Ice And Fire

by Andrea Dworkin

  flights of steps going up to the door, just one level block. There

  were more gardens. Kids didn’t stay outside playing that I could

  see. Or maybe there weren’t any, I don’t know. Joe had grease

  on his hair and it was combed very straight and sticky sort of,

  and he wore checkered shirts, and he talked different but I

  don’t know why or how: he didn’t seem to be used to talking.

  He was a teenager. I would walk down the street and he would

  sort of come out and I wouldn’t know what to say, except one

  day I smiled and he said hello, and then after that I would

  decide if I was going to walk down the Catholic block or not

  and if I was chasing boys and what was wrong with him that I

  wasn’t supposed to talk with him and I couldn’t talk with him

  too long or someone would notice that I hadn’t come home

  with my friends on my block. And I used to come home other

  ways too, where I had no one to talk to. I would walk home

  by the convent and try to hear things inside it, and sometimes I

  would walk home on the black blocks, all alone. This was my

  secret life.

  *

  There was an alley next to a church on the way to school and

  we would always try to get lost in it. It was only a tiny alley,

  very narrow but long, dark and dusty, with stray cats and

  discarded bottles and strange trash and urine and so even

  children knew its every creak and crevice very soon. But we

  would close our eyes and spin each other around and do

  everything we could not to know how to get out. We would

  spend hours pretending to be lost. We would try to get into

  the church but it was always closed. We would play adventures

  in which someone was captured and lost in the alley and

  someone else had to get her out. But mostly we would flail

  around being lost, the worst thing being that we would know

  exactly where we were and there were no adventures and we

  couldn’t go in the church. Then sometimes suddenly we would

  really be lost and we would try to find our way out and not be

  able to no matter how hard we tried and it would start getting

  dark and we would get scared and somehow when we got

  scared enough we would remember how to get out of the alley

  and how to get home.

  *

  20

  We had to walk a long way to and from school, four times a

  day: to school, home for lunch, back to school, home at the

  end of school; or sometimes we had to go to the Hebrew School

  after school, twice a week. In school all the children were

  together, especially the Polish Catholics and the blacks and the

  Jews, and after school we didn’t speak to each other or be

  friends. I would try to go to the houses of kids I liked in

  school, just walk by to see what it was like if it was near

  where I walked to go home, and there would be polite conversations sometimes on their blocks, but their parents would look at me funny and I could never go in. We got to love each other

  in school and play together at recess but then no more, we had

  to go back to where we came from. We had to like each other

  on our block whether we did or not and it was OK when we

  were playing massive games ranging over the whole wide world

  of our block, but sometimes when I just wanted to talk to

  someone or see someone, one person, it wasn’t someone on

  our block, but someone else, someone Polish Catholic or black,

  and then I couldn’t: because it just couldn’t be done, it just

  wasn’t allowed. My parents were good, they were outspoken

  against prejudice and they taught me everybody was the same,

  but when it came to actually going on another block they just

  said not to go there and there and there like everybody else

  and when I tried to go there the parents on the other end

  would send me away. There was Michael who was Polish Catholic, a gentle boy, and Nat who was black. She would come to my house and once at least I went to hers, at least once or

  twice I was allowed to go there, mostly she came home with

  me, my parents protected me and didn’t let me know how the

  neighbors felt about it, and we always had to stay inside and

  play, and her mother was a teacher and so was my father:

  and I loved her with all my passionate heart. When we

  moved away to the suburbs so mother wouldn’t have to walk

  any steps because she couldn’t breathe I was torn apart from

  all this, my home, my street, the games, the great throng of

  wild children who played hide-and-seek late into the night

  while mother lay dying: and I said, I will go if I can see Nat,

  if she can come to visit me and I can visit her, and I was so

  distressed and full of grief, that they looked funny at each

  other and lied and said yes of course you can see Nat.

  21

  But where we moved was all white and I couldn’t see Nat.

  *

  So when I was a teenager I went back to the old neighborhood

  to show it to a teenage friend, the old elementary school where

  I had been happy and the old streets where I had been happy,

  we took two buses to get there and walked a long way and I

  didn’t tell anyone I was going, but now it was all black and

  getting even poorer than it had been and there were hundreds

  of teenage girls in great clusters on the streets walking home

  from high school and we were white and we were surrounded

  and they got nasty and mean and wanted to know why we

  were showing our white faces there and I looked up and there

  was Nat, quiet as she had always been, the same scholarly

  serious face and long braids, now teenage like me, and black,

  and with a gang of girls, and she told them to leave me alone

  and so they did and she walked away with them looking away

  from me, looking grave and sad and even a little confused:

  walking away from me, but I was the deserter. I watched her

  walking away, and I still see the look on her face even with my

  eyes open, a remorseless understanding of something I didn’t

  know but she did and whatever it was I had found her but it

  didn’t matter because of whatever it was. It was the saddest

  moment of my life. Later, mother died. I didn’t laugh or weep

  or understand. Why are they gone?

