This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  I’d seen the picture of Ben that had been taken on August 7, 1964—the day of his brother’s funeral. His mother, wearing a black straw hat and black veil that covers her downcast face like chicken wire, cups Ben’s temple, holding his head to her chest. His white shirt collar is brilliant; it seems to illuminate his face and make the tears on his cheek glisten. He looks like the child he was, grieving and haunted.

  Soon after the funeral, Ben’s family began to receive death threats. The Goodman and Schwerner families raised money among their network of friends, family, and supporters in New York City, and their financial support enabled the Chaneys to flee the South. By the time I met him, Ben lived in New York and attended the predominantly white Waldorf School as the first recipient of the Andrew Goodman Memorial Scholarship. With the aid of well-wishing benefactors, he was spending his summer in a similar milieu at Shaker Village.

  He didn’t say much about his history, at least not to me, and I didn’t know how to initiate that conversation. I was intimidated by his celebrity, by the horror in his life that had earned it.

  Of course my female friends and I talked endlessly about him. We talked endlessly about all the boys—the ones we liked, the ones who liked us, the ones we’d made out with in the woods the night before.

  “So after he felt me up, Howie told me to start shaving my legs,” Michelle said as she brushed out her curly blonde hair in preparation for straightening.

  “What did you tell him?” Ruth asked. She licked her finger then quickly touched the flat of the iron she was about to apply to Michelle’s hair.

  “I told him he was a sexist piglet. I said, ‘I’ll shave mine when you shave yours,’” she answered from behind the curtain of hair that now fell in front of her face. Then, arms akimbo, she bent over and carefully touched her head to the edge of the ironing board.

  Ruth fanned Michelle’s hair out, then laid a damp towel over it. “I bet he didn’t tell you to start wearing a bra.” She firmly swiped the iron just inches from Michelle’s forehead. “Assuming he noticed.”

  “Oh, he noticed,” came Michelle’s muffled response.

  Ben probably figured into one of those conversations. By the end of the summer, practically every boy there did. I know we danced together in the Rec Hall and played with the camp cook’s mangy dog—a bandana-clad mutt that softened Ben’s raucous, angry laugh. But my most vivid image of him is silent. He is on one side of the dirt road that led up to the Village, at the edge of the meadow where I liked to sit and dream. He is wearing his usual outfit—blue jeans and a bright white T-shirt—smoking a cigarette. He stands apart as we congregate on the other side of the road. I sense the gap between us; I see it, but don’t know how to bridge it. Nothing in my experience equips me to make sense of his.

  As the FBI investigators dredged rivers in their search for the missing men back in 1964, they found the bodies of other black men and women who had been murdered. These were the unnamed, uncelebrated victims of racist violence. They were not icons. Most of us knew nothing of them.

  But Ben did. I recently found another picture of him taken on the day of his brother’s funeral, one that Life magazine chose not to run.15 The Chaney family is in the limousine that would carry them to the cemetery. His parents sit in the front seat, gazing out the front window, their faces sober and empty, depleted. Ben’s three older sisters sit in the back seat, looking straight ahead. But Ben, perched in the corner of the back seat, his head disproportionately large as it juts out over his slender torso, stares directly at the camera. His face is hard to read, as if he is looking inward and out well beyond the lens at the same time. He seems to be looking into the future, and it is bleak.

  Ben didn’t return to Shaker Village in 1968, and by 1970 he had joined the Black Panther Party in New York City. That spring, on the way home from a trip to Florida with two New York friends, Ben was arrested in South Carolina and charged with four first-degree murders and other crimes in three Deep South states. All the alleged murder victims were white, and Ben faced the death penalty in the electric chair.

  Hearing about his arrest at the time, I felt unsurprised, and ashamed of that fact.

  While he had been present when the murders took place, Ben was found innocent of murder.

  He did his prison time once again back in the South. A newspaper photo from this time shows him standing in a cell, still wearing blue jeans and a bright white T-shirt. His face is in shadow, bifurcated by bars. He has a sparse mustache and his hand, hanging by his side, is holding a cigarette. His eyes, pained but alight, seem to be saying Of course.

  I recently discovered a Shaker Village alumni group on Facebook, where someone posted a photo from my second year there, the summer of 1968. About 120 of us are arrayed on the ground in front of the old chair factory, the largest building on the property. Built into the hillside, the building now housed a dirt-floored theatre for camp-wide meetings and movies, and above it, workshops for weaving, caning Shaker chairs, candle-making, and building Shaker baskets. Evenly spaced windows checkered the front of the building, flooding the workshops with natural light and making the wide wooden floorboards gleam like honey.

  In the black and white group portrait, most of the kids are smiling, or at least not scowling. They wear T-shirts (without logos, as all T-shirts were then), jeans, shorts, Indian blouses, flannel work shirts. Some wear sandals, some wear Beatles boots, but many are barefoot. There’s Eric, one of the Bergen twins, all red curls and braces and pompousness to make up for being short. There’s the guy whose name I forget with his arm around his girlfriend —the “it” couple, because he had enough facial hair to form a robust mustache, and she had him. David, with his cupid chin and hair broader than his narrow, army-jacket clad shoulders, looks frail and yearning, which is how I remember him. Four rows up, half cropped out of the picture, is one of the many Dans, dark and glum, in the ludicrously piped sweater he seemed never to take off, dutifully staring at the camera. His boyfriend, Zach—tall and willowy, with fair skin and curls like Byron and Dylan—must have been outside the camera’s frame, because the two of them were never apart. Innocent and pining, it didn’t occur to me then that they were anything other than best friends.

