by Grace Paley
There were many greeters when we passed the Amish farm and made a sharp right into the encampment. Women poked their heads into the windows of our car to assure us of a welcome, to tell us where to park, where the “Non-Registration” booth was, to tell any men in the car that they would be welcome in the large area around the house and garden but beyond the barn the women wanted privacy and safety. We bumped our car over the terrible corrugations that had once been the earth of a farmer’s cornfield. We learned that we were expected to put three hours of work into camp maintenance every day. We contributed seven dollars. We found out quickly that the condition of the soil beyond the parking in the tenting fields was also pretty poor. Corn uses the land up, and it was a hope often expressed that this land could be renewed, returned to the fertility of the green farms of the county.
* * *
Because of friends from New York and New England who had camped earlier we knew: Seneca was Stories. The story of the flag; the story of the TV camera crew; the story of the woman who climbed the army depot tower and painted out the words MISSION FIRST—leaving the words PEOPLE ALWAYS; the story of the astrologers who advised the protesters on what day and what hour to do civil disobedience; the story of the men who apologized, the women who joined us; the story of the woman who wore a shirt saying Nuke the Bitches Till They Glow, who was moved a tiny bit, so she removed the words Till They Glow, reserving further action for deeper thought; the story of boardwalks and ramps lovingly built to keep us all from twisting our ankles, and all that work—the plumbing and electrical work—done by women; the story of rumor, invention, and absolute factual truth in the lovely combinations that become myth.
Here are some of the stories I lived in or alongside of—and a couple of stories told me so often that I’ve begun to think I was a part of those stories, too.
On Saturday, July 30, 1983, about one hundred women left Seneca Falls to walk twelve miles to the encampment. They carried large cutouts of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and other women their walk honored. They intended to show the connections between the everyday killing oppression of women and the battering of our world in man-made war. They walked peacefully through uninhabited miles of field and scrub and small towns lined with American flags. When they came into Waterloo, they saw a huge sign stretched between two houses. It greeted them: NUKE THEM TILL THEY GLOW. THEN SHOOT THEM IN THE DARK.
They turned the corner to cross the Waterloo bridge and were met by several hundred Waterloo citizens, nearly all holding little and large flags, nearly all screaming foul cries and words they hoped would insult the women: “Commies,” “Lezzies,” “Kill them,” “Nuke them.” Many carried flagpoles with pointed tips, and their enraged screams and jabbing terrified our women, who, after brief discussion, decided to sit down. (This is often done in confrontations to show that violence is not intended and also to give the sitters a chance to talk quietly about what to do next.) The sheriff, an elected official who had known all about the walk weeks earlier, had no way to control the infuriated crowd that consisted of his neighbors, who were, after all, voters. He offered a detour, which made sense to some women. But for the women sitting under the barrage of hatred, it seemed foolish to turn their backs. Besides, they felt somewhat stubborn about upholding their right to walk through an American town without vicious abuse. They thought that right was worth a good deal. Many women tried courageously to look into the eyes of the men and women barring their way … to somehow change the confrontation into a meeting. Finally, and ironically, the quiet women were arrested for disorderly conduct, while the screamers were allowed to go. One by one, the women were dragged off to become the fifty-four Jane Does who spent five days in the only jail big enough to hold them all—the Interlaken High School.
Among the women arrested was one prominent Waterloo citizen who was horrified by the behavior of the townspeople. Her daughter was one of the first to come to the encampment the next day to inform us that many of her neighbors were ashamed, that the hard screaming knot didn’t represent them, though it would be seen again and again—at the Seneca Depot truck gate, at the Interlaken High School, where thirteen brave vigilers who were keeping a watch at night were surrounded by huge trailer trucks, assuring darkness, invisibility, and terror. Here, too, the flags were used to poke and jab at the circle of women.
The green lawn outside the Interlaken High School was a place where lots of play happened, too. In the daylight we pantomimed the August 1 march for our Jane Does watching from distant windows. We played out the fence-climbing arrests, we sang to them and, in fact, sang so well that day by day, the taunters became quieter. If we shouted, they shouted. But when we sang, they listened. I listened myself. We were singing beautifully. And we were saddened for the opposition, which tried a couple of songs, worked on “Jingle Bells,” but foundered on “America the Beautiful,” which we joyfully took up.
A story: one of the vigilers at the Interlaken High School prison was approached by a man who told her he’d been one of the people at the Waterloo bridge. He hadn’t screamed, he said, just waved his flag. He asked what the whole thing was about, for godsakes. She explained the reason for the camp, the historical purpose of the walk. “Oh,” he said, “I thought you were all sitting down in the road because the VFW wasn’t letting any women be part of their parade. And I agreed with them. That’s why I was mad.”
Two days after the August 1 march, I was a greeter at the camp entrance. A big car turned in. Father and son. The father leaned out the window and said, “We came to say we’re sorry about everything. That’s all.” The son spoke through the far window. “We wanted to ask you women how you do it. Those people were really rotten to you. I heard them. They insult you and they call you names and you’re so calm. My father and me—we honor you. We don’t understand, but we honor you.”
