The Death Drill
Baby Jesus and I visited Mother for her birthday, which we tried to do each year.
I regaled her with stories of my political fisticuffs. She regaled me with the latest family dirt. Julia Ellen and Russell weren’t getting along. Kenny Jr. was getting serious about a girl and thought he’d marry her. Wade was on his way back, praise Jesus; he’d served his time and would not reenlist. Kenny Sr. was being chased by a rich woman he worked for and his wife didn’t much like it. Aunt Mimi was considering moving to England and shoving Elizabeth II off the throne.
After racing through the family, Mother started on her friends. A lady she worked with was so fat that she huffed and puffed with each step. Working in a bakery weakened her resolve to lose weight. Then there was Pastor Golder, who was entirely too serious about church dogma. Mom wanted to sing and she’d heard enough sermons to last the rest of her life. At this point she interrupted herself and rendered a few heartfelt bars from “Holy, Holy, Holy,” which then melded into “Beautiful Savior,” Dad’s favorite hymn and one we’d sung at his funeral.
I knew what was coming. We’d been there umpteen times. The dreaded death drill was upon me.
“Now when I die”—she hopped up, dragging me into her bedroom—“open this drawer.”
I opened the drawer of her fat-bellied dresser. “Mom, you have the neatest drawers.”
“Organization saves time. Here’s the key to the strongbox.” She lifted out a tiny, shiny key and then marched to the closet, opening the door. “Here’s the box.” She pointed to a mint-green box. “Get it down.”
I stood on a chair and lifted it down. She opened it. “Here’s the insurance policy. Here’s everything you need.” She rifled through the papers, picking out each one, explaining again what I’d heard over and over since Dad’s death in 1961.
When Dad died, Mother had thought she’d go too. However deep her grief, her love of life won out and she was radiantly alive or irritatingly alive, depending. But his sudden death had inspired the death drill. She was determined that when the awful event transpired I would not be at a loss. No matter how ravaged by sorrow, I’d know what to do.
“Now, I don’t want a big funeral. Feed me to the fish.”
“Mother.”
“If I have cancer, I’m walking into the ocean.”
“Will you stop?”
“No, I won’t. It’s foolish to stay alive when there’s no joy in it and when you’re not going to get better.”
“Don’t fret, Mom, only the good die young.”
“Aren’t we smart to our mother.”
“You’re healthy. If I start acting too nice, it means I think you’re sick.”
She considered that. “Let’s go to Saks.”
“Mom, I am not standing in front of that perfume counter while you spray on every perfume there.”
“Party pooper.”
“We could go to the tennis courts.”
“Why?”
“You’ve never been.”
“I’m not sitting in the hot sun.”
I locked the strongbox and put it back on the top shelf of the closet. “We could pick up Aunt Mimi and go to Saks.”
I knew they’d content each other, and I could wander off.
That fast Mother was on the phone: “Sis, comb your hair and put on your lipstick. We’re going to Saks and Rita’s taking us to lunch.”
What a chiseler she was.
They could eat. On her second piece of apple pie, Mother launched into the death drill, which Sis had heard a million times too.
“Julia, don’t be so morbid.”
“I’m not morbid, I’m practical. You’ve got lipstick on your teeth.”
Aunt Mimi wiped her teeth. “I told Julia Ellen once what to do.”
“She’ll never remember it. Repetition.”
“She’ll remember.” Aunt Mimi opened her purse, a large affair, and retrieved her lipstick. “You know, I think I’ll buy that color I was looking at.”
The color was cerise. Ugh.
“I’m leaning toward Persian Melon myself,” Mother said.
“You need a tan and only field hands have tans.”
“What about Coco Chanel?” Mother replied.
“Who cares what some Frenchwoman does?”
“Only the whole world.”
Aunt Mimi ignored this, turning to me. “Do you really believe that women are equal to men?”
“Under the law, yes. In reality I don’t think anyone is equal to anyone.”
She didn’t want a real discussion, she wanted to inflict her opinions on me, which was fine. I’d been hearing them all my life. She leaned over conspiratorially, which meant Mother leaned too. “Now you listen to me. Women are not equal to men. We are superior. Any woman worth her salt can wrap any man around her finger, and I’m not talking about sex. I mean you run them. You hear me?”
“Yeah.”
Mother smiled.
“You tell those girlfriends of yours to dump this whole Equal Rights Amendment idea. Just can it. I don’t want to talk to a man as an equal. I want to control him. If I’m an equal, then I have to treat him as an equal. Never.” She rapped the table. “Men are here to do our bidding. You just leave well enough alone.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I knew better than to enter into the “men as our beasts of burden” discussion.
“Why are you agreeing with me? To get me to pipe down?”
“No, I agree with you.”
“You do?”
“Yes.” I elected not to tell her that I agreed but for vastly different reasons and that I thought the Equal Rights Amendment would be a good thing at some time.
“Well.” She exhaled, disappointed to win without a knock-down-drag-out. “I knew you were smart, book-learning smart, but you’re learning about the way the world works, aren’t you?”
“Learned it from you and Mom.”
