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*Folks: This is a medley of excerpts from creative pieces I've written. It gives you an idea of the flavor of my form and content, and my life. Please let me know your responses. I'm interested.
That spring King was killed in Memphis right before Easter break. It was 1968. I remember waiting at O'Hare airport in Chicago. They only let suburbanites board the plane that night. Anyone wanting to land and go into DC itself was forbidden to even fly. The capitol was under curfew, no one allowed in or out, while riots tore through cities everywhere. My uncle who met me at National pointed out the fires burning across the river that night as we drove away.
* * *
... The Vietnam war went on all the time we were in high school and we were never allowed to have teach-ins to discuss it then. I remember school-sponsored debates on Vietnam after we left. It's strange thinking of that school now, filled with the children of Vietnamese refugees we were sent over to kill. These Asia youth use our lockers, study out of some of the same textbooks we used back then. There's a large Vietnamese community in the neighborhood around Montgomery Blair now, but then we never dreamed that the people our government was bombing would end up selling us rice and veggies on Fenton Street.
* * *
... We hung old white bedsheets on the church basement walls for graffiti-writing, scrounged card tables and chairs and lots of empty wine bottles for candle stubs, some cups and silverware. Our own teenage coffeehouse founded to raise money for SNCC.
* * *
... You asked me to tell you the story of the day the Radical
Lesbians stole the press from the youth services agency where I
worked. That was 1971 - MayDay Year - the big spring demonstration
that followed all those years of Vietnam Moratoriums in Washington,
the once and for all demo that aimed to stop the government in its
tracks. The Capitol was bombed that year and they thought Leslie
Bacon, a young woman in the MayDay Collective, knew something about
it.
One day the FBI came looking for her. She was in the shower
and when she heard them coming she climbed up naked, out the trap
door in the roof. They chased her across the rooftops til they
caught her. At the same time, someone came around warning all the
communal houses. "Flush your dope ... clean up ... there's FBI
knocking on everyone's doors!"
After all that died down, in November, I was asleep, one
morning in my basement furnace room on Lamont Street, where 12 of
us adults and 3 kids lived. A little way down the hall was Sharon,Þsleeping
too, when the phone started ringing through our
dreams.
Sharon answers it. She comes into my room and says, "We've got
to get down to the office! The Lesbians are stealing the press.!"
So we throw on some clothes, jump on my Kawasaki 90 and ride down
to the bottom of the 19th Street hill.
When we got there, the press was gone, the women were gone,
the truck was gone, and Bill Treanor - the director and founder of
Special Approaches in Juvenile Assistance - had just arrived. He
stood there with his hands on his hips, squinting down the street
at nothing. Furious! ... " (from a larger published piece called
"The Day The Lesbians Stole the Press")
* * *
They lost the land. All the cousins grew up, took city jobs. The elders raised frying chickens and worked at the Jantzen factory down the road. "See that well over there. There's 6 nigger bodies down that hole," my uncle said, taking us out on tour one day. Summer 1965. I was smart ass 16, tried to wear my black & white SNCC button til my father made me take it off.
* * *
"We Are the Children Our Parents Warned Us About" said the
sign painted above the archway. "Acid-Rock." "My father fucked me."
And many more sayings like the pages of someone's diary scrawled
above furniture and up to the ceiling in the crowded tv-lit
shadowed front room.
Jeremy, the intake counselor, was kneeling beside her explaining the house rules, volunteers were trooping in and out unloading casseroles the church had made for dinner that night and, at the bottom of the stairway a boy with long hair strummed a guitar with 2 broken strings, a lit cigarette impaled on its neck.
* * *
Once there was a contaminated woman who ran a free clothing store. She ran it out of a busy city street basement you had to hold onto a cold metal railing while swinging down jack-knifed concrete steps to get to. The store was really her living room filled with clothes racks and shelves and sweater bins. She lived behind a curtain in a tiny room that opened onto a patch of garden with brick walls, separating the alley in back.
* * *
(from a piece published years ago, 1973, in off our backs):
Is it passing whimsy;
or true flash -
that the two womenlovercarpenters,
walking by the teepee just now,
soft murmuring voices in the air,
sound like maybe the Garden of Eden
softness, serenity, awareness everywhere.
The hammer/nail sounds of pounding building
heard through the forest
on my first womansfarm
still hearten me,
Amaze me with their strength.
Summer 1973 and I am writing from Albion, California, the home of Country Women magazine. We are on the Mendocino coast on a ridge of fir and redwoods and bull pine, overlooking the Albion River right before it flows into the Pacific. ... Last night Jeanne, one of the Country Women here, was talking about the need for historical and biographical research on American women who ran farms on their own before, and whose memories and experiences have been lost in time. If they have been lost before, I think those women's spirits are already being revived here in this area of California. ... On Friday the hip capitalist construction contractor who gave me a ride up Highway one-oh-one was incredulous when I told him where I was hitching to. "Women can't live without men, it's impossible!" he assured me, and refused to deal any further with the very real evidence that they do. I think what he really meant was "men need women, we can't do without you," but he never would have said that to me with the tape deck bawling out "Brown Sugar" anyway.
