by Alice Walker
It is not the lesbians, however, that one “sees” in San Francisco, but gays. This was one of the most striking things to me when I settled here, with a cast of fictional characters for a new novel in my head, lesbian and straight. Women are always together affectionately. The intense female couple you see on the street could as easily be mother and daughter, sisters, best friends, as lovers. It was the intensity between men that was new and that I liked.
I am writing this now partly as a way of remembering Polk and Castro Streets during the late seventies. How the “last man” and I would always cruise those streets on any outing that took us more than a few blocks from home. At first I thought our interest was simply voyeurism, or maybe my lover was a latent gay (I sometimes wondered); but it was something other and different from that. Neither of us had ever seen men taking such obvious delight in each other (and both our fathers had been physically distant from us and emotionally repressed), and to us their caring seemed to say something delightful about the possibilities of men. To drive slowly up Castro, near the theater, and to be met by the sight of two grown men locked together in a thorough and obviously toe-curling kiss was a revelation. And sometimes they both had mustaches! It was a bit like my seeing a bearded iris for the first time.
Very often there were parades. On Halloween, for several years, we dressed up as various night creatures and trick-or-treated about the city, taking in the fabulous costumes, the outrageous hair styles and make-up only gays would have the queerness to make and the imagination to wear. I loved the life that gays gave Halloween, a holiday I learned to enjoy only because of them; and I was always reassured by the presence of Sister Boom Boom (a gay man) on the electoral ballot, and by pictures of the Sister himself, demure in white scapular and black habit, “nun of the above,” making still another bid for Board of Supervisors. There was another side, darker (or whiter) and more sinister. There were gays dressed like Nazis, who frightened me. There were those who seemed enamored of whips and chains. White well-to-do gays who moved into poor black neighborhoods and gentrified them to death, gradually forcing black people out. But there was also something cheering to the soul about these men, all colors, classes, and conditions, who, in spite of everything that had been taught them about the evil of it, steadfastly affirmed their right to love each other. And to be open and frolicsome about it. I came to understand why homosexual men are called “gay.” Because they hadn’t repressed their basic feelings the way most straight men seem to, they were full of vitality and fun. I could imagine that straight men, who so often appear dead behind the eyes and immobile below the neck, resented them for this. Now I hear on the news that one out of every two gays in San Francisco has AIDS. Many are dying. In this crisis the gay community has shown courage and tenderness equal to its former raunchiness; the city itself has been compassionate and brave. Still, it is rare these days even to see heterosexuals kissing on the street. It is as if we are all mourning the loss of spontaneous outrageousness. I miss the shock, the revelation, the smile evoked by the sight of two people (whatever they are, and even if they’re more than two!) brazenly expressing love, or just unmistakable intent.
How sad now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks they are holding guns.
So many cultures have died it is hard to contemplate the possible loss or dulling over of another one, or to accept the fact that once again those of us who can appreciate all the bearded irises of life will be visually, spiritually, and emotionally deprived.
1987
WHY DID THE BALINESE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
“Why do you keep putting off writing about me?” It is the voice of a chicken that asks this. Depending on where you are, you will laugh, or not laugh. Either response is appropriate. The longer I am a writer—so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb—the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer’s pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer—a fool, and so why should one fear?—horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to be and the human animal to perceive its being.
This then is about a chicken I knew in Bali. I do not know her name or that of her parents and grandparents. I do not know where she was from originally. Suddenly on a day whose morning had been rainy, there she was, on the path in front of us (my own family, on our way back to our temporary shelter), trying to look for worms, trying to point out other possible food items to her three chicks, and trying at the same time to get herself and her young ones across the road.
It is one of those moments that will be engraved on my brain forever. For I really saw her. She was small and gray, flecked with black; so were her chicks. She had a healthy red comb and quick, light-brown eyes. She was that proud, chunky chicken shape that makes one feel always that chickens, and hens especially, have personality and will. Her steps were neat and quick and authoritative; and though she never touched her chicks, it was obvious she was shepherding them along. She clucked impatiently when, our feet falling ever nearer, one of them, especially self-absorbed and perhaps hard-headed, ceased to respond.
When my friend Joanne—also one of my editors at Ms. magazine for nearly fifteen years—knew I was going to Bali, she asked if I would consider writing about it. There was so much there to write about, after all: the beautiful Balinese, the spectacular countryside, the ancient myths, dances, and rituals; the food, the flowers, the fauna, too. When I returned, with no word on Bali, she asked again. I did not know how to tell her that my strongest experience on Bali had been to really be able to see, and identify with, a chicken. Joanne probably eats chicken, I thought.
I did, too.
In fact, just before going to Bali I had been fasting, drinking juices only, and wondering if I could give up the eating of meat. I had even been looking about in San Francisco for an animal rights organization to join (though it is the animal liberationists, who set animals free, who actually take my heart); in that way I hoped to meet others of my kind, i.e., those who are beginning to feel, or have always felt, that eating meat is cannibalism. On the day my companion pointed out such an organization, in an Australian magazine we found at a restaurant in Ubud, I was slow to speak, because I had a delicious piece of Balinese-style chicken satay in my mouth.
