SINISTER WISDOM

17

SINISTER WISDOM 17

Founding Editors: Harriet Desmoines and Catherine Nicholson
Editors and Publishers: Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich
Editorial and technical consultant: C. ColetteTypesetting, paste-up, and sinister wisdom: Harriet Desmoines
and Catherine Nicholson
Special thanks to: Janet Aalfs, Jamie Blue, Wendy Cadden,
Liza Deep Moss, Judy Grahn, Angela Guidice,
Kaymarion, Barbara Macdonald, Cynthia Rich,
Toni Yancey
Cover, Graven Image, by Ursula Kavanagh; photograph by
Marianna Murphy-Kohl
Printed by New Victoria Printers, Lebanon, NH.
ISSN: 0196-1853
This issue was partly funded by a grant from the
Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, withfunds CCLM received from the National Endowment
for the Arts.

Copyright ©

Sinister Wisdom, 1981. All rights reserved toindividual authors and artists.

Published quarterly.
Individual subscriptions: 4 issues $10; 8 issues, $18
Out-of-U.S.: 4 issues $12; 8 issues $21 (U.S . dollars, please).
Institutional: 4 issues $15.
Supporting: $25 and up.
Free on request to women in prisons and mental institutions.
Sample copy: $3.60 (postage included).
SINISTER WISDOM

P.O. BOX 660

AMHERST, MA 01004

CONTENTS
NOTES FOR A MAGAZINE
Michelle Cliff
Adrienne Rich
The New Victoria Printers (by the collective)

2
4
8

Taking Back My Night , a poem by Catherine Risingflame Moirai
She Knew Ways , a narrative by Donna Allegra
Texas Sketches, a narrative by Betty Bird
Holding Fast , a poem by Martha Courtot

10
15
20
27

Whores, theory by Andrea Dworkin
Present Danger , a narrative by Judith McDaniel
Elegy, a poem by Willyce Kim
Afterimages , a poem by Audre Lorde

32
37
52
53

To Be and Be Seen: Metaphysical Misogyny
theory by Marilyn Frye
Contexts , a· poem by Irena Klepfisz
Indigenous Acts, narratives by Beth Brant
Sources of Power, a poem by Celeste Tibbets
Boys at the Rodeo , a narrative by Judy Grahn
The Garden, a poem by Paula Gunn Allen

57
71
75
80
84
90

BOOK REVIEWS
Judith Barrington on Melanie Kaye
Anita Skeen on Jan Clausen
Susanna J. Sturgis on Susan Wood-Thompson

93

96
99

RESPONSES
Suzy McKee Charnas
Marge Piercy
Baba Copper

104
104
106

ANNOUNCEMENTS108

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS110

GRAPHICS
Photographs by Marian RothDrawing by Sharon Fernleaf
Photograph by Beth Karbe

7,51,56
19
83

NOTES FOR A MAGAZINEAs Adrienne and I take on the editorship of Sinister Wisdom, I think
about the ways lesbian/feminists must work to rededicate ourselves to a
women's revolution. I see the need to bring up the idea of revolution because it can so easily become obscured. And as women we tend not tothink in terms of revolution. The historian Blanche W. Cook has said thatrevolution is a process, not an event. It is a process which requires courageand vigilance. Theory and nourishment. Criticism and support. Anger. And
it requires love - for ourselves-for each other. We are women and we havebeen taught to love : men children. Seldom-if ever-each other. Seldomif ever - ourselves. We have been taught- and the dominant culture con tinues to tell us-to direct our affection outward : not inward. To choose
to love both ourselves and each other is a revolutionary choice.
As a young woman I dreamed of a woman who would love me. I had
been fortunate - I had been deeply loved by a woman when I was a child .
After her death I withdrew into this longing for a woman who would draw
this emotion from me again. And who would give it back. Who would
hold me and stroke me and let me sleep close to her .
When I next loved a woman , we became lovers , but this was not a withdrawal. Another level of life opened to me, in which I experienced a releaseof velocity and momentum which seemed only right and well deserved.
The love of woman lover for woman lover-as I have experienced it-isthe most private of emotions. I cannot share this love with any other woman-but I can work to allow it to inform relationships with other women .
Then this love becomes a source of sustained revolutionary commitment.
As a Renaissance historian I dissected love . The love described by thesyphilitic misogynist Paul in Christian theology. The love described by
Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, who based their theories on thoseof the gynephobic slavocracy which was fifth-century Athens-among other
patriarchal states . This love-these loves combined-had at its base malebonding and female oppression . Love was "conceived" by these men as asource of power; in fact , as a power in itself. It was the motive force of
their universe. This happened in an age called by many "golden" -in which
women were burned at the stake . In which the men in power engaged in
all forms of slavery. In genocide. This was a sadomasochistic era. An eraof pornography.
And in 1972 I thought that this love had something to do with me.
That in it I could love myself. In fact , I almost lost myself: as a woman
lesbian woman of color .
But I still hold to the idea of love as power: to connect touch reacheach other-and smash old patterns of self-hatred woman-hatred .
2

We live in a culture in which the word love masks other emotions andis used to justify varied forms of oppression and objectification . What
June Jordan has named "a steady-state deep caring and respect" seems
in the mainstream almost nonexistent. We live in a culture the Renaissancehelped create. In which slavery and genocide are sanctioned. And the power
remains in the same hands .
As I try to write this, I am struck by how corny it feels to me to bewriting about love . Writing about love can make you feel corny , and it
can make you feel self-righteous. And so I need to say that I am serious
and want to be taken seriously . That by love I do not mean easy escapism
into another woman's arms . And I need to say that I am not self-righteousI am in struggle to love and trust women in my day-to-day life . We needto allow ourselves complexity in our feelings toward each other. We needto admit our anger as well as our love for each other. But we must avoid
endangering our emotions with oversimplification. This is a time for us inwhich we are beginning to face issues which are complicated but which
will bring us, through our efforts, into another place on the lesbian/feminist continuum. I think of Elly Bulkin's essay on racism, which appearedin SW 13 ; Barbara Macdonald's essay on ageism and the youth culture ,which appeared in SW 16; the work in the disabled women's issue of off
our backs; the work in the "Disobedience" issue of Feminary; the Persephone Press anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga; thedialogue between Black and Jewish women edited by Beverly Smith inConditions 7 . The issue which all these address is the issue of difference
between women, of division between women . It is an issue which somelesbian/feminists claim is diversionary , others claim is nonexistent. But
unless we continue to address ourselves to this matter of difference anddivision , I do not think love between us is possible. Not a love which willtranslate into power and in tum bring forth revolution .
I have been traveling around this country this past year. In one particular place I listened to a woman say that she felt she had been taught all
her life to be "nice." She felt this expectation of niceness to be a constant
oppression. She reserved the right not to be nice, she told me . This woman
was a young lesbian . We had this conversation in a woman's center. Whena fifty-year-old straight woman called the center-because she was going
through a divorce and did not know whether she was going to make itonly one woman agreed to speak to her ; and this woman was an outsider.
This incident stayed with me, and I began to think about the idea of
niceness and how many of us have been taught this as girls and conditioned
in it throughout our lives . I thought how niceness is connected to quiet ,
speechlessness, silence. How niceness can also mean politeness, passivity ,inaction. I wondered how much the expectation of niceness is a constantfor women which crosses race, class , ethnic lines. And I also wondered
what the opposite of niceness is . I decided it is both anger and love. Bothare emotions which demand action; both are emotions which women havebeen traditionally denied for ourselves .
3

These are some of the thoughts I have as Adrienne and I take on theeditorship of Sw. I approach this editorship with a certain degree of ambivalence. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman. A lesbian. A woman of color.
I have just begun to write , and I am selfish about my writing and my time.
But I have made a lifetime commitment to a revolution of women .. I want
to serve this revolution . And I want this revolution to be for all women .
I want Sinister Wisdom to continue to be informed by the power of women. I want to make demands on this magazine , and I want other women
to make demands on it also. I want these demands to include courage andvigilance. Theory and nourishment. Criticism and support. Anger and love.
Michelle Cliff

In their first issue , in 1976, Harriet and Catherine described the founding of Sinister Wisdom as a political action. We reaffirm that purpose here.
We believe that no art , no writing, exists that is not ultimately political.
That language and images have the capacity to bolster privilege and oppression , or to tear away at their foundations. We believe that what we readaffects our lives . That the images we look at influence how we see. That
there are pictures and words that numb us , dull us , keep us circling in one
place , others which can challenge us to the quick, heal and empower us.
At the most bedrock level , lesbian/feminist publishing is concernedwith making women visible , in the sense in which Marilyn Frye uses thatterm in her essay in this issue - visible as we do not find ourselves in the"straight" misogynist world of imagery and naming. And not some few
women , but the diversity of women whose passion and labor are the pulsebeat of this planet. But why "lesbian/feminist"? To see women from aperspective that does not accept the structures of enforced heterosexuality
is something different from accepting those structures and choosing tofocus on women, as many journals, women 's studies programs , art shows,"special issues" of periodicals , or conferences have done.
In the past decade or more a network of lesbian/feminist presses andpublications has grown around the country. What this means to us is that
we are not alone: at a time of escalated sexual and racial terrorism, andthat economic terrorism which demands silence and compromise as theprice of a job , Sinister Wisdom is part of a political and social web of resistance. In recent years we have seen that network documenting the beginnings of intensive dialogue among women across racial lines, with theappearance of Conditions 5 (and articles in other issues); Azalea: A Magazine by & for Third World Lesbians; r ecent issues of the Southern lesbian/feminist journal Feminary; the anthology This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color, published by Persephone Press; toname a few milestones. We believe it is no accident that much of this process has been initiated and pursued by lesbian/feminists, both women ofcolor and white women. For as lesbians , we are all marginal in our com4

munities of origin : we all know the meaning of erasure , stigma , otherness ,separation .
In 1975 , in their introduction to Lesbianism and the Women 's Movement, a collection of essays from the early lesbian journal The Furies,
Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron wrote of lesbian/feminism as "a commitment to women as a political group which is the basis for a political/
economic strategy leading to power for women, not just an 'alternative
community.'" As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, ft:minism was being
actively invited into the "alternative culture" of the "new age ." Many allwomen events were becoming more and more like enclaves , often accessible
only to women who were "child-free ," young , physically strong, or tothose with a little extra money. Many lesbians were "coming-out" into
ready-made separatist spaces , ill-informed/or uninformed about the realitiesof earlier lesbian lives, the existence of lesbian/feminist theory , the historyof women's liberation, or the lives of women unlike themselves . As Barbara
MacDonald wrote in "Look Me in the Eye" (SW 16), the "lesbian community" often looks like a youth culture- with all the political implicationsof the youth culture, as tolerated and manipulated by patriarchy.
To imagine yourself always , every day, in every choice or act of yourlife , as living in history (herstory) : as being part of an historical process,the process of the liberation and empowering of women ; and to try to
live, work , and treat with others as if your behavior as an individual had
the power to affect that process , for better or for worse-that is perhaps
the hardest thing of all , the thing we are lured to forget when we areoffered enclaves of women-like-ourselves or feminism and lesbianism as"alternative communities." As Martha Courtot has written in this issue :imagine me a woman like yourself though different
who knows for women of our time for women of conscience
there can be. no private escape routes
As to Sinister Wisdom, we are concerned more than anything else withthe substance of what we will publish . We are not striving for mass circulation ; we want to try to keep growth-with its attendant practical concerns- balanced against strength and honesty of content , and we do believein the diffusion effect of getting the work out, even as a small magazine.
We want to publish material which makes explicit the experience of women
who have often been erased or unheard even within lesbian communities .
We want to see a continuing documentation of -dialogues on race , and whatmust inevitably come on their heels , and already is-a wholly new, woman identified dialogue on class- what that division has meant for all kinds ofwomen , in concrete , womanly terms . We are not interested in work which
is limited to claiming some hierarchy of oppressions. The oppression of
women is too complex to be wadded into one vague concept, and every
principled formulation that each woman can bring to it is necessary andprecious.
We seek artwork which depicts the diverse work and environments of5

our lives, which challenges traditional white male images of women andthe presumptions of the "art world" itself. We want interviews with women who don 't usually get interviewed; diary extracts; exchanges of letters.
We ask for "narratives" - what some people call "fiction" -because so many
women are writing somewhere between autobiography and made-up tale,and truth is not limited to mere fact. We look for poetry which connects
lesbian sexuality and passion with the ways lesbians are living in the world
beyond the bedroom; we also want poems which examine freshly, from alesbian and feminist perspective, anything in the universe.
We believe that many more women should be writing theory. The word
"theory" has bad associations for some: abstract writing, rhetoric, something detached from practice, from action , from daily needs. Yet theory
can take many forms. Catherine Risingflame Moirai's poem "Taking Back
My Night" in this issue is on one level a theory of patriarchal languageimagery. Theory essentially means thinking , reflecting on, what has happened
to us and drawing some kind of general prinCiples from that. The earliest
feminist theory of the late sixties and early seventies was derived from thehighly specific, intensely personal , activity of consciousness-raising. Yet"theory" still has the forbidding associations of a cerebral, chilly, essentiallymale activity. Unfortunately, when we explore our concrete experiences
without theory-making , we are left with isolated instances, feelings of victimization , therapy insights, perhaps, but no sense of how these experiences
belong to a larger whole , or how we can move out from them not just as
individuals but with large numbers of other women. So SW welcomes writers
who are "doing theory" and inventing new forms in which to present it.
Sinister Wisdom has , from the first, published work by "straight" womenor by women who saw themselves so at the time. We will continue tochoose work which participates in a lesbian perspective, which does notassume a heterosexually-centered universe, and which we feel to be ofvalue for lesbians, however the author or artist chooses to identify herself.
That women are the theme or subject matter is not enough; we seek workin which women are visible in Frye's sense:
If the lesbian sees the woman, the woman may see the lesbian seeing
her. ... The woman, feeling herself seen, may learn that she can be seen;
she may also be able to know that a woman can see, that is, author perception . ... With that, there is the dawn of choice, and it opens out over
the whole world of women.

We will do whatever we can to encourage and incite work which will
make SW a resource for women of conscience for the years immediately
ahead-years in which timidity and complicity will be increasingly purveyed
as appropriate responses to institutional terrorism. We need the best of
your imagining , your thinking, your' documenting of reality, your wit,
anger, criticism, and love.
Adrienne Rich6

photograph by Marian Roth7

THE NEW VICTORIA PRINTERS
Situated on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont are two
women-owned and operated companies, New Victoria Printers and New
Victoria Publishers. These two corporations are housed in an old carriagehouse in downtown Lebanon , New Hampshire . It all got started five years
ago , when three women printers found ourselves out of jobs. We got together with another woman who had the promise of some money, anddecided to start our own print shop. With the help of the Haymarket
Foundation we found $10 ,000 , which we used to renovate the space, buy
a camera, two offset presses , and bindery equipment, then opened forbusiness. We chose the name New Victoria Printers after Victoria Press, a
print shop in London in the 1860s owned by Emily Faithful , who employed only women. She published and printed a magazine called Victoria
Magazine, which advocated the rights of women . Our logo is taken froman early portrait of Simone Weil , but she has become her own persona,affectionately called Vicki .
Our original goals were to do quality offset printing; to print for women's and other alternative groups at a discount; to pay ourselves a reasonable wage; and to provide ourselves with a mutually caring environment inwhich to work . Basically we were attempting to maximize control over
our workspace and our lives.
From the start we were committed to collectivism, and organized ourselves so that each of us had equal say in decision making. Many of ourold ideas about hierarchies and division of labor have been challenged
through this process, and it has taken us a while to learn to balance theamount of energy put into our working relationships with that put into
production. But we have continued to be committed to this process andfeel that it is one of the best ways to put into action our feminist principles.
After about a year as a commercial print shop we decided to form apublishing company so that we could produce our own work as well. We
began by advertising for manuscripts and forming a board of editors fromamong local women. A year and a half later , our first book, Fire Under
Water, poems by Miriam Dyak, was in print. Our second book, Tilt, is ananthology of writings , music, photographs, and art by women of northern
New England. The third, also by Miriam Dyak, is a very intense, continuous poem about the death, over nine months , of the man she was living
with, and is called Dying. And our most recent is a children's book withphotographs and drawings about a girl who searches for things that are
brown like her-Noelle's Brown Book. Currently , we are working on ananthology of women's science fiction and fantasy, Woman Space, which is
now in the printing process . Also, this year we look forward to publishinga historical study, The Heterodoxy: A Club for Unorthodox Women by
Judith Schwarz .
8

None of our books have made us any money beyond paying for themselves, with perhaps a little left over to start the next one . In fact , they
have been capitalized primarily by the print shop , by our volunteer laborand that of community women, and by the US government through a
National Endowment grant, an occasional CET A worker , and the New
Hampshire Council on the Arts . And although the publishing and theprinters are two separate nonprofit corporations, the ability to publish
seems almost wholly dependent on the existence of the print shop. We
feel that we are operating on a fairly fine , at times indistinguishable , line
between being part of the commercial establishment and being an alternative women's press. From what we have read , however, most feminist print
shops which have printed only for women , or who have focused entirely
on publishing works ,for women , have not been able to succeed financially.
Maintaining this balance seems to be a matter of survival for us.
It has been a struggle at times to keep it all together. Commercial printing is a very competitive business, especially in our area, and also very
pressured with trying to meet deadlines . And publishing has never been
profitable for any but the very large corporations . It is , for most of us infeminist publishing, a labor of love and of political commitment. That is
why we are especially happy to be printing the National Women's Health
Network News, which has helped us, over the past year and a half, to see
the possibility of becoming a more exclusively feminist press. When we
started Network News, their circulation was 1400 ; it is now up to 8 ,000
bimonthly (we do everything including the bulk mailing) . And we havealso just begun this quarterly.
And even though there is a small but wonderful women's community
here , we always feel the need for connections with other women aroundthe country, and for feedback on what we are doing . We are interested inhearing what you would like to see in print. We publish T-shirts (silkscreened) and car.ds in addition to books , and are always looking for inspiration and ideas for these. We are open to printing apprenticeships aswell , in which an organization or individual author can self-publish bybecoming part of the actual printing process. We have done this withpoetry , and recently gained a collective member who put out a novella bycovering material costs , doing labor exchange , and apprenticing , so producing Her Voice in the Drum (ReBecca Beguin; Lichen) with distribution
strictly to feminist bookstores .
Despite some of the difficulties of trying to keep two feminist businesses
alive and well in Lebanon , New Hampshire, it certainly has its rewards. It
is wonderful to work together with other women and to be in charge of
our workspace. Beyond this we feel it is very important for women toown and operate the means of production. Not only does this break down
the stereotypes about women and machines, but it gives us the real power
to print words women want to read . It is at present the basic tool our
movement has for communicating with one another.

Beth Dingman
with assistance from: Claudia Lamperti, Barbara Hirschfeld,
ReBecca Beguin
and indirectly the other members: Petey Becker, Bonnie Lou Arnold

9Catherine Risingflame Moirai

TAKING BACK MY NIGHT

I.

There are nights when the fear
drifts like fog when there is no one.
here no one but me. I dread
the walking in the dark
fantasize the shapes of men white
as death stalking me . I holdmy breath when I open the door andlock it behind me to shut out
what was or what might be.
I stroke my quilt,
the quilt left abandoned in a stall
triangles of black, deep red , blue
given me by women who loved each other ,made by some unknown womanfrom necessity and flour sacks.
I wonder what child woke , afraid
under that quilt
and if a woman woke , afraid
beneath a man quick to anger.
I remember a child waking
hot with fever and pain
like a needle through the ear
with every heartbeat, huge , invisible :I remember standing in the bed
screaming into the dark
where there was no help , no answer.
I learned familiar thingschanged in the dark :even the glass of milk by the bed
turned to poison over night.
Familiar face turned monster:
I woke, afraid ~hearing the monster stumbling down the hall
to punish me.
I woke to run , to hide
under the bed , under the table ,if I were quick,10

if I slept light,
if there were enough light
to see where to run .
I learned vampires wore black capesand fled the dawn.
Evil witches wore blackand had dark hair.
Gentle Cinderella was blond ,like the good fairies .
I loved Snow White because her hair
was dark like mine .
In church I learned abouthorns of light , shining souls,
the valley of the shadow ,seeing through a glass darkly ,cast into outer darkness :God , hecreated light and found it good.
At school I learned aboutbright ideas, bright students ,Dark Ages , the dark night of the soul,the Dar k Con tinen t.
Everywhere I learned
little white lies,
free white and twenty-one ,blackmail , blacklist,
blacken his reputation ,black sheep ,black as the grave,
Darkies .
My grandmother wanted me
to be a pale lady .
I tried ; then I tried
to kill myself. I learned hellis very bright.
I decided to live;
I decided to live
well. I decided
not to be a lady ;I decided to live
beyond the pale.
II.

Here we walk holding hands
without light11

we guide ourselvesby the feel of the pathby the darker
patterns of trees against the sky .
Sometimes I close my eyeslearning to trust myself to fmd the way
learning to trust my loves to guide me .
I have to trust the dark to garden .
I lay down the sheets of straw,
the old hay, the gathered leaves
between the plants. Beneath the mulch
the worms make earth richand all the sweetness of the world begins.
I feed the worms, and celebrateas they multiply , and remember
I will feed them again, and better,someday.
I have to trust the dark .
When we go to the garden
each morning we fmd
tomatoes ripened overnight.
The pear trees are heavy , breaking;we pick the fruit and carefully
wrap each one to sweeten
away from sun .
At last on the kitchen shelves
the jars glow in shadowed peace
where light will not steal color .
When daylight fades
my tired body praises
the shorter day bringing rest.
Long winter nights are the goal,
the reward, the time to recoverfrom the bright hard times.
III.

12

I sit reading by the fire:the abolitionist writes
the dark races are more intuitive
gentle not gO,od at math.
The philosopher declares
the dark side, the yin
is cold and feminine .
The rabbi contrasts
Sabbath white and pure with Lilithdark and evil, who refused to be laid

down, Lilith made of earth
and kept beyond the outer wall .
I am thinking about women
wearing veils and wigs and rings
and words
hidden so men can staybright and pure .
The definition of what we areis will they kill us for it?
have they ever not killed us for it?
Watching sparks rise
I remember the smell of sizzling hair
when my brother set
the match to mine.
I read that in a certain village
the pyres seared against the black
magic cat knowledge
til one woman left alone
watched the men for enlightenment.
I remember a picture from my father's
state: a ring of whitespace around a charred black bodywhose first crime was being dark ;the white men stood with rope and torch
making proud offering
open to the camera.
Later in an eastern paper city
under a sudden August sun women
ran with flaring hair
to a river already boiling .
I watch the flames riseremembering all the brightfmal solutions.
Some nights we hear dogs
calling on the hills.
We know men can change their mind
about their game.
My love dreams that they are hunting here;
she dreams that they are hunting us.
13

Where we share common fateand cause
there we may also choose a new
definition : in the darkness, sherises strong and free
and finds it good.
Tonight I will walk in darkness
feeling my way homeby the curve of the earth
feeling my way to sleepby the curve of a woman.
If I wake in the night
she will soothe me .
If the men in white comeshe will not desert me.
I have to trust the dark.
I have to trust myself.
I am learning to love myself.
I have not let them kill me ;I have not let myself die.
I am still learning to walkwhere I am afraid.

