Living by the Word

by Alice Walker

  “16:05—The body of a child was recovered under the female. Same area. No description. Only bones.

  “17:50—Left forearm with clenched fist recovered at door…

  “19:45—Adult male from waist down recovered, no descriptions. Some skin…

  “11:30—The body of one Negro/male was lifted from the front area with his heart outside the chest area by crane…no arms, legs missing from thighs down. No head…”

  —REVOLUTIONARY WORKER, Nov. 14, 1985

  According to the report [The Commission on the MOVE “confrontation”], Goode paused only 30 seconds before approving the dropping of the explosives. [My italics.]

  Negotiation with MOVE was never seriously considered…

  A long gun battle ensued. The commission says the 10,000 rounds of ammunition fired by police was “excessive and unreasonable,” especially given the presence of children in the residence.

  In addition, the report notes that work crews found only two pistols, a shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle in the rubble of the MOVE compound…

  Once the fire began, it could have been quickly put out if the Fire Department immediately had used two high pressure Squrt [sic] water guns it had trained on the house. However…Sambor and Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond hastily made the “unconscionable” decision to let the fire burn, hoping to force the MOVE members to flee…

  At least two adults and four children attempted to escape after the house caught fire, but police gunfire prevented them from fleeing.

  —THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, Mar. 2, 1986

  Nobody was supposed to survive.

  —Ramona Africa,

  NEW YORK TIMES, January 7, 1986

  I was in Paris in mid-May of 1985 when I heard the news about MOVE. My traveling companion read aloud the item in the newspaper that described the assault on a house on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia occupied by a group of “radical, black, back-to-nature” revolutionaries that local authorities had been “battling” for over a decade. As he read the article detailing the attack that led, eventually, to the actual bombing of the house (with military bombing material supplied to local police by the FBI) and the deaths of at least eleven people, many of them women, five of them children, our mutual feeling was of horror, followed immediately by anger and grief. Grief: that feeling of unassuageable sadness and rage that makes the heart feel naked to the elements, clawed by talons of ice. For, even knowing nothing of MOVE (short for Movement, which a revolution assumes) and little of the “City of Brotherly Love,” Philadelphia, we recognized the heartlessness of the crime, and realized that for the local authorities to go after eleven people, five of them children, with the kind of viciousness and force usually reserved for war, what they were trying to kill had to be more than the human beings involved; it had to be a spirit, an idea.

  But what spirit? What idea?

  There was only one adult survivor of the massacre: a young black woman named Ramona Africa. She suffered serious burns over much of her body (and would claim, later in court, as she sustained her own defense: “I am guilty of nothing but hiding in the basement trying to protect myself and…MOVE children”). The bombing of the MOVE house ignited a fire that roared through the black, middle-class neighborhood, totally destroying more than sixty houses and leaving 250 people homeless.

  There we stood on a street corner in Paris, reading between the lines. It seems MOVE people never combed their hair, but wore it in long “ropes” that people assumed was unclean. Since this is also how we wear our hair, we recognized this “weird” style: dreadlocks. The style of the ancients: Ethiopians and Egyptians. Easily washed, quickly dried—a true wash-and-wear style for black people (and adventuresome whites) and painless, which is no doubt why MOVE people chose it for their children. And for themselves: “Why suffer for cosmetic reasons?” they must have asked.

  It appeared that the MOVE people were vegetarians and ate their food raw because they believed raw food healthier for the body and the soul. They believed in letting orange peels, banana peels, and other organic refuse “cycle” back into the earth. Composting? They did not believe in embalming dead people or burying them in caskets. They thought they should be allowed to “cycle” back to the earth, too. They loved dogs (their leader, John Africa, was called “The Dog Man” because he cared for so many) and never killed animals of any kind, not even rats (which infuriated their neighbors), because they believed in the sanctity of all life.

  Hmmm.

  Further: They refused to send their children to school, fearing drugs and an indoctrination into the sickness of American life. They taught them to enjoy “natural” games, in the belief that games based on such figures as Darth Vader caused “distortions” in the personalities of the young that inhibited healthy, spontaneous expression. They exercised religiously, running miles every day with their dogs, rarely had sit-down dinners, ate out of big sacks of food whenever they were hungry, owned no furniture except a few pieces they’d found on the street, and refused to let their children wear diapers because of the belief that a free bottom is healthier. They abhorred the use of plastic. They enjoyed, apparently, the use of verbal profanity, which they claimed lost any degree of profanity when placed next to atomic or nuclear weapons of any sort, which they considered really profane. They hated the police, who they claimed harassed them relentlessly (a shoot-out with police in 1978 resulted in the death of one officer and the imprisonment of several MOVE people). They occasionally self-righteously and disruptively harangued their neighbors, using bullhorns. They taught anyone who would listen that the U.S. political and social system is corrupt to the core—and tried to be, themselves, a different tribe within it.

