CONTENTS
A Woman Lies Buried Under Me, a poem by Gloria AnzaldUa
From A Book of Travel, narrative by Barbara Deming
Illustration by Jane Gapen
Nadine Pagan's Last Letter Home, narrative by Judith Katz
the dream, a poem by Michele A. Belluomini
Why I Can't Write Establishment Poetry, a poem by Pesha Gertler

7
11
12

Vulnerability and Power, theory by Sarah Lucia Hoagland
By Her Hands, a poem by Rebecca Gordon

13
24"Making Soul, Creating Alchemy," review of This Bridge Called
My Back, by Michelle Cliff
Letter: 10/6/81 from Beth Brant

26
32

Three Drawings by Diane Ayott

37

The Nourislunent of Small Things, narrative by wendy stevens
All About Eve, a poem by Martha Nichols
Four Poems by Diana Bickston

40
47
48

Anti-Semitism in the Lesbian Cotnmunity: A Collage of Mostly
Bad News by One Jewish Dyke, theory by Selma Miriam

50

The Convert, narrative by Barbara Smith
Brigid, narrative by Mary Ann Daly
Novena, narrative by Valerie Miner

61
73
77

Four Poems in Search of a Sober Reader, poetry by Catherine
Risingflame Moirai
Milagra, narrative by Elsa Perez-Treviiio
Bloodlines, a poem by Celeste Tibbets
The Legend Fall Return
poems by Paula Gunn Allen

81
85
90
94

The Flood, a poem by Martha Boethal
The Privilege of Choice, review of Lillian Faderman's
Surpassing the Love of Men, by Judith McDaniel
Testimonies, a review of The Lesbian Path and We're Here,by Bonnie Zimmerman

2
3

97
100
104

Gloria Anzaldua
A WOMAN LIES BURIED UNDER ME
A woman lies buried under me ,interred for centuries, presumed dead.
A woman lies buried under me .
I hear her soft whisper ,the rasp of her parchment skinfighting the folds of her shroud.
Her eyes are pierced by needles,
her eyelids, two fluttering moths .
A woman lies buried under me,
afraid to wake, afraid to greet
the eyeless ovals of intimate faces.
And choosing.
A woman lies buried under me
dreaming that she walks
across the horns of the moon
and wakes at the foot of its bridge.
A woman lies buried under me.
Clothed in black
the moon sheds its lighta fragile snake skinbrushing my face .
A woman""'li?s buried under me .
I hear her soft whisper ,the rasp of her parchment wings
fighting the folds of my shroud.
A woman lies buried under me.
I emerge covered with mud .
Twigs fall from my eyes.
I rise, smell every flower
touch the four corners
and the burning trees .
In my own hands
my life.

2"

Barbara Deming

From A BOOK OF TRAVEL (Chapter 13)

In 1950-51, Deming, young then , but already in full possessionof her writer's craft and consciousness, went for the first time toEurope and lived and traveled there for more than a year. Italy,
France, Germany, Greece, Spain-traveling usually 3rd class, with aknapsack and her father's quilt, she took her writer's notes and kept
letters, etc. Soon after, conceiving the whole experience as central
in her life , and as passionately unified by her falling in love during
this period, she set out to write of it- and finished a first chapter.
But she couldn't continue. Friends discouraged her-because she waswriting about a lesbian and this was not only taboo then, it was notconsidered an authentic hold upon reality.
Times change. Having a good memory, having kept the notes,
letters, etc., she is able to give us now this experience, to resee itthrough her powers of a writer who is also a poet. Since the writing
was postponed twenty years, we get the benefit of Deming's later
perspective on this material- showing us a young woman in the process of her radicalizing, before she is aware of theory. The portion
here is a good example of this. And of the religious or epic qualityof this work, a woman's epic for our age of awareness.
-Jane Gapen
On another day I took a bus to Elevsis. And on that day I fell into a
dreaming state deeper still. My first feeling was a shock of disappointment.
I found little more than three columns upright there . A peasant woman
who saw me staring about made a rolling motion with her hands- "Bomba ."Mussolini's planes had bombed the place. Here was a jumble of fractured
stones and pillars and bits of ornament. The site was on a small hill above
a town that was now a factory town. Townswomen were gathering some
edible weeds among the ruins. And a few chickens hopped from ancientstone to stone. I wandered along the hilltop , among the marble wreckage.
No shape of what once had been was still discernible . Here was just the
rubble of it. But I can remember still my disappointment changing to a
deep surprise, as I stood among those scattered stones. Smoke rose fromthe chimneys of the town just down the hill. Its factory whistle shrilled .
There were bursts of popular music, and a continual seething of voices .

3But these sounds which were the nearby sounds of the present day seemed
to me curiously remote-even illusory. Whereas the jumble of tumbled
stones at my feet seemed electric with life-subtle , undeniable . I stood fora long time in a state of surprise . The factory whistle shrilled again. It
was as though the sound struck against my body but fell away. My inner
ear brimmed with a gentle humming. In fact my whole body seemed tohum. It was as though the soles of my feet picked up vibrations from theground. I wrote LI1 my state of wonder : "These ruins are more live thanthe present life."
At the time I found it strange that I should feel it to be so at thatparticular site. I no longer fmd it strange. For I have come-as other women have-to muse at length about the rites that once were celebrated
just there - the Eleusian Mysteries. Rites in which Persephone , who has
been carried off by the Lord of the Underworld, is reunited with hermother , Demeter , and with her own stolen-away self. Rites acted out ina time when women had begun to lose their strength to the patriarchs,
but here affirmed the truth that it could not be taken from us once andfor all-will be found again.
As I write of Persephone's abduction there floods into my memory a
dream I dreamed as a young girl. Which has remained for me down throughall the years of my life sharp as though I had dreamed it yesterday-its
imagery distinct , and the feelings , too , distinct that cast their net over me.
I dreamed it at a time when my father used at bedtime to play with mybrothers and me a game he called Daddy Wolf. He would hide in the parlor with all the lights out. We would creep together down the long hallthat led to the .room, and then-venture into that dark. He would jumpout of the shadows, catch in his arms fIrst one of us and then another ;tickle us until we screamed with joy and terror. It was play my motherpleaded with him to give up. For she would have liked to put us to bed
in a calm and drowsy state. But my father loved the game . In the dream:
I am on the back of a large silvery wolf. Seated there , captive. Not able
to slip off. Not bound in any physical way, but passive, accepting-that I
am the captive . It is this resignation that is the dread feeling that fills the
dream . The wolf moves with awesome dignity slowly down the hall andtoward the front door-passing in this motion the open door to the dining
room, where all the family sits. Or rather, my mother, my brothers, thewoman who cooks for us . They see us pass and with helpless looks theyraise their hands in sorrow and then bow their heads. Yes, I belong to the
Daddy Wolf. He will bear me wherever he wants. And it is for me simply
to be his quiet passenger . At the front door , I wake from the dream.
Though I don't wake entirely. For its feelings hold me still.
A net of feelings in which I struggled all through my youth. As an adolescent I began to feel that net give. Began to feel I had the new weightand new impulsive motion to break it. This was a delicious feeling. Whichpersisted during my four years at an all-women's college. There we young
women stared into one another's eyes and saw each other as strong and4

pen and ink drawing by Jane Gapen, 1981

beautiful. But as soon as I graduated and was attempting to make my living and my way in a man's world- I could taste in my mouth again thatfa~ar earlier taste , of captivity .
Nell's kisses could dispel it sometimes . And her assuring glances. But
too often I could catch in her own eye the look of one being borne in a
direction not her own. She did have about her a lovely air of capability .
Of gayety , too. That could seem to assert: oh our lives belong to us. And
yet-I could see that she too sometimes doubted it. Or doubted at leastthat two women hand in hand could find their way. And fmally of course
it was a man to whom she had turned. Would the woman I loved always
fmally turn from me to a man? Probably . And what was I then to dowith all my feelings for her? Or rather , if I stamped out those feelings ,stamped them underground, what was to become of me-whom thosesame feelings had first brought alive? As I stood there among those tumbled shining stones , all my feelings for you circled through my body as
though they were my blood . And the humming in my ears asserted : This5

