “graduate” to become feminist authors and local or national activists, including Donna Allen, Charlotte Bunch, Jacqui Ceballos, Leah Fritz, Kate Millett, Pamela Kearon, and Alix Kates Shulman.

¹⁰
The sit-in at the
Ladies' Home Journal
was a particularly newsworthy one. See Susan Brownmiller's
In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution
(Dial Press, 1999) for specifics, and for further information on this period.

¹¹
One of my poems from this period, “The Covenant,” dedicated to Kenneth, has the following as its closing stanza: “Bodies, to brave what dreams dare show, / must recognize each faceless ghost. / Give me my father. I give you / your sister, and procure her rest / from wanting him. So we fulfill / their final promise with our first—/ and you and I, who share this hell, / again lose what was always lost” (from
Lady of the Beasts
).

THIRTEEN

Montage

I want a women's revolution like a lover
.

I lust for it, I want so much this freedom
,

this end to struggle and fear and lies

we all exhale, that I could die

just with the passionate uttering of that desire. …

—R
OBIN
M
ORGAN
, “M
ONSTER
”

Nursing Blake, I lie sprawled beside him, staring down at him where he sucks, all twenty-two inches of his little body of a piece with my flesh, erotic, symbiotic. For him, I am food; for me, he is relief from the pressure of milk-full breasts. He stares back into me, mouth busily working, fierce blue eyes the color of Kenneth's not yet darkening to what will become the deep brown of mine. We study one another, awed. He elicits from me an expression I've never felt move across my features. Perhaps this is his way of getting me to show him how to smile in wonder, to teach the shapes tenderness can take, how joy laughs. There is nothing abstract about him; he
is
his senses. His eyes roll slightly: satiation, pleasure, sleepiness. He gives himself up to a voluptuous yawn. His tissue-thin, lilac-veined eyelids flutter, then droop slowly closed,
glowing alabaster curves lit from within. He breathes, softly, steadily. He is absolute and exquisite.

So this is what is meant by being in a state of grace.

A whole new poetry begins here, miraculous, celebratory; a whole new politics begins here, too.
¹
I clasp him and drowse, musing about the hypothesis that in ancient societies the model for all relationships was originally the bond of love between mother and child, not as we know it today—in its corrupted form where women can at times misuse power over children because child-rearing has been the one area where they're allowed to exercise power, but in a pristine state of mutual love and sensuality, interdependence, sensitivity to unspoken need, true nurturance. I suddenly realize that to live in such a culture might mean that I could feel about everything—male and female, child and adult, human and animal and plant—the way I feel about this small being asleep against my heart. All at once I'm in tears with a longing I sense is more authentic than every word of political rhetoric in any language, because it vibrates with loss, because it surfaces with the intensity of the desire boiling beneath that loss.

It's impossible to negotiate this period—roughly the Seventies, with cusps on either side—in a linear fashion, as if one event neatly followed another in discrete or even overlapping continuity. Living unwraps more like a piece of music, in layers, in folds: melodies, counterpoint, motifs, syncopation, dissonances, harmonies. Certain periods of everyone's life are even more extreme, surpassing music, which, after all, moves sequentially through time. Such periods erupt in simultaneous, vivid images displacing one another so rapidly they virtually coexist, more like a painting: revealing in detail, but with perspective, viewable entire—immediate, whole, out of time, everything happening at once.

But our medium here is language, and words require sequence and progression in being spoken, written, or read; they exist in time. A compromise form, though, might be borrowed from film: the montage …

Although women all over the Third World carry their babies in side, back, or front slings, in 1969 Snuggli pouches are not yet common in the United States. Being ahead of one's time can flatter one's ego but apparently challenges other people's manners and finally exhausts one's own patience. Older women on the street feel free to stop and berate me for “warping the baby's spine by carrying it that way.” Since he isn't garbed in blue or pink (then the only options other than white), but rather in a home-tie-dyed layette of bright jewel-like vegetable-dye colors, every passerby, of either gender and any age, feels compelled to inquire as to his sex and seems actually hostile to the child until such curiosity has been satisfied. All this stopping and chatting makes Blake crabby. It makes me even crabbier. After enough of these interrogations have turned every outing into an ordeal, I develop a repertoire of brisk responses deliverable while not breaking stride. These efficiently discourage sidewalk chitchat, though they earn me a nutty-lady reputation in my neighborhood:

“Girl? Boy? Dunno. Never looked.”