I have faced the distressing possibility that I may never be a “pure” vegetarian. There is the occasional stray drumstick or slice of prosciutto that somehow finds its way into my mouth, even though purchased meat no longer appears in my kitchen. Since Bali, nearly a year ago, I have eaten several large pieces of Georgia ham (a cherished delicacy from my childhood, as is fried chicken; it is hard to consider oneself Southern without it!) and several pieces of chicken prepared by a long-lost African friend from twenty years ago who, while visiting, tired of my incessant chopping of vegetables to stir-fry and eat over rice and therefore cooked a chicken and served it in protest. There have been three crab dinners and even one of shrimp.
I console myself by recognizing that this diet, in which ninety percent of what I eat is nonmeat and nondairy, though not pristinely vegetarian, is still completely different from and less barbarous than the one I was raised on—in which meat was a mainstay—and that perhaps if they knew or cared (and somehow I know they know and care), my chicken and fish sister/fellow travelers on the planet might give me credit for effort.
I wonder.
Perhaps I will win this struggle, too, though. I can never not know that the chicken I absolutely saw is a sister (this recognition gives a whole different meaning to the expression “you chicks”), and that her love of her children definitely resembles my love of mine. Sometimes I cast my quandary about it all in the form of a philosophical chicken joke: Why did the Balinese chicken cross the road? I know the answer is, To tr
y to get both of us to the other side.
It is not so much a question of whether the lion will one day lie down with the lamb, but whether human beings will ever be able to lie down with any creature or being at all.
1987
JOURNAL
June 17, 1987
Early this morning, as I was putting the finishing touches on this book, I received an urgent call from “Liz” of Neighbor to Neighbor, an activist group that successfully gets out news about the wars in Central America, using U.S. media, primarily television. Two days from now there will be a program it has organized called “The Peace Oscars”—named for Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was a defender of poor people’s rights in El Salvador until his assassination, by an agent of the Salvadoran government, while he administered mass in his church. At the ceremony, which will be held in the beautiful Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, six of the bravest and most compassionate of human beings will be honored: people who have risked their lives to take medicine, food, clothing, and technical skills to the poor and suffering people of Central America; men and women who have been arrested many times as they exercised their opposition to the often genocidal policies of the U.S. government; people who founded the Sanctuary Movement in this country; one refugee woman from El Salvador, whose personal story of oppression, terror, escape, and commitment, told at hundreds of gatherings in the United States, radicalized the people who heard her and deepened their commitment to the struggle to end war. I am to co-host this program, and, in fact, give the Peace Oscar (a small blue ceramic bird) to the sister from El Salvador.
The urgent message from Liz, however, is that a bomb threat against the ceremony has been telephoned by a mechanical-sounding male voice that said our crime is that we do not want to fight communism. Because several of the participants and invited guests are federally appointed officials of the state of California, she tells me, there will be federal agents about, cordons of police and various SWAT teams, whose job it will be to sweep the place clean of any bombs. This often happens to movements like ours, she sighs. She tells me everyone involved will be called, in order for each to decide whether to come or stay home.
Of course I remember bomb threats, and bombs, from the sixties. I think of the children, Angela Davis’s young acquaintances, blown up while in Sunday school. I think of Ralph Featherstone, a SNCC worker, blown up in his car. I think of the NAACP official, who, along with his wife, was blown up while in bed. When I lived in Mississippi, bombings occurred; when my husband and I moved there, the bombing/lynching of NAACP leader Vernon Dehmer was in the news. I remember the bombing of Dr. Martin Luther King’s house. There is a long history of bombings in North America. This is not the first time “communism” has been used as an excuse.
I send along the message of the threat to the people I’ve invited. But I know I will not be deterred. I spend a few hours with my lawyer and finally draw up my overdue will and assign a durable power of attorney that will be effective through the weekend (the affair is to take place on a Friday night). It isn’t fatalism, or courage; I simply can’t imagine not being there to honor these amazing, but also ordinary, people. I can’t imagine not being there to hug my sister from the south.
A writer, apparently, to the core (though I frequently kid myself that if I never write again it’s fine with me; there’s so much else to do—sitting in a rocking chair watching the ocean, for instance), I find my thoughts going to my unfinished manuscripts. If anything happened to me, I wonder what my editor, John the meticulous, could make of my unfinished novel, a third typed and in a drawer, a third typed and in the computer, a third in my notebook and head.
What of this book? I realize that, as it stands, it has the rounded neatness of contemplation, and I would like to leave the reader with the uneven (I almost said ragged) edge of activity. I returned to my notes for the past week, and this is what I found:
I am Nicaraguan; I am Salvadoran; I am Grenadian; I am Caribbean; and I am Central American.
