Too much effort. Hopelessness begged me to return to sleep. First, rest up for the plane journey. Ah…here it came…sweet darkness.
Rachel would come to me if I just waited long enough. She’d appear in the doorway, come to my bedside, and kiss me good night. As long as I never woke up, Rachel would stay with me forever.
The next time I woke, it was dark. I was still underneath the Chrome Palace quilt. Must not have boarded a plane. Movement caught my eye. Robin must have opened the blinds. Two figures were embracing and kissing on the balcony across from Robin’s building. Did one of them have a lover, a husband or wife, somewhere else? Feminism was right, the personal was certainly political. But making the personal fit one’s politics, trying to change the nature of jealousy in human beings, would never work. The thought of Rachel with another woman still made me need to vomit. I could never accept that. Yet Rachel had. Or had she? Maybe that’s why she left. If I ever felt this way again about someone else, I promised myself, I wouldn’t fuck around with non-monogamy. Had I given up BeJo sooner Rachel would be with me today. Now I knew that free love was free only if you weren’t in love.
Weeks passed, and I had no desire to leave my prison bedroom. Robin came and went, offering solace and trinkets of distraction. BeJo called, Robin said it seemed like daily, but I couldn’t go to the phone for anyone. Whenever I was alone I’d find myself reduced to tears. I cried when I woke and I cried in my sleep. I found no reason to leave this haven. Loving Rachel had been a little bit of heaven and a great deal of hell. Mind, body, and soul, I’d finally been in complete harmony when I made love with her. The double bed on the ocean was the most sublime happiness I’d ever know. Less was not worth living for. My grief felt endless, as though it could replenish a long dried-out well. It was better when Robin came in because I couldn’t cry in front of her again. Real butches didn’t show this kind of grief, even if they were feminists. And the façade of my butchness was all I had left.
I rolled onto my stomach, drew up the quilt and buried myself. Maybe it was time to end my life as I knew it. Move to another city. I’d used up Los Angeles and all the women in it. I could be happy in a tiny village, somewhere in a mountain cave where I would wake up in a year and not remember Rachel. Could I have been so wrong about who I thought I was? Was the mania of political life only my brake pedal against intimacy?
I thought of my .38 caliber that lay in the closet at BeJo’s wrapped in the soft rag of an old flannel shirt. Maybe moving was not the solution. Maybe I should just end my fucked up life.
Only BeJo knew I owned a gun, which I’d bought on a whim when I lived in the ghetto with robberies going down weekly on my street.
“Where’d you get this?” she’d screamed the day she’d accidentally found it.
“At a pawn shop,” I explained nonchalantly. “They’re easy to buy! Everyone’s doing it. I didn’t even need to show my driver’s license.”
Knowing how well BeJo knew me, I was sure she’d hidden it by now, just in case I’d come home looking for it.
I awoke in the middle of the night soaked in a cold sweat. No! I couldn’t kill myself! How would that look in the headlines of the gay press? “Lesbian Leader Shoots Self Over Ex-Lover.” The gay movement couldn’t afford a high-profile activist’s suicide. We’d seen too many soppy, stereotypical gay movies like the recent The Killing of Sister George where the gays died at the end. No, we couldn’t handle any more dead dykes.
Killing myself would make a travesty of everything I’d worked for. The movement was more important than my sorry-assed struggles. I would not betray it.
I’d made it through tough times before; feminism had taught me that breakdowns were opportunities for breakthroughs. So, what in my life needed basic change? Somehow I had to find closure with Rachel on my own since she obviously was not going to be around to help. And if I was honest with myself, I’d see what Rachel saw—a life more committed to social change than it could ever be to a single human being. Maybe I needed to learn to love that part of me and stop denying that was who I was. Maybe being a political lifer was positive and great and too valuable to throw away. Something positive had to come from quitting the strike and losing Rachel. I’d find a way to break through to the other side of nowhere.