“Both.”

“Oh, dear no, it's not human. An alien, you know.”

“Don't care, so long as it's a healthy, happy homosexual.”

But the women who nightly patrol our street corner of Third Avenue and 13th Street are different. They think I'm amusing; they coo adoringly over Blake in his pouch, they watch out for us protectively when I return from evening meetings with the baby asleep like an infant marsupial. We get to know each other. I invite them in for coffee breaks when the weather turns cold. They each have searing stories of why they're in the life, why they detest it. They all have dreams of getting out, but they're also clear about their lack of options. One is a single mother of a little boy with a cleft palate, hustling to raise money for an operation for him; she's a college graduate but believes she can only earn the kind of cash she needs quickly by hustling. From these meetings comes the first attempt to
form a prostitutes' union—which collapses when two of the women are murdered by their pimps. “This isn't work anyone should unionize,” one woman says to me. “This is work that shouldn't exist.”

At first, I avoid speaking to the press about the burgeoning Women's Movement, encouraging others to pick up the mike and run with it. My own skills in this area feel tainted by having been learned in a context I never chose, so in fleeing my childhood history I also disdain the tricks of my old trade. But it soon becomes clear that no one else in our activist group wants to handle the press—or, more accurately, everyone
wants
to, but is scared witless.

No
problem
, I think: I can be useful here! It's skill-sharing time! I start informal, free, media workshops, first for a few women in my own small group, later expanding to any women interested. We desperately need articulate spokeswomen, yet almost everyone is scared of facing a microphone, TV camera, or audience. I explain terminology—boom, take-outs, slug, segment, sound bite. I construct exercises to build confidence: “Imagine you're looking into the lens. Inside it, imagine a tiny woman wearing a housedress, her hair in rollers, standing by her ironing board, watching TV. She wants and
needs
to hear from us, so look through the lens at
her
, talk to
her
,” or “If you're nervous facing an audience, close your eyes for a second and un-dignify them. Visualize them sitting not in auditorium seats but on rows and rows of toilets, pants down around their ankles, butt-naked. Now really, what's to be afraid of?”

Finally, they're ready. At the next demonstration, I stand back like a proud stage mother—and watch them clam up, stutter, go blank, fall silent. What's been programmed into my bones to regard as
anathema
happens: dead air on live radio, glassy stares from a picketing spokeswoman during a live remote TV feed; collective foot-in-mouth disease while talking to print reporters. I know the only cure for their fright is experience, but in order to do it they have to
do
it—a catch-22. I try not to be intolerant, and I work hard to hide my judgmentalism, but my background and characteristic impatience make me unable to grasp the depth of their terror. They want to give up, but of course I won't hear of stopping.
So we do the training all over again, longer, more carefully. With the same result. Twice. At last, they persuade me to speak to the press; they
promise
they'll watch, learn, and “join in.” So, starting with the Atlantic City protest, I do it. Since I've been brought up to do it well, I do it well. Idiotically, I think my sisters will like me for doing what they asked me to do.

Naming really
is
a form of logos, breath, reality. Kenneth and I call each other by our own names to Blake—never “Come to Daddy” or “Sit here with Mommy”—and consequently we keep our identity, not as roles but as real, fallible human beings. This might turn out to be the most important thing we do in all our radical child-raising. It helps to empower Blake—and will make for a much easier transition as he comes to maturity. Around age three he wants to experiment with calling us Mommy and Daddy, as he hears other kids calling their parents that. We say it's up to him, we'll answer no matter what he calls us. After about a week, he shrugs and reverts to Robin or Rob, and to Kenny.