  Back home I heard little of the MOVE massacre. Like members of MOVE, I don’t watch TV. The local papers were full of bombings, as usual, but bombings in Libya, Lebanon, El Salvador, Angola, and Mozambique. There seemed to be an amazingly silent response, outside of Philadelphia,* to the bombing of these black people, the majority of them women and children, presided over, after all, by a black mayor, the Honorable Wilson Goode of the aforementioned City of Brotherly etcetera. (Meanwhile, there was incredible controversy over the filming of a movie in which no one is killed and a black man abuses a woman!**) Nor do I yet know what to make of this silence. Was the bombing of black people, with a black person ostensibly (in any case) responsible, too much for the collective black psyche to bear? Were people stunned by the realization that such an atrocity—formerly confined to Libya or Vietnam—could happen to us? Did I simply miss the controversy? Were there town meetings and teach-ins and pickets round the clock in every city in which Wilson Goode and his police officers appeared? Or did the media (and Philadelphia officials, including the black mayor of which black Philadelphians were so proud) succeed in convincing the public that the victims were indeed the aggressors and deserved what they got? Ramona Africa, after all, was arrested for assault and sentenced to prison for “riot”—and it was her house that was bombed, her friends, colleagues, and loved ones who were slaughtered. Thumbing through the stacks of articles I’ve been sent on the MOVE massacre I see that an earlier assault on their house occurred in 1978, when a white man, Frank Rizzo, was mayor. Under Rizzo, MOVE people were evicted, often imprisoned, and their house was eventually razed. Under Goode, their house was bombed, their neighborhood destroyed, and many of them killed. And why?

  Through both administrations, the city officials and MOVE neighbors appeared to have one thing in common: a hatred of the way MOVE people chose to live. They didn’t like the “stench” of people who refused, because they believe chemicals cause cancer, to use deodorant; didn’t like orange peels and watermelon rinds on the ground; didn’t like all those “naked” children running around with all that uncombed hair. They didn’t appreciate the dogs and the rats. They thought the children should be in school and that the adults and children should eat cooked food; everybody should eat meat. They probably thought it low class that in order t
o make money MOVE people washed cars and shoveled snow. And appeared to enjoy it.

  MOVE people were not middle class. Many of them were high-school dropouts. Many of them were mothers without husbands. Or young men who refused any inducement to “fit in.” Yet they had the nerve to critique the system. To reject it and to set up, in place of its rules, guidelines for living that reflected their own beliefs.

  The people of MOVE are proof that poor people, not just upper- and middle-class whites and blacks who become hippies, are capable of intelligently perceiving and analyzing American life, politically and socially, and of devising and attempting to follow a different—and, to them, better—way. But because they are poor and black, this is not acceptable behavior to middle-class whites and blacks who think all poor black people should be happy with jherri curls, mindless (and lying) TV shows, and Kentucky fried chicken.

  This is not to condone the yelping of fifty to sixty dogs in the middle of the night, dogs MOVE people rescued from the streets (and probable subsequent torture in “scientific” laboratories), fed, and permitted to sleep in their house. Nor to condone the bullhorn they used to air their neighbors’ “backwardness” or political transgressions, as apparently they had a bad habit of doing. From what I read, MOVE people were more fanatical than the average neighbors. I probably would not have been able to live next door to them for a day.

  The question is: Did they deserve the harassment, abuse, and, finally, the vicious death other people’s intolerance of their life style brought upon them? Every bomb ever made falls on all of us. And the answer is: No.

  The real reason for the government hit-squad is no secret: MOVE is an organization of radical Utopians. Their political activity, their allusions to Africa, their dreadlocks, all speak rejection of the system. For this, they have been harassed, besieged, framed, beaten, shot, jailed, and now bombed. The reported shout from the MOVE compound this last fateful Monday was: “We ain’t got a fucking thing to lose.”***

  How does it feel

  to watch your neighbors

  burn to death

  because you hated

  the sound

  of their dogs

  barking

  and were not yourself

  crazy

  about compost heaps?

  How does it feel

  to hear the children

  scream in the flames

  because you said

  the clothes they wore

  in winter

  were never enough

  to keep them warm?

  How does it feel

  to know the hair

  you hated

  spreads like a fan

  around a severed head

  beside the door?

  How does it feel

  to “take full responsibility,”

  as the mayor said,

  for an “absolute

  disaster”

  to your soul?

  How does it feel to massacre

  the part of yourself

  that is really,

  well—

  considering the nappy hair

  and watermelon rinds

  and naked black booties

  and all—

  pretty much

  an embarrassment?

  What will

  the white people think!

  How does it feel, folks?

  The bad image is gone:

  you can talk now.

  How does it feel?

  When they come for us

  what can we say?

  Our beliefs are

  our country.

  Our hair is

  our flag.

  Our love of ourselves

  is our freedom.

  We, too, fucking yes,

  sing America.

  1986

  * For several weeks the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, appointed by Goode, conducted hearings, in an apparent attempt to justify the massacre and exonerate the police and the mayor himself.