is more real than that "real world" nearby in which you must make yourway. The world which will ask you to deny what you are feeling. How
was I then to make my way? But this question only flicked in and thenout of my mind. I was listening to that humming. Which my feet pickedup from the ground. And which circled through my body as though it
were my blood.
I think again suddenly of the myth of Persephone, and of my long ago
dream. In the dream , it occurs to me now , there is no figure of Demeter,
angrily demanding her daughter's release - refusing to let there be summer ,going on strike, declaring winter until her daughter has her liberty. My
mother's glance, meeting mine , despairs of my release: names herself acaptive too - pained to see me caught up now as she has long been. She isherself Persephone. Her glance declares: "I know , I know too well. No,
we cannot belong to ourselves. It is his kingdom here." She does not show
fear for me , exactly. This wolf as she knows him in her own life does notbite or snarl. He simply carries us in a direction that is not our own-is
his. Her look is awed and bitter, her anger masked.
My beautiful and bitter mother. At this point in my life I was trying
not to think of her very often. I feared to have her captive glance takeaway my strength. And yet-any bold or near-bold gestures toward free dom I had been able to make on my own she had always given her astonished blessing. She had seen me off on my ship to Italy , and left in mystateroom a long box of flowers (mountain laurel she had picked) and anote that had made me cry . We were shy with one another, she had written , but she wished she had the words to tell me her pride in me-and in
the book I had just finished, and the poems she had seen . "I can nevertalk to you about your poems ," she wrote ; "To me they are so very personal it would seem a sort of intrusion. But my admiration is very deep."
Some of the poems of course were about Nell - as I knew she knew. Hernote ended with the sudden cry: "Feel free!"I stood among the fallen stones of Elevsis, and listened to the hUmmingin my ear. It seemed to be telling me that I was in fact free. However,
the hubbub of voices from just down the hill seemed to be warning methat I was not.

6

Judith Katz

NADINE PAGAN'S LAST LETTER HOME

May 29oJI: / (lirlDear Ma A long time ago you told me about a girl child a womon child thirteen
years old this one Anne Frank who lived with seven other people in an
attic in Amsterdam Holland in the 1940s. She lived in this tiny attic because she was hiding from the Nazis who came all the way from Germany
to hunt for Jews and Gypsies and queers and crazy people in order tokill them. Anne Frank's attic was a tiny tiny space. The people who lived
there were very cramped and did not always get along: sometimes theyargued over food to eat, sometimes over air to breathe. They depended
on the good will of people who were neither Jews nor Nazis for food andnews of the outside. These people who helped the Jews were often themselves in great danger: the Nazis considered it a crime against their fastgrowing empire to save the lives of those who they wanted to exterminate .
Anne Frank and her family and friends hid in their attic because it
was not possible for them to escape Holland as others who had sensed
that times were going bad had done . They were like many Jews who had
thought that times would get better for them again in Holland . They had
believed that even though German soldiers had invaded their little country
it still belonged to them and they to it. Many had thought , "If only weare good citizens, if only we adjust our last names, leave our prayer books
in ·the synagogue , eat sauerbraten instead of geflite fish, if only if only if
only, then we will be safe ." By the time Anne Frank's family realized
such camouflage was useless it was too late. The men in the occupying
German government wanted to keep all the Jews in Holland so they could
ship them off to concentration camps and kill them.
The Nazis succeeded in killing a great many Jews, a great many Gypsies ,a great many homosexual men, and a great many crazy people . It is unclear how many lesbians were killed at this time because you know how
invisible we lesbians become in the schema of things. Perhaps some of theJewish and Gypsy womyn were lesbians ; probably many of the crazywomyn were lesbians . Some far-sighted lesbians could easily have beenamong the first to escape when German soldiers threatened to enter thecountry brandishing ,flags and singing stout songs.

7

If Anne Frank had grown older she might have discovered that she herself
was a lesbian. What if she harbored such feelings as she tacked pictures ofAmerican movie stars over her mirror? What if she told her mother andfather? Would they have said, "So it didn't work out with Peter Van Daanis that any reason to announce your lesbianism?" Would it have matteredif she had kept it a secret? I mean, even though she and the others hid
their Jewishness in an attic, didn't all but her father Otto Frank become
so many piles of gold fillings and bars of soap? Didn't they all have numbers and nightmares burned into them so indelibly that even Jews who
never slept in those foul concentration camp barracks remember the dreams?
Even Jews like you, Ma, who read about the death camps in American
newspapers. Even Jews like me, Ma, who learned the stories from you.
While Anne Frank lived in her attic she kept a diary. When Otto Frankreturned to Holland from his devastating vacation, he was given this diaryby friends. He edited it and showed it to the world. American publishers
liked the diary so well they made it into a book that anyone could buy
at the store and read at home. Theatre producers in New York City liked
the book so much they made it into a play that you could buy tickets toand watch. People in Hollywood liked the play so much they made it into a movie. The people who run television liked the movie so well they
played it on tv. I fIrst learned the story of Anne Frank from your lips,
Ma, but then I saw it on television and Anne Frank had a face, a Hollywood actress's face to be sure but a human face and she and her outlaw
family became real people in Amsterdam, waiting to escape, waiting to befound. It was a lesson common as the chumash books I studied from in
Hebrew school: this is how we Jews survive in the face of terrible danger;
how we make do with what we have, bide and spend our time in times
when being identifIed as a Jew means certain death.
Jane told me she believed as a child that in another life she had been
Anne Frank. Womyn I know who have traveled to the attic where Anne
Frank hid before secret service soldiers captured her and shipped her off
in a box car to be killed say to me, "Nadine, it was so eerie ... I sat at
her dressing table, I touched her hair brush, it felt so familiar, Nadinewhat if I was Anne Frank?"
Today I write to you from an attic in Massachusetts. I have freedom tocome and go as I please but for how long, this is uncertain. In other life
times I was persecuted as a Jew. My so-called crime this life time is not
my Judaism alone (although when the time comes they'll throw that into
the soup of my offenses like so many carrots and onions), but a kind ofwitch craft that has slept deep inside us womyn for generations. Like acomplicated dream we don't always remember, it comes back to us fromtime to time, in pieces or all at once. Throughout history, when men spot8

us dreaming as we do, they wake us up , tell us we never had such dreams,
warn us that to dream in such a way is punishable by burning. Some of
us forget then, lose our purpose and go back to sleep in another way . But
some refuse to forget and work hard to remind the others. Now, at a time
when men with bombs and the missiles to deliver them come perilously
close to destroying life on this planet, this witch craft comes into manyof us again , a steady, waking dream. We call the witch craft lesbia. The
men who plan to annihilate us call it terrorism. Their way of naming us
is ironic to me . I'll tell you why.
These generals and congressmen and ministers claim that we lesbians with
our Take Back the Night Marches, karate classes, tarot cards and custodycases are so dangerous to human life they have to pass laws against us .
They claim this at the same time that they themselves prepare to carve up
the Nevada desert to plant MX missiles in its holy sandy soil. They say
this as they dump poisonous chemicals into our oceans and make red tides ;as they take millions of dollars away from government programs that feed
and house people so they can use the money to make bombs and guns tokill people.
I hear you tell me , "Look, Nadine, times are tough for everyone . Give ina little. A law is a law." You wonder why I still wear overalls at my age.
You ask me not to wear my labrys in front of my grandmother because
it looks, you say, "too much like a cross." But, Ma: a lesbian is a peculiar
creature : when people don't want to see us we're invisible; when they hunt
for us they see us everywhere . could have nothing on my neck and highheels on my feet and they'd still spot me a mile away.

