by Marge Piercy
The other men liked to dance with her if they liked to dance, but it was an interval. It was nice but slightly artificial. Something in their manner said that when she used sensual gestures she was not quite fair, or that they would overlook them. She was unsexed for them. Corey was not quite unsexed. Sometimes away from her, he would go to bed with some girl. He would tell her deprecatingly. He told it that they came after him, and she believed it. Girls liked to flirt with him, girls liked to touch him. He was easy to touch. He was as simply sensual as a cat. He liked to be stroked. But then she would walk by, and he would nudge the girl off his lap and come loping after to tell her something. He was satisfied to try out his charm and get a response and quit. Many girls looked after him with a sour expression.
Sometimes she did get jealous of all the stir and fuss around him when they were traveling. Shawn knew that, and he would tease her:
What a road show are Corey and Shawn.
They like to turn the folks on.
They razzle and dazzle and burn to a frazzle,
while Joanna conceals a yawn.
Back on the farm this time, two weeks worth of new arrivals had come and settled in. She couldn’t just start orienting somebody who’d been there for two weeks and had already made a small place for himself. Finally she had to see that she couldn’t really make a case for the kids she had oriented doing a hell of a lot better than the ones she’d missed. It had been a make-work idea, a sappy scheme to create importance for herself. Corey must have been patronizing her politically to encourage her. Or he had simply refused to confront her on it. Or worse, he thought it did not really matter how she kept herself busy.
“Aw, come on” Shawn said. “It was a good idea. But with all this running around, you just can’t do it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing. Can you judge how the kids felt?”
Big Ned was from Fink’s Bend. He was not exactly a runaway. A couple of times a year he wrote his parents a scrawly letter without a return address, and sometimes he would buy a gaudy postcard to send them from San Francisco or Seattle. This time, coming back from St. Louis, Big Ned was driving, and he drove them to Fink’s Bend. “I just got to stop by and see how the folks are doing. We’re safe with them. People, I just got to see if they’re okay. They can’t write to me anywheres. We won’t stay but an hour or two. And I can drive all night to make up.”
The river was pretty, the town was mean and the house was out back of town, as Ned had described it. It was a farmhouse without a farm, an unpainted two-story with a lean-to attached, and two tires in the yard full of dead petunias, while another tire for a swing hung from a horse chestnut. It was a couple of weeks past Christmas, but a tissue-paper wreath that one of Ned’s sisters had made at school was still nailed on the door.
The gas stove had a heater in it, and they all sat in the crooked kitchen around a big table drinking coffee and eating eggs and fried potatoes that two of the girls had cooked. Mr. Howard, Ned’s father, was a laid-off miner, ten years laid off. Joanna thought he was an old man until she looked at his eyes. Ned told them Mr. Howard was in his late forties. He was smaller than his son by more than a head. His eyes were a pale but glittery blue-gray always roaming over them all and asking questions about who and how and what they were that he was too hospitable and too polite to ask out loud. They were waiting for Ned’s ma to come home. She was the only one with a regular job. She worked in a clothing factory moved into town to take advantage of the cheap non-union labor of the ex-miners’ wives.
Mr. Howard had been out of Fink’s Bend, mainly in the Army. He had come back with a metal plate in his knee and gone into the mines until the owners closed them down. Once again he had left, to go to Chicago for work. There he had been lured and laid off and mugged and his salary at the new job attached to pay for a TV he had bought for his hot furnished room, and the new company hadn’t liked his salary being attached, so they’d fired him. After that, everybody had said he was too old.
Mrs. Howard had had to send him the money to come home.
He was answering Corey’s questions one at a time, shaking his head as he talked and listening to his own tale as if wondering at it all. He told it as if he were sure there was a joke in it if only he listened. He watched them carefully for their reactions. He told it as if it must be a funny story, a shaggy-dog story, if only he knew how to look at it.
He wanted Ned to stick around a while. He kept saying Ned had to stay long enough to go hunting, and he’d see if his boy was still good for anything. See if he still knew how to use a gun. He poached, of course, and he hated the wardens.
Mrs. Howard arrived finally after dark, thin and wispy and gray and too excited by Ned to talk. Three kids were still at home, and Ned impressed them that they must not tell anyone that they were there.
After supper, Ned and his father and Shawn and Corey drank white lightning while Joanna sat in the kitchen with Ned’s mother and the girls. They were shy of her and did not talk much. Ned asked his father a lot of questions about people he had known, and Corey asked about the town. After a while he came out to the kitchen and asked the kids lots of questions, too. He had to loosen them up, but he teased them until they were giggling, and then he got them talking about the school and the kids there and their lives and the town.
They left the next morning, early. Corey was silent for half the day, before he began to talk about Fink’s Bend. “It’s a worked-out colony. The powers came in, they worked those mines and worked the men and got what there was to get, and then they cleared out. Leaving hunger and waste and a gutted land. I don’t know how to deal with it. Maybe we depend on a certain amount of fat. Of course Ned isn’t revolting against his parents. They didn’t fuck up, they got fucked over. Like my old woman. But it’s like we’re irrelevant there. We can’t tell Ned’s family to come along and turn Indians. But they’ve been robbed. How can we give them back what they need?”
