Tony Platt GoodToGo

"THE RESULT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE SAME"

    On a cold, wintry Friday in late January, with much-needed rain gently falling, my friend Robynn and I join a tour of San Mateo fourth graders at the Mission Dolores in San Francisco. The students, a teacher tells me, have been prepped for the visit by making models of the mission. “They use all kinds of materials, some buy kits. Last year, one kid used sugar cubes. It was awesome.” The kids are restless, wet and hungry, herded into pews in the chapel to sit through an introductory talk given by Vincent Medina. He quickly gets their attention. “My Ohlone and Bay Miwok great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents were married here,” says the docent by way of introduction, pointing to a spot in front of the altar. “And they’re buried here too,” he adds without indicating any particular place.

    The docent frames the history of the missions as a story of culture conflict between the Spanish and Indians. It’s unusual to have a native person in charge of the mission narrative, even more unusual to have natives hold their own inside the narrative. Medina is determined to rescue his ancestors from historical oblivion and paternalism. It was Miwok, Yokut, Patwin, Wintun, Wappo, and Ohlone peoples, he tells us, who made and assembled some 36,000 adobe bricks that comprised Mission Dolores. Soon after the mission was dedicated in 1791, Ohlone artists created a large mural that combined native and Catholic imagery. But in 1796, the mural was literally, as well as metaphorically, eclipsed from view by a baroque-style relief sculpture imported from Mexico. It remained hidden from history, not unlike the Ohlone, for some two hundred years. Now, re-discovered, it’s still off-limits to the public for reasons of preservation, but you can see what it looks like in a faithful recreation painted on the wall of Mission Community Market on Bartlett Street.

    “People often say that the Spanish built the missions. But it was the Ohlone who built this one, under the supervision of the Spanish. Important to give them credit, it’s a matter of fairness and truth,” Medina tells the fourth graders. He asks them what they know about the mission. Shyly and briefly, they mention Junipero Serra, adobe walls, hard work. “Any questions?” he asks. One kid wants to know if the mission had toilets.

    We are told that the Spanish missions “left an important mark on our culture” – buildings, architecture, and art. As for the Indians’ experience in the mission, says the docent vaguely, “it was sometimes a very, very difficult place.” Gesturing to the chevron-patterned beams in the ceiling, he makes the point that the “Ohlone were not willing to give up all their culture.” Behind the altar is the mural that “we are trying to figure out how to preserve and show to people.” Medina leads the group in saying some basic Ohlone words – hello, good morning, and so on – and informs us that under the mission system “the Indians couldn’t speak their traditional languages.” It’s left to the teachers to later fill in the blanks and explain this system of linguistic enforcement. Very few teachers, however, take on this responsibility.

    The mission’s small cemetery is preserved in the inner courtyard. We know from Mission Dolores’ registry of baptisms, marriages, and deaths that native people who converted to Catholicism (typically after two weeks of training) were buried on mission grounds. The ancestors of Andy Galvan, another native docent, are interred somewhere in the mission, but he tells me, “We don’t know the exact location of their burial.” This is true of the 11,000 mostly Ohlone buried at the mission. There are human remains everywhere beneath our feet. The playground of the mission school sits on top of a huge cemetery, bodies stacked below. Kids play basketball over a pit of unmarked graves. “It’s a weird situation,” says Medina to the fourth graders, hinting at injustice.

    As the kids line up to ring the mission bells, Robynn and I leave the group and wander off into the cemetery. Some of the non-native dead are named and acknowledged in individual graves.
There’s also a full-scale model of an Ohlone hut and a modern, wooden tombstone that generically acknowledges the native dead. Strange to see a long-gone home resurrected in a cemetery, but at least the Church is making an effort to bring native people to life and acknowledge their central role in the mission.

    Better to tell half a story than none. But the untold half – the “difficulties” faced by native peoples in the mission – still remains off limits. We know that one result of Spanish colonialism in Alta California was at least a fifty percent decline in native populations. Disease was the main killer, but how did dislocation, servitude, and cultural annihilation undermine resistance to disease? Was it the early stage of a genocide carried out later during the American gold rush? In the name of Christian civilization, how uncivilized was the Catholic Church? The mission tour, much like the textbooks required of fourth graders, skirts these issues.

    But a large wall text on “Treatment of Indians,” prominently displayed in the Mission Dolores’ museum, defends the party line, making the near demise of native peoples during the mission period a matter of natural inevitability. It’s a chilling reminder how easy it is, in the words of George Orwell, to “make lies sound truthful and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”:

    “There is absolutely no documentary evidence to indicate that [Junipero] Serra ever mistreated any one, either personally or individually… The California missions and missionaries have always had their detractors and probably always will. Fuelled by emotion rather than persuaded by fact, the allegations tend to generalize and blame Serra for every excess and abuse that occurred during the entire 1769–1834 mission period. The mission system’s greatest ‘sin’ was not individual shortcoming, but inculpable eighteenth-century ignorance. Unable to solve complex medical, social and environmental problems, the Indian population was drastically reduced, especially through disease…. Whether Spanish, English, Russian, or even if no settlers had preceded the Americans, the result would have been the same.”

    I leave the mission’s museum with mixed feelings: surprised and glad to see native people rescued from historical amnesia; distressed that perpetrators of injustice once again evade a reckoning. On the way home, I take Robynn to the shrine of Tartine’s for some comfort food.

A BETTER DAY

“Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood

Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood

Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves

Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace

Let me die in my footsteps

                                                    
Before I go down under the ground”
                                        (Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” 1963)

    In 1963 I moved from England to California, in part to get as far away as possible from my father’s overbearing influence. The political divide between us had deepened as I embraced Marxism and the New Left, while he shunned anything smacking of isms, except capitalism. As he soured on politics, I was ready to be inspired by Mario Savio standing on a police car in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, urging us to put our bodies on the gears and wheels of the machine in order to make it stop; and by Malcolm X, as channeled by Alex Haley, saying it was possible for black and white to unite and fight. “In our mutual sincerity we might be able to show a road to the salvation of America’s very soul.”

    My father and I, as it turns out, shared a very similar political trajectory: unrealistic optimism followed by pessimistic realism. For Monty, the 30s promised global socialism. For me, the 60s was a vibrant and hopeful era, with socialism spreading throughout the world, social democracy coming to the West, and colonialism on the run in the Third World. The collapse of utopian dreams is always rupturing, and always unexpected. The rise and fall of Alex Haley, and the spirit and untimely death of Mario Savio epitomize for me the hope and demise of the New Left.

    Alex Haley was an unlikely hero. Without any formal training in history, not even a college degree, he wrote two bestsellers that more so than any other books written about the United States in the twentieth century changed the public conversation about race. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), he made a black revolutionary into a popular, cultural icon and a model of redemption. And his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) – and, more importantly, the television mini-series on which it was based – are credited with generating an unprecedented black-white dialogue, as well as a compelling origins story. Six million copies of Malcolm X were sold by 1977 and 130 million viewers watched Roots. 

    Haley wasn’t a particularly good historian. He lifted whole sections from another author’s book for Roots; his ties to his supposed African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, are likely fictional; and recent research on Malcolm X has blown huge holes in Haley’s hagiography. But he was a hell of a good storyteller and the stories he told resonated with millions of people.

     I got a sense of his rock-star popularity in 1989 when he visited Sacramento State University, where I was teaching at the time. Nobody seemed to care about his oddly Republican politics, or the plagiarism charges, or sloppy scholarship. “You are the answer to the prayer of our ancestors who hoped during uncertain, terrible times that there would be a better day,” was his upbeat message spoken to a large, mostly youthful crowd on a crisp, fall day.

    He seemed to look each of us directly in the eye, urging us to find common ground, telling us what we had come to hear. He was on the road, giving his stump speech, the talk that he had delivered so many times since Roots that the only notes he needed were the ones reminding him where he was and to whom he was speaking. Some of my friends were disappointed because they expected something new or different. But most people there wanted to hear the familiar speech, delivered in his unpretentious style, a message of reassurance and comfort. He told us the story about how he came to write Roots. Like all good folk tales, we wanted to hear the ending that we already knew.

    Although Haley’s speech seemed to ramble from anecdote to anecdote, it was in fact finely honed and crafted, a mosaic of disparate threads. Constructed around a narrative that traced his life from childhood to the present, his story was crammed full of moral lessons, biographies, autobiography, motherwit, and parables.

    Haley’s message was relentless: a people whose voice has been long silenced and whose vision has been long hidden from history in fact possess a wondrous past that can’t be denied. The crowd listened closely, imagining the untold stories of our individual pasts and the unexplored potentiality of our collective futures. And in case we missed the point, the motif on his stationary proclaims: “Find The Good – And Praise It.”

    Haley’s stories moved easily between experience and imagination, a talent that upset critics who prefer writers to come packaged in appropriate boxes – fictional or non-fictional. By this time, Haley probably wasn’t sure which was which. In Roots, he invented dialogue. Malcolm X wanted Haley to serve as his recorder and clean up his grammar, but Haley engaged his subject in a passionate dialogue that resulted in a memorable book of many voices.

    Haley left the Coast Guard in 1959 after a twenty-year enlistment. He was thirty-eight years old, searching for a new career. He was an outsider to academia – he had quit college after two unsuccessful years, despite the advice of his professorial father – and regarded as an interloper by the Negro literati who, with one notable exception, had no time for a writer who had learned his craft writing love letters for illiterate sailors and public relations pieces for Uncle Sam.

    When C. Eric Lincoln, a fellow writer and authority on black Muslims, proposed Haley’s membership in an African American academic group in the early 1960s, years before he became a celebrity, he was voted down because he lacked proper credentials. In response to his inquiry to leading black writers, asking for their advice about how to make it as a freelance journalist, James Baldwin, fresh from his success with Go Tell It On The Mountain and Notes of a Native Son, was the only who took time to see Haley and give him tips about how to survive in New York’s cutthroat literary circles.

    Years later, the tables were turned: Haley’s books were selling in the millions and Baldwin was struggling to survive, economically and physically. When Baldwin called, asking for advice and a “loan.” Haley quickly wrote him the first of many checks, “never more than just a few thousand.” Haley told me that he would never forget the “thin-as-a-willow-reed” writer whose generosity defied the snobbish intellectuals who had turned their backs on a struggling writer without status. Later, when Roots made Haley a rich man, he turned over the royalties of The Autobiography to Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz.