  **The Color Purple.

  *** Carl Dix, Revolutionary Worker leaflet, May 16, 1985.

  ALL THE BEARDED IRISES OF LIFE: CONFESSIONS OF A HOMOSPIRITUAL

  I was an adult before I realized that when I was growing up in the fifties in a small segregated town in the South there were at least three groups of people I never saw—people who were present in the life of the town, in the culture and activities of the two obvious (black and white) communities, but camouflaged: Jews, who were few in any event and were blended into the white community (at least from a black person’s perspective); Indians, who were racially blended into both black and white communities (heavily so, in the black community); and homosexuals, who were blended into the heterosexual world of both. I have no memory, as a child, of ever seeing, hearing about, or even being able to imagine homosexuality.

  Even in college there were only jokes I didn’t get about “queers,” and, on return trips home, whispers that such-and-such a one was “funny.” The social taboo of my college years, of which I was aware, was interracialism. I actively combatted it by having numerous friendships with white women and children, and by dating white men. I later married, had a child by, and divorced a white man.

  It was through erotica that I first understood that two women or two men could be sexually attracted to each other. I was staying in the borrowed rooms of a former college classmate, and she had books that graphically described methods of attaining orgasm. Some of these methods were very strange. One of them I’ll never forget described the languid inventiveness of a young woman guest at a boring dinner party, who masturbated herself—underneath the table and while ostensibly listening to the tiresome monologue of her host—with a fork. She was actually gazing at the woman across the table from her at the time. This seemed to me wonderfully different from the usual story of “boy meets girl.” But why a fork? Use of this utensil was a bit decadent, I felt. Not to mention cold.

  My adult awareness of homosexuality comes from my own feelings of attraction to other women as well as to men (and to yellow people, red people, brown, and white people, in addition to the prescribed black ones). But these feelings toward women, as toward people of other races, were buried very deep, so deep, in fact, that I was friends for many years with a woman with whom I discussed everything, who actually had women lovers, but we never discussed that. It was my fault, I’m sure, that we didn’t. I was married, I was obviously attracted to men. For that is one of the things, for a woman, that marriage is supposed to “prove.” I never spoke of women sexually. It never even occurred to me. Saying the word “lesbian” caused me to stammer.

  Yet my friend’s refusal to reveal the lesbian side of her nature, surely her most intrinsic self, in a friendship in which everything else was shared—including my struggles in loving men—hurt me deeply. I assumed it meant lack of trust. It certainly indicated fear of me, as a nonlesbian. Fear that I would betray her. That I would not be someone to be counted on. That I would not understand. I was insulted by this. (Aquarians, they say, can tolerate anything but being thought narrow-minded. In my case, this is certainly true.)

  My indignation at this lack of faith in me, however, was the cosmic slap I needed to begin to see what was before my eyes and to begin to hear, in conversations with both women and men, the very obvious things that were or were not said. I began to be able to see and hear through the camouflage, and many new and interesting worlds emerged.

  After one fully completed lifetime of work, marriage, and loves in the Northeast and the South and over a decade after college, I arrived in San Francisco, ready for anything, but in fact deeply in love with—as I thought of it, sometimes wearily—yet another man. Or, as I also sometimes put it, “with my last man!” For I faced the dilemma of the consciousness-raised woman who is appalled to realize that even after knowing “the worst” about men in general one is still very attracted, often, to individual men. (In order to comprehend quickly that this is not necessarily h
ypocritical, think of how you feel about white people collectively, then think about your white friends. If you are white, think about blacks…. ) I wanted very much for my lesbian friends—of whom I now had several—to accept me and my choice of partners, as I accepted them and theirs. In fact, and to complicate matters in what I thought was a rather beautiful way, this was also a need shared by my lover, the “last man.” Far from feeling threatened by my lesbian friends or even by his own, he admired them. He liked the same things I liked: their independence and courage, their pride in self-sufficiency and competence, their refusal to be dominated by men, their love, erotic and platonic, for other women. He was also a great admirer of their clothes.

  It was no mystery to either of us—observing heterosexual relationships every day in which women are oppressed or routinely denied the full expression of who they are simply because of their gender—why women who wished to do so were right to choose other women as lovers. Also, in themselves, women are beautiful and lovable. Yet, because my lover and I were with each other, we were assumed by our more radical lesbian friends to be oblivious of this, and from time to time we agreed that he should not be present when these friends came to call. But this was painful for us to accept, even though we understood. However, having lived through the black separatist movement, we did understand. But, come to think of it, we’d both been hurt then, too.

  In any case, I was not, unfortunately (from my lesbian friends’ point of view), relating to other women sexually. How could they trust someone who slept with a man? I had of course suffered under a variation of this question before—from black people. How could they trust someone who slept with a white person? All such questions reflect the questioner’s vulnerability and lack of self-confidence, but few of us recognize this at the time. We are flung into a solitude so severe that it inadvertently increases our sense of freedom as it loosens our bonds to any specific group, whether racial or sexual. Our perception of the limitations of ourselves and of others is sharpened considerably, as is the passion of our self-respect. We begin to see that perhaps all people must be our people, since the various factions of peoplehood to which we “belong” are so very hard to please; and that we must be “every person” in any event if we are to assume the absolute largest possible freedom for ourselves. I reached the point with both groups, lesbians and blacks, of just saying: Accept me as I am, with this tendency I have of being able to love everyone, including you, or just don’t (expletive) bother me at all. On these terms, I am happy to say, I have regained most of the friends I lost.