Dance the Eagle to Sleep

by Marge Piercy

  People buzzed to each other, obviously uncomfortable with the format of everybody sitting in seats instead of the familiar circle, speakers addressing the group instead of each person speaking what he had to say in his turn. Billy had foreseen that and approved. No time for rigmarole and mystic formulas when they faced destruction. They had to sit still and listen to be moved into action. Tonight was to be the step beyond games. He needed the mass effects, the ambience of audience caught in large currents to pull them across.

  Having kept the arrangements in tight hands, he had placed his warriors around the edges and across the sides of the stage for visual and psychological effect. They looked tough and disciplined. They were his pride and delight. From adolescent misfits, sour and lazy and rank with self-pity and spongy daydreams, stupefied and vain and whining and on the make, he had created real urban guerrillas. He had forged a responsible, trained corps. They were the fruit of months of hard work, so let them stand where everyone could see and admire and want to emulate. If he considered them an elite, it was with a consciousness of what material he had squeezed that cadre from. If they were an elite, an elite could be made out of any material with sufficient work, intelligence, direction, and pressure—pressure from the inside and the outside. It had been a matter of upping the ante for the prestige that all kids wanted from their peers. Now let his warriors, his best troops, be prominently displayed around the hall as one of his best arguments in the fight that was coming here tonight.

  The walls and the stage were heavily hung with posters and pictures of Third World revolutionaries. Beside the portraits of Che and Mao were innumerable Bolivian and Guatemalan and Algerian and Vietnamese and Angolan martyrs and fighters. That too was part of upping the ante. It was not merely a matter of needing alternative heroes. The past struggles in the United States could have filled the walls with dead radicals. It was not merely a matter of feeling solidarity with others who were fighting the same enemy in various parts of the empire.

  It had to do with wanting to be somebody else. It had to do with the middle-class guilt that all these kids had instilled in them, a sense of powerlessness in themselves, futility, the subtle socialization through guilt and shame and the daily quiet gnawing fear of the loss of love through which they had all been persuaded they wanted to shit in the potty and keep their hands off their peckers and eat their food and not kick or punch each other. And go to school and sit in school and not wet their panties and keep quiet and keep still and be good and perform well. It was not enough not to fight. If you went inert, you got sent down to the lower tracks to be packed into hell and welfare. No, you had to perform. Neither an overachiever nor an underachiever be.

  So they all wanted to be somebody else, someplace else. They hated where they came from too much to want to think about what a revolution by and for such people might involve. He was giving them images of manhood to enter that vacuum.

  The meeting began with terse reports of what had happened—the two raids and a general dragnet on the streets. The cops had hit another commune two days before, but the commune had already dispersed and nobody had been taken. Marilyn, chosen by lot to head security for March, gave her report. Evidence suggested the Indians had been informed on by someone who had lived in the Hudson Street commune and spent time on the farm.

  Two people fit that description: Ellie was a high school dropout who had joined the Indians the year before. She had been arrested in demonstrations at the schools between semesters, with the bunch of high school kids she was working with. Tim was an experienced warrior and bread distributor who had been trapped by narks on February 14 and was being held without bail and was expected to be court-martialed for desertion from the street militia in Cleveland. As far as they could find out, Ellie was in an institute for juvenile offenders upstate. Tim seemed likelier, as he could face a death sentence for desertion, as well as life imprisonment under the federal legislation against psychedelic drugs. They had been unable to trace his whereabouts.

  People were scared as they listened to the reports, he could feel that. Not scared for their necks, not scared for their politics, but little scared: scared for their comforts and their tribes and their friends and their daily pleasures and hassles. Scared of a change, that was what it came down to. He could thank the enemy for breaking up the communes, because from organizing tools they had become homes for wayward adolescents, and everybody would have been content to play ring around the posy for the next ten years. Now the people were shaken out of their comfy social burrows.

