amazing how seeing hate stuff and touching it can make one
viscerally sick.
I was called out into the living room. My mother and father
were sitting on the formal sofa that we had and I was expected
to stand. My father had the junk beside him on the sofa. He
had called the FBI. They were going to come and question
me. They came and they did. Mr. Kane disappeared from the
street and Mrs. Kane would stand out on the lawn, her auburn
hair crowning her beauty, alone; she was now alone. Their
house was eventually sold.
The crime, it turned out, was to threaten a candidate for
president of the United States. The dirty drawings and words
were taken to be direct threats against Kennedy, as were the vile
insults targeted to the Catholic Church and the pope. I, too,
was punished, but not by the government. I can’t remember
what the punishment was, but it was tempered with mercy
because I had helped shut down a hate enterprise. I knew that
Mr. Kane was not a conservative in the way that Mr. Buckley
was, even though Mr. Buckley supported segregation, to my
shock and dismay.
To find out what was and was not conservative as such, I
approached a group called Young Americans for Freedom.
Their leader was a somewhat aristocratic man named Fulton
Lewis III. This was far outside any prior experience of mine.
I wanted to debate him. I set up the debate for a school
57
Heartbreak
assembly. I hurled liberal platitude after liberal platitude at
him. He won the debate. This made me question not my
beliefs in equality and fairness but how one could communicate those beliefs. I felt the humiliation of defeat, of course.
I don’t like losing, and I was stunned that I did lose. Stil , the
home team had lost because students thought that Mr. Lewis
III was correct. These were the years of the John Birch Society
and None Dare Cal It Treason, a book in which commies and
socialists were hidden in every nook and cranny of the government and the media, and the point was that these equality-minded folks were Soviet dupes, low and venal. I didn’t see
how my classmates could think being against poverty or for
integration were Soviet ideas or treasonous ideas. Mr. Lewis
was exceptionally gracious.
This was the beginning for me of thinking about something
the entertainer Steve Allen, a liberal, had writ en in National
Review. Roughly paraphrased, Mr. Allen’s piece asked why a
person was categorized as just a liberal or just a conservative.
Wasn’t that same person also a musician or a teacher and a
husband and a father? The patrilineal approach was the only
approach in those days, liberal or conservative. I thought it
was probably wrong to hate people for their politics unless
they were doing evil, as Mr. Kane was. The argument remains
alive; the stereotypes persist, veiled now in a postcommie
rhetoric; I think that hate crimes are real crimes against groups
of people, imputing to those people a lesser humanity. And
58
Young Americans for Freedom
even though I’ve lost debates since the one with Mr. Lewis
III, I still think it’s worth everything to say what you believe.
There are always consequences, and one must be prepared to
face them. In this context there is no free speech and there
never will be.
I think especially of watching William Buckley, on his Firing
Line television program in the 1960s, debate the writer James
Baldwin on segregation. Buckley was elegant and brilliant and
wrong; Baldwin was passionate and bril iant and wore his
heart on his sleeve - he was also right. But Buckley won the
debate; Baldwin lost it. I’l never forget how much I learned
from the confrontation: be Baldwin, not Buckley.
59
Cuba 2
The bad news came first from Allen Young, a gay activist: in
Cuba homosexuals were being locked up; homosexuality was
a crime against the state. A generation later I read the work of
crushed by the state and wrote a florid, uncompromising prose.
I read the prison memoirs of Armando Val adares and heard
from some friends raised in Cuba and original supporters of
Castro and Che about whole varieties of oppression and
brutality. There was also more recently a stunning biography
of Che by John Lee Anderson that gave Che his due - coldblooded kil er and immensely brave warrior. Of course, the river of blood and suffering makes it hard to say why so many
of us, from David Smith to myself, saw so much hope in the
Cuban revolution. Batista’s thuggery was indisputable; his
thievery, too, from a population of the exceptionally poor and
largely illiterate was ugly; but the worst part of it was U. S.
support for his regime. That support made many of us challenge the political morality of the United States. Castro claimed he wanted an end to poverty and il iteracy, and I believed him.