14

Donna Allegra

SHE KNEW WAYS

She knew ways to lift herself straight off the face of the earth into her
own arms of love . She danced-the body alone doesn't make the dance ,movement comes through a spirit releasing flesh. She appeared at a standstill, but felt built for speed, lightning slim and bright to meet each eventthat came along and not go under.
She touched her lips, retracing a woman's kiss. Nikki had just left, having told her no ever so gently . Imani breathed deep and closed her eyes.
She'd done her part well-opened to the strong attraction and followed
desire. Openly she'd said to the woman: For a while now I've wanted tobe something to you, like how you be to me.
lt took a tough lesson in love to say aside her suit of armor, to open
her heart , to hear the answer : no. Her usual course of action was to remain silent, to close down all dreams and expect nothing if she braved
even to recognize the flesh of her desire. But with Nikki, she'd put out for
the friendship and fmally gathered courage enough to speak about love.
Fresh air and sunlight stung through surfacing tears and anger . Imanichafed under the elements healing her exposed flesh. She'd extended herarms, been embraced and then set on her way. She owned many strengths
now, and so being more, more was demanded each new day . She swallowed,
took another deep breath. Strange , the space that never got fIlled didn't
ache unsatisfied. No defiant thoughts of food drink pills to fill or drown
her yearning reared up. She'd learned how to pray and not expect an exact
fit. She sensed something new-the secret place she'd sought long and hard
to wrestle from outside actMty . She'd never suspected pain could take her
there, but she touched on dignity and self-respect. Her character still held
stiff with stubbornness and arrogance , but she centered on a sense of herself.
Her spiral had passed another starting point. She stepped from a line ofmany-breasted warriors who nursed and cared for themselves, who milked
love and passed blood easily. Once again she'd turned around, grown andswitched places. Her rightful place was as pupil , not master of life . The
child whined and dragged out its case so an adult could show up in her
skin. She didn't like the cards on this deal but picked them up to play her
hand. Gladly she'd give what she could when she could in amounts shehonestly had to offer.
Uppermost in her mind she loved ... Nikki for sure, but beyond thewoman, Imani just plain loved. She turned inside and knew ways to lift
herself like those night sisters dancing with rhythms incredible : moves a15

rose whiplash from water-so smooth in release , so fast in return. She
called the place to mind; in twilight the women rose up for a dance with
one another and once again a vision opened to Imani ; this time she didn't
try to shut down her mind, she'd free the memories. Life's lines traced
through the dance.
The soft haze of sadness set aside , memory moved her limbs. With eyesbright and shining, some phantom partner helped her around. Vague outlines of her life patterns fell into place and clicked . Unfolding eruptions
unearthed her spirit while she, wide awake and dreaming , stood dazed,
rooted in the moon's light.
Halfdrunk and reeling pink. and orange, the moon Herself sat outside
Imani's window. Life stood up with a different flavor in this place wheregirl children freely walked the nights naked. Imani understood she had
actually drawn down ·the energy to learn from these sisters, to step in thisdance of dark women with fine eyes and proud muscles.
Anyone watching would see a woman intent on a vision-lovely andgone from this "{orld: brown, red , moon-dusked , glistening dark and dreamy,
a woman ravaged by her own splendor, chocked and overfull of inner firelooks that so often get wasted by some man adorning himself. But Imani'seyes had always followed women as far back as she could remember inthis life and, she knew, in previous ones . She recognized a woman in thecircle as somehow herself, who when she danced showed a strong line ofthigh-the chekere lifted a mane of dread, the beads rattled the gourd wind .
The step to join this spirit family was as far as Imani ever rememberedof the journey. When the visions first came, she reared away from whatmade way as if in answer to her questions. She tried to shut down andpush them back, but gradually became willing to look on what simply
waited for her recognition. With effort she rode the balance between thisother-world awareness and familiar consciousness that could translate thewaves of energy . She felt the need to see her way through to a particularmessage beyond the hope that lifted her , but still hadn't made it all theway home.
Well, that's it for the day, she addressed her reflection , thinking: I can't
believe I'm this handsome, frankly amazed at the large eyes still soft withbrooding, the face smoothed and sheened by youth, the lines clean to thebones shaping all the lovely places. She wore a muscular frame under her
clothes, yet slenderness gave her a vulnerable quality. She posed for aneven stronger appearance, figuring that would decrease the number of men
who hit on her, but men always had something to say and it matteredlittle whether she appeared a straight femme or stomping butch: the lookof a young boy served her well.
The clock on the steeple outside her window frowned 8: 15. She lived
half a mile from the park and so needed only to put the cowbell and chekere in the knapsack where the lapa lay neatly folded. A light run paced
crosstown would bring her loose and ready to perform. The group had
pulled together in stops and starts, but after a year hanging with each otheraround dance and drum, they formed a unit tight enough to perform the16

city parks with whoever showed up, pass the hat and share some cash after
the applause.
Friday night brought down the first round of tourists eager to check
Greenwich Village. Washington Square sponsored a full concert of cityrhythms . The players showed up on roller skates bikes two legs runningaround the park or inside chasing volleyballs dribbling soccer balls. All
manner of music from machines mean enough to ride the subways backto a cappella innocence lived in the hub of the village . Guitar-playing hardtimes-blues-singing white boys from comfortable homes came to profIle in
the night. Broken-down winos still hung in there , young bloods soon totake their places sold loose jays smoke coke all kinds of pills and drugs somuch finer than wine they oUght to be illegal.
Imani entered at the southeast corner and saw Nikki, Dana and Lynn
heading towards her along Washington Square South. Her gear unloaded ,she stretched her limbs. The four women exchanged spare greeting. At rehearsal/over business/on a night to hang, only fatigue tempered by mercy
might end the conversation. When they came together to pull an audience ,they stored energy for the ripe time.
Everyone ready, they started down a pathway to set up an area aroundthe concrete circle bordering the fountain. Nikki placed a hand on Imani 's
nappy head, saying, ''What's happening dreads?" Imani ·answered with anarm around her friend's shoulder. She stroked Nikki 's back for the minute ,thinking , A year ago I'd have to hate her just to cope. She breathed deep ,appreciating this handiwork by the Goddess-she thought along lines of a
Goddess, of Sisters Who came before her and Whose spirits guided her
growth. That same Goddess had laid out the brilliant summer night where
the moon shone a smiling genius and the stars jeweled the blue .
Nikki and Dana settled on the edge of the fountain, pat out a yan valu ,the Haitian rhythm so like the water , and began. Their drums gathered thepeople . With Lynn at her side, Imani did a ceremonial step as they awaitedthe mixed bag of curiosity and cynicism that contained their audience . The
two dancers carved the semi-circle of space they'd need for movement.
Imani didn 't keep her usual watch on the people , and many had gatheredaround. She held to a stillness inside and the majesty of the night. She
didn't want to see the slick drugs passing or the eyes tha.t hungered after
woman flesh . Her gaze followed the waves in the trees where their leaves
swelled up under one another. The trees stood, an ancient village of women who had seen many human lives come and go and who knew better
than to get excited over them.
Nikki was walking her drum round the eager circle , many of them seeing a woman pregnant with rhythm for the first time. Even the skeptics
felt her tap the well to a mighty pulse as she walked with the drum talked
with the drum called spirits to shower everyone with the same joy she realized with the drum . Dana stayed seated as always , locked dead in meditation, a slight smile remaining on her face.
Her spirit sufficiently roused by rhythm, Imani's movements emerged,
saying yes to the heart beat, now is the time to head to the source of myjoy power beauty delight gratitude and love . The impulse cued her chekere ,17and along with Nikki, she too rattled rhythm of life pouring a bead song .
Imani stalked the circle , a syncopated powerhouse inviting people to join
her. Follow me , she wanted to tell them. Shake loose everything that's kill ing you and binding your wings and denying your truth.
Her body flowed free to praise to love to expect the good and the best
as her natural right to life. Moved beyond cares and shyness, the truth she
stepped to called everyone to take up for greater forces, to link in the ritual cleansing, to return home to the inner well and tap clear waters.
She set the chekere down to ride a solo approved by ancient family .
Way outside bounds into expanded forms, Imani focused energy to. tell thespirits all that had been done to her , speaking first as a child come crying
to her mother how people didn't treat each other fair; that they laughed
at one another for sport and didn't behave with courtesy and respect.
She came out, her head wrap working from her neck up and downtluough her spine, telling how some stole the life blood of others and thensold it back in diluted forms , that the food packed poison and neither air
now water flowed clean and free. Fiercely she rattled her beaded locks
and pushed past the demons insecurity fostered: these she shoved outside
the door in one slam stroke that rose from her belly slithered through herchest and in triumph tossed back her head. She uncovered wounds at thecore-the times people judged her unkindly for not lining up the way theirattitudes implied she should, the times they wouldn't let her just live true
to who she was. She unleashed all the wrongs ever done her so she could
roam free of their weight.
She turned to Lynn and put out the song two women sing to one another naked of masks. They frolicked and romped and played and then,kicking high, moved off together in twin movements, in triumph, in glory.
The dance cleansed from the inside out-nothing more needed be said. The
drums had the last word and brought the conversation to a close.
Nikki then took the helm, for she too had gone to the well shared inside and brought back plenty clear water. She pumped and poured andlifted beyond human spaces. Lynn came back, giving it all up-sharp prancing and high stepping. Even Dana acknowledged life force outside the communion with her spirits.
Imani wasn't sure if she were really in the park or if she existed in theplace of her visions. Easily she grasped the meaning she'd strained so hard
after. She danced again, eager to bring the precious knowledge to the people around her: I see it now-there never was an ending, maybe not evena beginning, just what's always here waiting for us. We're part of something that's the same always and forever-the song of my heart that springs
from the source, before even a thought of separation. We're meant to learn
and grow and be ourselves however we come out. There's nothing wrong
with me, she gloried, love counts more than all the mistakes . This truth
I've been dreaming of lives in everyone. We're all part of the same piecethe shit and the sunshine. We're supposed to connect to the place where
there aren't any differences-touching wide and pure and free and see: thelove is how we lift ourselves. I remember so clearly now-nobody can tell18

me it's not true. We can go back to the love we all shared when we wereyoung and from some other place. My spirit dances this song, and risingwith the glory, she lifted herself straight off the face of the earth into themagic where all things are possible, her arms reaching out to love.

drawing by Sharon Fernleat

19Betty Bird

TEXAS SKETCHES
The bell rang . I grabbed up my drawings and hurried out of the classroom, stopping outside to pick my blue long coat from the hook. I wrestled
into it while still holding the portfolio . As I approached the front door of
the school building, I met Charles, a big second grader who lived next door.
We usually walked home together , although we did not come together inthe morning.
The School Patrol held out her flag on a stick and stopped the cars
while we crossed Pennsylvania Avenue at Second Avenue, where the big
Methodist church was . My family went there when Mother could get us
all to. As we started down the long block toward the railroad tracks on
the Hump , a big gust of wind came that was stronger than the rest, snatching the portfolio from my arms. It hit the ground in the middle of thestreet. The flap flew open, and my pictures ripped free and blew acrossSecond Avenue and Pennsylvania , leaping in the air and racing faster than
I could run. The traffic light had changed, and the Patrol on the otherside of the street did not see me trying for my things across Second. I got
two that had stayed on my side of the street and started walking sadly
west on Pennsylvania again. Second Avenue and Pennsylvania were big
streets that I was never to cross without help. Besides, the drawings had
blown far down the street by now. I could no longer see them .
The first semester of first grade was over. We had kept our drawings
from art class all year and were to take them home to keep now . I loved
art class . My lines were always straight, and my colors just right, to me atleast. I especially liked the blue-suited policeman and the brown-legged
cowboy wearing his chaps. That one took two pieces of paper , and you
had to fit the chaps onto the rest of the body carefully so the lines matched.
Color pleased me very much , as did shape and shade. Drawing absorbed
me totally. I could work for hours with my Crayolas . Art would be mylife when I grew up . I knew that.
At home I changed into my jeans and warm shirts. Why didn't they let
us wear pants to school? Winters were cold in Dallas, and that January
wind stung my legs red. When Daddy came home, I ran to meet him .
"Have you got anything in your dinner box for me?"
"I don't know. Maybe you'd better look in and see."
Opening the large metal box, I found the thermos bottle clamped in
the lid , but I passed quickly over it beneath the paper towel in the bottom. There it was. Just as I thought from having shaken the box before
opening it, a Hershey bar, with almonds! Not every day, but some days,
Daddy brought me something special . On others, he was not hungry for
all Mother gave him, so he brought his potato chips or cupcakes home20

again . I could always have them , but usually I had to wait till after supper. Too often though, the lunch box held only a bolt he had found lying
on the dock or in the lot where the six-wheel trucks parked . Daddy always
saved everything, as did Mother. They were frugal (the Depression , I think ,when Papa Bird split matches twice and sometimes four times so theywould last longer) , but they were not stingy .
Supper was fried potatoes , as usual . I loved them . Mother made themkind of soft with onions cooked in there . The grease sizzled and snappedwhen she turned them over. Red beans were there als,o , as usual. I loved
them too. We had them every day and tonight was no exception . Cornbread, sliced tomatoes, and sliced onion came also with fried Spam. I
loved my tea glass. Now I had a goblet like the others. For years I had touse a snuff glass saved for us by Grandmother Wright and brought by thedozen in brown paper bags when she came to visit each year. When wetalked about her, we always called her Grandmother , but when speaking
to her we mostly called her Grandma. Grandfather Wright came on the
train with Grandmother. They always had peppermint candy in their suitcases. Grandmother ate hers mostly at night. When they came, they took
Dot's room that I shared with her . The crackling of the candy sacks would
sometimes wake me at night, and there would be Grandmother, bending
down beside her bed with her suitcase pulled out from under the bed , eating a peppermint. She said it settled her stomach and let her go back tosleep .
I was looking forward to a few days off between semesters , even though I
liked school. The teacher had asked me if I wanted to go to second grade
the last half of the year; I said no . I had lots of friends in first grade, Michael,Sisi, and I loved Miss Parker, my first grade teacher. So I told Miss Parker
that I did not want to go to second grade because I did not know anyone
there. I would be afraid of all those new people. (Oh well , I knew Charles ,but he didn't count.) So I would go back to myoid room when school
started again next week.
Since there was no school the next day, I could stay up late . My brother
Clyde and Doris, his soon-to-be wife , took me to the movies with them .
The man in the uniform, a bellhop I think , danced allover everything, his
feet tapping wildly. Up on the counter , down on the chair , across the marble floor. But before the movie was over, I got cold. Chills came all overme and Doris gave me her coat too .
The ne xt morning I woke up feeling bad . I was hot and had dark spots
on my stomach . Mother rocked me and said I had the measles . For days
and weeks I had to stay in bed . The fever burned my skin like the time I
had fallen in the fire and burned my arm when we lived in Sherman . The
doctor said I must stay covered and drink hot tea. God , how I hated him .
Stupid old Dr. Frye, saying to keep covered when I was so hot I could
hardly breathe . I kicked the sheet and blanket off and Mother and Daddy
pulled them up again . Fighting, I cried and screamed , and they poured thetea , hot , so hot , down me with a spoon. Dr. Frye wanted the measles to"break out ," whatever that meant. It was supposed to be bad for you if
the measles did not break out. Warmth was supposed to help . My fever21hung at 105 degrees for what seemed like days to me. Then the sweat
popped out and I began to get cooler. The blankets could come off and I
slept under the sheet. But still, only people who had had the measles could
come visit, and they did not stay long .
While I was sick, we kept the shades down. The room was dark. It was
to protect my eyes . Dr. Frye said light would hurt them. As I felt better,I began sitting up . I liked to play Flinch. When you saw two cards alikein the middle of the table, you quick slapped them with your hand. The
first to slap them got those two cards .
Mother, Dot, and I were playing one evening when I was about well.
Dr. Frye said it was okay now. When we started the game, things looked
okay, just a little shadowy . Before the evening was over, I had to quit; thecards were very blurred , and I could not tell the spots apart.
I do not know how long before my parents figured out I could not see.
We started going to many doctors. Light hurt my eyes and made themwater. Mother would put my sunglasses on, but I still had to shut my eyes
and hold her handkerchief over my face. Mother and Daddy did not likewhat any of the doctors said, so they would take me to another. We would
get up in the middle of the night and drive for hours to get to anotheroffice. Finally, Dr. Block, my Dallas eye doctor, told them to take me to
Marshalltown, Iowa, to the Woolf Eye Clinic. Money was a problem, but
the church and neighbors gave us some, and the three of us went to see
Dr. Otis Woolf senior, Otis junior, and Henry, Otis junior's brother.
Mama Lyles said I would be just fine when I came home, so I was glad
to go but scared of an operation.
They looked in my eyes and saw the same cloudy thing the other doctors saw. Dr. Henry was the funniest. I liked him best. He teased me andsaid I was from "Taxes" because he thought that was the way I said Texas.
Otis junior operated on my right eye and removed a cataract. He put
a metal shield over my eye and taped it down so I would not rub my eye
while it had stitches in it. While I was in my hospital bed, Mother andDaddy brought me a radio. It had a large knob to turn for the stations
and a small one with a raised animal face on it. I felt of it but could nottell what it was, no matter how hard I tried. I was very sorry. They wanted
me to be able to tell it was a deer.
When Dr. Otis junior took my shield off, nothing had changed. I still
could not see anything. He said it might take time, but that time has notcome.
We were all sad on the way home. I was nine now. It was 1951. The
summer was hot and Missouri and Kansas were flooded. We could get nowater at public places and had to drink soda pop all the way to Texas.
One is good when there is no water around, but after two days with nowater, sodas do not taste good. They left sweet, thick stuff in my mouth,
which I hated.
We stopped in Arkansas to see some places in the Ozarks . In a little
gift shop I found a plastic cigar whose end lit up when you bit the holder.
I loved it and played with it all the way to Dallas, asking every five minutes, "Mother, is it lighted up now?" The battery grew weak, and to my22

sorrow I lost it before reaching home to show it to Bill , my brother who
still lived at home with us. Nevertheless, I explained it to him repeatedly ,and Mother, Daddy , and I assured him he would have liked it if he hadseen it. Bill assured me that he would have, every time I told my story
again.
SchoolShortly after recovering from the measles , while still visiting all those
Texas ophthalmologists , Dr. Block told my parents about another familywith a blind daughter one year younger than 1. Mother and Daddy visitedthe School fot the Blind in Austin, but did not like it. So they wanted
me to go to school in Dallas. Dallas had no schooling for blind children ,so Dr . Block thought my parents and Sarah's parents should meet, forthey wanted schooling for her in Dallas also . The four of them contacted
our state representative, Mr. Parkhouse, and began trying to persuade him
to make schooling available to blind children in Dallas . While the legislative process took its winding course, the Sacks , who were rich, brought ateacher to Dallas who was to be my nemesis for the next six years.
While we waited for Miss Collier to come from Austin, Mama Moon,
Sarah's governess , taught us to play with clay and build with blocks . I did
not like the blocks as well as I liked my log cabin set I had gotten for
Christmas. I would build a house and a corral and fill them with the horses
and cows that I had also gotten for Christmas. That's what I liked best to
play with in the winter, but summers I spent outsid·e . I climbed trees andplayed with the rocks from the driveway, which became horses in myhands. With mounds of dirt I fashioned corrals, garages, and a bridge fromthe dirt up to the sidewalk . The dirt I hauled in my tiny dump truck,
which I got around the corner at Pop's grocery . I liked the rocks thatwere sloped on one side so my index fmger could rest on them. They alsoneeded a point to tap the ground to supply the sound of hooves . The extra slick ones that were black were my favorites . My name was Jud Mason,and I owned ranches all over my front yard. When on my feet, I rode astick horse, one of Mother's old brooms. The straw provided a fine grip,
as does a horse's mane .
When on my stick horse , I was anyone : Gene Autry, Roy Rogers , or
Slick Gun Blacky . The latter was my villainous self, who could ride fasterand draw a gun faster than anyone else alive. I swaggered as I rode myhorse slowly through the back yard , alert to any sound that would reveal
the presence of my enemy Charles.
Leaving my horse to shelter flat on the ground, I would spring into thechinaberry tree, the trunk that pointed toward the house . It sloped justright to form a good fork for a seat a few feet up , where Mother could
just grab my foot when she wanted me to come down"and I did not.
In the tree I drove nails-two side by side to hang my hammer on so
it would be handy for driving more nails. Single nails were spaced at strategic places, from which I hung my buckets made of cans with nail holes
poked in each side and bailing wire strung through them for handles. Billand Daddy showed me how to drive the nails through the cans and to cut
23the wire with wire cutters, then to bend it over into a U to go throughthe holes .
In these cans I stored hundreds of the hard, green, smelly berries . This
stock was to throw at anyone who became my enemy . Often I played alone and the enemy was of my own imagining; these I always beat. Other
times my enemy was Charles . We chunked at each other across the hog
wire fence with barbed wire strung along the top to keep people fromcrawling over it. The posts were small trees , some of which crooked before quite reaching the top strand . Others forked and the wire rested between the prongs.
Charles's yard had no chinaberry tree , so he had to gather what I threw
at him and send them back as return fire . Neither of us hit very often .
Warfare took on different characteristics as we learned other weapons
from Bill and his friend . Rubber guns came in at one time. These were
cut with a saw from wood. They were basically straight barrels which
turned in a ninety-degree angle and widened into a square or rectangle
handle , depending on the size of the scrap of wood you had scrounged .
The other end of the barrel had a horizontal notch cut or sawed into it.
On the back of the handle, you nailed a clothespin , with the snapping
part pointing up. Getting the clothespin off the handle was the tricky part.
You took the pin apart , used two tiny nails , and hoped you did not split
the wood. Then you had to put the pin together again , which my hands
were hardly strong enough to do. Fortunately , Bill or even Mother would
help out.
Your ammunition was cut from old inner tubes from cars . With thescissors, I would cut a half-inch strip , going across the tube from one side
to the other . This created a large rubber gun that was then stretched fromthe notched end of the barrel , along the barrel, and clamped in the pin.
To fire , you squeezed the pin . I don't think I hit many people , but I ran
and played like the rest. We always shot low . The cardinal rule was not
to hit , throw , or shoot anyone in the face , for "You'll put out somebody'seye" we were told over and over.
I am surprised we did not put out someone 's eye or life, for we also
took up making and warring with steeple shooters, a twisted coat hanger
formed into a Y with rubber bands loosely strung across the point. From
this we shot steeples , which we made from inch-long sections of coathangers, again cut with the wire cutters and bent in the vice into U-shaped
missiles . These we never shot at people , for they were too dangerous- well,almost never .
I climbed trees , chased pigs (I don't know where they came from, they
just came down the street one day , as did the white horse we caught andkept till the owners came), made toys, and ran. Ran outdoors , climbed on
garage tops , and shimmied up into the child-size cage with wire sides (rumored to be a squirrel cage, but we never saw any in there) .
While at the Sacks', upstairs in Sarah's quarters , Mama Moon toiled on.
Shapes , colors, textures , scissors, paper, paste. Okay stuff, but not very
active. No noise , no going downstairs except when Hetty fixed lunch or
Mrs. Sack played the piano and we listened to classical music and did
24

movements on the floor. Later I learned Sarah herself had not been allowed downstairs for the first five years of her life . Her father , a nice but
distant man , had not been able to accept Sarah's blinlfness. She was premature and lost her sight in the incubator from too much oxygen , as havethousands of premature babies. Even after discovering the cause , often the
choice is death or blindness . Blindness being the lesser of the two choices,
doctors and parents rightfully save the children.
Sarah's father felt guilt and shame at her blindness, built an upstairs
large bedroom and bath, and put her in it with Mama Moon from Padukah.
A loving woman , Mama Moon could not make up for the affection Sarah
missed and is still looking for .
We could go out on the terrace when the weather was warm . Sarah hada large tricycle with a chain like a bike . I loved it. The terrace was smooth;the bike glided across it smoothly, bumping only over the small lines etchedin the cement, as was the way then. There was an iron rail around the terrace , except for one set of stairs . Mama Moon stood there to protect us
against falling . I would plan to have a large cement area in my house when
I grew up so I could ride a bike or skate as far as I wanted to go .
All of this was nice as "school ," but it was not home. Little did I knowthat the worst was yet to come. In the fall of 1950, when I was eight ,Miss Collier came to teach us. Schools were still not ready to take us , sowe went to the Unitarian church at Normandy and Preston Road in North
Dallas. They had a large playroom for the children at church, which weused for school during the week. We got swings for the yard and had piano
lessons and band in the chapel. I learned quickly to go out the classroom
door, turn right a few feet , and then fade left to hit the water fountain. I
loved cold water and still do . Anything cold , really , and I even learned tolike hot tea with milk as an adult.
Sarah was slower to learn how to get places. She would follow me andthen shove me aside to get at the fountain first. I hated her but did notpush back. Mother told me not to. Hitting and pushing other children was
not right. Bill and I fought , but when we would start , we would have to
put on the boxing gloves and go outside. He was eight years older but notmean , so I came out all right.
No matter how I protested , Sarah pushed me. She had a shrill, high .
voice and whined a lot. Miss Collier always gave her my things and spoke
sharply to me while speaking nicely to Sarah . I believed money lay at theroot of it. I knew she hated me because I was poor. Miss Collier came tomy house only once , and my family and I were stiff and uncomfortable
the whole time . I played the piano for her but hated it and could feel hereyes on my back while I played. Miss Collier stayed at Sarah's house till
she got one of her own. I heard the Sacks paid her salary that first year.
When I was nine , we started to Ben Milam School. My parents kept
fighting , along with other parents who had flocked to the Unitarian churchclass with their blind children. By the time we went to Ben Milam , we had
Douglas, Tommy, John , and Tommy Lucks as well as Sarah and myself.
About 1950, Texas passed a law providing for a teacher and materials forblind children in public schools where five or more children were present.
25

Although we lived all over Dallas , we all gathered in Ben Milam for school.
It made it hard to make friends at home, but I liked it much better thanthe School for the Blind, which I later attended, which was like a prison
and the kids were funny acting. Oh yes, Rudy McClung came to school at
the church also . He was the kid Miss Collier hated worst of all. I know
now he needed to learn independence, but then I thought her unnecessarily
sharp with him and his brother , who later joined us when he was old enough.
Douglas threw temper tantrums , yelling "bitch" imd "shut up" at Miss
Collier, kicking her and pinching her. She got very angry but never hit him
as I recall. My family almost adopted Douglas, for his parents had abandoned him . He was a little strange after living in foster homes all that time ,Mother said. As in all other things, my parents asked my opinion. I wanted
Douglas , but they fmally decided they were too old to take a second visually impaired child. He could see some but had many personality problems as well as perhaps a little brain damage .
Jolm St. Jolm was quiet. I hardly remember him. Tommy Lucks had alimp , wore thick glasses, and had a crush on me for years , so I did not
like him. My true love was Tommy Godsey. He liked to run and play. He
wore glasses also, and we had great fun rmming relays and whirling on the
merry-go-round at Ben Milam. Before we reached junior high, Tommy wasdead of the cancer that had affected his vision in the first place.
Years later, I called Miss Collier , at my parents' urging , when I washome from college. They swore she was proud of me and had always liked
me and wanted to hear from me. I telephoned her and found an old, friendly
woman. We had trouble making conversation at first, but we hit upon thetime-honored practice of catching each other up on what had happened tous and common acquaintances in the six years since I had seen her last.
Then she brought up Sarah, who was living in Berkeley after the death ofboth of her parents by heart attack only a few months apart. As my wariness crept .over me to be on guard against her praise of Sarah, she said ,"You know , Betty , I tried so hard to help Sarah. She had so much catching up to do . You were always so quick to learn and independent. Your
parents loved and helped you and fought for that law, and let you climb
trees when they were terrified , but they kept their mouths shut and let
you do it. I see now you may have thought I did not care about you, but
I did. I am very proud of you. Even though I did not help much, you aremaking it, while Sarah has had a nervous breakdown and had to leave
Berkeley ."She went on to tell me of the room built upstairs for Sarah and Mama
Moon to stay for five years . I felt ashamed of having disliked her for solong, but still could not like her. I understood the dynamics of what wasgoing on . She was adding to the independence I was learning, but kindness
is good for capable children too. I wonder if she told me the truth.

