Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  Steve was conventionally heterosexual. I was not. Had I been stone straight, I would never have been conventionally heterosexual. He was a good young man, and being great-looking didn’t hurt him, either. But our romance couldn’t flower. We wanted different things.

  I’d met a few gay women at the junior college. Being gay or straight didn’t seem to be a defining factor at Broward Junior College. Getting good grades and transferring on was paramount, and everyone was working, putting aside money.

  During this time, Mother held her breath, fearing that Aunt Mimi would hear of my possible queerness. “This wouldn’t happen if she was your blood child” is really what she feared, because Aunt Mimi would have the whip hand.

  A few times I borrowed Mom’s car to go to a dance bar in western Fort Lauderdale. Val’s, a big barn, hosted mostly gay men with a sprinkling of fruit flies (straight women who hang out with gay men) and the odd lesbian. I was the odd lesbian. I danced with the boys, watched them drink and pair off, and then I’d drive home at sunrise.

  Through Bill Stevens, her boss, Mom knew every cop and minor public official in Broward County. The police cruised the parking lot writing down license numbers. Unless they could catch someone in a homosexual act, there wasn’t much they could do except harass. However, one of them told Bill I was down at the bar and Bill told Mom.

  If you’ve ever seen a fighting cock in the pit, you’ve seen Mother. She flew all over me.

  “What’s the cop going to do, Mom, put it in the paper?”

  “No, but people talk.”

  “Talk is cheap,” I quoted back to her. It did not produce the desired effect, a glow of maternal appreciation for how much she’d influenced me.

  “Don’t sass me. I am still your mother!”

  “Yeah, that’s a misfortune we both share.”

  She cracked me one. Mother, quick with her fists, rarely hesitated to use force when argument failed. I ducked and turned my back because I hate getting hit in the face. She hurt her hand so bad it swelled up and eventually turned black and blue, which meant I had twice the amount of housework to do.

  Forget borrowing the car. She did take me down to a used car lot. I saw an old Buick convertible for eight hundred and fifty dollars, but that might as well have been eight thousand dollars. I found a Buick older than that, a 1955, still out of reach. I’d kill for that car today. Weren’t the portholes terrific? I loved the big chrome smile of the Buick.

  Thanks to the miles of walking, though, my legs drew whistles.

  Mother took in laundry, ironing and mending to augment her income. The mortgage payment was sixty-six dollars a month, so my rent covered most of that. We had to eat, maintain a car and feed Sunshine and Skippy, who gave Mom more comfort than I did.

  Mother and I battled off and on. About everything. She wanted me to be like her. I couldn’t. Her gifts weren’t my gifts. Mother must have believed I would be a duckling, imprinted at birth to waddle after her like Julia Ellen trailed after her demanding mother.

  Julia Ellen, hands full with work and a son, absorbed the strain of trying to please a mother and a husband, the two vastly different. Uncle Mearl might have dampened Aunt Mimi’s meddling ways, but then he’d have been stuck with her ire.

  Aunt Mimi, while siding with Mom on any issue concerning me, enjoyed my reduced status far too much. She knew I’d had to come home to save money. She didn’t know the rest of the story. Mother harped on my profligacy, and if there was one subject Sis expanded upon, apart from religion, it was “A penny saved is a penny earned.” I had not been a spendthrift. I burned at her chastisement but I said nothing.

  What good training for my later life. I am adept at deflecting attention away from the real issue to a lesser, still real issue. Time and again I would need to be the whipping girl to give other people the room to succeed.

  You learn to bury your ego. Since mine was inextinguishable, like JFK’s flame, I needed this lesson.

  Fortunately, another event pulled Mother away from berating me for dancing the night away with a bunch of gay men.

