Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  Just once I got in danger. I was in a restaurant eating, and some guy had a banquet there. The restaurant guy said, “Go up on Peterson’s, on some street. He didn’t pay the bill. He’s got the money.” I walked in—there were nine coppers waiting. The guy who sent me set me up. The coppers said I threatened the guy with a baseball bat. I never even seen the guy. Went to Reed and Company, polygraphers on Michigan Avenue, took the test and cleared. In other words, in a court of law. They put me on probation. Almost sent me to jail for something I had nothing to do with, never did.

  I’m against burial and I’m for, a hundred percent, cremation—because I believe that funerals are barbaric. Loading a guy in a box with a necktie is the most barbaric thing in this century. Haven’t we smartened up yet? My God. Shakespeare teaches us it’s all a fraud . . .

  You’re not a religious man?

  Not at all.

  Was your family Christian?

  Yeah, Christian. I’m not Christian.

  Do you think there’s something after death?

  Shakespeare, a great line: “Death is an undiscovered country from which no traveler returns.” Nobody comes back. Where are they? Where are those guys like Lincoln and them guys. What happened to them? They’re in a box? Where? Give us some clue that Jesus is coming back . . . Give me a clue! What year is he coming? So we can be prepared.

  What about reincarnation?

  Fuck no. The great mystery to me is metamorphosis—how that fucking butterfly comes out of a caterpillar. Unbelievable. One of the mysteries of nature that they don’t write enough about. How interesting, how it goes from one life to another. The caterpillar goes and dies, comes out another one.

  Do you believe in God?

  I’m from Missouri—you better show me.

  Are you afraid of death?

  Hell no, but I’m pissed off that I wasn’t a success and I didn’t leave a legacy of money for my nieces, or a name for myself. Not to go out as a number but to go out as a mensch—a guy who did something constructive, someone who will be remembered. You! Who the fuck is going to remember me?

  Isn’t somebody going to remember you?

  They forget—people forget.

  You’re in a couple of books.

  Because of you!

  You feel you were a failure, is that it? What is a success?

  Economic security, not necessarily social stature. To be generous to people that came short of the glory of God, you might say, just didn’t make it and had the ability. Many are called, few are chosen.

  Where do you get these literary phrases?

  I’ve read Walter Lippmann’s Twentieth Century twenty-six times—he was the smartest. I read the New York Times Book Review section to see what they’re publishing. I pick it up every week.

  You buy it?

  Who said anything about buying it? One example, somebody had written on Amos ’n Andy, the radio show, in the review. The reviewer apparently didn’t do his research. If he did, he should have put it in there because it was interesting: the theme song of Amos and Andy was the theme song that they played in the theaters on the organ for D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. That was a tidbit. How come this reviewer, or the author of the book, didn’t have that in there? There’s another occasion of the Peter Principle. They reach the height of total incompetence.

  Did you ever see people get killed?

  Do I know hit men, professional killers? Of course I do.

  But you were never in danger?

  They knew I had sponsors. That avoided any conflict.

  You told me once you don’t go to weddings? Why not?

  I’m not that type of guy. I don’t dance, I don’t drink, and I don’t flaunt myself like some others I could name. I go to funerals. I never look. Even my own brother died, I never went up to the casket, or my nephew, or my mother, or my father, or my sister—I never look. I find it disgusting, absolutely disgusting. I was hustling rugs years ago, oriental rugs. So I went to a funeral home. I had a phony book in my hand. I told the guy, “I have an oriental rug and I don’t want to bring it back. I’ll make a deal with you. You want it? Buy it and I’m on my way.” So he took off his gloves and came down. He says, “Will you take a check?” I says, “I can’t take a check—I’m giving it to you for a price. You want it or you don’t.” So he says, “Follow me to the bank.” He gave me cash. I would sell undertakers. They’ll take a hot stove. Those are the biggest thieves in the world. They push the wife over this way to buy the most expensive casket because she would be in grief. And the husband, they got him busy at the other end of the thing. She would sign for the most expensive coffin. But they never sold it to her husband, always to her. Undertakers are the most thieving sons of a bitch on the planet Earth. They’re worse than stock manipulators. I tell these guys, “Here, I’m giving you a fucking bargain, take it. Throw me a bone.” I had a big markup with it. They’d come down. But I always showed a profit.