26

Martha Courtot

HOLDING FAST
"Holding fast to one's rootsis the foundation of courage."
Lao-Tsu
One :A Dream of Water

face down in the stream
the water is darkwith rivers of light pushing toward the sea
my face rests

against the earth

water tries to enter my mouth my nosewater dark water runs down my ear
which closes itself to warning
who is here to pull me up?
this is a drowning stream and i am pulled
into deeper water than you knowa sly something whispers sleep, sleep
and water enters me a forgotten memory
an old friend mother, bedtime kisses
the sweet smell of a wet apron
and sleep
Two :The Foundation

early i was promised
to a skin of lonelinesseach year

it stretches wider

like a highway
in the middle of america
three a.m .
no one awake but a trucker
oblivious to the mouths of the darkwhich are opening to the silence
then the night and the highway
and the trucker become
one yawning mouth of silence27and thenthe sirens begin
here is the foundation of courage
the building to last
the unswayable body of truth
sunk deep in the past
while sirens surround
Three :The Dream of Falling
A Universal Symboli am in a large old building
in an unidentified city
there are many women here with me
you are here with meseven floors under us the earth shudders again
steel beams bricks unbreakable glass
lie at our feet do not step in the glass
do not stand under beams that are ready to fall
do not move too quickly do not panic
the floor we are standing on which once
seemed as firm to us as the faces of our fathers
is getting ready to collapse
we can hear the whining and creaking of wood
unsettling itself beams giving way
one move from any of us could bring the building down
and all of us with it including you
all of us falling through the air like birds
thrown from the nest too late to learn to fly
so we are moving very carefully very slowly
we are trying not to argue about whichis the correct direction
our separate rhetorics are buried beneath the debris
we are Simplified now
we must fmd a way down through the coreof a building which is getting ready to fall28

when you move away from me
nimble footed and thini realize you have your escape route planned
it is private and predictable
it does not include me

i remember my large body and the places i have come fromwhich taught me early not to expect too muchwhich taught me i did not understand the rules
i am afraid now to take a step in any direction
whether away from you toward you or down
Four:

Class Backgroundwe sit in this room discussing "class"measuring ourselves by how many tvs we had
how many courses at dinner
who ate white bread and who ate whole wheat
we pretend to agree that there are attitudes
which oppress
we do not mention these attitudes
here in this room each week
the core of myself unwinds slowly
a paper curled tight unto itself
hidden between the strips i find ancient messagesof dreada contempt of self wound deeper
than any love can reachhow can i tell you this?
how can i show you my wounds
without dying a little?
as i leave this room
tripping overmy clumsy dirty self the poor girl with stains
on her dresses with hand me down clothes
tangles in her hair a faraway look in her dark eyes
the girl who balances herself and her rageon the railroad tracks each day who promises
not to surrender
the child who was never good enough
who never learned the rules because she knew
she had not made themtripping over this self i wonder if i will ever learn
to trust myself again
and i wonder how i ever talked myself
into trusting you
Five:

Holding Fast

still we know the building is fallingaround us29we carry this knowledge with us
into our public lives
and some of us have private escape routes
and some of us are still trying to convince ourselves
we deserve to escapeand some of us want to blow the whole building up
just to prove our pointi admit to ignorance
i do not yet know how to pull myself up
from the drowning stream without abandoning my sisters
i do not yet know how to make myself stay awake
while the past tears through me a crazed animal
blind and innocent to the wreckage
it surrounds me withholding fast to one's rootsis the foundation of courage
but my roots are with the lonely deaddug deep under basement obsessions
and just now i am surrounded by myself
a litter of paper strips come aparttorn into pieces
they cannot be glued back together
they are highly combustible
while you edge closer to the door
taking back your fathers nameusing the lessons your mother taught you
i am trying to hold myself fast
Six:

Survival Systeqls

the dark wealth of my hillbilly mother's facerefuses to abandon me
my grandmother blackeyed and furious
uneducated except by life continues to teach me
she insists i survive

30

contrary to reports my sisters are not trappedon the inside pages of True Story magazine
although their lives resemble paper
it is tough and not easily destroyed

my father the house-painter the cab-driver
dead at fifty-four not able to support his family
holds me still in his loving smileand the ten year old i am hangs on
Seven:

Possibilities

when you think of me imagine me in a building
getting ready to collapse
imagine you are there also
will we help each other?
imagine me a woman with wild hairfalling out of the window of the tower
will you catch me?
imagine me the woman her face in a stream
falling into sleep
wake me up help me to arise
and i will teach you a new way to see
imagine me a woman damaged
who has pulled herself out of a suicidal ragethat has lasted most of her lifetime
imagine me a woman who has refused to damage her daughters
imagine me a woman like yourself though different
who knows for women of our time for women of conscience
there can be no private escape routes
imagine us all together surviving long enoughto know and love each other for the first time31Andrea Dworkin

WHORES

The best houses do not exhibit the women in cages.
The Nightless City or the Historyof th e Yoshiwara Yuk waku , 1899 reporton a red-light district in Japan

Male sexual domination is a material system with an ideology and a metaphysics . The sexual colonialization of women's bodies is a material reality:
men control the sexual and reproductive uses of women's bodies. The institutions of control include law, marriage , prostitution, pornography,
health care, the economy , organized religion , and systematized physicalaggression against women (for instance, in rape and battery). Male domination of the female body is the basic material reality of women's lives;and all struggle for dignity and self-determination is rooted in the struggle
for actual control of one's own body , especially control over physical accessto one 's own body. The ideology of male sexual domination posits that
men are superior to women by virtue of their penises ; that physical possession of the female is a natural right of the male ; that sex is, in fact,
conquest and possession of the female, especially but not exclusively phallic conquest and phallic possession ; that the use of the female body forsexual or reproductive purposes is a natural right of men; that the sexual
will of men properly and naturally defines the parameters of a woman's
sexual being, which is her whole identity. The metaphysics of male sexual
domination is that women are whores. This basic truth transcends all lesser
truths in the male system . One does not violate something by using it forwhat it is: neither rape nor prostitution is an abuse of the female because
in both the female is fulfilling her natural function ; that is why rape isabsurd and incomprehensible as an abusive phenomenon in the male system ,and so is prostitution, which is held to be voluntary even when the prostitute is hit, threatened , drugged, or locked in. The woman's effort to stay
innocent , her effort to prove innocence, her effort to prove in any instanceof sexual use that she was used against her will , is always and unequivocably an effort to prove that she is not a whore . The presumption that
she is a whore is a metaphysical presumption : a presumption that underlies
the system of reality in which she lives . A whore cannot be raped, onlyused . A whore by nature cannot be forced to whore-only revealed throughcircumstance to be the whore she is. The point is her nature , which is awhore's nature. The word whore can be construed to mean that she is acunt with enough gross intelligence to manipulate , barter, or sell . The cunt
Copyright © 1981 by Andrea Dworkin. "Whores" is an extract from Andrea Dworkin's
recently published book,Pornography: Men Possessing Women .
32

wants it; the whore knows enough to use it. Cunt is the most reductive
word; whore adds the dimension of character- greedy, manipulative , notnice. The word whore reveals her sensual nature (cunt) and her naturalcharacter.
"No prostitute of-anything resembling intelligence," writes Mencken ,"is under the slightest duress .. . "1 "What is a prostitute?" asks William
Acton in his classic work on prostitution . "She is a woman who gives formoney that" which she ought to give only for love . . . "2 Jane Addams ,who worked against the so-called white slave trade, noted that "[ t] he one
impression which the trial [of procurers] left upon our minds was that all
the men concerned in the prosecution felt a keen sense of outrage against
the method employed to secure the girl [kidnapping] , but took for granted
that the life she was about to lead was in the established order of things,
if she had chosen it voluntarily."3 Only the maternal can mitigate thewhorish , an opposition more conceptual than real, based on the assumptionthat the maternal or older woman is no longer desired . Freud writes Jungthat a son approaching adulthood naturally loses his incestuous desires forthe mother ''with her sagging belly and varicose veins ."4 Rene Guyon , whoargued for male-defined sexual liberation, writes that "[w ] oman ages muchsooner. Much earlier in life she loses her freshness, her charm, and begins
to look withered or over-ripe . She ceases to be an object of desire." 5 The
mother is not the whore only when men have stopped desiring her .
Guyon , in whose name societies for sexual freedom exist today, heldthat women were defined exclusively by their sexuality , which was essentially and intrinsically the sexuality of the prostitute. "Woman's sexual
parasitism," writes Guyon , "is innate . She has a congenital tendency torely on man for support, availing herself of her sexual arts, offering in return for maintenance (and more, if she can get it) the partial or complete
possession of her person ."6 This propensity for exchanging her body formaterial goods is her seXUality, her purpose , her passion, and consequently"[s] ale or contract , monogamy or harem - these words mean little to her
in comparison with the goal ."7 For this reason , Guyon contends that eventhe so -called white slave trade - the organized abduction of lone or young
or destitute women for the purposes of prostitution- cannot be construed
as forcible prostitution :How hypocritical it is to speak of the White (sic] Slave Trade only asa means for recruiting the ranks of prostitution . The White (sic] Slave
Trade is universal , being carried on with the consent of the "slaves ,"since every woman has a specific sexual value . She must sell herself tothe highest bidder , even though she cheat as to the quality of the goods .B
Like most male advocates of sexual freedom (the unrestrained expressionof male sexuality) , Guyon theoretically and repeatedly deplores the use offorce ; he simply never recognizes its existence in the sexual use of women .
Typically, every charge by women that force is used to violate womenin rape, battery , or prostitution-is dismissed by positing a female naturethat is essentially fulfilled by the act of violation , which in turn transforms
violation into merely using a thing for what it is and blames the thing if
it is not womanly enough to enjoy what is done to it.
33Sometimes "consent" is construed to exist. More often, the woman isperceived to have an active desire to be used by the male on his terms.
Great Britain's Wolfenden Report, renowned for its recommendation thatlegal persecution of consenting male homosexuals cease, was also a reporton female prostitution. The Wolfenden Report stressed that "there are
women who, even when there is no economic need to do so, choose thisform of livelihood."g The Wolfenden Report recommended increasing legal
penalties against prostitutes and argued for more stringent enforcement oflaws aimed at prostitutes. Male sexual privilege was affirmed both in thevindication of consensual male homosexuality and in the advocacy ofgreater persecution of female prostitutes. At the same time, women's degraded status was affirmed. The whore has a nature that chooses prostitution. She should be punished for her nature, which determines her choice
and which exists independent of any social or economic necessity. The
male homosexual also has a nature, for which he should not be punished.
This desire of the woman to prostitute herself is often portrayed as
greed for money or pleasure or both. The natural woman is a whore, but
the professional prostitute is a greedy whore: greedy for sensation, pleasure,money, men. Novelist Alberto Moravia, like many leftist writers seemingly
obsessed with the prostituted woman, writes in an assumed first-personfemale voice to convey the woman's pleasure in prostitution:
The feeling I experienced at that moment bewildered me and, no matter
how or when I have received money from men since, I have never again
experienced it so clearly and so intensely. It was a feeling of complicity
and sensual conspiracy ... It was a feeling of inevitable subjection whichshowed me in a flash an aspect of my own nature I had ignored until then.
I knew, of course, that I ought to refuse the money, but at the same time
I wanted to accept. And not so much from greed, as from a new kind ofpleasure which this offering had afforded me .10
The pleasure of the prostitute is the pleasure of any woman used in
sex-but heightened. The specific-the professional whore-exists in thecontext of the general-women who are whores by nature. There is additional pleasure in being bought because money fixes her status as one who
is for sex, not just woman but essence of woman or double-woman. The
professional prostitute is distinguished from other women not in kind but
by degree. "There are certainly no women absolutely devoid of the prostitute instinct to covet being sexually excited by any stranger ,"11 writes
Weininger, emphasizing both pleasure and vanity. "If a woman hasn't got
a tiny streak of a harlot in her," writes D.H. Lawrence, "she's a dry stick
as a rule."12 The tininess of Lawrence's "streak" should not be misunderstood: "really, most wives sold themselves, in the past, and plenty of harlots gave themselves, when they felt like it, for nothing."13 The "tinystreak" is her sexual nature: without a streak of whore, "she's a dry stick
as a rule."
There is a right-wing ideology and a left-wing ideology. The right-wingideology claims that the division of mother and whore is phenomenologically real. The virgin is the potential mother. The left-wing ideology claims
34

that sexual freedom is in the unrestrained use of women, the use of womenas a collective natural resource , not privatized , not owned by one man but
instead used by many. The metaphysics is the same on the Left and on
the Right : the sexuality of the woman actualized is the sexuality of thewhore; desire on her part is the slut's lust ; once sexually available, it does
not matter how she is used, why, by whom, by how many, or how often.
Her sexual will can exist only as a will to be used. Whatever happens toher, it is all the same. If she loathes it , it is not wrong, she is.
Within this system, the oniy choice for the woman has been to embraceherself as whore, as sexual wanton or sexual commodity within phallic
boundaries, or to disavow desire , disavow her body. The most cynical use
of women has been on the Left-cynical because the word freedom is used
to capture the loyalties of women who want, more than anything, to be
free and WJlO are then valued and used as left-wing whores: collectivizedcunts. The most cynical use of women has been on the Right-cynical because the word good is used to capture the loyalties of women who want,more than anything, to be good and who are then valued and used asright-wing whores: wives, the whores who breed. As Kate Millett writes:" ... the great mass of w()men throughout history have been confmed tothe cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet
and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young."14
Men of the Right and men of the Left have an undying allegiance toprostitution as such, regardless of their theoretical relationship to marriage.
The Left sees the prostitute as the free , public woman of sex, exciting because she flaunts it, because of her brazen availability. The Right sees in
the prostitute the power of the bad woman of sex, the male's use of her
being his dirty little secret. The old pornography industry was a right-wingindustry: secret money, secret sin, secret sex, secret promiscuity, secretbuying and selling of women, secret profit, secret pleasure not only fromsex but also from the buying and selling. The new porno~raphy industry isa left-wing industry: promoted especially by the boys of the sixties as
simple pleasure, lusty fun, public sex, the whore brought out of the bourgeois (sic) home into the streets for the democratic consumption of allmen ; her freedom, her free sexuality, is as his whore-and she likes it. It
is her political will as well as her sexual will; it is liberation. The dirty little
secret of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce.
The new pornography industry is held, by leftist males, to be inherently
radical. Sex is claimed by the Left as a leftist phenomenon; the trade in
women is most of sex. The politics of liberation are claimed as indigenous
to the Left by the Left; central to the politics of liberation is the massmarketing of material that depicts women being used as whores. The pimpsof pornography are hailed by leftists as saviors and savants. Larry Flynt
has been proclaimed a savior of the counterculture, a working-class hero,and even, in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times signed by
distinguished leftist literati, an "American Dissident" persecuted as Soviet
dissidents are. Hugh Hefner is viewed as a pioneer of sexual freedom who
showed, in the words of columnist Max Lerner, "how the legislating of
sexuality could be fought, how the absurd anti-play and anti-pleasure ethic
35

could be turned into a stylish hedonism and a lifeway which includes playand playfulness along with work."15 Lerner also credits Hefner with beinga precursor of the women's movement.
On the Left , the sexually liberated woman is the woman of pornography.
Free male sexuality wants, has a right to, produces, and consumes pornography because pornography is pleasure . Leftist sensibility promotes andprotects pornography because pornography is freedom. The pornography
glut is bread and roses for the masses. Freedom is the mass-marketing of
woman as whore. Free sexuality for the woman is in being massively consumed, denied an individual nature , denied any sexual sensibility otherthan that which serves the male. Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when
the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked
or cruel when the corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sellcunt ; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or
red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man'spleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerfulagainst the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery
is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery ; torture is not wicked or
cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography
is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Lefthas gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too .

NOTES
1. H. L. Mencken,ln Defense of Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City PublishingCo., 1922),p. 187 .
2. William Acton, Prostitution (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1969),
p.118 .
3. Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan Co. ,1914) , p. 40 .
4. Sigmund Freud , The Freud/lung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund
Freud and C. l . lung, ed . William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull
(Princeton/ N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 503.
5. Rene Guyon, Sexual Freedom, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York : Alfred A.
Knopf, 1958), p. 239 .
6. Guyon, Sexual Freedom, p. 198.
7. Ibid. , p. 200 .
8. Ibid ., p. 204.
9. John Wolfenden , Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1957), p. 80.
10. Alberto Moravia, The Woman of Rome, trans. Lydia Holland (New York: Manor
Books,1974),p.88.
.
11. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1975), p.
219 .
12. D. H. Lawrence, Sex, Literature and Censorship, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1953), p. 69.
13. Lawrence, Sex, Literature and Censorship, p. 69.
14. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon Books, 1971), p. 119.
15. Max Lerner, "Playboy: An American Revolution of Morality," New York Post,
January 10, 1979.

36

Judith McDaniel

PRESENT DANGER

She watched them turn and walk away. Single file. The way they had
walked down the narrow path to her cabin four days ago.
The fat one gestured with his rifle. "Don't follow us." He turned backup the path.
The threat was real. She felt it. Sat silent as the four men heaved andgrunted up a small rock face and tromped up the stream.
She paused only until they were out of sight, then tied her blanket ina roll around her waist and moved away from the stream. The forest darkened around her as she entered, pushed back branches, made a place forher head and shoulders to weave through the dense underbrush . She went
about fifty yards, then sat and watched the path she had come through .
Her mind focused on the image of their retreating backs. She recreatedthe picture of them, one by one, climbing the rock face and disappearing.
Then she would imagine one turning away from the others, coming backsilently to kill her.
But no one came up the path. She must have sat, her back against therough tree trunk, knees pulled up to her chin, for several hours. If one
had come back down the stream, he hadn't seen where she had gone into
the woods.
She was alone for the first time since they had come. The first time infour days. As the solitude settled around her, sensation began to return.
Her eyes burned from staring up the path. She blinked and looked to one
side, moving head and neck cautiously. Green, she registered. Sitting indeep shade she noticed the dark moss, ferny ground cover. A few yellow
brown leaves had filtered to the forest floor. No sound of other humans
since the men had gone beyond range. Noise . Her own body breathing.
Water. Birds. Insects.
She stood slowly and began to move toward the stream again. At theedge of the underbrush she looked around. They were gone. Her eyesburned, her throat was dry. Every muscle felt torn. Her vagina was raw
with a searing pain. Taking off her boots, then her sweater , pants , andshirt, she put her feet into the icy water. She moved deliberately, ignoring
the cold. Slowly she sat and submerged her whole body.
2
As she lay back in the water of the Adirondack stream, her head began
to ache from the cold. Water washed over her face. She inhaled tentatively,
then blew bubbles of air outward. Her face was an icy mask. She wanted
to be numb.
37

"We're heading northwest ," they had said the night before when they
had reached the stream. "You can go south. You should find something."
Laughter.
At dawn she had wanted to ask for a knife, matches, some of theirfood, but no words came. They had turned and left her with only a single
blanket.
Sitting up in the stream, she looked down at her thighs under the clear
brown water. Red scratches ran along the top of her inner thigh from justabove her knee to her crotch. The young one, she thought, he'd never takehis pants off. His zipper had raked her. She wouldn't ask him to move it.
He was ashamed to let the other men see him. He wouldn't drop his pants,
just worked vigorously, his zipper cutting her with each thrust.
Her limbs felt fragile in their stiffness as she lifted herself slowly outof the water. Pulling her long dark hair back, she wrung the water out ofit, shivered, looked up at the late September sun through the heavy layersof pine branches. About one o'clock, she guessed, climbing onto a rock
midstream where the sun struck more directly than at the woods' edge.
She lay in the relative warmth of the afternoon sun, but could not rest.
The acrid odor of burnt logs from last night's camp fire lingered under thepine . She was still where they had left her. Better to move, stay warm
moving.
The stream bed to the south looked passable. Large rocks had been
dropped randomly by a retreating glacier. And gravel. She looked downstream for a moment, then tied her boots, wrapped sweater and blanket
around her waist, and started to pick her way from rock to rock.
She had no sense of destination, knew direction only vaguely. She had
no illusions about retracing the direction they had come. The men had
bushwhacked through heavy underbrush, using compasses, carrying water.
Two landmarks, she thought, the tracks and the stream. The second day
they had crossed the railroad tracks, running north and south the lengthof the forest, a symmetrical steel anachronism, they had seemed, moving
in and out of the tangled underbrush. And the stream. She stopped frequently to drink, assuaging her thirst and hunger with water, realizing as
she did so that she must stay with the stream to survive .
Now she tried to remember what she knew about the wilderness. She
wasn't out of place there. But camping and canoeing were things donewith equipment, with friends, and food and fire. Survival camping? Even
then the survivor got a tin cup, a knife, and some matches. She had one
blanket. And some knowledge. Don't eat mushrooms and bright-coloredberries.
But what could she eat? Her stomach contracted in pain, a distinct andfamiliar pain. She had been hungry before. If she could focus on this discomfort, maybe she wouldn't notice the sharp burning pain in her crotchwith each step forward.
3

When they had forced her out of the cabin-two of them, then her,then two of them, single me down the narrow path to the pond and out
38into the bush-she had gone without protest. She had stopped speaking.
The passivity she had adopted, complying mutely with their demands , washer bid for survival. To resist, she saw the first day, was to give them anexcuse to kill her, at least to brutalize her more fiercely.
The dynamic was easy to see. Her friend Jamie had two dogs. One ,Jamie said, would attack when it was scared. If you didn't scare it, it
wouldn't hurt you. The other dog feared nothing, hunted and killed forsport. Startled by a woodchuck, the first dog would bark ferociously, terrified enough to hold the chuck at bay. The second dog would comebouncing up happily, sniff curiously at the hysterical barker, then kill thewoodchuck. It was a deadly combination.
She had come to the cabin alone, leaving work early on Friday anddriving the hundred miles quickly. She had gone straight to the woodpile
for the key Jamie had left her. Instead of unpacking the car, she had begun to split wood in the early autumn twilight. Not because she needed it
to burn; she knew Jamie would have left the wood box full inside thecabin. She needed the stretch of her body , the violence of impact. Before
darkness stopped her, she had split nearly a quarter of a face cord . Placing
the cut log on the block, swinging the maul behind her, sliding her handdown the smooth handle as it arched over her head and slammed into thelog end .
When she had first seen Jamie split a log, she thought it seemed an impossible skill for her to learn. Jamie was a tall woman; Susan was justaverage height, slightly built with thin hands and wrist bones.
"You put your body weight behind it , Susan ," Jamie had explained.
"Swing with your whole body.""But how am I going to hit the top of that little log?" she had asked
in exasperation. "How do you hit the center of it each time-? " Her ax
bounced off the side of the wood block again.
"Just like playing tennis," Jamie had insisted. "Keep your eye right onwhat you want to hit."
It worked, and Susan had loved the sense of powerfulness, of energy
directed, released, effective.
Unlocking the cabin in twilight, lighting the kerosene lantern, she felt
a sense of peace return. She was glad to be alone, glad Jamie had taken
the dogs with her on her short trip south . She poured a glass of wine , thenread Jamie's note pinned under the lantern: "Sorry to miss you. Lots oftomatoes ripe in the garden. Make yourself at home and call me next week."
Susan kindled a small fire in the stove for company and then pulled
out Jamie's fluffy down sleeping bag . She arranged her back against thesofa and began to read, dozing gradually, and then slept deeply without
dreams .

4
Picking her footing as she stepped from boulder to boulder, Susan felt
hunger making her awkward. She hadn't eaten a real meal since the Saturday the men had first come. Now it was Tuesday. She had tried to fast
once after reading Doris Lessing's Four-Gated City. Skipping breakfast
39

wasn't hard , nor even lunch. But when she had come home to her apartment , sipped a glass of water and lemon juice , she couldn't think about
anything except the food she might be preparing and eating . She knew it
would be days before she experienced the heightened perceptions and insights Lessing had described , and she realized, sitting dizzily on the bed,
how silly this was . She had to go to work the next day and the next,
could not indulge in a long and quiet isolation in a peaceful room in ahouse someone else was taking care of. She had gotten up from the bed ,fixed a bowl of soup and an omelet, and eaten them too quickly . It was
her only attempt at fasting .
Now she recognized the light-headed and dizzy feeling of prolonged
hunger . She supposed there must be something she could eat growing inthe stream bed or at the edge of the forest. But summer was past with its
abundant variety of berries , and she couldn't think what else there might
be . If Jamie were here, if Jamie were here, part of her mind chanted as
she looked vaguely along the stream bed for something to eat. Images ofJamie leading her class of seven-year-olds around the edge of the playground , pointing out the delicate sharp bud hidden under the protective
stem of the leaf, naming the trees and plants , putting names and pictures
together with fmely drawn details. "It's what makes you a good teacher ,"she'd told Jamie once , "and you'd be a great detective , I'll bet." Susan
was joking, but it was one of the differences between them that mattered :that Susan saw only the broader shapes of things, recognized familiar
forms and never focused on a detail . She knew the birds by their color ,some trees by their shape and a lifelong familiarity, had an instinctive
liking or disliking of the people she met , but rarely examined her responses
to them or looked closely at the texture and environment of their lives .
Vegetable food was green, she knew, and looked at the brown reeds
and cattails without bothering to pick one . In a muddy backwash she
found some green shoots and broke them off, sniffmg tentatively at thestems . Inoffensive . She put her tongue out and licked the smooth white
lower stalk . No taste . She bit into it. The flavor was musky and slightly
muddy. The reed was sinewy., not tender , and the tough celerylike strings
wouldn't chew . But some of the pulp dissolved, and she swallowed it andwalked on slowly, chewing the stems and looking for other food .