.r

I read in a magazine about a torture device that the US government makes
and sells to foreign countries, many of which are right here, on this sideof the globe, south of us. These countries are run by military dictatorships
which our government helps by selling to them torture equipment like thishelmet I saw. Men put this helmet on your head and then they torture
another part of your body and you scream from the torture and the scream
repeats itself loudly into your ears over and over again. The United States
government makes this helmet. They make it here, you wear it there. You
are tortured there, you scream there , you hear the scream but we overhere in the US we just see the photographs. Of the helmets, not the torture.
Once I saw a picture of a bed in a room where men torture people in
Chile. There were no people in the photograph but you knew from lookfig at the bed, from the blood-soaked concrete floor that held it up thatpeople had been tortured there. Womyn and men, lesbian , homosexual,
heterosexual, light-skinned and dark, sane and crazy, in Chile, in Iran, in
Brazil. They make it here, you get it there. If it's there for South American dissidents it's here for North American lesbians. I'm a witch, they're

9Jthe terrorists but that's not how they see it.
I do not plan to stay in this attic I write to you from like Anne Frankand the people in her family. I have the wherewithal to travel and so I
will go. I go as an outlaw, out the bathroom window and with only theclothes on my back.
I will write notes to you , Ma , in my travels , post cards and long letters .
I will send none of them by mail . When they pick me up and throw me
in a box car and send me to the state penitentiary for womyn in the state
they fmd me , these communications to you will be among my possessions.
If they don't burn them , you will probably get to read them some day.
If they do burn them , they may shortly thereafter burn me too . If thishappens , you will feel me so clearly in the air no words will be necessary.
Until that time ,my love,
NadineThanks to Ynestra King and Adrienne Rich for helping me deepen and widen thispiece .

10

Michele A. Belluomini

the dream

back in the old neighborhood
cautiously picking my way among
abandoned houses and broken sidewalks
I am trying to follow my grandmother, but
clumsy , I fear I will fall
she shouts encouragement to me in Italian
she climbs a rope ladder to the attic
words float from her mouth like water
old women, young womenmarch in procession
in their black aprons they carrygleaming eggs and melons
I have not been invited , yet I am here
tumbling through air
past banners of brightly colored canvas
trying to follow my grandmotheras she climbs the stairs
past the room where the baby diedwomen dressed in black climb up
and down the stairs
holding eggs between their teeth
they finger their bones
a rosary
the air is sharp with the tang of new ginger
a constant murmuring likewater over pebbles
the women work, deliberate , efficientthe mirrors are covered , red peppers
are hung in the windows
deft hands hang sheets, cut string
the inhale and exhale of breath isslow and reassuring

11

from hand to hand the black stone is passed
ovoid
it glimmers and shines
gasping for breath,
I watch as my grandmotherbrings the knife down on a melon,
slicing it cleanly
it falls open
reveals
two rows of perfectly formed teeth
locked in a grimace

Pesha Gertler

WHY I CAN'T WRITE ESTABLISHMENT POETRY
You speak too directly, they said,for poems.
Are lies, then, the suitable idiom
for poems? tra la and gossamer
My life is filled with shit
and rape and poverty
tra laGossamer wings 0 brush gently across
my daughter bloodied by a bully.
Direct. Life is like that. Poems
are nottralaSarah Lucia Hoagland

VULNERABILITY AND POWER

This is exploratory, incomplete , and part of a longer work on Lesbian
ethics. l It is obvious to me that if we are to move from being bound toeach other and working together only because we have identified a threat
from an outside force , to a bonding, a free choosing of intimacy based onshared perceptions and politics,2 we must examine some of the ways weinteract with each other and some of the ethical ideals which serve as the ·foundation of that interaction . In particular we must examine interactions
which amount to attempts to control,. which may involve some form ofcloseness resulting from dependency but which proscribe intimacy as well
as autonomy.
Mary Daly has noted that the feminine virtues are the virtues of subservience. 3 These include vulnerability, altruism , and self-sacrifice . Whilevulnerability is not usually called a virtue, still a virtuous womon must
make herself vulnerable. That is the nature of her virtue. Emerging fromunder the rule of the fathers, these qualities function to drain our " natural
resources ," our healing, creating, enabling power. They have served tochannel our gynergy to men and thus keep us from realizing our power.
It is my contention, however , that while men designed the feminine virtues ,thus gaining access to female energy and securing male domination (particularly in the patriarchal institutions of the nuclear family and enforced
heterosexuality), wimmin have refmed these virtues in defense and resistance, developing them as a means of obtaining some (individual and limited) control over those who have our gynergy. It is my contention that
we have developed them as survival and resistance strategies .
Part of my reasoning is this. If the feminine virtues function to charmel
our gynergy away from our Selves, then we must have developed them asa means of obtaining some power over those who have our gynergy. For
example, when we sacrifice we can display our resulting wounds and use
them to gain some control in a context which presumes female sacrifice
and in which all hints of female autonomy have been eradicated. So if asa matter of survival we have developed our expected opening and giving
into strategies for gaining some control , strategies which promote distanceand erect barriers, we face a problem. Since we have not fully named andcopyright (c) 1981, Sarah Lucia Hoagland13

perceived these strategies as part of our resistance to male domination
under the rule of the fathers,4 they can operate among ourselves as habits
and reactions whenever we feel threatened.
In the introduction to The Coming Out Stories, Adrienne Rich asks:"And why is our common , 'moral and ordinary' . . . love of women notenough to create of us a mlrndenheap- a band of female warriors, a movement? . . . Why are we still so rent among ourselves?"5 And in Womenand Honor she notes: "There is a danger run by all powerless people: that
we forget we are lying, or that lying becomes a weapon we carryover into relationships with people who do not have power over US ."6 I believethat part of the unraveling of these concerns lies in an exploration of thefeminine virtues . And the concept I wish to explore in this paper is vulnerability .
There is a belief among Lesbians that the way to establish trust among
ourselves is to make ourselves vulnerable to each other. Most Lesbian femi nists I know plan for a world in which we can be safely vulnerable toeach other. I myself once had this vision and argued that so long as a society exercises power as control, vulnerability will be confused with impotency. Thus one who is vulnerable is a target of attack, a victim. However, I went on , in a womon-identified space, a space in which power candevelop as ability not control , emanates from the dark core, and is a powerof processes and changes , vulnerability may come from strength, not weakness : when we choose to make ourselves vulnerable, I thought, it will bebecause we are strong and flexible enough to absorb what may come. That
was my argument, and while superficially the idea sounded plausible , I
soon began to wonder about it. I envision a time when we can be open
to each other with less caution and greater flexibility because we allow
greater honesty to inform our exchanges. But I no longer believe this vision connects in any way with the concept of vulnerability.
When playing with the dictionary one day , I discovered to my horrorthat "vulnerable" comes from the Latin, vuiner'ilbilis, meaning "to wound."One of its entries is "having the power to wound ." The editors call thisdefinition obsolete. Current usage connects "vulnerable" with either being
wounded or being open to wounding or attack. I do not believe a concept
tied so completely to attack and wounding can involve any form of power
but the power of control and its resulting presumption of access-the process of domination and subordination .
The context of making ourselves vulnerable in order to establish trust
emerges from heterosexual behavior and male fantasy . Wimmin have been
forced to make ourselves vulnerable to men, to open ourselves to wounding by extending ourselves appeasingly and by displaying our "weaknesses"
or our "helplessness" during initial contact and ever after at regular intervals in order to prove we're not like Eve, Cleopatra, or Delilall, and toreassure men that we would never be able to threaten them, that we see
the necessity of remaining loyal to them, and that they are beings who
deserve such reassurances. Making ourselves vulnerable and granting undue

