Like Caroline Wyburgh and Sylvia Plath, I was nineteen when I first felt the full force of this lack of freedom. I had grown up on the suburban edge of the country in the days before children were closely supervised and I went to town or to the hills at will, and at seventeen I ran away to Paris, where the men who often propositioned and occasionally grabbed me in the streets seemed more annoying than terrifying. At nineteen, I moved to a poor San Francisco neighborhood with less street life than the gay neighborhood I had moved from and discovered that at night the day’s constant threats were more likely to be carried out. Of course it wasn’t only poor neighborhoods and nighttime in which I was threatened. I was, for example, followed near Fisherman’s Wharf one afternoon by a well-dressed man who murmured a long stream of vile sexual proposals to me; when I turned around and told him off, he recoiled in genuine shock at my profanity, told me I had no right to speak to him like that, and threatened to kill me. Only the earnestness of his death threat made the incident stand out from hundreds of others more or less like it. It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness out-of-doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wish to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem. I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move to someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me—all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men’s behavior rather than society’s to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but it had not in me.
The constant threats and the few incidents of real terror transformed me. Still, I stayed where I was, became more adept at navigating the dangers of the street, and became less of a target as I grew older. Almost all my interactions nowadays with passersby are civil, and some are delightful. Young women receive the brunt of such harassment, I think, not because they are more beautiful but because they are less sure of their rights and boundaries (though such unsureness manifested as naïveté and timidity are often part of what is considered beauty). The years of harassment received in youth constitute an education in the limits of one’s life, even long after the daily lessons stop. Sociologist June Larkin got a group of Canadian teenagers to keep track of their sexual harassment in public and found they were leaving the less dramatic incidents out because, as one said, “If I wrote down every little thing that happened on the street, it would take up too much time.” Having met so many predators, I learned to think like prey, as have most women, though fear is far more minor an element of my everyday awareness than it was when I was in my twenties.
The movements for women’s rights often came out of the movements for racial justice. The first great women’s convention at Seneca Falls, New York, was organized by abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott out of anger over the discrimination they faced even while trying to fight against slavery—they had attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, only to find that the male-dominated organization would not seat any female delegates. “Stanton and Mott,” writes one historian, “began to see similarities between their own circumscribed status and that of slaves.” Josephine Butler and the English suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst also came from abolitionist families, and in recent years some of the most original and important feminists have been black women—bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, June Jordan—who address both race and gender.
When I wrote of the gay poets of New York, I left out the Harlem-born James Baldwin, because for him Manhattan was not a deliciously liberatory place where he could lose himself, as it was for Whitman and Ginsberg. It threatened instead never to let him forget himself, whether it was the policemen near the Public Library telling him to stay uptown, the pimps on uptown Fifth Avenue trying to recruit him, when he was a boy, to become one of the dangers, or the people in his own neighborhood keeping track of him as do people in small towns. He wrote about walking the city as a black man rather than a gay one, though he was both; his race limited his roaming until he moved to Paris. Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a criminal category when in public, so that the law often actively interferes with their freedom of movement. In 1983 an African-American man, Edward Lawson, won a Supreme Court case challenging a California statute that “required persons who loiter or wander on the streets to provide a credible and reliable identification and to account for their presence when requested by a peace officer.” Lawson, who, the New York Times reported, “liked to walk and was often stopped late at night in residential areas,” had been arrested fifteen times for refusing to identify himself under this statute criminalizing walking. An athletic man with tidy dreadlocks, he used to dance at the same nightclub I did then.
But in public space, racism has often been easier to recognize than sexism and far more likely to become an issue. Late in the 1980s two young black men died for being in “the wrong place at the wrong time.” Michael Griffith was chased by a gang of hostile white men in Howard Beach, ran out into traffic to escape their persecution, and was killed by a car. Yusef Hawkins was bludgeoned to death for being a black man in another white Queens neighborhood, Bensonhurst. An enormous outcry arose over these two cases; people rightly understood that these young men’s civil rights had been stripped from them when they were attacked for walking down the street. Not long after Griffith and Hawkins died in Queens, a large group of teenage boys from uptown Manhattan went into Central Park at night and found a white female jogger. She was gang-raped, cut with knives, beaten with rocks and pipes, her skull was crushed, and she lost most of her blood. Expected to die, she survived with brain damage and physical disabilities.