  Standing in the back row is Michael Scala from New York, gangly and goofy behind his granny glasses and untucked button-down shirt. One hand rests on the tree next to him, the other holds up a sign. Stop the War, it says. He is unusually tall, towering over the other kids like Abe Lincoln, but he is smiling like Abe probably never did, with the open happiness of someone who has no reason to doubt that the world belongs to him and his friends, if not now, then soon.

  I look for myself in the group photo. There is a girl with center-parted long, frizzy hair four rows up, two kids away from the blond guy with big lips who I think was called Charlie. Her head is tilted to the right, the way I’m told mine often is, and her expression is grave. She might be me.

  From The Berkshire Eagle, August 8, 1968:

  Shaker Village Pair Organizing ‘Peace March’

  A pair of youngsters spending the summer at Shaker Village Work Group in New Lebanon, N.Y. have organized a “peace march” for Aug. 10 from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. in Park Square. Michael Scala, 16, and Julie Wittef, 15, claim they already have 300 marchers—200 from Shaker Village and another 100 from the Pittsfield area—and they are attempting to recruit more. A series of peace “vigils” in Park Square last winter and spring never drew much more than 100.

  Purpose of the March

  The purpose of the march, Scala said, is “to protest the amount of money being spent in Vietnam in view of the domestic problems that we still have in the U.S.” The protesters, he said, will carry signs stating their point of view. Yesterday, the group started putting up silk-screened posters in store windows and libraries in an attempt to drum up more interest in the march.

  The youngsters and the adult staff members live in a communal
society. Each person has one vote.

  In handwriting much larger and more legible than mine is today, I’d circled my misspelled name, underlined the final sentence of this article, and next to it, written Stupid.

  Sitting cross-legged in the grass, Michael and I had crafted the text of our anti-war leaflet a few weeks before the march.

  “We’ve got to educate people,” I said. “They don’t know that the Vietnamese don’t want us there.”

  Michael lit an L&M and dragged deeply. “No, man. We’ve got to show them that we grok them.”

  “Grok?”

  “Yeah, like in Stranger in a Strange Land.” I looked at him quizzically. “Wait, you’re telling me you’ve never read that?”

  “I’ve never read that.”

  He shook his head. “You’re the one in need of an education. Stranger in a Strange Land is only, like, the greatest book of the twentieth century.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a dog-eared paperback from under his work shirt. On the cover, a man and woman, both blond, nude, and shapely, stood in waist-high water. She looked heavenward, he to the side, as if alert to danger. Both were muscled, golden against an indigo sky. “It’s about a guy raised on Mars, a human, who’s raised by Martians after his astronaut parents die, and comes to earth as an adult and is, like, totally freaked out by how sexually uptight and war-like and fucked up we are.”

  “So what’s…whatever that word was?”

  “Grokking. To grok. It means to empathize, you know? To so thoroughly understand someone else that you become one with them.” His heavily accented Long Island voice rose in excitement. “Like merging with the whole. No more individual identity, man. No more divisions. We’re all one.”

  We’re awl one, I repeated in my head, trying to mimic his pronunciation of vowels, so exotic and earthy at the same time.

  We decided to frame our leaflet as a series of questions, seeking the tone that would be the perfect blend of rabble-rousing and respectful.

  Why is the United States spending three million dollars an hour, half way around the world, when forty million people are impoverished here? we asked.

  Why have over twenty thousand young men—American alone—died in this immoral war in a country that does not want our support?

  The questions continued, seven of them spanning two columns, each headed by a giant question mark. And at the bottom of the leaflet, in its own carefully drawn box, was this entreaty:

  We plead with you to give these matters your highest consideration and to pose questions to your friends, your community, and to yourself.

  While I’m sure that the summer of 1968 held the same mix of farm work and folk arts and music as the summer of 1967, it seems to me that our sense of separation—even of the possibility of separation—from mainstream culture, had already dissolved. By August of 1968, buffeted by assassinations, police riots, escalated bombings in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon’s campaign for president enveloped in the mantle of the “Silent Majority,” we were feeling like trapped and frantic members of the society we had to change.

  One morning in late August, in the last week of the summer program, Jerry Count stood in front of us and held up the front page of the New York Times, dominated by two black-and-white photos. In one, a procession of tanks lined a cobblestoned street in Prague, empty except for a single taxi headed in the opposite direction. In the other, a young Czech man had leapt atop one of the tanks and legs spread, held up a flag as if leading a charge. On either side of the street, clusters of people stared, and behind them, thick smoke rose from an unseen fire.

  In response to political reforms in Czechoslovakia and a surge of democratic stirrings during what had been dubbed the Prague Spring, the Soviets had enlisted their Warsaw Pact allies to join them in sending two hundred thousand troops and two thousand tanks into the country overnight. By the morning of August 21, 1968, Czechoslovakia was occupied.

