The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant Read online

  it. There was a tangle of sex and jazz, black culture and black

  male love. There was a Gordian knot made of black men and

  Jewish white women in particular. Speaking only for myself,

  I wasn’t going to settle in the suburbs, and New York City

  meant black, jazz meant black, blues meant black.

  Philadelphia, in contrast, had folk music and coffeehouses

  with live performers. Most were white. I liked Dave Van Ronk

  and in junior high school stole an album of his from a big

  Philadelphia department store; or maybe it was just the bearded

  white face on the album cover, an archetype egging me on.

  My best friend in high school liked the Philly scene with its

  scuzzy, mostly failed musicians and its folk music. I'd go with

  her when I could because Phil y promised excitement, though

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  Music 3

  it rarely delivered. She and I flirted with a small Bohemia, not

  life-threatening, whereas when I was alone in New York City

  there was no net. In the environs of Philly I went to hear Joan

  Baez, whose voice was splendid, and I listened to folk music

  on record, Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot,

  who rambled in those days mostly in Philadelphia. These took

  me back to Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Cisco Houston.

  By the time Bob Dylan came along, I was uninterested in the

  genre altogether until some friends in college made me sit

  down to listen to Dylan soi-meme. Even then, it was his politics that moved me, not his music. That changed. It changed the first time because he was an acquired taste, and after

  listening enough I acquired sufficient love of the music-with-

  lyric to be one with my generation; and it changed the second

  time, years later, maybe decades later, when his mar iage fel

  apart and I found out that he had been a batterer. He lost

  me. I can’t claim any purity on this, because I’ve never lost

  my taste for Miles Davis, and he was a really bad guy to

  women, including through battery. So I love ol’ Miles, but I

  sure do have trouble put ing any CD of his in the machine. In

  Amsterdam I met Ben Webster, but so did any white girl. He

  was way past his prime, but he still played his heart out.

  I remember the saliva dripping from his lips and the sweat

  that blanketed his fat body or the visible parts of it. He’d sit

  in the sun in Leidseplein; he always wore a suit; and he’d be

  the Pied Piper. I wished he had been Fats Wal er, whom I’ve

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  Heartbreak

  rediscovered on CD. I heard B. B. King in concert a few times

  there, and the Band once. I loved B. B., whom I met years

  later, and I loved the Band.

  But it was Bessie who came to stand for art in my mind. I

  found her albums, three for 33 cents, in a bin on Eighth Street

  while I was in high school, and once I listened to her I was

  never the same. I don’t mean her kick-ass lyrics, though those

  are pretty much the only blues lyrics I can still stomach. I

  mean her stance. She had at itude on every level and at the

  same time a cold artistry, entirely unsentimental. Her detachment equaled her commitment: she was going to sing the song through your corporeality. Unlike smoke, which circled

  the body, her song went right through you, and either you

  took what you could get of it for the moment the note was

  moving inside you or she wasn’t for you and you were a bar ier

  she penetrated. Any song she sang was a second-by-second

  lesson in the meaning of mortality. The notes came from her

  and tramped through your three-dimensional body but graceful y, a spartan, bearlike bal et. I listened to those three albums hundreds of times, and each time I learned more about what

  art took from you to make: not love but art.

  Before the compact-disc revolution, you couldn’t get good

  or even passable albums by Ma Rainey, so she was a taste

  deferred, and the brilliant Alberta Hunter came into my life

  when I was in college and she was singing at the Cookery in

  New York City, a very old black woman with a pianist as her

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  Music 3

  sole accompaniment. I would have done pretty much anything

  to hear Big Mama Thornton live, and, of course, for me,

  college-aged, Janis Joplin was the top, the best, the risk-taker,

  the one who left blood on the stage. When I lived on Crete,

  still col ege-aged, Elvis won me with “Heartbreak Hotel. ”

  Even now I can’t hear it without the winds from the Aegean

  blowing right by me. But when it comes to conveying ideas

  without words, jazz triumphs. A U. S. writer without jazz and

  blues in her veins must have ice water instead.

  11

  The Pedophilic

  Teacher

  I was lucky enough to have three brilliant teachers in junior

  high and high school. The first, in junior high, was Mr. Smith,

  who was a political conservative at a time when the word was

  not in common usage and not many people, including me,

  knew what it meant. He taught English, especially how to

  parse and diagram sentences, over and over, so that the structure of the language became embedded in one’s brain and was like gravity - no personal concern yet omnipresent. You could

  run your fingers through English the way God could run his

  fingers through your hair. He was the Czerny of grammar.