“The Central Park Jogger Case” was discussed in startlingly different terms. Considerable public outrage had been expressed that the two murdered men had been denied the basic liberty to roam the city, and the crimes were universally recognized as racially motivated. But in a careful study of the Central Park case, Helen Benedict wrote, “Throughout the case, even up to the start of the trial, the white and black press kept running articles trying to analyze why the youths had committed this heinous crime. . . . They looked for answers in race, drugs, class, and in the ghetto’s ‘culture of violence.’ ” The reasons proferred, she concludes, “were woefully inadequate as an explanation . . . because the press never looked at the most glaring reason of all for rape: society’s attitude toward women.” Portraying it as a case about race—the assailants were Latino and black—rather than gender failed to make an issue at all of violence against women. And almost no one at all discussed the Central Park case as a civil rights issue—as part of a pattern of infringements on women’s right to roam the city (women of color rarely show up in crime reportage at all, apparently since they lack men’s status as citizens and white women’s titillating appeal as victims). A decade after Bensonhurst and Central Park, the gruesome lynching of a black man in Texas has been greeted with outrage as a hate crime and an infringement on the civil rights of people of color, as has the brutal death of a young gay man in Wyoming—for gays and lesbians are also frequent targets of violence that “teaches them their place” or punishes them for their nonconformity. But similar murders motivated by gender, though they fill the newspapers and take the lives of thousands of women every year, are not contextualized as anything but isolated incidents that don’t require social reform or national soul-searching.
The geography of race and gender are different, for a racial group may monopolize a whole region, while gender compartmentalizes in local ways. Many people of color find the whiter parts of
rural America unwelcoming, to say the least, even in the places where a white woman might feel safe (white supremacists seem to arise from or flock to some of the most scenic parts of the country). Evelyn C. White writes that when she first tried to explore rural Oregon, memories of southern lynchings “could leave me speechless and paralyzed with the heart-stopping fear that swept over me as when I crossed paths with loggers near the McKenzie River or whenever I visited the outdoors.” In Britain the photographer Ingrid Pollard made a series of wry portraits of herself in the Lake District, where she apparently went to try to feel like Wordsworth and felt nervous instead. Nature romanticism, she seemed to be saying, is not available to people of her color. But many white women too feel nervous in any isolated situation, and some have personal experience to draw upon. When she was young, the great climber and mountaineer Gwen Moffat went to the beautiful Isle of Skye off Scotland’s west coast to climb by herself. After a drunken neighbor broke into her bedroom in the middle of the night, she cabled for a man to join her and recounts, “Had I been older and more mature, I could have coped with life on my own, but living as I did I laid myself open to all kinds of advances and speculations. Ordinary, conventional men thought this way of life an open invitation and I couldn’t face the resentment which I knew they felt when they were rebuffed.”
Women have been enthusiastic participants in pilgrimages, walking clubs, parades, processions, and revolutions, in part because in an already defined activity their presence is less likely to be read as sexual invitation, in part because companions have been women’s best guarantee of public safety. In revolutions the importance of public issues seems to set aside private matters temporarily, and women have found great freedom during them (and some revolutionaries, such as Emma Goldman, have made sexuality one of the fronts on which they sought freedom). But walking alone also has enormous spiritual, cultural, and political resonance. It has been a major part of meditation, prayer, and religious exploration. It has been a mode of contemplation and composition, from Aristotle’s peripatetics to the roaming poets of New York and Paris. It has supplied writers, artists, political theorists, and others with the encounters and experiences that inspired their work, as well as the space in which to imagine it, and it is impossible to know what would have become of many of the great male minds had they been unable to move at will through the world. Picture Aristotle confined to the house, Muir in full skirts. Even in times when women could walk by day, the night—the melancholic, poetic, intoxicating carnival of city nights—was likely to be off limits to them, unless they had become “women of the night.” If walking is a primary cultural act and a crucial way of being in the world, those who have been unable to walk out as far as their feet would take them have been denied not merely exercise or recreation but a vast portion of their humanity.
Women from Jane Austen to Sylvia Plath have found other, narrower subjects for their art. Some have broken out into the larger world—Peace Pilgrim (in middle age), George Sand (in men’s clothes), Emma Goldman, Josephine Butler, Gwen Moffat, come to mind—but many more must have been silenced altogether. Virginia Woolf’s famous Room of One’s Own is often recalled as though it were literally a plea for women to have home offices, but it in fact deals with economics, education, and access to public space as equally necessary to making art. To prove her point, she invents the blighted life of Shakespeare’s equally talented sister, and asks of this Judith Shakespeare, “Could she even get her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?”
