Cinnamon Girl

by Lawrence Kessenich

  “Whatever we think about all this, ultimately, we’re clearly not going to get anything done today. If you want to stay and keep talking, fine, but anybody who wants to can go. For those not inclined toward political discussion, head on over to the library and read some of the articles I put on reserve— they’ll be on the final exam. Barring a strike, I’ll see you all at our next class.”

  About half the people in the class left, including our redheaded agitator, who undoubtedly moved on to another class to stir things up. The rest of us had a serious and volatile discussion about whether a student strike would serve any purpose. Some felt a strike would be a waste of time. Others, like me, felt that it would be a significant gesture in the wake of the Kent State shootings. It would say to the establishment we weren’t going to ignore the issues, weren’t going to be frightened away from our concerns by the death of our fellow students.

  Some people were just worried about grades—they didn’t want to waste the work they’d done all semester. I found this pathetic. It wasn’t as if UWM was an expensive school. I asked them how losing one semester of credit compared to the fate of the Kent State students. It was an unfair question, but it shut them up and allowed us to concentrate on deciding if a student strike would serve a real purpose. After an hour and a half of discussion, most of us had decided it would.

  By the time I got out, bright red flyers had been tacked up all over the place calling for a student strike at UWM in conjunction with a national student strike. It called on everyone to gather the following morning at 9:00 a.m. on the lawn in front of Mitchell Hall. As I was reading one of the flyers, Carl Lindstrom appeared at my elbow.

  “Kent State’s really got people riled up,” he said. “I think there’ll be a big turnout for the rally. Are you going?”

  “I’m planning on it. How about you?”

  He smiled faintly—the only way he ever smiled, it seemed. “I’m one of the organizers,” he said. “It may cost me my draft counseling office here, but what the hell. I can always set up in the Episcopal center, across the street. The pastor there’s on the organizing committee, too. We’re meeting down at the Social Action Center tonight at seven. Want to join us?”

  “Me? Help organize? I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

  “I think you underestimate yourself, John, but you shouldn’t take it on if you’re not ready. Why don’t you drop in tonight and see what it’s all about?”

  I told him I might. We promised to see one another in front of Mitchell Hall, the next day, if not before.

  WALKING HOME FOR LUNCH, I entertained fantasies about leading a demonstration as part of the strike. I kept thinking of that Romantic painting of Victory leading the forces of France into battle. But demonstrations were supposed to be non-violent—at least, that was my image of them. I had been weaned on the non-violent philosophy of Martin Luther King, who had been killed in May two years before, the month I graduated from high school. To me, the participants in the civil rights movement were more heroic than soldiers. Unlike soldiers, they’d had nothing with which to defend themselves in the face of attack. And, yet, they’d marched on—from Selma, Alabama, to the South Side of Milwaukee—insulted, threatened, spat upon, attacked with nightsticks, rocks, water hoses, police dogs, sometimes beaten, mutilated, and killed. But they were not moved from their goal. I wasn’t sure I had that kind of resolve.

  When I got back to the house, I found that Claire had gone off somewhere with Jonah. Jonathan had just gotten up, after only a few hours of sleep. I found him in the kitchen, his stocking feet up on the table, eating a carton of plain yogurt. He had no idea where Claire and Jonah had gone.

  “Has the strike been announced?” he asked.

  “The flyers were up after my class. Are you involved in organizing it?”

  “Yeah, sort of. Part of it, anyway. Are you going to participate, or are you going to be a scab?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Where? In your classes or out on the lawn?”

  “On the lawn, of course.”

  “Good man.”

  He swung his feet down, stood up, tossed the yogurt carton into the trash and his spoon into the sink. Then he tore a banana off the bunch on the counter and headed for the door.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping him in the doorway to the hall. “Do you know something about the plans for tomorrow? What’s going to happen?”

  “Oh,” he said, purposely being vague, “I don’t know. A big demonstration, that’s all. We’re going to try to shut the place down.”

  “And what if people don’t participate?”

  He smiled knowingly. “We’ll try to convince them that it’s not a good idea to go to classes anymore.”

  “You going to the meeting at the Social Action Center tonight?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Carl Lindstrom told me about it.”

  “You know Carl?”

  “He was my draft counselor last fall. He thinks I might be good at organizing.”

  “You offering to help?”

  It was my turn to be vague. “Possibly. I don’t know.”

  “Forget it, then. You’ve got to be sure. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. It’s too risky otherwise—for everybody.”

  He started walking away.

  “I think I’ll come, tonight,” I said, straining to please. “I know I support the strike.”

  He stopped with his hand on the front doorknob and turned to me. “It takes more than that to help lead it, but suit yourself. Just don’t tie up the meeting with a lot of stupid questions, okay? We’ve been working toward something like this for a long time and we don’t want amateurs fucking it up.”

  Without waiting for my reply, he was out the door. It wasn’t until I looked into the refrigerator to find something for lunch that I realized it was my yogurt and banana he’d eaten. No doubt he felt he’d “liberated” them for the sake of the revolution.