    Though he got paid well to visit Sacramento State for half a day, there was no show-biz glamour or phalanx of security guards. He walked slowly through the campus, portly and easy-going, stopping to greet the constant stream of admirers who let out squeals usually reserved for movie stars. They came up asking for autographs or to shake his hand, but quickly found themselves answering his questions about their roots.

    Still, he was never really comfortable in the public spotlight or around intellectuals. He preferred writing about legends than being one. And so every year, once in the summer and once in the winter for two months at a time, he would retreat to the “fruitful writing isolation of a cargo ship,” crisscrossing the Atlantic and Pacific just as he had done in the Coast Guard.

    “It is my impression,” Haley wrote to me during a slow trip to Australia, “that academia contains some of the more grudging folk in this world. With no respect whatever to the institution of academia, I counted one of my luckier things that I did not become a scholar, as my professor father very strongly intended. In fact, there were three sons of us for whom he had this intention, and we turned out to be writer, lawyer, and architect. Dad, bless his heart, was still nonetheless proud of us.”

    When Haley finished his talk in Sacramento and the audience rose to give him a standing ovation, I realized that this was the first time I had ever been part of a truly multicultural audience on campus. For a brief moment, the university actually reflected the diversity of our community. Hundreds of black high school kids, most of whom will never make it to any university under our current system, had come to witness the rare spectacle of an African American as an American hero. They were loud and boisterous during Haley’s speech and, after it was over, they had a purposeful gleam in their eyes, a renewed determination to envision a better day.

    Alex Haley’s ability to reach and move a crowd reminded me of the time that twenty-two year old Mario Savio reached and moved me. I was in my second year as a graduate student in Berkeley in 1964 when Savio, in protest of the university’s ban on political speech, told a campus crowd on December 2nd that “there’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious – makes you so sick at heart – that you can’t take part.” Drawing upon imagery from Thoreau, he called upon to us practice civil disobedience and to jam the gears of the machine. That day, Savio and 800 others were arrested in Sproul Plaza. I supported the Free Speech Movement, but avoided arrest then since I was nervous about my immigration status. (About a decade later, I’d make amends by getting arrested twice during People’s Park protests at the same site.)

    The FSM was a defining moment for activism in the 1960s and for my own political development. Poised between the civil rights struggles of the previous decade and the promise of the antiwar and feminist movements ahead, it offered our generation of students the opportunity to participate in history, to be activists in our own right rather than vicarious participants in other people's struggles. It was a joy to feel that we might be part of an emergent majority, with the moral authority of justice on our side for once. Savio was not the only leader of the student movement, but his example of self-sacrifice moved many people like myself to deeply consider our political commitments and to put our beliefs into practice. Also, it helped that we were on the winning side: the university revoked its ban on political speech.

    Thirty years later, in 1994, I was back in Sproul Plaza for the Free Speech Movement's reunion. In the intervening years, my political activism cost me my job at Berkeley, but I was lucky to get a tenure-track job at Sacramento State. Mario had not been as lucky. It took him until 1984 to get a science degree and until 1989 to get his master’s degree. He was nearly 50 years old when he started teaching math and philosophy as a lecturer at Sonoma State University. By then the boom years in academia were over and part-time jobs were the norm.

    There was a large crowd on hand at the reunion, including a new generation of activists who were eager to witness a slice of history and hear old-timers justify our pasts. Mario Savio - now graying, balding, and pony-tailed, like many of us in the crowd - spoke with vigor and eloquence about our legacy, likening us in the words of T.S. Eliot to "the hidden laughter of children in the foliage." There we had been, in the margins and shadows of political power, but still alive and kicking, "sudden in a shaft of sunlight even while the dust moves."

    Mario was not there that December day in 1994 to sentimentalize or bury our movement. If it had been hard on him to live with fame and notoriety in the aftermath of the 1960s, it was even harder to be treated in the 1990s as an icon of a long gone past. He insistently spoke to the present, of the growing boldness of an increasingly reactionary political system, attacks on immigrant and women's rights, and the rollback of civil rights gains. Be vigilant, don't mourn, and get organized, he told us.

    A few months later, Mario and I worked together in the Campus Coalitions for Human Rights and Social Justice, a loose-knit organization of campus activists in northern California. Our challenge, no less, was to go against the tide of immigrant bashing, prison building, and welfare cutting. In particular, we focused our efforts on opposing the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative, which as Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot asked voters to go beyond even the most conservative Supreme Court decisions to end all forms of state-supported affirmative action.

    It was an uphill battle. Mario had been more hopeful than most of us that the attack on affirmative action would generate a political revival by combining youthful idealism with wise experience, creating the basis for a new, vibrant, cross-generational movement. Pity he didn’t live to see the rise of the Occupy movement; he would have been out there on the front lines. It was difficult for him to accept the degree to which universities had by the 1990s become sites of demobilization and cynicism. When his health, already a problem for many years, got worse, his friends urged him to slow down and take it easy, which, for a short while, he did. "Obviously I needed to pull back," he wrote me in May of 1996. "In the past I have not had the good sense to read my own signals right. Guess I'm growing up - at last, and just in time!"

    But, quickly, he was back in the fray, compelled by the news that the anti-affirmative action forces were in disarray and that, with enough effort and work, we had a chance to defeat Proposition 209. Mario worked with his son Nadav day and night to produce a pamphlet, "In Defense of Affirmative Action," which was used widely on campuses in the last few weeks of the campaign. It helped to close the gap in the polls, but with insufficient money, the damning of faint support by the National Democratic Party, and a low voter turnout, our anti-209 campaign failed by eight points.

    Mario suffered a heart attack and went into a coma a few days before the elections, and died the day after without regaining consciousness. He left life as he lived it, intensely committed and passionate in his public politics, gracious in private to his friends. I miss his shaft of sunlight.

Alex Haley (1921-1992)
Mario Savio (1942-1996)

FOR ALL OF US

    It’s about time: the Smithsonian has chosen its site on the Mall in Washington, D. C. for the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC); the design for the building is approved; and the staff is at work on collections and exhibitions. If it all goes according to plan, in 2015 at long last we’ll have a national museum devoted to one of the country’s foundational and enduring experiences: Black history as the American story – a history “for all of us,” promises Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s director.

    What does it mean to denote a country’s racial past as central to its identity? This issue was on my mind in 2004 when I visited England, my place of birth and formative years, delving into my own experiences of race and looking closely at representations of British racial history in exhibitions and museums. (This was before the flurry of activities marking the bi-centennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007.)

    My grandparents arrived in Manchester in the 1900s as immigrants from Rumania and Poland, looking for security from pogroms and work in the flourishing textile industry that had emerged a century earlier out of the “triangular trade.” The local economic boom was powered by cotton shipped into the port of nearby Liverpool, then transported to the textile factories in the Manchester area. From the early 1700s to the early 1800s, some 11,000 ships involved in trading slaves for cotton and other commodities left the major ports of Bristol, Liverpool, and London. Liverpool reaped more profits from slaving than any other European port.

    For a large chunk of the 19th century, mills and factories made Manchester into the hub of the rag trade and capitalist world. It was here after World War I that my Grandpa Daniels hustled as a small-time dealer in odds and ends, and my Grandpa Platt eked out a meager living as a tailor. And it was here after World War II that my father would make his fortune, mass-producing raincoats for Burton’s (a national clothing chain), and lose it in the 1980s when the industry moved to Asia in search of cheaper labor and newer plants.

    As a teenager in the 1950s, I took long walks in Dunham Park, an old estate converted into a public park near our family’s home in an exclusive country village near Manchester. I never stopped to wonder about the incongruous presence of a statue that featured a kneeling African slave, holding up a huge ornamental sundial. I had not been taught about the presence of black servants in England since the sixteenth century or the habit of English traders in the West Indies in the eighteenth century to regularly bring home young slaves as personal servants or gifts. If you look carefully at eighteenth century portraits of the landed gentry, you’ll often find them decorated with young Africans, typically close to the floor, on a par with the family’s pet cats, dogs, and monkeys.

    I was reminded of this amnesia when I visited the Cecil Beaton retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (1904-1980), as the catalogue dogmatically asserts, “was the most significant British-born photographer of the twentieth century.” I remember being attracted in the 1950s to his glossy, glamorous images of the rich and powerful, especially the movie stars, especially the female ones. But his class blinders and pomposity also irritated me then, as they did in the 2004 exhibit, which presented Beaton as a shrine to glorious Englishness. Take, for example, the 1944 photograph of Felicity Wavell – yes, Felicity – the wife of the British Viceroy, sitting in a carriage hauled by four anonymous, shoe-less Indian servants in turbans. Without the slightest hint of irony, the caption reads, “Beaton was impressed by the grandeur and vastness of the Viceroy’s house; the marble corridors and the number of servants in scarlet and gold liveries.”

    Also in the exhibit you can find a 1937 photograph of Coco Chanel, one of Beaton’s favorite subjects. She’s posed in an elegant gown, arms folded, leaning against a wall. Close by, but below her, is a pedestal bearing a sculpture of a generic black slave carrying a plant. The flesh-and-blood couturier towers over the ceramic servant, not unlike the relationship between the sundial and anonymous African in Dunham Park that I finally stopped to observe a few years ago.

    I grew up in an England that tried to contain most of its subjects over there. The thin strip of sea at the edge of the country’s southern border, The English Channel, kept out “wogs” from the Empire, as well as culturally separated us from “frogs” in France. By the 1960s, British racial anxieties were preoccupied with rebellions in the colonies and the specter of Caribbean, African, and Asian immigration to the core. My grandmother grew up a staunch racist, hating all schwartzes, but never knowing one until the Caribbean cooks at her fancy Jewish retirement home adopted her recipe for chicken soup. The last time that I visited her in 1994, close to her 100th birthday, she called out a cook to meet me and there they stood, the Jamaican and the Jew, arms around each other. On the other hand, my Uncle Phil who moved from Manchester to New York as a young man, stood firm in his hatred of “niggers” and died a bitter old man, his bigotry unblemished.

