by M G Vassanji
“Call me when you get to Washington,” she said. “Call collect. You should come and see me before I go to the hospital.”
“You’re going to the hospital?”
“A minor operation, the doctor thinks I could do without some parts of my body and be no worse.”
“I’ll call.” His heart sank.
Thursday, November 13, 1969.
Buses waited at Freedom Square on Mount Auburn early in the afternoon to take Boston-area protesters to D.C. All was orderly, even subdued. Mobe officials were at hand to assist, and policemen looked on, arms folded; the only evidence of the impending protest was the placards, at this stage simply extra luggage with the backpacks. Ramji arrived at the square with his fifth-floor buddies the Ethiopians, but having found their bus they were quickly dispersed in the mad scramble for seats and acquaintances. A girl from the Weathermen group had commandeered the quiet, studious Tekle and sat beside him, Ebrahim and Marek had found a seat together.
“Hi there,” said a voice as Ramji stood perusing the available seats from the aisle. “Here’s a place —” He felt a tug at his sleeve. “Seems you’re looking for a window — here, I’ll move over — you can have the window.”
It was Lucy-Anne the radical, whom he’d met at the Student House some months before, looking rather different today — though no less enigmatic. He paused a moment before accepting with thanks. She had on an oversized faded army jacket over blue jeans, with a red beret and boots. Rather small feet, he observed as he sat down. As on the previous occasion beside her, his heart began doing a nervous double-time.
“I had a ride, you know, yesterday, could have saved a few bucks,” she said, abruptly beginning conversation.
“Then why didn’t you take it?”
“Oh.” She was taken by surprise. “Very forthright aren’t we. That’s good. A fight, that’s why. A lot of factionalism and politics. Informers. You’re not an informer, are you? … No, you don’t know half of what I’m talking about.”
“No.” This was going to be hell, he thought; and she’s supercharged, she’s not likely to fall asleep on the way.
He looked out the window for a while, as the bus found the interstate exit, settled on I-95. No forests on the way, he thought, recalling journeys taken back home; no wild animals crossing the road, no tea stops, the bus simply rolling along the concrete highway bypassing town after town; no mystery — and no inconvenience either, the bus won’t break down or get stuck in the mud somewhere. The driver was a youngish guy, hair sticking out under his hat, already chatting up the people in the front seats, answering them: “I agreed to go, didn’t I? Count that as my contribution to the protest.”
Ramji turned, finally, to look at Lucy-Anne; she returned a blank look, seemingly a challenge.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“Oh? Like what?”
“Like — where did you go to school?” I’ve got you there, haven’t I, now the shoe’s on the other foot, and unless you quarrel, I’m going to find out who this Lucy-Anne Miller, this firebrand radical, is.
“I dropped out … from Glenmore.” She paused, couldn’t resist: “Know where that is?”
“Yes, in Pennsylvania. But why did you drop out — what year?”
“I got tired of the hypocrisy and racism. The college was nothing but an assembly line turning out faithful functionaries of the racist imperialistic state. There were only white faces around me, white and middle class and revolting; I got to hate them. If you saw a black person around, she was a domestic — a servant. And there is the whole black ghetto the other side of City Line.…”
“That’s just like apartheid,” he said, knowing full well this would get her approval.
“It is apartheid.” She looked pleased, surprised.
“But why not get your degree first?”
This is the Third World speaking, we don’t like waste, we can’t afford it. All that money, effort — could be put to use?
“I went to work with poor black women — mothers; I babysat while they went to work in those large houses in the Main Line suburbs. And I organized.”
Her family lived in Worcester, Mass. Her father was a doctor, her mother a housewife of Quaker origin from Philadelphia. They were important, her mother’s antecedents, the way she said it. She had a brother, in law school, and a little sister of ten.
Ramji stared at her. The jeans, the army jacket; the small, delicate face with thin lips and large eyes, the straight beautiful brown hair falling at the sides. We gave her everything money could buy … he said to himself, recalling a popular song. Now she was a full-time raging activist, at the front line of demonstrations. Was that mark above her left eye made by a police baton? She brushed it lightly with the back of her hand, almost shyly, with a smile. “Protest’s taken on a new meaning in America. Enough of the namby-pamby stuff. The keyword is revolution.” Bring the war home, smash the state.…And her parents, what did they think of her revolutionary activities?
