They were marched in by two pleasant-enough-looking little old ladies with white hair tightly iron-curled (they looked like an advertisement out of a 1930’s issue of Liberty Magazine, reading time: 1 minute 32 seconds).
It was cold in Dayton, in the mid-twenties, and they were bundled in heavy jackets or overcoats. Perhaps thirty of them, sitting terribly erect in four rows of straight-back chairs. Barbara Benham introduced me, and against a backdrop of two enormous posters (one of me, the other of the Eniwetok mushroom) I climbed up onto a tall stool. I grinned at them and said, “My name’s Ellison. I’m a writer. How many of you have ever read anything I’ve written?”
Glen Ray sat in the back of the room, arms folded, watching me carefully.
There was silence from the audience.
It wasn’t unusual. I’m under no illusions about the minority of Americans who read anything, much less me. But it’s a hook with which to begin.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s try it this way: how many of you are interested in writing, about a career in writing, about what it’s like to be a writer, his life ... that sort of thing?”
Nothing. An oil painting. Mount Rushmore. Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln. Dead eyes. Slack jaws. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. Not a tremble.
“Oh boy,” I murmured sotto voce, “I really am in the Great American Heartland, aren’t I?” Glenn Ray crossed his legs uncomfortably. Big Brother was watching. “Well look, troops, you got hauled out of your class and drug over here to listen to some dude you never met before rap about a lot of dull stuff. So what should we talk about? The world situation? How about the Art Thomas case?”
Nothing. But off to the left, in the rear, someone said, “Art Who?” (In the first installment of this Dayton Diatribe I mentioned that Art Thomas had been making headlines in Dayton. A black educator who had been railroaded out of his job because he had avoided a cops-and-kids confrontation by relating to the kids and getting them to back off, but in the process he had called a cop a pig.)
I couldn’t believe they didn’t know about it. “You’ve got to be kidding!” I said. “This is the biggest thing to happen in Dayton in years. It may go to the Supreme Court as a test case ... and you people haven’t even heard about it? Okay, how about the My Lai massacre? You’ve been reading about that, haven’t you?”
Television faces stared back at me. No, gentle readers, they had not heard about it. Or if they had, they didn’t remember. Or if they remembered, they weren’t sufficiently involved to even nod a yes at me. I was looking at the result of hours before the glass teat, passively suckling the distant images of dead bodies piled on top each other.
What do you do?
I did something.
What I did was wrong or right, depending on what you conceive to be the role of a guest artist brought in to impart information about a scene of the world different from that through which they move. I freely cop to culpability in what I did next. I could have accepted my intuition about those kids and where they were at. I could have said to myself, Ellison ... back off. Let them continue the way they’re going. Let them think it’s all somewhere off in the distance, has nothing to do with them. Let them think you’re a sweet guy, kind of dumb, and kind of boring, and let them go back at the end of the hour to Wilbur Wright High School, having heard nothing more visceral than the nonsense those two little old ladies feed them every day. I could have said that.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I raised my tone of voice considerably and demanded, “What the hell is with you, people? What are you learning in school? My generation and all the ones that went before have left you a garbage dump, a cesspool: you’re the ones who have to clean it up. Do you want another fifty years of war? Do you want the land and the air and the water to become so intolerably polluted they won’t support life of any kind? Not just for your great-grandchildren, but for you and me? Chances are good if they don’t slaughter us all first, we won’t live for another fifty years. You see, there are these things in the ocean called diatoms, and they produce seventy per cent of our oxygen, and we’ve polluted the water so much the plankton that feeds on the diatoms is vanishing, and that means—”
And I was off. Running fast. Up and down and around. “What the hell are you people training yourselves to be? Redemption stamp center clerks?”
Then I read them one of my stories, Shattered Like A Glass Goblin, which—depending where your head is at—-is either a pro- or an anti-dope story. I wrote it as an anti. And when I got finished, Glenn Ray was even unhappier. It had some sex in it, and some cursing, and some dope, and some violence.
Then one of the kids raised his hand. It was the first sign of mobility in the crowd. I wanted to rush over and play Monte Hall: for raising your hand, sir, I will make a deal with you! You can have your choice of a revolution, an all-expense-paid rejuvenated America, or a six-pack of groupies. But I’d forgotten for a moment that I was in Dayton.
“Are you telling us to smoke marijuana?” he asked. “Don’t you know that it’s against God’s Covenant? Don’t you know that marijuana leads to Hard Stuff that makes people want to go out and rob and kill to get the Hard Stuff?”
“Hold it, hold it,” I said, dazed. “That was an anti-dope story I just read to you. But I think you’re old enough to know the difference between Hard Stuff and marijuana. Either way, it’s your life. I don’t use, and if anyone asks me my opinion, I’d say forget it. But it’s your life, baby, and if you want to mess it over with drugs, that’s your prerogative. Kindly don’t try and push me into a corner where I have to defend pot, because that doesn’t happen to be my crusade.”
