Dance the Eagle to Sleep

by Marge Piercy

  “Playing games, that’s all” Billy got up and stomped around the long lab table. “You should be ashamed to talk about revolution. Just playing games. Have you read Marx? Have you read Lenin? Che? Mao? Do you have any idea what you think you’re doing playing hide and seek in a school building?”

  “Moncada was just a building too. And they didn’t even hold it briefly. You start where you’re at and where you can’t stand any longer to be. You start saying no to the system and yes to each other.”

  “Rhetoric. Bullshit. You have no analysis and no strategy. You have no program.” Billy sat down sneering.

  “But we have a thousand kids in motion. Don’t we?”

  To that he had no answer. That was what had kept him there. Maybe it was simple curiosity to see forces in confrontation.

  “What would be the use of having an analysis right now, when the kids wouldn’t be ready for it?” Corey bent forward, touching Billy’s knee. “This is what they’re ready for, and this is going to make a lot of difference in them”

  “A few holes in a few heads.”

  “Are you going or staying, Billy? Are you staying with us?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Come around with me and review the defenses.”

  Billy shook his head no. But the picture amused him, him and Corey the raging delinquent strolling arm and arm through the rabble looking at “defenses.” He shook his head no, but waited.

  Corey smiled. “Come on. Want to see what you think of them. Get your thoughts on how we can improve our positions. We’re buying time, remember, time to organize each other.”

  He saw that he could not simply sit out the siege in the physics lab. He wanted to touch that sense of motion. He would be busted with the rest of them, so he might as well plunge in and satisfy his curiosity.

  “They’ll be surprised to see me.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You were surprised to find me here”

  “Maybe” Corey grinned. He got up, stretched himself like someone much taller, and motioned him toward the door.

  Billy got up heavily, emphasizing his bulk and sticking his belly out. “But now I’m part of the master plan, uh?”

  “You’ll be part of making it, won’t you?” Corey led out. In the hall kids were sitting in loose circles, kids were scrawling slogans on the walls, and a boy was working on jimmying the lock on a storeroom door. Everything was much more diffuse than he had imagined. People had broken into small details and everything seemed to be happening at once in all directions without coordination or direction. Corey did take Billy’s arm, but his fingers were unconscious. He was alert only to the scene. Nobody paid much attention to them.

  Corey explained in brief snatches. “We’re taking turns sleeping up on three, so that there’s always somebody on duty.” They stood watching the kids working on the barricades inside the doors. Chairs, shop benches, tables, desks were heaped up bristling.

  There were meetings going on all of the time in one or another room, big meetings in the gym every few hours, constant announcements over the PA system and rock music blasting away. Their talk had excited Billy. He knew he was a fool to take any of the gab seriously. Corey was just trying out his charisma on a new sucker. But on the other hand, something was happening here. Action combined the niceties of game theory with the shock of collision. Close to five hundred lads had taken the school. They occupied the lunchroom and fed each other. They served on the sanitary and food and building squads. They had meetings at which they argued about what they wanted in their lives and what kind of world they would be willing to live in. They danced and smoked grass and played basketball in the gym. They took down the pictures of George Washington and the Superintendent of Schools and put up posters of Che and the Rolling Stones. With all the art department supplies for the rest of the term liberated from the storeroom, they were making a huge collage and painting a mural in the cafeteria depicting themselves and their culture heroes seizing the school and the Franklin shopping plaza.

  Corey assigned him a crew, and he set them to making smoke and stink bombs for the defense of the doors. This was the longest time in his life he had been away from home except for camp. He had hated camp. Here he was not under anyone. He could go away from them into a room and shut the door and work on a problem. Mostly the problems did not engage him long. He would hear noises outside and want to know what was up. His curiosity surprised him. He did not want to miss anything.

  Corey asked him, “Is everybody treating you well?”

  “Aren’t specialists always treated well? They do that too” He liked and hated it at once. Respect. He wandered around the edges of the groups. He hated the dancing. Obscene movements. Some of it was naked and that was worse. Taunting him for being fat, for being awkward, for being him. Not overtly, of course. They were respectful. Indeed, they treated him like Captain Marvel wandering through in his red plastic suit. Gee, look who’s here, how are you, old man? You want to dance? He turned on with them and went high up into the pinnacle of his head and looked down on the motes in Brownian movement and no longer cared.

  He found his interest in the cookbook fiddlings of chemistry revived. Pick out the active ingredients in grass and synthesize them cheaply. Or play other changes on the chemistry of human absurdity. Corey would provide him with the volunteers he needed. Yes. When they lost the school, he would return to chemistry.

  Corey had assigned him a girl; he was sure of that. Her name was Ginny, she said in a soft voice and slept beside him on a table in the physics lab. The second night he had sex with her. He was grimly determined, though scared she would figure out he was new to it, but she acted pleased and friendly. She seemed relieved that he wanted to.

