by Studs Terkel
On the other hand, I think there were a small number of people who felt like the whole system was lousy, and that you had to change the system. Well, now, I’m not so sure that I know what kind of a system to put in its place. I do think you’ve got to have a system of government that’s responsive to the needs of the people.
PEGGY TERRY: I don’t think people were put on earth to suffer. I think that’s a lot of nonsense. I think we are the highest development on the earth, and I think we were put here to live and be happy and enjoy everything that’s here. I don’t think it’s right for a handful of people to get ahold of all the things that make living a joy instead of a sorrow. When you wake up in the morning and the minute consciousness hits you, it’s just like a big hand takes ahold of your heart and squeezes it, because you don’t know what that day’s gonna bring. A hunger, or . . . you just don’t know. It’s really—it’s really hard to . . . to talk about the Depression because what can you say except you were hungry.
[More strains of “God Bless the Child” playing]
BORN TO LIVE, 1961
One of my guests, the day of my interview with Myoka Harubasa, was the skipper of The Golden Rule, a ship sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers. The Golden Rule had been skirting the waters of the world, defying all barriers, calling out for an end to bombings such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My interview guest, Myoka Harubasa, was a hibakusha. Hibakusha means a survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose life to many is worse than any death could be. There was also an interpreter from Chicago, Joan Takada, who translated for the hibakusha. Two other guests were casual visitors, seated in the studio: a Danish former staff member, Vreni Naess, who was visiting with her two-year old baby, Eric. And that was it. The hibakusha is describing a sunny morning in August 1945, and toward the end the inter preter says “I can’t go on.”
[WE HEAR Myoka Harubasa speaking, followed by Joan Takada translating her words.]
MYOKA HARUBASA OF HIROSHIMA: They were looking up in the sky, trying to spot the airplane. And then she thought that there was a very big flash in the sky, so she hid her face on the ground. Then she remembers that she must have been blown away by the impact . . . and when she regained consciousness she couldn’t find most of her friends. They were either blown to bits, or burned, or . . . She says that all her clothes were torn away except the very undergarment. And her skin where she has all her burns—the skin was just peeled off and hanging from her body. And she has that on her arms and legs and on her face . . . [Long pause] And she said it was such an intense heat that she jumped into the nearby river. . . . the small river that was running through the city. . . . She says that her friends who were in the river . . . [Pause; slight sob from the interpreter.] I don’t think I can say it.
[Japanese children singing a Japanese children’s song segues into American children singing an American children’s song]
MAN AT DINNER TABLE: The fact that you find a nine- or tenyear-old child being gravely concerned about the fact that he’s not going to be living in ten or fifteen years because of this atomic war that’s coming up is . . . is . . . this is the frightening part to me. Heck, when I was nine or ten years old, I was wondering if . . .
WOMAN AT DINNER TABLE: You were greedy!
MAN: Jesus! Is the pond going to have polliwogs in it this year or not, you know, something like this. But here these kids are wondering: Am I going to be alive?
WOMAN: It bothers them. It really does. And to have these remarks come out at home out of a clear blue sky: “I wish I’d never been born.” Oh! It’s frightening. No, she just said, “Well, if the bomb is going to hit, I’m going to enjoy life while I can. I’ll do what I please.” Oh, what an answer! And what do you say?
SECOND MAN AT DINNER TABLE: And how old is she, ten?
WOMAN: Nine.
MAN: Nine.
[American children singing]
God said to Noah, There’s gonna be a floody, floody
God said to Noah, There’s gonna be a floody, floody
Get those children out of the muddy, muddy
Children of the Lord
PERRY MIRANDA: Well, remember, we talked a little about the guys thinking over different things. Y’know, putting down their head sometimes, and going back, say, thinking over some memories. Well, what do you think? What are some of the things they think about, or what are some of the things they worry about? [Pause] What are some of the things that the guys worry about?
YOUTH: I don’t know, man.
MIRANDA: Do you ever worry about what’s gonna happen to you when you grow older?
YOUTH: We was born to die; that’s all.
MIRANDA: You were born to die?
YOUTH: Yeah.
MIRANDA: What about in between the time you’re born and the time you die?
[Pete Seeger strumming Beethoven’s Ninth on his banjo]
Born to die? What about in between the time you’re born and the time you die? [Strumming continues under Terkel’s voice.] Man is a long time coming. To paraphrase the old Chicago poet: Man may yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief, the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march.
Where to. What next?”