  The meeting moved slowly, like a fat old dog looking for fleas. He forced his patience to stretch and stretch, letting the tensions speak themselves, waiting until the room was on the edge of impatiently demanding an answer, a plan. Then just as he was ready to move, just as he glanced over at Matty to give the sign, Corey rose out of the audience like a waif and jumped up on the stage. He took the microphone, going to sit on the apron with his legs dangling over.

  “Sisters and brothers, this is the season of the steamroller, of the club and the net. But we are water, and we will flow away, and re-form ourselves together in our season.

  “Brothers and sisters, we have taken ourselves, frantic freaked-out kids with the man’s programming in our heads, fear and poison in our bodies, and we have made a new people. Now the man is breaking the center. We must flow out. Those who are deserters have to go underground, and we must have solid ID for everyone in danger. But those of us who face only small detainment have to be strong enough to pass through organizing. It is time to go home for a while. It is time to go back where we came from, bringing the message, and spreading the tribes.

  Today is March 18. The year’s big call up comes after July 4. We have almost four months to organize a massive refusal. We have four months to pull friends out of the system. In the summer we will come back together in a new wave, five times as strong. It is time to show the strength of water and flow away from the man’s steamroller. To stand is to be crushed, but to flow out is to gather new strength. We have to be ready for the most massive organizing and recruiting campaign we’ve ever tackled. What we have to do is break into small groups here in the auditorium, and each person should hassle out with his tribe what he should do: the danger he faces, his resources, his tasks. We must develop clear organizing strategies. We can help each other to choose not just the survival route, but the growth route, in spite of the club, in spite of the raids, in spite of our sisters and brothers now in the man’s jails.”

  As Billy strode forward to grab the mike, he was not really angry. He was exalted, he was more high and ready than angry, but anger was his manner. Corey could not avoid this confrontation. Let him try to turn this clash into cornmeal mush. The lines were drawn past his old ability to soften and confuse them. The lines were drawn before everyone.

  “Warriors and tribesmen, we have just heard the council of defeat. The enemy is attacking us, so we should surrender our territory and scatter before the heat. Who here doesn’t dig that our only strength comes from being united? As individuals, they can pick us off. As tribes, we can fight back. We should go underground, says a former leader. But our friends went underground, into the tunnels, went into hiding instead of fighting, and where are they? The only good defense is offense. The only people who got off the trap of the farm were those who fought their way off. They’re here tonight. Where are the others?”

  He had touched them on a nerve. He felt it. “The proposal of my opponent is basically that since the enemy is attacking our organization, we should disband it before he attacks more. Why should we quit? We lost members of two communes, sure, but two months ago we had that many less members. Why are we growing? Because we fight the man. Because we attack instead of letting ourselves be rounded up like sheep. Because we are militant and protect our people, and everyone knows it. It’s no time to abandon what we’ve stood for that brought people to us—that brought in every warrior in this room. The enemy won’t change his mind about squashing us i
f we’re stupid enough to do his job for him and disarm ourselves and scatter back to the homes and stinking neighborhoods where we could not survive before. Go back, pretend it never happened, maybe the man will forget. Maybe we should all turn ourselves in and enlist. No, warriors and tribesmen. We aren’t that weak. It’s time to strike back. It’s time to take the offensive. It’s time to attack. We’ll defend our territory. We’ll call out the high schools. We’ll have actions in the streets, and we’ll tie up this fucking city. The man won’t know which way to swing his club. The whole city will be cracking. We’ll make the Lower East Side so hot, the man won’t be able to patrol it. Well force him out and patrol our own turf. That’s how we’ll save ourselves as a tribe. Not as chickens running for shelter. As Indians fighting together for our communes and turf. Call out the high schools! Call out the tribes! Into the streets and onto the housetops. This is our city. The streets belong to the people. Let’s take them!”

  People were on their feet, yelling. His warriors were beating on the floor in unison, with a weird hollow drumming effect that made the hair on his neck rise. Childish rituals. He could taste the excitement, he was himself high and riding on it, yet he knew the crowd’s excitement and his own were alien as mouse and giraffe.