  I think it was sunny that morning. But no light glinted off of Jerry’s wireframe glasses as he stood in front of us, huddled and mute. When he roused himself to speak, he used words like “travesty” and “unforgivable.”

  “Any state founded on authoritarianism—socialist or capitalist—will sow the seeds of its own collapse,” he railed, jabbing the offending photographs with his finger. Then his arms just dropped to his sides, sagging in his puffy red cardigan. “But oh, the people it will take down along the way.”

  In November of that year, all of the summer’s villagers got a letter notifying us of Jerry’s passing. The newspaper obituary it included spoke only of his “sudden death,” and made no mention of the cause. There were rumors, never confirmed, that he’d committed suicide. As I would later feel upon reading about Ben Chaney’s conviction, on hearing the news, I was sad but unsurprised.

  Shaker Village Work Group closed for good in 1971, one of many physical communities, actual instantiations of utopian ideals, to come and go. But attempts to build them persist, and given both the swelling ranks of baby boomers and the emerging ethos at the time, 1967 was a banner year. That’s when the planned city of Columbia, Maryland, opened, with a carefully designed layout of streets, schools, interfaith congregations, and stores on an intimate, pedestrian scale. Inherent in the plan was the belief that well-designed cities could improve not just an individual’s quality of life, but promote racial, religious, and class integration.

  One of the most earnest and dull segments of Our World is a profile of the newly opened Cumbernauld, a “visionary” town in Scotland, designed with a sunny, if unwarranted, faith in the power of enlightened civic engineering. The vision of Cumbernauld’s designers was to replace urban squalor, pollution, and irrationality with a planned community in a pastoral setting, one that would eventually provide seventy thousand people with safety, fresh air, a self-sustainable economy, and, of course, accessible shopping.

  But those ambitions feel very distant now as I watch a woman and her daughters traverse paved paths through Cumbernauld’s empty courtyards, seemingly stranded in this still slumbering Brigadoon made of poured concrete and grand ideas. In the streaming gray video, this treeless new settlement looks barren and lonely, and I feel the aching gap between the longing for the ideal community and its sensible execution.

  Cumbernauld still exists, though its pedestrian walkways became wind tunnels, and the development seems largely distinguished by having been the site of Britain’s first indoor shopping mall and for having twice won the architecture magazine Prospect’s Carbuncle award for being the most dismal place in Scotland. Fast food restaurants abound there, and according to a BBC report, “When it won the Carbuncle award in 2001, judges compared Cumbernauld to Kabul and described its shopping centre as a rabbit warren on stilts.”

  Utopian ideals endure, even though every physical community erected to house them has eventually crumbled. Perhaps these are convictions that can’t be constructed, only grown and carried from place to place, through time. What grew out of those last few summers at Shaker Village was organic and real, far more enduring in its impact than Cumbernauld. Though our physical congregation as a community—and as a generation—was transitory, the knowledge we acquired there sunk deep roots that have strengthened and spread. We know, and now our children know, that peace and cooperation are material and daily choices that we make. Utopia isn’t built from the outside in, and it certainly can’t be planned. It doesn’t require great engineering minds, just verdant hearts.

  As I try to summon up how I felt being there, what gets revived is the shocking carnality of my first French kiss, the energy stoked by being part of a group and feeling myself to be a pulsing cell in a larger organism, the completely unwarranted confidence in my own agency. What I remember from those summers is simply being an adolescent. But what I feel now is the continuity in conviction that is my past, pulling me like a tow line into my future.

  Upon being released after thirteen year
s in prison, Ben Chaney went back to New York City and got a job as a paralegal for Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General who had represented him at his trial. He created the James Earl Chaney Foundation, to promote voter registration and to maintain a memorial in Meridian to his brother, Schwerner, and Goodman. He gives speeches to young people about the need for nonviolent change. I’m guessing that he no longer smokes.

  I’ve found one recent picture of him, part of a slide show of photos taken at the 2009 annual gala celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King held by CORE, the venerable civil rights organization.16 Ben and David Goodman, brother of Andrew, receive plaques in honor of the three slain men. They join a cast on the dais that includes the now ancient Delfonics singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and the USO Liberty Bells—three women looking like an integrated knock-off of The Andrews Sisters—singing the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Roy Innis, the Republican-leaning chairman of CORE, imposing and dapper, receives an award. Pat Boone, the now seventy-five-year-old white singer who made his fortune singing covers of R&B songs, the Christian icon who organized the first Beverly Hills Tea Party rally, emcees the event and shows a music video tribute to Dr. King. And in the audience in front of them are over two thousand well-heeled people, an even mix of black and white, clapping with what I imagine to be a mix of politeness and bafflement at this bizarre assembly.

  But then comes the climax of the evening—a video greeting from President Obama. Once again, as so often happens lately when I look at the cultural kitsch of the recent past and present, I wonder why I’m laughing so derisively. I am, after all, looking at a photograph in which a group of old people who have led long lives full of pain and puzzlement are finally being addressed by a black man who is, after all, a president.