  I LEFT FOR WORK BEFORE CLAIRE RETURNED. As I made my deliveries for Siegel’s, I listened to news about the Kent State incident and about the student strike being planned across the country. The shootings had politicized many students who’d previously been indifferent to Vietnam War protests, and widespread cooperation with the strike was expected. As always, there were those on the far right who felt the students had gotten what they deserved, but virtually everyone else, from moderate to liberal, felt the Guardsmen had seriously overreacted.

  The radical left used the incident as evidence that it was time to take up arms against the establishment, but there weren’t many buying that argument either. The vast majority of people wanted less violence, not more.

  Listening to the news accounts inspired me and, by the time I was through with work, I’d decided I had to go to the meeting at the Social Action Center. I wasn’t ready to commit to leading anything, but I wanted to see what was going down.

  When I arrived, the main room was so full I could barely squeeze in the door. People filled the sofa and perched across its back; they sat on the floor, on tippy piles of boxes, on windowsills. Every inch of space was occupied. Those who arrived after me were forced to stand in the hall, although the Gray Panther representative, John Ascher, a man with shoulder length gray hair who was a head taller than anyone else in the room, kept warning us to close the door. He was worried, naively it seemed to me, about possible political enemies overhearing our plans. Any serious political enemies could have walked into the middle of that room while it filled up—and probably had.

  I caught glimpses of Carl conferring with Ascher and with my roommate Jonathan and a few others in the vicinity of the industrial spool coffee table. I assumed these were the strike organizers. I recognized a black man, Jimmy Sommers, the head of SDS at UWM. He was the brother of a woman I’d dated briefly. He had a permanently angry look on his face that had always intimidated me when I visited their house.
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br />   Finally, Jimmy helped Carl up onto the spool. They were a study in contrast, Jimmy a broad-shouldered, stocky-legged man in a red flannel shirt and jeans, who could have passed for a lumberjack, Carl looking like the proverbial reed in the wind standing up there, as if the energy of the assembled multitude could knock him right off his perch. But I suspected that, despite his frail body and gentle demeanor, he was sure enough of himself to handle the crowd.

  “All right,” he said quietly. “Let’s get started here.”

  Conversation ended abruptly and all eyes focused on him.

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do tonight, if we want to bring off this strike tomorrow. It’s a big undertaking at a school the size of UWM. We have an ad hoc committee here that’s done some planning, but we want to know what all of you think about our ideas, so don’t be afraid to speak up. And don’t be afraid to ask questions, either. There’s no such thing as a dumb question here.”

  I happened to look at Jonathan when Carl said this and saw him roll his eyes. As he’d made clear to me earlier, he was not so sanguine about the usefulness of less-than-perceptive questions.

  “We have representatives of several different political groups on the committee, all of whom have a stake in the strike and the political upheaval we hope it will cause. We don’t all agree about what we want to happen, once the strike is successful, but we’ve agreed on what we’d like to do to make it happen. That’s what we’re going to tell you about tonight, in the hopes we can hammer out a practical, intelligent plan and give people concrete tasks that’ll make the strike happen.

  “I’ve committed the Social Action Center as a meeting place for those involved in organizing the strike. Once the strike is successful, we want the Student Union to be strike headquarters, but until then—and in case we get pushed out—”

  Here several boos were heard. Carl paused and put up his hand.

  “I know, I know, none of us wants to think about it not working out, but we don’t know what’ll go down. Just in case, it’s good to have a gathering place off campus, and this will be it. We’ll try to have someone manning the phone at all times, to give out information and control rumors. The phone number is on a mimeographed information sheet we’ll give to anyone who wants one.

  “The way we’re going to work things tonight is that each of us on the committee is going to present part of the plan. Actually, I’ll present an overview of the plan and then each of the others will go into more detail about how we’re going to organize specific segments. Let me remind you again to ask questions or make suggestions at any time. We don’t want to run this meeting like fascists, so feel free to jump in.”

  No one was moved to jump in at that moment, so Carl went on.

  “The major goal of the strike is to shut down the university in order to call attention to the idea that it shouldn’t be business-as-usual in this country when a lot of people are dying unnecessarily over in Vietnam. We plan to open the strike with a rally and march, tomorrow morning at nine. At the end of the march, we’ll go to the Union, take it over, and turn it into strike headquarters. Then we’ll break up into smaller groups and make our way around the campus, confronting students and professors who aren’t honoring the strike. We’ll also issue press releases on the state of the strike from the Union. If all goes well, we’ll reconvene in front of the chancellor’s office at an appointed time—probably late in the afternoon, and take that over, too.

  “The plan is to stay put in the Union and the chancellor’s office until the university takes seriously our demands for more education on topics related to the war. In the Union, we’ll demonstrate what we have in mind by holding seminars and staging performances on war-related issues. We have no idea how long this could take, so we need a sizeable core of committed people. I’m glad there are so many of you here tonight, but each of us will have to recruit more people tomorrow to make this feasible. We’ll talk about how to do that later.

  “Right now, I’d like to introduce Jimmy Sommers, the head of SDS at UWM, who’ll talk about the rally that’ll kick off the strike. But before Jimmy gets up here, are there any questions?”