It went on that way for the better part of an hour. Punching, punching, trying to get through, trying to tell them they were our last, best hope, and if they sat there with prognathous jaws and Little Orphan Annie eyeballs the whole country was doomed.
I’m afraid I said Spiro Agnew was an asshole.
And when the hour was up, the two little old ladies rose, and said, in their best Louisa May Alcott manner, “We’d like to thank you, Mr. Ellison, for your—uh— enthusiasm. But our bus driver is waiting for us to hurry back to school, so—uh—thank you and goodbye.”
The kids, a mite dazed by the mixmaster into which they’d stumbled, were led docilely back to the Halls of Academe where they would be told to ignore that strangely-garbed hippie with the decadent ideas and the inexcusable profanity.
They were given “evaluation sheets” on which they were to record their opinions of the hour.
Glenn Ray looked like a man who has just learned Santa Claus takes bribes.
Barbara Benham looked disturbed. She didn’t say anything. But an hour later, we got word Mr. Ray wanted to see us. He came down to Miss Benham’s classroom, and he said, “You’d better stick to talking about writing.”
I asked him pointedly if that meant I was not allowed to talk about the world or politics or any of the other subjects on which I’d dwelled in the Wilbur Wright class. He hurriedly assured me he meant no such thing ... just that I was a writer and should deal with these topics from that position. It seemed a reasonable request, and I said I would. When he left, Barbara Benham looked even more disturbed.
“Anything wrong?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said, and bit her thumb.
Later that day I had a get-together with students from the Living Arts Center itself, rather than a specially-bussed-in crowd. It was called the “Let’s Talk” session, and . these were an entirely different breed of kids than the Wilbur Wright zombies. These kids— ages 12 to 17—were sharp, inquisitive, irreverent, uncompromising, alert. We got to rapping about all sorts of things love/hate, war/peace, truth/shucks, power/subservience—and the only bad moment I can recall was when a boy in the back asked, non sequitur, “What’s Barbra Streisand like?” Everyone did a take. It had absolutely nothing to do with anything that had gone down in the dialogue, but I said simply that I didn’t know her, but from what I’d heard aro
und the studios, she was a royal pain in the ass to work with. The kid burst into tears later, I learned, telling Mr. Ray and others, “Why’d he have to say that about a great star like Miss Streisand?”
I won’t say it was the greatest rapport in the history of Western Man, that afternoon session, but there is a photo on page 23 of the December 16th edition of the Dayton Daily News showing me surrounded by kids, laying an anecdote on them, and their heads are thrown back in laughter, their mouths open with joy; they are having a good time.
You see, we related. Remember that... it comes up later.
But: in the back of the group, Glenn Ray sat watching. This is a Watchbird watching you. He particularly didn’t like my reading of the two Glass Teat columns dealing with The Common Man—a hobby horse I’m currently riding. He didn’t like me saying the greatest danger to freedom and liberty in our country was the stupidity of the masses, the passive acceptance of all the poison spurted from the fangs of Spiro.
Later that night I had my first meeting with the science fiction workshop kids. And we grooved. They were like the other Living Arts kids: bright, into it, curious.
Things were going well. I thought.
(What I did not know was that calls were coming in from the parents of those Wilbur Wright students. One man showed up at the Center and wanted to “look around” and see what this here now Center was all about. Glenn Ray was being drawn uptight. Waves were appearing on the placid surface of his little frog pond.)
Next morning came the pivotal scene, I feel. I was to meet my second bussed-in group. Black journalism students from Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School.
The instant I walked into the classroom, I felt it. A difference. The biggest difference. Life surged in that room. Thirty-some kids, all black, with a male, white teacher. They were slumped in the seats, eyes watching. Yeah. That’s where it’s at, friends. None of that “here I sit, docilely waiting for your effulgent intelligence, great white teacher” jive. These kids had had all the shit thrown at them. They were wide awake and wanted the dude up in front to prove he was worth listening to.
And that, Establishment, is the attitude all school kids should have. They should demand their teachers be interesting and on top of it and stimulating.
The difference was like, uh, black and white.
Glenn Ray sat in the back, watching.
We started out, and for the first ten minutes I was being tested. There was no hype possible with these kids. I was white, and that was a strike or two right there. And I was fancied-up with what looked (to them) like new clothes, and that was another couple of strikes. And I was in a position of authority, and that was strikes five and six. So I proceeded to put what I had in front of them. And that entailed doing precisely what Art Thomas had done: talk to them the way they talked to each other. And that meant the words motherfucker and dumbshit and pile of crap were exchanged. Broke through. Read them a fantasy I’d written about an extraterrestrial who was passing as a human to illuminate the arid emotionalism of a black girl passing as white. They dug it. And we got to really rapping. Good things. Truths and fears and humor and some mutual affection were passed around. (“You know,” I said to one black kid who’d asked a dumb question, “you are a dumb shit man.” And he replied, “Thass okay. You just an envious Jew, baby.”)