5When she had awak~ned that morning in the cabin, curled still in frontof the fireplace , she couldn't at first remember why she was there. The
place itself was familiar; she had come to the cabin many times in thethree years since Jamie had moved there. As she lay looking at the dark
rafters overhead and the flagstone chimney climbing up the wall, she felt
peaceful , completely rested-stiff from the thin foam pad on the hardwood floor-but rested. Jamie's cabin always did this for her. She loved
the freedom of isolation, the physical presence of the mountains, watching
the shift of color and tone as the seasons changed . She came for Jamie's
companionship , but more, she sometimes thought, for the quiet of thecountry and the sense of knowing herself again that Jamie's cabin and themountains had always seemed to give her.
40

She thought again, as she puttered around the kitchen, lighting the gas
burner to melt butter, cracking the eggs, that she was glad to have thetime to herself. She took the eggs out in the sun on the back porch . The
night had been cold, but the sun could still warm the air by midmorning.
She sat back on a wide wood porch chair, stretched her legs up to theporch railing, and started to eat her breakfast.
She remembered the eggs and her complacency as she climbed arounda small waterfall, carefully picking her footing down the broken rock face.
She remembered the eggs, not because of her hunger, but because she had
been so relaxed, so self-secure as she sat on the porch. What had happened?
What had she done wrong? What could she have done differently to escapethe horror of the last few days? Alone . Shouldn't have come alone. Careful.
Careful? What did I do? What did I do wrong?
It had been irrevocable from the moment she had heard the branches
snapping in the underbrush and then looked and seen the four men walking down the path toward the cabin, rifles slung over their shoulders, too
early for any legal hunting season.
6
Retching violently, she vomited back the pieces of long stringy green
her stomach rejected. She leaned on a rock, pressed her forehead against
the pebbly cold surface, and waited for the spasms to pass. Exhausted andchilled, she began to look for some shelter for the night. In the waning
light she moved away from the noise of the stream into the shelter of the
deeper forest. The blanket-now wrapped around her arm and shoulderswas an old wool army-surplus one , warm, but not warm enough for nearfreezing temperatures. And the damp. She had been soaked the fust nightin the forest clearing, sitting defiantly, back against a tree, soaked by theheavy dews that came when days and nights carried such temperature extremes.
When she had walked out of the house that Sunday, she had carriednothing with her. ''We'll take her along," they had said, and she had not
known what that meant, not understood where they were going, believed
really-in that level just below conscious thought-that they were walking
her into the woods to kill her, and she had taken nothing but the clothes
she had been wearing.
And if she had not kept up, she wondered. If she had not been able towalk as quickly, climb as well, if her shoes had been thin instead of sturdy,
if her pace had slowed them, what then? Would they have left her sooner,
closer to home? Or would they have just shot her, turned a rifle on her
for sport, as one had threatened? ''Watch it," he had said when she stumbled, stopped to catch her breath. "I'll tie you to a tree and use ' you fortarget practice." Better, she supposed, to be lost this far in, than tied toa tree, even five miles from the cabin, slowly starving . Or bleeding. Or dead.
A more heavily wooded copse to her left seemed promising, and she
picked her WilY carefully through the top branches of a tree that had fallen .
At the base of the trunk several branches crisscrossed, and she pulled othersfrom the ground onto the trunk, creating a small cave, about a foot tall41

and long enough to crawl into. She wrapped her blanket around the lengthof her body, sat on the ground, and inched feet first into her shelter.
Shivering, eyes wide open , she watched dark obscure the shapes aroundher. She tried not to think, not to remember, but as her physical activity
ceased, her thoughts moved frantically, repetitiously, staccato .
The whiskey. Must have been that. Always got worse after the whiskey.
Why did they do it? Other men think these things. Don't do them. Other
men drink whiskey. Already breaking the law. Deer jacking. Do it every
year. Got dull. Did they do this every year? Other men have fantasies, but
he .. . The voices stopped. She was sitting with her back to a tree. Cold.
Dulled. They had finished eating. They sat at the fire, passing the flask.
"What's that you got there , Jack? Something for the girl?" Her brain
went gray , winced without movement. She had thought they would forget
her.
"Hey, girl, come over here ," he commanded. ''We got something for
you ." Laughter. Always the laughter. She sat without moving. Her pulse
speeded , and she felt the blood heat her face. She needed to swallow but
couldn't. The lackey stood up , walked to the tree , and pulled her to herfeet , shoving her by her elbow toward the fire. Jack sat , feet stretched in
front of him, fly open, cock erect.
"Hey, honey," he grinned, "it's getting cold out here. I want you totake those jeans off and sit down here on top of me and keep it warm."
Lackey was grinning , the fat one giggled. The boy swigged another shotof whiskey.
She did not move. Head bowed, this command she could not follow.
She could not take part in her own humiliation.
The lackey jogged her elbow , then slapped his hand across the side ofher head. When she did not respond, he tore her pants down and, holding
her arms above her head , forced her onto Jack's lap.
7
In the dream she was sleeping, but the covers kept slipping away . Her
hands were weak as she tried to pull on the edges of the blankets. She
knew there was a reason she could not keep the covers up and if she could
only remember what it was, she wouldn't be cold. It was her own fault,
her own fault , the voice said. Then her bed was on a boat that rocked androcked and she felt the ocean under her and the voice said hold on, holdon or you'll roll off, hold on, but her hands were weak and numb and she
thought if I can only wake up from this sleep, I'll be fine. She opened hereyes. There was only the dark and the sound of the ocean rolling and sobbing, and she saw that her bed was a cradle with sides and knew she
couldn't fall out but only wanted to pull the blankets up so she could bewarm .
She woke just before dawn, as the birds started to talk, and turned
painfully onto her back. She had slept in a curl on her side all night forwarmth, and her shoulder and arm had no feeling. As the light returned,
she watched the branches move against the sky, the voices silent within
her.
42Movement made her arm tingle, then shot streaks of pain from elbow
to hand. As movement displaced the warmth of her shelter, her body
started to tremble violently, a shiver that began at her core and pulsed
outward to the extremities. Walk. She knew she had to start walking.
Warm up. Wrapping the blanket sarape-style around her arms and shoulders,she began to move through the denser forest toward the noise of the stream .
At the stream she drank, then sat and took off her boots. She had carefully removed her socks each night and tucked them around her waist todry, sleeping with the heavy leather boots unlaced on her bare feet. Now
she pulled the dry socks on, laced the boots tight. Standing, she was hit
by dizziness so extreme she had to bend down again . She needed food,she knew that, needed food to go on walking, and yet she could see nothing
edible. Rising more slowly, she began to step from boulder to boulder down
the stream bed.
Susan thought that if she concentrated on seeing something to eat, she
was likely to fmd it. She wanted to believe most firmly in the control ofher conscious life . "Accidents rarely happen," she told Jamie . "If you're
looking for something, it will come. A lover. A new job . We prepare ourselves, make ourselves receptive, then change can happen to us.""That's naive ," Jamie had countered. "You can't really believe you
have that much control."Susan wasn't sure. But it was an attitude that helped her live.
8
The path of the stream had been growing less and less steep . Gradually
there were fewer rocks for her to step onto , and she found herself forced
to the edge of the stream, to walk on the bank, where footing was lesssecure and tangled branches made her progress slower and slower. Then
she was at an impasse. Water spread on all sides, lying in pools among thelimbs of fallen trees. A dam. Beavers chewing , building, backing up thestream.
She walked out on a log to survey the marshy bog confronting her.
Sitting on the edge of the log, her feet dangled only inches above themurky water . Exhaustion became fixed in her mind as she began to countthe steps around the muddy tangled expanse. She sat slumped on the log,
no energy for anger or grief.
She was a child again, lost in the endless tangles of childhood dreams,
nightmares of being lost and alone , not fantasies but sleeping dreams overwhich she had no control. Wandering through the maze of a forest, lostin the midst of thousands of strange adults in a place she could not recognize, she woke calling, heard no answer, no voice answer. Woke in thenight not knowing her own bedroom , sobbing and sobbing, until her motherheard and came and stood beside her in the dark . "Did you have a bad
dream , honey?" "I got lost , Mommy."
The thought-half-formed and present from the first moment-that she
might be rescued , came more to her mind as she sat gazing up into thewide blue expanse of sky . She looked for a plane , someone to come andfind her. WlLy aren't they looking for me? Surely someone's noticed I'm
43gone. But who? Jamie might have noticed that the cabin was messed up,
but one of the men had locked the door again and another had driven her
car out of the clearing around Jamie's cabin and parked it a mile up an
old logging road. Someone fmd it. Let someone fmd it. Mommy , I'm lost.
She had walked through the woods with the four men for two days ,looking as they came over a rise or into a clearing, looking for other people .
But there were none. Hunting season was weeks away , and summer wasover. The enormous expanse of forest seemed deserted. She was alone.
Sitting on the log, she knew vaguely that she had lost the sense of claritythat had carried her through her first day alone. Relief at being alone, free,
and alive left little room for fear. Now part of her doubted that she would
survive. To survive meant going on , going on alone, perhaps for days. It
was never a question of whether to try or not to try. She never envisioned
walking out into the marsh until she lost her footing and drowned . She
had endured much in order to survive. What she doubted now was her
ability to endure.
She reached out a hand and pulleq absently on one of the cattails growing out of the mud. Ugly. Then she ran her thumb along the stiff fuzzybrown head. She no longer felt hunger , but knew her body craved food.
Pulling the cattail toward her , she thought there might be something inside
it she could eat. It came up from the mud , slurping as the mud sucked its
roots. Nothing in the head. She pulled apart the stem. It was dry andwoody, the leaves tough and fibrous. She looked at the roots , covered
with mud and mucous-gray slime . Nothing , nothing at all .
But she dipped the roots in the water and swished off some of the mud .
On one side of the root clump she saw light-colored pointed fingerlike roots
sticking out. She broke one off and washed it cleaner . Brown petals ofleaf covered a glistening shell-pink root. She broke it in half and bit thesmooth surface . Not bitter. She chewed slowly , remembering her attempt
at eating the day before.
She ate two, then stopped, waiting to see what her stomach would do,gathering in other plants as she waited. She walked the length of the log,
tugging gently at the cattail stems, coaxing them out slowly , rinsing off
the pale pink protrusions, and laying them in a corner of her folded blanket.
By noon she had eaten and rested and gathered food for the journey.
Finding this food was a gift , she thought. But she felt , too , a renewed confidence. She had found food. The frightening tangle of underbrush aroundthe pond seemed to recede. She tied the blanket in a pouch around her
waist and walked back up the stream until she came to dry land on eitherside . She decided to cut east through the forest , then angle back to thestream below the marsh. She thought the railroad tracks might parallel thestream bed. But if she didn't cross them, at least she'd get back to thestream before dark. Taking a drink of fresh water, she turned then andwalked into the forest.
9"Keep your eye on what you want to hit," she remembered Jamie saying. Spotting a tree fifty feet due east, she began to move toward it. The
44

old pine forest had shaded out most of the undergrowth, making passage
seem fairly easy at first. Stepping over fallen branches , ducking under closely woven bare dead pine branches sticking out like spikes from the talltrunks, Susan picked her way toward the first tree. Checking the sun andthe clearing where the stream had run , she picked another tree and started
toward it. Two, three , four. She had imagined the bog to be about two
miles long, a mile wide. Five, six. She 'paused to pull a briar away fromher pants leg . On the fiftieth tree, she would begin to move east and south
again. On the hundredth tree she would cast back toward the west andpick up the stream . Unless she came to the tracks.
Counting, moving in a chosen direction , munching on the cattail roots,
she felt her sense of clarity returning. She was thirsty. But she was on apath of her own choosing.
She loved the smell of the tall conifers, the sense of grandeur she felt inthem when she stood at the base of one and looked straight up its trunk
to the sky. Solitude, she thought, that's what it was. Surrounded by otherpines, yet each one of these huge old trees seemed to stand alone in theforest.
As a child she had learned that all of New England had been pine forest
once , that the Indians knew that the deer loved the fresh pine shoots, andthat pine trees could only grow in acid soil. So every year the Indiansburned a part of the forest back, keeping the soil acid and making newpine growth for the deer. The pine seeds hid in the pine cones during thefire and, when it was over, started to grow.
She had thought it was good of the Indians to do that for the deer ,but she was not pleased to learn that the Indians needed the deer for foodand clothing. She only wanted to imagine the delicate-bodied doe in thespring, stepping daintily through the forest , nibbling with white teeth thenew pine growth.
She wondered now, as the undergrowth became thicker and less passable , whether the four men had killed the deer, found them in their passage to winter feeding grounds and killed them. Killed them before thehunting season , before they had reached their natural protection higher inthe mountains. For a moment she saw the blood and torn flesh, and thenshe saw herself, tied to a tree , tom and bleeding.
Stop. She told her mind , stop . Leaning exhausted against a tree , sherealized that the way ahead was more and more difficult. Large trees had
fallen, not just dead branches . And thick green undergrowth was coming
up in the light left by their falling . She was hot now, and the ground was
sloping upward . She spotted a tree at the top of the incline and moved
toward it, hoping for a clearer view of her direction.
She wondered why they wanted the deer , those gutted carcasses, furmatted with blood , piled up in a truck . Money? What were they worth?
Did they use them for food like the Indians? She thought not.
Sweating, she struggled to the top of the hill by pulling herself over a
fallen tree. She could look across the gully to the next rise . There, stretching through the forest, were the silver rails lying across the dark railroad
ties. She sat abruptly as relief loosened her body. They were there, in front45

of her, running for miles through the tangle of forest and swamp. She had
only to cross the gully.
She started over the rocky ledge and down toward the trees . They weremuch younger, much shorter now, and they were deciduous, she realized .
She saw the shades of brown and light green ahead of her , not the heavy
dark green of the older pines. Puzzled, she continued to climb down toward
the gully bottom.
Before she reached the young woods, she knew. A windfall . It stretched
for miles. Hundreds of large old pines blown down in a huge swath of wind ,blown down and lying on the ground, rotting as the young trees grew up
in the open light , healing the forest's wound . She stood looking at the hundreds of feet of fallen trees lying between her and the railroad tracks, fallen trees, split , wrenched out of the earth, roots twenty feet tall where
they were pulled out of the rocky soil.
She walked back up to the ledge and sat, dropping the blanket behind
her , pulling off her sweater. It was warm , too warm for a late afternoon
at the end of September . A rme haze covered the sun. She rested her headon her arms. The bog behind and to her right. To the north the men with
their rifles. A windfall ahead to cross. And tonight, she thought wearily,
rain.
10
Resting, then dozing on the hard rock , she dreamed of going northwhere the men with their rifles hunted the delicate-bodied doe with soft
brown eyes. Where the men with their guns and knives shot and killed anddismembered and left bleeding corpses behind . She dreamed of their camp
fIre at night and of their rifles piled together under a tree and of herself
creeping into the camp where they slept, whiskey on their breath andblood on their hands. And she dreamed she would pick up one of therifles and walk toward the shapes of the sleeping men with blood on theirhands. And she would raise the rifle and fIre it at the four sleeping shapes.
Fire it again and again and again.
She woke at dusk , chilled, feeling light raindrops on her face , thinking,I should have done that , I should have followed them that first day andat night crept into their camp and shot them all.
And while she climbed back toward the pine forest , looking for a treethat would give her some warmth for the night and shelter from the coming rain , she imagined the looks on their faces , imagined killing Jack first ,and then the lackey. But she wanted them to wake up and see what wasgoing to happen . She wanted them to be afraid of her. And she wanted
the fat one to squeal and the boy to look unbelieving as she fired shotafter shot into their writhing bodies. She could kill them, she knew she
could kill them. She could kill them .
Taking the blanket off her shoulders to move more freely, she remembered that it had belonged to the boy. They had goaded him into taking
her that night when she lay on the ground where Jack had dumped herfrom his lap. He had come reluctantly and worked back and forth on her,
his face grimacing as if with pain , his zipper scratching her thigh. When46

the boy was through, she had stood and pulled on her jeans. Then walked
out of the firelight circle and sat again with her back to the tree. The boy
had brought the blanket and dropped it beside her. As the night got colder ,she had wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, curled with her backagainst the tree, and shivered until dawn .
Now she carefully pulled small green pine branches off the larger boughs ,twisting each stem to avoid peeling the bark . She arranged the branches
along the frame of the shelter she had constructed , needles down , to shed
the rain . Remedy enough in a shower, she knew , but useless if the rain
turned into a downpour. Wrapping the blanket around the length of herbody, she inched into the shelter without disturbing the branches , thenpulled the fragrant pine boughs closer and wrapped them like arms aroundher.
Listening to the rustle of the rain in the pines , she lay and wondered
what she ought to do tomorrow. No point in going back . She wasn 't evensure where back was. She wouldn't go north. The men had probably killed
the deer and left the forest by now . But to the north was more wilderness ,unpopulated forest. She had to get south. She would have to cross thewindfall . That was brutal work. In her condition she might slip , turn anankle, break a limb , trying to climb over or around the enormous tree
trunks.
She told herself she ought to be glad . She knew where the tracks were
now , knew exactly what it would take to get out. Tomorrow she would
fmd food and then start across the gully. She should be glad. But anxiety ,not relief, pushed blackly against her eyelids , sapping her sense of confidence in her body , her ability to go on . "I should have killed them ," shewhispered again.
As she thought of her dream , and remembered the feeling of the rifle
in her hands , against her shoulder, she wondered again why they hadn't
killed her. Had they been so sure she wouldn 't find her way out? They
had never been threatened by the idea that she might confront them somelater day. That she could have them arrested for illegal hunting . Or rape.
She thought that second. The anxiety tightened her backbone as she imagined seeing them again, trying to tell someone what they had done to her.
She knew she'd rather kill them. It would be easier to pick up a rifle andshoot them than to hike into a village and find a sheriff and tell him what
they had done to her. Yes, they had been sure that she would never tellanyone, even if she could walk out of the forest and into a village. They
had never been afraid of her.
Hunger knotted her stomach and distracted her thoughts. She needed
food, she would feel better if she found more food. But the thought ofcattail roots turned the spasm in her stomach to nausea. She wanted foodthat had an odor, food with flavor, food that was warm or even hot.
Moving her weight off her shoulder , she turned on her stomach. Aroundher the forest came to life. Nocturnal feeders moved through the underbrush with rustling feet. A raccoon sniffed the pine branches she had spreadover her, then moved on. She heard a fox catch a burrowing shrew in thewindfall over the ridge.
47

11

Her sleep was light , dreams scattered. For a moment she drove a car ona wide road toward a place she had to be. And then she realized the car
was only a bicycle , and she worked harder to pedal up the rolling hills. As
she worked and breathed harder , the bicycle became a tricycle with little
wheels and she still had to go up the hill and behind her was a wagon tied
to her tricycle with a little girl in it, and her legs were stiff and crampedwith pedaling. Waking and shifting her body to straighten her legs, shethought of Jamie and imagined herself walking back into the cabin andwondered what she would say. Would Jamie know something was wrong?
Or would she have to begin , "Guess what happened the other day?" Herthroat ached with wanting comfort, and tears trickled down her nose. "Oh,God , I want to get out of here , just let me be home," she whispered into
the pine leaves.
She remembered Saturday morning , how she was resting in the sun,drinking a third cup of coffee , her feet propped on the porch railing infront of her. The sun was warm on her face. And then there was the crackling in the underbrush, and she looked up ... her mind refused the memory.
No. No . Just the sun and the front porch. But the crackling in the underbrush persisted , and she looked up and saw the four men walking single
file down the path toward the cottage, rifles slung over their shoulders,
too early for any legal hunting season .
She had stood as they approached, stood on the porch with the cup ofcoffee in her hand, stood on the porch so she was taller than the men who
were walking up the path. But they had not stopped. They had not stopped
and asked permission. They had walked up onto the porch and lounged
against the railing.
"Hey , honey , got a cup of coffee for us?" Jack had asked.
And then she began to lose her perspective, began to lose the small bitof control she had created over the memory by knowing it was past and
she was lying wrapped in a pine-bough shelter somewhere deep in theforest.
"No," she had said, thinking of the pot she had just emptied.
He laughed. "Yes, you do ," he said.
"Hey, a girl like yon ought to have some hospitality for nice guys likeus," chimed in the shorter man.
She saw that the four of them were around her. She felt them pressing
toward her, even while they leaned-apparently at ease-on the porch. They
were around her , and she felt the menace in Jack's voice when he said,"You'll bring us some coffee, won't you?"
She was afraid. She hesitated, then turned toward the cabin door, thinking she would lock it as she went in. But the smaller man moved first andheld it open for her in mock chivalry, and Jack had followed her into the
kitchen . Moving jerkily, she filled the kettle with water and lit the gas jetwith a match. As she shook the match out, Jack grabbed her hand andpulled her toward him.
She jerked her hand away , fear turning to anger. "I don't like that,"she said , moving away from him. ''What do you think you're doing?"48

He had just laughed and leaned against the refrigerator.
"Hey, Jack, you're not going to take that, are you?" asked the little
one, his voice a goad. "Come on , she's a pretty little piece." Then theyboth moved toward her , rough hands on her clothing as she struggled tobreak away and the kettle started to shriek on the stove.
"Hey," Jack shouted sharply, slapping her hard , his knuckles grazing
her jaw. "Cut it out, or I'll hurt you." Her teeth ached from the slap, andher arms were bruised . He smiled. "I don't want to hurt you. We just wantsome pussy."
The fat man and the boy were watching from the kitchen door.
''Why are you doing this?" she asked , her voice monotone dazed. No
one answered her.
Jack moved toward her. "Don't move ," he warned . "Just stand still andyou won't get hurt."
He stood in front of her and put her hand on his cock, swollen under
his pants. He unfastened her pants and slid them down to her ankles. She
did not move. Two of the men took her arms and pulled her backward
over the table. No no no , she was saying, but the memory went on relentlessly. Went on while Jack pulled her sweater up over her breasts, stripped
her pants off her ankles , went on while the men grinned and breathed andJack pushed forward and rammed between her spread thighs, and she
screamed with the tearing pain , screamed silently. She was screaming, but
no one could hear her, screaming, but there was no noise, and her tears
made everything wet around her.
12

She could still feel Jamie's hand on her hair when she woke, the long
gentle caress moving down the side of her face. A dream of comfort andwarmth and tenderness .
Rain had soaked her blanket and clothes. She touched her hair. It waswet, clinging to her head . Rivulets ran through the pine needles she waslying on. She was not at home. Jamie was not there. Wearily, she thought
for a moment she could not go on. Then her body started to shake withchill, and she eased herself out of the wet blanket and stood to stretch.
The world around her was green and brown through a ftlter of gray rainy
mist. Leaving the sodden blanket lying on the ground, she began to walk
down toward the gully .
Mist rose from the heavy vegetation in the windfall. The rain had stopped,
and the windless dawn seemed hushed and tentative. As she walked, herbody moved sluggishly, half alive , a foreign thing , barely under her control.
She had done nothing wrong, she told herself, nothing to deserve punishment. She did not understand a hatred so deep that it lit on any random
victim. She had been there . That was all. It had nothing to do with her.
Nothing to do with her.
Then she caught the lie. Yes, it had everything to do with her. It had
happened to her. They did this to me. They did this to me. I'll kill them.
Jesus, I'm going to kill them. Fury exploded whitely . Dizzy, distracted,
she knelt on the ground, her body rocking back and forth, back and forth .
They did this to me. I'll kill them, I'm going· to kill them. There was ang-uish and necessity in the thought.
She was caught in a trap of frenzied anger and hatred. Kill them : Killthem . She rocked oblivious to the stones under her knees , the damp hilir
falling forward over her face . Body clenched tightly , she rocked , and theanger washed over her, submerged her. She was no longer separate ; herbody had no beginning and end ; skin no longer separated herself from theforest floor where she rocked and rocked, clenched in a fist of hatred ..Thetiny kernel of herself dissolved and spread like dye on the water , marking
the location for a moment , then merging , floating outward, sinking .
Gradually her pulses slowed. She let her shoulders loosen and began toconsciously draw one slow breath after another. Her throat felt sore , anda shiver started deep in her stomach. She sat without moving for a longtime , then brushed the hair away from her face with a slow motion. The
sun came out palely on her left , almost over her shoulder.
She rested in the sun, drained and battered. No context of her own
knowledge or experience could explain what had happened. Lost control.
I really lost control. It was the only point she could focus on as she saton the forest floor , staring down at the tangled windfall growing be~w
her at the foot of the ridge. She sat, mentally touching each side of her
bruised self, testing, probing, remembering. She felt her body had grownvery small.
Her mind played images: I got lost, Mommy . She walked to the wood pile and picked up the ax. Four men walking up the path . Jamie tucking.
a note under the lantern , walking out of the cabin. The doe stepping delicately through the underbrush . Four men walking up the path. The ax .
The rifles lying stacked under a tree . Jamie"s voice, Keep your eye ·on
what you want to hit, Susan. Walking out of the cabin , two of them, thenher , then two of them. She crouched on the forest floor, paralyzed. She
could not think why she should go on walking.
She imagined herself never moving from the forest floor, lying c4fled ,ceasing to breathe after a while, the autumn, leaves floating down -to coverher in gold and brown. That was not the comfort she wanted. She wanted
to be warm and alive and stroked . It was a desire she could not relinquish.
She stood and began to walk again, deliberately, slowly angling sideways down the slope. At the edge of the gully she paused and looked
across the young forest. From this height it seemed to her a sea of green
and gold , as she looked at the rounded rise and fall of brush. She entered
the windfall. The light surrounded her in tr-anslucent green , the sun catching fine mist that sprayed off the leaves as she passed.
Under the slanting trunk of a shattered pine , she paused. In its shadewere clusters of ferns, damp moss, and tall spiked day-lily leaves . Digging
down, she pulled up the tendrils of day-lily' roots . Knuckles, orange knuckles, clung to the fibrous root , crunchy and ~weet. They grew wherever the
shade was too deep for briars and saplings. They would grow here while
the young trees struggled for light and filled the scar in the old forest.
She struggled up to the trunk of the fallen pine tree. She looked 1:;lackfor a moment at the other pines, tall, lining the sky behind her, each asolitary splendor. Then she slid down the other side and continued towork her way across the gully.
50

photograph by Marian Roth51

Willyce Kim

ELEGY-for the Mt. Tamalpais
Pt. Reyes victimsMay my rage
take backthe mountainon which you died .
May my hands
forever bea weapon
to your memories.
May my ears
ring withyour silenced
un-heard cries.
May my legs
always carry
the weight ofyour shattered
lives.
May my lungs
breathefor all of you
under wilderness
skies.
May my anger
move
the mountain,
and may
the mountainforever move me.

Historical Footnote: In 1980 seven people were killed while hiking in andaround Mt. Tamalpais and the Pt. Reyes shoreline. Six of these victims were
women. One man is thought responsible for these violent crimes; he has notbeen apprehended.