* * *
(from an off our backs piece, 1981):
West Coast Women's Music Festival, Summer 1981 -- The group of
over 400 women of color, Jewish women and whites gathered in the
dark in front of Camp Mather Lodge were worried and angry. They
were shouting at each other, without mikes or organization, trying
to gain the floor and be heard. They had all just walked out en
masse from the outdoor concert after a confrontation with the
festival producer Robin Tyler, about issues of race and class
criticism that they had just begun to air on stage. This was the
culmination of a series of meetings and dialogues that had been
taking place during the weekend, ending in a rally and
demonstration where the group had marched together to the concert,
singing, demanding to be heard on stage. A series of backstage
negotiations had resulted in a partial airing of issues on stage,
but had been followed by an angry outburst from Robin, after which
the crowd left and returned to the Lodge to decide what to do
next.
Andrea Canaan, a black woman who co-directs the Pacific Center
for Human Growth in Berkeley, came forward into the circle's center
and called for silence. "What we need is a song," she said. "I want
to share with you the song my family sings whenever there's
trouble. This is the way we do when there's trouble in our home.
This is the way we do in our home. We gather our mothers around us
when there's trouble in our home. We gather our mothers around us
in our home... We gather our sisters around us ...we gather our
children around us...we gather our lovers around us ... sang
the crowd, picking up the verses as she led. And the mood changed.
Conflict resolution and mediation began.
Whenever people work for a year to create and dismantle a
community in 4 days, expectations and emotions fly high looking for
random and focused relief. The festival was both a musical
celebration and a political happening. This article focuses only on
the political issues of race and class expressed at the
festival....
* * *
Belmont Road is one block long, hypotenuse of the triangle 18th and
Columbia make; first street south on 18th St., as it
slopes downhill, towards the White House, away from Kalorama Park.
This intersection now features a colorful weekend marketplace.
Farmers sell squash, green apples, corn, berries and real tomatoes.
Latinos sell radios, Muslims vend perfumed oils. There are tenant
bake sales, a bag lady selling used costume jewelry next to the $5
foot massage man and the Antioch college flower stand by the bus
stop.
Adams Morgan rests between the hilltop overlooking the zoo and the Circle below - a neighborhood of mixed race families, rooming houses, halfway houses, mom & pop stores, auto garages, delivery services and print shops. On the west it borders the embassies and the green snaking wonder of Rock Creek Park. ... By 1978 Salvadorans lived all around us and filled the stoops with their laughter, babies, guitars and nightly banter. They called our building The Boat - a structure that bowed itself around both corners rising like a beached hull, a place of refuge after so much flight. ... White linen-covered tables and soft lighting now fill the corner apt. where Mr. Brooks died; this room that housed our tenant office and the long harried bilingual meetings. In the front yard where cardgames and barbecues once thrived, Central American waitresses now tend outdoor tables. All the first floor efficiencies are shops. Most of the communes have become yuppie hives. ... We left Belmont Road last Fall, pasting our farewell leaflets on the trees.
* * *
Sisters watch brothers touch each other for the first time, shyly, then with increasing passion and possession. Discover ourselves, our own salty womb essences, hot yearning pockets of tendernesses. Sucking, sucking, coming, coming. Coos, groans, and explosions. Something real, fragile and beautiful; a group creature emerges. Intoxicating, frightening, touching so deep. Our Moon Circle meditations grow out from this. ...
* * *
Before sleep, in the dark bus, riding along, we played back the tape of John Trudell's speech. "We are going to have to find ways to talk to people we can't talk to now," he said. "The people have risen, spoken, tried before but somewhere they did not put it all together, they tried to change the social conditions, without addressing their relationships to the land. Together we have the collective power of an earthquake, a tornado. No matter how many of us they kill, we will not be stopped." On the way home from the 1980 Black Hills International Survival Gathering an earthquake rumbled through 14 midwestern/southern states. The Shah of Iran died. We gave our bus to Chief Billy Tayak and the Piscataways who still live near the Chesapeake Bay. And the Lakota, they occupied those sacred Paha Sapa Hills above Rapid City, challenged the government to drive them away.
* * *
She said, "I'm hungry"
and I said "use it"
She said "watch me"
I said "I don't know."
...
I said, "But you leave me."
"No," she said, "It's you that leaves us.
You let your awareness lapse.
We're here whenever you call,
whenever you sweep the veils aside
and open to we can enter the space."
I saw the moonlight on the harbor
Heard the steady beat of waves against the pier,
breathed the salt air from my window
and turned aside to the table where my work still lay ...