twice; for both. Y ou can love som ebody once and som ebody,
a little, once. Then it ends and yo u ’re a sad, lonely girl, though
you don’t think about it much. After, the light would come,
slow; he’d be kissing m y hands.
F O U R
In February 1965
(Age 18)
I live in a funny kind o f silence, I have all my life, a kind o f
invisible bubble. On the streets I am quiet and there is quiet all
around and no one gets through, nothing, except for the wind
sometimes bellowing in my head an awful noise o f cold
weeping. I don’t look quiet but I am quiet. People don’t see
much so they don’t see how still I am. I see the people talking,
all the people o f every kind, throwing words at everything,
throwing words at each other, throwing words at time, sitting
over coffee throwing words, peaceful or shouting, smiling or
in pain, throwing words at anything they see, anything that
walks up to them or anything that gets in their w ay or trying
to be friendly throwing words at someone who doesn’t know
them. I don’t have words to throw back. When I feel
something no right words come or no one would know what
they mean. It would be like throwing a ball that could never be
caught. They act like words are cheap and easy as if they can
just be replaced after they are used up and as if they make
things all right. if I am caught in a situation so I have to, I say
something, I say I am shy and I smile, but it’s not true, I am not
shy, I ju st don’t have these great numbers o f dozens o f words,
it’s so blank inside, so empty, no words, no sound at all, a
terrible nothing. I don’t know things. I don’t know where the
people come from when the light starts coming through the
sky. I don’t know where the cars come from, always starting
about an hour after the first trash can is pushed over by boys
running or cats looking for food. T here’s no one to ask if. I
knew how but I can’t think how. The people come out first; in
drips; then great cascades o f them. I don’t know how they got
there, inside, and how they get to stay there. I don’t know
where the cars come from or where the people get all their
coats or where the bus drivers come from in the em pty buses
that cruise the streets before the people come out. I f it’s raining
suddenly people have different clothes to stay dry in but I
don’t know where they got them or where you could go to get
them or how you would get the m oney or how they knew it
was going to rain if you couldn’t see it in the sky or smell it in
the air. I don’t know how anything w orks or how everyone
knows the things they know or w hy they all agree, for
instance, on when to all come out o f the buildings at once in a
swarm , or how they all know what to say and when. They act
like it’s clear and simple and they’re sure. I don’t have words
except for m y name, Andrea, which is the only w ord I have all
the time, which m y mom ma gave me, which I remember even
if I can’t remember anything else because sometimes I forget
everything that happened until now. Andrea is the name I had
since being a child. In school we had to write our names on our
papers so maybe I remember it from that, doing it over and
over day in, day out. And also m y mother whispered it to me
in m y ear when she was loving me when I was little. I
remember it because it was so beautiful when she said it. I
don’t exactly remember it in m y mind, more in m y heart. It
means manhood or courage and it is from Europe and she said
she was damned for naming me it because you become what
you are named for and I w asn’t the right kind o f girl at all but I
think I could never be named anything else because the sounds
o f the w ord are exactly like me in m y heart, a music in a sense
with m y m other’s voice singing it right to m y heart, it’s her
voice that breaks the silence inside me with a sound, a w ord;
m y name. It doesn’t matter w ho says it or in what w ay, I am
comforted, as if it is the whisper o f my mother when I was a
baby and safe up against her in her arms. I was only safe then in
all my life, for a while but everything ends soon. I was born
into her arms with her loving me in Camden, down the street
from where Walt Whitman lived. I liked having him there
because it meant that once it was somewhere; it meant you
could be great; it meant Camden was something; it meant
there was something past the rubble, this great gray man who
wasn’t afraid o f America and so I wasn’t afraid to go anywhere
and I could love anyone, like he said. Camden was broken
streets, broken cement, crushed gray dust, jagged, broken
cement. The houses were broken bricks, red bricks, red,
blood red, I love brick row houses, I love blood red, wine red,
crumbled into sawdust; w e’re dust too, blood red dust. It was
a cement place with broken streets and broken bricks and I
loved the cement and I loved the broken streets and I loved the
broken bricks and I never felt afraid, just alone, not sad, not
afraid. I had to go away from home early to seek freedom
which is a good thing because you don’t want to be a child for
too long. You get strong if you go away from where you are a
child; home; people say it’s home; you get strong but you
don’t have a lot o f words because people use words to talk
about things and if you don’t have things there’s few words
you need. It’s funny how silence goes with having nothing and
how you have nothing to say if you don’t have things and
words don’t mean much anyway because you can’t really use
them for anything if you have nothing. If you go away from
home you live without things. Things never mattered to me