  Easter dinner, held at Sis’s that year, brought the whole crackbrained crew together. If nothing else, it was good for a laugh. Uncle Mearl had bought Aunt Mimi a home organ—a good one, too. Various keys produced background rhythm such as brass, strings, a bossa nova beat. Aunt Mimi, enchanted with the banjo effect, regaled us with “Tiny Bubbles” against this background. This was after we pleaded, begged and otherwise adored her. Once she had banged out a few tunes she would plop her grandson Michael on the bench. Another one to inherit the considerable musical talent in the family, he outplayed his grandmother, who pretended she was pleased. She was pissed.

  This led to a recitation of her back operation, which must have occurred when the earth was cooling. Anyway, it occurred either before I was born or when I was too little to take proper note of its impact. We heard every detail, from the washing of the back to kill bacteria to the first slice of the knife. You would have thought she was conscious. On and on this medical adventure unrolled. We smiled. We tried not to check our watches. Mother tapped her foot on the carpet. Why anyone has a carpet in Florida is beyond me. Aunt Mimi felt more is more.

  There I sat as the Jesus-with-thorns picture opened and closed its eyes. Christ kneeling at Gethsemane reminded me that we all pray to have this cup pass our lips. Then again, the Crucifixion meant the cup didn’t pass. Surrounded as I was with ample dolorous evidence of our good Lord’s corporeal suffering, I realized in a flash why Aunt Mimi decorated with torn and bloody Jesus: She intended for us to suffer.

  Can’t say she didn’t warn us. Well, she rattled on. Mother, having surrendered the limelight for nearly an hour, folded her hands in her lap, not a good sign.

  “Didn’t you say the pin they put in your back is gold?”

  Nodding vigorously, Aunt Mimi indicated with her thumb and forefinger how big the pin was. “Gold. The body accepts it better.”

  “I’d like some for outside my body,” Mother replied, which drew snickers from the rest of us.

  Aunt Mimi, loath to stop, waved off her sister with a hand motion and fake smile. “Oh, Juts, you’re such a card. Eighteen-karat gold.” She twisted around and pointed to the spot in her back.

  Mother rose, heading for the bathroom. To fool us, she opened and closed the door. She tiptoed into Sis’s bedroom, where she opened the chest of drawers. I heard her open it, but Sis, in love with her own voice, missed the telltale squeak.

  Within a minute Mother strolled back, that nonchalant expression playing across her face that I knew meant “Duck!”

  She carried a manila envelope of considerable size.

  “I believe your X rays are in here.” She wiggled the envelope.

  “Give me that.” Sis lunged for it.

  Mother sidestepped her, pulled out an X ray and pointed to the rod, clearly visible, while Sis kept batting at her.

  “It’s black!” Mother triumphantly announced.

  We leaned forward for a better look. I grabbed the X ray from Mother, pointed to the spot and passed it on. It was black as the ace of spades.

  Aunt Mimi, empurpled with rage, shouted, “You’ve spoiled my story!”

  “No, I separated fact from fiction.”

  The rest of us screamed with laughter. Aunt Mimi didn’t know that gold would show up black on an X ray. If Mother knew she kept it to herself.

  Mother flounced out. I followed. Aunt Mimi’s threats wafted out the front door.

  “Windbag.” Mother cheerily smiled, checking the rearview mirror as her sister doubled her hand into a fist, shaking it at her.

  Mother giggled, hooted and guffawed the short distance home. I laughed, too. Watching Mother get someone’s goat was worth the price of admission.

  Mom was her old self again.

  41

  Fly the Coop

  The lady customers at the gym collected plane fare so I could fly to Philadelphia to interview at schools. I’d applied to school
s out of state for my last two years.

  Despite my good fortune at Broward Junior College, I still mistrusted the state school system. For one thing, the South changed slowly, reluctantly. I didn’t think I could live with the daily dose of racism and sexism so common at the time.

  Not that I had truly analyzed sexism. I hadn’t. I just knew I didn’t cotton to being talked to as if I were an amusing, bright child.

