We Are All Good People Here

by Susan Rebecca White

  Perhaps I will see you in Atlantic City? I hope so.

  D

  September 3, 1964

  Dear Eve,

  I’ve called your house several times, but your mom always says that you are “unavailable,” either out with friends, or back-to-school shopping, or napping. I know she is just making an excuse because you don’t want to talk. Oh, but Eve, we have to move past all of this! I have so much to tell you, so much to discuss. And I want to hear about you—are you still seeing Warren? Last spring you were talking about volunteering with the Columbia Citizenship Council and tutoring children in Harlem. Are you still planning to? I hope so. God knows Harlem is suffering. Is Warren still a member of that Columbia group speaking out against our involvement in Vietnam—what is it called, ICV? I think I would like to go to one of their meetings this year, at least find out more about their position. Maybe we can go together.

  Oh, Eve. I feel bereft without you in my life, and I’m so sad we aren’t going to be rooming together this year, though of course it’s nice we each got singles. I admit I let my feelings grow hard toward you earlier this summer when you were still mad at me for going to Mississippi without you, but now I just miss you. I want my friend back.

  I miss our long talks. Here is what I would say if I were sitting next to you on one of our beds, smoking cigarettes and hearing the sounds of Dylan coming out of Abby’s room for the ten thousandth time: Negroes are the only ones who really understand race in America. They are the only ones who go through every day of their lives in colored skin, skin they cannot peel off just to have a temporary respite from the abuse it brings. They are the ones who can teach us about oppression in America, because they live on the receiving end of it. And they are the ones who can teach us about resistance, about standing up for human rights.

  Those of us with white skin can empathize, can stand in solidarity, but we can always trick ourselves into thinking things aren’t so bad. We are allowed to make up stories about “the race situation” because we don’t have to bear the burden of it on our own bodies.

  Here is something else I would like to talk to you about: I am not sure we made any real change this summer. Positive change, that is. Three of us died. Countless were beaten. (Lew got the back of his skull split open with a railroad spike—he had to have twenty-two stitches.) I was threatened with a gun, pointed at my head. An unloaded gun, it turned out, but I didn’t know that during the endless seconds it was held against my temple. The families we stayed with will surely face retribution from their white employers, their white landlords, the white law enforcement, now that most of us are gone and the national media has turned its attention to other matters. And we did not, after all, unseat the Democratic delegates sent from Mississippi. I’m assuming you followed all of that on the news? What a joke. The DNC offered us two seats—two seats out of seventy. We turned them down. Took the “moral victory.” Is there any such thing?

  Did you watch Fannie Lou Hamer testify in front of the select committee when we were vying for the seats? She was so powerful that LBJ called an emergency press conference during her talk so that the cameras would move off her and onto him. And then do you know what that jackass did? He announced that it was the nine-month anniversary of Kennedy’s death. That was his big press conference. By the time they turned the cameras back to the select committee hearings, Fannie Lou had finished speaking. But it didn’t matter. Stations replayed her testimony again and again. (Please tell me you saw it!) There she was, with a voice that did not waver, speaking of how she was brutally beaten by the police after she tried to register to vote in 1962. “How many beatings will I have to take?” she asked those well-heeled committee members. Lew, who stayed in Mississippi during the convention, said that the Negroes watching Miss Hamer testify could not believe that one of them, a poor farmer, a colored woman, was speaking on national television about their lives, was captivating the nation with the truth.

  Throughout the convention she kept saying, “When you tell the truth, you’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Well, she was right. We had nothing to hide. But that didn’t stop the Democratic Party from shutting us down. Even though our supporters lined the boardwalk in front of the convention center with poster boards reading: “One Man / One Vote” and “I Support the MFDP.”

  Oh, Eve. My heart is so heavy. What a wasted opportunity. If they had seated us, if they had refused to seat the “Dixiecrats” from Mississippi, not a one of whom represented their state’s Negro citizens, God, it would have changed things. Just thinking about the loss makes me cry.