14

access to a given male-so matter of course that men often do not evenneed to solicit it- has evolved under the rule of the fathers and forces us
to establish that we are exceptional wimmin, i.e. , not like other , dangerous ,wimmin, and hence worthy of this man's attention and trust. Thus theidea of making ourselves vulnerable in order to establish trust emerges
from a context in which wimmin have been forced to deny our common
womon bonds and connections in order to survive, that is , in order toattain male approval under the rule of the fathers.
Aside from constant appeasing postures. the primary way to prove
we are "exceptional" to a given male is to belittle the wimmin aroundus. Waiting in New York's La Guardia Airport one Winter Solstice ,I watched a young womon arrive and greet her boyfriend who was there
to meet her. She had been to a family gathering, and for the next twenty
minutes of conversation she belittled each female member of her family ,beginning with her grandmother. In the process she was making herself
vulnerable in two ways. In the first place she was disassociating herself
from her female bloodline and from wimmin in general in order to prove ,indirectly, that she, at least, could be trusted by him. This is the result of
male-identification; she exposed herself to wounding by cutting herself
off, and she will be wounded by the isolation- has been wounded already.
Nevertheless she was doing so in an attempt to survive in the only way
apparent to her-alignment with a male .
More interestingly, she was using vulnerability as a tool. She was exposing herself by exposing the "weaknesses" of the wimmin of her bloodline
to show that she could recognize their qualities as weaknesses and that
she abhorred them as much as any man would. The case is interesting because she was using vulnerability in an attempt to gain security and avoid
risk . She was exposing herself by exposing the "weaknesses" of her bloodline in order to actually ward off an attack on herself along those lines
and in order to gain male approval- "trust." If her boyfriend later hurls acharge at her that she, too, has these ''weaknesses ,'' he will have betrayedher.7 By giving him information that could be used to hurt her in orderto establish exceptionality and gain his trust, she is using vulnerability togain some security and even a bit of control from a position of subordination.
There is a related pattern among wimmin who deny connections withfeminists, or heterosexual wimrnin who deny connections with Lesbians,
or liberal and socialist feminists who take pains to make men feel comfortable by denying connections with radical and separatist ideology respectively.
After a heterosexual liaison has been established, vulnerability can beused in another way; it can become a means whereby a womon can control a man's access to her life in certain respects and force him to keep
his distance emotionally, if not physically. This way he can't consume her.
One womon described a relationship she observed this way : The wife issubmissive, vulnerable, and needs protection. As the husband is the domi-

15

nant member of the pair and she has no separate means of self-realization,
he is supposed to guess what she needs, and on occasion, wants. (Since
he's supposed to be superior, let's see just now much he really knows andhow competent he really is.) She makes herself vulnerable by dependingon him to guess and provide for her needs; if he fails, he wounds her. As
inevitably he does fail at second-guessing her needs-something she is awhiz at in his case, since she has had to learn to observe him-she feels
hurt and eventually angry due to his fatuousness. In the process she makes
him feel guilty. He is thus distanced and must attend to her even moreclosely, trying to guess her innermost needs while she goes competently
about her business. Thus at crucial moments she can call in her due; she
can call certain shots in their relationship while keeping him at a distance .
This is but one heterosexual scenario . Given the power imbalance ofthe social mechanisms accompanying the rule of the fathers, vulnerability
can be a way of gaining token, minor, individual control. And while thecontrol may be minor relative to autonomy, the conceptual difference between seeing the vulnerable womon as submissive on the one hand, andseeing her as resisting total dissolution within the dominance/submission
scenario of the rule of the fathers on the other hand, is significant for us.
One revealing television perfume commercial aired the last few years
in December for the holidays exhibits a seductively dressed white womonwith a French accent who states, "I crave vulnerability, I think too much
intimacy is dangerous." This is a significant contrast. The message is that
she craves control and thinks too much openness dangerous. She makes
herself vulnerable but does not allow full knowledge of herself such as
one who is intimate would have. Yes, openness is dangerous for one trying to gain sOme control over her circumstances in a context denying all
remnants of female autonomy. And it is out of this context that the ideaof wrapping a man around the little fmger (left or right as the case maybe) emerges. She keeps him at a distance, maintaining the "mystery" andthereby maintaining some separation. If the mystery is dispelled throughintimacy (knowledge a male often begins to gain when a womon lets down
her defenses after fITSt engaging in sexual intercourse with him), she becomes ordinary and hence no longer exceptional. Yes, in this context
intimacy is dangerous, and vulnerability is a strategy for gaining control.
Under the rule of the fathers, wimmin have fashioned our presumed
vulnerability into various strategies for survival. And we must herald thesestrategies for what they are. However because we have so refmed and perfected them, they may have become for many of us a matter of reaction
and defense rather than a carefully plarmed course of action. Or at least,very often we can resort to them without fully considering other options.
Thus making ourselves vulnerable to gain control may be a matter of
habit, and as a result we are in danger of using vulnerability unthinkingly
against those who have no real power (control) over us. For example,
mothers can use vulnerability to gain (unacknowledged) control over theirchildren.

16

So it is important that we examine the belief among Lesbian feministsthat the way to establish trust among ourselves is to make ourselves vulnerable to each other, that this is a Lesbian-feminist ideal. We should also
examine the converse belief that in order to retain power we can neverreally open to another womon, never share our full selves. These two beliefs combine to yield the prevalent idea that we cannot have a living-in
relationship with another womon and still maintain autonomy because
sharing in a relationship is seen as putting another womon's needs over
our own . More importantly, I have heard it argued that autonomy andintimacy are incompatible. My suggestion is that using vulnerability as atool leads not to intimacy but rather to a false closeness, a dependency,
and that while the use of vulnerability is incompatible with autonomy ,development of intimacy is not.
Among Lesbians, if I make myself vulnerable in order to establish trust,if I open to a womon in ways that invite her to wound me, if I open up
before we have found a common ground of trust, my opening is most
likely an attempt to gain control in the relationship without accepting
responsibility either for the attempt or for any control I might succeed ingaining. For example, if I share doubts about myself with a womon before
we have grounds for trust, I am revealiflg to her what I am defensi,{e about.
If she then criticizes me for the very thing I am defensive about, she has
declared open war because I "trusted" her with this information; she has
betrayed my trust. This then acts as a constraint on her: So long as we
remain "friends" she cannot criticize me in these areas; she must "support"me, i.e., give the appearance of agreeing with everything I do. Our bonding
has become a binding, and our "friendship," then, has become not an
open, honest exchange of ideas, critiques, and support but rather a means
whereby I have enlisted someone to insulate me from my fears and pain
(as opposed to someone who may hold me through them).
In a related vein, vulnerability can become a way of gaining undue
access to another womon's life. In exchange for becoming vulnerable toyou I may expect automatic time priorities and knowledge of what you
are doing. Or I may make presumptions about your willingness to do certain things which I would not make about other close friends. This is thetaking for granted, the presumption, of lovers . And it is difficult to unravel because supposing autonomy and bonding are compatible, then if
autonomy means you do what you want and being lovers means we have
similar wants, surely I can simply expect you to want, freely , what I want.
If you don't, it seems a sign you no longer love me. I think this type oftrap is most likely to occur when we regard ourselves as becoming vulnerable to each other (so that unfamiliar difference can seem a threat) andless likely if we regard ourselves as becoming more intimate with-gaining
greater knowledge of-each other. The problem, as I see it, lies in the expectation. When I take your giving for granted as a result of having become vulnerable to you because of the "rules" of the relationship, I am

