Living by the Word (19 page)

In any case, I was not, unfortunately (from my lesbian friends’ point of view), relating to other women sexually. How could they trust someone who slept with a man? I had of course suffered under a variation of this question before—from black people. How could they trust someone who slept with a white person? All such questions reflect the questioner’s vulnerability and lack of self-confidence, but few of us recognize this at the time. We are flung into a solitude so severe that it inadvertently increases our sense of freedom as it loosens our bonds to any specific group, whether racial or sexual. Our perception of the limitations of ourselves and of others is sharpened considerably, as is the passion of our self-respect. We begin to see that perhaps all people must be our people, since the various factions of peoplehood to which we “belong” are so very hard to please; and that
we
must be “every person” in any event if we are to assume the absolute largest possible freedom for ourselves. I reached the point with both groups, lesbians and blacks, of just saying: Accept me as I am, with this tendency I have of being able to love everyone, including you, or just don’t (expletive) bother me at all. On these terms, I am happy to say, I have regained most of the friends I lost.

It is not the lesbians, however, that one “sees” in San Francisco, but gays. This was one of the most striking things to me when I settled here, with a cast of fictional characters for a new novel in my head, lesbian and straight. Women are always together affectionately. The intense female couple you see on the street could as easily be mother and daughter, sisters, best friends, as lovers. It was the intensity between men that was new and that I liked.

I am writing this now partly as a way of remembering Polk and Castro Streets during the late seventies. How the “last man” and I would always cruise those streets on any outing that took us more than a few blocks from home. At first I thought our interest was simply voyeurism, or maybe my lover was a latent gay (I sometimes wondered); but it was something other and different from that. Neither of us had ever seen men taking such obvious delight in each other (and both our fathers had been physically distant from us and emotionally repressed), and to us their caring seemed to say something delightful about the possibilities of men. To drive slowly up Castro, near the theater, and to be met by the sight of two grown men locked together in a thorough and obviously toe-curling kiss was a revelation. And sometimes they both had mustaches! It was a bit like my seeing a bearded iris for the first time.

Very often there were parades. On Halloween, for several years, we dressed up as various night creatures and trick-or-treated about the city, taking in the fabulous costumes, the outrageous hair styles and make-up only gays would have the queerness to make and the imagination to wear. I loved the life that gays gave Halloween, a holiday I learned to enjoy only because of them; and I was always reassured by the presence of Sister Boom Boom (a gay man) on the electoral ballot, and by pictures of the Sister himself, demure in white scapular and black habit, “nun of the above,” making still another bid for Board of Supervisors. There was another side, darker (or whiter) and more sinister. There were gays dressed like Nazis, who frightened me. There were those who seemed enamored of whips and chains. White well-to-do gays who moved into poor black neighborhoods and gentrified them to death, gradually forcing black people out. But there was also something cheering to the soul about these men, all colors, classes, and conditions, who, in spite of everything that had been taught them about the evil of it, steadfastly affirmed their right to love each other. And to be open and frolicsome about it. I came to understand why homosexual men are called “gay.” Because they hadn’t repressed their basic feelings the way most straight men seem to, they were full of vitality and fun. I could imagine that straight men, who so often appear dead behind the eyes and immobile below the neck, resented them for this. Now I hear on the news that one out of every two gays in San Francisco has AIDS. Many are dying. In this crisis the gay community has shown courage and tenderness equal to its former raunchiness; the city itself has been compassionate and brave. Still, it is rare these days even to see heterosexuals kissing on the street. It is as if we are all mourning the loss of spontaneous outrageousness. I miss the shock, the revelation, the smile evoked by the sight of two people (whatever they are, and even if they’re more than two!) brazenly expressing love, or just unmistakable intent.

How sad now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks they are holding guns.

So many cultures have died it is hard to contemplate the possible loss or dulling over of another one, or to accept the fact that once again those of us who can appreciate all the bearded irises of life will be visually, spiritually, and emotionally deprived.

1987

“Why do you keep putting off writing about me?” It is the voice of a chicken that asks this. Depending on where you are, you will laugh, or not laugh. Either response is appropriate. The longer I am a writer—so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb—the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer’s pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer—a fool, and so why should one fear?—horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to
be
and the human animal to
perceive its being.

This then is about a chicken I knew in Bali. I do not know her name or that of her parents and grandparents. I do not know where she was from originally. Suddenly on a day whose morning had been rainy, there she was, on the path in front of us (my own family, on our way back to our temporary shelter), trying to look for worms, trying to point out other possible food items to her three chicks, and trying at the same time to get herself and her young ones across the road.

It is one of those moments that will be engraved on my brain forever. For I really
saw
her. She was small and gray, flecked with black; so were her chicks. She had a healthy red comb and quick, light-brown eyes. She was that proud, chunky chicken shape that makes one feel always that chickens, and hens especially, have personality and
will.
Her steps were neat and quick and authoritative; and though she never touched her chicks, it was obvious she was shepherding them along. She clucked impatiently when, our feet falling ever nearer, one of them, especially self-absorbed and perhaps hard-headed, ceased to respond.

When my friend Joanne—also one of my editors at
Ms.
magazine for nearly fifteen years—knew I was going to Bali, she asked if I would consider writing about it. There was so much there to write about, after all: the beautiful Balinese, the spectacular countryside, the ancient myths, dances, and rituals; the food, the flowers, the fauna, too. When I returned, with no word on Bali, she asked again. I did not know how to tell her that my strongest experience on Bali had been to really be able to see, and identify with, a chicken. Joanne probably eats chicken, I thought.

I did, too.