They beamed.
“Well, I’m going to buy that lipstick,” Aunt Mimi said.
“Makes her look like a bled pig,” Mom said under her breath.
“What was that. Juts?”
“Nothing.”
52
Purdah
I can’t remember meeting Charlotte Bunch, one of the best thinkers in the women’s movement. It seems she’s always been in my life. When I made her acquaintance in D.C., she anchored the antiwar movement there and was married to Jim Weeks.
At that time, in 1971, she was Goody Two-shoes. The years have given her a leavening cynicism but her basic impulse is still to overflow with the milk of human kindness.
Initially, I thought this was a pose. It truly is Charlotte. I respected her mind, one of the best tactical political minds I have ever encountered. I loved her for her kindness.
Jim Weeks impressed me not because he was smart—most of the young politicos were smart—but he too was a kind person. He also grew a red beard yet his hair was black, an eye-catching combination.
Jim was so nice that Charlotte grew restive. Had he deviled her more, they might have remained locked in wedded bliss. Theirs was a remarkably civil parting, which speaks volumes about both of them.
Charlotte’s growing feminism sent her in a new direction, me. We’d sit up until all hours of the night talking about how to reach women. How could we make them aware of the special obstacles awaiting them in politics, whether protest or traditional? Then there was the small matter of not being hired for the well-paying jobs. The only other woman I had ever talked to who understood politics from both sides of the fence, party and protest, was Gloria.
I must now take credit for a harebrained idea. I’d apologize, but why? I learned. Sometimes you have to fall flat on your face to learn.
I thought that if women were lesbians, their best energy would go to women; they would become woman-identified instead of identifying with men, who clearly did not have their best interests as a class at heart. A man might have an individual woman’s best interests at
heart, but not women in general. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed much.
If women were lesbians, then they would work for the freedom of all women. Now I hardly wanted all women to be lesbians. That would be too boring. I only needed a critical mass.
Charlotte, while less enthusiastic than I, eventually rolled along on my wave. We founded the Furies Collective.
Anybody who was anybody lived in a collective or a commune then. Often they operated as political cells. Other times they existed so people could save money. No matter what, the concept galvanized hundreds of thousands of young people, much as the utopian movement galvanized our ancestors in the nineteenth century, the Shakers being the most outstanding and long-lived example.
We all thought we could create a better way to be with people. We thought we could eliminate the power struggles and free our best energy to heal our country.
You may laugh now, especially if you’re older than I am or quite a bit younger, but we were patriotically motivated. I cannot overemphasize how much we loved our country and how dismayed, frightened, disgusted we were at the turn of events. Like Saturn devouring his children, the United States was killing its young people at Jackson State and Kent State. Sure, we didn’t die by the millions, like the Russians from 1917 to 1945, but none of us ever expected the National Guard or the police to fire upon us. The older generation never warned us that freedom demands vigilance and sacrifice.
Although I had been raised poor and my parents were much older than my contemporaries’ parents (Mom and Dad were born in 1905, remember), even I believed that all we had to do was point out a problem and it would be corrected.
I never believed our government would kill us. Once they did I woke up fast. We all woke up fast. No longer was the administration something that needed correcting; they needed to be removed.
I will believe to my dying day that our efforts helped end the war in Vietnam. Watergate accomplished the rest.
But at this time, we would go for a walk and an unmarked car would cruise alongside us. Our phones were bugged. And our taxes paid for this foolishness! I wasn’t followed every day and neither was Charlotte, but anytime there was a demonstration the goons would show up.
In a way the drive for communal living was born from this chaos and fear. We needed structure. We needed to watch out for one another. We needed to train ourselves to be rigorously nonviolent. That’s a hard one for me because if you push me hard enough, I’ll haul off and knock you one. Growing up the only girl among the boys, I learned to inflict pain in order to be left alone. If I hadn’t, the boys would have squashed me like a bug.
Our collective would be a lesbian one. We named ourselves the Furies after the avenging angels who pursued Orestes for killing his mother. The Furies asserted motherright. Also, what a lovely way for me to show off my Greek and Latin.
Initially twelve women gathered together and we lived together for over a year. Tasha Byrd, Ginny Berson, Sharon Deevey, Susan Hathaway, Lee Schwin, Helaine Harris, Coletta Reid, Jennifer Woodull, Nancy Myron, Joan Biren, Charlotte and myself.
I knew little about anyone’s personal life. Actually, you had no personal life. You worked at our newspaper, our home repair class, our car repair class or canvassing the bars. You worked all the time.
Our newspaper, called The Furies, shocked the conservative wing of the women’s movement. I don’t think they believed lesbians could be literate and they never expected us to stick together as a group. But we knew when someone’s boot was on our neck and it didn’t take a genius to write clearly about it. God, those ladies were outraged. Actually, their fussing was rather delicious.
Gloria’s faction, far more flexible, understood our analysis of how we were kicked around, but while not as old as many of Betty’s followers, Gloria was ten years older than I. That’s a large enough gap to engender a slightly different viewpoint on events, different flash points of recognition. Those of us born in the middle forties to middle fifties were experimenting with communes, political protest, music and, for some unfortunately, drugs. Gloria’s generation, born in the thirties, for the most part wasn’t part of the wave.