17binding you to me, not bonding with you, and our relationship becomesa vulnerable dependency rather than an intimate bond.
Of course we must not use another womon's vulnerability as an excuse
to avoid hearing her needs. There must be spaces where we can explore
our wounds. And we must be able to ask for help. However, the othermust also be able to refuse. What I am talking about is the use of vulnerability as a means of engineering closeness or as a means of gaining accessor as a shield. And what should be resisted is the power play, the coercion.
Perhaps the most revealing use of vulnerability I've witnessed came froma Lesbian-feminist who , upon publishing a piece and rmding it criticized,
avoided the content of the criticism as well as responsibility for her own
work by arguing that no one should criticize a womon who is suicidal . In
general when one opens herself to wounding for a purpose, she is in asense holding herself up for ransom (the redemption of a prisoner or aslave). And the price the other must pay to redeem her is to refrain fromcriticizing her in those areas. She trusts the other will not hurt her; and if
the other does, even by just withdrawing because of her own wounds,
then the other can become a scapegoat for all that goes wrong in the relationship, thus enabling the one to avoid examining herself.
All of this does not always happen in our relationships . My point isthat using vulnerability (to establish trust, to gain access, to obtain control) sets up mechanisms whereby constraints work against growth andchange, and especially against bonding and intimacy.
Recently an appeal to vulnerability surfaced from a context which its
proponents call Lesbian-feminist, an appeal which openly embraces thefull force of the word's etymology as an end in itself and not even as atransforming power. Some Lesbians claim that to be a Lesbian-feminist in
the fullest sense one must engage in sadomasochism, in particular in masochism, because physically and emotionally submitting to another womon
to be wounded (though not to a man) is the ultimate act of trust. By
opening herself to wounding, by inviting another womon to wound her,so the argument goes, a Lesbian is allegedly expressing the ultimate trust,the ultimate commitment to sisterhood. In the flrst place, by asking thesadist to dominate her the masochist is forcing the sadist to be supremely
attentive, the masochist is becoming the center of at/tension, and she isthus gaining some control. However to do so she must be willing to accept
the dominance/submission context established by the rule of the fathers;8
she must be willing to embrace subordination. This is hardly a commitment to sisterhood .
More signiflcantly, in terms of the philosophical justiflcation of masochism it is phenomenal how closely the reasoning is tied to religious ecstasy.
One might as well argue that turning over the entire direction of one's
life to another womon is an even greater act of "trust." The concept oftrust requires analysis as much as the concept of vulnerability. (For example, in a certain sense one can trust one's enemies since one can be certain of or depend upon their actions.) However the signiflcant point here18

is the rhetorical equation of trust with submission . My ultimate feminist
act, this line of reasoning proclaims, is total submission to another womon.
Submission is no more a matter of the trust of bonding than it is a matterof cooperation or commitment. The logic in defense of Lesbian masochism
does not challenge or exorcize the ideology of the fathers, it embraces it.
Hailing vulnerability-the specific opening of oneself to wounding-as
a desirable virtue effectively obscures the fact that we live under the ruleof the fathers, a rule of dominance and subordination, and thus that oursurvival is profoundly political because it means survival as autonomous
wirnrnin and on our own terms. And as Audre Lorde reminds us, we were
never meant to survive.9 The idea behind the feminine virtues buries eventhe fact that turning the other cheek is an act of violence .lO In turning
the other cheek we are inviting the other person to do us violence. (JVe
are also egging our attacker on, encouraging him.) The belief that thisdoes not merit the name of violence stems from the same mode of thought
exhibited by a Wisconsin police officer who refused to alert the community
to a rash of rapes, refused to warn wimmin that a rapist was striking often
and obviously, because he didn't want anyone to get hurt. It stems fromthe belief that violence done to wimrnin doesn't hurt anyone, or thatbreaches of our integrity or our health are not violations. At every tum
we as wimrnin have been encouraged to not take ourselves seriously, 11 andwhile one side of vulnerability in a situation of dominance is a power play,the other side perpetuates a devaluation of our existence.
Even in a space free of patriarchal rule, a feminist fantasy space, I fmd
myself leery of using vulnerability to establish trust. A good example
occurs in Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground. A worn on who had escapedfrom the city after having been raped and dressed in armor as a joke,meets Seja, a hill womon. Failing to reach the womon in armor either
through language or with a mind stretch, Seja makes herself vulnerable,
saying, "'If you do not understand my words or my mind, then understand my body. I do not wish to harm you . You may kill me if you like.
I trust you will not.' With that Seja exposed her neck to the womon inarmor, showing her she could kill Seja with her sword, that Seja was willing to take this risk with her, go that far with her, that Seja therefore was
not the enemy."12First of all, the image is based on the practice among some animals of
exposing their bellies, necks, or genitals to other members of their pack.
The problem is that such behavior establishes dominance and a dependence which comes with a form of security, but it does not establish trust
among equals.
Secondly, I think the womon in armor may well have struck Seja. Men
had just brutally raped and dressed her in armor as a mockery. She waswounded and violated, and wounded animals strike out regardless of theintentions of those approaching them.
In a wonderfully biophilic 'conversation late one evening in Mirmeapolis,l3

19

Sally Gearhart pointed out that the hill wimmin have a concept of death
different from our own, so that taking such a risk would not have the political significance it does surrounding our survival in patriarchy. While thefeminine virtues function to feed our gynergy and strength to men, it is
not true that in the Wanderground those we live with fear and hate us. In
this respect, then, vulnerability becomes a strategy to be used in a certain
type of rescue mission in order to transform fear of an external force into.
trust of one's own kind. Nevertheless, I question the strategy.
While vulnerability may transform a womon's fear, it will not transformher personality. Suppose once recovered, Margaret turns out to be the sortof person Seja just does not get on with. Suppose in five years Margaret
makes political choices Seja strongly disagrees with. It is possible that Sejamight eventually come to resent Margaret-not because Seja helped her
and now doesn't get on with her , but because Seja risked her own life in
the process of helping her. In evaluating the transforming power of trust
we must ask whether vulnerability ever comes with no strings attached.
There is a more important aspect that merits consideration in the useof vulnerability as a rescue strategy. By using vulnerability to transform
Margaret 's fear, Seja is forcing Margaret to choose between killing a womonor letting loose her own armor , her defenses . And in choosing to let loose
her armor, Margaret must still her anger , contain it. Yet it may be toosoon for Margaret to do this ; it may be time instead for her to vent herrage and thus begin to assuage her wounds. The anger inside us must comeout, and we need to fmd ways to attend to it.
One might argue that this is precisely Seja's purpose. She is providing
a safe situation in which Margaret can vent her rage if necessary. But isthe situation safe? If I expose myself to someone who has been seriously
wounded in order that she may vent her rage on me (and thus to gain her
trust), I provide her with an inappropriate target for her anger because I
am not the cause of her anger and because unfortunate consequences canresult. If she hurts or kills me, she must later live with that. So Seja is
not really providing a safe situation in which Margaret can vent her rage.
Even though the risk of Seja's life does not have the political significanceit would under the rule of the fathers , still her life is not without meaningor value. Had Margaret killed Seja, she would have had to live with thisloss, a loss that was not a purpose or goal of the expression of her anger .
It is crucial we relieve tension and frustration resulting from anger, but
not by directing our aggression toward someone who is not the cause.
Further, turning our rage on each other when the other is not thecause, whether consensual or not , may relieve tension and frustration andhence momentarily feel good . But we are not thereby dealing with thecause of the anger . And if in one way or another we carmot address thecause to our satisfaction, our tension and frustration will build again andagain and must be relieved again and again in a recurrent pattern that proscribes growth and healing because one does not break out of it. The prob-

20

lem is compounded when this process is defended in the sadomasochistic
arena and the temporary relief of tension is associated with sexual orgasm.
The recurrence of building tension and then seeking relief is seen here not
as a failure to break out of the cycle and deal with the source of tension.
Sadomasochists attribute it rather to the natural recurrence of sexual appetite. The process is thereby embraced in the name of feeling good, andthose who push for growth and change are judged anti·sex.
To return to the Wanderground and Seja's strategy in aiding Margaret
in her anger and pain , wounds take time to heal. The hill wimmin could
leave Margaret alone, watching from a distance as they did with the gentles,leaving food nearby and protecting her from extraneous forces while she
focuses on her Self, giving her time and space to discover and name her
own needs for herself. There are other ways to provide a space for dealing
with anger and pain than by risking one's own life. And trust does nothave to be established immediately. In forcing Margaret to respond to her
by choosing to trust or kill, Seja may be placing an additional burden on
Margaret and cutting short a needed process instead of aiding her in unburdening her anger . Even in the best of contexts, to use vulnerability asa tool is to take a "short-cut through \Illother's personality ."14
I do not mean that within a radical and Lesbian-feminist space weshould take no risks; I do not mean to encourage shallow relationships.
I mean to encourage a deep evaluation of our risks. To state the case in
the extreme , if the risk I take is that in acting I may not get her to dowhat I want, then I am setting myself up to be hurt and betrayed by her
if she refuses to do what I want. There is nothing wrong with asking another to do something. But in setting myself up to being wounded by arefusal, I am not really allowing the possibility of refusal; or rather I am
setting our relationship or possible relationship up against a refusal. The
actual request can become irrelevant while compliance with my will becomes proof of her commitment to me. Thus I am risking the relationshipin order to get her to do what I want, and I am thereby taking a shortcut through her personality, cutting off her processes and putting constraints on her growth. Eventually, to maintain autonomy she must end
the relationship .
For there to be the risk of bonding, instead, I must be prepared for all
responses, not only the ones I want. For example, if I come out to a friend
or I speak my anger to her, she may reject me or she may listen, or she
may speak anger back, or she may come out, and so on. If she turns fromme, it was time for the relationship to end. If she hears me, then our relationship grows and develops in one of several possible directions. Either
way ,-the relationship changes. The real risk of bonding lies in a willingness
to take the next step, to change the relationship, to lose the security ofpredictableness. The risk lies in embracing the unknown.
I also do not mean to suggest we should forever guard against being
vulnerable to each other. As you come to know me more intimately you

