A Chorus of Stones

by Susan Griffin

  What, then, did they feel, those who answered Israel’s letters? Did the answer come from one person or many? Were the letters composed according to the dictates of a policy as mysterious and unaccountable to the authors of the letters as to Israel himself? What passed through the mind of the VA doctor the day that Israel returned to confront him, and began to shout, so that, in order to continue with his schedule, he had to have the man who had been his patient ushered out of the hospital by the military police?

  It was in another winter, two years before I met Israel, that I was approached by a woman who wanted to tell me how she had reluctantly participated in a series of anonymous falsehoods. She had been working for the Department of Energy. It was soon after the accident at Three Mile Island. Congress had mandated that the safety of nuclear power plants be studied. The department put her in charge of determining what kind of training the operators at plants were receiving.

  Like a runner from the battle of Troy, she told me her story in great gulps of speech. Yet, despite her urgency, her approach was careful. I listened carefully too, sensing she might be struck dumb at any instant, not from any outside force so much as her own fear.

  She had written not one but two reports, she told me. The first report showed serious, even dangerous inadequacies in training programs for those who daily operate the control boards of nuclear power plants. But Congress never received this report. It was buried from the public eye. It was only the second report, done at the request of her supervisors, and omitting several very revealing questions, that Congress ever saw.

  After she did the second study, she quit her job. Now she wanted to give the first report to someone. Would I take it? She did not have it with her. We met in Kentucky, but the report was in Tennessee where she still lived. I would have to return to the South and visit her there.

  It was over a year before I could come again, and circumstances had changed. She had searched for work for several months, until the money she saved was almost gone. Her old job was still there, and she took it. She could not give me the report now. At least not for publication. Did I understand? It would mean the loss of her livelihood. But still she wanted me to visit her. She would tell me her story in greater detail, and show me the inner workings of the place.

  The ground was cold and the grass turned brown, the way it does in winter east of the Rockies. I had been to Appalachia before, but never in this season. Still there was a beauty that surprised me. The doe-brown hills were soft like the soft speech of the region. Lee’s rented house, though it was in a working-class neighborhood of Knoxville, was surrounded with an expanse of grass and trees. It was made of wood, white, with a sitting porch all along the front.

  It was because she loved the Appalachia that she first accepted the offer of a job at Oak Ridge. The research facility that produced fissionable material for the first atomic bomb is situated just outside Knoxville in what was once farm country. It is not too far from the mountains and it shares the culture of the whole region, a culture laid close to the land, familiar with poverty, rebelling against authority yet submitting to seemingly anonymous powers, a culture rich unto itself, with its own vocabulary, its own style of guitar playing, woodcarving, dance, storytelling and wit.

  Now writing, I find some irony in this, that her desire to work in the nuclear industry came from a sense of integrity, the wish to live and work in the place where she was born. Though she knew weapons were made there, the original purpose for which she was hired was innocent enough. A private contractor for the Department of Energy, was studying the effects of weatherizing the houses of the poor, and she would assist in that study.

  A few days after I arrived she drove me into and around this community. Before she moved to Knoxville she had settled in Oak Ridge itself, the community that was planned around various nuclear plants and research facilities. The first sign to her that something was wrong here was the absence of that soft, musical Appalachian speech so familiar to her.

  I recognized a look to the place; it was the same look that had come over the San Fernando Valley where I grew up in the middle fifties. Old farms, orchards, fields, replaced by low concrete buildings, thrown up almost overnight, shopping malls housing chains, with a manufactured look, as if life itself were the prefabricated product of an assembly line and lacking any history, or at least missing all memory of the past.

  How did it happen? There was some planning. It took place quickly, in the heat of war, under the aegis of the military. Iris, who lived with Lee and was her lover, had seen some of the plans. Her father was a machinist at Oak Ridge and she had grown up there. She described these plans as we sat in their kitchen one night. A separate sector for African-Americans was engineered into the ground plans. And another sector for plant workers, machinists, secretaries, support people, in undistinguished rectangular buildings with thin walls fronted by asphalt parking lots. This was where Iris’s parents still lived and it was where Lee lived before she moved to Knoxville. The nicest sector, wooded and comfortable, with front lawns and backyards, and shaded drives ending in circles, was reserved for the scientists and the administrators.

  Yet, though there was a hierarchy from the beginning, the look of the place pointed to no seat of power. There was no domed capitol, no ceremonial arch, no wide boulevard leading to an impressive set of marble steps. One sensed instead a hidden power, inaccessible both to the eye and, in some cases, even to reason. There were the omnipresent yet never declared plans, unassailable for reasons of national security, dictating that chain link should be thrown around a field, or that access to an old country road be suddenly forbidden. Who ordered this and why was never known.