For the past several days I have been thinking about this sentence, and wondering what I mean by it. I am also Norte Americana, an African-American, even an African-Indian-Gringo American, if I add up all the known elements of my racial composition (and include the white rapist grandfather). Perhaps this is one way that I am Nicaraguan, or Salvadoran, or Grenadian. For the people in those countries, too, are racially mixed; in their country, too, there are the reds, the blacks, the whites—and the browns.
But I think the primary reason that I feel so Central American/Caribbean is that when I look at those people—and even though I study but do not yet speak their language—I see myself. I see my family, I see my parents, I see the ancestors. When I look at Nicaraguans, at, for instance, the humble peasant woman being “interrogated” by a Contra carrying several guns and knives and three times her size, when I see and identify with her terror, when I look at the vulnerable faces of the nearly naked and barefoot children, when I see the suffering and pain on the faces of the men, then I am seeing a great deal of my own life.
I, too, was born poor, in an impoverished part of the world. I was born on what had been a plantation in the South, in Georgia. My parents and grandparents worked hard all their lives for barely enough food and shelter to sustain them. They were sharecroppers—landless peasants—the product of whose labor was routinely stolen from them. Their parents and grandparents were enslaved. To me, Central America is one large plantation; and I see the people’s struggle to be free as a slave revolt.
I can remember in my own life the days of injusticia that continue in so much of the world today. The days when children withered in sickness and disease (as I have withered) because there was no money to pay for their care and no concern for their health anyway, by the larger society. I myself have suffered the deprivations of poverty, so that when I look into the face of a Central American peasant, a Caribbean peasant, I see myself.
And I remember the years of fighting the white bosses of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, especially, and of occasionally winning our battles for dignity and bread against them—though at a cost (so many of the people we loved were brutalized or assassinated) that still bruises the heart. When I see the proud though weary faces of the Sandinistas, I see our own young faces. The faces that went south in the sixties to teach black people to read and write, to go out to vote, to stand up and be counted. And to keep the eyes on the prize.
It is the same spirit. The spirit of poor people who have been ground down nearly to a fine powder of humanity and yet who stand like rocks and refuse to be blown away.
I am Nicaraguan. I am Salvadoran. I am Grenadian, Honduran, I chant to myself. It has almost become a mantra.
And yet, this year I paid more in taxes than my parents and grandparents together earned all the years they worked the land of the gringos of the South. And over half of that money will go to buy weapons that will be shipped from the Concord Naval Weapons Station at Port Chicago, California, thirty miles from my home, and used against these people that I think of as myself.
These were my thoughts a few days before I was arrested for blocking one of the gates to the Concord Naval Weapons Station.
It was a hot, dusty day, June 12, 1987, and I woke up thinking of all the things I needed to bring to the demonstration: a hat, sunblock, drinking water, food, spare clothing (in case we were in jail for longer than a day), whatever medical supplies I might need. I drove to the weapons station with the three other members of my affinity group: Robert, Belvie, and Paul. Belvie and I had designed beautiful turquoise-and-coral T-shirts with the name of our group (Wild Trees), a large mushroom cloud, and the words “Remember Port Chicago.”
For the past ten years I have shared my life with the writer and sometimes political activist (primarily in the Civil Rights movement and against the Vietnam War) Robert Allen, who all that time has been writing a book about the so-called accident at Port Chicago on July 17, 1944. What happened was that 320 men whose job it
was to load the bombs being sent to use on Japan and other places in the Pacific were blown to bits (literally), along with the ships they were loading and much of the base and nearby town. Two hundred of those killed were black.
Because theirs had been the job of loading the weapons onto the ships, theirs was also the job of picking up the pieces—of men and debris—left by the explosion. When asked to continue loading the bombs after this horrendous experience, most of the men said no. They were threatened, imprisoned, tried for mutiny. Sentenced. Sent to jail. Released years later with dishonorable discharges.
My friend Robert has tracked down many of the surviving “mutineers” and, over the years, continued to wrestle with the implications of this event for America.
Port Chicago is now Concord. The name has been changed and the old town of Port Chicago completely destroyed, razed, in fact, by the government. But the weapons remain. Rather, they remain long enough to be shipped out—to Japan (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was shipped from here), Vietnam, Nicaragua, and now El Salvador.
A few days before the demonstration we—the organizers (The Pledge of Resistance), the news media, demonstrators-to-be, and I—stood on a hill overlooking the base. We could see the white trains—white to reflect the heat—going into bunkers built into the hillside. Inside those bunkers are some of the deadliest weapons ever devised. There is, for instance, something that sounds even worse than napalm: the white phosphorous rocket. The sparks from it burn through the skin and flesh and into the bone. It can take a week for the burning to be put out. I have seen photographs of children who have lost limbs to the sparks from this rocket. I have found unbearable the suffering and questions in their eyes.