52

Audre Lorde
AFTERIMAGES

However the image enters
its force remains within
my eyesrockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve
wild for life, relentless and acquisitive
learning to survive
where there is no foodmy eyes are always hungry
and remembering
however the image enters
its force remains within
A white woman stands bereft and empty
a black boy hacked into a murderous lessonrecalled in me forever
like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep
etched into my visions
food for dragonfish that learn
to live upon whatever they must eat
fused images beneath my painII

The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson
A mississippi summer televised.
Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the raina white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat
her fmgers tarry for a moment on the chimney
now awashtearless and no longer young, she holds
a tattered baby's blanket in her arms.
In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare raina microphonethrust up against her flat, bewildered words"we jest come from the bank yestiddy
borrowing money to pay the income tax
now everything's gone. I never knew
it could be so hard."
Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud
caked around the edges
her pale eyes scarming the camera for help or explanationunanswered
she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed"hard, but not this hard."
53

Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her
hanging upon her coat like mirrors
until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside
snarling "She ain't got nothing more to say!"and that lie hangs in his mouth
like a shred of rotting meat.
III

I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till
his 15 years puffed out like bruises
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street
and he was baptized my son foreverin the midnight waters of the Pearl.
His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner's photographies
newspapers protest posters magazines
Police Story, Confidential, True
the avid insistence of detailpretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy's loins
his grieving mother's lamentation
the severed lips, how many burns
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers
louder than life
all overthe veiled warning, the secret relishof a black child's mutilated bodyfingered by street-corner eyes
bruise upon livid bruise
and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children's blood
with savoured violencewith pictures of black broken flesh
used, crumpled, and discarded
lying amid the sidewalk refuse
like a raped woman's face.

54

A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson Mississippi
testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachersripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jacksonand celebrated in a whorehousethe double ritual of white manhood
confirmed .
IV"if earth and air and water do not judge them
who are we to refuse a crust of bread?"
Emmett Till rides the ctest of the Pearl, whistling
24 years his ghost lay like the shade of a raped woman
and a white girl has grown older in costly honor(what did she pay to never know its price?)hOw the Pearl River speaks its muddy judgment
and I can withhold my pity and my bread .
"Hard, but not this hard ."Her face is flat. with resignation and despairwith ancient and familiar sorrows
a woman surveying her crumpled futureas the white girl besmirched by Emmett's whistle
never allowed her own tongue
without power or conclusion
unvoiced
she stands adrift in the ruins of her honor
and a man with an executioner's facepulls her away .
Within my eyes
the flickering afterimage of a nightmare rain
a woman wrings her hands
beneath the weight of agonies remembered
I wade through sumlner ghosts
betrayed by vision
hers and my own
becoming dragon fish to survive
the horrors we are livingwith tortured lungs
adapting to breathe blood.
A woman measures her life 's damage
my -eyes are caves , chunks of etched rocktied to the ghost of a black boy
whistlingcrying ar1d frightened55her tow-headed children cluster
like little mirrors of despair
their father's hands upon themand soundlessly
a woman begins to weep .

56

photograph by Marian Roth

Marilyn FryeTO BE AND BE SEEN:METAPHYSICAL MISOGYNY

I

In the spring of 1978, at a meeting of the Midwestern Division of theSociety for Women in Philosophy, Sarah Hoagland read a paper entitled"Lesbian Epistemology," in which she sketched the following picture :Individuals and cultural groups form their basic pictures of the world
in a way determined by their conceptual schemes-the frameworks ofconcepts and "givens" which shape what is thinkable and what is unthinkable. In the conceptual schemes of phallocracies there is no categoryof woman-identified woman , woman-Ioving-woman or woman-centeredwoman; that is , there is no such thing as a lesbian . This puts a lesbianin the interesting and peculiar position of being something that does
not exist, and this position is a singular vantage point with respect tothe reality which does not include her. It affords her a certain freedom
from constraints of the conceptual system; it gives her access to knowledge which is inaccessible to those whose existence is countenanced by
the system. Lesbians can therefore undertake kinds of criticism and description, and kinds of intellectual invention, hitherto unimagined.
Hoagland was urging lesbian-feminists to begin this work, and she herself
began to try to say what could be seen from that exceptional epistemic
position .
Some critics of that paper, bridling at the suggestion that lesbians might
be blessed with any exotic powers or special opportunities, were quick todemand a definition of the word "lesbian." They knew that if a defmitionof "lesbian" featured certain patterns of physical contacts as defmitive,then the claim that phallocratic conceptual schemes do not include lesbians would be obviously false, since phallocrats obviously can and do
wrap their rapacious minds around verbal and visual images of females
positioned in such phYSical contact with each other. And they knew alsothat on the other hand any defmition which is more "spiritual" (so to
speak), such as woman-identified-woman, will be flexible enough to permit
almost any woman to count herself a lesbian and claim for herself these
exciting epistemological privileges .
Other critics, who found Hoagland's picture engaging but were loathe
to glorify the conditions of exile, pressed for a defmition of "lesbian"which would be both accurate and illuminating-a defmition which would
shed light on what it means to say lesbians are excluded from phallocratic
57

conceptual schemes, and which might even provide some clue as to what
lesbians might see from this strange non-location beyond the pale.
These pressures combined with the philosopher's propensity to view allorderly procedure as beginning with definitions, and the assembly wasirresistibly drawn into trying to define the term "lesbian." But to no avail.
That term is extraordinarily resistant to standard procedures of semantic
analysis. It finally dawned on me that the elusiveness of the meaning of
the term was itself a clue that Hoagland's picture was right. If indeed lesbians' existence is not countenanced by the dominant conceptual scheme,
it would follow that we could not construct a definition of the term "lesbian" of the sort we might recommend to well-intentioned editors of dictionaries. If a conceptual scheme excludes something, the standard vocabulary of those whose scheme it is will not be adequate to the defining of aterm which denotes it. If Hoagland's picture is right, then whatever weeventually do by way of defining the word "lesbian," it will evolve withina larger enterprise, and cannot be the beginning of understanding andassessing that picture.
Another way of beginning is suggested by the observation that womenof all stripes and colors, including lesbians but also including non-lesbians,
suffer erasure. This is true , but it also seems to me that Hoagland is right :the exclusion of lesbians from phallocratic reality is different and is related to unusual knowing. The difficulty lies in trying to say just what
this means. In order to get a handle on this we need to explore the differences and the connections between the erasure of women generally andthe erasure of lesbians.
It turns out that the explanation of how and why we are outside thescheme reveals what it is we can see and know from our odd position, andthat in turn reveals what a lesbian is. What we are can be understood interms of our distinctive knowledge and seeing. It is our wicced connection
with women that is the crux of our difference.
I start with a semantic reminder.
II
Reality is that which is.
The English word "real" stems from a word which meant regal, of or
pertaining to the king.
"Real" in Spanish means royai.
Real property is that which is proper to the king.
Real estate is the estate of the king.
Reality is that which pertains to the one in power, is that over which
he has power, is his domain , his estate , is proper to him.
The ideal king reigns over everything as far as the eye can see . His eye.
What he cannot see is not royal, not real .
He sees what is proper to him.
To be real is to be visible to the king.
The king is in his counting house .
58

III

I say, "I am a lesbian. The king does not count lesbians. Lesbians are
not real . There are no lesbians." To say this, I use the word "lesbian,"and hence one might think that there is a word for this thing, and thusthat the thing must have a place in the conceptual scheme . But this is not
so. Let me take you on a guided tour of a few standard dictionaries, todisplay some reasons for saying that lesbians are not named in the lexiconof the King's English.
If you look .up the word "lesbian" in the Oxford English Dictionary
you find an entry that says it is an adjective that means of or pertaining
to the island of Leslios, and an entry describing at length and favorably
an implement called a lesbian rule, which is a flexible measuring device" ,used by carpenters. Period.
If you have picked up enough gossip to suppose that a lesbian is a homosexual and you look up "hoinos"exual," Webster's Third International
will inform you that ''homosexual'' means of or pertaining to the samesex. The elucidating example provided is the phrase "homosexual twins"
which means same-sex twins. The alert scholar can conclude that a lesbian
is a same-sex woman .
A recent edition of Webster 's Collegiate Dictionary tells us that a lesbian is a woman who has sex, or sexual relations, with other women . Sucha defmition would be accepted by many speakers of the language and at
least seems to be coherent, even if too narrow. But the appearance is deceptive, for this account collapses into nonsense too. The key word in thisdefmition is "sex"-having sex or having sexual relations. But what is having sex? It is worthwhile to follow this up because the pertinent dictionary
entries obscure an important point about the logic of sex. Getting clear
about that point helps one see that there is semantic closure against recognition of the existence of lesbians, and it also prepares the way for understanding the connection between the place of woman and the place oflesbian with respect to the phallocratic scheme of things.*
Dictionaries generally agree that "sexual" means something on the orderof pertaining to the genital union of a female and a male animal, and that"having sex" is having intercourse-intercourse being defined as the penetration of a vagina by a penis, with ejaculation. My own observation of usage
leads me to think these accounts are inadequate and misleading. Some usesof these terms do fit this dictionary account. For instance , parents andcounselors standardly remind young women that if they are going to besexually active they must deal responsibly with the possibility of becoming
pregnant. In this context, the word "sexually" is pretty clearly being used
in a way that accords with the given defmition. But many activities andevents fall under the rubric "sexual," apparently without semantic deviance,
though they do not involve penile penetration of the vagina of a female
human being. Penile penetration of almost anything, especially if it is ac*The analysis that follows is my own rendering of an account developed by Carolyn
Shafer. My version of it is informed also by my reading of "Sex and Reference," byJanice Moulton, Philosophy and Sex, eds., Baker and Elliston (Prometheus, 1975).
59

companied by ejaculation, counts as having sex or being sexual. Moreover,
events which cannot plausibly be seen as pertaining to penile erection,
penetration, and ejaculation will in general not be counted as sexual, andevents that do not involve penile penetration or ejaculation will not becounted as having sex. For instance, if a girlchild is fondled and aroused
by a man, and comes to orgasm, but the man refrains from penetrationand ejaculation, the man can say, and speakers of English will generally
agree, that he did not have sex with her. No matter 'what is going on, or(it must be mentioned) not going on, with respect to female arousal ororgasm, or in connection with the vagina, a pair can be said without semantic deviance to have had sex, or not to have had sex; the use of thatterm turns entirely on what was going on with respect to the penis.
When one first considers the dictionary defmitions of "sex" and "sexual" it seems that all sexuality is heterosexuality, by definition, and thatthe term "homosexual" would be internally contradictory. There are usesof the term according to which this is exactly so. But in the usual andstandard use, there is nothing semantically odd in describLTlg two men as
having sex with each other. According to that usage, any situation inwhich one or more penises are present is one in which something could
happen which could be called having sex. But on this apparently ''broader''defmition there is nothing women could do in the absence of men that
could, without semantic oddity, be called "having sex." Speaking of women who have sex with other women is like speaking of ducks who engage
in arm-wrestling.
When the dictionary defmes lesbians as women who have sex or sexual
relations with other women, it defmes lesbians as logically impossible.
Looking for other words in the lexicon which might denote these beings
which are non-named "lesbians," one thinks of terms in the vernacular,
like "dyke," "bulldagger," and so on. Perhaps it is just as well that standard dictionaries do not pretend to provide relevant definitions of suchterms. Generally, these two terms are used to denote women who are perceived as imitating or dressing up like, or trying to be, men. Whatever theextent of the class of women who are perceived to do such things, it obviously is not co-extensive with the class of lesbians. Nearly every feminist,and many other women as well, have been perceived as masculine or as
wishing to be men, and most lesbians are not so perceived. The term"dyke" has been appropriated by some lesbians as a term of pride andsolidarity, but in that use it is unintelligible to most speakers of English.
One of the current defmitions of ''lesbianism'' among lesbians is womanloving-the polar opposite of misogyny. Several dictionaries I checked haveentries for "misogyny" (hatred of women), but not for "philogyny" (loveof women). I found one which defines "philogyny" as fondness for women,
and another dictionary defines "philogyny" as Don Juanism. * Obviously
neither of these means love of women as it is intended by lesbians combing the vocabulary for ways to refer to themselves. According to the dictionaries, there is no term in English for the polar opposite of misogyny
nor for persons whose characteristic orientation toward women is the polar*Ellen Schell brought this one to my attention.
60

opposite of misogyny.
Flinging the net wider, one can look up the more Victorian words , lik esapphism and sapphist. In the Webster's Collegiate, "sapphism" is defined
just as lesbianism. But the Oxford English Dictionary introduces anothertwist. Under the heading of "sapphism" is an entry for "sapphist," accord·
ing to which sapphists are those addicted to unnatural sexual relations be·
tween women. The fact that these relations are characterized as unnatural
is revealing . For what is unnatural is contrary to the laws of nature , orcontrary to the nature of the substance or entity in question . But what iscontrary to the laws of nature cannot happen ... that is what it means tocall these laws the laws of nature. And I cannot do what is contrary to
my nature, for if I could do it, it would be in my nature to do it. To callsomething "unnatural" is to say it cannot be . This definition defmes sap·
phists-that is, lesbians-as naturally impossible as well as logically impossible.
The notion that lesbianism is not possible in nature, that it is nobody 'snature to be a lesbian , has a life of its own, even among some people who
do know factually that there are certain women who do and are inclined
to do certain things with other women and women who sincerely avow
certain feelings and attitudes toward women. Lesbianism can be seen as
not natural in that if someone lives as a lesbian it is not assumed that thatis just who , or how, she is, but that it is some sort of affliction, or is a
result of failed attempts to solve some sort of problem or resolve some
sort of conflict (and if she could fmd another way, she would take it, andthen would not be a lesbian). Being a lesbian is understood as somethingwhich could be nobody's natural configuration but must be a configuration one is twisted into by some sort of force which is in some basic sense"external" to one. "Being a lesbian" is understood here as ce"rtain sorts ofpeople understand "being a delinquent" or "being an alcoholic." It is notof one's nature the way illness is not of one's nature. To see this sense of"unnatural" one can contrast it with the presumed "naturalness" of theheterosexuality of women. As most people see it, being heterosexual isjust being. It is not interpreted. It is not understood as a consequence ofanything. It is not viewed as possibly a solution to some problem, or as away of acting and feeling which one worked out or was pushed to by circumstances. On this sort of view, all women are heterosexual , and some
women somehow come to act otherwise. On this view, no one is, in thesame sense, a lesbian.
Almost every lesbian has had at one time or another the following
adventure : she tells someone she is a lesbian and the response is "no, youaren't." Simple straightforward and explicit denial. The denial is often
followed up with some explanation such as (1) you have just had some
unfortunate experiences; (2) you're too nice to be like that; or (3) you
are my daughter, my daughter is not a lesbian. All of these meet yourplain assertion with the plain and self-confident assertion that you areeither self-deceived or lying. The other one knows that you are not a lesbian. This remarkable confidence suggests that they have prior knowledge
that you could not be a lesbian. It is like the confidence I would have that61

an animal presented to me as the product of a cross between a dog and acat could not be a cross between a dog and a cat, whatever else it was.
There are people who do believe in the real existence of perverts anddeviants . What they share with those who do not is the view that the behaviors and attitudes in question are not natural to humans. One's choice,then , when confronted with someone who says she is a lesbian, is to believe her and class her as not fully or really human , or to class her as fully
and really human and not believe that 'she 'is a lesbian.

"Lesbian.
One of the people of the Isle of Le~bos .
It is bizarre that when I try to name myself and explain myself, mynative tongue provides me with a word that is so foreign , so false, so hopelessly inappropriate. Why am I referred to by a term which means one ofthe people of Lesbos? .
The use of the word "lesbian" to name us is a quadrifold evasion , alaminated euphemism. To name us , one goes by way of a reference to thepoet Sappho (who used to live there , they say) , which in turn is itself anindirect reference to what fragments of her poetry have survived a few
millennia of patriarchy , and this in turn (if we have not lost you by now)
is a prophylactic avoidance of direct mention of the sort of creature who
would write such poems or to whom such poems would be written ...
assuming you happen to know what is in those poems written in a dialectof Greek over twenty-five hundred years ago on some small island somewhere in the wine-dark Aegean Sea .
This is a truly remarkable feat of silence .
The philosopher John Langshaw Austin , commenting on the connection
between language and conceptions of reality , said the following : "Ourcommon stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have foundworth drawing , and the connections they have found worth marking , inthe lifetimes of many generations."*ourcommon stock of words
men have founddistinction is not worth drawing
connection is not worth making
Revealing as this is, it still dissembles. It is not that the connections anddistinctions are not worth drawing and marking, it is that men do notwant to draw and mark them , or do not dare to .
IV
\ When one says that some thing or some class is not countenanced by acertain conceptual scheme, or that it is not "among the values over which
the variables of the system range ," or that it is not among the ontologicalcommitments of the system , there are at least three things this can mean .
One is just that there is no simple direct term in the system for the thing*From "A Plea for Excuses," Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press, 1961), p.
130.
62

or class, and no very satisfactory way to explain it. For example, it is in
this sense that Western conceptual schemes do not countenance the forces
or arrangements called "Karma." Indeed, I don't know whether it is suitable to say "forces or arrangements" here, and that is part of the point. A
second thing that can be meant when it is said that something is not in
the scope of the concepts of the scheme is that the term which ostensibly
denotes the thing is internally self-contradictory, as in the case of roundsquares. Nothing can be in both the class denoted by "round" and theclass denoted by "square," given what those words mean. A third thing
one can mean when one says a scheme does not encompass a certain thingis that according to principles which are fundamental to the most general
picture of how things are in the world, the thing could not exist in nature.
An example of this is the denial that there could be a beast which was across between a dog and a cat. The belief that such a thing could exist
would be inconsistent with beliefs about the nature of the world and ofanimals which underlie vast chunks of the rest of our worldview. Lesbianis the only class I have ever set out to define, the only concept I have everset out to explain, that seemed to be shut out in more than one of theseways, and as the considerations reviewed here seem to show, it is shut out
in all three. You can "not believe in lesbians" as you don't believe in thepossibility of "doggie-cats" or as you don't believe in round squares; or
you can be just unable to accommodate lesbianism in the way many of us
cannot accommodate the notion of Karma-the concept of Karma doesn't
articulate suitably with the rest of my concepts; it can't be worked in to
my active conceptual repertoire.
The redundancy of the devices of closure which are in place here is
one of the things which leads me to say that lesbians are excluded fromthe scheme. The overdetermination here, the metaphysical overkill, signals
a manipulation, a scurrying to erase, to divert the eye, the attention, themind. Where there is manipulation, there is motivation, and it does notseem plausible to me that the reason lies with the physical details of certain women's private liv~s. The meaning of this erasure and of the totality
and conclusiveness of it has to do, I think, with the maintenance of phallocratic reality as a whole, and with the situation of women generally apropos that reality.
V

At the outset I said lesbians are not real, that there are no lesbians. I
want to say also that women in general are not countenanced by the phallocratic scheme, are not real; there are no women. But the predicament of
women apropos the dominant reality is complex and paradoxical, as is revealed in women's mundane experience of the seesaw of demand and neglect, of being courted and being ignored, being actively persecuted andidly overlooked. The observations which lead me to say there are no women in phallocratic reality themselves also begin to reveal the elements ofthe paradox. These observations are familiar to feminists; they are among
the things we come back to again and again as new layers of their meanings become accessible to our understanding.
63

There are two kinds of erasure of women which have by now become"often noted." One is the conception of human history as a history of theacts and organizations of men , and the other is a long and sordid recordin western civilization of the murder and mutilation of women. Both ofthese erasures are extended into the future , the one in fiction and speculation, the other in the technological projects of sperm-selection for increasing the proportion of male babies , of extra-uterine gestation , of cloning,of male-to-female transsexual reconstruction. Both sorts of erasure seementwined in the pitched religiOUS and political battle over the control offemale reproductive functions (the fights about abortion , forced sterilization , contraception, the conditions of birthing, etc .), which can be seen asa feud between males who favor centralized control by the state and males
who favor de-centralized control by individual men .
A reasonable person might think that these efforts to erase women reveal an all-too-vivid recognition that there are women-that the projects ofideological and material elimination of women presuppose postulating theexistence of the objects to be eliminated . In a way , I agree. But also, there
is a peculiar mode of relating belief and action which I think is characteristic of the construction of phallocratic reality , according to which projectsof annihilation actually presuppose the nan-existence of their targets . Thismode is an insane reversal of the reasonable procedure of adjusting one's
views so that they accord with reality as actively discovered : it is a mode
according to which one begins with a firmly held view , composed fromfabulous images of oneself, and adopts as one's project the alteration of
the world to bring it into accord with that view .
A powerful example of this strange practice was brought to my attention by Harriet Desmoines , who had been reading about the United States'
expansion across the North American continent. It seems that the whitemen, upon encountering the vast and rich mid continental prairie , called
the prairie a desert. They conceived a desert , they took it to be a desert ;and a century later it is a desert (a fact which is presently obscured by theannual use of megatons of chemical fertilizers) . Did they really believe thatwhat they were seeing was a desert? It is a matter of record that that iswhat they said they saw .
There is another example of this sort of practice , to be found in thescientific and medical realm , which was brought to my attention by thework of Eileen Van Tassell. It is a standard assumption in the disciplinesof human biology and human medicine that the species consists of twosexes, male and female. Concrete physical evidence that there are individuals of indeterminate sex is erased. Individuals whose primary or secondary sexual characteristics are indeterminate are surgically and/or chemicallyaltered, or categorized as monstrous-not human . In this case , as in thecase of the rich and living prairie, erasure of fact does not prove that thefact was believed, and destruction of concrete objects does not prove thatthe existence of the objects was recognized ; these are, on the contrary,ways of acting on the belief that those are not the facts and the belief
that no such objects exist.
64

If it is true that this mode of connection of belief and actions is charact~ristic of phallocratic culture, then one can construct or reconstructbeliefs which are fundamental to that culture's conceptual/scientific system by inspecting the culture's projects and reasoning that what is believed
is what the projects would make to be true. As noted before , there are
and have long been ongoing projects whose end will be a world with no
women in it. Reasoning back, one can conclude that those whose projects
these are believe there are no women .
For many of us, the idea that there are no women, that we do notexist, began to dawn when we first grasped the point about the non-genericso-called "generic" "man." The word "woman" was supposed to mean female of the species, but the name of the species is-' 'Man.'' The term "female man" has a tension of logical impossibility about it that is absent
from parallel terms like "female cat" and "female terrier." It makes one
suspect that the concept of the species which is operative here is one according to which there are no females of the species. I think one can begin
to get a handle on what this means by seeing how it meshes with anotherinteresting phenomenon, namely the remarkable fact that so many men
from so many stations in life have so often declared that women are unintelligible to them .
Reading or hearing the speeches of men on the unintelligibility of women, I imagine they are like people who for some reason can see everything but automobiles and are constantly and painfully perplexed by blasts
and roars , thumps and bumps, which they cannot avoid , control, or explain. But it is not quite like that, for such men do seem to recognize ourphysical existence, or at least the existence of some of our parts . Whatthey do not see is our souls.
The phallocratic scheme does not admit women as authors of perception, as seers. Man understands his own perception as :simultaneously generating and being generated by a point of view. Man is understood toauthor names ; men have a certain status as points of intellectual and perceptual origin. Insofar as the phallocratic scheme permits the understanding that women perceive at all, it features women's perceptions as passive,
repetitive of men's perception, non-authoritative. Aristotle said it outright:
Women are rational, but do not have authority.*
Imagine two people looking at a statue, one from the front , the otherfrom the back, and imagine that the one in front thinks the one in backmust be seeing exactly what he is seeing. He cannot fathom how the othercan come up with a description so different from his own. It is as though
women are assumed to be robots hooked up to the senses of men-not
using senses of our own, not authoring perception, not having and generating a point of view. And then they cannot fathom how we must be
wired inside, that we could produce the output we produce from the input they assume to be identical with their own. The hypothesis that weare seeing from a different point of view, and hence simply seeing something he cannot see, is not available to a man, is not in his repertoire, so· Politics I 13, 1260 a13.
65

long as his total conception of the situation includes a conception of women as not authoritative perceivers like himself; that is, so long as he does
not count women as men. And no wonder such a man fmds women incomprehensible .

