Cinnamon Girl

by Lawrence Kessenich

  “I understand. But I do love you, Claire. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know you think you do.”

  “Do you think you love me?”

  Another pause.

  “Don’t ask me that, right now, okay? It’s too soon. I know I care for you a lot. I have since the night we met. But I don’t know what that means for the future. I’ve got to go, now. I can hear Mrs. Millowski screaming down the hall, and I’m the only one who can calm her down.”

  “I’ll call you from the Union—or from the police station.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Okay. Goodbye. I love you, Claire.”

  “You probably shouldn’t say that, either.”

  “But I do love you. Even if we’re ‘just friends,’ I still love you.”

  “If you mean it that way, I guess I can say it, too. I love you, John. Goodbye.”

  The line went dead, but I didn’t hang up. The sound of Claire saying “I love you” lingered in my ear until the dial tone broke the silence. I hung up. She loved me! Whatever it meant ultimately, it was enough for the time being. I floated out to the porch to finish my toast, then floated back into the kitchen to wash up the dishes. I floated all the way up Downer Avenue to school.

  It was exactly nine o’clock when I joined the crowd massing in front of Mitchell Hall. A microphone and large speakers were set up on the wide porch in front of the building. I saw Carl Lindstrom, Jimmy Sommers, Bill Fleischer, and John Ascher huddling a few feet behind the microphone. There were about a dozen homemade signs poking up out of the crowd, and people around the fringes were working on new ones with magic markers and poster board. In the unseasonably warm air, the gathering had a festive feeling about it.

  Surprisingly, the police were not in evidence, yet. I didn’t think the chancellor would hesitate to ask them in. More than one campus had been trashed by demonstrations that had gotten out of hand. But I had a good feeling about this one. UWM was not Berkley or Columbia or Madison, where large demonstrations had been happening for years. It was a commuter school, where most of the students went home to their old neighborhood and their high school friends at the end of the day. It had taken the Kent State killings to mobilize them. The crowd was growing by the minute. Students seemed to be streaming in from all directions, on and off campus.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see Tony standing there, grinning, in his characteristic black t-shirt and black jeans.

  “Hey, bro,” he said. “Just like old times, huh?”

  I felt as if I’d been punched in the chest. I was totally unprepared to see him. Perversely, the image of Claire pulling her nightie up over her head came into my mind’s eye and I couldn’t shake it. I was speechless.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said.

  I was saved by Carl’s voice, which boomed out over speakers turned up much too high.

  “Would those of you leading contingents—”

  I whirled around to face the front. Carl paused while Bill Fleischer ran to turn down the volume. Then he started up again.

  “Sorry. Would those of you who’ll be leading contingents to the Union please come up here for a moment.”

  I turned back to Tony. “I’ve got to go up there.”

  “You’re helping lead this thing? Far out!”

  “Just the group that’ll liberate the Snack Bar—assuming we get into the Union in the first place.”

  Tony got a determined look on his face.

  “We’ll get in,” he said. “Can I be part of your group?”

  “If I have anything to say about it, you can.”

  “Kolvacik is coming, too.”

  “The more the merrier,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted. But my voice cracked as I said “merrier.” I saw it written in my mind as “marry her.”

  “You okay, man?” asked Tony. “You look tired.”

  You don’t know the half of it, I thought. “I’m fine. How did you get out of work for this?”

  “I just got lucky. There wasn’t much work today, so my number never got called.”

  I went up front, where eight or ten people were gathered around Carl and the other rally organizers. Carl quickly reviewed the plan for securing the Union, asking each of us to gather twenty people to assist us in our area. As soon as each area was secure, the leader was to send a representative to the ballroom to report in.

  “There is to be no trashing—anywhere,” he said emphatically, “and it’s your job to prevent it. This is not a fraternity prank. It’s a political action. Anything we do that reflects badly on us weakens its political impact. Understand?”

  We all nodded.

  “Let’s get started, then. You go out and gather your people, while we get things going up here. The plan is to be on our way to the Union in forty-five minutes.”

  I returned to where I’d left Tony standing. Fortunately, he was engaged in a lively discussion with a tall, pretty black woman in a dashiki with a plunging V neckline.

  “John,” said Tony, “this is Alicia Bolton. She’s in my Ed Psych class. John lives in the same house I do.”

  Alicia and I grasped palms and checked each other out. She looked familiar.

  “Hey,” she said, “I know you! You used to go out with Miriam Sommers!”

  “That’s where I know you from,” I said. “We met at a party, once. How is Miriam?”

  “She’s good. She should be here, soon. Jimmy told her she’d better get her sorry black ass out here today or he’d personally come and get her.”

  “I bet she didn’t like that!” I said.

  “Damn straight! She hates it when Jimmy bosses her around. And she could care less about politics. She’s an aaahhhhtist. But he was dead serious about today.”

  “As I recall, he was dead serious about which way the toilet paper should be put on the roller.”

  Alicia laughed loudly.

  “You do know the man, don’t you? Anyway, I think Miriam will show for this one. She knows it’s important to Jimmy. And she does love her brother, different as he is from her.”