Castro up against Batista is the mise-en-scene. With Castro
60
Cuba 2
the poor would have food and books. Castro also promised to
stop prostitution, which had destroyed the lives of thousands
of poor women and children; prostitution was considered
one of the perks of capitalism, and Havana in particular was
known for prostitution writ large. Where there was hunger,
there would be women and children selling sex. Now we would
know to look for other phenomena as well: incest or child
sexual abuse, homelessness, predatory traffickers. It would
have been hard to think of Castro as worse than Batista
outside the context of the cold war. When the tiny band of
guerrilla fighters conquered Havana and extirpated the Batista
regime, it was hard to mourn unless the prospect of equality,
which was the promise, inevitably meant tyranny (which I
think is the right-wing argument). Virtual y forced by the
United States into an alliance with the Soviets, Castro’s
system of oppression slowly supplanted Batista’s. Watching
the United States now cuddle with the Chinese because
Chinese despotism is rhetorical y commit ed to capitalism,
one can only mourn the chance lost to the Cuban people
thirty-some years ago when the United States might have
been a strategic al y or neighbor. I’m saying that the United
States pushed Cuba into the Soviet camp and that Castro
became what he became because of it.
61
The Grand Jury
I was eighteen; it was 1965; a grand jury had been impaneled
to investigate the charges I had made against New York City’s
Women’s House of Detention, the local Bastil e that sat in the
heart of Greenwich Village, in the heart of Bohemia itself. I
had been sexually brutalized and had turned the internal
examinations of women in that place into a political issue
that would eventually topple the ancien regime, the callous,
encrustated Democrats.
I had been subpoenaed to testify on a certain day at a certain
&nb
sp; time. My French class at Bennington was also on that day, at
that time, and I was hopeless in the language. My French professor took my haplessness in French rather personally and refused to give me permission to miss the class. I explained
that I had to be absent anyway, and I was. She backed off of her
threat to give me a failing mark and gave me a near-failing
mark instead.
I stayed at a friend’s apartment in New York the night
before my testifying, and Frank Hogan, New York City’s
much-admired district attorney, came with another man that
night to see me. The magnitude of his visit is probably not
62
The Grand Jury
self-evident: the big pooh-bah, prosecutor of al prosecutors,
came to see me. He seemed to want to hear from me that I
would show up. I assured him that I would. Just be yourself
and tell the truth, said the snake to Eve. I assured him that I
would. He kept trying to find out if I was wary of testifying
or of him. I wasn’t. I was too stupid to be. The rules have
since changed, but in 1965 no one, including the target of a
grand jury investigation, could have a lawyer with her inside
the sacred, secret grand jury room. I was not the target, but
one would not have been able to tell from what the assistant
district at orney did to me. Hogan had assured me that al
the questions would be about the jail and pret y much said
outright that the jail had to go, something to that effect. He
probably said sympathetically that he had heard it was a horrible place and I assumed the rest. After al , if it was hor ible, why wouldn’t one want to get rid of it? The grand jury room
was big and shiny wood and imperial. I sat down in what
increasingly came to seem like a sinking hole and had to each
side and in front of me raised desks behind which were
washed white people, most or al men. The assistant district
attorney, who had been with Mr. Hogan the night before but
had said nothing, began to ask me questions. Where did I
live? Did I live alone? Was I a virgin? Did I smoke marijuana?
I started out just being confused. I remembered clearly that
Mr. Hogan said the inquiry was about the jail, not me, so I
answered each question with some fact about the jail. Did I
63
Heartbreak
live alone? They knew I was living with two men. I described
the dirt in the jail or the excrement that passed for food. Did
I smoke marijuana? Was I going to betray the revolution by
saying no? On the other hand, was I going to give the grand
jury an excuse to hold for the righteousness of the jail by
saying yes? I answered with more details about the jail. And
so it went for several hours. I eventually got the hang of it.
The pig would ask me a personal question, and I would
answer about the jail. He got angrier and angrier, and I stayed
soft-spoken but firm. They could have jailed me for contempt,
but they didn’t want me back in jail. I had created a maelstrom
for them; because of the news coverage, which was, for its
time, massive, huge numbers of people in the United States
and eventually around the world knew my name, my face, and
what had been done to me in the jail. Put ing me back in jail
could only make the situation for Mayor Robert Wagner, head
of the cor upt city Dems, more difficult. I had spoken on
the same platform as John Lindsay, a liberal Republican who
would eventually become mayor, and I had something to
do with making that unlikely event happen. After I testified I
went back to college. While probation would have been the
normal status for someone not yet convicted of anything
and released on her own recognizance, I was on parole, which
allowed me to cross state lines to go back to school without
violating the court’s rules. The system was being so good
to me.