21will come to know what is most capable of wounding me. However once
intimacy and trust are developed, if they are developed instead of a forced
closeness, we are less likely to use that knowledge to hurt each other.
Hence our vulnerability is less likely to be a weapon. Vulnerability is aneffect of bonding, but it is not a tool for bonding (or for anything else but
control). Used as a tool, vulnerability establishes the "trust" of dependency
but not the trust of intimacy.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, intimacy involves extremely strong bonds resulting from affection or understanding, and asharing of interests, problems, and experiences. This takes time, as does
the development of trust, and it is not something one can guarantee. If I
attempt to establish closeness by using my vulnerability, then later on if
I fmd her interests or needs changing and taking her on other roads whenmine do not, or if I fmd my own interests changing while hers do not, I
will be more likely to see such a change as a betrayal of my trust and of
our relationship. The closeness I established, thus , will have grown into abinding dependency . If instead I pursue the closeness of intimacy, of greater
knowledge, and embrace the risk of change-if I let go of control,I5 I willbe less likely to restrict my growth or try to restrict hers for fear of losing
something valuable in my life. Thus even if we grow apart, the real valuethe bond-can remain solid because it is based on affection, understanding,and shared past experiences. In this way, I believe , autonomy is compatible
with intimacy.
I do not have any quick and easy strategies. In fact one of my points
is that there are none. I only have a hazy vision. Still, I do believe that if
we hold a sister's freedom as a goal, as Mary Daly suggests, if we love her
freedom and we love our own, then as we work through our pains andanger with each other, and especially the way we hurt each other, we will
maintain honesty and humor, encourage autonomy and integrity, develop
intimacy and establish trust. (Whew!)
AFTERWORD

This material, obviously, comes out of my own experience and observation. And I am aware that the descriptions do not apply to all wimmin .
Nevertheless the material does seem to have general application. And I
think the mechanisms set up under the rule of the fathers affect many of
us in one way or another, though we live in quite different circumstances,even if just by providing traps we can fall into .
One very sensitive and very complex area I would like to develop or
see developed is the effects of using vulnerability as a strategy when confronting questions of classism or racism and when articulating politicaldifferences within the Lesbian community . I would also like to explore
the immediate implications of using alt~rnatives to vulnerability for hearing
anger between Lesbians of different races and of different classes.

22

NOTES
I.-An earlier version of this discussion appears in The Lesbian Inciter, 2. I am
grateful to the many Lesbians who have heard and responded to various versions of
this paper, especially Lesbians in Minneapolis, Lincoln, Iowa City, Chicago, and New
York. Particular thanks go to Deidre McCalla, Llena de la Madrugada, Judy Seale,
Karen Dodson, Lucy Burke, Kate Burke, Ann Jones, Phyllis Bere, and Sally Gearhart.
None of them, of course, is responsible for the content of this paper.
2. See Julia Stanley (penelope) " "Lesbian Relationships and the Vision of Community," Feminary, IX, 1 (Spring, 1978).
3. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973), and Gyn/Ecology(Boston: Beacon, 1978).
4. See "Femininity, Resistance, and Sabotage," Sarah Lucia Hoagland, forthcoming,in an anthology on masculinity and femininity edited by Mary Vetterling-Braggin (Littlefield, Adams).
5. The Coming Out Stories, edited by Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan 1. Wolfe(Watertown, Mass. : Persephone Press, 1980).
6. Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor (Pittsburgh, Pa. : Motheroot Publications,
1977).
7. She will affirm his male supremacy as long as he affirms her exceptionality.
8. This argument and the one below on the question of sadomasochism appear in
my paper "Sadism, Masochism, and Lesbian Feminism."
9. Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,"
Sinister Wisdom, 6 (Summer, 1978), reprinted in The Cancer Journals (Argyle, N.Y.:
Spinsters lnk, 1980).
10. Deborah Snow suggested this point to me in conversation, Spring, 1980:
11. The one exception to this seems to be when we are acting in someone else's
name.
12. Sally Gearhart, The Wanderground (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1978),pp.4-6.
13. Spring, 1980.
14. The phrase "short-cut through another's personality" comes from Adrienne
Rich, Women and Honor, op. cit.
15. I explore various ways we assume control over each other, for example inconfusing support with approval, in another section of the Lesbian ethics manuscript.
However I wish to point out here that I include in this even taking over for anotherwomon in order to help or protect her, or letting her take over to help or protect me.

tpEMINA~YA

FEMINIST

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Rebecca Gordon

BY HER HANDS

What, you didn't ask this morning,
will happen to us
if my hands grow too
stiff, too weak to love you?
I shook but did not speak, afraid
to break the seal
your courage left intact
though words paced
restless in my chest:
We shall have stilla multitude of lips between us
and the will .
In quiet I rememberedwith whatever skill she loves
a carpenter lives
by her hands.

Later we shop. I watch you
choose a cup
a sister's birthday gift,
swift stunggrab your hands, kissat your knuckles
bent around the bellyof the cup they hold,
red and cold24

a kiss for lucka kiss for suppleness as if
to suck this stiffness out
through the fmgertips ,Now outside the toilet stall
I lean easy, musing
on the dear small sounds of you
a moment later , hear the crack,a sharp report through paper "The cup, My breath fails
Under the door your red hands
reach for the sack. It
swings sad between your feet.
clinking like a bag of nails.
You emerge , your facesuffused with effort ofresisting private tears
in this public place .
I recall the grace of your hands,seabirds flirting in caves
my morning estuaries, ruddy
with the taste of salt and sandremember too
however she may lovea carpenter lives
by her hands ,and fmd my gift of language silenced
rudely by your pain.
What speech, what spells
what revolution
can make this moment whole again?

25Michelle Cliff

MAKING SOUL, CREATING ALCHEMY

A review of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women ofColor, edited by Cherne Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. Published by Persephone Press, P.O. Box 7222, Watertown, MA 02172 . 261 pp. $8.95.

This Bridge Called My Back stretches across the lives and histories ofwomen of color-Mro-American, Asian American, Latina, and Native
American; spans objectification and oppression, stereotype and otherness,
racism and assimilation; crosses through reality, dream, myth, memory
into vision, politics, revolution . So much is here in this book, for myself,
for other readers, that it is difficult to begin-or at least, to know where.
Much of the work in This Bridge departs from the past, in the lives ofancestors, mothers, grandmothers, foresistersI am a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my motherspeaking for her through the unnamed part of the mouth
the wide-arched muzzle of brown women(Cherne Moraga, "For the Color of My Mother")
What a shame not to speak Blackfoot. It was my mother's first languageshe'd talk it over the phone long distance-she'd speak it when she went
home (the Blood reserve in Southern Alberta) she even spoke it in mydreams but I never learned. All that talking denied me.
(Anita Valerio, "It's in My Blood, My Face-My Mother's Voice,
the Way I Sweat")
Points of terror. Points of denial. Repeat the story that it was my grandmother who went to look at apartments .... She could pass for Italian.
She kept her family behind her. I can pass for anyone. Behind me stands
my grandmother working at the bra and girdle factory, speaking with anaccent, lying to get an apartment in Puertoricanless neighborhoods.
(Aurora Levins Morales," 'And Even Fidel Can't Change That! "')"Speaking for her through the unnamed part of the mouth"-I think of
my own mother; "my mother's first language": again I think of mymother-her patois, her speaking to family only in this tongue; people
asking her when we went shopping in New York-''What is your accent?
It's so musical!" And her anger at being asked, and her shame also. Muchlater in my life, she told me she had a constant ringing in her ears from26