    Thanks to my parents’ politics, I grew up with a sense of moral outrage at racial injustice. Among my mother’s collection of antiques, now displayed on a shelf in my office at home, was an 18th century abolitionist snuff box – or what I thought was a snuff box – decorated with a slave on his knees, in shackles, and the abolitionist motif, AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER. It’s one of my favorite remembrances of my parents because it symbolizes the best of them, the progressive legacy they grafted on to me, the part of their leftist background they didn’t jettison when they climbed the class ladder into the all-white, suburban countryside.

    I grew up hating obligatory visits to places like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London because it represented the spoils of empire and arrogance of power, as well as boredom. I was reluctant to visit the V & A in 2004 because of these associations, but did so because I wanted to see if anything had changed. Much had changed, much had not. There was a fabulous retrospective of Vivienne Westwood that takes fashion out of the museum’s traditionally prim and proper displays into a hip happening. How much had things changed at the venerable V & A? Well, Westwood dedicated the catalogue of her exhibit to “freedom for Leonard Peltier.”

    But the core exhibit in the British Galleries, at least two floors of rare artifacts that chronicle three centuries of empire, was silent on race. Well, that’s not quite true. The historian Catherine Hall had told me that if I checked out a small room in the V & A, I would find a short film, twelve minutes actually, sandwiched between celebratory videos on country houses and the Crystal Palace. There I found and watched, alone, “Art, Design and Empire,” a politely subversive take on how many icons of British culture are not “originally British at all.” In the most radical segment of a video that mostly espouses a trendy multiculturalism – “we learn from them, they learn from us”– the artist Lubaina Himid discusses how a seemingly typical, 19th century watercolor of an English drawing room conceals “the hidden histories of the Empire.” Embedded in middle-class propriety, she tells us, is the history of violence. “Instead of having, you know, slave servants about the place, we’ll have a lovely piece of fabric or we’ll have a delicate table, so we’ve kind of brought it all in, colonised it, owned it and kind of made it British.”

    After watching the video, I trudged through two floors of encased artifacts in the British Galleries at the V & A, reminded why as a teen I disliked having to do this. I didn't see anything on race, but maybe I was missing something. I asked a young woman behind a desk, "Is there anything in the exhibit on the slave trade or the abolitionist movement?" She leaned forward, asked, "Sorry, sir, please?" I repeated the sentence in my best American English. She paused, pretended to mull over the question, smiled slightly. "No, sir, sorry, not that I know of. Sorry."

    While the V & A has taken the approach of boring from without and encircling its traditional collections with innovative exhibits, other museums have taken a more direct approach. In the three major slaving ports of London, Liverpool, and Bristol, there are exhibits that deal with the less-than-glorious aspects of British racial history. Just outside London in Greenwich, where the lords of the Empire decided the global rules of time and space, is the National Maritime Museum. Here, if glamorous naval relics or homage to Tintin at sea are not distracting, you can find a small exhibit on “Trade and Empire” that includes artifacts of slavery, a brief account of the abolitionist movement, and a quirky video that draws upon clips of old British movies to satirize colonial racism.

    The texts that accompany the exhibit are blandly neutral: “The display looks at the importance of trade in the growth of the British Empire and the vital role the Royal Navy played in developing and protecting that trade. It also shows how imperialism was an important force in world history and how it has influenced the culture of Britain today.” And there are no written materials on the topic to take away from the gift store at Greenwich. Teachers who bring their classes here also need to bring a great deal of background information with them because none is provided. The museum’s guide is silent on race and oblivious to the inclusion of a late seventeenth portrait of an anonymous (probably generic) young black girl, wearing a smile and slave collar of pearls, and looking up adoringly at her fair-skinned mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. As in the statue at Dunham Park and Cecil’s Beaton’s photograph of Coco Channel, the experience of slavery becomes a decorative backdrop to British Civilization.

    I approached the exhibit in Liverpool with low expectations. It was March and a sharply bitter wind swept off the Mersey and slapped away the protection offered by my winter wool coat. In the remade city center, which sprawls in an endless succession of charmless malls, working class shoppers checked out the bargains and packs of football fans got an early start in the pubs. I knew that Liverpool is an important center of immigration but I saw very few Black people on the streets or in the stores downtown, either selling or buying. A friend, sociologist Joe Sim, gave me a quick lesson in the city’s race relations before taking me to Toxteth, a segregated and run-down neighborhood still bearing the scars of race riots some thirty years ago. Out of sight, out of civic mind.

    The next day I walked from the city center to the exhibit. It’s located in a fashionable development by the docks that boasts private flats and condos, upscale restaurants and bars, and a sleek Tate gallery. When I found out that the materials dealing with race are located in the basement of the Maritime Museum, I prepared myself for a theme park designed by Madame Tussaud. But I was wrong. There’s nothing decorative or sentimental in the approach to race that you find in the exhibit on “Transatlantic Slavery.” The subtitle, “Against Human Dignity,” makes clear from the get-go that this will not be an exploration in postmodern ambiguity.

    The large exhibition stretches from pre-colonial Africa to the present. It’s informative, with smart captions and a well-written catalogue, expresses an antiracist morality, and names names, including many in high places. Walking through the exhibit, there is no doubt that Liverpudlians flourished off the slave trade and that every leading entrepreneur cashed in on the buying and selling of human beings. The portrait of a mayor of Liverpool hangs formally in a rogues’ gallery of slavery’s benefactors. The exhibit also shows the diversity and complexity of the abolitionist movement, and makes explicit the relationship between slavery and modern forms of racial discrimination. When facts and interpretations are contested – such as how many died during the middle passage or how much slavery impacts today’s race relations – the curators give us both sides of the argument and the responsibility for  deciding what we think. And there’s no effort to pretty up the past or to avoid the H word: “this African Holocaust,” notes the catalogue, “involved death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Its full impact will never be known.”

    Some historians might find the exhibit’s intellectual approach too economistic, given its emphasis on the accumulation of wealth as the motor force of racism. But I found it quite refreshing because I live in country where class has magically disappeared from public discourse or, when used, is put in quotes as if to infer that its existence is debated, in much the same way that fundamentalist Christians challenge the teaching of “evolution.”

    Some people are no doubt critical also of the separation of the exhibition on race from the mainstream exhibit on maritime history and artifacts: Old ships and sea lore on the main floor, humiliation and degradation in the basement. It’s an old, unresolved argument, and I’ve swung in both directions at different points in my life. Right now, given the resurgence of new forms of racism in England and persistent tendency in the schools to glorify British history, I think it makes moral and political sense to organize a distinct exhibit that demands sustained attention and engagement.

    The first part of the Liverpool exhibition offers a relentless exposé of the everyday workings of racism. So it was something of an emotional relief when I came to the section that deals with opposition and resistance. And there in one of the cabinets, unexpectedly, was a perfect example of the snuff box that I inherited from my mother after she died. The caption on the cabinet in the Maritime Museum told me that mum’s collectible was in fact a patch box, made of enamel on copper in South Staffordshire about 1790. This means that more than 220 years ago, another woman, rich enough to buy an expensive doodad – no relation to my mother, whose parents arrived by boat in England in the 1900s fleeing a Roumanian shtetl for a Manchester ghetto – sat in her grand boudoir, opened up this miniature box, and applied a small cloth patch to her face, either as a decoration or to cover a blemish, before heading off in a carriage to a social event. I like to imagine that she and her husband were part of the campaign to abolish slavery in Britain, urging the Royal Navy to patrol the West African coast and stop the slave boats making it across the Atlantic.

    The display of the patch box took me by surprise and I dropped my camera, breaking its casing. Maybe because it was here that I recognized the contradictions within my own past: the wealth that trickled down from the slave trade to the rag trade and a belief in the possibility of social equality, both are my legacy, the worst and best of human qualities.

    It was a mistake to go to the Liverpool exhibit by myself because this kind of experience needs to be talked about and through. So for my next exploration I searched out a companion and found Derrick Weeden who, luckily, had his own reasons for wanting to see how the Brits tackle, or don’t tackle, the race question. We spent the day together, traveling from Birmingham by train to Bristol, site of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. Derrick, an actor based in Oregon, was on tour with David Edgar’s two-play cycle about American politics, “Continental Divide.” I was there to visit the playwright in his home city and to see the plays, which I’ve followed like a stage-door Johnny since David conceived them in our home in Berkeley in 1998.

    Derrick and I had talked briefly before this outing to Bristol, mostly about “Continental Divide,” but this was the first time that we had spent several hours together, alone, over the best part of a day. We were strangers to each other in most ways. On the train, I told him the story about the patch box and my family history. He told me about his experience going into a pub in Birmingham’s city center, by himself, on a whim. “Everything stopped when I walked in. Just stopped. Not a sound, everybody checking me out.” Perhaps I should mention that Derrick is six feet three, standing erect as he usually does makes him look taller, a sharp dresser, built like the baseball player he used to be in high school days before acting swallowed him up whole. And, oh yes, he’s black. “As black as coal,” as they used to say in England in the 1950s, if they wanted to be polite.  Derrick took in the scene in the pub, his antenna processing everything. His mother, originally from the West Indies, and his dad, a lifer in the military from everywhere, including Panama where Derrick was born, had taught him the rules of racial etiquette, how to get in, check it out, and get out if necessary. Derrick decided this time to get out. He left the pub, slowly.

    But, mostly, Derrick stays in the thick of things. He’s learned from his parents and his experiences, he told me, that white folks come in several shades and politics, that some can even be trusted. We discovered that we both had our personal reasons for visiting the exhibit on the Empire. Like me, Derrick traces one part of his family to the English heartland and he too is curious about how, in Joan Didion’s words, “history could bloody the land.”

    We were both impressed and moved by the exhibit on the Empire. It opens and closes with a variety of everyday people speaking about their experiences of race in Britain. Some praise the country that took them in from homelands they wanted to escape, some curse the day they arrived, some see racism on the retreat, others feel its burning presence every day. There’s no guide or catalogue, but the exhibit is well signed, has several hands-on displays, and is educational without being patronizing. As in the Liverpool exhibition, the approach stresses the economic roots of racism, shows its centrality to British imperialism, and credits the struggles of “nationalists and freedom-fighters in the non-white colonies who fought against colonialism.” The exhibit also takes on more complex issues, such as “the double-edged nature of much of the linguistic and sociological knowledge amassed by Britain in the name of enlightened scholarship.”

