New York in the '50s (14 page)

The six protesters from the Catholic Worker and nineteen other pacifists who had been arrested for disobeying the New York State Emergency Defense Act were scheduled to appear for sentencing in December 1955 at a magistrate's court uptown. I went to court with Ammon Hennacy that morning. He had pleaded guilty and brought a canvas bag of books with him to read in jail. “If you don't
take 'em with you,” he told me, “you can bet they aren't going to give you any after you're in.” He had packed a volume of poetry by Shelley, the stories of Tolstoy, a book on the Irish rebellion, and the Bible. With his books slung over his shoulder and a dark maroon stocking cap pulled down over his thick gray hair, Ammon was ready to go. I was proud to be with him.

What made me admire this snaggle-toothed old guy, with his cardboard picket signs and his hodgepodge of Catholic-anarchist beliefs, was his willingness to go against the grain, to challenge the conformity of the fifties. I found some notes I made at the time for an article I wanted to write on Ammon, and they convey the way I saw him as a symbol: “Far from the lonely crowd there lives an anti–organization man whose principal possessions are health and a vision.”

The message of two best-selling books of the time, David Riesman's
The Lonely Crowd
and William H. Whyte's
The Organization Man
, was that our society was going to overwhelm the individual and make him (you and me!) part of an anonymous mass culture, blinding him to the evils around him, as well as to the passion and joy. Ammon's very existence was an antidote to that facelessness, proof that an individual could go his own way, follow his own lights, stick to his own unpopular course that he thought was right.

In court that morning, Judge Hyman Bushel read his sentence of a $25 fine or five days in prison, and Ammon stepped forward and asked permission to read a short statement. The judge nodded, and Hennacy pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and began to read: “As a Catholic, I twice refused to take part in air-raid drills in accordance with the practice of Saint Peter, who was arrested twice for speaking on the street, and he and all the Apostles said to the state that they should obey God rather than man. As an anarchist, I follow the practice of William Lloyd Garrison, the first American Christian anarchist …”

Hennacy concluded by saying that as a matter of principle he would not pay the fine but was willing to go to jail. Judge Bushel nodded and then announced he was suspending the sentences of the protesters. He talked at length about how he had been influenced in this decision by the many fine things he had heard about
Dorothy Day and the work she and her volunteers were doing down on Chrystie Street. Dorothy stood unmoving among those who faced the magistrate and listened in silence, expressionless.

Outside the courtroom, Ammon gave me his own summation of the proceedings. “You see,” he said, “Dorothy swamped 'em with her spirituality.”

Ammon was, as always, proud of Dorothy. He was also, I thought, a little disappointed that he didn't get to go to jail again. With his bag of books, he was all set. I went back home and rewrote my notes.

I used them as part of an article I'd been working on about the Catholic Worker movement that was published in
The Nation
under the title “Miracle in the Bowery.” I was proud to give out copies to my friends at the Chrystie Street house, assuming they would be pleased to see this tribute to their cause. Most of them were, except for Dorothy Day. I was puzzled and disturbed. She not only didn't acknowledge the article, she didn't speak to me at all after it was published. She avoided me.

I asked my friends at the Worker what was wrong, and they told me Dorothy was angry that I'd quoted Malcolm Cowley, in
Exile's Return
, about her being able to drink the gamblers under the table at that Greenwich Village bar. I was shocked, because I considered it a great achievement for a woman to be able to drink heartier than a bunch of male barflies. Like most of my friends, I believed in the Hemingway outlook that being able to hold your liquor was a sign of character. I operated under the spell of that myth, living it out as I drank and came to rely on alcohol more and more. It would be another quarter century before I understood that Dorothy no longer saw the glamour in her drinking or wanted it advertised in that spirit because she saw every day the destruction alcohol had wrought in the lives of the men in the Bowery. As in so many other ways, she was ahead of her time.