“They’re liberals. They support the antiwar movement.”
But perhaps not the extreme form to which you would take it, he thought, but said nothing. She eyed him briefly, then took out a diary from her breastpocket and began writing in it. He looked away.
The bus had settled to a steady, almost lulling speed, and the mood inside was now more subdued, the initial excitement and brouhaha having abated finally. They had been joined by a hippie couple, who had clambered in at the toll booth. The two were now sitting in the aisle, cross-legged, facing each other, their meagre belongings between them. The guy had a light beard and long hair caught in a blue band round the forehead; the girl had two golden braids and wore a long patchwork skirt. Catching Ramji’s stare, she smiled at him. Her companion edged closer to take a keen look at Ramji, then, apparently satisfied, joined his hands and said, “Namasté. I’m Shiva.”
“And I’m Parva,” said the girl in a soft voice, also joining her palms.
“Namasté,” Ramji said hesitantly, intensely aware of the now-silent but very observant Lucy-Anne beside him. “I’m Ramji.”
The guy nodded, the girl smiled again at Ramji, and the couple settled back. They looked marvellously contented and together, he thought, totally from another planet.
After a while the girl fished out from their things a packet of assorted seeds and a fig, which she and her boyfriend shared in silence.
Ramji tried to read but dozed intermittently instead. In his half-awake state, the late-afternoon sun pouring in through the window, his mind dreamily wandered off in all directions, bringing back memories of home, reviewing the new aspects his life had taken on in the past year.
There were cries of joy and relief as the bus exited from the highway and stopped at a restaurant, and all tumbled out, for bathrooms and food, some even for a few throws of a Frisbee to stretch the limbs. Ramji and Lucy-Anne shared a table with the Ethiopians and the Weathermen girl, whose name was Susan. The Ethiopians talked about the Eritrean war, charming the two American girls with anecdotes about the history of their ancient country.
“These friends of yours,” Lucy-Anne said to him later in the bus, “they have quite a charisma among women. They’re quite in demand, you know.”
“They seem rather quiet. Especially Ebrahim. I know him well,” Ramji said.
“You mean the Afro-head. He’s made the most conquests —”
“Really?”
“… and looks like Susan’s the next one.” She regarded him quizzically. “You’re not exactly a love machine, are you.”
“Well, if you’re bent on insulting me …,” he began, not knowing what else to say.
“I mean, do you fuck?” Ramji cringed, blushing all over, and she pressed on: “Honestly, do you fuck?”
“But I do —” he spluttered out.
“Oh, I see. Is she an older woman? Knowing you, she’s got to be an older woman.”
So Shawn’s been talking. Saying what?
“Let’s
change the subject. Where I come from, there are certain things we don’t discuss.” Give her a cultural guilt trip. It worked.
“Okay. Fine.”
Do I fuck? The inhibitions I’ve grown up with … as soon as my arm brushes against someone like you, as it just did, my conscience takes over and begins an inquisition: Whose arm brushed against whose — who was in the way? Come on, it was no accident, admit you desire her. No I don’t, I wouldn’t know what to do with this macho type. Macho? Remember the miniskirt she wore? — weren’t you just dying for a peep inside, the colour of her panties? And the soft features — the saintly look, as you once said, the martyr, surely you find that attractive. I simply don’t desire her, she’s not my type. Then why the nervousness, the racing heart? Because of you, you son of a bitch, goading me and nagging me.
It was grey and dusky outside. At the back there now began a singalong led by a regular of the Tech’s Friday night Coffee House.
Lucy-Anne turned up her lips scornfully at the inevitable Tech anthem in the repertoire.
She opened her mouth, closed it, heard the song out.
Let the laser shine in, let the laser shine in,
It’s the Tech I’m in …
Finally she blurted: “They’re making a picnic of the revolution. It’s no picnic —”
“They’ve only come to express their opinion on Vietnam. So have I,” he said proudly. “I myself signed on fifteen of them.”