  The second was Mr. Belfield, who taught honors American

  history. I had him for two years, the eleventh and twelfth

  grades. Very lit le at Bennington later was as interesting or as

  demanding. He had unspeakably high standards, as befitted

  someone who had wanted to be secretary of state. It was wonderful not to be condescended to; not to be simply passing time; not to waste the hours waiting for some minor diversion to make one alert; to have one’s own intellect stretched

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  The Pedophilic Teacher

  until it was about ready to break. He too was a political

  conservative and seemed to live a solitary, affectionless life.

  But then, I wouldn’t know, would I? And that is exactly right.

  There is no reason for any student to know. The line separating student and teacher needs to be drawn, and it’s up to the teacher to do it. The combination of Mr. Belfield’s own

  intel ectual rigor and his substantive demands were a total

  blessing: he taught me how to write a book. I worked hard in

  his class, and I cannot think of any other teacher who was so

  authentic and commit ed, whose pedagogy was disinterested

  in the best sense, not a toying with the minds of students nor

  fucking with their aspirations for bet er or worse: he wanted

  heroic work - he demanded it. You might say that he was the

  Wagner of American history without the loathsome anti-

  Semitism and misshapen ego. Other people accused him of

  ar ogance, but I thought he was humble - he was modest to

  use his gifts to teach us. Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Belfield

  ever al owed the deep sleep of mediocrity; neither wanted

  narcoleptic students; you couldn’t play either of them for favors,

  and they didn’t play you.

  The third great teacher was dif erent in substance and in

  kind. He liked little girls, especially litt
le Jewish girls. I don’t

  mean five-year-olds, although maybe he liked them too. But

  he liked us, my two best friends and me. He had sexualized

  relationships with the three of us. He played us against each

  other: Who was going to get him at the end of the day or

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  Heartbreak

  through his machinations get to skip a class to see him? Who

  had spent the most time with him that day? Who had had the

  sexiest conversation with him? I thought that he and I were

  going to found a school of philosophy together; he would be

  the leader and I would be his acolyte. The sexiest thing about

  him was the range of his experience, not only concerning sex.

  He knew jazz; he introduced me to Sartre and Camus, though

  not de Beauvoir, certainly not; he had smoked marijuana and

  talked about it; he encouraged identification with bad-boy,

  alienated Holden Caulfield and through Holden the wretched

  Franny and Zooey; he drew me pictures of al the sex acts,

  including oral and anal sex; he printed by hand the names of

  the acts and instructed me in how to pursue men, not boys;

  he suggested to me that I become a prostitute - as he put it,

  it was more interesting than becoming a hairdresser, which

  was the one profession in his view open to women of my

  social class; he encouraged disobedience in general and

  af irmed that I was right to be so disenchanted with and contemptuous of the pukey adults who were my other teachers and to hate and defy al their stupid rules. At the same time,

  he was very controlling: my friends and I danced his dance;

  he partnered each of us and al of us; he created configurations

  of sex and love that manipulated, sexualized, and intensified

  our friendships with each other - it was a menage a quatre; he

  knew what each of us wanted and there he was dangling it and

  if you were part of his sexual delight he’d give you a taste.

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  The Pedophilic Teacher

  We thought that he was the one honest one, the one hip one.

  He knew who Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were; where

  Tangiers was; the oeuvre of Henry Miller and of Lawrence

  Durrell; what the politics of the Algerian War were, especially

  as it related to Camus; in fact he had actually been to Paris; he

  knew that sometimes, like Socrates, you needed to swallow

  the poison and other times, like Che, you needed to use the

  barrel of a gun. In other words, he was dazzling. He was the

  world outside the prison walls, and escape was my sole desire.

  His best trick was giving the three of us passes to get us out

  of classes we didn’t like, and we’d get to spend that time with

  him learning real stuff: sex stuff or sexy stuff. For instance,

  instead of the traditional candy bar, he of ered me writ en

  excuses from my mathematics classes, time bet er spent with

  him: it’s a wonder I can count to one. He fucked one of us on

  graduation night and kept up an emotional y abusive relationship with her for years. I almost commit ed suicide at sixteen because I didn’t think he loved me, though he later assured me

  that he did in a hot and heavy phone cal : under his influence

  and Salinger’s I had walked out into the ocean prepared to

  drown. The waves got up to about chest level when I realized

  that the water was fucking cold, and I turned myself around

  and got right out of that big, old ocean, though the ocean

  itself, not suicide, continues to entrance me. In my heart from

  then to this day, I became antisuicide; it took me longer - far

  too long - to become antipedophilic.