  Now, at seventy-three, I can’t do much of anything—my spine. I went to the doctor yesterday, he gave me a new pill to help me. I can’t walk too good. It’s a terrible thing for a man to go out a complete failure. The one sin of nature is that we grow old and die. The great gift of life we got is that they gave us that gift to be a fucking failure. After they give to you good health and good common sense. Now, I don’t fear dying. The great fear I have is dying a failure. We all go. I don’t want to go out a nothing. I want to go out a man among men.

  *Laurence J. Peter with Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong (New York: William Morrow, 1969; repr. New York: Buccaneer Books, 1996).

  Quinn Brisben

  A retired public school teacher. He and his wife are the only white family in an African-American community. His appearance is a cross between the traditional Santa Claus and Colonel Sanders. “I was a schoolteacher for well over thirty years. I have been active in every progressive cause I could get into from the fifties on.” He’s been teaching primarily African-American children. “I’ve had three generations in one family sometimes. Some of the worst deaths were when students died. It happens now and again. There was one girl whom I liked very, very much who got shot in a drive-by in the late nineteen eighties. And we’ve had them go to dope . . .” [Quinn hands me a card.] “I have donated my body to medical science. Embalming, autopsy should not be performed. An executor will arrange with a funeral director to remove my body to the Anatomical Gift Association of Chicago.”

  I THINK DEATH’S going to happen to me. [Laughs] It happens at the rate of one per person. There’s no way out of it. I’m sometimes tempted when I see someone jogging in the park to yell at ’em, “You’re gonna die anyhow.”

  I am not religious. I’ve been told all my life I was going to Hell. Fortunately, I read a very good book when I was eight years old, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck says, when he realizes he’s one of these dirty abolitionists that everybody hates, and that all the preachers in town say you’re going to Hell, he says, “All right, I’ll go to Hell, then.” You know, there are things more important than satisfying the religious conventions of your time. And ever since I read Huckleberry Finn, I’ve believed that.

  I think the Greeks were right: you’re alive as long as your friends remember you. Now, you’ve got all these books, Studs. The thing is, you are probably going to be remembered not for what you say but for what Lovin’ Al, the guy who parked the cars, said in Working.* He’s the one that I happen to remember best. You’re going to be remembered for what he says. We both know who Kid Pharaoh was, and he’s going to be remembered as Kid Pharaoh, not by his real name.

  The thing is that I teach history, and you remember these things. You teach them to students. George Washington led this army. You don’t tell them the names of the privates and the corporals, even if they were an important part of this, because nobody can remember everything. Bertolt Brecht wrote this marvelous poem: “those people that built the Great Wall of China—where did they go for lunch .
. .” The more you study something, the more you tend to downgrade the achievements of individual celebrated people and realize how much help they had.

  This really got to me when I’d just gotten out of jail in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1964. I’d been in jail for about thirty-six hours, and they released another guy at the same time, a guy by the name of House, from Detroit—some relation to Son House, the blues singer. He had been in for two weeks and he got lice, as it happened. Those were not ideal jails . . . 1995 or ’96 or something, the ACLU sued the state of Mississippi and they’d had to tear down half their jails as cruel and unusual punishment. Anyhow, we got back to the Freedom House and I got one of these long combs. You’ve got to have a fairly fine-toothed thing for this job, combing out lice. You dip it in kerosene and you pull it through the hair—and you’ve got to get down to the scalp, that’s where the louse eggs are. That, in my opinion, is the original for the phrase getting down to the nitty-gritty. So I was doing that with Stu House. This was 1964, and the length of his hair of course was a political statement. He was wearing, I don’t know if they called them a natural yet, a “freedom bush” I think was the name in ’64. He was a nappy rascal. This was hard work, pulling the lice out with this fine-toothed comb. We had the television on and we’d been kind of left behind.