Two young women came up out of darkness to join us in our night circle at Interlaken High School. Someone tells me they own or work in a restaurant near the depot. They sit with us as we go around the circle trying to see who will go home and who will sit the night out with a good chance of arrest. The two young women sit with us for about an hour, listening to us listen to one another, then proudly and deliberately walk past their neighbors on the way down to their car. The words “Traitor, traitor” follow them in a halfhearted way.
A great deal has been written about that hostility at Waterloo, as though a country that refuses to pass something as simple as the Equal Rights Amendment would not have pockets of vicious misogyny, as though a nation with tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, army bases, weapons factories in the midst of unemployment would not be able to raise a furious patriarchal horde.
From that rage of flags that seemed so pervasive in the towns of Seneca County we must go back to the days before the camp’s opening. A Waterloo man came to the already exhausted, worried organizers and maintainers of the camp and said, “Take this flag and place it at the camp entrance, or else we will tell the world, the media, the town, how you refused the American flag.” The women met to discuss this—as we were all to meet time and time again in large and small circles. There was so much strong feeling on either side that a committee of fifteen was charged with resolving the problem: five women in strong opposition, five women in determined support, and five easygoing intermediate mediators. After seven hours under the only shade tree in that part of the camp, it was suggested that women could make their own flags. And many flags were made, not national flags, but painted and embroidered banners with pictures and sayings about our lives—also a couple of handsome handmade American flags—and all these were hung on lines in the front yard of the camp, along the road. However, the flag of the provoker was not accepted. As a result, the flag entrepreneurs of Seneca County did an incredible business, as anyone driving through the red-white-and-blue towns will tell.
In the Nicastro Restaurant a couple of miles up the road, the encampment leaflet and vision statement are tack
ed to the wall right next to two awards to Mr. and Mrs. Nicastro: Parents of the Year. In their guest book we have all written our thanks for the decency of this family to all the women who drank coffee and ate fine celebratory dinners after jail. They allowed their place to be used during the summer for meetings between the campers and the community.
* * *
On August 1, about 2,500 women marched from the nearby Sampson State Park to the depot. It was a long, hot walk, stalled by the sheriff every twenty-five feet or so; he was waiting for state troopers. He feared another confrontation. The angry opposition had already entrenched itself and its flags at the truck gate. But this time a band of very brave Waterloo citizens stood with their children not too far away, holding signs that said they’d fight for our rights whether they agreed with us or not.
Once at the gate, women came forward to transform the military steel mesh into an embroidery of banners, dolls, children’s photographs, quilts, christening dresses, lovers’ photos. Then they stepped back, and the women who planned the civil disobedience came forward. Immediately women began to climb over the high fence. I thought it was rather ridiculous, but as I and my Vermont affinity group of six women looked and looked, it became more interesting. It was the riskiness of the fence. I thought, This may be the last fence I’ll be able to climb in this life (I’m sixty and I see a fence shortage ahead), so I joined the others and we climbed that fence that looked to us women—young or old—a lot like the school fence that encircled girlhood, the one that the boys climbed adventurously over again and again. We were carted off by young soldiers—many of them black and Hispanic—all of them perplexed, most of them quite kind. There was a physical delight in the climbing act, but I knew and still believe that the serious act was to sit, as many women did, in little circles through the drenching night and blazing day on the hot cement in front of the truck gate with the dwindling but still enraged “Nuke Them Till They Glow” group screaming “Lesbian bitches” from their flag-enfolded cars.
To this gate the curious citizens of Waterloo or Romulus or Geneva came. Folks who’d read of this excitement brought their children and their coolers to watch silently, and sometimes speak, asking the hard questions again: “What about the Russians?” or “We have to make a living, don’t we?”; and sometimes to say sadly, “Did you really burn a flag and then urinate on it?” No. No. No.
So we had troubled them. And we asked: Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if hundreds, thousands of Germans had sat down before the gates of the Krupp gas-oven plants and troubled the contented hearts and minds of the good German people? They might have also asked those first two questions.
* * *
On Wednesday, August 3, people gathered at the fairgrounds in Waterloo outside the big corrugated-metal building in which the trial would be conducted. Lots of visible media—meaning TV. Our Jane Does had continued their resistance: they were carried into “court,” then back out into the yard as the judge tried to conduct one trial after another. They demanded a common trial and dismissal of unjust charges. We, their supporters, were removed from the building. Singing again. Finally the senselessness of individual trials became clear. Three women were allowed to speak for the group. Then the judge dismissed the case and ordered the charges dropped. He, like the sheriff, was an elected official but saw the wind blowing in a different direction. Outside in the terrible heat, I walked among the men and women, the cameras, the stalwart youths standing like statues holding enormous flags on thick flagpoles. And found a group of Waterloo women with cardboard signs. WE SUPPORT YOUR RIGHT TO WALK THROUGH OUR TOWN. THE CONSTITUTION SHELTERS YOU. Our Seneca sisters were hugging them, thanking them for their bravery. “Oh,” said one of the women, surprised and embarrassed, “we didn’t think we’d be so important as all that.” “You’re the most important of all to us,” we answered.