  My father told me not to despair. My father reminded me that because of our actions, the nation had to turn its eyes to Mississippi. The nation had to tune its ears to Fannie Lou Hamer. My father says that change will come, eventually, as a result of all of this. I would say that I “pray” that he is right, but Unitarians aren’t that big on straight-up praying, you know—we’d rather attend a seminar discussion on the psychological benefits of prayer! (You didn’t think I’d get through this letter without at least one Unitarian joke, did you?)

  Something else happened in Atlantic City. A minor event compared to the delegate fiasco, but an important one all the same—important to me at least. Pete showed up. Pete showed up with a sign of support, a placard that read: “I Support the MFDP.” He stood on the boardwalk for hours with that sign before I ever saw him. And here’s something I didn’t tell you—I had broken up with Pete at the beginning of the summer. I’m sure you remember how unsupportive he was of us—of me—going to Mississippi. He felt I was putting my life and the lives of the Negroes in Mississippi in danger. He said why not work on “fixing” Harlem first. He said something about uneducated colored people not being “ready” for the vote. I know. It was awful. I broke things off with him after he said that. But then we ended up exchanging letters over the ten weeks I was down there, and I guess the stories I shared shifted something in him, allowed something—empathy, I suppose—to blossom. And there he was, standing in solidarity in Atlantic City. Can you imagine what his mother, Stockton, president of the West Hartford DAR, would say?

  Pete asked me to marry him. Our engagement is assuredly not the most important event of the summer, and yet, I am happy. Thrilled in fact. We will not get married until after I graduate from school, so it’s a long way off. And the wedding will be small, unless Pete’s mom manages to talk me into something bigger. But I’m happy, Eve. Grateful for the life Pete and I will build.

  Do you think you might be my maid of honor?

  I miss you,

  Daniella

  Chapter 6

  CALLED HOME

  New York City, 1968

  Eve would not be a “Good German.” She would not get lost in a fog of rationalizations. She would not, when the Vietnam War finally came to an end, clear the condensation from her glasses and cry, “I never knew; I never knew the terrible things we were doing!” as the “Good Germans” had once done. She knew. She knew what American soldiers were doing to villagers in Vietnam, knew what they were doing to children in those villages. Children. She knew that napalm burned between 1,500 and 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and if you tried to wipe it off it only spread, until eventually flesh melted from the bone.

  Children suffered this death, delivered by bombs dropped from the sky by her country. Her country.

  Warren had a book of photographs, purchased in Paris, showing scenes from everyday life in Vietnam after the French had finally retreated and before the Americans arrived. She could not stop studying its pages. She was especially drawn to a picture of two dozen children or so, bunched shoulder to shoulder in disorderly rows, widemouthed and laughing, two of them mid-clap, captured in the middle of delight, their bare feet on the dirt, or perhaps it was sand. What were they laughing at? What was bringing them such delight? Anything and everything. Children were delighted so easily—this she knew from her own teaching.

  Only a few years after that photo was taken, the Ameri
cans would arrive. She thought of the boy in the photo who was clowning around with his hands on top of his head, reminding her of Malcolm, her own class clown. She imagined a boy like him walking down a dirt road, taking lunch to his father. She imagined a noise coming from above, the child looking up to the sky. Spotting it. Spotting the plane overhead. She imagined him watching as bombs tumbled out from its insides. How graceful the bombs might look, falling. How elegant. And then the fire, gasoline mixed with a rubber perfected in the labs of Dow Chemical, creating a viscous, burning gel that stuck to the flesh.

  Her parents were shocked—shocked!—by those who lit themselves on fire in protest, burning themselves to death, first Thich Quang Duc in Vietnam, protesting the treatment of Buddhists under the South Vietnamese government, but soon followed by American martyrs, so overcome with the evil America was perpetuating—in their names—that they made the ultimate sacrifice, their flaming bodies demanding that we pay attention to what was happening, pay attention now.

