Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  What do you mean when you say that “poetry humanizes”?

  It makes the abstract concrete. It makes the general specific and particular. We can never look at “the immigrant” the same way if we’re reading or hearing the poetry that humanizes the immigrant.

  What about these kids from the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Puerto Rico? They’ve got a tough life ahead of them. They’ve got to get a job. They’ve got to make money. Shouldn’t they be doing something more practical than writing poetry?

  Well, for me, poetry is practical. Poetry will help them survive to the extent that poetry helps maintain their dignity, helps them maintain their sense of self-respect. They will be better suited to defend themselves in the world. They have to realize that their lives are the stuff of poetry. They have to be given license to write poetry about themselves and what they know before they’ll do it. To that extent, poetry can be taught. Obviously there are certain things that can’t be taught, one of which is that sense of urgency. You have to have something to say.

  Your father, Frank Espada, came to this country from Puerto Rico. As a teenager, he joined the Air Force and was stationed in Texas. Then he became a political activist. What’s the story there?

  He was going to spend Christmas furlough with his parents in New York City. When he got on the bus, my father, who is a dark-skinned Puerto Rican, sat at the front. And by the time they got to Biloxi, Mississippi, on the coast, he was the only person on the bus. It was the middle of the night and they changed drivers. The new driver came on and saw my father sitting there in the front, and immediately instructed him to go to the back of the bus. My father, being nineteen years old, having grown up in East Harlem, wasn’t about to take that from anybody, so he used a colorful expletive in response. The driver returned with two cops and my father was arrested. He appeared before the judge and the judge said, and I quote, “Boy, how many days you got on that furlough?” And my father said, “I have seven days.” And the judge said, “I hereby sentence you to seven days in the county jail.” My father says that that was the best thing that ever happened to him, because he decided then and there what to do with the rest of his life. At the age of nineteen, he figured out he wanted to fight this sort of thing. And so, when he got out of the military, that’s exactly what he began to do. He got involved with the civil rights movement and later on became a political activist in many areas as a leader of the Puerto Rican community in New York.

  Which brings us to the poem you wrote about your old apartment building. ...

  This is called “Return.”

  RETURN

  245 Wortman Avenue

  East New York, Brooklyn

  Forty years ago, I bled in this hallway.

  Half-light dimmed the brick

  like the angel of public housing.

  That night I called and listened at every door:

  In 1966, there was a war on television.

  Blood leaked on the floor like oil from the engine of me.

  Blood rushed through a crack in my scalp;

  blood foamed in both hands; blood ruined my shoes.

  The boy who fired the can off my head in the street

  pumped what blood he could into his fleeing legs.

  I banged on every door for help, spreading a plague

  of bloody fingerprints all the way home to apartment 14F.

  Forty years later, I stand in the hallway.

  The dim angel of public housing is too exhausted

  to welcome me. My hand presses

  against the door at apartment 14F

  like an octopus stuck to aquarium glass;

  blood drums behind my ears.

  Listen to every door: There is a war on television.

  It wasn’t enough to write poetry like that. You went on to law school.

  When I graduated, I simply went to work in Boston’s Latino community. I worked in the field of bilingual education law, which was very unusual, and, later on, housing law. I was a tenant lawyer.

  Tenant lawyer. Law as a political tool.

  Absolutely.

  Poetry as a political tool?

  Absolutely.

  How so?

  Both involve advocacy. Speaking on behalf of those without an opportunity to be heard. Not that they couldn’t speak for themselves given the chance. They just don’t get the chance. And to me, there’s no contradiction between being an advocate as a lawyer and being an advocate as a poet. I mean, to me, it was all in the same spectrum.

  What’s that old term—poetic justice?

  For me, all justice is poetic. First of all, because it is so beautiful. To see justice done: there’s something about that I can’t even put into words. Or for that matter, when you see it happen in a courtroom, there’s someone there, again, ordinarily silenced and suppressed by that system, who has an opportunity to speak or to speak through you. When that person is vindicated and justice is done, to me, there’s no feeling like that.

  Your latest book, The Republic of Poetry, was short-listed for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Do you think that, politically, Americans have the imagination to see ourselves as a republic of poetry, where, as you say, we work these distinctions out before they reach the level of bigotry, prejudice, and exclusion? Or is that utopian?

  I would never want to underestimate the racism in this society. We talk about borders all the time. In fact, for Latinos, the true borders of our experience have always been the borders of racism. Having said that, I also believe that we don’t necessarily see the situations in which solidarity happens. We don’t see the situation where somebody reaches out to someone else. Does that make the news? Do we hear about that? How would our perspective on this crisis change if we saw and heard more of that kind of news? I mean, we have to deal with this paradox that there are more than forty million Latinos in this country and yet we’re invisible. If you remember when legislation was introduced into Congress that essentially would criminalize so-called “illegal immigrants,” there were enormous demonstrations in the streets in New York, in L.A., in Washington, D.C. And the common denominator of the response was shock, not just at the fact of the demonstrations, but at the dimensions of them. Where did they all come from? Now, the question is: why is it that these forty million people were invisible the day before those demonstrations? To me, all that shock that was registered—“Look at all the Latinos! ”—sounded a little bit like Custer at Little Big Horn: “Look at all the Indians.” You know? That sense of shock and surprise was a perfect expression of this invisibility that we endure.