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  Heartbreak

  I thought Paul Goodman was right when he wrote in

  Growing Up Absurd that sex had always been passed on from

  adults to children; college-aged, I met Goodman, watched and

  experienced some of his cruelty to women, and was bewildered, though I knew I didn’t like the cruelty and I didn’t like him. How could someone write a rebel’s book and be so

  mean? To me, that was a formidable mystery. In later years my

  friend Judith Malina, who directed a play of Goodman’s

  though he taunted her repeatedly by saying women could not

  direct, told me about how he slapped her during a therapy

  session - he was the therapist. Of course, Goodman was a

  pedophile and a misogynist, as was Allen Ginsberg, whom I

  met later. I say “of course” because there is a specific kind of

  education the pedophilic teacher gives: the education itself is

  a seduction, a long, exciting-but-drawn-out coupling, an intellectual y dishonest, soul-rending passion in which the curiosity and adventuresomeness of the younger person is used as the

  hook, a cynical use because the younger person needs what

  the older provides. It may be at ention or a sense of importance or knowledge denied her or him by other adults. In my case I was Little Eva, and a snake offered knowledge and the

  promise of escape from the constriction of a dead world in

  which there were no poets or geniuses or visionaries. Al the

  girls, after al , were expected to teach, nurse, do hair, or clean

  houses, or combinations as if from a Chinese menu. Because

  most adults lie to children most of the time, the pedophilic

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  The Pedophilic Teacher

  adult seems to be a truth-tel er, the one adult ready and willing to know the world and not to lie about it. Lordy, lordy, I do still love that piece of shit.

  17

  “Silent Night”

  It was the sixth grade, I was ten, we had just moved from

  Camden to the suburbs, and I wouldn’t sing it: that simple.

  They put me alone in a big, empty classroom and let me sweat

  it out for a while. Then they sent in a turncoat Jew, a pretty,

  gutless teacher, who said that she was Jewish and she sang

  “Silent Night" so why didn’t l? It was my first experience with

  a female collaborator, or the first one that I remember. They

  left me alone in the empty classroom after that. I wasn’t a

  religious zealot; I just didn’t like being pushed around, and I

  knew about and liked the separation of church and state, and

  I knew I wasn’t a Christian and I didn’t worship Jesus. I even

  knew that Christians had made something of a habit of killing

  Jews, which sealed the deal for me. I was shunned, and one of

  my drawings, hung in the hal on a bulletin board, was defaced:

  “kike” was written across it. I then had to undergo the excruciating process of get ing some adult to tell me what “kike”

  meant. I thought my teachers were fascists in the style of the

  Inquisition for wanting me to sing “Silent Night” when they

  knew I was Jewish, and I stil think that. What they take from

  you in school is eroded slowly, but this was big. I couldn’t

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  “Silent Night"

  understand how they could try to force me. Transparently,

  they could and they did. Force, punishment, exile: so much

  adult firepower to use against such a little girl. To this day I

  think about this confrontation with authority as the “Silent

  Night” Action, and I recommend it. Adults need to be stood

  up to by children, period. It’s good for them, the adults, I

  mean. P
ushing kids around is ugly. The adults need to be

  saved from themselves. On the other hand, students should

  not, must not shoot teachers. The nobility of rebellion student-

  to-teacher requires civil disobedience, not guns, not war -

  pedagogy against pedagogy In this context, guns are cowardly

  I was, however, in crisis. I had read Gone with the Wind

  probably a hundred times, and like Scarlet I was willful. My

  problem was the following: abortion was illegal and women

  were dying. How could this be changed? Was the best way to

  write a book that made you cry your heart out and feel the

  suffering of the sick and dying women or to go into court a la

  Perry Mason and make an argument so compelling, so truthful and poignant, that people would rise up unable to bear the pain of the status quo? You might say that in some sense I was

  fully formed in the sixth grade. My frame of reference was not

  expansive - I did not yet know about Danton or Robespier e

  or any number of referent points beside Perry Mason - but in

  formal terms the dilemma of my life was fully present: law or

  literature, literature or law? By the end of that year, I had

  decided that they could stop you from going to law school -

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  Heartbreak

  and would - but no one could keep you from writing because

  nobody had to know about it.

  It was my mother whose politics were represented by the

  abortion theme: she supported legal birth control and legal

  abortion long before these were respectable beliefs. I had

  learned these prowoman political positions from her, and I

  think of her every time I fight for a woman’s reproductive

  rights or write a check to the National Abortion Rights

  Action League or Planned Parenthood. Our arguments for the

  abortion right now might be more politically sophisticated,

  but my mother had the heart and politics of a pioneer - only

  I didn’t understand that. These were the reproductive politics

  I grew up with, and so I did not know that she had taught me

  what I presumed was fair and right.