  All the important people were at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. It was a great day, the day that Fannie Lou Hamer had testified before the credentials committee. Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been part of our group all summer, but Dr. King personally had not endorsed the Freedom Summer Movement. And Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney had been killed, and a thousand of us had gone to jail—and still no word from Dr. King. Now that we were a complete success, that day Dr. King endorsed Mississippi Freedom Summer—late August. Stu said to me, “Do you know, you and I are going to go down in history under the name of Martin Luther King.” Well, we have. The civil rights movement takes a whole page and a half in a high school textbook. They mention King, they mention Rosa Parks, they’ll mention Malcolm X as the loyal opposition, sort of. They don’t have time to mention even Bob Moses, let alone all of us privates and corporals. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Martin Luther King absolutely deserves all the honors he’s got . . .

  I am very grateful to the women—it almost certainly was women—who invented agriculture twelve thousand years ago or so. I don’t know any of their names. I don’t know a lot of people’s names who have contributed to all kinds of things that I enjoy. Somebody invented that machine that even you can operate, the tape recorder, though you are notorious for goofing up . . .

  There’s two things you can do wrong in your personal life. One of them is that you don’t prepare for death, that you don’t think it’s going to happen to you. The other thing is that you don’t prepare for living on. I went into a spell, a very severe depression in the late sixties. Most of it was just my personal thing, but the civil rights movement was grinding to a halt, the Vietnam War escalating, Richard Nixon becoming president. I’m sure this added to the troubles. I ended up in a mental hospital with severe depression for about six weeks or so. The thing is, Dr. King had been killed, all kinds of other people had been killed. There were assassinations all during that period. Some people I knew had been killed, like Mickey Schwerner. And I hadn’t been. In other words, I was a failed martyr. I’d gone out there and risked my ass and there were no takers. I’m this awful failure . . . The thing is that I hadn’t prepared: What happens if you live? How do you keep on living? I’ve lived thirty-some years beyond that. So I’ve got to prepare. There could be a headline in tomorrow morning’s Sun-Times, Studs Terkel and anonymous die in car crash. That’s OK, I’m in your books. I’m going down in history under the name of Studs Terkel, too, just like Lovin’ Al and Kid Pharaoh.

  I taught high school history for thirty-two years. All of these people who I taught about, whose memory I preserved . . . Every year I taught U.S. history I talked about those guys in the 54th Massachusetts, charging up on Battery Wagner and getting slaughtered and proving that blacks were willing to fight for their own freedom. I preserved their memory. As for my depression, for one thing Richard Nixon helped. He went steadily down and I felt better because of it. My mother would have said that was un-Christian, but that was the way it was.

  Then, I had a family, I had a loyal wife, I had two nice children. I did it better than my father: I’m friends with my grown children. My grandchildren like to be around me. This helped. The school administration never liked me much, but I was popular with the students. There are things I’ve got left to do. It’s important to have things left to do. After you die, other people live on. You saw my card. I am very happy to have my physical existence helping some third-year medical student learn something about the human body by cutting me up. That will be it. Oh, maybe I can still achieve martyrdom and there’ll be a memorial meeting. Bernard Shaw used to say that martyrdom is about the only way that you can achieve great fame without having any ability. [Laughs] The best book that helped me was by Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. He says that you do not want to break off your encounter with the absurd—you keep going on. Also, I’m with Nietzsche on this. He says, “I love the thought of suicide, it’s gotten me through many a rough night.” [Laughs] You know, you’ve always got that out if the pain or the humiliation gets too much. But you really don’t want to break off that encounter with the absurd—you want to keep going.