VI
For the reasons given, and in the ways indicated , I think there is much
truth in the claim that the phallocratic scheme does not include women.
But while women are erased in history and in speculation , physically liquidated in gynocidal purges and banished from the community of those withperceptual and semantic authority, we are on the other hand regularly andsystematically invited , seduced, cajoled, coerced , and even paid to be in
intimate and constant association with men and their projects . In this , thesituation of women generally is radically different from the situation oflesbians. Lesbians ilfe not invited to join-the family, the party, the project,
the procession, the war effort. There is a place for a woman in every game:
wife, secretary, servant , prostitute, daughter , janitor, assistant, babysitter,
mistress, seamstress, proofreader, cook, nurse , confidante , masseuse, indexer,
typist , mother. Any of these is a place for a woman , and women are muchencouraged to fill them. None of these is a place for a lesbian.
The exclusion of women from the phallocratic scheme is impressive,
frightening , and often fatal , but it is not simple and absolute. Women's
existence is both absolutely necessary to and irresolvably problematic forthe dominant reality and those committed to it, for our existence is presupposed by phallocratic reality but it is not and cannot be encompassedby or countenanced by that reality. Women's existence is a backgroundagainst which phallocratic reality is a foreground .
A foreground scene is created by the motion of foreground figures against a static background. Foreground figures are perceptible, are defmed ,have identity , ortly in virtue of their movement against a background . The
space in which the motion of foreground figures takes place is created anddefmed by their movement with respect to each other and against the background. But nothing of the background is in or is part of or is encompassedby the foreground scene and space. The background is unseen by the eyewhich is focused on foreground figures, and if anything somehow draws
the eye to the background , the foreground dissolves . What would draw theeye to the background would be any sudden or well-defined motion in the
background. Hence there must be either no motion at all in the background,or an unchanging buzz of small , regular, and repetitive motions. The background must be utterly uneventful if the foreground is to continue to hang
together, that is, if it is to endure as a space within which there are discrete
objects in relation to each other. *I imagine phallocratic reality to be the space and figures and motion
which constitute the foreground, and the constant repetitive uneventful
activities of women to constitute and maintain the background against
which this foreground plays. It is essential to the maintenance of the fore*My thought here is influenced by the work of Susanne K. Langer, especially Mind: An
Essay on Human Feeling (princeton University Press).
66

ground reality that nothing within it refer in any way to anything in the
background, and yet it depends absolutely upon the existence of the background. It is useful to carry this metaphor on in a more concrete modethinking of phallocratic reality as a dramatic production on a stage .
The motions of the actors against the stage-settings and backdrop constitute and maintain the existence and identities of the characters in a play .
The stage-setting, props, lights, and so forth are created, provided, maintained, and occasionally rearranged (according to the script) by stagehands.
The stagehands, their motions , and the products of those motions areneither in nor part of the play -neither in nor part of the reality of thecharacters. The reality in the framework of which Hamlet's actions havetheir meaning would be rent or shattered if anything Hamlet did or thought
referred in any way to the stagehands or their activities, or if that background blur of activity were in any other way to be resolved into attention-catching events .
The situation of the actors is desperately paradoxical. The actors are
absolutely committed to the maintenance of the characters and the characters' reality; participation as characters in the ongoing creation of Reality
is their raison d'etre. The reality of the character must be lived with fierce
concentration; the actor must be immersed in the play and undistracted
by any thought for the scenery , props , or stagehands, lest the continuityof the characters and the integrity of their reality be dissolved or broken .
But if the character must be lived so intently, who will supervise the stagehands to make sure they don't get rowdy , leave early, fall asleep, or walk
off the job? (Alas, there is no god nor heavenly host to serve as Director
and Stage Managers.) Those with the most intense commitment to themaintenance of the reality of the play are precisely those most interested
in the proper deportment of the stagehands , and this interest competes
directly with that commitment. There is nothing the actor would like better than that there be no such thing as stagehands, posing as they do aconstant threat to the very existence, the very life, of the character , andhence to the meaning of the life of the actor; and yet the actor is irrevocably tied to the stagehands by his commitment to the play. Ha{Illet, ofcourse, has no such problems; there are no stagehands in the play .
VIIAll eyes, all attention , all attachment must be focused on the play ,which is Phallocratic Reality . Any notice of the stagehands must be obliqueand fUtered through interest in the play . Anything which threatens the
fixation of attention on the play threatens a cataclysmic dissolution ofReality into Chaos. Even the thought of the possibility of a distraction isa distraction . It is necessary to devise devices and construct systems which
will lock out the thought-crime of conceiving the possibility of a direct
and attentive focus on anything but Reality .
The ever-present potential for cosmological disaster lies with the background. There is nothing in the nature of the background that disposes it
to be appropriately tame ; it is not made to serve the foreground , it is justthere. It therefore is part of the vocation of phallocratic loyalists to police
67attention. They must make it radically impossible to attend to anything
in the background ; they must make it impossible to think it possible tofasten one's eye on anything in the background.
We can deduce from this understanding of the motivation, what it isthat phallocratic loyalists are motivated to forbid conceiving: What mustnot be conceived is a seer for whom the background is eventful, dramatic,compelling-whose attention fastens upon stagehands and their projects .
The loyalists cannot just identify such seers and kill them , for that would
focus the loyalists' own attention on the criminal, hence the crime, hence
the object of the crime , and that would interrupt the loyalists' own attention to Reality.

The king is in his counting house. The king is greedy and will countfor himself everything he dares to. But his greed itself imposes limits onwhat he dares to count.

VIII
What the king cannot count is a seer whose perception passes the planeof the foreground Reality and focuses upon the background.* A seer whose
eye is attracted to the ones working as stagehands, the women. A seer inwhose eye "the woman has authority , has interests of her own, is not a robot. A seer who has no motive for wanting there to be no women; a seer
who is not loyal to Reality. We can take the account of the seer who
must be unthinkable if Reality is to be kept afloat as the beginning of an
account of what a lesbian is. One might try saying that a lesbian is one
who , by virtue of her focus, her attention, her attachment, is disloyal tophallocratic reality: she is not committed to its maintenance and the maintenance of those who maintain it , and worse , her mode of disloyalty
threatens its utter dissolution in the mere flick of the eye. This sounds
extreme, of course, perhaps even hysterical. But listening carefully to therhetoric of the fanatic fringe of the phallocratic loyalists, one hears thatthey do think that feminists , whom they fairly reasonably judge to be lesbians, have the power to bring down civilization , to dissolve the social
order as we know it, to cause the demise of the species, by our mere existence.
Even the fanatics do not really believe that a lone maverick lesbian can
in a flick of her evil eye atomize civilization, of course. Given the collectivity of conceptual schemes, the way they rest on agreement , a maverick
perceiver does not have the power to bring one tumbling down-a point
also verified by my own experience as a not-so-powerful maverick. What
the loyalists fear , and in this I think they are more-or-Iess right, is a contagion of the maverick perception, to the point where the agreement inperception which keeps Reality afloat begins to disintegrate.
The event of becoming a lesbian is a reorientation of attention in akind of ontological conversion. It is characterized by a feeling of a world
dissolving , and by a feeling of disengagement and re-engagement of one's
power as a perceiver. That such conversion happens signals its possibility
to others.
*The influence of Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology should be obvious, here and elsewhere, inthis essay.

Heterosexuality for women is not simply a matter of sexual preference ,any more than lesbianism is. It is a matter of orientation of attention, as
is lesbianism, in a metaphysical context controlled by neither heterosexual
nor lesbian women. Attention is a kind of passion . When one's attention
is on something, one is present in a particular way with respect to thatthing. This presence is, among other things, an element of erotic presence.
The orientation of one's attention is also what fixes and directs the application of one's physical and emotional work.
If the lesbian sees the woman, the woman may see the lesbian seeing
her. With this, there is a flowering of possibilities. The woman , feeling herself seen , may learn that she can be seen ; she may also be able to knowthat a woman can see, that is, can author perception. With this , there enters for the woman the logical possibility of assuming her authority as aperceiver and of shifting her own attention. With that there is the dawnof choice , and it opens out over the whole world of women. The lesbian's
seeing undercuts the mechanism by which the production and constantreproduction of heterosexuality for women was to be rendered automatic.
The non-existence of lesbians is a piece in the mechanism which is supposed to cut off the possibility of choice or alternative at the root, namely
at the point of conception .
The maintenance of phallocratic reality requires that the attention of
women be focused on men and men 's projects- the play; and that attention not be focused on women-the stagehands . Woman-loving, as a spontaneous and habitual orientation of attention , is then, both directly andindirectly inimical to the maintenance of that reality. And therein lies thereason for the thoroughness of the ontological closure against lesbians, thepower of those closed out , and perhaps the key to the liberation of womenfrom oppression in a male-dominated culture .

IX
My primary goal here has not been to state and prove some rigid thesis ,but simply to say something clearly enough , intelligibly enough , so that it
can be understood and thought about. Insofar as I am making claims, they
are these: Lesbians are outside the conceptual scheme, and this is something done, not just the way things are. One can begin to see that lesbians
are excluded by the scheme, and that this is motivated, when one begins
to see what purpose the exclusion might serve in connection with keeping
women generally in their metaphysical place. It is also true that lesbians
are in a position to see things that cannot be seen from within the system.
What lesbians see is central to what makes them lesbians and their seeing
is why they have to be excluded. Lesbians are woman-seers . Upon coming
to see women, one is spat summarily out of reality, through a cognitive
gap and into negative semantic space. If you ask what became of such awoman, you may be told she became a lesbian, and if you try to fmd out
what a lesbian is, you will be told there is no such thing .
But there is.

69End Note:
In the spring of 1979 I had the unique pleasure cf working up a version of this paper
to deliver as a talk for an all-lesbian audience at the Michigan Statewide Lesbian Political Action Conference in Lansing. It was the only time I have ever composed a talk foran all-lesbian group, and it was wonderfully liberating and challenging to write for an
audience for whom nothing I wanted to say or think would be "going too far." It removes all the usual excuses for editing oneself, and leaves one simply facing the abyss
with nothing to do but jump. I thank the organizers of that conference for being sobrash as to have an all-lesbian c~:mferenge. The present version of the paper grew out ofa version delivered to Midwestern SWIP in the fall of 1978, a version composed for theabove-mentioned conference, and another version prepared for and delivered at Cornell
University (Women's Studies and the philosophy department) in the fall of 1980.

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a collectl.on of essays, interviews,
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70

Irena Klepfisz

CONTEXTS
for Tillie Olsen"Dollars damn me . .. -Herman Melville, as cited in Silences"[ have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you
have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true
talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted,and completely crippled. .. -Katherine Anne Porter, ibid.

I.

I am helping proofread the historyof a dead language. I read out loudto an old man whose eyes have failed
him. He no longer sees the difference
between a period or a comma, a dashor a hyphen, and needs' me for I understand how important these distinctions are.
The room is crammed with books, books
he had systematically tagged for future
projects-now lost. Sounds pour outof me. I try to inject some feelingand focus, concentrate on the meaningof each linguistic phrase. On the edgeof my vision, he huddles over a blurredpage, moves his magnifying glass from line
to line, and we progress. Time passes.
My voice is a stranger's, sensible andcalm, and I, the cornered, attentive hostess,listen in silence as it conjectures the history of languages long dead without a trace.
How, I wonder, did I become what I am not?
I request a break. The sounds cease.
I check the clock, calculate , write
figures in a notebook. I am numband stiff, walk up and down the hall,stare into busy offices. I wait.
I wait for something forgotten, somethingcaught and bruised: a brown feather,a shaft of green light, a certain word.
I bend, drink water, remember stubborn
clams clinging to the muddy bottom.
71

II.
The building across the street
has an ordinary facade , a view of the parkand rows of symmetrical spotless windows .
Each morning , the working women come to performtheir duties. They are in starched white ,could pass for vigilant nurses keeping
order and quiet around those about to die .
And each morning , idle womenin pale blue housecoats , frilled and fluffedat the edges , stare out of double windows ,waiting for something to begin .
With whom would you change places, I ask
myself, the maid or the mistress?
III.

The clock sucks me back. I calculate the loss,
return to the books, his unrecognizing eyes .
He is unaware of the pantomime outside ,feels no rage that I and the world are lostto him, only mourns the words dead on the page.
We begin again. I point to the paragraph,synchronize the movement of eye and mouth ,abandon all pretense of feeling. Silently I float
out, out toward the horizon, out toward the open sea,leaving behind the dull drone of an efficient machine.

lamthere again, standing by the railing, watching
the whales in their narrow aquarium, watching
their gleaming grace in the monotonous circle, watching
how they hunger for fleshly contact, how the young keeper
places his human hand in their rough pink mouths,
rubs their tongues, splashes them like babies. I cannot
watch them enough, but feel deeply ashamed for I know
the price.
With a shock I realize we are not together ,that he is lost, caught in a trap .
He sounds the words over and over, moves
the glass back and forth, insists there isa lapse in meaning. I sit silent , tense , watch
as he painfully untangles the subtle error, watch
as he leans back exhausted saying: "I knew something
was wrong! I knew from the context that something
was wrong!"
72

IV.

At the end of the day I stack the galleys ,mark an x where we've been forced to stop.
He is reluctant to let me go, anxious , uncertain about the coming days , but I smile ,assure him they'll be all the same. Alone ,I rush for the bulb-lit train, for the empty
corner of the dingy car, then begin the struggle
against his vacant stare, against the memoryof the crowded shelves .
It is a story, I tell myself, at leasta story , that one Sunday when I refused
to go to work. Fifteen, bored with inventory
and week-end jobs , I stayed in bed and,already expert, called in sick. Her rage
was almost savage , wild. She paced
through the apartment , returned to me again
and again saying "Get up! Get up now!"
as if I was in mortal danger . But nothing
would move me from my bed , from the sun
cutting through the iron fire escape outside ,from the half-finished book about the man
and the whale. "It's not that much money ,"I called to her.
And then her inexplicable silence . At firstshe sat in the kitchen , fmgering the pieceof cloth, staring absently at the teacup.
Finally she got up, began pinning the pattern.
Soon I heard the clean sound of the scissor
against the kitchen table , then silence again
as she basted . Much later that day, she workedon the machine , and still she did not speak
to me, just let the bobbing needle make its own
uninterrupted noise. And as I went to bed
new with the excitement of that sea of words ,filled with my own infmite possibilities , she
continued sewing, fulfilling her obligation
for the next day's fitting.

V.
The blind man balances easily in the rocking
car . He moves among us, sings , shakes a tin
cup . Most of us think it's all a con , but it
makes no difference. Pose is part of necessity .
73

Riding each evening through the echoing tunnels,
I've begun to believe in the ex;stence of my own
soul, its frailty , its ability to grow narrow,small. I've begun to understand what it means
to be born mute, to be born without hope of speech.

74

Beth Brant

INDIGENOUS ACTS

NATIVE ORIGIN
The old women are gathered in the Longhouse.
First, the ritual kissing on the cheeks, the eyes , the lips, the top of thehead ; that spot where the hair parts in the middle like a wild river througha canyon . On either side, white hair flows unchecked , unbinded .
One Grandmother sets the pot over the fire that has never gone out. To
let the flames die is a taboo, a breaking of trust. The acorn shells havebeen roasted the night before . Now , Grandmother pours the boiling waterover the shells. An aroma rises and combines with the smell of wood smoke,
sweat, and the sharp, sweet odor of blood.
The acorn coffee steeps and grows dark and strong. The old women sit
patiently, in a circle , not speaking. Each set of eyes stares sharply into the
air , or into the fire . Occasionally, a sigh escapes from an open mouth. A
Grandmother has a twitch in the corner of her eye. She rubs her nose ,then smooths her hair .
The coffee is ready. Cups are brought out of a wooden cupboard . Eachwoman is given the steaming brew . They blow on the swirling liquid , thenslurp the drink into their hungry mouths. It tastes good. Hot , strong , dark.
A little bitter , but that is all to the good.
The old women begin talking among themselves . They are together to perform a ceremony. Rituals of women take time. There is no hurry ; timestands still.
The magic things are brought out from pockets and pouches.
A turtle rattle made from a she-turtle who was a pet of the woman'smother. It died the night she died, both of them ancient and tough . Now
the daughter shakes the rattle , and mother and she-turtle live on. AnotherGrandmother pulls out a bundle that contains a feather from a hermit
thrush. This is a holy feather. Of all the birds in the sky, hermit thrush
is the only one who flew to the Spirit World. It was there she learned her
beautiful song. But she is clever , and hides from sight. To have her feather
is great magic. All the women pass around the feather. They tickle eachother's chins and ears. Giggles and laughs erupt in the dwelling.
From that same bundle of the hermit thrush, come kernels of corn ; yellow , red, black. They rest in her wrinkled , dry palm. These are also
75

passed around. Each woman holds the corn in her hand for a while before
giving it to her sister. Next come leaves of Witch Hazel and Jewelweed;
Dandelion roots for chewing , Pearly Everlasting for smoking. These things
are given careful consideration, and much talk is generated over the "old"ways of preparing these concoctions.
A woman gives a smile and brings out a cradleboard from behind her back.
There is much nodding of heads, and smiling, and long drawn-out ahhhhhs.
The cradleboard has a beaded back that a mother made in her ninth month.
An old woman starts a song, the rest join in :Little baby
Little baby
Ride on Mother's back
Laugh, laughLife is good
Mother shields you
Mother shields you
A Grandmother wipes her eyes, another holds her hands and kisses thelife lines . Inside the cradleboard are bunches of moss taken from a menstrual house. This moss has staunched rivers of blood that generations ofyoung girls have squeezed from their womb walls.
The acorn drink is reheated and passed around again . A woman adds woodto the fire. She holds her hands out to the flames, almost in supplication.
It takes a lot of heat to warm her creaky body. Another woman comesbehind her with a warm blanket. She wraps it around her friend and hugs
her shoulders. They stand quietly before the fire .
A pelt of fur is brought forth . It once belonged to a beaver . She was found
one morning, frozen in the ice, her lodging unfinished . The beaver was
thawed and skinned . The women worked the hide until it was soft andpliant. It was the right size to wrap a new born baby in, or to comfort old
women on cold nights.
A piece of flint, an eagle bone whistle, a hank of black hair, cut in mourning; these are examined with quiet, reverent vibrations .
The oldest Grandmother removes her pouch from around her neck. She
opens it with rusty fingers. She spreads the contents in her lap. A fistfulof black earth. It smells clean, fecund . The women inhale the odor; themetallic taste of iron is on their tongues, like a sting .
The oldest Grandmother scoops the earth back into her pouch. She tugs
at the strings, it closes. The pouch lies between her breasts, warming her
skin. Her breasts are supple and soft for one so old. Not so long ago, shenursed a sister back to health. A child drank from her breast and washealed of evil spirits that entered her while she lay innocent and dreaming .
76

The ceremony is over. The magic things are put in their places. The oldwomen kiss and touch each other's faces . They go out into the night. The
moon and stars are parts of the body of Sky Woman. She glows on, neverdimming, never receding.
The Grandmothers go inside the Longhouse . They tend the fire, and wait.

ROBBING PETER TO PAY PAUL
Her hands moved slowly across the quilting boards. Brown hands withmany wrinkles, liver spots . Swollen hands, old hands, though the woman
they belong to can't be much older than sixty.
The top of the quilt has been pieced together by the daughters of the notso old woman. Now the final work is being done. The top is stitched to abottom layer, a bed sheet that Grandma has dyed. Sandwiched in between
are thick, fluffy clouds of cotton batting.
This pattern, called Robbing Peter To Pay Paul, looks quite uncomplicated,but a woman's eye can detect the intricacy of the design . Each block is amirror image of the one beside it, only in a different color and material.
So the eyes are dazzled by bright colors next to somber ones, dark colors
next to light. Each square has robbed a little scrap of cloth from the other.
''Mother, you'11 go blind ," my aunts would say . Grandma would just laughas she pulled her eye glasses from her face and wiped her tired eyes. "Ionly have one block to go, just one more. Beth Ellen, do you have thoseneedles threaded yet?" And I would painstakingly thread the needles witheight year old fingers. The needles were Number Six, for quilting. The ends
were blunted, like Grandma's life, away from the Mohawk Reserve in Canada.
Grandma belonged to the Turtle clan. She passed this on to her children
and grandchildren. Her quilts were the shell that covered her, protected us
from a white world. Her quilts were a time traveling; a remembrance ofher mother, a recollection of a former life that was certain in its certainties.
Stitch by stitch, block by block. The hands moving across the boards; stealing scraps of cloth to begin a new square. Stealing time for one more block,just one more .

MOHAWK TRAIL
for Denise

There is a small body of water in Canada called the Bay of Quinte. Look
for three pine trees gnarled and entwined together. Woodland Indians, they77

call the people who live here . This is a reservation of Mohawks, the Real
People . On this reserve lived a woman of the Turtle clan. Her name was
Lydia, and she had many children. Her daughters bore flower names; Pansy,
Daisy , Ivy , and Margaret Rose.
Margaret grew up , married Joseph of the Wolf clan . They had a son . He
was Joseph too . Eight children later, they moved to Detroit , America.
More opportunities for Margaret's children . Grandpa Joseph took a mailorder course in drafting. He thought Detroit would educate his Turtle children . It did.
Joseph , the son , met a white woman . Her name is Hazel. Together, they
made me. All of Margaret's children married white. So the children of
Margaret's children are different. Half blood , half breed, Uncle Doug used
to tease us . But he smiled as he said it. Uncle was a musician and played
jazz. They used to call him Red. Every Christmas Eve , Uncle would phone
us kids and pretend he was Santa. He would ask, ' 'Were you good little
Indians or bad little Indians?" We , of course , would tell tales of our goodness to our mothers and grandmother . Uncle would sign off with a ho ho
ho and a shake of his turtle rattle. He died from alcohol. He was buried
in a shiny black suit, his rattle in his hands. Around his neck , a beaded
turt le.
Some of my aunts went to college . Grandma baked bread and pies, Grand pa peddled them in the neighborhood . It helped to pay for the precious
education. All of my aunts had skills, had jobs. Shirley became a dietitianand cooked meals for kids in school. She was the first Native American in
the state of Michigan to ever hold that position . She was very proud ofwhat she had done "for her people." Laura was a secretary. She received
a plaque one year , from her boss, proclaiming her speed at typing . Someone had painted a picture of an Indian in headdress typing furiously away.
Laura was supposed to laugh, but she didn't. She quit instead . Hazel could
do anything. She worked as a cook , as a saleswoman in a 5 and 10 centstore . She made jewelry out of shells and stones , and sold them door todoor. Hazel was the first divorcee in our family . It was quite thrilling tobe the niece of a woman who went against the grain. Elsie was a sickly
child . She didn't go to college , but worked in a grocery store , and minded
women's children for extra money. She would catch the streetcar in winter ,all bundled up in Grandma's coat , and wearing bits of warmth from her
sisters' wardrobes . It was the fear of everyone that Elsie would catch coldor something worse. When Aunt Elsie did die, it wasn't from cold or flu .
She died from eight children and cancer of the womb and breast . Colleen
became a civil servant. Serving the public , selling stamps over the counter.
Auntie is the youngest child of Margaret and Joseph. She is the quietest ,the dreamiest, the kindest. After marrying white men , my aunts retired
their jobs. Then they became secret artists , putting up huge amounts ofquilts , needlework, and beadwork in their fruit cellars. Sometimes, when
the husbands and children were asleep , my aunts would glide to the cellar
78

and gaze at their work. Smoothing an imaginary wrinkle on the quilt, running the embroidery silks through their fingers, threading the beads on thesmall loom; turning the red, blue, and yellow stones into a work of art.
By day, the dutiful wife. By night, weaving, beading, quilting their souis
into artifacts that will be left behind after death, to tell the story of whothese women were.
My father worked in a factory, making cars he never drove . Mama encouraged Dad to go to college. Grandma prayed that he would go to college.
Between these two forces, Dad decided to make cars in the morning and
go to school at night. Mama took care of children for money . One night I
awoke to the sounds of my father crying. "Hazel, I don't know if I canmake it. I'm tired, so tired." Mama took his hand and said, "You must do
this. For your daughters, your son, and most important, for Margaret andLydia." So Dad continued and eventually became a quiet teacher. He loved
his work . Mama still took care of kids . There were so many debts fromschool. We wore hand-me-downs for years. Dad had one suit to teach in.
When he wore his beaded necklace, some of the students laughed. His retirement came earlier than expected . The boys in his Indian History classbeat him up as they shouted, "Injun Joe, Injun Joe." My mother stopped
taking care of children. Now she takes care of Father and passes on thefamily lore to me.
When I was a small girl, Grandpa taught me Mohawk. He thought I was
smart. I thought he was Magic. He had a special room that was filled withblueprints . When and if he had a job, he would get out the exotic paper,and I sat quietly, watching him work. Grandpa Joseph told me stories whil·e
he worked. Stories of Broken Nose and Long Nose, who would frighten
bad children into becoming good. But I, who was so good, need not fear.
His room smelled of ink and tobacco and, sometimes, the forbidden whiskey. These times were good. When Grandfather died, I forgot the language.
But in my dreams I remember, Raksotha Raoka: Ra.
Margaret had braids that wrapped round and round her head. It was mydelight to unbraid them every night. I would run the brush from the topof her head, down through the abundance of silver that was her hair. Once,
I buried my face in it. She smelled like smoke and woods. Her eyes werelike smoke too . Secret fires, banked down . I asked her to tell me about
the Reserve. She told me her baby had died there, my father's twin. She
told me about Lydia. Lydia had dreams of her family flying in the air, becoming seeds that sprouted on new ground . The earth is a turtle where
new roots bear new fruit. Bittersweet. "Lydia gave me life," Grandma said.
Grandmother, you have given me my life .
Late at night, pulling the quilt up to cover me, she whispered; Don't forget who you are. Don't ever leave your family. They are what matters .
I would like to thank my lover, Denise Dorsz, for her active support and comfort andfor helping me to get in touch with Margaret again. I would like also to thank Michelle
Cliff and Linda Hogan, who have given me spiritual as well as technical assistance.