Ned said only, “It’s a pretty place. You ought to see it in the spring. There’s still a lot of room for hunting and fishing. It’s good country, even if you can’t do nothing with it.”
“I don’t know how to speak to the guys standing around the streets of that town. We’ve worked out our own language and our own way of being together, but somehow it doesn’t include those robbed bastards, and it ought to. It’s our fault that we can’t. It’s dangerous. The people who should be cheering us on all think we should be lined up against a wall and shot. But I know I can’t make it with them. Maybe we just have to try to reach their kids and that has to be enough. But it doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like failure.”
So much time riding in the rut of a highway. So much time half awake, half asleep, with his heavy head on her shoulder and their legs cramped in back seats. So much time driving into the glare of headlights with a rock station turned loud till the whole car pounded. Dairy Queens and Howard Johnson’s and Glass Houses and Savarins and Chicken Delights and McDonald’s Hamburgers and Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer stands. They were always constipated or belching and raw-stomached. Shawn and Big Ned could fart at will and had contests. Corey was broken out in pimples. He had picked up crabs somewhere, and now she had them too. They seemed to grow up in waves. She would itch frenetically. Then they would the away into a lull that would make her imagine she was rid of them. Then they would swarm again.
Yet, at times, it seemed to her that they ran back and forth across the countryside upon tracks. From commune to commune they rushed and imagined that they were reaching out. Every time they passed a school in session, she had a strong sense that that was where their caravan should be halting.
She tried to correct the maps in her head and tried to remember that they were only going from little group to little group across the country in scattered patches, and largely they were talking to themselves. Though their survival depended on building as big a base as possible, kids tended to become quickly uncomfortable with people outside the movement and not to want to deal with the
m. Their jargon and slogans isolated them. It was a drag to talk to people who did not share your assumptions: you had to start with ABC, practically. Older Indians often showed their contempt for new recruits, who sounded too much like the society they had all just left. They hated what they had been, and kids who reminded them of their old selves.
Corey had a theoretical grasp of that narrowness and was always pushing the need to grow. Nevertheless, he would extrapolate from the tiniest scrap of contact to a roaring movement. Because of Marcus and his boys in the Catskills, he would talk about the Indians as a black movement as well as white. Actually, their only contact was the food-and-medicine drops monthly. Because they had some farms, he would talk of them as having gone to the countryside like Mao to build their peasant base. But no one on any of the farms ever talked to another farmer. They were farming in secrecy, as remote from the rest of the countryside as any gentleman farmer. Because Billy had trained a few warriors in small-weapons use, Corey would talk about the Indian army of urban guerrillas. Sometimes in listening she felt as if they were all manipulating words and symbols and imagining that somehow the symbols would convert themselves magically into real power at the instant of need.
Corey still talked a lot about the Indian resistance in the past, but that mythology meant little to most of the others. Most of the kids talked a great deal of Mao and Che and Lenin, and if they could make a comparison, no matter how farfetched, between something they were doing and some action of one of their heroes or some piece of history in China or Cuba, then they were suddenly more confident, they felt real.
“Despair is a revolutionary crime” Corey would tell her. “We must have a real will to power. We must break through our own impotence into real struggle” At times she felt as if that breakthrough was only a form of theater. They were always whipping each other into more-and-more-militant thrusts of rhetoric. Nobody dared seem less revolutionary than anybody else. Their language was all of armed struggle, while they had not one plane or tank or bomb.
She thought again and again of what Corey had said about Fink’s Bend, and it seemed to her that in a way he was wrong: that they did have something to say to everybody. The desire to be free was an old native urge. Fink’s Bend had been populated by people who had gone there to be free and independent. Everywhere the mechanisms for keeping people passively in their places were eroding. People were not getting back what they wanted for their sold labor. Taxes grew and services shrank. Prices rose and quality decayed. Everywhere people felt used and betrayed and coerced and cheated. Mostly they blamed each other or the blacks or the foreigners who kept making trouble for the U. S. Army in the various countries they happened to live in, or the kids who kept making noise and rocking the boat. Joanna kept thinking that somebody ought to be talking to them.
But somehow they were not getting any better at talking to people who were not yet Indians. They were getting louder and angrier and shriller. They were getting surer they knew the answers—all the answers. Councils tended to turn into sharp debates now between different sides gathered around leaders who could argue a position and put others down. The shyer, the less verbal, got less verbal still and finally kept their mouths shut. The louder got louder still. In some tribes the women might as well have stayed out of council, for they were ignored and afraid to speak.
There was fear everyplace. There was reason for fear everyplace. Wherever they went, they heard stories of arrests and beatings and raids and imprisonment.
Shawn Rides the Tiger
Shawn felt burnt out much of the time. The three of them were still together a lot, but they were separated more in their functions. He would set himself up with whoever he was playing with while Joanna went off to do her woman’s thing and Corey rapped with the council. Joanna had her own style— tense, and yet somehow plain—but she didn’t think so, or pretended not to. “I don’t like you to listen. Eh, I sound like Corey.” She made a monkey face.