  I will learn again from Richard Nixon. If that man couldn’t be humiliated to death, that’s the kind of toughness we all want. Actually, if your favorite organ, the brain, is dead and beyond hope under our present technology of resuscitation, by all means cut your bill to Commonwealth Edison—pull the plug. It’s just that I don’t want anybody putting pressure on me to pull the plug. I’ve been active with an organization run by my friend Diane Coleman, who’s been in a wheelchair, I guess, all of her life, and it’s called Not Dead Yet. She’s against this assisted suicide because, if you’re running up bills in a nursing home, the temptation is for the management to increase their bottom line by putting pressure on you to pull your plug. Really, people should not be talked into suicide. The obligation of the medical profession and everyone else is to talk them out of it, to keep them going on and countering the absurd. If I’m not talking back ’cause my brain is dead and there’s no hope of reviving it, that’s fine, pull the plug. My favorite nineteenth-century Manchester economist is Ebenezer Scrooge. He used to say, “If Tiny Tim is going to die, then let him do it and decrease the surplus population.” Nobody’s got a right to tell that to Tiny Tim.

  *Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: The New Press, 1997 [repr.]).

  Kurt Vonnegut

  A writer. Among his more celebrated works is Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel inspired by his experience as an American POW in Dresden, during the Allied bombings. His most recent sardonic work is God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian. He is honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

  MY FIRST AMERICAN ancestors had been born Catholics in the north of Europe, around Münster, Germany. Vonnegut is not a noble name. There’s a stream right outside of Münster which is about the size of a table, about three and a half feet wide. It’s called the Vonne, the stream. And “gut” is a piece of property.

  My ancestors, educated people, came over before the Civil War. One on my mother’s side of the family lost a leg—I forget what battle. They settled in the Middle West, founding cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and they forgot all about Europe. They didn’t forget about the music, and they didn’t forget about the poetry, and they didn’t forget about the language, but they really lost all interest in German politics.

  My ancestors settled in Indianapolis. My paternal great-grandfather arrived with some money, looking for a business to buy. He bought a brewery. These were well-heeled opportunists, educa
ted opportunists, as compared with Irish immigrants or Italian immigrants. They arrived here before there was an Ellis Island, before there was a Statue of Liberty. They were here to settle down and become American nobility.

  My grandfather, Bernard Vonnegut, was born in Indianapolis. His father, Clemens Vonnegut, the immigrant, had founded a successful hardware store. He was selling rifles and axes and all that. He had three brothers. They all loved the business, they were making a lot of money, but Bernard was so unhappy. He wanted to be an artist. They hardly knew what the hell that was. Apparently they had never had one in the family before. They talked to a guy who knew something about art. He did the lettering on tombstones, and he was also a sculptor. He said, “This boy has to go to Europe.” So by God, his family sent him. [Laughs] He had a hell of a good time. So they told him to come home.

  He was stagestruck—theater. He wanted to design sets, but there is no such trade that anybody gets paid for. So he went to MIT instead and took a master’s degree in architecture. Then he went to New York and founded a club of young architects, meeting at the Salmagundi Club. His family said: “Enough is enough! You’re having too much fun—come home, get married . . .” So he did. He became the first licensed architect in Indiana. As for religion, my family were rational people, and they decided the priest didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. What really shook them was Darwin. That sounded exactly right to them, and it put the Bible out of business. To them, this country did have religious documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. They had no expectation of an afterlife. They were freethinkers. The Germans were so hated in the First World War, never mind the Second World War, that the freethinkers simply disappeared. They became Unitarians.

  My father was partner with his father, my grandfather in Indianapolis. He was an architect who became my grandfather’s partner. A lot of buildings in Indianapolis were done by one or the other. But Father was a businessman, and so he had to join Kiwanis, because the people pass around business in Kiwanis—insurance and architecture and law and whatever. But he also had to have a religion, because nobody wants to deal with a guy who isn’t anything, has no religion, which means he’s just a wild man. So Father said he was a Unitarian. That was OK. He and his father designed the Unitarian Church out there in Indianapolis. You had to be something.