79

Celeste Tibbets
SOURCES OF POWER

i. room

mammaw came out to the room where i sleep
to tell me that susie's son had calledthat he said his mother was a fme woman andthenshe stood silent at the railin the kind of silence
that begs the physical to intervenethat only touch can end
she stood there silent
and i sat silent drawing in my lap
anxious to finish the sketch
i was making of perk's fish
yesterday her best friend from childhood diedher friend susie
who she played in the mud withand hid from their brothers withsusie who sold her eggs
and meat and tomatoes
when she still lived back homesusie diedand still i would not physically console her
afraid to be the first to enter her griefof the thousands of years
that she's had to grieve alone
i shuddered to think of a lifetime of not being held
when in sorrowof gaining no comfort
when sad , lonely, aching ,of having no hand to reach toin mid-sleep after a nightmare during a bad night
i shuddered to think of my power to enteryet still i could not
i was afraid to touch her
afraid tobreak the long never spoken practiceafraid to touch my mother's mother
we don't touch much anyway
my family80

we are strangers
known only by the shine of our skini claim others more closelythan this blood kin
last night i was afraid of the poweri had to hold her
afraid of the energythat would be released
ashamed that i would not care enoughthat i did not love her enoughto touch her
so i stayed in my chair comfortable
and let her suffer in her dark room alone
ii. sources of poweri have known for years now
how to breathe a breath of moonat midnight through the window
when all other sources seem gone
how to take a breath of sun and wind in morning
how to bathe in the ocean, swim naked in summer
how to use the wind the waters the sun for power
as i also use the moon
women have long harnessed the wind
turned· sun into energy
used water for generations to power us
if only she'd known of her own power sourcesthen i might not have feared mine as much
we take our energy from the elementsfrom storms and stars to keep us going
we refuel in woods and waters
when all other sources are expired
we kriow how to quietly without greed
take only what we need to refuel and then continue
when all other sources are blocked
when we are deprived of and refused each otherwhen our children are hungry
when we become hopelesswhen our men turn mean
when they beat us turn us inside out
when they beat us turn us inside out
when there is no support for difference
when we are used and used and used again
we have known how to tap reserves
81the moon the waters the sun the wind
to refuel and then continue
if only she'd known she had power
but every time she grew some connection to the sources
grew some life she could refuel fromhe 'd mow it down
like he mowed down a row of her favorite rose bushes
not long before he died-ah he was sick he didn't know what he was doing
he was a sick man
the cancer was making him crazy
if only she'd known
had had some way to refuel
if only she'd known she had poweriii . him deadnow that he 's been dead ten years
she begins to speak against him:
nobody knows what kind of problems i had with that man
even his appendicitis was my fault :that damned cabbage you fixed fo! supper, he said
now that he's been dead ten years
i could begin to touch her but
i am too small to ask the questions
that matterdid you love him mammaw
did he ever hit you
did you make love often
was it good
did he please you
did he ever say i love you
i am afraid of the answers
too weak to shoulder her truths
so she cried and grieved and slept alone last nightwith her thoughts of susie
her friend from georgiasusie whose diseases finally caught up to her
no we weren't no kin, but you see , we were . raised up together
jest like we was82

we were fifty years distanced in that room
three generations aparteach a world that made us different
i was afraid to enter her truths
afraid to shoulder her sadness
i was too small to touch her
afraid of the power i held to enter
did you love him mammaw
did he ever hit you
did he ever say i love you

photograph by Beth Karbe83

Judy Grahn

BOYS AT THE RODEO

A lot of people have spent time on some women 's farm this summer of1972 and one day six of us decide to go to the rodeo. We are all matureand mostly in our early thirties. We wear levis and shirts and short hair.
Susan has shaved her head .
The man at the gate , who looks like a cousin of the sheriff, is certain
we are trying to get in for free. It must have been something in the way
we are walking. He stares into Susan's face . "I know you're at least fourteen ," he says. He slaps her shoulder , in that comradely way men havewith each other. That's when we know he thinks we are boys.
"You're over thirteen ," he says to Wendy .
" You 're over thirteen ," he says to me. He examines each of us closely,and sees only that we have been outdoors , are muscled , and look him directly in the eye. Since we are too short to be men , we must be boys. All
the other women at the rodeo are called girls.
We decide to play it straight , so to speak . We make up boys' names foreach other. Since Wendy has missed the episode with Susan at the gate , I
slap her on the shoulder to demonstrate . "This is what he did ." Slam . She
never missed a step . It didn 't feel bad to me at all. We laugh uneasily. We
have achieved the status of fourteen-year-old boys , what a disguise fortravelling through the world . I split into two pieces for the rest of theevening, and have never decided if it is worse to be thirty-one years oldand called a boy or to be thirty-one years old and called a girl.
Irregardless , we are starved so we decide to eat , and here we have thestatus of boys for real. It seems to us that all the men and all the women
attached to the men and most of the children are eating steak dinner plates;
and we are the only women not attached to men. We eat hot dogs, whichcost one-tenth as much. A man who has taken a woman to the rodeo on
this particular day has to have at least twelve dollars to spend. So he hascharge of all of her money and some of our money too, for we average
three dollars apiece and have taken each other to the rodeo.
Hot dogs in hand we escort ourselves to the wooden stands , and firstis the standing up ceremony. We are pledging allegiance for the way oflife - the competition, the supposed masculinity and pretty girls . I standup , cursing, pretending I'm in some other country . One which has notbeen rediscovered. The loudspeaker plays Anchors Aweigh, that's what I
like about rodeos, always something unexpected. At the last one I attended
in another state the men on horses threw candy and nuts to the kids , chipping their teeth and breaking their noses . Who is it, I wonder , that has put
these guys in charge. Even quiet mothers raged over that episode.
84

Now it is time for the rodeo queen contest, and a display of four very
young women on horses . They are judged for queen 30 percent on theirhorsemanship and 70 percent on the number of queen tickets which peoplebought on their behalf to "elect" them. Talk about stuffed ballot boxes. I
notice the winner as usual is the one on the registered thoroughbred whose
daddy owns tracts and tracts of something-lumber, minerals, animals . His
family name is all over the county.
The last loser sits well on a scrubby little pony and lives with her aunt
and uncle . I pick her for the dyke even though it is speculation without
clues. I can't help it, it's a pleasant habit. I wish I could give her a ribbon.
Not for being a dyke , but for sitting on her horse well. For believing thereever was a contest, for not being the daughter of anyone who owns thousands of acres of anything.
Now the loudspeaker announces the girls' barrel races, which is the onlygrown women's event. It goes first because it is not really a part of therodeo, but more like a mildly athletic variation of a parade by women to
introduce the real thing. Like us boys in the stand, the girls are Simply
bearing witness to someone else's act.
The voice is booming that barrel racing is a new, modern event, thatthese young women are the wives and daughters of cowboys , and barrel
racing is a way for them to participate in their own right. How generousof these northern cowboys to have resurrected barrel racing for womenand to have forgotten the hard roping and riding which women always
used to do in rodeos when I was younger. Even though I was a town child,
I heard thrilling rumors of the all-women's rodeo in Texas, including thatthe fillest brahma bull rider in all of Texas was a forty-year-old woman
who weighed a hundred pounds .
Indeed, my first lover's first lover was a big heavy woman who was
normally slow as a cold python, but she was just hell when she got up ona horse. She could rope and tie a calf faster than any cowboy within five
hundred miles of Sweetwater, Texas. That 's what the West Texas dykes
said, and they never lied about anything as important to them as calf roping, or the differences between women and men. And what about thatnews story I had heard recently on the radio , about a bull rider who waseight months pregnant? The newsman just had apoplectic fits over her ,but not me, I was proud of her. She makes me think of all of us who have
had our insides so overly protected from jarring we cannot possibly getthrough childbirth without an anesthetic .
While I have been grumbling these thoughts to myself, three barrels havebeen set up in a big triangle on the field, and the women one by one have
raced their horses around each one and back to start. The trick is to turnyour horse as sharply as possible without overthrowing the barrel.
After this moderate display, the main bulk of the rodeo begins , withcalf roping , bronco riding, bull riding. It's a very male show during which
the men demonstrate their various abilities at immobilizing, cornering ,maneuvering , and conquering cattle of every age.
A rodeo is an interminable number of roped and tied calves , ridden
and unridden broncos . The repetition is broken by a few antics from the85

agile , necessary clown. His long legs nearly envelope the little jackass heis riding for the satire of it.
After a number of hours they produce an event I have never seen before-goat tying . This is for the girls eleven and twelve . They use one goatfor fourteen participants. The goat is supposed to be held in place on arope by a large man on horseback. Each girl rushes out in a long run halfway across the field, grabs the animal , knocks it down , ties its legs together.
Sometimes the man lets his horse drift so the goat pulls six or eight feetaway from her , something no one would allow to happen in a male event.
Many of the girls take over a full minute just to do their tying, and thefact that only one goat has been used makes everybody say, "poor goat,poor goat," and start laughing. This has become the real comedy event of
the evening , and the purpose clearly is to show how badly girls do in therodeo .
Only one has broken through this purpose to the other side . One small
girl is not disheartened by the years of bad training , the ridiculous crossfield run , the laughing superior man on his horse, or the shape-shifting goat.
She downs it in a beautiful flying tackle. This makes me whisper, as usual,"that's the dyke ," but for the rest of it we watch the girls look ludicrous,
awkward, outclassed, and totally dominated by the large handsome manon the horse . In the stands we six boys drink beer in disgust, groan andhug our breasts, hold our heads and twist our faces at each other in embarrassment.
As the calf roping starts up again, we decide to use our disguises towalk around the grounds . Making our way around to the cowboy side of
the arena , we pass the intricate mazes of rail where the stock is stored , tothe chutes where they are loading the bull riders onto the bulls.
I wish to report that although we pass by dozens of men , and although
we have pressed against wild horses and have climbed on rails overlooking
thousands of pounds of angry animalflesh, though we touch ropes andhalters , we are never once warned away, never told that this is not theproper place for us , that we had better get back for our own good, arenot safe, etc., none of the dozens of warnings and threats we would havegotten if we had been recognized as thirty-one-year-old girls instead offourteen-year-old boys. It is a most interesting way to wander around theworld for the day.
We examine everything closely . The brahma bulls are in the chutes, readyto be released into the ring . They are bulky, kindly looking creatures withrolling eyes; they resemble overgrown pigs. One of us whispers , "Aren't
those the same kind of cattle that walk around all over the streets in India
and never hurt anybody?"
Here in the chutes made exactly their size, they are converted into wild
antagonistic beasts by means of a nasty belt around their loins, squeezed
tight to mash their tender testicles just before they are released into thering. This torture is supplemented by a jolt of electricity from an electric
cattle prod to make sure they come out bucking. So much for the rodeo
as a great drama between man and nature .
A pale, nervous cowboy sits on the bull's back with one hand in a glove
86hooked under a strap around the bull's midsection. He gains points by using his spurs during the ride. He has to remain on top until the timing
buzzer buzzes a few seconds after he and the bull plunge out of the gate.
I had always considered it the most exciting event.
Around the fence sit many eager young men watching, helping , andgetting in the way . We are easily accepted among them. How depressing
this can be .
Out in the arena a dismounted cowboy reaches over and slaps his horse
fiercely on the mouth because it has turned its head the wrong way.
I squat down peering through the rails where I see the neat, tight-fitting
pants of two young men standing provocatively chest to chest.
"Don't you think Henry 's a queer ," one says with contempt.
"Hell , I know he's a queer," the other says . They hold an informal
spitting contest for the punctuation . Meantime their eyes have brightened
and their fronts are moving toward each other in their clean , smooth shirts.
I realize they are flirting with each other, using Henry to bring up thedangerous subject of themselves. I am remembering all the gay cowboys
1 ever knew. This is one of the things 1 like about cowboys . They don 't
wear those beautiful pearl button shirts and tight levis for nothing.
As the events inside the arena subside, we walk down to a roped off
pavilion where there is a dance. The band consists of one portly, bouncing
enthusiastic man of middle age who is singing with great spirit into themicrophone. The rest of the band are three grim , lean young men overfourteen . The drummer drums angrily, while jerking his head behind himself as though searching the air for someone who is already two hours lateand had seriously promised to take him away from here . The two guitar
players are sleepwalking from the feet up with their eyes so glassy you
could read by them.
A red-haired man appears , surrounded by red-haired children who ask ,"Are you drunk , Daddy?""No, I am not drunk ," Daddy says .
"Can we have some money?""No ," Daddy says, "I am not drunk enough to give you any money."
During a break in the music the red-haired man asks the band leader
where he got his band.
''Where did 1 get this band?" the band leader puffs up , "I raised thisband myself. These are all my sons-I raised this band myself." The red haired man is so very impressed he is nearly bowing and kissing the handof the band leader as they repeat this conversation two or three times .
"This is my band ," the band leader says, and the two guitar players exchange grim and glassy looks.
Next the band leader has announced "Okie from Muskogee ," a songintended to portray the white country morality of cowboys. The crowd
does not respond but he sings enthusiastically anyway . Two of his morealert sons drag themselves to the microphone to wail that they don 't smoke
marijuana in Muskogee-as those hippies down in San Francisco do , andthey certainly don't. From the look of it they shoot hard drugs and pop
pills.

In the middle of the song a very drunk · thirteen-year-old boy has staggered up to Wendy, pounding her on the shoulder and exclaiming, "Canyou dig it, brother?" Later she tells me she has never been called brotherbefore, and she likes it. Her first real identification as one of the brothers,in the brotherhood of man.
We boys begin to walk back to our truck , past a cowboy vomiting on
his own pretty boots, past another lying completely under a car. Near our
truck, a young man has calf-roped a young woman. She shrieks for him
to stop, hopping weakly along behind him . This is the first bid for publicattention I have seen from any woman here since the barrel race. I understand that this little scene is a re-enactment of the true meaning of therodeo, and of the conquest of the west. And oh how much I do not want
to be her; I do not want to be the conquest of the west.
I am remembering how the clown always seems to be tall and riding on
an ass, that must be a way of poking fun at the small and usually darkpeople who tried to raise sheep or goats or were sod farmers and rodeburros instead of tall handsome blond horses, and who were driven underby the beef raisers . And so today we went to a display of cattle handlinginstead of a sheep shearing or a goat milking contest-or to go into evenolder ghost territory, a corn dance , or acorn gathering . ..
As we reach the truck, the tall man passes with the rodeo queen, whomust surely be his niece, or something. All this non-contest, if it is foranyone, must certainly be for him. As a boy, I look at him. He is his own
spitting image, of what is manly and white and masterly, so tall in hishigh heels, so well horsed. His manner portrays his theory of life as thesurvival of the fittest against wild beasts, and all the mythical rest of us
who are too female or dark, not straight, or much too native to the earth
to now be trusted as more than witnesses, flags, cheerleaders, and unwilling stock.
As he passes, we step out of the way and I am glad we are in our disguise . I hate to step out of his way as a full-grown woman, one who hasn't
enough class status to warrant his thinly polite chivalry . He has knocked
me off the sidewalk of too many towns, too often.
Yet somewhere in me I know I have always wanted to be manly, what
I mean is having that expression of courage, control, coordination, ability
I associate with men. To provide.
But here I am in this truck, not a man at all, a fourteen-year-old boy
only. Tomorrow is my thirty-second birthday. We six snuggle together inthe bed of this rickety truck which is our world for the time being. We
are headed back to the bold and shaky adventures of our all-women's farm,
our all-women's househollis and companies, our expanding minds, ambitions, and bodies, we who are neither male nor female at this moment in
the pageant world, who are not the rancher's wife, mother earth, Virgin
Mary, or the rodeo queen-we who are really the one who took her self
seriously, who once took an all-out dive at the goat, believing that theodds were square and that she was truly in the contest.
And now that we know it is not a contest, just a play-we have run
88off with the goat ourselves to try another way of life.
Because I certainly do not want to be a thirty-two-year-old girl, or calfeither , and I certainly also do always remember Gertrude Stein's beautiful
dykely voice saying, what is the use of being a boy if you grow up to bea man .

"Boys at the Rodeo" also appears in True to Life Adventure Stories, Volume II, editedby Judy Grahn and co-published by Diana Press and Crossing Press, Trumansburg, N.Y.,
in June of 1981.

July 19·August 2, 1981
SEVENTH ANNUALWOMEN'SWRITING
WORKSHOPS• POETRY WRITING• FICTION WRITING• Pl.AYWRITINGINTRODUCING

NON-FICTION PROSE
Instructor: Kirsten Grimstad
Guest writers and editors:
Marge Piercy
Elaine Gill. The Crossing Press
Director: Beverly Tanenhaus
Faculty: Katharyn Machan Aal
Kirsten Grimstad
Hartwick College/ Oneonta, N.Y. 13820
Write: Mrs. Christine Patience89Paula Gunn Allen

THE GARDEN

scene isky still bright
we weed, companionable.
she on her side of the low wallme on mine
"they leave their shells in the ground"
she says, "see these holes? I don't know
why, they have to be dug up andthrown away." she holds up
a transparent thing,tissue pattern for an insect dress.
her petunias, my corn, beans, squash and I
nod amiably.
in the hills last night
two more animals
dismembered:
rectum, lip, nostril, vagina
split.
bodies left bloodlesson the unmarked grass.
something out there.
something unknown.
I straighten, groaning
wipe sweat from my eyes.
mystic impulse all aroundslicing holes in air
digging bad dreams
in daylight.
sun like a corpse over me.
sky blooming deep.
a shroud.

scene ii
unmannered.
soft as night.
air keening.
sky building.
90

what manners these?
fear lightly easing itself overback wall, through trees.
starshine
beginning at the edge .
her dress moves with ease , eyes
glitter, hairso soft in evening wind, sherecalls summer nights ,arms like branches singing, bodysinking graceful into dusk .
comfort of lounge chairholds buttocks, back, pliant neck.
she dreams of Pentecost , tongues
of flame above her shining hair ,longs for beatitude , so suited
to this place .
a manner of speaking touches her lips
lightly, careful for her carelessness,words slip cautiously toward formation,
birds settle in for the night, crying .
daylight evaporates as she swirls
her drink, sips cold with perfect easeagainst her teeth , rests against cushions
soft as dissolving clouds
overhead .
trees by the back wall
begin to stirominous .
sky goes dark.
she doesn 't see ,she doesn't make a sound .
Pentecost shimmers
flows from her hair
between her thighs .

scene iii
light angling
volunteer's face ashen
up two days and nights
starshine is not what
got in her eyes .
he used a knife
on her vagina she tells me,
and maybe the hatchet we foundbeside the bed
91the blood, my god, she tells me,
outside surgery we standuneasy , graceless, longing
for the carelessness of birds.
scene iv
hauntedtissue paper hulls
bad dreams in daylightno sleep in dark
before my eye
a shadow
photograph of Brazilian
Indian woman hungby the ankles from a polelong hair sweeping down
blowing in the laden breeze
white hunter standing next to her
spread legs . she is naked .
she is dead.
-Paula Gunn Allen"The Garden" was published in SW 15 with one stanza missing. We are glad to reprint
it here in its entirety.

92

Judith Barrington"WE SPEAK IN CODE"

A review of We Speak in Code, poems and other writings by Melanie Kayewith visual art by Paula King, Michele Goodma!1, and Lee Pickett. Publishedin 1980 by Motheroot Publications, 214 Dewey St., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15218 .
$4.75.
"A woman who squeezes into a ball / what women already know / andwhisper / does not expect good reviews." These lines from Melanie Kaye's
poem "Cassandra" are a good description of what she has done in her
book We Speak in Code, published by Motheroot Press. There is a certain
kind of truth-that of naming our common experience-that calls for the
response "of course," accompanied by a sense of relief. The fact that''women already know" in no way lessens the impact of this naming; frequently the relief lies in the fact that an important piece of our world hashitherto been unnamed-sometimes taboo . And this kind of writing comesout of a truly political desire to speak the unspeakable in order to change
it: there is no thought of making pretty poems or seeking good reviews.
Melanie's book is full of such writing. In poems that are specifically
about political issues ("Trojan" and "Heat Wave"), as well as in poems
that give political meaning to her life experience ("City Indoors," "Jewish
Food"), she conveys important truths that break down the barriers between personal and political, and creates pieces of writing that are powerful, affecting, and demand to be read aloud.
Appropriately, I found more important revelations in the section of thebook called "Naming" than anywhere else. Lines like "if love were a current to turn off / I could put out the light / and sleep easy" and "loss if I
care floss if I don't care" from "Connection," as well as the poems "Trust"and ''When you won't fight back," explore the fears and rage in lesbian
relationships, often ignored by lesbian writers who want only to present
the positive, idyllic side of lesbianism as a way of helping us move pasthistorically damaging images. But it is time to risk the more complex truths
about our relationships; time to trust our analysis enough to admit that
we are flesh and blood, that the patriarchy is within us too , and that we
do not lie around in meadows out of focus all day. Melanie writes of thereality and dispenses with romantic myths. In ''When you won't fight back"she says, "I want to knock you off the bed / for looking so innocent / sopained," while she loses none of the joy and passion that are another partof the complex truth: "sometimes like creatures without boundaries / weenter each other's eyes / in hunger so simple / it seems holy" ("Trust").
The complete power of this book, however, does not lie in the content
of individual lines or even individual poems. It seems, rather, to come fromthe successful blend of poet and political activist that Melanie offers in93these pages. One senses that there is an ongoing relationship between thewords as a means of recording and furthering political acts, and the politicalacts themselves . Melanie , it seems , would not be a poet-or at least not thiskind of poet-if she could not write words that cause change and if she
could not do political work that she records in poems . Neither one comes
first, but the two are inextricably entwined.
The connection between the words and the artwork in the book extends
this political/artistic interplay . The words and images not only complement
one another but work together in a way that images created to illustrate atext cannot do . The ability of feminism to integrate form and content andto show how everything is inevitably connected to everything else , is once
again demonstrated here by the way the pictures and words make up awhole new form. Time and again we come up against the infuriating limitations imposed on us when we try to articulate feminism within a traditionally defmed category , whether it be the teaching of women's studies
within an academic discipline that clearly cannot contain it, the writing ofa book that is assumed to be "either fact or fiction," or the articulationof a political position in which traditional naming forces us to divide theconsciously oppressed lesbian from the unconsciously afraid would-be
lesbian .
The power of word and image in We Speak in Code stems from thecommon political struggles of the women , and the fact that many of thesubjects were described by artist and poet at the same time, during andafter incidents experienced by both of them. Sign, for instance , is familiar
to many women in Portland , Oregon, where Melanie and the artist PaulaKing distributed the poster that describes how two deaf-mute women used
sign language to escape a pair of kidnappers and would -be rapists . The
graphic, showing two pairs of hands signing "escape" and "cooperation,"
is a powerful and beautiful response to reports of the incident. There isa tension in the first half of Melanie 's poem, where the two women areplanning how to escape, that parallels the painstaking expressiveness ofthe pair of hands on the left side of the graphic, while the speed and excitement of the escape , described in the last part of the poem , reflect thecontrolled urgency of the other pair of hands , pushing forward with thefmgers closed.
My favorite graphic is Paula's The Takeover of Eden, although this may
be in part due to my having seen the original: a stunning piece of applique/quilting , the quality of which cannot be captured in print . The same is trueof The Day I Left My Vacuum Cleaner, another of Paula's embroideredpictures, which in the book loses its contrast of color and texture . Still
more unfortunate is the poor reproduction of the photograph by Lee
Pickett of the Monster Basketball Team, whose members are shown wearing T-shirts by Michele Goodman. The Monster graphic on the shirts is invisible in the book's reproduction and the potential impact of the picture
lost. Michele's Medusa Mask, however, photographs well and is a strong
addition to the mytholOgical section of the book, which includes poems
about Pandora and Cassandra.
94

I think it is interesting that this book integrates not only words andimages but also a wide variety of written forms. I understand that changes
in literary forms indicate changes in the consciousness of women writers:
traditional forms do not seem enough to contain our visions in a periodof expansion and political assertion, especially when our writers insist on
including material that is traditionally "not suitable subject matter" forpoetry (or ~he novel, or the essay). Melanie's book includes many different
kinds of writing, some of which I can easily label ("poem," "journal excerpt"), others, like the piece "Labyrinth ," which I really cannot. This isa definite strength; the forms are being shaped to fit what the writer has
to say . In the case of the two "Rituals" at the end of the book, they were
written to be performed by a group of women , one at the Portland Women'sNight Watch in 1978 and the other on International Women's Day , 1978 .
We Speak in Code leaves one with a strong sense of collaboration, notonly because it describes many collective actions but also because it presents itself as a collaborative effort. Credit is given to sources of inspirationand to women who participated in the first performances of the "Rituals,"
but the overall impression is not one of the "great artist" thanking those
who gave her support, but rather one of a network of women working together for common political goals , the major focus of that work being, inthis instance , Melanie's poetry. We are all, of course, creating a networkof women, whether or not we know one another, involved in common
struggles as lesbians and feminists. Writing like that of Melanie Kaye makes
sense of that struggle , helps to create the network , and makes it all seem
possible.

95

Anita Skeen"YOUR INVESTMENT IN HISTORY"

A review of Waking at the Bottom of the Dark by Jan Clausen. Publishedin 1979 by Long Haul Press , Brooklyn , N.Y. Distributed by Crossing Press,
Trumansburg, N.Y. 14886.78 pp . $3.
What we remember- those images , dreams , and moments of previous
years and lives- becomes the material of much of our everyday conversation . It seems natural to remember , to compare childhood stories , comingout stories , the people who have passed in and out of our individual lives.
Jan Clausen's Waking at the Bottom of the Dark begins with a poem, thetitle poem for -the book, which forces the reader into memory . Who cannot rememb~r , and identify with, "waking / at the bottom of the dark / tothe love of your body"; "the sleepy child with her difficult socks"; a time
when "it is good / to be out walking early" ; or "the windows glazed withlight / the trees shake out / their fmal green and gold." If poetry is experience , in this opening poem Clausen involves us directly , and the poem concludes, "0 how can i remember : / it was winter. clear. the light /was shining
through the crystal / park ." The poems throughout this book are about
how we as women and lesbians deal with such items of memory: where
they come from , how they come to haunt us , how we attempt to resolvethem.
In the first section of the book, we encounter ideas and images which
will occur constantly throughout the following pages : memory, dreams ,waking, sleep , rain , revolution . Clausen combines these images in unanticipated and unusual ways. In "the empress anastasia in new york ," we begin
in the rain, move thr9Ugh a "dream picture" into jews and concentration
camps, vietnam, the bay of pigs, suez, and discover a line like "i remember
my mother's soft / face skin with the / fallout scare." In the "dream picture"
the narrator experiences, she is, among other things , "bored as havana /before the revolution." The poem begins in "the rain- / shaped sleep / ofwomen / who nod in doorways / dreaming of good times," takes us through"catastrophes we do not name . / these dreams of dreamless sleep , / remembering nothing," and leaves us with the poet walking "toward rain / downa beach shining/white through the storm ." We will recall this last image
six poems later when , in a poem entitled "pacific," the poet says, "ocean /you blue/calm mother/heal me."Connections between women, children, mothers, daughters, are central
to the book's themes. In this same poem, "the empress anastasia in newyork," we are introduced to a mother and grandmother, and the poems
which follow become a weaving of the lives of grandmother, mother,daughter, sometimes positive , sometimes negative , but always lives aware96

of these connections. In the fifth section of "children," the poet declares,"you're / the barren daughter / illegitimate mother / cassandra / of off-color
prophecies / the lumpen poet." In "struggle," a poem about the dissolvingof the narrator's relationship with her lover, Clausen says, when she speaksof dividing their few possessions, "there's just / your investment / in history /her face." As we read on through the poems in this collection, we discoverthat our investment in history is not only our relationship with the women
who are our lovers; an even stronger message which pervades the book is
our investment in the lives of our grandmothers and mothers, our investment in the lives of children, our own or someone else's . We are thrust
into the middle of a cycle : grandmother, mother , daughter, child. All are
one ; all become parts of the other. "You will spend / your life raising /other people's children," remarks the poet in the closing lines of the fourth
section of "children," a section which has opened with the lines "this childhurts you / like another self." In "tantrum," also in the second section of
the book, the poet clearly gives us the conflict between the adult and child(mother and daughter?) when she says, "it is a nightmare ... / and history
repeats. / you take the path, / you turn and drag her / screaming she wasforced / past all the swings and fathers." In a later poem, "words for this,"
Clausen writes, "time / our distracted mother, grabs / our wrists / and hauls
us, howling where /we would not go." In the same poem, a few lines later,
she says, "it's you / i would shelter, / knowing we can- / not save- even thechildren / even our own skins, / tomato vines / rotting beneath / november
rain.""Stories," a poem which declares ''we live / beneath one roof / with ourseparate stories," shows us that our stories are not separate at all. These
are not poems which single out the lesbian experience as one which is different, unusual, unique; rather, they show the universalities among women.
We are lesbians, but we are also mothers , daughters, children , friends. In"the kitchen window ," the poet writes: "no words, you say / we slip /through the nets / of speech / mother , lover, friend." She is one of these;
she is all of these. After having read in "dialectics," "i am a lesbian ," andin "flying over my life," "i am a woman," we return to the final lines ofthe fmal poem in the third section of the book: ''your breasts / complete
me. anchor me / in this life." She is the lesbian fulfilled by her lover; sheis the child who seeks the life-giving sustenance of the breast. And the poet
can also place herself in the role of mother , giving birth to herself: in "dialectics" she writes, "how difficult / to live inside my story ." By writingthese poems, by developing the technique of words, the poet gets out ofher story, gives birth to herself, to her own experience , to our experiences.
We return, then, to the first lines of that section of the poem : "in childbirth / you focus on technique."Throughout the poems we witness change. In "Sestina, Winchell's DonutHouse," one of my favorite poems in the collection, change is one of thesix end words repeated in each of the six stanzas. Though it sometimes
refers to money, we also see the darkness change, the narrator's fantasy
that her co-worker could change, and the narrator's own changing of clothes .
97

In many poems, darkness turns to light, light turns back to dark. The seasons change : we find ourselves on "the pavement / rancid with August heat";in "April, / vapid with pastels"; in September when "the maples / turn awayfrom green"; or out on "flat December mornings." She looks at the womenaround her: "i study / the tabula rasa / of teenage bodies / the curled mothers /ten years /will turn them into." We sleep; we wake. We dream; we havenightmares . Clausen asks in the first line of "children," "what have you to
fear?" and though she answers in the next two lines, "it is not / extremes,"
several poems later in "impermanence" she writes: ''you fear , i fear extremes
invite extremes." It is the extremes, the polarities, we fmd in these poems
that give us insight into our common lives. In "words for this," we areback to the "fear of memory," yet the poems have shown us that it ismemory that enlightens and brings us comfort: "our bodies remember /return through time / to the clearing." The grandmother in "grandma" whowants now to be alone remembers walking miles to the nearest farm, unafraid in the dark, though the wolves howled on the frozen shore; in thefollowing poem , the speaker remembers walking home in the mornings in"summer's most delicate pink early light" to "sleep out the hot day alone."
We see all these elements come together in a stanza from ''words for this":"fear / of memory. change . / fear of falling / the oldest. and / the hunger. /how , every- / woman, we / rise."
In Waking at the Bottom of the Dark we struggle through memory,
wake from the darkness to seek the light, but fmd darkness corning on
again. We try to see through this darkness the lives of others, our own
life. We search through dreams; we peer through the rain. The poet says,"i / wake daily / to discover / the un- / accustomed fact / of our joined lives."
These poems celebrate the ways that women's lives are joined, those which
are obvious and those which are unaccustomed; and when she asks in oneof the final poems of the book, "dialectics," "to see clearly, is that / thegreatest gift?" I find myself answering "Yes."