    Unlike the Liverpool exhibition, the Bristol museum integrates race into its core exhibit. I know, I know, a few paragraphs ago I was singing the praises of separatism. Now I sound like an old-fashioned integrationist. As I said, I can go either way on this issue. To me, the structure and form are less compelling than whether or not the exhibition demonstrates complexity, an ethical point of view, and honesty. It works in Bristol because the curators make race relations central to their presentation of how the British Empire was formed.

    But there are losses too: Ireland gets short shrift, a pity since it would be an instructive lesson about the making and unmaking of racial categories. And you have to look closely for information about the gendered aspects of colonialism. Overall, though, I’m glad that youngsters and tourists will get new ways to think about the celebratory history that they’ve learned as a catechism in English schools or imbibed back in the States from Masterpiece Theatre.

    Over a shared dessert of sticky toffee pudding at one of the new restaurants by the port in Bristol, looking out at the river that launched slave ships some two hundred years ago, Derrick and I discovered a sorrowful connection. What was most depressing to both of us about the exhibits in England was that we had to travel five thousand miles to find matters of race given serious attention in public institutions. After all, we live in a country that perfected the business of chattel slavery and refuses to even mark emancipation with a public holiday.

    Back home in the United States there are museums that deal with the contributions of specific ethnic groups, but what’s absent is any national recognition of the deep wounds and ruptures generated by racism. The Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture promises to shake up our reputation for national amnesia. It took England more than a century since the beginning of its imperial decline to initiate an honest discussion about the legacies of the slave trade. Hopefully, we wont have to wait that long to explore how the past bleeds into the present.

STRAIGHT SHOOTER: PIRI THOMAS, 1928-2011

    Piri Thomas, poet and writer, died Monday October 17, 2011, in his home in El Cerrito, California, surrounded by his wife, Suzie Dod Thomas, and family. His death at age 83 from pneumonia came after a long illness.

    What are the odds of a dark-skinned, Puerto-Rican-Cuban-American from Spanish Harlem shooting at a cop and living to tell the story? Pretty slim, but Piri Thomas not only survived after seven years of hard time in Comstock in the 1950s, he also wrote a lifetime of stories for us. Along with Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964) and Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Piri’s Down These Mean Streets (1967) gave millions of American readers a devastatingly human portrait of life on the other side of the color line. He also wrote a moving account of doing time (Seven Long Times, 1974), a novel, several plays, a book of short stories, and recorded two CDs of poetry and music. He was an extraordinary performer, an inspiration for the genre of spoken word, and a tireless educator for social justice.

    He’ll be remembered for writing an iconic book. I’ll remember him for presiding over a literary salon in his picket-fenced home in Berkeley, at which he doled out equal time to neophytes and seasoned writers. For visiting classroom after classroom, spotting the most hostile students in the room and warming their cold hearts with love and passion. And for challenging binaries of race and proclaiming our common humanity.

    When Piri Thomas and Suzie Dod Thomas, his partner in everything, married in May 1988, I wrote this for them.

Straight Shooter

Lives lost before they knew life,
his friends are buried in anonymous pits
in America, not Germany.
Long before Presidential Commissions
and the War on Drugs,
they were lucky to get numbered graves.
Splashing every stone vivid with color,
excavating their remains,
he gives them each a name,
a place in our history.

He exchanged his 38 for a pen
but didn’t give up the bullets.
A straight shooter,
firing from his hip
while somersaulting through the sky,
or from the back seat of a limo
dressed slick in white,
his aim is magically true.
He’ll pierce our hearts
from
a
thousand
yards.

A survivor, he endured street fights,
taking many losses in back alleys.
A collector, he recorded
each small, memorable victory,
inscribed them all,
indelibly,
on
the back
of
our hands.


Leading The Way

She has seen America from its margins.
Straddling its borders,
she could pass through
the front door
if she so chooses.
A white Puerto Rican,
A Latina gringo,
looking in,
while looking out,
holding up mirrors
for us
to
see.

She exchanged her diploma for a vision
but didn’t surrender her smarts.
A builder,
she knows construction,
how to navigate the rocks in the river,
how to steer the water
from mountain top to ocean.
She’ll swim the whole course,
leading the way,
a glint in her eye,
in her hair
an ostrich feather.

(May 1988)

Tax-deductible donations in Piri’s memory (payable to Social Justice) should be sent to: Piri Thomas Memorial Fund, c/o Social Justice, PO Box 40601, San Francisco, CA 94140. Memorials are being planned for the Bay Area, New York, and Orlando. Dates to be announced.

BETWEEN THE LINES

“If you cannot see
istilleat
between the lines
allofmymeals
then your collected facts
witha
will never constitute
musselshell
knowledge.”
(Shaunna Oteka McCovey, Yurok/Karuk, 2005)

    You can come to a place time and time again, year in and year out – as I’ve been coming to my getaway retreat in Humboldt County on California’s northwest coast for some thirty-five years – and not see for so long what a serendipitous experience suddenly makes obvious and impossible to ignore. My relationship with Big Lagoon first changed as a result of a personal tragedy. But it was my belated recognition of a social tragedy embedded in the landscape that triggered a journey that would become this book.

    Visiting Big Lagoon has always been a life-affirming experience for me, a place to slow down my citified pace and take small pleasures in the everyday. The Yurok refer to the lagoon as Oketo or Where It Is Calm, a name they give to any large body of enclosed water. Oketo seems especially appropriate for placid Big Lagoon, only a stone’s throw from the volatile Pacific Ocean. I typically escape here to luxuriate in the present. But out of the blue, about three years ago, I found myself propelled into the “cool sepulcher of the past” when I discovered that my bucolic hideaway was a short walk away from an unmarked Yurok cemetery that had been plundered early in the twentieth century.

    I thought I was familiar with every nook and cranny of Big Lagoon until this new information expanded my sightlines. Bob McConnell, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Yurok, taught me to imagine the thousands of people who lived, worked, and died here long before the region became a mecca for tourists. Gene Brundin, chairman of the Yurok Tribe’s Repatriation Committee, introduced me to Big Lagoon’s botanical diversity – its herbs, plants, and roots once regularly used as medicines, teas, and materials for baskets. And archaeologist Janet Eidsness encouraged me to look at the ground in new ways in order to appreciate how a midden of rocks cracked by heat from fire, oily dark-stained soil, and broken shells reveal stories about everyday native life.

    It’s an interesting paradox of the creative process, as choreographer Twyla Tharp observes, that you need to exercise rigorous control over a project, “but good planning alone won’t make your efforts successful; it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.” Unlike my previous work, this is not an investigation that I carefully thought through and planned before starting the research. The topic came to me head on and demanded my attention. And once I agreed to go off into uncharted territory, I stumbled into fissures that run deep beneath the ground.

     Humboldt County is typically described in tourist guides as an “outdoor paradise” and “eco-tourist’s heaven,” with “legendary giant redwoods,” “stunning beaches,” “rugged cliffs,” and “picturesque coastal villages.” It’s a place “where you can connect with Nature.” I am very familiar with this narrative. It’s what draws me to Big Lagoon. But beneath this imagery of a pristine landscape is a messy social history of people divided by warfare, antagonisms, and disillusionments. From the perspective of the Yurok and other native peoples in the region, “much of the land has been wounded, broken or lost.” For some historians, northern California in the mid-nineteenth century was one of the bloodiest places in the country, deserving of a language that we usually associate with other countries and other times: pogroms, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, even genocide. What happened in California did not presage Nazi Germany or mimic Boer-ruled South Africa, but there are resemblances and affinities that demand serious consideration.

    Thanks to the post-1960s generation of historians, we’ve made considerable progress in complicating the rosy-hued story of northern California as a place celebrated primarily for economic daring and individual initiative, peopled by “men with empires in their purposes/And new eras in their brains,” as Sam Foss put it in 1894. Now we know much more about the brutal underside of the Golden State, and about the micro-histories of people who were typically omitted from the master narrative of evolutionary progress – native communities, Chinese immigrants, women pioneers, Latino miners, and white workers who didn’t strike it rich.

    And yet it’s still so easy to visit Humboldt County and be oblivious to its troubled history: there are no public memorials or monuments or preserved sites that shock us into remembrance of tragedies not-too-long past or juxtapose the grandeur of the region’s scenery with its killing fields. Nobody seems bothered that a well-visited elk refuge in Redwoods State Park is named in honor of one of the country’s most notoriously racist ideologues. We seem to have a hard-wired capacity to deny and compartmentalize painfully disturbing information. For many years, I could separate my knowledge of Big Lagoon’s troubling past from its pleasurable present. In this sense, I was no different from my parents who refused to visit Germany because of its murderous legacies, but didn’t think twice about taking the family for vacations to what had been Vichy France, happily visiting towns where Jews had been rounded up for transportation to concentration camps.

    Death changes the meaning of a place. Until a few years ago, I’d never associated Big Lagoon with the end of life. But since the summer of 2006, when we followed our son’s wishes and launched his remains into the lagoon, it’s been impossible for me to separate the living from the dead.  And about a year later, answering the Yurok Tribal Council’s call to protect the cultural legacies of their ancestors who had been uprooted from Big Lagoon, I decided to learn more about this “place of ceremonial renown.” As a historian interested in public history and memory, how could I ignore this past literally buried in my own backyard?

    What I initially thought would be a personal exploration of mortality and a brief investigation into local events in a small place led to an investigation of complex big issues that resonate in the history of anthropology and archaeology, and in contemporary debates about patrimony and repatriation: Whose cultural meanings speak for a place? Whose history prevails in the public domain? What can be done to repair the damage and atrocities committed by long-gone generations? To answer these questions, I had to leave the rural quiet of Big Lagoon and travel to museums in London, Berlin, and Washington, D.C., and to a cemetery of slaves in New York; and delve into long-forgotten archives, shuttered cabinets, and basements stacked with human remains. I also had to learn to see between the lines.
______________
This is a slightly edited version (without footnotes) of the first chapter of my new book, Grave Matters: Excavating California's Buried Past (Heyday, October 2011). For more information about the book, see this link: Grave Matters

THE SHAME OF CALIFORNIA

    I’ve been eating well this summer, enjoying the local fruits and vegetables of northwest California, while sixty miles away a group of men risked their health by refusing to eat for three weeks. I’m in Big Lagoon, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest in an area of coastal California described by National Geographic as among the top twenty “unspoiled” tourist destinations in the world. An hour’s drive north of here is Pelican Bay State Prison, a state-of-the-art hellhole that was recently the center of a three-week hunger strike led by prisoners in the Secure Housing Units (SHU).