  The place looked amazingly peaceful, even placid, for the site of the manufacture of terrible weapons. But this placidity was like the calm of someone given to hysteria or violence who has been tranquilized. There is a dull calmness that is too still, and then the stories that every once in a while migrate to the surface. The animal laboratory, a nondescript building surrounded by green, looking for all the world like a dentist’s office, housing, according to Lee, strange creatures such as six-legged pigs who still survived after years of experiments to determine the genetic effects of radiation. The results of those experiments were labeled top secret. And no one was allowed into that building without a permit. But for what purpose did they still keep the animals?

  And then there was the story Lee told me about a truck carrying spent fuel rods that had turned over on the pike. The Department of Energy sent a friend of hers, a photographer, out to document the accident, but in the middle of taking pictures he found himself pinned down by two guards, a pistol pointing at his head. They tore the film from his camera and threatened to arrest him. When finally he convinced them to look at his credentials, they said he did not have the right authorization.

  This village belongs to the castle, Kafka wrote earlier in the century, and whoever lives here or passes the night does so, in a manner of speaking, in the castle itself. Nobody may do that without the Count’s permission.

  But who is the Count? And how does one get to the castle? Who gives the proper authorization? Who can tell us why things are the way they are? There was in Oak Ridge no single Count, no single castle, but instead many shadowy Counts, like strange magnets acting at a distance, known only by the indecipherable patterns of what lay within their purview.

  As if she were describing this vacuum of identifiable power, pointing out an enclosed piece of the landscape to me, Lee said, These are called orphan lands. The phrase had originated among local people to name those parts of what had been public ground, now mysteriously sealed off by some agency at Oak Ridge. The sense of humor is not new. There is a history of absent power in this part of the country. Near the end of the nineteenth century British and Northern capital combined to buy up tracts of land in Kentucky and Tennessee for mineral rights. Hence came the big mines and company towns, and governments within governments whose real power issued from far away.


  There were of course small rebellions as well as sly remarks, and for this too the region had a history. It was settled by mountain people, men and women who had forged their way farther and farther into lands ungoverned by white men, people who preferred as little governance as possible. Now there were the burials, for instance, headstones you might encounter anywhere along the turnpike. According to an old Tennessee law, all public lands can be used for private burial, and Lee took these burials to be a mute protest against the seizing of public ground. Of course I read another irony into this image of the dead lying all about these offices from which issued instruments of death.

  Lee was born in the coal mining mountains of Tennessee and she had an aching love of the region. Her family was poor but her father had had some education. He was a preacher. One summer she told me she had had to spend every night, seven days a week, sitting in a tent hearing another preacher deliver his sermons, with that unremitting harshness of purpose and predictable repetition which characterize evangelical rhetoric.

  The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth. It is only now as I write that I wonder if such a tightly circumscribed structure of thought makes up for early, painful and unaccountable losses. Even the loss, for instance, of all the daylight hours, of one’s life force, taken year after year by an obscure and distant ownership, the loss of dignity which comes from poverty and need, by which one is reduced to fear, or begging, or doing what does not seem entirely right, the loss of selfhood when nameless others have so much power over one’s life. Just like silence, this loss is repeated from one generation to the next so that its occurrence too seems inevitable.

  But all systems of thought, especially if they are rigid, are bound to fail at one moment or another. This happened to Lee’s father just after the Second World War. Every explanation for existence he had memorized stood mute before what he witnessed. He had been sent to the South Pacific. And then, six months after the bomb was dropped, he found himself in the ruins of Hiroshima. He would describe it to his children, the spectacular dimensions of the damage. But the crumbling of something inside him could hardly be described. Lee’s mother said it more simply, Nothing before or since had so destroyed him, she said. He returned shattered.

  Was it then, shaken and stunned, in the paucity of anything else that might help him survive or even understand what he had seen, that, though all he believed in before had failed this test, still he drew the old beliefs more tightly around him, the same way an abused child clings more desperately to the abusing parent? Certainly it was that way with his idea of manhood. And his sons suffered from this. The boys were smacked down, Lee said, for not being men, on the one hand, and then for being too much men.

  Both sons ended up in various kinds of trouble. The older one started to pull himself together after the younger son was found dead in a drainage ditch. He had been taking drugs and then walked home through an icy countryside in just his shirtsleeves. When he fell asleep he must have tried to warm himself by lying in this cradle in the earth.

  The requirements of gender are like the omnipresent yet partly hidden plans of a secret bureaucracy. I am thinking of Franz Kafka, how he was a small man, in some way unmanned by the terrifying figure of his father, whose standards he could never achieve. It was the critic Walter Benjamin who noticed that the last sentence of The Trial speaks of shame: It was as if the shame of it must outlive him. Certainly a soldier, judged on the battlefield by his manhood, is compelled by a fear of shame and the desire for a glory that will survive him. Does the shadow of a soldier’s life fall over every man?