  22

  Neither weep nor laugh but understand.

  Spinoza

  *

  Mother would be sick and dad worked two jobs, teaching and

  in the post office unloading packages. Mother would be upstairs in her bedroom in bed, near death, or in the hospital, near death. My brother would be sent somewhere and I would

  be sent somewhere: to separate relatives, suddenly, in the

  middle of the night. But sometimes we were allowed to stay

  home. A black girl would put us in the bath together and wash

  us and put us to bed. My brother and I would play and splash

  water and the black girl would wash us and smile, but she was

  always tentative, never belonging there. She was always young,

  there were so many, even I knew she was young, not as old as

  any other big people I had ever seen, and for days on end she

  would be the only one to talk to us or touch us
or do anything

  with us. They were nice to us but never said much and none

  stayed too long because we were too poor to pay for help and

  eventually we always had to be farmed out separately to one

  relative or another. The house of our parents would be dank

  with disease and despair, my father’s frenetic dinner served so

  fast because he had to get to his second job, the only minutes

  we could even see him or hear his voice, and the only one who

  talked to us or was nice to us was the black girl who put us in

  the bath together where we played and played, after we had

  our argument about who had to sit on the end with the faucet,

  and she put us to bed: and I always wanted her to stay and be

  my friend or at least talk and say things I could understand

  like other people did. No one stayed long enough so that I

  remember her name because we were funny kinds of orphans:

  mother wasn’t dead but dying; father loved us but couldn’t be

  there; the relatives split us up so we were always alone in

  strange houses surrounded by strange ways of doing things

  and adults who weren’t as nice to us as our father was and

  they thought that if they were your grandmother or aunt it

  made being there less lonely: which it did not. They must have

  been teenagers, so much bigger than we were that they seemed

  23

  like adults. They must have been poorer than even we were.

  They were black and we were white: and whoever it is I remember, on your knees by the bathtub, as the blond-haired baby boy and I splashed and squealed, as you dabbed and

  rubbed, whoever it is: where are you now? and why were you

  there at all? and why couldn’t you stay? and while mother lay

  dying, you were kind.

  *

  Once mother was hiring the girl herself. She must have been a

  little better then, standing up in the living room, dressed in

  regular clothes not sick clothes, without my father there or any

  doctor. I came in and there were lots of women and my mother

  talked to them one at a time but all in the same room and one

  was white and the rest were black and my mother said who

  would you like to have and I said hire the white one.

  *

  I had never seen a white one so I said hire the white one.

  *

  Hire the white one, I said, maybe seven years old. Hire the

  white one. My dying mother hit me.

  *

  When we had to move from Camden because my mother

  couldn’t walk steps or breathe and was frail and dying, the

  neighbors on our block got sullen and banded together and

  came and said don’t you sell to blacks. Our next-door neighbor

  got sullen and threatening and said don’t you sell to blacks.

  These are our friends, said my parents. We will do what’s

  right, don’t you worry, said my father ambiguously. We sold

  to Polish Catholics, blond, with heavy foreign accents. Not

  Jews but not black. The best offer, my father swore. The

  neighbors were chilly anyway but soon they all moved. The

  blacks were coming closer. So they sold to blacks and moved

  out.

  *

  One of the houses where I had to stay was my uncle’s: marriage, not blood. He was richer than us, a judge, a reform democratic politician even though he had friends in the Klan,

  and he was vulgar, and I hated him, and the reform democrats

  won and my uncle and his friends looted the city and got rich

  and that’s why the blacks in Camden are so poor.