    Pelican Bay was California’s first supermax prison, built in 1989 on 275 acres of clear-cut forest near Crescent City. With an annual budget of $180 million, it has a payroll of more than 1,600 guards and service workers. The prison was built for 2,280 prisoners, but its current census is close to 3,500, almost half of whom is housed in a prison within the prison, the SHU, an X-shaped cluster of brutalist concrete buildings, surrounded by guard towers, electronic fencing, and barren ground. Here, more than a thousand men, whose families live hundreds of miles away, are imprisoned 23 hours a day in 8 x 10 foot, windowless, constantly lit cells, subject to sensory deprivation and social isolation, sometimes for years.

    The hunger strike at Pelican Bay, which lasted from July 1st to July 22nd, was led by long-term prisoners in the SHU. It is estimated that on any given day in the United States, at least 25,000 prisoners are held in isolation, and perhaps as many as another 80,000 are kept in segregation units, typically in isolation. Writing in the New Yorker (“Hellhole,” 30 March 2009), Atul Gawande calls this practice “legalized torture,” resulting in long-term physical and mental damage to many of its victims.

    Pelican Bay, like many of California’s prisons, was built on formerly agricultural land in a region seeking to resuscitate its depressed economy. The hardscrabble Crescent City, briefly a boomtown during the Gold Rush and once a beneficiary of the lumber and commercial fishing industries, has one of the state’s highest unemployment rates and most stingy public services. When the state borrowed from public funds to build the high security prison at a cost of $277.5 million to taxpayers, it was supposed to boost the local economy. But the benefits primarily went to local landowners, and construction and utility companies; to national chains like K-Mart, Ace Hardware, and Safeway; and to the politically powerful guards’ union. Meanwhile, the county’s unemployment rate is almost 14 percent and one out of three people live in hand-to-mouth poverty.

    The city’s misery is compounded by its record rainfall and susceptibility to tsunamis. Unless work or family requires you to stay in Crescent City, this is a place to drive through on the way somewhere else. No wonder that prisoners comprise about 46 percent of the city’s 7,600 population. Small towns that hoped for a bonanza by inviting prison construction, says Ruth Gilmore in Golden Gulag, are victims of a boondoggle.

    California may lag behind many other states in high school graduation rates, welfare benefits, and investment in public health, but when it comes to punishment, we rank at or near the top. Between 1852 and 1964, California built only twelve prisons. Since 1984, the state has erected forty-three penal institutions, making it a global leader in prison construction. Today, ninety penitentiaries, small prisons, and minimum-security camps stretch across nine hundred miles of the fifth largest economy in the world.

    In 1982, the prison system cost taxpayers two percent of the General Fund; by 2006, it cost almost eight percent. In 2008, more than one out of six state workers in California was employed by the Department of Corrections, almost three times as many as were employed in Health and Human Services. In the last decade, “corrections”  (with 61,000 employees) has increased its share of state workers, passing the state university system (46,000), second only to the University of California (86,000). Meanwhile, prison suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national average. And we have one of the most extravagant penal systems in the country, costing taxpayers about the same as the state spends on higher education.

    Most of the new prisons have been built in out-of-the way rural areas, like Crescent City, making it easier to lose sight of the humanity of the people we warehouse: mostly men (93 percent), mostly Latinos and African Americans (two-thirds), mostly from big cities (sixty percent from Los Angeles), and mostly unemployed or the working poor, victimized by drastic changes in California’s economy over the last twenty years. The prison system is the shame of California, testimony to the persistence of institutionalized racism, the widening economic divide, and the gutting of social programs.

    Prisons function as an unemployment program comparable to early capitalist workhouses, except they’ve become warehouses of unused labor rather than sites of production. When prisoners return to their communities, observes Gilmore, the cycle is repeated: they are locked out of “education, employment, housing, and many other stabilizing institutions of everyday life. In such inhospitable places, everybody isolates.”

    On July 1st, a small group of prisoners in Pelican Bay’s SHU, calling themselves the Short Corridor Collective, initiated a hunger strike, calling for the abolition of long-term solitary confinement, improvement in programs for SHU prisoners, and an end to various abusive administrative procedures. Unlike a similar action by prisoners in 2002, this strike drew the support of thousands of prisoners throughout the state. Moreover, Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity was so successful in getting out information about the strike that European human rights organizations urged the Governor to respond to prisoners’ demands and the New York Times carried an Op Ed condemning the “bestial treatment” of prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison (Colin Dayan, “Barbarous Confinement,” 17 July 2011).

    During the strike, according to the Short Corridor Collective, at least seventeen strikers, including three leaders, were transferred to another prison for medical treatment. The Collective ended the action on July 22nd after gaining the right to wear cold weather caps, to have calendars in their cells, and to have access to educational programs in the SHU. Though these concessions by prison authorities are modest, we should not underestimate the larger significance of the strike. It draws worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens; it forces the government of California to sit down, face-to-face, and negotiate with people who have been demonized as semi-human beasts; and it raises the possibility of once again incorporating prisoners into a larger struggle for social justice.

    The civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s regarded prisoners as an important constituency, forging intimate ties between community and prison. It fought for massive decarceration, abolition of capital punishment, and ending the racial double standard of arrest and incarceration. It will take a similar movement today to expose the tragedy of American injustice and make prisoners human again. Thanks to the Short Corridor Collective and thousands of activist prisoners, we now have an opportunity to renew the struggle.

_________________________________________

For more information about the strike at Pelican Bay and its consequences, contact prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com.





   

DANCING TO WORDS

“and once
you start dancing
to words
you might never
stop”
(Jessica Hagedorn, “Sorcery,” 1975)

    After my mother died in 1997, I had the queasy job of rummaging through her cupboards of stuff, giving away or throwing out ninety percent. While culling a lifetime of photographs I found an image of her as a young teen in a dance outfit that snagged my attention. She has fire in her eyes and a steady gaze. The photo is tinted and attached to wood. On the back is my scrawling signature, done when I was a kid. Somehow, during its sixty-five year journey from mantelpieces to storage boxes, her feet have broken off.

    As a child I was very close to Eileen. She was one of very few women that I knew intimately during my youth. I grew up in a house of men – my sister is much younger than I am. I was educated in all-boys’ prep and high schools, and in an all-male college. Men also were all my teachers, from puberty in the early 1950s in northern England through grad school at radical Berkeley in the mid-1960s.

    Before my dad made and lost his fortune, Eileen was a hands-on parent, not yet wealthy enough to disappear behind go-betweens, as she did later with my sister. In my teen years she became a double agent in Shakespearean family dramas, a buffer between the patriarch and rebel son.

    Later, everybody in the family moved on while she stayed stuck in place. At the age of 21, I left home, region, country and hemisphere when I immigrated in 1963 to California, to what then was the other side of the world. Not long after, my brother Steve left home, first for Chile, then Scotland. My sister Sue followed our example, first for Paris, then Israel. In the early 1970s, Monty, my dad, “buggered off,” as Eileen memorialized the event, scared of drowning in the boredom of suburban bliss that he himself had created and would soon recreate with wife No. 2 in Monte Carlo.

     By the 1990s, all of Eileen’s immediate relatives, except one, were dead or had left Manchester. Only her mother, my grandmother, remained nearby, living the last decade of her long life in a home for elderly Jews, fifteen miles away. In 1995, Edith made her century and died. Two years later, my mother moved into the same retirement home, living her last weeks a few yards away from the room in which her mother had died. With her death came the end of my family’s 100-year association with Manchester. My grandfathers arrived in the 1900s from Poland and Rumania to hustle work in the margins of the textile industry. Three generations later the diaspora has taken us to northern Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East.

    “Each generation grows into its grudge,” observed filmmaker Oliver Stone, reflecting on his own dark past. My mother didn’t waste time growing into her grudge. She grabbed it full-blown when my dad buggered off and carried it proudly for some twenty-five years, day and night, like a comforting shroud until her death on August 12th, 1997, when she was buried with it under her skin.

    For most of my adult life, my relationship with my mother was strained. Maybe she blamed me for starting the exodus that took everybody away from her. And no doubt I reminded her far too much of Monty. I in turn resented her for giving up on a third of her life, settling to stew in resentments on a very low light. What could I, a doer always with a plan at hand, have in common with such a bitter quitter? Much more than I imagined.

    I got to know mum better near the end of her life when I helped to take care of her during a slow, awful death from lung and throat cancer, the culmination of some 600,000 Players inhaled “down to her boots.” Her illness gave us something to do together. It also allowed me to give back some of the comfort she gave me when I was a child. I even tried to put my judgments on hold and see the world through her experiences as a divorced, middle-class suburbanite who had side-stepped the new woman’s movement of her youth and was too set in her ways to catch the feminist waves that beckoned invitingly in the 1970s.

    As a teen Eileen was overshadowed by her formidable matriarch of a mother, who unconditionally adored her ungrateful son, with little to spare for her only daughter. “I don’t remember mother ever loving me until she needed me.” As a girl Eileen aspired to be a dancer, but Edith put a quick stop to that: “Nice Jewish girls don’t go on the stage.” On the eve of her wedding, Edith told her virgin daughter to take a spare sheet on the honeymoon, and grit her teeth and bear it. And when she suffered from constipation during the first year of marriage, Monty put her bowel movements on a schedule. “Can you believe that,” she asked me in the last year of her life, as if these excavated memories explained everything.

    It’s a wonder that Eileen left her mark, given these omnipresent minders, but she did. Self-educated and socially engaged – from her stint as a young commie to charitable good works later in life – she made politics a part of my everyday upbringing. My organizational skills, which can be obsessive at times, must have been passed on genetically from my mother. She had a great knack for finding “horses for courses” – getting people to do what they do best, even if they don’t know it. In the last year of her life, she had my sister assigned to finances, my brother to communications, and me to questioning doctors. When I visited her a few months before her death, she set up an appointment with her GP, which she never intended to keep. “Oh no, dear, not me, you go.” My job was to check up on the doc’s check up of my mother, and bring back euphemisms. “He says you’re doing as well as can be expected.”