After a short medley the singing died out, the mood in the bus went from cosy to dark and sombre. They were on an overpass, looking down upon a New Jersey slum: houses old and dilapidated: broken porches, shattered steps, rotten sidings, peeling paint; deserted streets, ancient cars, and not a soul in sight. A scene that takes the collective breath away in this bus, and for a moment at least you understand the anger of these activists, and of Malcolm X, and the Panthers … unless you are one of those who blame the poor for their own problems. Why not? Instinct, or simply faith, that there is collective responsibility.
Spirits picked up gradually, however, after they’d passed the slum, and hit the roof when they were queued up at a toll plaza and someone shrieked, “Look, they’re also driving to the march!” and everybody peered out excitedly.
A Volkswagen Beetle in the left lane, weighted with passengers and decorated with stickers, exchanged with them delighted cries of solidarity and two-finger peace signs and clenched fists through the windows. Simultaneously, they were given the finger from the right-wing, two guys in a Mustang, and answered multifold and most appropriately in the same language: Fuck you too, buster. Two drivers in military uniforms received howls of derision but waved cheerfully back. Then quiet once more, as they gathered speed. How long before we get there? A few more hours. The sun had set, and headlights glared back from the dark. The hippie couple had left them at the toll plaza.
They passed Philadelphia, and after that came a sense of nervous expectancy. We’re getting there, almost there. A pamphlet was passed around from the Mobe regarding discipline during the marches. The first activity, the March Against Death, would already have started, at six, but they could make the end of it.
“Where will you be staying?” Ramji asked Lucy-Anne.
“A friend’s house. We’re going to take it over — his parents are away for the whole week. You’re welcome to crash, if you don’t have a place.”
“No — I’m going with Ebrahim and the lot; they have some Ethiopian friends at George Washington University …”
“I guess they do.”
“What activities have you planned?” he asked. He imagined her in a motorcycle helmet jeering at the cops somewhere. And the line of cops in riot gear moving towards her, clubs raised. She didn’t reply, so he asked: “Do you think you can bring about change only through —” what word to use? — “violence?” He was pleading, he knew, telling her, Be careful.
He said: “You don’t have to hit your head against a brick wall to bring change.”
“Sometimes you have to … to demonstrate, to shake the system up. A few people can make the difference.”
They were quiet again. More flyers came their way, more reading lights came on. People were hungry, apples were passed around, as well as some very hard muffins. He told Lucy-Anne about the gaunt and rather grim bearded librarian who worked the graveyard shift at the Student Center library and looked like some angst-ridden character straight out of Dostoevsky. He gave out small brown bags of hard, stale corn muffins to foreign students, with a piece of paper slipped in, typewritten with a quotation from the New Testament and service hours at a local church.
The muffins induced Ebrahim to come by and chat, and Lucy-Anne was rather perked up by his visit. Ebrahim, that gentlest of guys, had one day pulled a real shocker on Ramji. They’d met in one of the aisles of the Coop bookstore, and after a chat, just as they were about to head for the cashiers together, the Ethiopian — who had happened to introduce Dostoevsky’s novels to Ramji, specifically Crime and Punishment — took a box of Bic pens from a shelf and shoved it down his shirt. Ramji gaped, dumbfounded, then said quietly, “Why?”
They broke into a philosophical debate — like one of those they sometimes engaged in late at night over sweet black tea, except this was hurried and urgent and over a real issue — as they walked to the cashiers, the box of blue Bics still inside Ebrahim’s shirt. Stealing is wrong, Ramji said. Period. Did you read how much profit they made last year, came the reply. What difference will this make, a small thing? But you can afford it with your handsome scholarship. I donate to the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, came the answer. And, besides, they think we Africans are all thieves anyway.
But just before they reached the cash counters, Ebrahim removed the contentious item and with a gracious look of defeat placed it on a shelf.
A year ago I would have been satisfied at my good deed, he said to himself, my moral victory. Now nothing is clear anymore, it’s all grey, even the simple crime of stealing — and there’s only the individual conscience to nag. He felt suffused with a sense of his private guilt and helplessness.
Ebrahim went back down the aisle to his seat.