When the hour was over, they didn’t want to leave. The bus driver had to come in and practically drag them to the bus. Their teacher shook my hand and said it was a fine hour. He said he wished the time had been longer. Three of the students hung back. They wanted to have their picture taken with me. I dug it. One of their buddies cranked off a few snaps of us all together, and we made nice on each other and they split. I wasn’t worried about their evaluation sheets.
I looked at Glenn Ray.
I’ve grown sensitive to the look of hate these last few years. I looked at Glenn Ray. He hated me.
The Program Director of the Dayton Living Arts Center hated me. I didn’t know why, but later, talking to a member of the faculty (and for the benefit of Mr. Ray and Mr. DeVelbiss, who insist they don’t want to fire Miss Benham for having had the wretched judgment to bring me in as a guest artist, despite the prevalent fears of everyone at the Center that that was precisely what they wanted to do, it is not Miss Benham to whom I refer here), I was told that Mr. Ray, even though he is the man most directly responsible for what happens to the kids, relates poorly to them. I was also told I made Ray angry, and that I’d capped it by getting along so well with the black kids. Though a Negro himself, it seems Mr. Ray can’t talk to blacks the way I did.
I didn’t think it mattered. Not till later that day, only a few hours before I was to deliver the public lecture for adults and college students that had been advertised for weeks. It was at that point that Glenn Ray’s fear of “wave-making” melded with his hatred of your gentle columnist, and he pulled the plug. Spiro Agnew bit Glenn Ray and ...
He canceled my speech.
And that’s when it hit the fan, friends.
* * * *
52: 23 JANUARY 70
POISONED BY THE FANGS OF SPIRO: CONCLUSION
A wound neither as deep as a Chicago Conspiracy Trial nor as wide as two US Army sergeants being removed from their Armed Forces Radio posts when they told their audience that they were being censored and could not tell the troops what was really happening in the War. Neither as final as the silencing of Lenny Bruce ... nor as significant as the attempted whitewash of My Lai before the evidence piled up so high it couldn’t be denied (though Time reported last week that 54% of the American people still refuse to believe it happened); neither as painful as the police moving in on a recent Allen Ginsburg reading and first cutting off his mike, then putting on Muzak so he could not be heard ... nor as destructive as a Century City Riot; neither as debilitating as cancelling Joyce Miller’s Encounter from KPFK because she was sniping at the Administration ... nor as horrendous as the Smothers Brothers being flushed out of sight; neither as permanent as the silencing of Seale, Cleaver, King, Malcolm X, JFK, RFK or George Lincoln Rockwell ... nor as ghastly as court-martialing soldiers who protest. But when Glenn Ray panicked at the two or three phone calls he’d gotten from parents of students to whom I’d spoken, parents who didn’t want their kids to hear any opinions but ones approved by the Good Housekeeping seal ... when he grew terrified that his petty sinecure at the Center was in danger ... when he realized that after the defeat of the school bond levy he was in a vulnerable position ... when push came to shove and he had to suddenly stand behind the free speech and dissent he had so liberally championed to all those kids .... the poison from the fangs of Spiro took effect, and he canceled me out.
What happened next happened so fast, some of it may have been rumor, some of it may have been nightmare, some of it may have been reality, and some of it will stick with those kids for the rest of their lives.
I was in a workshop session with John Baskin’s science fiction writing class when Barbara Benham— the creative writing director who’d hired me—stuck her head in and asked me to step into the hall. “Glenn Ray canceled your speech for tonight,” she said.
I grew very calm. Two thousand years of racial memory of pogroms took over and I grew very calm.
“Well, let’s just go talk to Mr. Ray and see what’s happening,” I said.
The kids spilled out into the hall behind us. “What’s happening?” they asked. “What’s going on?”
“Go on back inside,” I said. “Glenn Ray canceled the lecture tonight. We’re going to go to his office and see if we can straighten it out. I’ll come back and tell you what went down.” They looked startled, uncertain and—unless you’ve seen it in the eyes of kids 12 to 16 years old you won’t know how it can chew on your heart—frightened.
“He can’t do that?!” yelled one girl.
I smiled my best Robert-Culp-going-into-combat smile. Little baby, you have no idea how easily he can do that
We went to Ray’s office, Miss B
enham and myself.
He was sitting behind his desk. Jack DeVelbiss, the Administrative Director, was conveniently out of town or hiding out or comatose, God only knew what. So this was Ray’s play, all by his lonesome. There was no love lost between us (and all this in two days). He had openly implied to other faculty members that despite the fact that Miss Benham was living elsewhere while I used her apartment for my stay in Dayton, there was something seedy and clandestine about it. Mr. Ray was lucky he never said that in front of her boy friend, John Baskin, who could separate Mr. Ray’s tibia and fibula like a chicken leg without too much effort. He had evinced dislike for me that stemmed—I was told by another faculty member—from my “weird” clothes, my constant talk of sex, my seeming refusal to deal with him as an authority figure, and because of that strange class (strange to him, that is) in which I’d been able to relate to, and communicate with, black kids though Ray, nominally Negro, could not. So there we were, nose-to-nose.
The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television Page 28