    My athletic ability and interest in sports clearly came from Eileen, not my wimpy dad. And my love of non-fiction owes a great deal to her, though she was a much more accomplished performer and storyteller than I’ll ever be. Despite her thoroughly middle class upbringing and marriage, her vocabulary never abandoned the working class slang, oral traditions, and Yiddish humor that were so much a part of her formative years in the industrial heartland of northern England. She talked like a cross-class polyglot, here a pretentious je ne sais quoi phrase, there a riff of street slang. “Do me a favor,” she’d ask politely when she was getting the worst of an argument. Pause, two beats. “Fuck off already.”

    I remember my mum as the life of the parties my parents used to throw in the 1950s for the Jewish petty bourgeoisie that had made it beyond the suburbs to “the country” with its faux Elizabethan pubs and anti-Semitic golf clubs. The fancy dress soirées, amateur nights, and dances to live music always bordered on the risqué and no doubt got raunchy later in the night. Eileen thrived on social vivacity and took center stage for once, while Monty-with-the-two-left-feet kept the booze flowing. Inevitably, she would agree to do her star turn: a campy rendition, sung and danced in the style of a gawky schoolgirl, of “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine,” with an encore of “Tip Toe Through the Tulips,” long before Tiny Tim’s revival made it popular.

    If you like long silences, it was best not to visit my mother in her last decade. When she was not chatting, entertaining, or telling stories, the house still throbbed with sounds. The television in the living room blasted away for most of the day and night, especially for sports. In the kitchen she turned on an old-fashioned radio as background noise. Upstairs, she had a radio and television in her bedroom, and another radio in the bathroom, one of them always on even if she was reading or doing a crossword puzzle. And it was a rare broadcast that didn’t get mum to comment. She didn’t so much talk back to the machines as with them.

    She was a talker my mum, a real talker. “Right you are, To luv,” she’d say when I took out my notebook and pencil, ready to write down her stories and dance to her words. The last time I saw my mother, a week before her death, she tells me about a dream she’d had the night before. “I’m driving around in yenna veld” – Yiddish for the next world or nowhere – “trying to find my way home. I’m lost. Each time I keep coming back to the same place where I started from. Over and over again.” Pause, her timing and pacing are still first-rate. “Who knows what that means,” she says. Shrug. Black out.

Eileen Platt (1920-1997)

MEMENTO MORI

In the summer of 2004, after a visit to Ireland, Cecilia and I spent two weeks in the village of Venasque, in the Vaucluse region of Provence, where we rented a house for two weeks. It’s the France of my imagination: a broad blue sky fractured occasionally by turbulent clouds; trees dripping with cherries and honeyed flowers; pigeons cooing by day, swallows zigzagging at sunset.

But I also brought along to Provence the sorrows of Ireland and a premonition of death.

Driving from Connemara to Dublin, a few weeks earlier, we stopped in the bustling, youthful city of Galway and discovered a local institution, Kenny’s Books. Kenny himself, seducing us far too easily with his gab, quickly sold us an armful of Irish literature after we told him that we had a taste for big, serious stuff. I was hungry for something to match my own preoccupations with aging and mortality. In my early 60s, I found myself moving on too quickly from almost forty years of full-time teaching and activism into a murky twilight.

“If it’s serious you’re wanting,” Kenny said and plied us with a pile of fiction by Dermot Healy, John McGahern, Neil Jordan, and Jennifer Johnston, our reading for France. All of these writers, deeply influenced by both James Joyce’s sensibility and style, plow through the barren fields of Ireland’s troubles, back to the catastrophe of famine and exile, the unexpected horrors of World War I – when the Irish signed up in droves, either for a pittance to send home and daily meals, or to practice how to shoot the Brits when or rather if they returned home – through the disillusionment that quickly followed the utopian dream of an independent and united Republic. There is little joy in these novels; you have to scour them hard for crumbs of relief.

I also picked up a copy of Joyce’s The Dubliners, which contains perhaps my favorite piece of short fiction, "The Dead," an essay combining elegant, compressed writing with an emotional restraint stretched taut until it bursts, a pattern I know well from experience. Joyce gives you so little to celebrate in his portraits of the disappointed lives of Dubliners in the 1900s that it is a shock to run into the extraordinary epiphany in its conclusion, when Gabriel learns from his wife’s honest revelation of a long lost love that it is “better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” For the first time in his life, and perhaps too late, Gabriel is deeply experiencing the world around him: “the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Here in Provence in early June, far from the “dark mutinous Shannon waves” in winter, we’re in one of France’s “plus beaux villages,” once a thousand years ago, maybe two thousand, a center of religion and agricultural commerce, now home to a few hundred residents, and a detour from the main road for a small number of tourists who set off from here to hike trails through the surrounding valleys and orchards. It is quiet enough at night that you can hear a dog bark a mile away, yet there is a boulangerie, epicerie, three restaurants, and a handful of working art galleries to keep stomach and spirit well fed. The village is perched high on a hill, which gave it security in medieval times, and now provides panoramic views of Mount Ventoux and the forest of Venasque, of ridged hills and Irish-green countryside stretching to the horizon.

We’d rented part of a rambling house in Venasque, named Chez Kubik after Gail Kubik (1914-1984), an American composer who lived here from 1963 until his death. He rehabilitated a building dating back to medieval times, its floors held up by massive beams added in the nineteenth century. Now it’s decorated with North African touches – terra cotta floors, tiles sculpted into white plastered walls, large windows to bring in the magical Provencal light, and shutters to keep out the midday summer sun. When Kubik died, Darius and Cathy Brubeck bought the place, which they and their family use when it’s not rented out.

There is a serendipitous connection here. I grew up a teenager in England’s industrial north in the 1950s listening to Dave Brubeck’s melodic West Coast jazz, trying my best to imitate Joe Morello, his softly swinging drummer, by accompanying the quartet on my prized drum kit, the gramophone blasting out “Take Five” in my bedroom in the Manchester suburbs. It was this kind of music, and the Beats of course, that drew me five thousand miles west as an immigrant to San Francisco in the early 1960s. Now I sit here in the dining room of Chez Kubik in southern France, admiring Cathy Brubeck’s artistic touches and lived-in space, and listening to the “Afro Cool” jazz piano of Darius Brubeck, Dave’s son, his music inspired by journeys east.

When I’m not reading Irish novels or writing, I love to shop for fruit, vegetables, and regional delights: olive-studded fougasse, white asparagus tasting of truffles, chocolate millefeuilles, fruity olive oils. My favorite market assembles in tiny Velleron every day, all year round, at six p.m. prompt. While waiting for it to open in a parking lot on the edge of the village, you can sip cold beer and eat a slice of sizzling pizza, just made in a wood-burning, brick oven in the back of a truck.

Back in our adopted home, a stroll in any direction through the narrow streets lined with sand-colored, stone houses takes you quickly out to the sloping orchards. One day I slowed myself down in the Place du Presbytère, the hub of old Venasque, to look at the war memorial that is de rigeur in every French village. It was dedicated after World War I “à ses glorieux morts” – no irony intended. Here I stop to read, one by one, the twenty-three names of the young men killed in the war, mostly in their 20s, including members of the Maillet family who lost Joseph, aged 21, and Paul, aged 23; and of the Tourrette family, who lost Henri and Louis, both 21 (and, later, Andre to the Algerian War).

These dead youngsters constitute enough for a whole class of ghosts at the nearby école de garçons. They are memorialized in Venasque not by triumphal arches or resolute combatants, but by the statue of a melancholy foot soldier, feet at ease, shoulders sloping down, glazed eyes looking off into the unknown, as the warm sun beats down upon all the living and the dead. It was on a return visit to Venasque two years later that I first heard that my son too had died. 

FACING THE PAST

    In October I spent a few days in Berlin, not for oompah and pretzels, but to check out memorial culture. I don’t know of another country that assiduously remembers the worst of its history as Germany does. Fortunately, the nation that carries the weight of Nazism did not take Ronald Reagan’s advice when he visited Bitburg cemetery in 1985 – “I don’t think we ought to focus on the past.” That could be the mantra, though, for his home state. Back in northwest California, I’m struck by how scrupulously the region forgets its sorrowful history.

    Throughout Germany there are close to two hundred “authentic sites of remembrance” of Hitler’s regime, as well as a lexicon of terms to describe the extraordinary variety of commemoration: memorials of apology, memorials of honor, active museums, memorial cemeteries, memorial plaques, thinking sites, learning places, documentation centers, and so on. In Berlin alone, you can spend a week going from site to site, as I did, and still not see everything. Back home in Humboldt County, a couple of hours once a year is all you need.

    Berlin has it all, from the monumental to the intellectual. In the center of the city is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – a huge plaza with 2,711 concrete stellae that evokes a wartime cemetery. “It’s so big, you can’t forget it,” says Angelika Kampe, a retired teacher. “It works as a landmark, like a big foot in the door of German history.”

    But if grandiose memorials and sorrowful introspection are not your taste, there is much to engage your mind and senses. At the site of the former Nazi headquarters in central Berlin, you can deepen your understanding of the “topography of terror,” learn how the best and brightest of German society created and administered Nazism. Outside Berlin, at a lake ringed with wealth, there’s the stately mansion where Hitler’s functionaries planned how to implement the final solution. On the day of my visit, the House of Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site is packed with young people studying wall texts, charts, pamphlets and books. There are no images of naked women being shoved into pits or bodies piled high into pyramids. “We are here to teach and learn,” says the center’s director, Norbert Kampe. "We want to work with the students, not shock them."

    Throughout Berlin there are memorials that catch you by surprise, blend into the everyday, and put you to work. A walk in the park can lead you to a concrete plinth with an eye-level opening that reveals a video of two men hugging and kissing, a reminder of the persecution of gays, then and now. Exiting a subway station you can find yourself face-to-face with your own image in a series of mirrors, a memorial to the Jewish garment workers who once worked in this district before they were disappeared. Walking up the impressive, red-carpeted stairway into government offices at City Hall takes you past an off-kilter, empty chair that recalls the Jewish politicians murdered by the Nazis.  An evening’s entertainment at the Berlin Phil means walking by a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of disabled and mentally ill whose murder was planned close to this celebrated concert hall.

    Back home in California, on a bitterly cold late afternoon in February, I join a small circle of folks on the west end of Woodley Island in Eureka, Humboldt’s largest city. We are here for the annual candlelight vigil to remember ancestors of the local Wiyot tribe who were murdered on nearby Indian Island in 1860. What happened on the island was part of a coordinated rampage in several villages by some of the county’s leading landowners and businessmen, resulting in the murder of two hundred Wiyot – mostly women, children and elders, hacked to death by “quiet weapons.” Those who survived were locked up in a cattle pen at Fort Humboldt.