  Never sentimentalize your material. The bricklayer who overly cherished bricks would never build a wall. And other homilies. Speechmaking rotted the brain. But over time he had dealt with his own repulsions, his clumsiness, his shyness before groups.

  A couple of his warriors followed to support him. All that arranged beforehand, the general pitch. They were doing okay. He did not have to listen but could watch the crowd instead. Tilting his glasses, pressing them hard into his cheeks to make out the haze of heads farther back, he read face by face through the rows, counting votes by expressions. Yes, he would carry them.

  Corey got the mike again. He should not have been able to. He just gently took it, and the warrior, Matty, who had been speaking let him. Billy thought quickly, procedural point. No, let him go first, then come on himself to clobber.

  Corey stood with head jutting forward, his face gloomy and sullen and his eyes glaring out from under half-shut lids. He looked awful. Billy moved up to stand beside him, towering over. Lack of sleep, fear for Joanna, hair cropped almost to baldness: Corey’s charisma was damp and low. For once, they were equal in this fight. Corey would pull no miracles of flesh and charm and brother-me sister-me words. He had no miracles to shake out of his skinny body like the bullfighter’s red satin cape magically whipped out of his bony ribs. Nothing but empty hands that cut the air mechanically as he spoke. His voice had gone dry. He turned and saw Billy standing over him, and for an instant their eyes met with a full glare of hostility on both sides.

  “We grow dizzy with our own rhetoric. We give ourselves visions that blind us to the real situation. There are not yet enough of us to fight the state. There are not yet enough of us to bring down this city. We don’t want to take over the system, but to abolish it. There are many ways to fight, but with weapons is the worst right now, because we can’t win. We should never fight when we can’t win”

  Some of the warriors booed and pounded on the floor in derision. The bad luck, the shame of the farm fell on Corey.

  “We must not be blinded by our own metaphors. We call ourselves warriors, we call ourselves guerrillas—so we can understand we’ve left their machine and are out to destroy it. But we must not be trapped inside our words. There are times to be visible and times to be invisible. We are afraid to leave the comfort of our communes and our tribes, but we must go out and organize everywhere.”

  “It’s you who’s scared now!” a woman shouted. “We don’t want to run away. We want to fight. Sit down!”

  “We must not let our own words and our habits and our past trap us. We must not just react to the enemy but act freely out of our own need to grow, and the need of those still inside the beast for liberation. We must go back and come out again. This is the path of growth. That is the real path of the Indian now, more difficult than rushing into the streets, because it will take greater strength and more purpose than we’ve ever shown.”

  It was not working, it was not working. Corey hated being booed, and he showed it. His voice sounded petulant. He retreated into self-righteousness. Their mood was running against him, and he could not come to meet it. He was not moving to effect the compromise that would heal. The more the warriors booed him, the more he repeated himself, embracing his martyrdom.

  “It’s going to be hard to go back where we came from because we were all so proud we left. But we have to go back for the others and bring them out too. We don’t have the strength of metal but the strength of water. We must trust our own strength and take the difficult path of dispersing in order to reunite.”

  Billy stepped nearer. Enough, enough. Corey was still holding the mike and tried to speak to him directly: “Billy, don’t hold too hard to the line. We need to loosen, to change as the situation hardens—”

  Billy pulled the mike from his hand. He turned to the audience, stepping to the edge of the stage. “Who dares to say we can’t fight? Who dares to say, now that the chips are down, that being warriors was only a game, only words? Look around you. These are fighting men and they’re ready to fight. It’s always easy to find excuses for your lack of nerve. We all have reasons to be afraid. Let’s stop pointing fingers. We all get tired and lose our nerve. We get confused and think up reasons not to act. It seems to us too much has been asked, that the price is too high. We want to rest for a while, to take it easy. That’s how defeat comes: when we’re defeatist beforehand. Of course there’s danger. Only a fool would pretend there isn’t, and only a fool would deny what you know: that it will be tough and dirty on the streets, and many of us will go down. But we’ll push the pigs off our turf and liberate our streets if we hang together. If we’re defeated, then is the time to counsel retreat. Then we can disperse and run away. But we’re not defeated. We’ve been attacked, we’ve lost a few prisoners. But here we are, look around! Are you beaten? Tell me!” Shouts of “No!” “Vote, then. Let me hear you! How many are ready to fight?”