98

Susanna J. Sturgis
F IN DING THE PLACE THAT LIES OVER ROCK
A review of Crazy Quilt: Poems by Susan Wood-Thompson. Crone Press ,Washington, D.C . Distributed by Crossing Press, Trumansburg, N.Y., 14886.
$3 available in print and, for the print-handicapped reader, on cassette tape .

For Ruth, Sarah , and Nancy, teachers of English
This is the third book of poetry 1 have read in my life. The other two
were , strangely enough, also by lesbian·feminist poets.
1 say that neither by way of a boast nor to flaunt my lack of qualifications for reviewing this particular very fine book of poems. 1 say it foreach of you who is about to turn the page ' in search of something about
anything but poetry, for each of you who is thinking that you would rather
go to, the dentist than to a poetry reading . 1 fight a strong inclination to
do the same - a legacy of high school bouts with have-to-be-read man poets
whose poems had shells that cracked with much effort and yielded up only
ash and a shriveled nut.
When asked ''Whom do you write for?" Susan Wood-Thompson wrote ,"I write for the woman who sent me a letter saying, 'Your poems makeme work so hard, but it's always worth it.'" They do and it is . One of myhigh school English teachers once said that a work of literature was a synthesis of the writer's experience and the reader's . It is fair enough, then ,for a trailblazer/poet to expect some effort from those who would follow
the path she created.
In "Interpreting Signs," the poem that opens Crazy Quilt,
Signs of struggle
are rare to find, but probably lie
everywhere unseen .
We have to see detailsa few wild turkey feathers looseby the creek meana bobcat killed and runs these hills.
In this snowscape the signs are left by other creatures and by the poet who
tracks them . Reading the signs , making the connections, is the theme ofthis, the first of the book's four sections. That adept interpreting is essential for survival is clear in "Heritage," wherf.'
Behind me and my mother and hers
stand Navajo women on Truchas Peaks
gathering wind-twisted driftwoodshattered flint hearing in birds
and in deer trotting ten minutes away
meals mittens shoes against the. roots .
99

Where the connections are mismade, there can be a warping guilt, as in"Fever ," where a little girl links her coming blindness to being sexually
abused : "Good girls/don't have that happen to them. Good girls don't/
go blind." Where the connections are not made at all, there is the anguishof "Mama ," in which the poet sits alone by her mother's hospital bedside.
The poet cannot speak; her mother cannot hear. Both pretend that life
can go on regardless.
Throughout this section it becomes clear that interpreting the signs, intuiting the connections, and asking the questions that make understanding(and poetry) possible are not innocuous activities. The poet comes secretly
and silently into the dark chapel of "Territory," where the nuns also come"to say what else they believed/who else , besides the sick, they loved."
She writes
I peered at the sisters' holy cards, tried each stall
expecting the trap door to hellto drop open under my knees
for coming in moonlightbelieving in firefor not knowing
my place .

In "Frances Kerr Thompson" she reaches beyond the sterilized stories bywhich families often hide their more eccentric members, and she discovers
more of those "signs of struggle." In the grandmother who died before she
was born , the poet fmds kinship with. .. the poetry-writing
picture-painting woman
stinking and not caring
on the trolley , when
- from exile in a tasteful lineage my bones come hometo the wisdom of resemblance
my skin webs to the shape of her cells .
This homecoming marks a resolution, a settling, the end of the "Interpreting Signs" section. But Crazy Quilt is a sort of spiral; each section
brings a climax that in turn begins a new process, progress, struggle. Earlier,the poet was seen "believing in fire," the flickering unseen flame in thechapel. The next , more dangerous , stage is "walking into fire ," into an
attempt to understand her aloof, silent mother in "After Winter Ceremonies." She finds a woman who longs to move but cannot, who fears falling
asleep but cannot wake up , who is unbearably cold but hypnotized by fire :The soft sore body billows along the floor
each point of air an icy sting
making the long way to the fireplacecrawling into the lick of flame
to get some more sleep
enough sleep at last.
Fire is the testing, the transforming , the destroying element. To survive ,one cannot crawl into fire; one must walk in upright , eyes open. On the100beach in "Birthdays" there is "space to pack my faces / again and again in
the sand/each one surprising," but that is not enough. There remains thefascination with fire, with essences:. . . I go home to set my hairon fireto see if flame will notch along my backbone
drop its ladder down my limbs:
if I shall burn me down to rock and sea
or try to fmd again your path to the beach.
On the other side of the fire is the distinctively un fiery , con trolled,dimly lit place of ''Therapy,'' the first part of a three-poem sequence called''Talking to People Who Are Not Here." ''Talking'' describes a rapid progress that begins with leaving the therapist behind repeating with a new
woman the ritual scene-setting, questioning, and distancing that open thepoem. In the second part, "Salt Between Us," the poet defines what she
wants and takes it. It is a poem of reaching out, of realizing both connections and separateness.
If you were to look toward the water
you would see us here
embryo shapes in the flood of earth, membranes
dividing-only for a lifetime-inner from outer salt
arms lifting-for an instant-from our breasts
to touch each other's faces, each other's floating hands.
"The End of the Conversation" fmds the poet "braced against the pull ofearth," speaking with an assurance like that which concluded "Frances Kerr
Thompson." Here she is reaching out to someone more tormented, lessbraced than she. The poet has emerged from walking through fire with awill to survive.
"The Place That Lies Over Rock" is about focusing, building, moving
on. It begins with the eerie, slow creatures of "Lifelike," whose tentative
awkwardness suggests the need to relearn everything from eating to understanding. The strange, surreal atmosphere of "Lifelike" is a transition to
the bright textures and solidity of "Gemini at Thirty-Five":
When you step from the tub
hair streaking paths of waterthen fluffy with blue towellingyou say, I have wrinkles
in a place I never did before
do you have these?
And because we are two women
because we are usually in loveand since we age together
year by year, I know the answers
to some questions I am asked.
"Gemini," "Prehistoric Pottery Design," and "the Way We Come" speakof fmding roots not only in the past or in the ground but also, especially,in relationships with other women. "The Way We Come" begins with a101

girl child resisting the needs and changes of her body , paralyzed by thefear of "doing the thing / everyone else would have known not to do" ;then it bounds exuberantly into a decidedly lesbian vision:
we kindle fires out of doors
and call each other over
our shadows flickering up along the sky
our tongues telling storiesof the death of kings .
"Crazy Quilt," the poem that names both the book and its third section , comes next to remind the reader that although visions are necessary,
they are not enough. "Crazy Quilt" is an eloquent, self-revealing poem,
written to a friend to explain a carelessly phrased remark. In it are thedangers , confusions, struggles , triumphs , and terrors of living on the boundary . It tells of "the cracking up":it is here when no one eats at dusk but I alone
feel the mind turn goblin
the witches of changechange to the witches of childhood
cackling through the sandstorm
of my parents' homejust missing this time as they zoom past my head
Most significantly, after the disconnected signs of the first section of
the book and the insubstantial fire of the second , "Crazy Quilt" marks the
poet's acceptance of her own vulnerability and her simultaneous discoveryof the kind of firm structure that enables rather than imprisons .
The cracking up is here
my house is far from orderly yet
but it is livablebuilt in the crevice an earthquake made.
I am crafty with strategies
for finding and building on the placethat lies over rock.
.
"Light Through the Door" records in journal style a period of greatchanges in the poet's life, deliberate changes that could not have been
made without the foundation established on "the place that lies over rock."
Instead of summarizing the experience after it is completed , this poem
comprises the facets of days and the process of moving from one place toanother. It is laced with connections made : with a lover; with light , earth,water ; with women becoming closer friends and working together. And
from those connections, that web, that community, comes the courage toleave a comfortable place for one unknown, to be in transit(ion).
Can we come back if we forgot something?
Can the love of women strong enough to leave
stretch out to women strong enough to stay?
This is no more my home , the place I know
for a while now I am simply toward another.
102

I wanted to go, I knew I had to go :now just as sure, some part of my life stays.
The culmination of Crazy Quilt, however, is not in the leaving but inthe seeing: in the long, moving, often funny, determined "Trying To See
Myself Without a Mirror." Reading the signs, walking through the fire, andfmding the place that lies over rock are all here in this. autobiographicalnarrative poem that ties the book together. "Trying To See Myself Without a Mirror" is like driving straight through the terrain that the previous
three sections cover on the side roads, with detours and many stops andstarts. It follows a route that would not exist if the life that generated theother poems in this book had not been lived and seen. Those poems surface and echo throughout ''Trying To See Myself."
The poet leaves us with a self-portrait of the artist at work; the tranquility of the scene is all the more precious for the turbulen.ce of the life
behind it, for the knowledge that life is more often turbulent than tranquil for lesbians, feminists, and poets.
Today the cold bites through the sunshine
and the wind stiffens what it blows against.
This morning I work at my deskand she across the hall at hers
like children coloring, like nuns praying
like white-haired women knowingthat though we may die alone
we will live together
the hair falling down the sides of our faces
as we bend over our work.

~"!Jf),J(~
rp EM! N AJ{.YA

FEMINIST

JOUR.,NAL

FOR
THE
SOUTH
Emphasizing the Lesbian Visionpublished 3 times a year
Subs: $6.50 for Individuals·$13 for Institutions
P.O .Box 954, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514
103

RESPONSES

I wish to comment briefly on Pamela C. Johnston's review of my book
Motherlines in SW 15.
Neither the explicit and committed feminist nor any other kind of fiction writer I have ever heard of has anything whatever to say about her
book's cover art unless, through some miracle of agenting or a milliondollar track-record , a clause specifically granting her cover-control has been
inserted into the publishing contract and is not ignored in practice by the
publisher. Small-scale specialty publishers are more flexible but usually
can't put your work into the hands of as many readers as the mass-market
publisher can . You consider the trade-offs and make your choice , and if
you go after maximum distribution via a mass-market publisher, you don't
normally get this kind of clause. Decisions about your cover-art are often
made not even by your editor but by the sales and art-<iepartment staff
who are credited with knowing more about what kind of cover best sells
a given sort of book. These are the realities of the business, and you makeyour peace with them as best you can.
As for the rest of Johnston's review: With regard to authorial intention ,she is simply and flatly wrong. With regard to the actual achievement-theeffect of the book on the reader-she is obviously 100% right for herself
and those of her mind ; however , having heard from a number of readers
I know that many are not of her mind. All in all, I expect that those whoare seriously interested in the questions Johnston raises will read the bookand make their own judgments, and this is not only satisfactory but the
point of the whole effort. Each individual confrontation of minds throughthe work is the reason for trying to write books more nourishing than cotton-candy, more challenging than nursery-rhymes, more rigorous than daydreams .

-Suzy McKee Chamas
Albuquerque, New Mexico
A few years ago I was asked to give a reading and workshop at an elite
western school. What the women had decided wc,uld happen during theirwriting workshop was that each woman (it seems to me in retrospect tohave been some hundreds , but must have been forty or fifty) would readto me a poem as I sat there . I was not to give criticism , for that would be
intellectual and male.
I have given workshops that people have commented were helpful; that
I was very critical and some of what I said was painful; that they carriedaway some kind of energy; that they learned practical information, techniques , at least addresses. Nobody from that day got anything out of it.
Certainly not me.
The basic problem for me was to keep an interested smile on my faceand look entranced as one poem succeeded another in a blur, while allattention was focussed on me as if to gauge by dilation of pupils or res104

piration and heartbeat the response they had forbidden me to utter. Not
being able to engage the work critically meant I tended to like none of it.
It felt visited on me. Certainly I did not believe any of them were serious
about their work if all they wanted was that I be paid to sit and endure
it. A window mannequin would have been more satisfactory conductingthat workshop.
Writing for yourself or your friends is fme. A healthy amateur substratum in any of the arts produces people who understand what's really involved in that art. Studying the piano or the violin may not lead you to
perform, but it may give you pleasure and it may help you appreciate
someone who has spent the necessary years and passion learning how to
use that instrument to capacity.
Performing publicly or publishing your work means you are addressing
it to your contemporaries and to posterity and that it belongs to everybody intellectually and emotionally .
Reviewing is a thankless task I view in the same way I do tithing , assomething you pay back into the community. Mostly when I review, I do
so to call attention to the work of women that has not, I feel , had enoughattention or enough understanding. I also review when I think something
being admired is less than admirable ; perhaps meretricious, perhaps dangerous. Reviewers also use on occasion a text as a way of talking about a cultural phenomenon they feel ought to be addressed. That is partly what
Joanna Russ was doing in her by now notorious review in Sinister Wisdom. *I am sure that Russ would have written differently if she had been reviewing for the New York Times. (This is speculative fiction indeed :Joanna being asked to review three lesbian novels for the Times.) If wecannot tell the truth as we see it, if we cannot be honest in women's publications for our own audiences, when do we tell the truth? Never? Then
let's cash it all in now . If reviewing means patting on the head and on the
fanny in mindless approbation whether we think what is being done isworth the price of admission or not, then it's patronizing mush. Traditional
feminine behavior. "Oh, darling, you look fantastic in that dress." Thenafterward, ''Where did she get it? That's the sort of thing your maid gives
you when she wears it out." Class example intentional, because we're discussing, after all, ladylike behavior. Be nice in pUblic. Say something niceno matter what you think. After all, you can say in private what you likelater on .
We have tons and tons of leftover middle class niceness. What we needis more intelligence, more originality, more winged women who take off
and head on out, and more heroines of culture who do the thing the firsttime, when it is not even beautiful yet, let alone pretty . And never comfortable . Instead of trying to cut Russ down to size and make her fit into
a teacup, let us enjoy her as one of our great resources. She is never easy
but she is always worth the climb.
Published writers are not children bringing home drawings from school
to put up on the refrigerator and not siblings to be treated exactly the* Joanna Russ, review of Donna Young's Retreat, in SW 12
105

same ; and feminist presses are not, as Marion Zimmer Bradley would haveit , places where amateurs publish their little attempts before they grow up
to mainstream presses. Feminist presses publish what is too political, too
experimental, too specialized , too frightening, too hostile for the large factory presses to touch. A writer may publish her whole career with smallpresses, as many poets have throughout the twentieth century, as James
Joyce did, and be a giant of letters.
If we are not honest in our evaluation of each other's work , where shalla feminist aesthetic arise? If we abandon the effort to set our own criteria,
we have left standing the old values and failed to create our own to replacethem.
-Marge Piercy
Wellfleet, Massachusetts

As is so often the case, you again have published material which ventilates unexamined parts of women's experience and expectations, thus exorcising some of our internalized demons. Barbara Macdonald, by her plea
for younger women to "Look Me in the Eye" has broken the silence whichleaves ageism so misunderstood , unexplained, unanalyzed - a concept dutifully mouthed by lesbians in the litany of social oppressions but ignoredin the hard work of consciousness change.
I am writing this letter of thanks for her perceptive insights because I
am afraid that the analysis she made of the power relationships between
older and younger women which could serve as mind-reversal keys for us,
will instead disappear without sound into the deepest well of all- the fearof age. I am sixty-two. Past sixty we are less able to play the "I don't
know what you are talking about-(Not me! Not me! I'm not old likeyou!)" game that chills all older women's ability to seek allies for our perceptions among women only a few years our junior. Battered by doubts
and isolation , we are poor at naming the source of our pain for lack of adetailed body of exchanged experience and analysis . Where are the jokes,
the reversed language, the shared metaphors that defend us from our erasure by the younger members of our only community? Past sixty, invisibility is palpable , unavoidable , omnipresent.
I agree with Macdonald that "the present attitude of women in their
twenties and thirties has been shaped since childhood by patriarchy toview the older woman as powerless, less important than the fathers andthe children , and there to serve both ." In addition to this elitist expectation , younger women suffer from mythical programming to demean thegreat psychological scapegoat, the mother. Since her invention by Freudas the source of all our problems and hang-ups , the mother (read older
woman) has not been someone who could be trusted or followed, a further
reinforcement of the point made by Macdonald about the shift in age between the leadership of the first and second waves of the women's movement in this century.
What we still have trouble acknowledging is that women are well conditioned to police each other, with the mother limiting the power of the106daughter's physical strength, confidence , and sexuality when she is young
and the grown daughter doing the same thing to the old mother . Thus the
Fathers do not have to expend so much energy to keep women in theirplace. We do it for them .
- Baba Copper
Talmage, Califo rnia

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ANTHOLOGY ON LESBIAN SEPARATISM. Julia Penelope and Sarah Lucia Hoaglandare preparing an anthology on Lesbian separatism. We want it to be for ourselves (separatists) , asking our questions, focusing on our issues. Presumably though, some material
will focus on challenges to separatism such as the problem of male children or the chargethat separatism is only a white, middle class issue. We welcome analytical essays, personal
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WOMYN's BRAILLE PRESS, Inc. Sinister Wisdom is now available on four-track cassette to womyn who are blind or physically disabled. The tapes are on loan or can bepurchased through the Womyn's Braille Press, P.O. Box 8475, Mpls., MN 55408 . Pleasewrite to W.B.P. for subscription information.
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109

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Donna Allegra is twenty-seven and Brooklyn born and raised. She began writing
poetry in 1976 with the Black lesbian writers' collective Jemima. Recently she has
been writing prose fiction under the influence of other writers in the Black lesbianperformance group Naps. "I've been writing a journal since I was fourteen, but it
wasn't until five or so years ago that I realized that my journal constituted 'writing.'''
She has published work in Azalea, Conditions 5, Essence, The Salsa Soul Gayzette,and Lesbians Rising.
Paula Gunn Allen is a poet and writer and a member of the Laguna tribe. She
lives in San Francisco.
Judith Barrington lives in Oregon and has published poems in various feminist/lesbian publications. To earn money she writes for the Portland Women's Newsletter(amazingly , they got a grant for a writer) and struggles to remain employed as a lesbian teacher of women's studies.
Betty Bird grew up in Texas . This is her fust published narrative.
Beth Brant. "I'm a forty-year-old Mohawk/white, lesbian/feminist from the Motor
City. I live with my lover and our two teenaged daughters. I am anxiously awaiting
the day when I can leave the nest. This is my first published work."
Martha Courtot has published two books. of poetry, Tribe and Journey. Sl"\,e iscurrently fundraising for her third book, Night River-donations generously accepted
at 2800 St. Paul Drive, no. 259, Santa Rosa, CA 95405.
Andrea Dworkin's new book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, has just been
published by Putnam's/Perigee. They will publish her collection of lectures, Our Blood,in paperback in the fall. Her other books are Woman Hating and The New Woman 's
Broken Heart. She is currently writing a book on women and the political right in
the United States.
Sharon Fernleaf. "I am a mother-this first because most else is done in between
and after tending to that responsibility. Just moved to Seattle. No formal art training
to date, just a love of visual expression and the powerful emotions one can bring toa work, or out in that work . So - I do freelance illustration and graphics for various
papers and magazines for women."
Marilyn Frye looks, feels, and smells as you would expect a midwestern lesbian/feminist philosopher would . Any regular Sinister Wisdom reader could identify her
in the crowd a t the airport.
Judy Grahn is presently embroiled in historical research. Persephone Press will
publish Another Mother Tongue: Stories from the Ancient Gay Traditions, and Crossing Press a new book of poems, The Queen of Wands.
Beth Karbe. "I am a dyke photographer primarily interested in Lesbian portraitureand the creation and preservation of images that reflect Lesbian strength, struggle,
and wisdom."
Ursula Kavanagh is thirty-seven. She was born and ra:sed in Dublin and now lives
in Chicago. A graduate of the Art Institute, she designed the Great American Lesbian
Art Show's Chicago poster and was a member of the Chicago GALAS collective. She
survives by working as a waitress three nights a week and occasionally selling her work.
Willyce Kim has published two small books of poetry. They are entitled Eating
Artichokes and Under the Rolling Sky. She lives in Berkeley with her dog Phoenix.
Irena Klepfisz is a poet trying to devote more time to her writing. She was afounder and for four years an editor of Conditions magazine. A collection of her
poetry, Periods of Stress, is available from Piecework Press. Most recently, her work
appeared in Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology (Persepnone Press).
Audre Lorde is a Black lesbian feminist poet who lives in New York. Her mostrecent book of poetry is The Black Unicorn, and her latest book is The Cancer Jour·nals (published by Spinsters, Ink), a collection of prose dealing with breast cancer.
Judith McDaniel lives and works in very rural upstate New York and hikes andcamps frequently in the Adirondacks.
Catherine Risingflame Moirai lives on a farm near Knoxville, Tennessee.
110Marian Roth lives in Cazenovia, N.Y., where she works as the staff photographer
at the Women's Writer's Center and teaches American government part-time at a
community college. She is currently working on a photography book to be called
Connections.
Anita Skeen was born in West Virgin ia and is currently teaching at Wichita Statein Kansas. She is completing a book of poems about relationships between womenand doing research on long poems by women.
Susanna J. Sturgis is an active member of Lesbian Heritage/D.C. and Hallowmas
Women Writers. On May I, she took a long-saved-for step and quit her job in order
to work on her thoroughly lesbian novel.
Celeste Tibbets lives in Athens, Georgia, supports herself fin ancially by working
with emotionally disturbed adolescents, writes at night, and wants to one day be a
farmer as well.

--

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Contributors, Please Read:
Please send all work for consideration and all business correspondence to:Sinister Wisdom, P.O. Box 660, Amherst, MA 01004. Please enclose SASE
for return of work we cannot publish, and a stamped postcard if you wish
acknowledgment of your work on arrival. Please double-space all manuscripts.
For artwork: Please send photographs (black and white prints only; glossy,
not matte; gray tones reproduce better than sharp black/white contrasts)
and line drawings (xeroxes or photos, not originals please). We would liketo publish portfolios 'of work with comments by the artist, as well as individual pieces of artwork.

New Address for Poster: Beginning in January 1981, the sale and distribution of the Tee Corinne solarized "Sinister Wisdom" poster has beentaken over by the Lincoln Legion of Lesbians. See announcement in thisissue for address and prices.
Subscribers: If you move, please notify us as early as possible. The post
office will not forward your magazine. It will be returned to us, at our
expense, and we will have to bill you to partially cover additional postage
and handling.
Back Issues (while they last): SW 4: ''What Is a Lesbian?"; poetry by Claudia
Scott, Audre Lorde; Joy Justice on separatism. SW 5: fiction by Flying
Clouds, poetry by Minnie Bruce Pratt, Susan Leigh Star on "The Politics
of Wholeness," Judith Schwarz on "Researching Lesbian History." SW 7:
Melanie Kaye on feminism and the medical establishment; poetry by Susan
Wood-Thompson, Teresa Anderson; "On Being Physically Different." SW15, special issue on Lesbianism: Sexuality and Power / The Patriarchy: Violence and Pornography. SW 16: ''Domestic History" of SW, 1976-1981,
by Harriet and Catherine; interview by C. Colette; interviews with lesbians
in prison; fiction.

...

SW 173.00