Shawn said, “We all sound like Corey.”
“Nobody sounds like you.”
“Nobody looks like you.”
She fluffed out her hair in mock coquettishness. “Do you look at me?”
They flirted that way, in intervals. They were so much together. Of course he and Corey flirted too, but in an easier way, all told. It was easier for Corey to demand affection and easier for him to express it. There wasn’t even curiosity between Joanna and him, because what could happen had, long ago, and meant nothing. But he saw her and she saw him clearly. They were alert to small signals. Shawn always knew when she was bored or irritated or tired to exasperation. She could tell when he was about to become monolithically stubborn or to infuriate strange warriors by acting in ways that showed off his utter contempt for their virtues, his gentleness, his sensuality, his mockery.
They watched over each other and took care and tempered the rasp of circumstance. They were each other’s road managers.
Corey had to be more alert to the special conditions of every commune, every encampment, every council. He could not listen at them the way they listened at him and each other. They took care of him but he could not, on the road, take care of them. Corey kept pushing them to play larger and larger independent roles—within the context of what he was about.
“Corey’s less dependent than he was?” Joanna said, trying out the words. It was snowing. They sat in a car with the heater and wipers going, waiting for a warrior to bring them formulas that Billy wanted to go into production in the lab at the farm. Some kind of cheap explosives. They felt uneasy but as Corey said, they couldn’t oppose what had been decided by council, and who wanted to sound counter-revolutionary?
Shawn drew on the steamed-up side window. He drew a Corey devil face with horns. “Nonsense. He’s just completely assimilated us. We’re extra selves.”
Or they would reverse positions. Both Joanna and Shawn could do that, because they could switch their polarizations according to mood. Generally he had a strong sense of self and was seeking a sense of connection. Generally she had a strong sense of connection and was seeking a sense of herself. But they could switch.
He shared with her a mistrust of their roles. At times she accused Corey of using the aroused interest in women’s liberation to sneak in his influence through her, Trojan-horse style. She would say the division of labor between them was the same old sexual division of labor—reproduced. Then she would change her mind and assert that only a woman could speak to women’s problems, because a man could not help but be manipulative in any situation with women.
Whatever the rhetoric, in tribe after tribe women mostly ended up running the kitchen, taking care of housework and babies, running the mimeograph machine, serving as bodies in demonstrations they had not planned or directed, serving as runners carrying messages or equipment of whose purpose they were often kept ignorant, doing all the tedious daily tasks that made tribal life possible. The women who made it into more effective and interesting roles did not think of themselves as representing a constituency of downtrodden women, but hung out with the male warriors and acted as much like them as possible. Joanna never felt that she was in danger of behaving that way (like Carole for instance), but she felt something crooked in the heart of her new political role that she could not quite isolate.
“I’m not liberated!” she yelled at Corey.
“Nobody is till everybody is. How can you expect to be liberated in the middle of a vast prison?”
“Words, words! You just mix them around and make boxes with them to hold your head in. I ask something real, and you give me back an abstraction. Plastic Man!”
Shawn thought Joanna was a little off in thinking of it all as a man/ woman thing. He thought it was beyond that, a whole way of relating in dominance or submission that was built into the sex roles, true enough, which was one reason he wouldn’t fulfill them, but built also into other relationships—parent/child, teacher/student, employer/employee, doctor/ patient. Whenever the balance of power was unequal,
there was a driver and a driven. Power was the lethal vice, the turn-on with evil built into it, because it required a victim to manifest itself. Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject. Corey and Joanna were still arguing in the back seat as Shawn drove.
“For instance if I disagree with you, I do it now. I don’t stand up and argue with you in meetings. I say it to you afterward”
Corey shrugged broadly. “Well, I can listen better now. We don’t have to use councils to talk to each other. We need to use councils to listen to everybody else. It would be irresponsible for you to use up council time on something we can do better on our own time.”
“Because I’m your private property. That’s why”
They sulked and scratched at each other and filled the car with the sulphurous fumes of their angers. They made up, curling into a ball. Black coarse hair, tangled carroty hair, their tough skinny bodies criss-crossed on a mattress into a porcupine of warm flesh and wild hair. They found each other in some dark underground knot of interlocked roots. Shawn sniffed around them. Different from anything he had known. Not for him. But it had an interesting atmosphere to it. He wondered what it would feel like to live so embedded in another.
And Shawn’s own role? Why wasn’t it altogether right? Better than it had been before the Indians. What he did was no longer ambiguous or commercial or sold out. Still, in the context there was something manipulative. He could remember how it had been when The Coming Thing had first got started, that sense of music being the most important event in the world, that sense of white-hot sexual joyous happening, of the world in flower. He had shared then a sense of making a new music with honesty and passion and abandon, of being the creative center of a pulsating universe.
He wasn’t making a new music now. He was using what he had learned. Rather, it was being used. He had put himself and his music in the service of the revolution, but somehow there was no interaction. In itself his music had become less vital. He knew he was not as good. How could he be without a regular group, without a committed group of genuinely talented musicians to work with, without being able to close into himself and into them and build musical ideas? He said every day that that was no longer important, but part of him did not believe it.