In fact, just before going to Bali I had been fasting, drinking juices only, and wondering if I could give up the eating of meat. I had even been looking about in San Francisco for an animal rights organization to join (though it is the animal liberationists, who set animals free, who actually take my heart); in that way I hoped to meet others of my kind, i.e., those who are beginning to feel, or have always felt, that eating meat is cannibalism. On the day my companion pointed out such an organization, in an Australian magazine we found at a restaurant in Ubud, I was slow to speak, because I had a delicious piece of Balinese-style chicken satay in my mouth.

I have faced the distressing possibility that I may never be a “pure” vegetarian. There is the occasional stray drumstick or slice of prosciutto that somehow finds its way into my mouth, even though purchased meat no longer appears in my kitchen. Since Bali, nearly a year ago, I have eaten several large pieces of Georgia ham (a cherished delicacy from my childhood, as is fried chicken; it is hard to consider oneself Southern without it!) and several pieces of chicken prepared by a long-lost African friend from twenty years ago who, while visiting, tired of my incessant chopping of vegetables to stir-fry and eat over rice and therefore cooked a chicken and served it in protest. There have been three crab dinners and even one of shrimp.

I console myself by recognizing that this diet, in which ninety percent of what I eat is nonmeat and nondairy, though not pristinely vegetarian, is still completely different from and less barbarous than the one I was raised on—in which meat was a mainstay—and that perhaps if they knew or cared (and somehow I know they know and care), my chicken and fish sister/fellow travelers on the planet might give me credit for effort.

I wonder.

Perhaps I will win this struggle, too, though. I can never
not
know that the chicken I absolutely
saw
is a sister (this recognition gives a whole different meaning to the expression “you chicks”), and that her love of her children definitely resembles my love of mine. Sometimes I cast my quandary about it all in the form of a philosophical chicken joke: Why did the Balinese chicken cross the road? I know the answer is, To try to get both of us to the other side.

It is not so much a question of whether the lion will one day lie down with the lamb, but whether human beings will ever be able to lie down with any creature or being at all.

1987

June 17, 1987

Early this morning, as I was putting the finishing touches on this book, I received an urgent call from “Liz” of Neighbor to Neighbor, an activist group that successfully gets out news about the wars in Central America, using U.S. media, primarily television. Two days from now there will be a program it has organized called “The Peace Oscars”—named for Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was a defender of poor people’s rights in El Salvador until his assassination, by an agent of the Salvadoran government, while he administered mass in his church. At the ceremony, which will be held in the beautiful Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, six of the bravest and most compassionate of human beings will be honored: people who have risked their lives to take medicine, food, clothing, and technical skills to the poor and suffering people of Central America; men and women who have been arrested many times as they exercised their opposition to the often genocidal policies of the U.S. government; people who founded the Sanctuary Movement in this country; one refugee woman from El Salvador, whose personal story of oppression, terror, escape, and commitment, told at hundreds of gatherings in the United States, radicalized the people who heard her and deepened their commitment to the struggle to end war. I am to co-host this program, and, in fact, give the Peace Oscar (a small blue ceramic bird) to the sister from El Salvador.

The urgent message from Liz, however, is that a bomb threat against the ceremony has been telephoned by a mechanical-sounding male voice that said our crime is that we do not want to fight communism. Because several of the participants and invited guests are federally appointed officials of the state of California, she tells me, there will be federal agents about, cordons of police and various SWAT teams, whose job it will be to sweep the place clean of any bombs. This often happens to movements like ours, she sighs. She tells me everyone involved will be called, in order for each to decide whether to come or stay home.

Of course I remember bomb threats, and bombs, from the sixties. I think of the children, Angela Davis’s young acquaintances, blown up while in Sunday school. I think of Ralph Featherstone, a SNCC worker, blown up in his car. I think of the NAACP official, who, along with his wife, was blown up while in bed. When I lived in Mississippi, bombings occurred; when my husband and I moved there, the bombing/lynching of NAACP leader Vernon Dehmer was in the news. I remember the bombing of Dr. Martin Luther King’s house. There is a long history of bombings in North America. This is not the first time “communism” has been used as an excuse.

I send along the message of the threat to the people I’ve invited. But I know I will not be deterred. I spend a few hours with my lawyer and finally draw up my overdue will and assign a durable power of attorney that will be effective through the weekend (the affair is to take place on a Friday night). It isn’t fatalism, or courage; I simply can’t imagine not being there to honor these amazing, but also ordinary, people. I can’t imagine not being there to hug my sister from the south.

A writer, apparently, to the core (though I frequently kid myself that if I never write again it’s fine with me; there’s so much else to do—sitting in a rocking chair watching the ocean, for instance), I find my thoughts going to my unfinished manuscripts. If anything happened to me, I wonder what my editor, John the meticulous, could make of my unfinished novel, a third typed and in a drawer, a third typed and in the computer, a third in my notebook and head.

What of this book? I realize that, as it stands, it has the rounded neatness of contemplation, and I would like to leave the reader with the uneven (I almost said ragged) edge of activity. I returned to my notes for the past week, and this is what I found:

I am Nicaraguan; I am Salvadoran; I am Grenadian; I am Caribbean; and I am Central American.

For the past several days I have been thinking about this sentence, and wondering what I mean by it. I am also Norte Americana, an African-American, even an African-Indian-Gringo American, if I add up all the known elements of my racial composition (and include the white rapist grandfather). Perhaps this is one way that I am Nicaraguan, or Salvadoran, or Grenadian. For the people in those countries, too, are racially mixed; in their country, too, there are the reds, the blacks, the whites—and the browns.