[Sound of drums and bells]
Two drummers, on the island of Ceylon, engaged in percussive battle.
T. P. AMERASINGHE: That’s a favorite pastime of the people on a Sunday afternoon—after work, for example. You will find drums playing, drummers trying to outdo one another.
How does the audience decide who wins—by the applause?
AMERASINGHE: No, they themselves come together. That’s the beauty of it. The two drummers, finding that they cannot be . . . one cannot outdo the other, play a final duet together.
Oh, that’s marvelous! It isn’t a question of one beating another.
AMERASINGHE: No, no, no.
They finally meet and they merge their strengths, fuse their strengths, or their arts.
AMERASINGHE: I think that’s also an old tradition of a comradely feeling, you see. You have the competition, but at the end both meet on equal terms.
[Drummers drumming]
An American art critic, observing a Goya hanging in the Prado.
ALEXANDER ELIOT: This picture of the two men clobbering each other in the quicksand in the valley, at the Prado, is first of all a horrible picture; a shocking picture. After that you begin to see it within the context of this magnificent landscape: all a silver, somber, magnificently harmonious thing . . . [A cello plays under his words.] and in the midst of it are these two bloody idiots. And you see that if you could only get through to them somehow, and tell them what they’re doing, and how they are denying by their very action the beauty and the harmony and the mystery that surrounds them—they’re denying the fact that they’re equally brothers—somehow they would recognize what Goya so poignantly makes you realize in looking at the picture.
[Cello ends and the Weavers sing.]
My Lord, what a morning
My Lord, what a morning
My Lord, what a morning
When the stars begin to fall.
LILLIAN SMITH: My father and my mother were quite sincere in believing in human dignity, in democracy, in the Christian beliefs of brotherhood, fellowship, love, mercy, justice; that sort of thing. And yet, at the same time, they accepted what I call the ritual of segregation just as though it were something immovable. And you had to be as decent as possible, you know, within this immovable something. And so, I would go to church, and as a small child—and I was a rather critical small child—I’d hear about Christian brotherhood, and of course none of my little Negro friends were at church. And I would come home and say, “Why? Why?” And always, the questions were gently unanswered . . .
The voice of a novelist from the Deep South . . .
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br /> LILLIAN SMITH: And when I would say, “Why? Why?” and say it too much, they would say, “When you’re older, you will understand.” Now, that was the part where it began to really work in my mind, and I began to feel that part of my mind was segregated from another part of my mind. There was a great split there, you see. A great chasm had already entered my mind, so that I was believing something and I was not living it. And that began to disturb me very much, although in many ways, I was just a kid, just a gay, funny, and ridiculous child. But in many ways, I was asking what I always speak of as the “Great Questions”: “Who am I?” “Where am I going?” “What is death?” “Who is God?” “Why am I here?” And sometimes I think I worried my mother very much because I said, “Mother, why are you my mother?”
Here now we all ask; children ask, and the Greeks ask, and existential philosophers ask, and every thoughtful person: “Who am I?”
The voice of a novelist from Paris.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: When I was young, I misunderstood the importance of the external world. I believed you can just do what you want and think what you think by yourself. Little by little I learned that my own ideas were the reflection of things going around me; that my whole life was the reflection of a lot of things going on in the world.
I was not at all a lonely person, and I did not invent and create myself. It depended mostly on circumstance. It was the war which was a big revelation in that respect. And then, going deeper and deeper into the experience provided by the war, I discovered the tightness of the ties which tie me to the whole world.
JAMES BALDWIN: The effort, it seems to me, is if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms in which you are connected to other lives. And they can discover, too, the terms in which they are connected to other people . . .
The voice of a young novelist from Harlem . . .
JAMES BALDWIN: It’s happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You know, when one has read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered that it happened a hundred years ago to Dostoevsky. And this is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person who always thinks that he’s alone.
[The Weavers sing]
You’ll weep for the rocks and the mountains
You’ll weep for the rocks and the mountains
You’ll weep for the rocks and the mountains
When the stars begin to fall.
A singer from South Africa remembers her mother:
MIRIAM MAKEBA: Yes, she never went to school. All she did was work all her life. She started working when she was about ten years old. They used to work in—she was born in Swaziland—and to be able to live they had to work for the white man who owns the farm. They didn’t get paid. They just worked for a place to live.
Yet your mother, you say, who had no schooling, no education, knew these songs?
[Makeba singing beneath her words]
MIRIAM MAKEBA: Oh, yes, she knew most of them. Some of them are not as old as she would be, but most of them are. And she . . . she used to work for these white people. She spoke very good Afrikaans, which is Dutch, and she spoke English very fluently. You would never know she never went to school.