My only job tonight and tomorrow was to live through the seeming emptiness, dump this self-pity, and be on the look out for a crack in a new door that would open someday soon. {5}
Chapter 32
The End of the War
[Los Angeles]
“I want to send my special love and rage to all of my sisters.” —Emily Harris, SLA
February, 1976
“Penny’s on the phone, Córdova, wake up!” Robin’s voice seemed to come from far away, but my bed was rocking. Robin’s voice was closer now. “Penny got fired.”
“Penny? Fired?” My eyes flew open. Just as suddenly I lost the train of thought and rolled over to go back to sleep. “Tell her I’m on sabbatical.”
“I told her that the last three times. And I’m tired of saying the same thing to BeJo and Penny, Tide people, and everyone. You’ve got to talk to your editor this time. You’ve been lying here for weeks. You’re wearing out my linens. Your stay at the Robin Tyler Rest Home for Divorced Butches is over. You’re either graduated or flunked. Now get up and go do your own life!” Robin held her cordless phone in front of my face.
I took the phone. “Penny?” I managed weakly, “Did they really give you the ax?”
I heard her suck in her breath and fight for control. “Don and Troy brought me in this morning. They said I was correct in my judgment that either the sexist ads had to go, or I had to. They chose the ads.” She offered a small laugh. I could hear the shock in her voice. “I made the sexist pigs gave me one last issue.”
Another end of an era, I reflected. Was radicalism dying? “Then it will be my last issue too, Pen.”
“You’d better think about that when your head is clear, my friend. But I appreciate the support.” Her voice cracked. She paused. I was afraid she was going to cry.
“What can I do to make it better for you?”
“My final issue,” she said. “I want this last cover story to be our best.”
“What cover story?”
“The prison, SBI called this morning. Emily Harris has chosen The Freep and Ms. Magazine to do her only two interviews.”
I gulped. So the imprisoned woman-soldier of the SLA had responded to my letter and chosen me! Despite the disintegration of my relationship with Rachel, I’d poured my heart into my appeal to her, sharing my belief in the need for radical systemic change and had included several feminist columns and articles I’d written on Joan Little and Susan Saxe so that she could see the breadth of my political commitment and knowledge. I’d sought to woo Harris with my words, my most powerful weapon according to Rachel, so that Harris would feel safe and confident enough to entrust me with her story. The letter had worked! A wave of hope swept through me.
Sitting up in bed, cradling the phone, I caught my reflection in the mirror. I hadn’t combed my hair or bathed in days. I dropped my gaze. “I’m in no kind of mental shape to do such a big interview, Penny. Maybe Tom should step in?”
“Harris said yes to your query letter, not his.” Her tone was sharp.
I groaned, falling backwards onto the pillows, picturing myself trying to pump up my former nothing-scares-Córdova energy. It felt like I’d left my butch arrogance at Jacki’s house on that night I was still trying to forget. Could I show up to listen to Emily in a way that I hadn’t been able to listen to Rachel?
“We’ve worked so hard to get this interview, Jeanne.”
I sat up. Penny had worked her connections hard for this interview, and picked up my slack at The Freep this last month when I’d let it all go to hell. I owed Penny, and I owed Emily Harris, a fellow feminist who had much bigger problems than I did. Besides, a prison seemed like the only place I could go where I wouldn’t be the most fuc
ked up human being on the planet. It would be healthy for me to get out of my self-indulgent head and into someone else’s. I wanted to interview Emily Harris because she had no voice. Since Rachel’s disappearance, I too had lost my voice. And I knew Emily’s enforced silence would last a good deal longer than my own. She was just twenty-five, a year younger than I. The capture of the last two members of the SLA had stunned and muted the underground Left.
“Will you help me find my notes?” I asked Penny. “I can’t remember where I left them.”
“I’ll start looking. The interview is the day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll be ready,” I said.
Stumbling into the bathroom, I knew I had to wash off yesterday’s dead skin, call BeJo to help me pack and come home to our apartment, and do whatever it took to walk out of Robin’s condo and step forward—into the rest of my life.