  Carl’s voice came over the loudspeakers again. “Welcome everyone! We’re ready to get started here, so listen up.”

  He paused for a moment. The crowd slowly quieted down and all eyes looked to the stage.

  “Hey,” I whispered, “I’ve got to recruit people for my contingent. Can I count on you two and Kolvacik—and maybe Miriam?”

  “I’ll talk Miriam into it when she shows,” said Alicia.

  “Thanks. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  As Carl recapped the situation in Vietnam—taking the opportunity to educate those who hadn’t thought much about the war until Kent State woke them up—I went around asking quietly for volunteers to join us. I asked a few people I knew, but most of them were strangers. I approached a variety of types, from obvious hippies to neatly dressed suburbanites. A few of them looked at me like I was crazy, but most were eager to participate. I told them where I’d be standing and asked them to gather around me when the rally ended and the march began.

  When I got back to Tony and Alicia, Miriam and Kolvacik had arrived. They both gave friendly nods, but we didn’t say anything, because Carl was finishing up his speech with an impassioned plea for discipline and restraint during the demonstration.

  “They’re just looking for excuses to write us off,” he said, “to call us hoodlums and ignore what we’re trying to tell them. Let’s not give them an opportunity to do that. We all grew up watching the civil rights movement on TV. We know non-violence works. Let’s shout out our message loud and clear, but let’s not hurt anybody or destroy anything. Let them be the bad guys.

  “We can do it. We can protest until we force them to end this damn war. Because we’re the ones being forced to fight it. And we’re not going to fight it anymore, are we?”

  “No!” shouted the crowd in unison.

  “You don’t mean ‘No,’” said Carl, “you mean ‘Hell
no!’”

  He started chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go! Hell no, we won’t go!”

  The crowd picked it up immediately, and soon there were hundreds of voices chanting it as signs waved above our heads. With movie script timing, the police appeared, a great blue-black mass moving up Kenwood Boulevard, which ran along the side of Mitchell Hall. They did not march, as National Guardsmen would have, but swarmed, looking, in their riot helmets, like some kind of strange, hardheaded insects. Their commanders were careful to keep them at a distance, so there was no implication that they intended to break up the rally. But their presence inflamed the crowd. The chanting, which had been directed toward the stage, was now directed at them, the whole crowd turning to face them and increasing the volume.

  “Hell no, we won’t go! Hell no, we won’t go!”

  The police stared us down. A young man in faded jeans with no shirt and long, greasy hair, broke out of the crowd and raced toward the police line. He stopped ten feet in front of them, turned around, dropped his pants and bent over, showing them his naked ass. It was a stupid and crass thing to do. I hoped it wasn’t an indicator of the general level of intelligence among the demonstrators. The police ignored him. A moment later, a few of his friends came out of the crowd to retrieve him.

  Eventually, Jimmy Sommers took the microphone and quieted the crowd with his low, authoritative voice. I watched Miriam as Jimmy did his stuff, and I could see the admiration in her eyes. I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t my being intimidated by him that had put her off. She wanted a man with his kind of authority, which wasn’t my style. She looked particularly beautiful that day, with a green, blue, and yellow paisley bandana tied around her short hair. It accentuated the almost Native American quality of her features, especially her strong, prominent nose and broad forehead. She looked like an African queen. I sighed. One that got away …

  Jimmy’s speech was shorter than Carl’s and more hard-hitting. He as much as said that if the war didn’t end soon, he saw no way for the UWM SDS to remain non-violent. But he reiterated the strike committee’s commitment to non-violence, telling people that this was where things stood for the time being and that they had to act in unison.

  Next, Bill Ascher spoke for the Gray Panthers, as an elder supporting the protests of the young, relating the oppression of the young to the oppression of the old. He was followed in rapid succession by representatives of the Black Panthers, the Gay Liberation Front, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and on and on, until people started to drift away. The rally had been going on for an hour and fifteen minutes. It was exactly what Carl had feared.

  Just when it felt as if a mass exodus was about to begin, Bill Fleischer took the microphone and galvanized the crowd by asking if anyone was ready to march. A great roar of approval went up. He quickly described the route the march would take: down Kenwood to Maryland; up Maryland and through the west end of the campus; across on Hartford Street, in front of the library; back down Downer to the Fine Arts building, then into the great plaza at the center of the campus and across it to the Student Union.

  “Then,” he said, in a quiet but firm voice, “we will occupy the Union, and the student strike of 1970 will officially begin. No more ‘business as usual’!”

  Another roar went up from the crowd. I know Bill intended to say more about the logistics of the Union take-over, but the crowd had had enough. We started moving, en masse, toward Kenwood Boulevard, which also happened to be in the direction of the police. Someone started chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go!” again and the crowd took up the chant. Bill and Carl and the other strike leaders had to hustle to get in front of everyone.

  Most of the people I’d recruited for my contingent found me as the crowd surged forward. I was near the front, myself, and I could feel the tension in the police line as we approached. I saw one officer squeezing hard on the handle of the billy club in his belt. They were being ordered back by their commanders, but they were hesitating. I had the sense they would have welcomed the opportunity to give us a good whipping. But they backed off, blocking Kenwood where it met Downer to keep cars from coming through. We turned away from them and marched down the street toward Maryland Avenue, which had already been blocked off by police cars.