64
The Grand Jury
A couple of months later there was an article in the New
York Times saying that the grand jury had found nothing
wrong with the jail. Everything had hinged on my testimony,
so they were also saying that I was a liar. I left the country
soon after, but seven years later, when the place was final y
closed, a lot of people thanked me. Years later Judith Malina
would say I had done it. When I challenged that rendering of
the politics, she said that political generation after political
generation had tried but I had succeeded - not that I had done
it alone, of course not, but that without what I had done, for
al anyone knew the jail would still be there, thirteen floors of
brutalized women. Most of the women in the Women’s House
of Detention when I was there and in the immediate years
before and after were prostituted women; I had the unearned
dignity of having been ar ested for a political offense. Frank
Hogan had a street named after him after he died.
Probably the best moment for me happened one day when
I was approached by a black woman on a Village street corner
while I was waiting for a light. She worked in the jail, she said,
and couldn’t be seen talking with me, but she wanted me to
know that everything I had said was true and she was one of
many guards who was glad I had managed to speak out. You
tell the truth and people can shit al over it, the way that grand
jury did, but somehow once it’s said it can’t be unsaid; it stays
living, somewhere, in someone’s heart.
65
The Orient Express
I was going to Greece. There were two countries in Europe
where one could live cheaply - Greece and Spain. The fascist
Franco was stil in power in Spain, so I decided on Greece. I
took a boat, the appropriately named SS Castel Felice, from
New York to a port in the south of England, then a train to
London. I had two relatives there, old women, hard-core
Stalinists, who talked energetically and endlessly about the
brilliant and gorgeous subway stations in Leningrad. It’s a
disorienting experience - listening to the worship of a subway
system. They saw me off on that legendary train the Orient
Express. It has since been rehabilitated, but in 1965 it was a
wretched thing. I had under $100 and the clothes I wore
along with some extra underwear and T-shirts. We changed
trains in Paris in some dark, damp, underground station, and
we kept going south. Somewhere outside of Paris people began
exiting and cattle began coming on. There was no food, no
potable water; as the train covered the terrain downhill we’d
get more cows accompanied by a peasant or a peasant family.
I hadn’t anticipated this at al - I, too, had read about the
elegant and mysterious Orient Express. A sweet boy offered
6 6
The Orient Express
to share his canned Spam with me, but I foolishly declined. It
was a four-day trip from London to Athens, each hour after
Paris more sordid than the one before. I did love the train ride
through Yugoslavia because the country was so very beautiful,
and I
promised myself I would go back there someday, a bad
promise nullified by war. I had never been in a communist
country; there were more police than I had ever seen in my
life, and each one wanted to see everyone’s passport and go
through everyone’s luggage. I was easy on that score. I had
one small piece of luggage and nothing more.
While still in Yugoslavia, I began talking with an American
named Mildred. She was wrinkled as if her skin had been
white bread, squooshed and rolled and then left to dry. She
had smudges of lipstick here and there and was very kind to
me. I needed water desperately by the time we reached
Yugoslavia, but I was afraid to run out to the station when the
train stopped because I didn’t know when it would start up
again. I’ve always found traveling by train exhausting and anx-
iety-making. Mildred gave me water or pop or something I
could drink. The cows were in touching distance now, and so
were the peasants, though there were many more cows than
peasants.
Mildred was going to Athens. Someone had stolen al of her
money. She wondered if she could borrow some from me -
what I had would be exactly enough for her to liberate her
things, being held by an irate landlord, and then later that
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Heartbreak
same day she would have the money wired to her by her son
so she would be able to pay me back. We made a date to meet
in a town square in Athens for the day following our ar ival.
I gave Mildred pretty much al of my money. I had enough for
the YWCA that first night. The next day at the appointed
hour I waited in the square. She never came. The direct consequence was that as it started turning dark I had to find a man to take me to dinner and get me a room. And I would
have to do the same the next day and the day after that. I
kept hoping I'd find Mildred here or there. I never held it
against her.
6 8
Easter
I went to Crete to live and write. I didn’t know much about
it except that my roommate at the Y was from there. What I