    What happened on Indian Island was not unusual. Between 1850 and 1864, some fifty-six massacres of tribal peoples took place in Humboldt County. By the turn of the century, the shock and awe of the Gold Rush, followed by settlers and the lumber industry, reduced the region’s diverse native population by at least eighty percent, comparable to the proportion of European Jews who did not survive Nazism.

    The massacre of 1860 is not the only tragedy that took place on Indian Island. Twenty-five years later, after a weeklong pogrom against Humboldt’s Asian communities, Chinese cannery workers were imprisoned in an abandoned mill on the island until their forced expulsion to San Francisco. In the early twentieth century, Indian Island became a prime spot for professional and amateur archaeologists, collectors and hobbyists. In 1913 Berkeley anthropologist Llewellyn Loud dug up twenty-four native skeletons and shipped them back to the university. Beginning in the early 1920s, a local dentist boasted that he alone excavated 382 graves. The body parts and artifacts buried with the Wiyot ended up in museums around the world, private collections, university basements, and living room cabinets.

    The annual circle of remembrance across the water from Indian Island is the only public acknowledgement of the region’s tragic racial past that includes genocide, ethnic cleansing, and widespread grave looting. Next to the site of our ceremony is a federal plaque, installed in 1964 to commemorate Indian Island as a National Historic Landmark. But the plaque provides no information about what happened on the island or about the victims and perpetrators.

    Meanwhile, fifty yards away, is a modest but moving memorial to people who lost their lives at sea – their names engraved in stone – and a gigantic sculpture of a hulking fisherman, silhouetted against the brooding sky. But there’s nothing here or elsewhere along the Redwood highway that invites tourists and locals to consider the thousands of native peoples who unjustly lost their lives on land. No memorials that ask us to reconcile a place of extraordinary beauty with the horrors of history. Nothing to disturb the public image of Humboldt County as an “outdoor paradise” and “eco-tourist’s heaven” where “you can connect with Nature.”

    What’s missing is a connection with the people who lived here “from time immemorial” and public recognition of the bloodshed that saturates the landscape.

THE HEART JUST INSISTS

"There is no separating my life from history."

    I’m visiting my old friend Betita Martínez a few days before her 85th birthday. I bring chocolate chip cookies, and my laptop to show her photographs of a recent trip to Europe and Morocco. Our conversation is not the grand political discourse it used to be. It’s become an ode to the everyday.

    We’ve known each other for thirty-five years, from the time we worked together on a radical pamphlet about the police, through our years as comrades in a Marxist organization, and during the last two decades as leftists struggling to find our way through the dystopian gloom. While most of us licked our wounds and picked up our interrupted lives, she protested with anybody who would march in the 1990s and was never without a sheaf of leaflets in the 2000s. She'd lived, as she put it, through five international wars, six social movements, and seven attempts to build socialism around the world. She kept the faith, while mine wavered. “The heart just insists on it,” she once explained.

    Betita looms large in my memory as a professional revolutionary who managed on a few hours of sleep and an occasional steak, with little time for small talk. This wasn’t always the case. At one time she was on the fast track to professional success.

    Elizabeth Martínez grew up in the white section of Washington, D.C.’s segregated suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s. As the daughter of a dark-skinned immigrant from Mexico City and a blue-eyed North American, she felt racism in the air, “but I did not have words for it then.” Her father, Manuel Guillermo Martínez, who had witnessed the Mexican revolution as a young man, worked his way up from a clerk in the Mexican Embassy to professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown; and her mother, Ruth Sutherland Phillips, got a master’s degree from George Washington and taught advanced high school Spanish.

    Soon Betita was emulating her parents’ hard work ethic, joining the bridge club in high school and prepping for college and a career. She was the first Latina at Swarthmore, graduating with honors in history and literature in 1946. Here she began a lifelong friendship with fellow student (and later renowned economist) Andre Gunder Frank, a Jewish scholarship boy from Europe who, like Betita, knew what it felt like to be in exile, never feeling quite settled anywhere.

    After college, using her mother’s vaguely British middle name, Liz Sutherland plunged into the post-war ferment of New York’s cultural scene. With her contacts from Swarthmore opening doors to institutions typically closed to women and Latinos, jobs came quickly and easily: as a translator and researcher at the United Nations (1947-1953), an administrative assistant in the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art (1957-1958), an editor at Simon and Schuster (1958-1963), and Books and Arts Editor at The Nation (1963-1964).
   
    For some fifteen years Liz hobnobbed with cutting edge artists and literati, and married one, the writer-activist Hans Koning. She moved easily between the Lower East Side "world of Beat poets, junkie painters, and LSD experiments"  – hanging out with Diane Di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and other demimonde intellectuals – and Fifth Avenue soirées hosted by chic patrons. This ability to function in very different worlds would serve her well later in life when she had to fundraise for grassroots causes and translate radical rhetoric into palatable liberalism for middle-class audiences.

    Among her friends were photographers Edward Steichen (her boss at MoMA) and Robert Frank, and the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. "I had more wondrous and disastrous relationships than you can count," she admitted in 1998. "With poets, artists, revolutionaries, junkies, and various combinations thereof." She was a "woman in a world dominated by men," but she could more than hold her own with the big boys, whether  it was the cut-throat world of publishing or reviewing French new wave and English kitchen sink movies in the la-di-da Film Quarterly. “If the film speaks its piece well, it lacks the magic of the unsaid,” she wrote in 1961 about Karel Reiz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. “There is nothing here to make you shiver, no awareness of ‘the million-eyed Spyder that hath no name.’ The characters are all there, but they are more recognizable than illuminating.”

    Unusually for somebody still in her 30s, she had honed literary skills as an editor, designer, and a lucid, passionate writer. Most of us hope to be good at one of these things in a lifetime. She did them all really well.

    In 1960, just two years into her job with a prestigious publishing firm, Simon and Schuster – and already an editor – she was assigned to work with the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman on the publication of Four Screenplays (including  “Wild Strawberries” and “Seventh Seal”).  She saw the landmark book “through from start to finish,” she told a reporter for Saturday Review.  During a visit to Sweden to meet Bergman, they had lunch together on a set. “What was it like to talk with him, what’s he like?” I once asked her, wide-eyed. “He said I had nice legs,” she replied.

    The following year she was off to Cuba, meeting with writers and filmmakers creating a “cinema of revolution.” That was her first turning point: “When Cuba declared itself socialist, so did I.”

    In 1964, Liz served as go-between and editor for the militant black-led organization SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and Simon and Schuster, resulting in an extraordinary book of photographs, The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. It opens with three tranquil, rural images of the Deep South, followed by a carnival scene of a lynching in graphic detail. Lorraine Hansberry gets credited for the introduction, as do Danny Lyon, Roy de Carava, and others for their photographs, but Betita’s name is nowhere to be seen. (She was similarly unacknowledged for her editing role in Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, another iconic publication.)

    She finally gets her due years later for helping Jim Forman write one of the most significant memoirs of the civil rights movement, The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Holed up in a house in Puerto Rico, she helped him not only get his writing in shape, but also broaden his “understanding of the vast and deplorable role of the United States government in suppressing the rights of all nonwhite people.”

    In the mid-1960s, now in the prime of her life, Liz Sutherland made the shift from publishing to joining the Movement, giving up a sure-thing life of privilege for long hours and low pay for the next forty-five years. She became director of SNCC’s New York office, getting the word out and raising funds from Jewish sympathizers when she wasn’t on the road in Mississippi and Alabama, or making overtures on behalf of black nationalists to the Chicano-led UFW organizing migrant workers in California.  “I did not grapple with my particular identity then, with being half Mexican and half white,” she recalls. “The work said who I was.” And the work was grueling, especially for a single parent. Her pre-teen daughter Tessa “endured many lonely hours and TV dinners” when her mother was interviewing civil rights workers in the South. “She understands about Mississippi.”
   
    A few years later, three pivotal events propelled her political development in a new direction. First, SNCC had, as she put it, “an identity crisis” and decided it “should be an all-black organization.”  Stokely Carmichael made clear in a speech given in Berkeley in 1966 that “we cannot have white people working in the black community.” No one “white-baited me to my face,” says Betita recently, but to most of the SNCC staff she was “classified as white.”

    Secondly, Elizabeth Sutherland and several other refugees from SNCC contributed to “an energized convergence of women in New York City,” as one observer has noted, and were in on the ground floor of the women’s liberation movement. She "looked hard" at the sexism within the movement and didn't like what she saw: images of "our women/in postures of maternity, sadness, devotion/tears for the lost husband or son/our women, nothing but shadows/reflections of someone else's existence/BASTA!."

    Feminist Elizabeth became a member of the New York Radical Women’s collective – a group that included Joan Brown and Shulamith Firestone – and contributed an article (with Carol Hanisch, instigator of the celebrated protest of the Miss America pageant in 1968) to the first issue of Notes From The First Year, a theoretical journal of radical feminism, priced fifty cents to women and one dollar to men.

    The Hanisch-Sutherland essay, which follows right after Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Organism,” is organized as a series of answers to typically asked questions about feminism. For example, don’t some women “naturally want to be housewives?” To which the authors of “Women of the World Unite – We Have Nothing To Lose But Our Men!” reply: “Anyone who think she feels good as she surveys her kitchen after washing the 146,789th batch of sparkling dishes isn’t being ‘natural’; she’s literally lost her mind.”

    From that moment on, there was no separating the struggle against racism and sexism. "The two cannot be honestly divided," she believed. Years later, she could recall Shulie Firestone's "sad, angry eyes" when she spoke of going to an orthodox Jewish school where the boys prayed, "Thank you, Lord, for not making me a woman." And Betita could equally recall "with anguish and anger" the meeting of a woman's group that went on with business as usual the evening of Martin Luther King's assassination.

    As Elizabeth Sutherland became Betita Martínez, she made sure that issues of gender were not put on the back burner. But it wasn't easy. She held off distributing for four years a statement exposing sexism and homophobia within the Chicano movement. "The super-macho," she wrote, "is haunted by the need to prove his manhood." Yet, in 1970, she was was willing to go public with “Colonized Women: The Chicana,” her contribution to Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful, an anthology that became required reading for a generation of feminists. Today, Morgan quickly recalls Betita’s “intensely feminist intelligence and commitment. Her stubborn insistence on freedom and power for all members of communities of color – including, surprise! women – got her into a lot of hot water. But that never stopped her.”