An elderly sharecropper from Tennessee laughingly answers the question about her capacity for work:
GEORGIA TURNER: Did I cut trees? [Laughter] I wish you’d seen the trees I cut! You know, I’m gonna tell you one thing. If you think I’m not telling you truth, go in the neighborhood down there.
Now, my sister had a little boy. He named Willie Sheldon; he yet live down there on the place. And he used to haul the wood. He was about ten years old—he wasn’t large enough to do much cuttin’. I’d cut, and he’d haul. And he’d give me half of the wood. I cut five loads of wood every day—five loads, and he hauled it. He hauled loads, two loads, and a half to my house and two loads and a half to his house. That’s how I got my wood. I cut it! Yeah, cut big loads—couldn’t hardly meet your arms around it! Wouldn’t take me long. I tell you, I’m a good axman. You ought to know. You don’t know what good work in me. I can yet do it! I can yet work.
And a Chicago poet quietly recalls her friend’s capacity for life.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS: Vit—of course, that wasn’t her name—was a friend of mine who had the irrepressibility that just seems unconfinable, even in death. And that’s why I wrote:Carried her unprotesting out of the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can’t hold her,
That stuff in satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid’s contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh. Oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,
Back to the bars she knew and a repose
In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking must emerge.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss
Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks
Of pregnancy, guitars and bridge work, walks
In parks or alleys, comes happily on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.
Oh, yeah!
[Bessie Smith singing “Gimme a Pig Foot and a Bottle of Beer”]
An operatic bosso-buffo remembers a celebrated colleague of the past, who was known for his lust for life as well as for his artistry:
SALVATORE BACCALONI: He is the most great actor—the most great personality I know in the world. When he sing the Boris, oh, yes, there are many, many Boris around. Some are good, or less good [Laughs], but Chaliapin remained the master. He go down in the street near to death. . . . I remember, he attack the monologo with one little breath of voice.
Chaliapin . . .
BACCALONI: [Sings] O triste il cor . . . He’s tremble on the stage, because he is near to fall down. But many Boris today acts [Sings again, this time much louder and with less feeling] O triste il cor . . . What kind of sick man is this? Is no sick at all! [Big laugh]
In other words, he actually felt the role. He wasn’t just a singer: he was an actor.
BACCALONI: He was no singer, he’s not an actor; Chaliapin, when he play Boris, was Boris! [Laughs]
He was Boris! [Both laugh]
[The sounds of cast members of Brendan Behan’s play The Hostage. They are discussing the author in a mood of high hilarity. Terkel points out that Behan is really saying, “There’s no place on earth like the world.” The cast members decide to sing this song, which Behan had written for the play.
There’s no place on earth like the world
There’s no place wherever you be.
There’s no place on earth like the world,
That’s straight up, and take it from me!
Never throw stones at your mother;
You’ll be sorry for it when she’s dead.
Never throw stones at your mother—
Throw bricks at your father instead!
[Pete Seeger singing “Abiyoyo”]
The voices of laughing men and laughing women. And the tellers of tales, tall and short:
PETE SEEGER: You know, once, long, long, long ago there was a little boy. And he liked to play the ukulele. Plink, plink, plink! He was always playing the ukulele all over the place. But, you know, the grown-ups say, “Get away, we’re working here! Go off by yourself, you’re getting in our way!”
Not only that, but the boy’s father was a magician. He had a little magic wand . . . he could make things disappear . . . [Fades out]
I’m sorry to say I don’t know much about telling stories. Gradually now, in my forty-one years, I’ve just barely learned how, just a little bit, to tell a story. But it’s taken me all of this time to learn.
A child learns how to talk, and they talk all the time. A man buys an automobile and he rides and forgets how to use his legs. And the fact is, let’s face it—printing was invented and a lot of people forgot how to tell stories. You don’t need to tell stories to your children at night
. You buy them a twenty-fivecent book at the local drugstore, or buy them a phonograph record, or switch on the radio or TV. You don’t have to use your brains anymore. You don’t have to make music, obviously. You don’t have to be an athlete anymore. You can turn on the TV and watch the best athletes in the world use their muscles, and you sit back and grow a potbelly. You don’t need to be witty anymore. You turn on the TV and watch an expert be witty. And of course the crowning shame of it all is for a man and wife to sit back and watch the expert lover pretend to make love on the little screen there.