There were so many other events that ought to be written about, and I know will be. But briefly … the busloads of women who came all the way from Minnesota … the women from Greenham Common in England, and Comiso in Italy, and from the Netherlands and Germany who worked so hard to share their experiences with us … the religious women who asked if they could pray in the depot chapel, were given permission, then asked to leave when the pacific nature of the prayers was understood … the walk to Harriet Tubman’s house … the civil disobedience actions of Labor Day, when women chose to dig a hole under the fence instead of climbing over it.
One of the most important events, and I do think of it as an event in itself, was the local news that the Seneca encampment became. That news coverage is part of the news I brought home. The combination of stubbornness that is nonviolent action, the peculiar, arduous, delicate process of our constantly public meetings set against the opposition’s vituperative rage illuminated the issues. What we talked and acted about was Peace and Justice, and the way we went about it spoke to the word “Future.”
One more story: I am waiting to use the phone. There are two phones. I am pretty annoyed with the long, gabby calls of the people on the line in front of me, until I’m finally close enough to hear a couple. One woman is giving information about her entire affinity group to a contact person … Someone’s dog has to be picked up … A mother must be called … A job has to be put off. The woman on the other phone is young and in tears. She’s saying, “Mom. Ma, please, it’s my world they’re gonna blow up.” Then some silence. Then: “Ma, please, I have to do it. It’s not terrible to get arrested. I’m all right, Ma, please listen, you got married and had us and everything and a house, but they still kept making nuclear bombs.” More tears. “Listen, listen please, Ma.”
I wanted to take the phone from her and say, “Ma, don’t worry, your kid’s okay. She’s great. Don’t you see she’s one of the young women who will save my granddaughter’s life?”
—1983
Pressing the Limits of Action
When did you first get involved in civil disobedience actions? Can you tell us some stories about early actions that you were involved in and then how you got involved in the peace movement?
If you consider the important actions of the civil-rights movement I don’t think I’ve done so much. There aren’t a lot of experiences that seem striking or interesting, but it does seem that my general disposition has been disobedient, civil or otherwise, though years ago we did have some kinds of local success. We were adamant about keeping the buses out of the park [Washington Square]. We were adamant about not letting the park be cut into for real-estate interests. One of the things I learned was stubbornness. And I’ve thought more and more that that’s the real meaning of nonviolent civil disobedience—to be utterly and absolutely stubborn.
Another example—although no one was arrested—they would not allow any music in the same park, which is hard to believe right now. But they wouldn’t allow any guitars or singing, flutes or oboes, anything. And we finally simply sat down together in the fountain circle with the children and we just sat and played guitars and recorders and fiddles. The police came from another precinct; they didn’t dare send the sixth. They went after us, knocking people around a little, but we were stubborn. Then we won. Now it’s so noisy you can hardly stand it. It seems if you have these early successes, no matter how small, they seem to form hopeful expectations.
Also, there was one action that seemed to wake us up in New York, and probably Boston, too. That was around the civil defense shelter drills. Dorothy Day was the only person in New York who, for a couple of years, refused publicly to take shelter. Then one year there were fifteen women and men. Then we were hundreds who stood in the open of City Hall park. Those actions were simple, because the drills were idiotic. Disobedience began to occur everywhere. People were arrested. The drills ended.
I don’t think the thing for me has been civil disobedience so much as the importance of not asking permission. For instance, we had kids in our public school who had trouble reading or writing. A few of us just got together and said we’d better go ah
ead and help out. We suspected that the principal wouldn’t want us around. So we simply went into the school and scattered ourselves among the teachers and began to work with the kids. It’s true that three months later we were kicked out, but we got a lot done, and methods and forms were created so parents could come back and be useful. People will say to this day, “How did you women do that? Who did you talk to?” We didn’t talk to anyone. We just did it. So I can’t say that was civil disobedience. It was just an effort to make change by making change. We talk a lot about living in a free and democratic country but we’re always asking permission to do very simple things.
Another fact, I came out of a socialist background as a kid and my meeting with pacifists was an extraordinary experience. I met people in the American Friends and the War Resisters League, people like that, totally unfamiliar to me. I had a normal Socialist childhood.
What’s a normal Socialist childhood?
Well, you know, on May Day you wear a red tie. I was a Falcon (Communist children were Pioneers). Then you sometimes took a course in Marxism when you were twelve or thirteen, something like that. I always worked as a kid in the student unions and in groups like that. The idea of nonviolence or pacifism may have been abroad in the land, but it was not abroad in my head at all. It never entered my mind. In those years—I’m talking about the forties—political positions shifted and changed and you really couldn’t hold your course in them because so much depended on what the Soviet Union said or did and whether you were for or against it. On either side you were often steered by that.