  She remembered talking to her mother soon after the suicide of Norman Morrison, a thirty-two-year-old Quaker who, in 1965, set himself on fire just outside Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon, his baby daughter covered in kerosene before he handed her to a bystander.

  “What a sick, sick man,” her mother had said. “To kill himself in front of his baby. And he had two other young children at home, and a wife! Imagine a father doing that to his family.”

  “What a sick, sick nation we live in,” Eve had answered. “To bomb innocent Vietnamese villagers in the name of freedom. Imagine doing that to an autonomous country halfway around the world.”

  “You do not understand the very real threat of communism,” her mother had rebuked. At the time, Eve had just rolled her eyes, but were they to have the same conversation today (they wouldn’t—Mrs. Whalen flat-out refused to engage in political discussions with Eve), she would tell her mom that she now considered herself a communist. She no longer simply wanted the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. She wanted the National Liberation Front to win. She wanted colonized people all over the world to break free, to smash imperialism, to be autonomous, to live as they so desired.

  She did not start from this place. She had once been a liberal, like Daniella and Pete, who had once been a Young Republican. Daniella and Pete had marched down Fifth Avenue two years ago along with tens of thousands of others, demanding that the United States withdraw from Vietnam. She had not marched in their group but had seen them among the other Barnard and Columbia students. The banner they held read: “Unitarian Universalists for Peace.”

  Eve was with people from the Independent Council on Vietnam—ICV—Warren, Abby, David, Mark. They carried signs, too. Warren’s read: “Not with My Life You Don’t.” Hers, cut into the shape of a stop sign, simply read: “Stop War.” Abby, ever the provocateur, carried a poster board that read: “Girls Say Yes to Guys Who Say No.” But the most compelling sign she saw was held by a black man in a group of black marchers: “The Vietcong Never Called Me a Nigger.”

  There were so many people at the march—young, old, black, white, college kids, working class—she honestly believed that LBJ would listen. (How could he not hear their chants? “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”) Back then she believed that the United States was a good nation that had made a bad decision in entering the Vietnam conflict but that, when faced with the will and the conscience of its people, would reverse its course, correct itself, take a dose of painful medicine and recognize how brutal it had become. Warren had laughed at her naïveté. The United States had always been a brutal country, he said, beginning with the genocide of the American Indians. And then the country itself—the actual White House, for fuck’s sake—was built by enslaved humans, kidnapped from their home country and brought here in chains, kept in submission by the lash and the noose.

  Back in the spring of Eve’s sophomore year, Warren had convinced her to tutor kids in Harlem through a program called the Citizenship Council. “Don’t be such a child,” he had said when she sniffed that she didn’t know if they would want her. After all, CORE had just rejected her application to go to Mississippi for the summer. But Warren was right (Warren was always right), and so she had signed up. Shortly after she joined, one of the Council leaders, David Gilbert, told her the story of how he had come to see the link between the shameful treatment of blacks in America and villagers in Vietnam. David had arrived at his tutee’s apartment in Harlem upset because he had just read a newspaper account of a massive bombing in Vietnam. He said to the child’s mother, “Our government is bombing people on the other side of the globe for no good reason.”

  “Bombing people for no good reason, huh?” the mother had said. “Must be colored people who live there.”

  • • •

  Many of the members of ICV were Jewish. Abby’s father had immigrated to America in his teens, but many of his relatives, including his brother, stayed in Poland. They all died in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. “We didn’t know!” the “Good Germans” had cried when they were forced to tour Buchenwald shortly after the Allies declared victory. The “Good Germans” walked past piles of emaciated corpses, shielding their eyes, ducking their heads. Eve had seen the pictures. She had imagined her own mother taking such a tour, claiming ignorance as she held a handkerchief over her nose.