  The reports from the University of Florida turned my stomach. The two brothers who had taken so many risks for integration had been locked on the eighth floor of J. Hillis Miller Health Center, the nut floor. One of them killed himself. I don’t know how. A suicide verdict makes me suspicious, especially in a person as outgoing and stable as he appeared to me.

  If he was confined to the mental ward, didn’t they search his room? How long does it take to kill yourself without a knife or a gun? Didn’t anyone look in on him? I find these questions disturbing.

  Was it a case of “Let’s teach this white boy a lesson”?

  Whatever he suffered externally or internally, I don’t think we will ever know. I have always hoped that his brother will write the story of those dreadful days. Obviously, the people involved in official capacities aren’t going to write it.

  When Jerry told me he didn’t know the details either. The whole thing was hushed up immediately.

  The reason I harbored suspicions and still do is that the first thing the university did to me when I rattled the cage was try to make me out to be a person with gender problems.

  I may have been only nineteen at the rime but I wasn’t a complete idiot. I knew how the Soviets declared dissidents mentally ill. They locked them up and threw away the key.

  How could I be sure that wasn’t happening here?

  My own troubles at the University of Florida and the subsequent stories I heard concerning politically active students ought me that the generation above me was so corrupt they would kill (in one form or another; one doesn’t kill just the body) young people who challenged repressive policies.

  I point the finger here at that older generation. We weren’t killing one another. It wasn’t youth versus youth. It was age versus youth.

  Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill—for a while, anyway.

  Not every veteran of World War II, Depression survivor or even World War I veteran (although they were moving off the stage politically) believed in harmful policies. Not every fifty-year-old was a devotee of the Ku Klux Klan or other forms of keeping people “in their place.” As the handwriting appeared on the wall toward the end of the sixties, many older people recoiled from what they read there and they too protested. But these were the early sixties. There were precious few of us and we were young.

  Our youth made us vulnerable. We were perceived as the most spoiled generation to be born up to that point. We were. Even I, raised as poor as I had been, harbored high expectations about my future. I was told this was the greatest country on earth: the home of the free and the land of the brave. I was told any kid could grow up to be president—unfortunately this appears to have been true. I thought if I worked hard I’d own my own home, have a truck, a washing machine and a dryer, indoor plumbing (I was raised around lots of people who didn’t have it, remember) and finally a television.

  I didn’t create these expectations. They were given to me. My generation was sold a bill of rights, a bill of wrongs and a bill of goods. We were ruthlessly singled out to be advertising’s patsies. The number of products aimed at us as children and then young adults was staggering. You pestered your parents to death and either got what you wanted or got a smack in the face.

  I believe this unremitting barrage of advertising created as much cynicism in my generation as Vietnam and later Watergate. It also created a reaction, a revulsion toward material splendors, toward commerce. In later years we surmounted the revulsion, consuming as voraciously as the generation above us, but for a time, perhaps ten or fifteen years, we actually asked pertinent questions about the proper use of resources and the ultimate aims of corporations. Is profit enough?

  Given every opportunity by government, state and federal, and often by our parents if they could afford it, we could easily acquire a college education. When we used that education to point out grotesque social wrongs, our elders were outraged. It never occurred to them that they created this exact response.

  From such small ripples as the suffering of the brothers I knew at Florida, a sea change would wash over America.

  In 1964 I had no idea how successful such new ideas would be. To believe in racial equality in any part of America branded you as some kind of loony, at best a dreamer.

  The hatred of white people for white people who opposed racism carried no subtlety. Given that federal grants were now attached to integration policies, a few of the smarter administrators at southern schools had learned to dissemble about black people.

  Also, there was little glory in Yankees coming down to protect white kids from our enemies. Those idealistic people from New York and Massachusetts wanted to march with black brothers and sisters. They wanted to sing protest songs and take risks. They could go home. For us, it was home. A few Yankees were killed and it took white Yankees being killed before the nation woke up to how sick racism is. My God, blacks were being killed all along. The southern whites who sympathized with black people were driven out of town.