and I never wanted them but sometimes I wanted words. I
read a lot to find words that were the right ones and I loved the
words I read but they weren’t exactly the ones. They were like
them but not them. I just moved along the streets and I took
what was coming and often I didn’t know what to call it. We
were going to die soon, that was for sure, with the bomb
coming, and there weren’t words for that either, even though
people threw words at it. Y ou could say you didn’t want to die
and you didn’t want them to wipe out the earth but w ho could
you say. it to so it would matter? I didn’t like people throwing
words at it when words couldn’t touch it, when you couldn’t
even wrap your mind around it at all. When I thought about
being safe I could hear the word Andrea coming from m y
m other’s lips when I was a baby, her mouth on me because she
loved me and I was in her arms but it ended soon. I played in
the bricks and on the cement; in rubble; in garbage; in alleys;
and I went from Camden to N ew Y o rk and the quiet was all
around me even more as if I was sinking under it sometimes;
and I thought, if your momma isn’t here to say your name
there is nothing to listen to. I f you try to say some words it is
likely people don’t understand them anyway. I don’t think
people in houses understand anything about the w ord cold. I
don’t think they understand the word wet. I don’t think you
could explain cold to them but if you did other words would
push it out o f their minds in a minute. T hat’s what they use
words for, to bury things. People learn long w ords to show
o ff but if you can’t say what cold is so people understand what
use is more syllables? I could never explain anything and I was
em pty inside where the words go but it was an emptiness that
caused vertigo, I fought against it and tried to keep standing
upright. I never knew what to call most things but things I
knew, cold or wet, didn’t mean much. Y o u could say you
were cold and people nodded or smiled. Cold. I tremble with
fear when I hear it. They know what it means on the surface
and how to use it in a sentence but they don’t know what it is,
don’t care, couldn’t remember if you told them. T h e y ’d forget
it in a minute. Cold. O r rape. Y ou could never find out what it
was from one o f them or say it to mean anything or to be
anything. Y o u could never say it so it was true. Y o u could
never say it to someone so they would help you or make
anything better or even help you a little or try to help you. Y ou
could never say it, not so it was anything. People laughed or
said something dirty. Or if you said someone did it you were
just a liar straight out; or it was you, dirty animal, who pulled
them on you to hurt you. Or if you said you were it, raped,
were it, which you never could say, but if you said it, then they
put shame on you and never looked at you again. I think so.
And it was just an awful word anyway, some awful word. I
didn’t know what it meant either or what it was, not really,
not like cold; but it was worse than cold, I knew that. It was
being trapped in night, frozen stuck in it, not the nights people
who live in houses sleep through but the nights people who
live on the streets stay awake through, those nights, the long
nights with every second ticking like a time bomb and your
heart hears it. It was night, the long night, and despair and
being abandoned by all humankind, alone on an empty planet,
colder than cold, alive and frozen in despair, alone on earth
with no one, no words and no one and nothing; cold to frozen
but cursed by being alive and nowhere near dead; stuck frozen
in nowhere; no one with no words; alone in the vagabond’s
night, not the burgher’s; in night, trapped alive in it, in
despair, abandoned, colder than cold, frozen alive, right there,
freeze flash, forever and never let loose; the sun had died so the
night and the cold would never end. God w on ’t let you loose
from it though. Y ou don’t get to die. Instead you have to stay
alive and raped but it doesn’t exist even though God made it to
begin with or it couldn’t happen and He saw it too but He is
gone now that it’s over and you’re left there no matter where
you go or how much time passes even if you get old or how
much you forget even if you burn holes in your brain. Y ou
stay smashed right there like a fly splattered over a screen,
swatted; but it doesn’t exist so you can’t think about it because
it isn’t there and didn’t happen and couldn’t happen and is only
an awful word and isn’t even a word that anyone can say and it
isn’t ever true; so you are splattered up against a night that will
go on forever except nothing happened, it will go on forever
and it isn’t anything in any w ay at all. It don’t matter anyw ay
and I can’t remember things anyw ay, all sorts o f things get
lost, I can’t remember most o f what happened to me from day
to day and I don’t know names for it anyw ay to say or who to
say it to and I live in a silence I carry that’s bigger than m y
shadow or any dark falling over me, it’s a heavy thing on m y
back and over m y head and it pours out over me down to the
ground. Words aren’t so easy anymore or they never were and
it was a lie that they seemed so. Some time ago they seemed
easier and there were more o f them. I’m Andrea but no one
says m y name so that I can hear it anymore. I go to jail against
the Vietnam War; it’s night there too, the long night, the sun is
dead, the time bomb is ticking, your heart hears it; the
vagabond’s night, not the burgher’s. I’m arrested in February.