an early age, which makes it hard to hear herself speak. And she can also"pass" and has done so. But she has never lost her accent.
The silence of my colored mother has haunted me. At first I took it
upon myself to learn the oppressor's language thoroughly . Then I (or perhaps this was simultaneous) took her silence into myself and did not
speak or write in any real way. Now I realize my language is my ownwhichever I choose to use, however I choose to use it-but that it comesfrom a past connected to my mother's past.
For me, Merle Woo's "Letter to Ma" made other connections.
When I look at you, there are images: images of you as a ten-year-old
Korean girl, being sent alone from Shanghai to the United States, insteerage with only one skimpy little dress , being sick and lonely on
Angel Island for three months; then growing up in a "Home" run bywhite missionary women. Scrubbing floors on your hands and knees ,hauling coal in heavy metal buckets up three flights of stairs, tending to
the younger children, putting hot bricks on your cheeks to deaden thepain from the terrible toothaches you always had. Working all your life
as a maid , waitress, salesclerk, office worker, mother. But throughout
there is an image of you as strong and courageous, and persevering:climbing out of windows to escape from the Home, then later, froman abusive first husband. There is so much more to these images than
I can say, but I think you know what I mean. Escaping out of windows
offered only temporary respites; surviving is an everyday chore. You
gave me, phYSically, what you never had , but there was a spiritual, emotionallegacy you passed down which was reinforced by society: selfcontempt. ... For deeply ingrained in me, Ma, there has been thatstrong, compulsive force to sink into self-contempt, passivity, anddespair.
The realities of self-contempt are known to all of us who grew up "different" in this society. We have seen it as a force in the lives of thosearound us, have felt its power within ourselves. The task is to recognize
this force, to outwit it, but always to be aware of its presence and the
purpose it serves the dominators, the colonizers, the oppressors. The
degree to which a woman has internalized the culture's contempt for her
difference can vary according to the degree she is the other. But just as it
is dangerous to hierarchize oppressions, so is it dangerous to assume thatwomen of color, lesbians of color are in some way more in thrall to selfcontempt than are white women, white lesbians. I have known white lesbians in my life so mired in self-hatred that it is almost impossible forthem to move. Merle Woo makes the important point that
Racism is an essential part of the status quo, powerful, and continues
to keep us down. It is a rule taught all of us from birth. Is it no wonderthat we fear that there are no exceptions [Le., among white women]?
Because racism is connected to power, it may allow the white woman
who is different (that is, possessed of a difference more than the difference of being female in a white-male dominated world) a connection to27

power that the woman of color will never have . And although the white
woman may appear to be filled (awash, even) with professed guilt about
her own racism, by her inaction she is accepting the power and privilege
which corne with racism. The woman of color is free of this connection
to the dominant culture, unless of course she chooses to pass (and I mean
passing not only in the sense of skin-color, but in accepting the dominantculture's condemnation of all difference, including her own). With eachlevel of difference in identity, a woman is removed from the possibility ofbuying into the dominant culture; the task is to transform this removal
into power.
This Bridge Called My Back connects women of color across racial ,sexual, class, ethnic identifications. It connects women to each other andit connects ideas to each other. But the writings in this book are always
aware of the divisions forged between women of color from varying backgrounds and heritages, and the writers respect the history of these divisions while at the same time they move to mend them.
Mirtha Quintanales. "I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance"(letter to Barbara Smith):
The Black woman's commitments, from what I can gather, are understandably with Third World women, women of color . And I am quite
uncomfortably in the middle. As a Third World, Caribbean woman I
understand what it means to have grown up "colonized" in a society
built on slavery and the oppression of imperialist forces . As an immigrant
and a cultural minority woman who happens to be white-skinned, I empathize with the pain of ethnic invisibility and the perils of passing ....
How to reconcile these different kinds of "primary emergencies" : raceand culture? Of course this kind of conflict tends to obscure the issueof class and its relationship to race and ethnicity so jmportant for theunderstanding of the dilemma .
. . . I am a bit concerned when a Latina lesbian sister generalizes
about/puts down the "white woman" -especially if she herself has whiteskin. In the midst of this labeling, might she not dismiss the fact of her
own white privileges-regardless of her identification with Black, Native
American, and other Third World women of color? Might she not dismiss the fact that she may often be far better off than many white
women? I cannot presume to know what it is really like to be a Black
woman in America, to be racially oppressed. I cannot presume to knowwhat it is really like to grow up American ''White Trash" and destitute.
These words of Mirtha Quintanales .spoke in a particular way to me. I too
am a white-looking Caribbean woman, immigrant to the United States.
Her essay brought back many memories, many observations. One of theconsequences of being colonized is that you are told, in both overt andsubtle ways, that you must speak in the language of your oppressor, orelse your speech is not real-it is dialect, patois, pidgin English. Just as
you are trained in the language, so are you trained in his ideas: a package I
deal. In the school I attended in Jamaica, where I was taught by assirni-

28lated Jamaicans and white Englishwomen, one of the primary focuses of
the teachers was to erase our accents, to correct our speech. Another was
to teach us only the history, literature, religion of our "mother" country.
I remember when I was twelve or eleven and chose for my foreign language
Spanish rather than French; I explained to the headmistress that I thought
it would be more useful in that part of the world to know Spanish-andshe laughed. I have other memories of that school: one being that thoseof us with the lightest skin were singled out for the most intensive acculturation, and made to believe that this was some sort of honor, while thedarker girls were encouraged in the high jump, broad jump, hundred-yard
dash. This all now seems so simple, so incredibly blatant, but the effects
were not so-they were (and are) complex and subtle and far-reaching.
The writers of This Bridge Called My Back are committed to a lifework
which is radical. They have a patience informed with anger, a passion
informed with consciousness-both necessary to see the revolution through.
The writers also realize the complexity of any movement of liberation;that past, present, and future must all be respected, integrated, and known:
Barbara Cameron, "Gee, You Don't Seem Like an Indian from theReservation":
I often read about the dilemmas of contemporary Indians caught
between white and Indian worlds. For most of us, it is an uneasy balance
to maintain. Sometimes some of us are not so successful with it. Native
Americans have a very high suicide rate.
When I was about 20, I dreamt of myself at the age of 25-26,
standing at a place on my reservation, looking to the North, watchinga glorious, many-colored horse galloping toward me from the sky.
My eyes were riveted and attracted to the beauty and overwhelming
strength of the horse. The horse's eyes were staring directly into
mine, hypnotizing me and holding my attention. Slowly from theEast, an eagle was gliding toward the horse. My attention began tobe drawn toward the calm of the eagle but I still did not want tolose sight of the horse. Finally the two met with the eagle sailinginto the horse causing it to disintegrate. The eagle flew gently on.
I take this prophetic dream as an analogy of my balance between thewhite (horse) and Indian (eagle) world. Now that I am 26, I fmd that I've
gone as far into my exploration of the white world as I want. It doesn'tmean that I'm going to run off to live in a tipi. It simply means that I'm
not interested in pursuing a society that uses analysis, research, and experimentation to concretize their vision of cruel destinies for those whoare not bastards of the Pilgrims; a society with arrogance rising, moonin oppression, and sun in destruction .
This Bridge Called My Back is divided into six parts: Children Passing in
the Streets: The Roots of Our Radicalism; Entering the Lives of Others:
Theory in the Flesh; And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You:
Racism in the Women's Movement; Between the Lines: On Culture, Class,29