  24

  I would be delivered to his house and his cronies would

  come and they would talk about the niggers and even when

  they were the government of the city they were planning to

  move out to somewhere else and they planned to steal especially from the school system, or that was the part I heard: they stole equipment from Head Start programs and looted school

  equipment and cheated on school-lunch programs and left the

  blacks to die and called them niggers and my uncle had a bar

  where he sold the niggers liquor and ridiculed them for getting

  drunk and bragged that he could sell them horseshit and they

  would drink it. He had friends who were friends of Nixon and

  friends who were friends of the Klan. Now Camden is a ghost

  town with black ghosts on those streets where we played our

  real childhood games. I had a divine childhood, even with the

  woman dying, and father away day and night working, and

  death coming suddenly, and my brother and me separated over

  and over, orphans in different places for years at a time: I ran

  in those streets and played hide-and-seek and Red Rover Red

  Rover and jumped rope and played fish and washed my doll’s

  hair with the other girls outside on the steps and sat behind

  cars near telephone poles and on strange days played witch: it

  was divine until I was torn away from it: and I walked down

  Catholic streets and black streets without anyone knowing and

  I loved Joe and Nat and Michael: then the vultures moved in

  when I had gone away, but I heard their plans and I know

  what they did: and the wonderful neighbors on the block where

  I lived hated blacks: and I said hire the white one at seven

  years old: and the vultures picked the bones of the city and left

  it plundered. Oh, Nat, where are you? Did you weep or laugh

  or understand?

  25

  Neither weep nor laugh but understand.

  Spinoza

  *

  We were very tiny, in the third grade— how small are seven-

  and eight-year-olds? — the little girls from my block. We were

  on a big street not too far from the school, one you had to

  walk down. It was a rich street, completely different from ours.

  There was no brick. There were big windows in the fronts of

  the houses and each one had a different front, some rounded

  or curved. There were fences around the few very nice steps up

  to the door, ornamentation on the outside, around the

  windows or on the facade, wide sidewalks, huge trees lining

  the street so it was always shady even in the early afternoon

  when we went home from school. We were small and happy,

  carrying our books home, chattering away. A bunch of black

  girls approached us, surrounded us. They were twice as tall as

  we were, real big, from junior high school. They surrounded

  us and began teasing and calling us names. They demanded

  Diane’s scarf. We were silent, very afraid. She was beginning

  to give them the scarf when I said no, don’t. There was one

  minute of stunned silence, then raucous laughter: wha you say

  girl? Don’t, don’t give it to them. Now why not girl we gonna

  take it anyway. Because stealing is wrong, I said sincerely. They

  surrounded me and began beating me, punching me, kicking

  me. They kept on punching and kicking. I remember falling

  and saliva pouring from my mouth and screaming. They kept

  punching me in the stomach until I fell all the way to the

  ground then they kicked me in the stomach over and over and

  then they ran away. I lay on the ground quite a while. No one

  offered to help me up. Everyone just stared at me. I got up but


  I couldn’t get all the way up because I couldn’t straighten my

  stomach, it hurt too much. I held it with both hands and stood

  bent-backed. No one touched me or helped me or spoke to

  me. I must have said something like my daddy told me it’s not

  right to steal. Then someone said that she knew someone who

  said my daddy was a sissy. A what? A sissy. He’s a sissy. What

  does that mean, I must have asked. You know, she said, that’s

  2 6

  what all the boys say, that he’s a sissy. Enraged, I walked

  doubled up home, determined to find the girls who had beat

  me up. But my parents told me not to because they would just

  hurt me more. I wanted to go into every junior high school

  class and look for them. But it would just make trouble and

  they would hurt me more, I was told. I remembered sissy and I

  remembered my girlfriends doing nothing. They were somehow

  worse than awful and mean. Doing nothing was worse.

  *

  When you get beat up you don’t see much, you begin falling,

  you begin trying not to fall so you feel yourself falling and you

  feel yourself trying to stay straight and the fists come from

  every direction, down on your head and in your face and in

  your gut most, and you keep not falling until you can’t breathe

  anymore and then you fall. You hit the cement and you feel it

  hit you and you see the feet coming at you and you keep trying

  to protect your face especially and your eyes and your teeth

  and if you can move once you’re down you try to kick back,

  to use your legs to get them off of you, but if you fall so that

  your legs are sort of twisted under you then you can’t do that

  and you can feel your back twist away from your stomach and

  it’s real hard not to piss and once they’ve stopped it’s real hard

  not to vomit. You don’t know anything about other people

  except the ones hitting you if there are a mess of them and

  they are all punching you at once. You don’t think, oh, my

  friends are standing around watching. It’s after, when you are

  suddenly alone, when the heat of the hitting bodies is suddenly

  cold air on your sweat and you suddenly understand that you

  are not being punched anymore, it has stopped, and you are