    Thirdly, a trip to Cuba in 1967 connected her with an inspirational gathering of Latin American revolutionaries that triggered her own identity crisis: “the ground of my life was shifting, stretching.” She took off for New Mexico in 1968, where she founded a Chicano movement newspaper, El Grito del Norte. When she got off the plane and "saw the silhouetted mountain range called Blood of Christ, Sangre de Christo, there was no doubt: I smelled Home." Here she organized the Chicano Communications Center. “A voice inside of me said, ‘You can be Betita Martínez here. It feels like home’.”
 
    It felt like home until the mid-1970s, when the collective built around El Grito del Norte foundered on betrayals and recrimination. It was a time of "loss and loneliness" that prompted Betita to leave New Mexico and join a leftist organization in San Francisco, hoping to be part of a movement that would transcend identity politics. Ten years later, after the Marxist left also imploded, she returned to grassroots work, searching for ways to bring communities of color together, speaking out fiercely against racism, sexism, and war – saying “NO to any definition of social justice that does not affirm our human oneness.”
 
    While illness limited Betita’s mobility when she reached her 80s, she kept on writing, as she’d done all her life. Without a university base or philanthropic support, she has accomplished what most academics never do in a lifetime: written several books that have left a deep impact on readers searching for socially relevant, well researched, and thoughtful history and commentary. Among her lasting contributions are Letters From Mississippi (1964), The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba (1969), 500 Years of Chicano History (1976), and 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History (2008), not to mention hundreds of journalistic essays. In 2000, she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, but not the private pension, home ownership, and other perks that typically crown an academic career.

    Recently, Betita looked more deeply and honestly into the self-inflicted wounds that can’t simply be blamed on the man, “the human toll of righting wrong.” It troubles her that for too long the Chicano movement was seen as a subsidiary of the African American movement; that women in SNCC and Chicano  organizations were too often considered subordinate to “male warriors” and assigned housewifely duties; that in the name of fighting for a “humanist society,” Marxist organizations could treat its cadre so brutally. And while she gave all to her extended political family, Betita “deeply regrets neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter who needed much more attention than she received in those years.”

    Now it’s the mother who needs and gets much more attention from her daughter. A stroke makes it hard for Betita to see, hear, and remember yesterday’s visitors, yet she insists on living by herself with her dog Honey in a small, rented apartment in San Francisco’s Mission district, surrounded by books, posters, mementos, and rows of filing cabinets. "I love all dogs and some people," she says. But she’s always delighted to see visitors, and disappointed when we leave.

    Today, the talk is about a trip Cecilia and I took recently. Her eyesight is not good, so she sits almost on top of the screen of my laptop as I scroll through hundreds of photographs that for me are already in the twilight between just now and the past.

    As she imagines the photos through a blur, I tell her stories to go with the images: riding a lurching camel through pillowy sand dunes in the Sahara, shopping in an outdoor market in Provence for just-picked fruits and vegetables, circling Jeff Koons' gigantic flowering puppy that sits calmly outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao, watching kids splashing through a swimming pool installation on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in London, and stumbling over memory plaques in Berlin. She happily munches cookies, and lights up when I come to photos of our new dog. "You must bring Buster here,” she says. "We must all go to Morocco to see the camels." She laughs at the absurdity and attractiveness of the possibility.

    She’s thirsty and I look for a glass near her sink. "This one?" I ask. "Yes," she replies, "that one. It's a mere bagatelle." I do a double take and she laughs. "I haven't heard that in a long time," I say. "Me neither," says Betita. "How come I can remember that, but can't remember the name of the person who helps me every day?" We stop for a moment, pondering the marvelous trickiness of the brain. Then, just as we have often done together, we muse about the meaning and etymology of this trifle of a word. As I search her well-used English and French dictionaries, and read out aloud all the detailed information I can find, I am reminded of the many times that we have done this together, sharing our pleasure in words and language, and for this moment all is as it was.

Happy birthday to Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez, born 12 December 1925.

THE DIRTY HISTORY OF THE NUREMBERG LAWS*

    Historical anniversaries are typically an occasion for remembrance, but the content of what and why we remember is always changing, and sometimes a matter of argument.

    Take, for example, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, whose passage seventy-five years ago in Nazi Germany transformed Jews from citizens to inferior subjects. To Hitler’s regime, the laws were a marker along the triumphant journey to the thousand-year Reich, to be celebrated as the purging of a deadly microbe from the political body of a resurrected Germany. To Jews, the laws represented a signpost pointing to the dead end ahead.

    Beginning October 6th, the National Archives is displaying the one-and-only original Nuremberg Laws for the first time in the nation’s capitol. We can only make sense of the documents in historical context, but what context to choose? There are debates among historians about the significance of the Nuremberg Laws for the Nazi state, and among curators about the pros and cons of displaying icons of fascism. And let’s not forget the seamy story of how the documents ended up in the United States through the machinations of a celebrated American general and world-famous library. Or the even more disturbing story about the mutually appreciative relationship between the Nazi and American eugenics movements.
 
    First, the facts about which there’s no dispute. The laws – so-called because Hitler ordered their passage in Nuremberg during the Nazi party’s 1935 rally – consisted of three separate pieces of legislation that were rubber-stamped by the Reichstag in an atmosphere of fascist pomp. The Reich Flag Law replaced the colors of the Weimar Republic with the swastika. The Reich Citizenship Law established a distinction between “citizens of the Reich,” who were entitled to full political and civil rights, and “subjects” who were excluded from those rights. The third statute, known as the Blood Law, legislated the subordinated status of Jews by prohibiting marriage or sexual relations between Jews and German citizens, the hiring by Jews of German citizens under the age of forty-five as servants, and flying the German flag by Jews.

    The Nuremberg Laws codified segregation and anti-Semitism into legislation. It is only recently that popular histories of Nazism have identified the laws, in the words of Michael Berenbaum, as “the first step towards destruction.” But long before 1935, Hitler’s vitriolic hatred of Jews was a centerpiece of his politics. “The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew,” he wrote in Mein Kampf in 1925. And when the Nazis assumed power in 1933, they quickly barred Jews from public office and most professions. Two years later, the Reichstag confirmed racist policies that were already well under way. It may be symbolically powerful, but not the most accurate history, to suggest that the road to Auschwitz began in Nuremberg in 1935.

    As specialists in German history have observed, the Nuremberg Laws are important as an example of the four hundred decrees and regulations through which the Nazi regime translated their obsession with racial hygiene into “a routine process of problem-solving,” in the words of Zygmunt Bauman. “Bureaucracy made the holocaust. And it made it in its own image.” The laws illustrate how the idea of genocide became a popular political project, requiring the mobilization of millions of active and passive supporters.

    For descendants of victims of Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws has another kind of appeal: Hitler’s illegible signature scrawled on the four-page, typewritten laws. His signature is quite common to collectors, but in the absence of documents signed by Hitler ordering the mass murder of Jews, the Blood Law is widely regarded as a physical relic of the Holocaust. Consequently, for many people the documents themselves prompt memories of terror. But there’s also the danger that Hitler’s signature might pander to a fascination with notoriety among some history buffs and neo-Nazis. Not surprisingly, German museums, as well as the National Archives, are careful to limit public access to Hitler memorabilia.

    There’s also an important American twist to the story that deserves remembrance. The original Nuremberg Laws ended up in the United States because General George Patton pocketed them for personal use in violation of Eisenhower’s order to collect important Nazi documents for possible use as legal evidence. Patton stashed the laws at the prestigious Huntington Library in Southern California; after his death, library officials kept the documents off-the- books for fifty-four years, preserved in a bombproof vault, without disclosing their presence to scholars or the public.

    In 1999, the Huntington announced their ownership of the Nuremberg Laws, but failed to carry out a title check, despite their suspicion, in the words of senior curator, that the documents “seem pretty clearly to be war loot.” Moreover, the library publicized without verification a statement fabricated by Patton that he had received the documents lawfully from one of his generals in a “great public presentation.”

    The Huntington chose not to display the Nuremberg Laws, instead loaning them “indefinitely” to the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center in Los Angeles, without informing the center of the documents’ dubious provenience. A few weeks ago, the Huntington yanked the Nuremberg Laws from the Skirball without consultation and did what they should have done in 1945 – turned over the laws to the National Archives, where they would have ended up with thousands of other Nazi materials. But even now, in full knowledge of the library’s role, the Huntington failed to acknowledge its own complicity in covering up the malfeasance of a war hero. No doubt, the close relationship of the Huntington and Patton families, and the centrality of General Patton in the origins story of the Library account for this selective amnesia.

    But the collusion of the Huntington in Patton’s theft is not the only issue that should be remembered. More significantly, Patton and several academics at the Huntington – openly from the 1930s until U. S. entry into the war, and privately through the 1950s – supported the racist and anti-Semitic ideology embedded in the Nuremberg Laws. Patton grew up with a romantic affinity to the “lost cause” of the Confederacy, was a lifelong white supremacist, and flirted with fascist ideas. He remained convinced during the war that “a colored soldier cannot think fast enough to fight in armor.” And at the end of the war, he confided in his diary and letters home that Jews were “lower than animals” who “never had any sense of decency or else they lost it during their period of internment by the Germans.”

    Meanwhile, back at the Huntington, leading members of the board of trustees – including the Nobel-prize winning physicist, Robert Millikan – were active and enthusiastic supporters of the Human Betterment Foundation, a rightwing eugenics think tank in Pasadena with close ties to Nazi “racial scientists.” Like their counterparts in Germany, they too advocated sterilization of the “socially unfit,” bans on “miscegenation,” and policies of apartheid as a means to cleanse the body politic of racial impurities.

    It’s fitting that the original Nuremberg Laws will now be preserved at the National Archives. Hopefully, the documents will be displayed on their 75th anniversary as more than a symbol of Nazi injustice. There are also lessons to be taught about what happened here as well as over there: low dealings in high places, homegrown racism, and the blurred line between fascism and democracy.

* This essay was first published in Truthdig.com, October 5, 2010