  With her soft hands she rubbed his back and belly and then his penis. She told him she was sure he was very strong and he told her gruffly that he was. He did not like her body much. It was soft and spongy and she had big jiggly breasts and a round belly somehow in the way. But he managed to stay in her, and he closed his eyes and pumped away with her making cooing noises. Odd thoughts distracted him, such as that someone might come into the lab and see them. The picture rose of the whole physics class sitting around them calmly taking notes while he humped away on her. She was wet inside, and somehow that distracted him too. That it was wet and runny like a mouth or a dog’s nose.

  When he finished she sighed and rubbed against him and said that was the way she liked it, going on for a long time. Most men didn’t. He patted her on the shoulder and turned over to try to sleep on the hard table. On the whole, he was glad he had done it. He still did not know how to talk to girls. The idea of having to go up to a girl and start talking and make a pass at her or however people got into those things, was enough to give him a headache or make him itch in his clothes, for instance when he had to go to parties.

  All things considered, therefore, he was more or less glad Corey had assigned the girl to him. He did not know if he was glad or sorry to think that she would probably be there the next night, too, but he had the hang of it now. With her, anyhow, it would not frighten him. Only he was not sure how he was supposed to act with her the rest of the time, so during the day he kept busy with his crew and pretended he didn’t see her when she came in. His crew were learning fast and he was pleased with them. He was getting a lot better results out of them than the school ever had. One of his best men was Chuck, who’d never been allowed to take anything more demanding than Life Science.

  Ginny hung around and finally out of embarrassment he put her to work with the crew. It turned out she wasn’t stupid. He could not say why he had assumed that she was. She even asked good questions. He forgot to be worried about how he should act. He treated her like the rest of the crew and that seemed to work.

  Why had he assumed that Ginny was stupid? It was Joe all over again. It was because she came from the Ditch, not from Valley Acres, because she was tracked into “general studies,” which was the drop
out track. She wasn’t even good enough for “commercial” which would train her for a typing job—a job she would always think of as temporary if she spent forty years at it. No, she was down in “general,” where she would, if she was persistent enough to hang around to graduation, be able to get a job in a department store or filing or running messages.

  He kept thinking about tracking. He spent time going through records in the principal’s office. Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your social class was established for the rest of your life. Unemployment or welfare or with luck into the mills, for the guys in “general.” Typing and clerking and maybe secretaries or bookkeepers for the girls in “commercial” College and afterward semi-technical or social work or teaching for the “academics” If you weren’t in the academic track and the fast classes, nobody would try to teach you much, just keep you busy.

  Ginny’s parents spoke Polish at home. She had scored down close to the borderline of mental defective in her early intelligence tests. No one had bothered to notice that she had managed to learn English since then, and that here was an alert if bruised intelligence. Chuck made a more than adequate chemist. He would never think up an experiment, but he could follow any formula and he was accurate.

  They were broadcasting by then to other kids, trying to get them to rise and take their schools. Students who had never willingly spoken in class since the third grade made speeches and broadcast appeals. A daily newspaper was run off on the office mimeograph, and there was no shortage of articles and drawings and jokes and editorials. All of them were erupting opinions they wanted to share.

  He kept trying to decide, day to day, if Corey was bright. He was no mushhead. Yet there were holes in Corey’s mind. Corey was profoundly ignorant. In twelve years of school, he had learned nothing about biology, physics, chemistry, music, literature, art, psychology, anthropology, or sociology. His history was a series of brightly lit counter-myths, tableaux of great Indian leaders and peasant uprisings and guerrilla struggles, a Manichaean war stretching into the dim past. Corey had a sense of politics, of what made people move. He had a facility with public speaking. His record had enough nasty comments on it to keep him out of anyplace he might have wanted to go.

  Billy made his first public speech about tracking and the school records. (His own had a note from the principal saying not to pass on information about his bad temper and therapy, because Franklin High needed the admission to a good school for their records.) At the end of his speech, it was voted to burn the dossiers. He was stunned and exalted before the fire.

  It was still a school. Classes met most times of the day and night. They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use. People proposed classes they wanted to give or take. Lots came under the general heading of Who Am I, Where Do I Come From, Where Are We Going? They had learned nothing real in prefab history or civics classes. Corey and Billy between them taught a course in American History that got the kids pretty excited. Billy found it sad and funny. He had never been interested, but in his casual browsing and reading he had picked up a smattering. Another subject that got people aroused—though once again it was a case of pooling the few facts that anyone knew—was Who Owns America? There was also a course in local politics. Some of the kids knew a little more about that. They had a chart going by the third day that covered three boards of the room they were using, filling in connections between the big local contractors and the steel companies and the city and county governments and the unions and the Sons of Italy and the Slovakian Businessmen’s Association and the downtown merchants. Then they trailed off. They found they still did not know who owned obvious centers of power like the banks. They did not know who owned the local paper. Or the radio stations. They pooled what little they knew about how to find out.

  There were also courses in karate and self-defense. Billy spent a fair amount of time in the gym practicing. He could tell that the other guys were surprised. Already they had forgotten that as a freshman he had been one of the best on the scrub team. Because he did not strut and pose around, they did not realize how strong he was. The girls wanted to learn karate and self-defense too, but they complained that no one would teach them seriously. They said the boys did not care if they learned or not, yet they had much greater need.