  “How do you think the pigs will respond to all of this?” asked someone across the room.

  “The city police may not be involved at all. We have information that they’ll have a sizeable contingent in some far corner of the campus, just in case they’re needed. We’ll see what the chancellor thinks constitutes needing them. He may see the size of the rally and panic immediately, or he may let us take over the Union. We just don’t know.”

  “But what’s our strategy if we do encounter them?” said a tough-looking guy in an army jacket with a unit patch and a Vietnam Veterans Against the War emblem on his sleeve. “Are we going to take them on or back off?”

  This was the first time Carl looked unsure of himself. He looked down at Jonathan and Jimmy, standing below him, as if asking their permission. They both looked grim.

  “This was a point of disagreement among the committee members,” he finally said. “I, personally, want only non-violent action. So do a majority of the committee. But a couple others have different ideas. We agreed that they should be allowed to air those ideas here, even if we don’t agree with them. You’ll hear what they think about this issue when they get up to speak about the strike.”

  When no more questions were forthcoming, Carl introduced Jimmy, who leaped up onto the spool.

  “First, let’s get this rally shit out of the way, then I’ll tell you what I think needs to go down tomorrow. The rally will start at nine sharp in front of Mitchell Hall. That big cement porch in front will be our stage. We’ll have speakers from all different kinds of groups—SDS, Black Panthers, Gray Panthers, Gay Coalition, Vietnam Vets Against the War, etcetera, etcetera. They’ll each talk about their perspective on the war. While that’s happening, we’ll be handing out literature telling people what we plan to do and why—with a big emphasis on the why. We need to convert people at this rally. We need to convince them there are more important things than going to class, that they can’t keep their head buried in the sand any more. This country’s coming apart at the seams. The quicker we can make the old order collapse, the sooner the new order can take its place. We might be able to do that peaceably for a while, but the Man isn’t going to let us for long. He’s gonna come down on our heads hard, and we’ve got to be ready for him. I say we don’t lie down and let him pound us. I say we fight back—maybe just with rocks and the sticks from our protest signs, but, one way or another, fight back. We’ll still get our heads busted, but we’ll let ’em know that we mean business. And people will see—”

  At this point the room erupted with voices, some saying “Right on” but most protesting, telling Sommers he was crazy, that we’d get ourselves killed, that this approach was stupid. He kept on talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying anymore. People were arguing all around me. I saw Jonathan tug on Sommers’s arm until he bent over to listen. Sommers nodded his head and got down from the spool. Jonathan climbed up. He didn’t attempt to speak. He just stood there, surveying the room with a commanding expression. Gradually, the arguments began to die down, and it wasn’t long before everyone was looking up at him. Soon, the room was silent, and still Jonathan had not spoken. It was fascinating to see my quiet, reserved roommate take control of a roomful of people. When he finally opened his mouth, he spoke very quietly, but he had total attention.

  “You’re supposed to hear about forming groups to disrupt classes, now, but that can wait. There are a lot of petty things—petty bourgeois things— that can wait. It’s time to stop pussyfooting around with this government. It’s time to bring it down. That’s what we in the Communist Party intend to do, and we’d like any of you who are serious about changing things to join us.”

  Despite my abhorrence of the anti-Communist crusades my parents participated in and of the “Red-baiting” that characterized political discourse in the country at the time, I was sho
cked to hear Jonathan reveal himself as a Communist Party member. It was partially that I lived with the man and knew nothing about this, but it was also that, because of my upbringing in the fifties and early sixties, and despite the fact I didn’t believe it intellectually any more, the idea of being a Communist still carried overtones of almost mythological evil in my mind. Jonathan Bradford, the guy across the hall from me, was actively engaged in activities designed to overthrow the U.S. government. I couldn’t quite believe it. I was so distracted by this realization I missed several minutes of what Jonathan said. I shook my head to clear it and tuned in again, just in time to hear him wind up.

  “I’m not going to waste any more of your time talking about this bullshit strike. This is meaningless. What a bunch of bourgeois students do and don’t do will have no impact on the revolution that’s about to happen. It’s the workers who need to organize, not the intelligentsia. Our job is to serve the working people, to help them do what is so hard for them to do while they’re under the thumb of capitalist bosses—organize to end their oppression. That’s where it’s happening, my friends. Not at UWM, not at Madison, not at Columbia or Berkeley or even at Kent State. Workers have been dying for the cause for a century. Now that we’ve lost a few of our own, we’re finally concerned. Well, if you’re really concerned, follow me out that door and down to Communist Party Headquarters. We are the people who are going to make a real revolution. Join us.”

  He jumped off the spool, parting the crowd as he walked toward the door. He seemed to be looking right at me as he approached, but his gaze went through me. A few people followed him, but only a few. When they’d left, the room erupted in conversation again. Carl got back up onto the spool and waited for things to quiet down again.

  “Well,” he said, “we’re off to a flying start. If this keeps up, we won’t have a strike committee left by tomorrow. Moving right along, I’d like to ask Bill Fleischer of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to tell us about how we plan to occupy the Union.”