Naming. I call Kenneth “K” in the letters I write to him, partly for brevity, partly in homage to Kafka, whose work we both love, and partly as a solution to the various names of Kenneth Pitchford. Casual acquaintances call him Ken, closer friends Kenneth, which is what I usually call him. But as the years go by, I more and more come to call him “Kenny,” as his older sister, Norma, always did. It seems the name with which he's most at home, the one that really fits him. Blake grows up hearing it and calls him that, too. Kenny likes it, and it's an endearing term of affection (though as unwelcome as “Rob” when superficial aquaintances think they can adopt it). Yet at times I wonder if, as a diminutive, it isn't also one that infantilizes him. …

Naming. Young radical white women begin mimicking a trend in the black community to adopt “freedom names,” as opposed to the slave names left over from Reconstruction days or, in the case of women, the patriarchal names of one's father or husband. I appreciate the importance of renaming, but most of the names chosen seem to me coy, derivative, unintentionally comical, or plain hypocritical (especially when used only in movement circles, not out in the “real world”). Some women, like Laura
X, choose what strikes me as a path too imitative of black male militance for comfort, especially questionable for white women to be treading. Others try for a matrilineal approach and adopt a form of their mother's first names; Kathie Amatniek becomes Kathie Sarachild, which comes across as ersatz Amish. Some drop the patronymic and resort to a first and middle name, as does Judith Weston Duffett in our group, becoming Judith Ann; this last seems to me the most tasteful solution. But it's a brightly ironic day when I realize I already
have
a matronymic, because Faith had invented Morgan and legalized it for her and for me. Morgan: half-bowdlerized (and Anglicized) from my father's name but half-based on Fata Morgana, the powerful female character with whom Faith identified. What in my adolescence had weighed on me as a mortifying negative turns out to be a feminist convenience.

Feminism—and motherhood—reinspire me to try to
truly
connect with Faith. I don't yet understand that the last person in the world you can organize is your mother.
You
may suddenly see her in a new light: she's an oppressed woman! she's a
sister!

She
still sees herself as your mother.

Faith cannot understand why, now that
I'm
a mother, I'm still: (a) writing poetry, (b) working as an editor, (c) going to meetings, demonstrations, and marches (forgod
sake
Robin!), (d) living on the Lower East Side (“that slum!”), and (e) returning to karate class—where I am about to make brown belt but have slipped behind, having had to fudge it and avoid front falls when I became pregnant and then stop class in my fifth month. My
sensai
is not amused that I dropped out to have a child. My mother is not amused that I returned and have a
sensai
. At least my child enjoys imitating my
kiah
yells when I practice my
kata
at home.

I'm trying to learn I can't please everyone. I fail at that, too.

I've been shifting from freelance editing to in-house work in publishing. Having been a “slush-pile” reader of unsolicited manuscripts at various
literary agencies and publishing houses, as well as an itinerant proofreader and copyeditor, I begin a steady editorial job at Grove Press in 1968. It seems ideal. The office is within walking distance from our home, and at first I'm assigned books by radical authors—Régis Debray's book on Che Guevara, Alex Haley's
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. Since as a freelancer one of my jobs had been constructing Sammy Davis Jr.'s so-called autobiography,
Yes, I Can!
from taped transcripts, these new assignments are a relief.

Once Blake is born, I shift to part-time: half-days. Kenneth manages to change his status at Funk & Wagnalls to part-time, too, and we both resurrect our freelance editing contacts to compensate for the financial cutback. Between us, we construct a job routine around Blake: a five-morning workweek for me, a five-afternoon workweek for Ken, a prompt changing of the guard at lunchtime. Both our employers consider the arrangement odd, but since we're underpaid for our skills anyway (and are both perfectionists about the quality of our work), it's not a bad deal for them, either. For us, this solution involves financial sacrifice as well as being bone-tired most of the time, what with the baby, publishing jobs, freelance work, movement activities, housework, and trying to find any spare second in which to write. Yet we know we're privileged to be able to forge such a solution, and we feel incredibly lucky. Blake gets both of us. And we both get to be there for the delight that is him, golden, growing.