  And is there not shame at the core of all one learns as one learns propriety? The body a terrain of forbidden acts. Hungers, expressions, evidences of flesh permeating an atmosphere of denial. Shame commingling with skin, cells, bone, even breath.

  If the shame is intense enough it outlives anyone it touches, whether man or woman. I am still thinking of gender. How shame drives this unbending structure to which we must mold ourselves. In the true logic of this system, if one does not conform, one ceases to exist at all. And any continued evidence of existence is the subject of shame. It is this feeling, that one ought to be invisible, hardly heard, barely making any impression on the whole, that wraps itself inconspicuously through every paradoxical turning, transforming even anger over compromise and loss and discomfort into an energy that sustains the monolithic judgment.

  That Lee was a lesbian was a fact only half disclosed where she worked. Though there were those who knew, the truth of her life was never openly discussed. We are all, even the most orthodox among us, used to such little lies of being. We make subtle changes in posture, or dress or speech, to match an occasion at which convention is required, becoming more manly, more lady-like for a period, until, returning home, we feel more ourselves. Moving from home to work, Lee suffered a daily transformation. Was this part of what allowed her to continue to participate in what she did not condone?

  She told me this story. One of her colleagues was a gay man. She was the only one where they worked who knew. Was it the need to keep his private life hidden that made him seem so closed? It is an effective way to keep a secret, to reveal nothing at all of oneself. This strategy need not be planned. Silence over any subject tends to grow. One thought, one moment multiplies until everything is buried and not speaking is a habit. But one day he opened up to her. He had been sent across the country to speak before assemblies of high school students and tell them that the manufacture of nuclear weapons and nuclear power was entirely safe. He knew this was not the truth. But he did it. How do you live with something like that? he asked her, and then sank back into his habitual silence.

  We sat in the kitchen together eating food familiar to me from my grandmother’s southern Illinois childhood, while Lee and Iris spoke of the discomfort they had with this work. Iris had been in love with science and particularly the subatomic world of nuclear physics ever since she could remember. Physicists and engineers had been the heroes of the world she knew. They were the heroes of my world too, growing up in the decades after the war. One felt as if these scientists held a key to an arcane world of meaning once open only to mystics or the most sensitive of theologians. In Iris’s world they must have seemed to have the power of God to make and destroy worlds.

  But in order to enter the world of meaning, Iris would have to work at cross-purposes with her sense of what was right. The only available employment in the field of nuclear engineering was in the weapons industry. Would she then, over time, sink like Lee’s friend at work into a silence that erases all meaning?

  The process is like a kind of erosion, diminishing the capacity to see as well as speak. Iris knew now that she had been swimming as a child in polluted waters. Had it affected her health? I asked her. No, she told me. But later I learned she had serious arthritis in her hip, requiring surgery, causing her continual pain. A co-worker of Lee’s, an industrial safety engineer, had also never made the connection between her own breast cancer and her frequent presence at the Y-Plant until Lee interviewed her for me.

  Lee never intended to work in the nuclear industry. After a while the weatherizing contract was completed. And then she found herself presented with contracts of another kind. The transition was smooth, barely perceptible. When she did leave, her résumé showed that she had the greatest experience in the nuclear field. The sense of wrongdoing she felt simply leadened her speech, her gait. She felt as trapped as the orphan lands, enclosed in an exclusive world, with its own ethics, its own standards, even its own language.

  It is language of disguises that has evolved over four decades, so that it is no longer so strange to speak of a nuclear accident as an event, or the explosion at Three Mile Island as a normal aberration. All bureaucracies contain such obfuscating terms. It was part of Kafka’s brilliance to capture what he called officialese, the language of the military and the governm
ent that was introduced to Central Europe by Frederick the Great in an attempt to make his armies uniform and obedient. It is an impersonal language, purged of feeling, disembodied, uttered as if by no one with an earthly existence.

  One must lie low, Kafka wrote in The Trial, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the disposition of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery—since everything interlocked—and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer and more ruthless.

  As she spread the two reports she had written before us on the kitchen table, Lee warned me again not to reveal her name or the contents of the first report. Not unless she succeeded in leaving, one day, and in finding other work. Together we read the figures and graphs, Lee translating them into the actual circumstances they represented until gradually I began to see that the boundary separating her world from mine was illusory, as I too, and all I loved, was swept toward the same catastrophe.

  When nothing is going wrong, she told me, it is a very easy task to run the control board for a power plant. But if a crisis is brewing, as many as twenty-seven gauges might need to be read, while the same number of lights are flashing, together with buzzers sounding. The effect is pandemonium. The wrong decision can make matters much worse. A crisis can accelerate rapidly, even in a matter of minutes or seconds, becoming irreversible. But the right decision cannot be reached without a thorough knowledge of how nuclear plants function, both theoretically and practically.