  This is not to say we could have won without those northerners. I mean won in the sense of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, etc. There’s a long way to go emotionally. I felt that southern whites working for equality and racial justice were thrown to the dogs, or maybe the death of this young man sits heavy on my soul and I couldn’t see beyond it. A young man, full of promise and goodness. I couldn’t believe my eyes when Jerry wrote me the news.

  I will always be grateful to the University of Florida for teaching me that those in power will do almost anything to stay in power. They will lie, cheat, steal and occasionally kill or drive people to their death. It matters little if they have a program to better the community or not. Once a person or group has power they do not willingly give it up. You must seize it from them.

  Today, the University of Florida is a far better place than I knew it to be, but it took a shocking death to push the university forward. The generation that administers the school now is one that saw the South torn apart in the sixties. That won’t happen again, even though there will always be people who want to turn the clock back.

  Maybe Mother wasn’t a fraidy-cat. Born in 1905, she’d had a longer time to see how people acted. When John Kennedy was shot I called Mom. Our government had survived other assassinations of presidents. That didn’t worry me. I couldn’t understand how it could happen here in my time.

  “Honey, I remember the sinking of the Titanic. The Hindenburg flew over once. I remember the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” She paused. “After a while you accept disasters.”

  “He’s the president.”

  “Nobody can control anything. That’s what I think. You get up every day and take your chances. It’s a big country and there’s a lot of crazy people. Hell, I can breed better dogs than we can breed people.” She laughed.

  “You don’t breed dogs.”

  “I used to breed chickens.”

  We were in the middle of a gruesome event and she made me laugh.

  She was right. If the president of the United States can’t be safe, neither can we. You take your chances. But you can minimize your chances. By speaking out, attending meetings and rallies, I was exposing both of us to danger.

  Mother wasn’t against fighting racism. In her mind, though, those of us who spoke out acted like a bunch of kids. We sought to attract attention to ourselves, which is, after all, what youth does. The whole world has existed without you, and you want to announce that you are here. We announced it loud and clear.

  She knew that solving this problem would take more than using personality, more than letting the m
ayor know you were best friends with his mistress, etc. This would take a critical mass of people to pull down those in power.

  The question was, how could we arrive at that critical mass if we didn’t speak out? She wasn’t even opposed to speaking out, but she didn’t think kids ought to be doing it. Once mature leadership stepped forward we wouldn’t be so exposed, not only to our enemies, but to our own lack of experience.

  She hadn’t known my friend at the University of Florida but she mourned him.

  “At least he died for something and wasn’t run over by a drunk.”

  “Do you think when your number’s up, it’s up?”

  “Sure I do.” She chewed on a pencil.

  Ever since she’d given up smoking she had a tendency to chew things. At least she never gnawed the furniture legs.

  What Mother didn’t take into account was that mature people had too much to lose by opposing racism. Kids could take the risk.

  I kept my promise, though. I didn’t mix into politics while living with her.

  When I interviewed at Temple University I was told point-blank they didn’t want me. The University of Pennsylvania was a bit more discreet in their rejection. Discouraged, I hopped on the train at Thirtieth Street Station, a gorgeous structure, landed at Penn Station and walked down to New York University. I don’t know exactly why I picked NYU. It was my last hope.

  Dean Henry Noss interviewed me. I told him what had happened at Florida, why that one semester of grades was bad. My grades from the junior college were good, my board scores from high school helped. Dean Noss, a square-built man with a warm face and an engaging manner, knew York and Lancaster counties well. He figured, if nothing else, I possessed an ironclad work ethic. He admitted me to New York University. I would have to take a series of tests since NYU felt southern schools so beneath them, my transcript might as well have been tissue paper. I would also have to take a year-long course in remedial speech because my accent was thick. I liked my accent, but I swallowed my pride.