  As we marched, more students joined us, while others watched from the lawn and from the wide concrete balconies of the Student Union, a building that filled almost half of the block between Downer and Maryland. A cluster of male students in tank tops waved an American flag from the second floor porch of their fraternity house, across the street from the Union. When some of the demonstrators called for them to join us, the flag-wavers gave them the finger in unison and called out something about “commie fags”—not the most original epithet. But we didn’t care. The day was ours.

  I was thrilled to look back and see demonstrators filling both sides of the boulevard and spilling over onto the sidewalks, dozens of protest signs waving above their heads: “End the Draft!” “U.S. out of Vietnam!” “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” Maybe this is it, I thought. Maybe demonstrations like this all over the country will make people sit up and pay attention to us. Maybe we’ll all refuse to go and they won’t have anybody to fight their stupid little war. It was exhilarating to think that we might be able to alter the course of the nation’s history by saying no to an immoral war.

  The “we won’t go” chant, which seemed to capture the feeling of the day, continued as we turned the corner onto Maryland Avenue, in the shadow of the Union. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen when we had circled the campus and returned to occupy the building. I was all for non-violent protest, theoretically speaking, but the prospect of being clubbed over the head and dragged to a paddy wagon terrified me.

  For years, I’d had recurring dreams about being in the power of people who didn’t care for me as an individual, who only wanted to punish me as a representative of something they hated. It was quite possible I was on the verge of confronting that nightmare in real life. And beyond the terror of being beaten was the fear of becoming an outcast. I was on probation for my shoplifting offense. If I was arrested and convicted of even a minor infraction of the law, I’d have a permanent record as a criminal with not one but two offenses. Would I ever be able to get a decent job?

  I mulled all this over as the march swept me along. I could just step out of the crowd and walk away, if I wanted to. The march would go on without me. But would I be able to live with myself if I did, if I ignored my conviction that, as Hamlet put it, something was “rotten in the state of Denmark”? I didn’t think so. As Carl had pointed out at the rally, we were a generation weaned on images of civil rights demonstrators standing up to snarling police dogs, blasting fire hoses, rock-throwing crowds, firebombs, and Klan threats. Month after month, year after year, we’d watched incredibly courageous black people—and whites, too—put their lives on the line for what they believed. With that example in the forefront of my mind, how could I run away from the responsibility of standing up for what I believed, no matter what the consequences might be? The answer was clear. I couldn’t.

  Part way up Maryland, we veered left, funneling between a couple of buildings into the west end of the campus. Our numbers continued to swell. I’m sure some people just came along for the ride, as if joining a Mardi Gras parade, but I sensed others were joining because, as the organizers had intended, the march acted like a clarion call to their conscience, making them realize, finally, that they did oppose the Vietnam War and the draft, and it was time to do something about it. How many of them would be willing to face down the police and help to take over the Union remained to be seen.

  When we reached Hartford Street, we turned right and headed up the gentle slope that led past Columbia Hospital. Doctors, nurses, visitors, even a few patients in hospital gowns, stared down at us from the windows. A few flashed peace signs, but most looked as if they were watching a freak show. I suppose we looked a motley crew—bearded, long haired, shi
rtless hippies beside plaid-skirted co-eds; professors in ties beside professors in tie-dye; blond boys in button-down, pale-blue shirts beside black students in wildly colored dashikis. But it was the variety of participants that gave me hope. If the protest cut across social lines, they could no longer pass us off as a radical fringe.

  Suddenly, Miriam appeared at my side and slipped her arm through mine.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she said. “All it took to get you white folks out was having a few of your own shot down. You notice that nobody took to the streets when those eight black students were shot down at South Carolina State.”

  Miriam had always loved to catch me off guard with provocative statements about whites.

  “They weren’t protesting the war, were they? I think this is the first time that anti-war demonstrators have been shot down. And the fact it was done by our own soldiers shocked people, too.”

  “I still think it’s because they were white. A lot more people started paying attention to the Civil Rights Movement when whites started getting killed, too.”

  “I suppose. How the hell are you, anyway? I haven’t seen you around much, lately.”

  “I’ve been doing a couple independent studies, so I’m not on campus as much. Do you miss me?”

  “Of course I miss you. It wasn’t me that broke us up, if you recall.”

  “If you’re going to start in about that again, I think I’ll go back and talk with Alicia.” She slipped her arm out of mine.

  “Just don’t go too far,” I said. “You’re part of my contingent you know.”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” she said, mock-saluting me. Then she winked and dropped back to join her friend, who was walking arm-in-arm with Tony.

  We were in front of the library, by then. A large group of students had left their books behind to come out and see what was up. As we passed by, a good number of them fell in with us. The crowd had gotten more rowdy as the march progressed. The chant had gone from the relatively mild “Hell no, we won’t go” to the more aggressive “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” We were definitely feeling our oats. It was a good feeling, a feeling of empowerment, whether it was indicative of any real power or not.