The Year of Five Liberations (4 of 5)
by John Shannon
art by Paul Takizawa
10
“What a prick,” I said when I got into Dan’s big blue Oldsmobile, meaning Cool Ice. Dan lectured me briefly on what he called unevenness. Of course I got it—you made allowances for people with different backgrounds—but still.
The committee eventually hired the “investigator,” who was probably a hooker (we didn’t ask) who then “fraternized” with the victim and managed to tape record an ambiguous admission that may or may not have exonerated Tray. In a court hearing it was thrown out posthaste by the same local judge who had tried Tray originally.
This much we knew: Tray Franklin had been convicted for the non-fatal shooting of a white clerk at the 7-Eleven across from the dense few blocks of apartments at the heart of the black community, an area known as Dodge City for its gunfire at night. We’d been told that Tray had been home in Dodge watching TV with his mother and sister at the time, a long-anticipated live appearance by Eric Burdon in fact, but anyone could be expected to lie for family, and we never pressed it. The white store clerk, according to rumors, had dealt drugs under the counter, and Tray’s life was committed to fighting drugs in his community, so it was just possible that the shooting was an escalation of some verbal clash between them. But the judge had seen nothing but an uppity black and slapped him with twenty to life, an unheard of sentence for a non-fatal wounding in the metropolis but maybe not out in the edge city.
Incidentally, Dan had provided most of the money to hire the investigator, dipping into an inheritance he had from his father, and Rocky and I had put in quite a bit, too. I can’t remember Dan’s words exactly but the lesson was always there: do your best with a thoroughly compromised world.
11
I must be making it seem that the Tray Franklin committee was our only political work. It was not. We organized a small union of county workers in our edge city that was famous for its resistance to unions. We called and brought together a substantial demonstration against the visit of an Apartheid sports team from South Africa. We—meaning some of us—were instrumental in beating back a cynical decertification drive against the trade union in the plant where I worked. There were abrupt local crises to rise to and long-planned events like Maydays and film showings and always the outrages in the wider world that had to be addressed in some way. And we were in near constant negotiation and debate with a dozen other collectives like ourselves about the possibility of forming a larger entity. These were not negligible accomplishments for 23 overworked people. I think I can sympathize with the burnout that old Communists from the 20s and 30s speak of, though I know we were little more than a model railroad version of their world, inch-to-the-foot scale. That isn’t to denigrate what we did. Stretched to our limits we made a noticeable difference against a very rich society that was relentlessly impervious to change. El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido. Well, sort of.
We taught ourselves that a handful of determined people can animate many more people and dig a tiny lever into events to multiply our influence immensely, though a lot of this leverage was probably based on the misestimations of powerful men who just weren’t used to seeing people in motion and undoubtedly thought for a brief time that our disturbance of the force signified much more than it really did. Fancy rhetoric aside. Yet it’s the same sort of lesson conferring the same satisfactions as those monumental battles of the hard-bitten Old Lefties who had worked on a far larger scale and, say, brought into being the United Auto Workers after months of pitched street battles in Flint, Michigan, and many deaths. The same dotted line of history crossed both our paths and it transformed us permanently and violently just as it had transformed them.
This is all metaphor and metaphor cannot replace theory. It seems now that we spent half our life writing papers and quoting Lenin to try to sort out what we were doing and why. If everything must parallel the early days in Russia, we were those idealists and students whose activities preceded the first abortive uprising in 1905. In Cuba, we’d have been the 100 who attacked the Moncada barracks in 1953. But we were not day-trippers and the police had our names.
Do not underestimate the value to us of what we came to learn and what we did. Our first grouplet was founded by Rocky and Dan and me not long after Nixon’s cataclysmic invasion of Cambodia. In the remaining eight months of 1970, 3,101 American soldiers died in Viet Nam. (“Vietnamization” was already under way and fewer Americans were going into combat by then. Still, for each soldier who died, the loss was total.)
For us, the lessons of that time were close, vital, energizing, transforming. For the American soldiers the lessons fell from very high in the sky and when they reached the earth they took some of the troops down very deep. None of us died, but we helped stop a war, dammit.
12
Disconcertingly Dina had begun to cry in bed after we made love, silently and turned away from me with only a slight shudder of her shoulders. I was not very good at intuiting the meaning of things like that and my mind tried out theories as fast as I could concoct them. She was suddenly ashamed of sex. I was inadequate in some way. Too small perhaps—oh, ugh. I was being sexist again in some way. She had a deep political disagreement that was spilling over into the personal. She was holding secret the fact that she was going to have to move to another state. She was knocked up. I was still on graveyard so had little enough time to get my own emotions under control before dressing for work.
“I’ve contributed so little,” she said.
A lot of bells went off telling me this formulation had nothing whatever to do with the crisis. I was under no obligation to listen to the bells, but a hunch told me that something else was going on beneath that banal tonnage of self-reproach, and something probably far more interesting than I was making out. I gave her that.
“You’ve done what you can,” I said generously. “Botanists are horribly overworked.”
Organic chemistry was famously the hardest course in college. She was obviously suffering and I’ve done my best never to close my eyes to suffering.
“What is it, Deen? Are you pregnant?”
“No no no. We’ve been careful.”
A blast of perception, like those horrifying scientific records of the fifties in which they planted cameras on firm steel towers around nuclear tests to capture all the palms bowing over at once, the seemingly cardboard houses blowing away, the pines stripped of their boughs and needles like a cough of dust.
“Is it Jim?” I said. Jim Stone had joined the collective late but he had come in from the college, an assistant prof, with the kind of charisma that always and inexplicably energized small children and dogs, so confident that you weren’t sure when he entered the room whether he was about to walk straight on out again through the far wall. Even I was probably a little in love with Jim, though we were rivals on many political issues.
“Oh, Johnny.”
An hour to clocking in, I thought. It was going to be a long night at the scorching mold bank.
“My heart just screams at me when I try to pretend I care for someone more than I do,” she said.
“You’ve already slept with him,” I said.
She nodded and that hurt. Twisted the knife. When we have these political functions in our lives, why aren’t we bigger about the other stuff? I guess I loved her and I became instantly an oaf and a lout though I fought it back. Everything about life is less stable than we think.
“Deen, if he’s willing, go to him. Tonight.”
Here I am today attempting to identify calmly what is wrong, or empty, or viciously triumphalist in our current culture, beavering away at writing on a very high level, and then by reminding myself abruptly of this humiliation I only want to bury my head under a pillow. I didn’t do too badly, I suppose. To the extent I gave her real sympathy I was not an accomplice to the pain either of us felt. There’s a lesson here that I’ve been trying for a while to assimilate and it’s part of a self-administered curriculum that seems to be roughly half-Buddhist in character. No, you can’t just forego your desires unless you want to give up human progress altogether and radial tires and hilarious new jokes and doxycycline, but it might just be possible with enough equanimity and a sufficiently broad perspective on human folly to give up clinging to desire.
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