  The shout was deafening.

  People hated the smell of defeat, and Corey gave it off, standing backstage with one tall guy. Shawn! Billy felt in his euphoria like giggling. Shawn had cut his hair and dyed it brown. There was a warrant out on him. Put on a pair of specs and a secondhand suit. He was talking fast and earnestly at Corey, who did not appear to be listening. Corey would not accept defeat— not this personal setback. Billy had won the solid man’s victory of strategy: could Corey see that?

  Every man came at last to the end of his nerve. But Billy did not run on nerve. His was the leadership now, not grabbed, not connived for or leaped into, not fallen upon him by chance, but slowly built for. An organization that supported him and whose embodiment he was before the others lent him weight. The other leaders rapped and trafficked in charm and the lure of their ease. He stood for discipline and he moved for power, and he would lead the tribes through. The outsider became the insider not by selling his brain and not by currying favor, but by building a slow necessary core about himself until the outside was the inside and the head of the pyramid was where he stood.

  Ginny popped out from between two warriors. She looked strange. He figured that out as she crossed the stage through clots of excited people: a skirt and sweater. He had not seen her in a skirt since high school. Her job was over. Gone with the farm. So she was free now. Ginny had never been initiated as a warrior, but what about a nursing corps? With her efficiency, she could put that together in a couple of days.

  He strode over to intercept her. Said hello awkwardly, how are you, getting the perfunctories over. Sketched out his idea.

  She did not smile. “Certainly you’d better get that organized, but I don’t think I can take it on now.”

  “You’re not going to try to go back to the farm!”

  “I think we’ll
be on the road. But I’ll let you know if we stick around.” She slipped past and went on to Corey, her smooth hair sleek under the lights. She walked quickly in her sure, slightly flat-footed way, and poked Corey in the shoulder. There was a flurry of consultation between Shawn and her. Then she took Corey’s arm and tugged him off, Corey moving as if drugged, with Shawn just behind them.

  A bolt of anger fixed Billy. The weak soft squishy core of her. Of course she took the losing side. If Corey had won with his giving-up-in-advance strategy, she would be hanging around Billy, acting all butter and broth and nursey. Maybe what she had liked in him had been his awkwardness and his freakishness, and now that he had mastered his life, learned to function on his strengths and neutralize his weaknesses, she looked at him blankly and moved away. Mother searching for baby boys to hang at her breast. Forget her, forget her. She belonged on a farm, all right. She would never escape the soft doom of her automatic taffy-sticky maternal machine. Now he must think clearly about the tactics of the next days. Time to break up the general meeting and call his warriors into special session. He was better off without sources of confusion licking at the edges of his mind. He had offered her a chance to be useful, and she had refused it. Someone else would fill the position before the evening was over. Call it the hospital squad. Maybe draft Marilyn.

  The demonstrations focused on two major demands: Free the Indians (the occupants of the tunnels and the raided commune) and Stop Police Dragnets—Let the Community Patrol Itself. The high school strike was about 60 percent effective except in places like Staten Island. It was being coordinated by a committee of kids active in the schools, usually around anti-pigeon agitation and disruption of the recruiting assemblies and placement exams. They were nice hip kids, but their vision was limited. They wanted to demonstrate effectively and show their support for the demands: they anticipated, perhaps, that that might have some effect. They actually hoped for the release of the prisoners, at least on bail. They did not understand there was no possibility of avoiding violence, because the demonstrations were going to be smashed. Therefore when the time came, he would have to bypass and discredit them. In the meantime, he let them run their show and filled service functions.