Dorothy had similar feelings about the whole subject of her bohemian past, and I realize now that her wish to deny it—she went so far as to buy up copies of a novel she wrote before her conversion in order to destroy them—was not meant to cover up what she would later consider her sins, to make herself seem holier or purer in retrospect, but rather because she didn't want that behavior to
serve as a model for other young people who might find it appealing.

“Dorothy was very protective of us,” Betty Bartelme recalls. “She was very puritanical about sex. She told me once not to wear sleeveless blouses to the Worker because it tempted the men. You had to know her past experiences—living the bohemian life—to understand how she felt. We were all very innocent and she was not.”

I was fearful that my gaffe of bringing up Dorothy's old drinking exploits in print might mean I wasn't welcome anymore on Chrystie Street, but it wasn't so. After my article came out and I returned from Israel as a correspondent for
The Nation
, I was invited to speak about the experience at one of the Friday night discussions. My friends at the Worker told me not to worry about their leader's displeasure. “That's just Dorothy,” Mary Ann McCoy said with a shrug and a smile.

There were other sides of Dorothy too. “None of the books about her captured how Dorothy was so much fun to be with,” Betty Bartelme says. “She was a terrible driver, and we used to go around with her in the car and she'd say the rosary out loud in traffic. We'd get to giggling in the back seat, and she'd turn around to shush us and almost run into a light pole, and we'd all get to laughing so hard we couldn't stop.”

Dorothy liked to have a good time, but she didn't enjoy those worldly pleasures that violated her own principles. When Evelyn Waugh came to America in the early fifties, he wanted to meet Dorothy Day and see the Worker, and he invited her to dinner at the Chambord. Dorothy said her vow of poverty wouldn't allow her to go to such an expensive restaurant, and instead she took him to a homey place in Little Italy called Angelo's, on Mulberry Street. Waugh asked for the wine list, and of course there wasn't any—you just took the house red. It obviously wasn't the kind of dinner the elegant English novelist had in mind. Still, he must have been impressed with Dorothy and her work. After he wrote a piece for
Life
magazine about his travels in America, he instructed his agent to send a check to the mission house in the Bowery. The agent didn't know what the place was called, so the check was made out to “Dorothy Day's Soup Kitchen.”

Some of Dorothy's old friends from her bohemian days still came
around to see her at the Worker, becoming volunteers or contributing money, food, or clothing. Allen Tate donated an old seersucker jacket that Mike Harrington was later given from the common storeroom; even though it was several sizes too small for Mike, he wore it with pride because it once belonged to “an established poet.”

“The Catholic Worker was such a
center
,” Mary Ann says. “It was a magnet for intellectual life in New York and throughout the country. It was a newspaper, a center of activities for helping people, for working in communities.”

That magnetic spirit drew people to its headquarters on Chrystie Street and sent them out again to spread the word of service and brotherhood to the poor and needy,
and
to practice it. “Our ideal,” Mike Harrington wrote in retrospect, “was ‘to see Christ in every man,' including the pathetic, shambling, shivering creature who would wander off in the streets with his pants caked with urine and his face scabbed with blood.”

Mary Ann and her friend Eileen were “having a really great time” volunteering at the Catholic Worker, but at the same time they were growing dissatisfied and restless. “We were unhappy working at the telephone company, and we wanted our life to change,” Mary Ann recalls.

One night when they were going back to Queens on the subway, Eileen said that she had taught religious instruction at a small church in East Harlem, the Parish of the Holy Agony. She loved the kids there, who were very poor, and often worried about how they were doing.

“Let's go,” Mary Ann said.

They started attending mass at Holy Agony, on East 103rd Street, and afterward they gave a class for the kids, and then they'd pack lunches and take them on picnics to Wards Island.

“We got drawn into the life of the kids,” Mary Ann explains. “Someone would say they needed to go to a clinic, and we'd take them. We were spending more and more time up there in the neighborhood, and we needed a base. There was a store empty on the corner of First Avenue and 101st Street, and we decided to rent it and make it a center for the kids. We quit our jobs, and Helen Russell, who we met on Friday nights at the Catholic Worker, joined us, and we all moved into an apartment at 321 East 100th Street.
We paid the rent, as well as the rent for the store, by taking turns doing temporary jobs.