  He called what they did “courses” although they did not look like anything that went on in school normally. The first thing they did was to push the teacher’s desk out of the way and set up the chairs in a circle. In some rooms they shoved the desks down the halls to build barricades and everybody sat in a circle on the floor. Sometimes they tried turning out the lights and talking in the dark to break people of the habit of keeping their mouths shut or worrying how others would judge what they said. They knew nothing. Yet each had scraps in his head that others maybe could use: questions, doubts, experiences, something seen on TV. They had to learn to give them to each other. What they were doing together was trying to learn how to learn.

  Groups formed all the time that were just as eager to talk as the classes, but somehow in another direction. He called them T-groups and found them boring and silly, but Corey insisted they were functional. Corey said that people were finding out that what each of them had thought of as his personal problem that he must solve in his life, was not personal at all but a common problem. If he found others in a little group who had that same hang-up, he must begin to see that an individual solution was bullshit.

  “If you find six other people confessing the same thing, you stop asking what you’ve done wrong. You stop feeling guilty about being such a stupid shit. You start asking how everybody got that way, and how to change the society that did it.”

  But Billy still considered the T-groups a form of titillation.

  The fourth night, the police cordon outside was reinforced by busloads of tactical police, and they knew the crisis had come. “Four days and three nights to turn five hundred kids into a people” Corey said. They lay on the roof watching the police bring up a bulldozer and get ready to smash in through the south doors. It was eerie. The moon was risen and bright on them. The police did not move like men, because they were so encased in their weapons and paraphernalia. They carried side arms, cases for handcuffs on their left hips, a club for head knocking and ball breaking, a gas mask and extra rounds of ammunition. Some had devices on their backs for spraying gas. Others carried spray cans or grenades. They moved with the stiffness of men laden with gadgets and protected from any sense of what they do. Something that looked like a tank was drawn up.

  They went downstairs. Corey stood in line for the mike. Everybody was trying to make ready for the assault. Some people were preparing to resist arrest passively, others hoped to make a stand. Wet cloths and jars of Vaseline were going around. Girls were taking earrings out of their ears to prevent the lobes being torn, and tucking their hair in to discourage being dragged by it.

  Corey spoke briefly in his turn. “We’ve done our best to make this jail into a human place, living here together and communally. We belong to each other and we’re a people now. We no longer belong to them or their rotten system. They can’t hold us. We’re water. Only if they can scare us and freeze us can they break us up. We’re water and we can flow together. We’re one tribe and we ought to be ready to leave this ugly place anyhow. We must move out and reach our brothers and sisters everywhere and call them out to join us.

  “Soon we’ll be together in another of their jails. Soon we’ll be back out and free in the open again dancing together. We must not forget, we must not let them make us forget that we’re people of one tribe, the first tribe of a new nation of the young and the free. Now they’re coming and we must protect each other as well as we can. We belong to a new nation of the young and the free, and we’re going to win!”

  The police began hurling in tear gas canisters and grenades. Billy looked around quickly for Ginny, but he could not get to her, and then his eyes began to burn and he bent over choking. He would mis
s sleeping on the hard physics table. He would miss his crew. He would miss the rough meals in the lunchroom. He would miss the interminable meetings and speeches and hassles. It was all over, he supposed, but these had been by far the best days of his life.

  How Joanna Accepts a Chain

  For the second time that year, the pigs shipped Joanna back to her parents in Fort Dix, where her father called her names and her mother got drunk as usual and wept and shook her by the shoulders and hair clumsily. They shipped her back to the hopeless box of being Jill. Back to the creepy school and the prison of the base and the generals’ sons who thought they were entitled to lay her because she had been around and her father was a flop—a permanent captain. Back to the world where people were numbers and little perches to defend and diseases. Back to the world where everything was known, and it all amounted to nothing more exciting than a laundry list.

  The world of people grinding each other. Owning each other. Her mother drank gin. Her father ate shit. All god’s children hated the nigger communist jew hippy bastards out there. The world of being excluded and exploited, or incorporated and exploited. You paid your life and you took your choice.

  She was sent home from school one day for not wearing a bra. “But a bra makes my breasts stick out more” she said to the counselor. “I don’t like my breasts to stick out.” She knew the woman wanted to punch her but did not dare, not quite. She had a good time with the counselor, playing with the word “obscene.” Joanna made a quick list of things she found obscene: powdering your face, wearing underwear that caused parts of the body to stick out or get squished in unnaturally, shaving under the arms or between the legs, dipping fingernails or toenails in paint …

  She didn’t mind being sentenced to stay home for three days. She spent the time locked in her room rereading Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes stories and dancing to the radio. Sometimes she danced naked in front of the mirror, not to excite herself, because she did not find it exciting, but in order to study the movement of her limbs and muscles exactly. She improvised, then watched frowning and improved or discarded the step or gesture.