It became quiet once again, except for the lulling, reassuring hum of the engine and the sound of the tires belting away in the night. Then suddenly there was a quick succession of exits, a profusion of headlights, and destination looked imminent. Another bus, full of demonstrators, vibrant with song, was passed; the drivers waved to each other. And a crescendo of voices erupted; there were conversations all over the place.
— A helmet, if you can. Always advisable. A must if you’re planning to take on the pigs.
— No, it just gives them ideas, see. It tells the cops you’ve come to riot. Let the crazies wear them.
— What crazies?
— You know, crazies.
— There are Crazies, Mad Dogs, Motherfuckers, Weathermen — which do you mean?
— Is Vaseline advisable? … I mean for tear gas … like, if were caught in a —
— Remember: this will be a peaceful demo. Any sign of disruption and it could be Chicago all over again. And we lose public support.
— There shoulda been instructions —
— Don’t worry, you’ll be told.
— Vaseline can help, but it’s not a good idea. If you don’t wipe it off soon enough, you’ll get burns.
— What do you do if there’s tear gas?
— Run like hell.
“And regroup and attack the pigs again, asshole,” Lucy-Anne muttered softly and with pleasure.
— Are they going to burn draft cards?
“How does the draft work?” Ramji asked Lucy-Anne.
“The rich get deferments and the poor go and get shot at. Do you have the draft in your country?”
“We have national service. It’s military training plus farming. The military training is brutal. It’s designed to make an animal out of you — a killer.”
“I know.” Pause; then softly,
with a sideways glance: “Would you have killed?”
If taken to fight the Portuguese down south? … They had been told in the service that they could be taken to Mozambique, to assist the guerrillas. Would he have killed?
He didn’t answer her.
“No,” she said. “You’re no Kenyatta.”
“Certainly not. Why do your friends call me that?”
After his visit to the Freedom Action Committee meeting in the Student House last spring, the students there had debated calling him either Kenyatta or Gandhi, and had settled for the former, as Kate had sneeringly told him.
“To mock you, I think. But you’re all right. I have an instinct for people. I can tell. And I think you’re all right.”
“Thanks,” he said. He was rather touched, though he wasn’t quite sure what she meant by “all right.”
There are more people behind you than ahead of you, urged the marshalls in blue armbands; keep moving. And we kept moving.
So that Saturday afternoon I marched for peace; not for or against America, this mighty cauldron of a place, but simply for an end to the war, and this country’s shameful, bullying role in it. And I was one among thousands, hundreds of thousands, an endless sea, a moving carpet of people; carrying placards and flags, and babies, supported by crutches and canes, in wheelchairs and strollers.…From the Capitol to the Washington Monument, moving to the beat of drums. Pennsylvania Avenue was cordoned off by buses and police, and Nixon was inside the White House watching football, they said, unperturbed by the marchers. But you bet he’s concerned, his mouthpiece Spiro Agnew will come up with a statement soon enough. We can’t all be wrong, thousands upon thousands, we feel it in our bones: Give peace a chance!
When Ramji refused a Viet Cong flag, blue and red with a yellow star, there was a scuffle; he was saved by a middle-aged woman carrying a placard that read MOMS WANT PEACE and walked with her awhile. My son’s in high school, she said, and I don’t want him drafted. If he’s called up I’ll take him to Canada, I think.…Oh why do these kids utter such obscenities? … With such marches Gandhi fought the British in India, and King the racists of America; with such a march will there be peace in Vietnam? Cambodia? South Africa? Rhodesia, Mozambique, Angola? … PEACE NOW! PEACE NOW! Realistically speaking, this is not going to bring peace to the world; homo sapiens are not peaceful creatures. A girl carrying a portrait of Ho Chi Minh stumbled, a guy offered to hold it for her, she refused. Along the route a line of silent Weathermen in fatigues, standing to attention and shoulder to shoulder, holding up Viet Cong flags.…I HAVE A DREAM! Yes, we have a dream, too, of one day returning to our countries and working in a school or college; of paying back to our country. Ask not what your country can do for you, et cetera, et cetera. “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong is gonna win!” A stone flew into the demonstration, and two fellows from the march made a dash for the culprits among the spectators, but were restrained by marshalls. They don’t throw tomatoes here; they shoot presidents, don’t they. Bystanders joined the march. TRICKY DICK STOP THE KILLING!