“Dorothy suggested we take the kids to the Catholic Worker farm on Staten Island. They'd set up a big tent and the kids would be fed. Word of what we were doing got around the neighborhood and people started helping us. Numbers runners offered to drive us to the Staten Island ferry. Eileen wrote articles about the kids for the
Catholic Worker
, and people donated food and clothes.”

It was perhaps the first day care center for children.

“Dorothy's ideas were so basic,” Mary Ann says. “Land and food. She believed in property and had the foresight to buy that farm on Staten Island. There was a tranquility at the farm—I remember sitting by a big oak tree, and a cow mooing. The chapel was part of the barn, and mass was held every morning. You celebrated nature and the hours of the day. We'd say to the kids, ‘Let's give thanks for the cows, and the milk the cows give.'

“There was a rhythm in the whole operation. We had haystacks and corn and people growing vegetables. Whole wheat bread was baked fresh every day. People took that food to the hungry men on the Bowery.”

Moving to East Harlem and devoting themselves to the children of the neighborhood was “part of this whole dimension of life we saw at the Catholic Worker, and in Dorothy Day,” Mary Ann says. “It goes with spirituality, an example of something higher than yourself.”

The rhythms and cycles Mary Ann McCoy saw in the operation of the Catholic Worker seem to move through time as well, from the fifties to the nineties, from Staten Island to the Bowery to Harlem and throughout the country, in the pages of newspapers and books written by people who worked and lived or even just visited Chrystie Street.

Ned O'Gorman says, forty years later, “The Catholic Worker wasn't just a circle or even just a movement—it was a sensibility, a vision.”

We are eating pancakes in the kitchen of the Storefront School in Harlem. Ned has on a pair of old jeans and a plaid shirt over a white shirt, with the sleeves of both rolled up, which is the way this headmaster dresses for work. He teaches each class in the school at least
once a week and knows the names of all 104 students. This morning he begins a history class the way our old professor Mark Van Doren often began his classes, with a question: “What is an unjust man?” Later, one little boy says he never heard of Hitler, and Ned rolls his eyes toward the ceiling and says, “Holy mazackers!”

After class, kids surround Ned in the hall, and he hugs a few of them and looks above the head of a boy to say, “These are the most divine children in the universe.” When we go down to the kitchen, a mother is waiting to get some advice about a job, and a young man from the neighborhood needs a check to give a lawyer for a case that is pending, and someone else wants the loan of a ten, and a pint-size kid wants to know the name of the God of the Iraqis (“Allah,” says Ned, and the boy writes it down in his notebook, asking how it's spelled), and Ned tastes the chicken cooking for lunch before settling down to his breakfast. Our own talk goes back to the Catholic Worker, and Ned says, “Dorothy's influence was profound. I sometimes think I'm here in some way because I soaked up her vision of the human family.”

Mary Ann married, moved to Brooklyn, and raised two children. She lives in the Lefferts Manor–Prospect Park neighborhood, which is mainly black and West Indian now. When whites started moving out in the early sixties, “a little band of people stuck when others left, restored deserted stores and old ghetto houses. We formed an organization of homeowners, had our own security patrol, tore down dead trees and put in new trees and planted flowers. We taught classes and started food co-ops, and people from all-white neighborhoods came and said, ‘Why do all the interesting things happen in the worst neighborhoods?'”

Having dinner with Mary Ann McCoy DeWeese at Slade's restaurant in Brooklyn Heights in 1991, I remember the time she invited me to have dinner with her and Eileen and Helen on 100th Street in East Harlem one winter night thirty-five years before. I had met the girls at a Friday night discussion at the Catholic Worker and seen Mary Ann and Eileen again when I went to the sentencing of the air raid protesters. I was fascinated that three attractive white girls would be living in a neighborhood that was largely Negro and Puerto Rican, on a street the
New York Times
, in an article on slums,
had called “the worst block in the city.” I thought I could write an article about it—and see more of Mary Ann, whom I had a crush on.