Sarah Schulman wrote a novel that is, like Woolf’s essay, a commentary on the circumscription of women’s freedom. Titled Girls, Visions and Everything after a phrase from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, it is among other things an investigation into how useful Kerouac’s credo is for a young lesbian writer, Lila Futuransky. “The trick,” thinks Futuransky, “was to identify with Jack Kerouac instead of with the women he fucks along the way,” for like Odysseus, Kerouac was a traveling man in a landscape of immobile women. She explores the charms of Lower East Side Manhattan in the mid-1980s as he did America in the 1950s, and among “the things she loved best” was to “walk the streets for hours with nowhere to go but where she ended up.” But as the novel progresses, her world becomes more intimate rather than more open: she falls in love and the possibility of a free life in public space recedes.
Near the end of the novel, she and her lover go out for an evening walk in Washington Square Park and come back to eat ice cream together in front of her apartment building when they overhear a man in a group of men: “That’s gay liberation. They think they can do whatever they want whenever they want it.” They have been, like lovers since time immemorial, walking out together. Like Lizzie Schauer, arrested in the Lower East Side ninety years earlier for walking alone, their venture into public space threatens to become an invasion of their private lives and their bodies:
“Lila didn’t want to go upstairs, because she didn’t want them to see where she lived. They started walking slowly away, but the men followed.
“ ‘Come on you cunt. I bet you’ve got a nice pussy, you suck each other’s pussy, right? I’ll show you a cock that you’ll never forget. . . .’
“For Lila, this was a completely normal though unnecessary part of daily life. As a result she had learned docility, to keep quiet and do a shuffle, to avoid having her ass kicked in. . . . Lila walked in the streets like someone who had always walked in the streets and for whom it was natural and rich. She walked with the illusion that she was safe and that the illusion would somehow keep her that way. Yet, that particular night as she went out for cigarettes, Lila walked uneasily, her mind wandering until it stopped of its own accord on the simple fact that she was not safe. She could be physically hurt at any time and felt, for a fleeting moment that she would be. She sat on the trunk of a ’74 Chevy and accepted that this world was not hers. Even on her own block.”
Part IV
PAST THE END OF THE ROAD
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Walking as a form of transport in modern middle-class Euro-American life is essentially obsolete. It is the rare individual who commutes to work on foot. Walking is usually linked with leisure. . . . One Irishwoman made a similar observation: “Just think, the two most important forms of transport early this century are now highly specialized hobbies!”—NANCY LOUISE FREY, PILGRIM STORIES: ON AND OFF THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO
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“People don’t walk in Texas. Only Mexicans.”—CHARACTER IN EDNA FERBER’S GIANT
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A black performance artist, Keith Antar Mason, told me recently that he is now working increasingly in the only public spaces for African- Americans that are supported actively by government—the prisons.—NORMAN KLEIN, THE HISTORY OF FORGETTING
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The stationary cycle and the treadmill both have slot machines attached, allowing casino customers to sweat and bet at the same time. . . . “People are going crazy about this,” said Kathy Harris, president of the Fitness Gaming Corporation in Fairfax, Va. . . . Ms. Harris pointed out that the machines were wired so “you can’t gamble unless you’re pedaling and you can’t pedal unless you’re gambling.” The company’s motto: “Put your heart into gambling.”—NEW YORK TIMES
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We’ve all heard of that future, and it sounds pretty lonely. In the next century, the line of thinking goes, everyone will work at home, shop at home, watch movies at home and communicate with all their friends through videophones and e-mail. It’s as if science and culture have progressed for one purpose only: to keep us from ever having to get out of our pajamas.—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
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Some people walk with both eyes focused on their goal: the highest mountain peak in the range, the fifty-mile marker, the finish line. They stay motivated by anticipating the end of the journey. Since I tend to be easily distracted, I travel somewhat differently—one step at a time, with many pauses in between. Occasionally the pauses beco
me full stops that can last anywhere from two minutes to ten hours. More often they’re less definite. . . . Trapped by our concepts and languages and the utter predictability of our five senses, we often forget to wonder what we’re missing as we hurry along toward goals we may not even have chosen. I became a tracker by default, not design, when my tendency to be distracted by life’s smallest signs grew into an unrelenting passion to trace those obscure, often puzzling patterns somewhere, anywhere—to their source or end or simply to some midpoint in between. But when I began tracking lost people, what had begun as an eccentric habit—following footprints on the ground—quickly matured into an avocation. . . . I now commonly walk toward a single goal: to meet the person at the other end of the tracks.—HANNAH NYALA, POINT LAST SEEN
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 33