Sybil Brand Institute for women was a lowdown jail with an uptown name. As I drove up its bluff, the prison began to emerge from the mist like a doctored photo of a boarding school that jailers might send out to comfort parents. It sat on a hill called City Terrace, between the downtown business district and the Latino barrio of East L.A., a fortress separating wealth from the peasantry. From inside, inmates heard the rush of traffic on the San Bernardino Freeway below as the hum of a humanity to which they no longer belonged.
As I reached the blacktop driveway, the marine layer lifted enough to see the fortress’s solid walls girdled with steel. The smell of punishment tasted like newly minted lead coin.
I pressed a brass button at the first gate and looked through the chain link at inmates wandering aimlessly in a yard. Black and silver barbed wire straddled the twelve-foot fence.
I wasn’t afraid. My bravado had returned. In grad school I’d spent a year interning at Ventura School for Girls, a youth jail, and another year at Terminal Island, California’s federal penitentiary for women. I knew the rules. Inmates were instructed to walk, but don’t run; speak but never yell; sleep, but don’t dream. Repression breeds discontent, I’d tried to tell my superiors. “You are over-identifying with the prisoners,” they replied. I’d turned down a career in criminology when I realized that “social work” meant keeping a lid on the garbage can of capitalism’s collateral damage. No, I wasn’t going to aid and abet the Establishment.
The uniformed female guard greeted me with her eyes on the ground, as if I didn’t have a face. I took this as a blessing since I’d forgotten to dress “straight” and had on a boy’s shirt and jeans. Although I wouldn’t have minded being somehow thrown into SBI’s notorious Daddy Tank, a private wing where butch-looking inmates were kept. Think of the stories I’d get, I thought, and the hardcore working class “daddies” I’d meet. Like other jails in America, SBI openly discriminated against masculine women.
The female guard led me, stomping down an antiseptic corridor. She belonged in the Daddy Tank too, I chuckled to myself, wondering if she recognized herself when she locked up butch prisoners. “Wait here,” she said, her keys clanging against metal studs on her uniform belt.
I sat on a cement bench in what appeared to be a small, private visiting room. It was really no more than an alcove at the end of a corridor, certainly not the main visiting room. I suspected that they kept political prisoners like Harris separated from the main population. They couldn’t risk these revolutionaries instigating an inmate civil rights riot. And goddess knows they had no civil
rights, as Angela Davis and others had published in stories about the private beatings that went on daily. A vending machine stood in the corner. I noticed it served coffee and soda only in paper cups, no metal cans. No decoration adorned the walls. Floor to ceiling, it was all asylum white, like the white noise inside my mind the last month at Robin’s.
Damn. There it was again. A flash from New Year’s Eve: me in a lunge stance outside Jacki’s back door. Knife in hand, my violence two parts self-disgust and three parts despair. My stomach torqued with shame. I looked under the bench for a trashcan. Vomit threatened my larynx. I should just let the bile out, I thought, and add throwing up in prison to my repertoire of sad behavior.
A loud bolt slid in its shaft. At the far end of the corridor an iron gate opened and Emily Harris stepped into view clad in prison orange. A short, small-framed white woman with mousy brown curls, she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. This self-avowed political outlaw had robbed a bank with a shotgun? The petite woman strode the tunnel toward me, her shoulders held high as though she was proud of her self-inflicted outrage. Proud but caged, I thought, wondering once more why I’d chosen to expose capitalism’s hypocrisy with the pen while she’d chosen to cripple it with gunpowder.
As Emily came closer, I saw that her eyes were clear, her affect resolute. Her pale face revealed no anger. I reached to take the pencil from behind my ear so she would see me as a sister instead of a journalist.
She offered me her hand. “I’m Emily Harris,” she said politely.
For a moment I saw Rachel’s face in hers. She had the same girl-next-door innocence.
“Jeanne Córdova. Thank you for choosing me.” I smiled broadly, wanting to ask immediately why she had. But that was too personal, too early. Motioning to the cement bench, I said wryly, “Looks like this is all we get.”