  She would not be a “Good German.” She would not, as Pete and Daniella had chosen to do, slide into cozy domesticity, hide out in the universities, get a mortgage, buy a car. Pete and Daniella were married now, both enrolled in graduate school at Emory, Pete studying history, Daniella studying law. She and Warren had gone to dinner with them a couple of months ago, when they were up north visiting Pete’s parents in Connecticut. It had been the first time Eve had seen Daniella since the spring of 1966, when they had graduated from Barnard. Three days after graduation, Daniella married Pete. Eve refused to attend the wedding, even though Daniella had asked her to be her maid of honor.

  For their reunion dinner, Daniella had suggested they meet at some Chinese place in Harlem, and Eve and Warren had agreed since it was near their apartment. But the place was an embarrassment—an Americanized version of “the Orient” where the host wore a red silk dress and the piped-in music was of the Frank Sinatra variety. They didn’t even offer chopsticks; Warren had to ask for them. “Bet they don’t have a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book, either,” Warren had whispered to Eve, making her laugh.

  Daniella was wearing the big diamond ring Pete had given her for their engagement, an heirloom piece crafted in 1912 that had belonged to Pete’s grandmother. Eve once cared about such things. Her own mother had a similarly impressive ring, though it was made in the late 1930s, an era not known for its opulence. But the diamond was of a respectable size. As a girl Eve had dreamed of the day she would get engaged, a handsome man offering her a ring with a big rock sparkling from its center (the diamond needed to be more than a carat, but not much larger or it would run the risk of being gauche). But now it struck her as immoral to wear something of so much value when there were so many impoverished people in the world. She suggested Daniella give the ring to the Panthers.

  “I hardly think they would want it,” Daniella had said, eating her lo mein with a fork. “Aren’t they all about autonomy and self-determination?”

  “They are, sure,” Warren said. “But they’d deign to hawk it for cash.”

  He wore his own ring, given to him by a North Vietnamese commander he met while on a secret trip to Cuba. It was made with the metal of a downed American fighter jet.

  • • •

  During dinner Daniella told Eve that their old friend Kitty Ridley had moved to Atlanta but that she was now Kitty Steed, having married her English professor during her junior year at Belmont.

  “I take it she dropped out?” asked Eve.

  “No, she graduated. She said she just didn’t take any classes from her husband once they were married. He’s teaching at
Emory now. They actually seem really happy.”

  “I wonder which young student he’ll fuck next,” Eve mused.

  Daniella raised a brow but didn’t say anything. “Oh, and I keep meaning to tell you, I ran into Charlie in Virginia Highlands, at Moe’s and Joe’s, which is kind of a hangout for Emory law students. I met his fiancé, Fig.” Daniella gave Eve an amused look.

  “God. Their wedding is next weekend.”

  “You going?” asked Daniella, her voice suddenly tight.

  She shook her head. Daniella sighed, seemingly relieved. Jesus, Daniella was still upset that Eve hadn’t attended her wedding. Wasn’t Daniella the one who used to tell her to de-personalize, that the movement was bigger than any individual drama?

  “She told me it was quite a feat to find a lipstick that matched the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses.”

  Eve couldn’t help but laugh. Of course Charlie would choose to marry a girl who went by “Fig,” a girl who was concerned about her bridesmaids’ lipstick matching their dresses. She probably had her silver pattern picked out for her the day she was born. Granted, so had Eve, not that she would ever use it. Indeed, she had sold the silver tea set that Grandmommy had given her, had sold it and given the money to Warren to help finance his Cuba trip.

  Just as Daniella had done, Fig had asked Eve to be the maid of honor in her wedding, the invitation issued through Eve’s mother during one of their increasingly tense phone calls.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Eve responded. “I haven’t even met her.”

  “Of course you have,” said Eve’s mother. “We invite her family to our Christmas party every year. And she was a cheerleader at Lovett, just two grades above you. You would have seen her at the Coventry-Lovett game.”

  “She must not have made much of an impression, because I don’t remember her.”