  You have in The Republic of Poetry some very powerful poems about war, prompting me to bring some news clippings that I have kept on this subject. Death among Latino soldiers in Iraq ranked the highest compared to other minority groups. One of the first U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq was an orphaned Guatemalan who at the time of his death was not even an American citizen. And two out of every three Latinos now believe that U.S. troops should be brought home from Iraq as soon as possible. What do those stories say to you?

  What those stories say to me is that the war in Iraq is a Latino issue. In fact, that the war in Iraq is probably one of the most important issues facing Latinos, because of our position in society. Latinos are more likely to be exploited in a time of war, more likely to go to the front lines, more likely to become cannon fodder, more likely to be killed or wounded. Because of more limited economic alternatives, we’re more likely to take that step and to join an army in a time of war, with the vague promise that somehow this will improve our conditions. We have to have a clearer sense of who the enemy really is, who’s really causing the suffering. And those statistics demonstrate that process is, in fact, happening. Latinos understand that this war is doing damage to our community, and they’re responding.

  There’s a poem in The Republic of Poetry, “Between the Rockets and the Songs,” about New Year’s Eve 2003, which would have been almost nine months after the invasion of Iraq. Read this and tell me
about it.

  BETWEEN THE ROCKETS AND THE SONGS

  The fireworks began at midnight,

  golden sparks and rockets hissing

  through the confusion of trees above our house.

  I would prove to my son, now twelve,

  that there was no war in the sky, not here,

  so we walked down the road

  to find the place where the fireworks began.

  We swatted branches from our eyes,

  peering at a house where the golden blaze

  dissolved in smoke. There was silence,

  a world of ice, then voices rose up

  with the last of the sparks, singing,

  and when the song showered down on us

  through the leaves we leaned closer, like trees.

  Rockets and singing from the same house, said my son.

  We turned back down the road,

  at the end of the year, at the beginning of the year,

  somewhere between the rockets and the songs.

  Again, this was an actual incident. It was New Year’s Eve. There was this great noise outside, this brilliant light. My son became very nervous.

  At that time, he was twelve years old. I knew that he was making these connections. He expressed this to me. He believed that we were being bombed. He believed that the war was happening on our street, the war he had been seeing on television, the war we had been protesting, the war we had all been talking about. And so I decided to show him that on one level, anyway, there was nothing to be afraid of. We took a walk until we found the source of the light and the source of the noise. And remarkably, it stopped and then the singing began. To me, that moment felt like the choice that we’re now all confronted with as a society. Are we going to choose rockets or are we going to choose songs? Are we going to choose war or are we going to choose peace? Are we going to choose violence or are we going to choose poetry?

  We are at that crossroads, not only my generation, but my son’s generation and the generation at that school in the Bronx, where those teachers are showing those kids, taking them by the hand and saying, “Here are the rockets and here are the songs. Choose the songs.”

  JOHN GRISHAM

  The novelist nailed it before many journalists did: if you don’t think the courts are friendly enough, buy them off. You need money, of course, but the corporations in John Grisham’s The Appeal have greenbacks to spare, and soon have the state supreme court in their back pocket. As one of their law firm’s operatives brags, “When our clients need help, we target a Supreme Court justice who is not particularly friendly, and we take him or her out of the picture.”

  Grisham describes this judicial heist so graphically that Janet Maslin in The New York Times called The Appeal “his savviest book in years.” It couldn’t have been more timely: practically every week brings word of fresh assaults on the independence of our judiciary. In thirty-nine states, judges have to run for office. That’s more than 80 percent of the state judges in the country. Over the past thirty years judicial elections have morphed from low-key affairs to extravagantly financed crusades, as wealthy vested interests anonymously pour huge sums of money into the election of judges whose civil decisions directly affect corporate America.

  In the decade leading up to publication of The Appeal, judicial campaigns raised $200.4 million, more than twice the amount collected in the previous ten years. Small wonder 97 percent of elected state justices in a recent survey to acknowledge being under pressure to raise money to win or stay on the bench.

  The 2010 decision by the right-wing majority of the United States Supreme Court, allowing corporations to flood campaigns with unlimited funds, further threatens judicial independence. ”No state,” says former justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “can possibly benefit from having that much money injected into a political campaign.” Read The Appeal and you will understand why.