We sat. I folded my leg across my knee and leaned toward her. “Is Emily Harris your real name?”
She laughed with surprise. It was a soft, normal young woman’s laugh, not unlike Rachel’s. “No it’s not!” she exclaimed. “I was born Emily Montague Schwartz, straight A student from Indiana U. I even pledged Chi Omega sorority.”
“Then you didn’t go to Wellesley?” I joked.
Our pleasantries continued and Emily relaxed. She had moved to Berkeley halfway through college and there met fellow student Bill Harris who was an ex-Marine just returned from Vietnam. In northern California, at the politically inflamed UC Berkeley campus, she and Bill had become involved with the radical activist group Venceremos, which visited political prisoners and agitated for prison reform. {1}
“That’s where I met Donald,” she concluded, referring to black activist and SLA Field Marshall, Donald DeFreeze, their leader.
“Cinque must have been very charismatic to have pulled together your cadre, a group willing to die for their beliefs?” I probed.
When I used his SLA name, Harris visibly stiffened. Cinque had put a bullet through his own head as two hundred cops surrounded a small house in Watts and in a hail of bullets and tear gas burned alive five of his and Emily’s comrades.
“Yes,” she replied, her voice numb.
Anguish, I thought, not hostility.
“He was the most committed revolutionary I have ever met. He was also my lover.”
I caught my clipboard on its way to the floor, fumbling from the bombshell she just dropped. Newspapers had speculated about personal relationships among the SLA. The lesbian underground knew that Mizmoon and Camilla Hall were lesbian lovers, but little was known about the love life of Cinque. My query letter to Emily had promised that I would not pry into her personal life; yet, I wanted badly to ask more about Cinque and her marriage to Bill, whether the rumored non-monogamy amongst the SLA in general was true. {2}And if it was, did non-monogamy work better for revolutionaries? Had sexual intimacy among them strengthened their willingness to die for their cause, or just added chaos, as it had in mine?
“And your marriage to Bill?” I ventured, holding my breath.
“The three of us were together,” Harris confirmed, tight-lipped. “Monogamy is a capitalist tool to keep women as chattel.”
I bit my tongue and waited for more.
“And yes,” Harris added, as though reading my mind, “we did spend a lot of time and energy dealing with non-monogamy as a radical political stance.” She paused, a slight growl in her tone. “I assumed you were a feminist.”
“Is that why you chose me?” I countered.
“As a feminist, a C
hicana and a lesbian, I thought you would understand me.”
For a second I was thrown by her adding “lesbian.” The New Left underground was just beginning to see radical gays and lesbians as comrades. I recovered and said, “Yes, I am all those things. And I think I do understand you. I want to.”
“Then please don’t ask me anymore petit bourgeois psychoanalytic questions.”
Clearly I’d been chastened. I flipped a page in my notebook and began again.
“After you were arrested in September, both you and Patty began to refer to yourselves as revolutionary feminists. Was this a new politic that the SLA was coming to, or does it signal your personal evolution?” Shit, was that too personal?
“The liberation of women and the overthrow of capitalism are inextricably entwined,” Harris replied. “As soldiers we recognize fighting for the revolution with a gun in hand is not just a man’s right.” She was now sitting stiffly, her backbone straight, drawing strength from territory she knew well. “Sexism is rooted in the very foundation of U.S. imperialism.”
As my tape recorder rolled, it struck me that Harris had gone into another persona. Perhaps the person talking was Yolanda, Emily’s chosen political name. Members of the SLA had offed their birth names in favor of more politically meaningful names. I laid down my tablet and offered whoever was speaking to me a cigarette. “This is where I disagree with you socialists,” I injected. “You’ve got the horse before the cart. I believe capitalism is rooted in sexism.” I loved being an advocacy journalist for moments like this—I had permission to dissect and challenge my subject’s beliefs.
When We Were Outlaws Page 40