Already established in careers and relationships, they couldn’t uproot all they had accomplished materially.
While slightly older people understood the impulse to live in a commune, they didn’t share that impulse.
That I was willing to try, introvert that I am, illustrates the passion of the time, the raw excitement of ideas exploding out of an emerging generation.
We thought we were changing the world. I don’t know if we did but we changed ourselves. Since we are the largest generation to be born during recorded history, we probably did change the world by virtue of what we did among ourselves. All those communes, underground newspapers, marches and resource centers began to affect aboveground media perception. Over the span of less than a decade, we traveled from being perceived as dirty, druggie hippies to exposing the moral catastrophe that was Vietnam.
In terms of women, what we did achieve has been taken for granted. Many of our goals are a fact of life now, just as public education is a fact of life. Who can recall the central figures in the struggle for universal public education? We have so swiftly absorbed some of the central tenets of feminism, such as equal pay for equal work, that we have forgotten how difficult achieving those victories, or even partial victories, was.
Sometimes I think, also, that we purposely don’t want to remember our recent history as regards women. It’s like sand in our eyes. An entire mental construct has faded away, except for right-wing pockets. There are still some people, men and women, who believe women are second-class citizens, a discretionary labor force (last hired, first fired), should be barred from certain careers, etc. They’re small but noisy. History has already brushed them aside in America, which may explain why they are so emotional. Losers squeal. Winners head into the future.
If nothing else, the South taught me that. We not only carry the scars of the War Between the States, we’ve tattooed them with bright colors. The North could care less.
The trivialization of women through sexualization is still a major obstacle to equality. It would appear that any form of sexuality offends the right wing. For those of us not living in constant fear of pleasure, this issue raises interesting questions about the nature of mating. All mammals devote a period of their lives to mating behavior. We’re no different. Our central problem is we’ve created societies that worship productivity; the idol capital means more than human relationships. Mating takes time. It is antithetical to a society organized to deliver goods and services. One of the ways to delay that natural process is to place all the sexual responsibility on women, to compartmentalize the fireworks of hormones in both sexes. So a real man goes to work. The job always comes first. Finding the right woman or even the wrong woman must take place after he’s turned out his quota of widgets for the day. It’s quite confusing.
Until the women’s movement addresses the entire displacement of sexuality in modern societies, it can’t begin to resolve the remaining inequalities toward women.
In the beginning we could only see our own problems. We’re far enough along the way to examine the entire issue of how lives are thwarted for commerce and commerce alone.
In the late 1960s I was already thinking of these issues. The women in the collective, the women in the movement generally, focused exclusively on a few issues. They were important issues, but we came to be defined by those issues alone, for example, child care. Our path to addressing topics such as the military-industrial complex was shut down. A few of us could have spoken to those issues, but in the beginning the only thing women could focus on was that pain peculiar to them as females, that distinct oppression.
The horror of any form of oppression is that it creates a reverse narcissism.
Any manner of treating people, any people, as inferior blights them. The resentment and hate growing from such treatment can never be underestimated no matter how s
uccessfully it is masked. Sooner or later, an inciting incident will blow the lid off. The fact that men are so smug about women’s continuing nonviolence astonishes me. It’s kind of like the old-time whites in the South assuming that “their Negroes” were “sweet.” I don’t mean to imply that racial oppression is identical to gender oppression but I do mean to say that all forms of oppression create various coping mechanisms, the foremost being that you only tell the oppressor what s/he wants to hear. You tell them the truth only when you have a critical mass behind you.
I learned some of these things in the Furies Collective by observing the behavior of women who felt powerless. Not every woman in that collective felt powerless, but enough did to give me a real eye-opener as to what a distorted worldview can do to people. Oppression always distorts. A few women, not everyone, saw themselves as victims no matter what the circumstances. Here they were in an all-women collective and they still perceived themselves as victims. One of us would have to be the bad guy so they could continue to be the innocent trampled-upon.
I was so carried away by the drama of the epoch, by the desire to do something positive for my country, that I violated my deepest instincts, which are to write in solitude and to live on the land with animals.
Here I was stuck with a bunch of women in sticky, hot Washington: Of Humid Bondage.
Baby Jesus despised the collective even though I loved on her constantly. Some of the other women lacked proper catitude, and no one thought it was funny when I set a place for her at the dinner table. She had to eat on the floor.
Charlotte and I, finally exhausted by all this togetherness, bucked the group. We modified our plan; you could have personal property, up to a limit, then you had to share. I hadn’t a cent, so I wasn’t affected—except I did want my own toothbrush. It was different for Charlotte, who had a fellowship at the Institute for Policy Studies, for Susan Hathaway and for a few of the others with resources. They were good about sharing, a lot better than I would have been if the shoe were on the other foot.
Surprised at our national presence, we worked even harder. What we learned in our time together must be different for each woman.
Rita Will Page 32