  Now world famous, John Grisham was a small-town lawyer and state legislator who never wrote a book until he was thirty. Since then his books have sold nearly a quarter of a billion copies in twenty-nine languages. Among them are A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Rainmaker, and The Testament. With The Appeal, Grisham, a devout Baptist layman and veteran Sunday school teacher, reads like an Old Testament prophet sounding the trumpet for justice.

  For all his success, John Grisham is not a very public man. He keeps a low profile and makes few speeches. So I was surprised to read that he was going to make a keynote address in Atlanta, Georgia, before the first meeting of the New Baptist Covenant, a group formed by former President Jimmy Carter to unite Baptists “around an agenda of Christ-centered social ministry.” We spoke around the time of that speech, just as The Appeal was published.

  —Bill Moyers

  You so rarely give speeches that I’m curious as to why you chose this gathering in Atlanta for a forum.

  I didn’t have much of a choice. The phone rang, and it was Jimmy Carter. And I’d never talked to him before. He invited me to come down, and I told him I probably couldn’t do it because my next book, The Appeal, comes out that week. He said, “Well, can I be pushy?” You know, I don’t know how you tell a former president they can’t be pushy. I said, “Sure,” and he said, “I really want you to come.” I said, “Okay, I’ll be happy to do it.”

  Tell me about The Appeal.

  It’s got more politics than anything I’ve written, tons of politics, tons of legal intrigue. All my books are based, in some degree, on something that really happened. This is about the election of a supreme court justice in the state of Mississippi. Thirty-some-odd states elect their judges, which is a bad system, because they allow private money, and it’s just like a campaign. You got corporate people throwing money in. You got big individuals. You got, you know, cash coming in to elect a judge who may hear your case. Think about that. You’ve got a case pending before the court and you want to reshape the structure of the court just to get your guy elected. And that’s happened in several states. Big money comes in, takes out an unsympathetic judge, replaces him with someone who may be more friendly to you. And he gets to rule in your case.

  This is the corporation that dumps the toxic poisons into the stream, ruins the community’s drinking water?

  Yes, Chapter One is a verdict where this big chemical company has polluted this small town to the point where you can’t even drink the water. It’s become a cancer cluster; a lot of people have died. And so there’s a big lawsuit. And that’s the opening of the book. Then it’s all the intrigue about what that company does, because the guy who owns that company doesn’t like the composition of the state supreme court. And he realizes he can change it.

  By buying an election, buying the judge. Judges in Mississippi are often determined by the most money that goes into the campaign. What are the practical consequences for citizens?

  In Mississippi, the court has now been realigned in such a way where you have a hard-right majority. Six or seven. Two or three dissents. When you’ve got a majority you only need five. Virtually every plaintiff’s verdict is reversed. So if your neighbor’s son gets killed in a car wreck and there’s a big lawsuit and there’s a big verdict against the negligent party, or if your friend is injured by a negligent doctor or a hospital, whatever, you’re pretty much out of luck.

  So the court is now decidedly biased, in your judgment, in favor of the powerful.

  Oh, it’s not in my judgment. It’s a proven fact. You can read the state supreme court decisions in Mississippi and Alabama, and both states have a hard-right majority. And so people with legitimate claims are not always, but generally, out of luck.

  Isn’t there any outrage among all those good Christian folks, as my mother would say, who live there—those ordinary folks?

  No. Because the Chamber of Commerce sells it, corporate America sells it, and the Republican Party sells it as a way to protect business, economic development, economic growth. “Look at our state. We frown on lawsuits. We frown on un
ions. This is a good place to do business.” That’s how you sell it. Sounds good. It’s how every politician does it down there. And you end up with a court that’s very unsympathetic to the rights of victims, to the rights of consumers, to the rights of criminal defendants. Yeah, that’s what happens when those types of people are elected.

  What’s your sense of why these Christian folks, so many Baptists, vote for the party that is in fact the party of money?

  They live poor and vote rich. The brilliant thing the Republicans did was get all these guys under one tent. From your traditional Republican base—wealthy Republicans, your country club Republicans, your corporate Republicans—and bring in the NASCAR bubbas and all those folks, and then get the religious right. All these good Christian folks. Get them all under one tent. All voting, really, for one purpose, and that’s to protect, you know, the rich folks. That’s worked beautifully for the Republican Party.

  Predators show up in just about every one of your novels. The little guy does get screwed until one of your protagonists shows up to take on the case. I grew up in a small town, too. You’re describing small-town justice.

  Yes, sir. That’s what I know. I was there, but I also study it. Watched it, you know, by reading about cases. The Innocent Man, you know, is the most recent example, and why I never wanted to write a nonfiction book. It’s a whole lot more fun, a whole lot easier, to create stuff than to go research a bunch of facts and have to do the hard work. And I try to avoid hard work if at all possible.