It is cold. There is a driving wind. It slices you in pieces. It goes
right through you and comes out the other side. It freezes your
bones and your skin is a paper-thin ice, translucent. I am
against the War. I am against war. I find it easier to do things
than to say things. I am losing the w ords I had about peace.
The peace boys have all the words. The peace boys take all the
words and use them; they say them. I can’t think o f ones for
myself. T hey don’t mean what they say; words are trash to
them; it’s hollow, what they say; but the words belong to
them. In January I sat in court and saw Ja y sent aw ay for five
years to a federal prison. He w ouldn’t go to Vietnam. I sat
there and I watched and there was nothing to say. The peace
boys talked words but the words were trash. When the time
came Jay stood there, a hulking six-foot black man and I know
he wanted to cry, and the Feds took him out and he was gone
for five years. The peace boys were white. He was afraid and
the peace boys were exuberant. He didn’t have words; he
could barely say anything when the ju dge gave him his few
seconds to speak after being sentenced or before, I don’t
know, it was all predecided anyway; I think the judge said five
years then invited Ja y to speak and I swear he almost fell down
from the shock and the reality o f it and he mumbled a couple o f
words but there wasn’t anything to say and federal marshals
took him o ff and his mother and sisters were there and they
had tears, not words, and the peace boys had no tears, only
words about the struggle o f the black man against the racist
war in Vietnam, I couldn’t stop crying through the thing
which is w hy I’m not sure just when the judge said five years
and just when Ja y seemed like he was going to double over and
ju st when he was told he could say something and he tried but
couldn’t really. I’ve been organizing with the peace boys since
the beginning o f January, working to organize a demonstration at the United States Mission to the United Nations. We are going to sit in and protest Adlai Stevenson fronting for the
War. The peace boys wanted Ja y to give a speech that they
helped write and it covered all the bases, imperialism, racism,
stinking U . S. government, but it was too awful and too
tragic, and the peace boys went out disappointed that the
speech hadn’t been declaimed but regarding the trial as a
triumph; one more black man in jail for peace. I tho
ught they
should honor him for being brave but I didn’t think they
should be jum ping for jo y ; it was too sad. They weren’t sad.
You just push people around when you organize, get them to
do what’s best for you; and if it hits you what it’s costing them
you will probably die on the spot from it. We have meetings to
work out every detail o f the demonstration. It is a w ay o f
thinking, precise, demanding, you work out every possible
scenario, anticipate every possible problem, you have the
right people at the right place at the right time, you have
everything happen that you want to have happen and nothing
that you don’t; and if something bad happens, you use it. I try
to say things but they just talk over it. if I try to say words to
them about what we are doing they don’t hear the words. I
think I am saying words but I must be mute, m y mouth makes
shapes but it must be that nothing comes out. So I stop saying
things. I listen and put stamps on envelopes. I listen and run off
addresses for envelopes on the mimeograph machine. I listen
and make phone calls to people to get them to come to the
demonstrations. I have long lists and I make the calls for hours
at a time but if I talk too long or say too much someone makes
a sarcastic remark or if I talk too much about the War as if I am
talking about politics someone tells me I am not w orking hard
enough. I listen and type letters. The peace boys scribble out
letters and I type them. I listen and learn how to make the
plans, how to organize; I take it in in a serious w ay, for later
perhaps; I like strategy. I learn how to get people to come and
exactly what to do when and what is important and how to
take care o f people and keep them safe— or expose them to
danger i f that is our plan, which they never know . I learn how
to make plans for every contingency— i f the police do this or
that, i f people going by get violent, i f the folks demonstrating
get hurt, i f the demonstrators decide to get arrested, what to
do when the police arrest you, the laws the police have to
follow , how to make your body go limp in resisting arrest,
Mercy Page 8