and Homophobia; Speaking in Tongues: The Third World Woman Writer;and EI Mundo Zurdo : The Vision. Each of these sections is preceded by avivid portrayal of women of color by the artist Johnetta Tinker, whose
artwork is also on the cover of the book. Tinker's illustrations are for me
the best kind of women's art : for example , her portrait of a black woman
at a bus stop writing in a notebook, which precedes Speaking in Tongues:
The Third World Woman Writer, brings to mind the probable reality that
this woman is coming from work/or going to work, that the bus may
come along and interrupt the flow of her words, that the bus may be lateand she may have to stop writing and worry if she will be late for work/or late picking up her kids after school or daycare, etc. Each part is alsoprefaced by an introduction, the fIrst four written by Cherrie Moraga, tl,telast two by Gloria Anzaldua. These essays, and the general introduction
and preface, set out the purpose of This Bridge, design the context, combine the parts of the book into a whole:
Cherrie Moraga, introduction to Part 2:
A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of ourlives-our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual
longings-all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here , weattempt to bridge the contradictions in our experience.
'We are the colored in a white feminist movement.
We are the feminists among the people of our culture .
We are often the lesbians among the straight.
We do this bridging by naming our selves and by telling our stories
in our own words.
There is also .in This Bridge a foreword by Toni Cade Bambara. Bambara
points out in her essay a theme, a fact , carried through the writings inthis book:
For though the initial motive of several siter/riters here may have been
to protest, complain or explain to white feminist would-be allies that
there are other ties and visions that bind , prior allegiances and priorities
that supercede their invitations to coalesce on their terms ... the process
of examining that would-be alliance awakens us to new tasks . ..
and a new connection:USa new set of recognitions :USa new site of accountability:USa new source of power:
US
In Sinister Wisdom #18, Joanna Russ talks about Harriet Tubman,and her portrayal by Cicely Tyson, as a woman motivated by herself,
essentially for herself. A selfIshness, a placing of the self fIrst in her priorities, is something a woman of color is not supposed to have, or to do. I
am talking here of a specifIc selflshness, one which demands a moral commitment to the self, not the superfIcial and comfortable self-involvementof the so-called me generation. I am talking about a selflshness hard-won

30

against those forces always denying that self importance. The self-worth
which will proceed from this selfishness will allow the woman in possessionof it the power to connect within herself, to others.
Gloria AnzaldUa, "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World
Women Writers" :The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. It is the quest
for the self, for the center of the self, which we women of color havecome to think of as "other"-the dark, the feminine. Didn't we start
writing to reconcile this other within us? We knew we were different ,set apart , exiled from what is considered " normal ," white-right. And
as we internalized this exile, we came to see the alien within us andtoo often , as a result , we split apart from ourselves and each other.
Forever after we have been in search of that self, that "other" and eachother. And we return , in widening spirals and never to the same childhood place where it happened , first in our families, with our mothers,with our fathers . The writing is a tool for piercing that mystery but it
also shields us, gives a margin of distance, helps us survive .
This Bridge Called My Back is essential to my existence : as I try to makesoul, create alchemy. As I try to connect parts of myself within myself
and stretch to meet other women of color. In St. Croix last March I met
another Jamaican woman-a woman darker than myself. We were both of
the same class. We had attended similar girls' schools- were taught bysimilar women. We compared our lives across anger. She has not returnedto the island for some years, neither have 1. She told me about a specificincident when she was twelve. The school was having an essay contest andshe submitted her essay to the (English) headmistress; it was returned toher and she was told that a lighter-skinned student had been chosen to
represent their age group in the contest. Of course it was not said in thosewords . She took it upon herself to submit her essay surreptitiously. And
she won. She said that this incident-this victory-was the only event inher school life in Jamaica which had aided her survival. And I could understand that. And I was also aware that my essay might have been the "official" entry . But I also remembered that when I returned to the UnitedStates I was left back a year because the school principal attested that
Jamaican schools were substandard.
This Bridge Called My Back is written with power and beauty, courageand complexity. I can only hope that women make use of this book: as atool; as a catalyst to create more work by women of color ; as a source ofknowledge and ideas; as a catalyst for white women committed to antiracism; as a source of energy. I want this book in the world.

31

Beth Brant

LETTER
10/6/81

Dear Michelle,
It was so sad not to see you at the Women in Print conference. Yourvoice was missed by me and many others. Do get well soon. I'm sure thehealing process is a long one, especially healing the spirit that has takensuch a trouncing. But of course , you are a life-lover, and will come back,stronger than before. Denise and I are thinking of you and send healing
energies and thoughts.
The conference was filled with emotional roller coasters for me. Coming by myself was a difficult thing to do. I am so shy and filled withimaginary terrors about so many things. First off, to know that there
were other women of color, but how to introduce myself; how to letthem know that the woman with the light skin and the eager look on her
face, wanted to align herself with them, wanted them to know "it's in myblood, it's in the way I sweat." Would they accept me? Would I feel thecommunity I hunger and dream about?
That night I stood and introduced myself as a Mohawk/white/halfbreed. I am shaking inside. Denise is not there to hold my hand. My
father, my Grandmother are not there to prove what I say-yes, I comefrom a dark-skinned people whose eyes are black and deep. I am a sport,
a mutant within my family. Do these women believe who I am? Why do
I care if white women believe me?
The next day Cherrie and Gloria and Mirtha and Juanita give a workshop on Third World Women writers. Gloria talks about La Malinche andthe fear of every Chicana woman of betraying her people. I understandthis betrayal. Every time I pick up my pen, that fear stops me, makes mewater down my words, makes me hold back the power. I am so afraid oftelling the secrets that are locked inside. The secrets of my family, thesecrets of my people, and, yes, the secrets of myself; how I feel about
being the light one, the pampered one, the "favorite" one. Must I face
the fact that part of the reason I was favored by my Grandpa was becauseof my blonde hair, my blue eyes? That tiny, dark man who taught me
Mohawk, who told me ancient stories, called me "our masterpiece," andit is time I knew that for him, for Grandma, there was a satisfaction in
knowing I would never be hassled like they were, never be called "nigger."
The betrayal they must have felt is more than I can imagine.
After the workshop I went to introduce myself to Cherrie. We criedin each other's arms. La Guera standing face to face. Gloria came over
and wept with us. I feel so alone, Michelle!! Always I carry this lonelinessaround me, like a shawl. It covers me and protects me also. For a few

32moments, the shawl was thrown off and I was revealed as a woman ofcolor to my sisters. There were no questions asked. I was not interrogated like white women do to me. I was me, Beth Brant, a woman who
identifies with who I am. Forty years of tears were being shed in thecircle of protective sisters. They invited me to a party that night. For the
rest of the day I fought with myself inside. Do they really like me? Will
they think I am cashing in emotionally on what seems sometimes to be a"trend" in our movement? Racism-anti-racism. It's on every woman's
lips. Is it in every woman's heart? I wonder, I wonder. I had a talk witha Black woman who told me her daughter would be S0 happy to look
like me. This I know. My skin that sets me apart from my own, hasgiven me assumptive privilege. Of course, this privilege can always betaken away, be smashed. My father worked in a factory. During the organizing of the union, how many times was he beaten? How many times
did the goons choose him for his dark skin? We know the answer, don't
we? I guess this is how I feel. My skin has been the tool with which I
have beaten myself. It has been the weapon that has separated me frommy own and from other women. I dare not trust! For, who is liking me
because they think I am white , like them? Who is mistrusting me, because
they think I am white, unlike them? A lot of colored women were using
the word schizophrenia. This is true. I know you feel it too, Michelle. It's
not just a matter of living in two worlds. It's knowing we can and haveadjusted to the world we hate. The white world, filled with white people
who hate us, who want us to leave things alone. Pass for white, pass forhetero; don't be different, don't identify with our own kind, don't speak
about racism from the heart. Leave it in the air, as a subject or topic to
use when things get dull. Leave it to float from space to space, never filling the imagination with power or anger. I weep as I write this. I am
frightened by what is not said or felt in this movement we align ourselveswith. But, of course, I can't imagine it being otherwise. Feminism is myhope, our hope. There is no other way to see the truth, than throughfeminist eyes.
I went to the party. It was silly and fun and real. I wore my beaded
turtle, as if it were an amulet. Also I know I wear it as a sign-see me . I
am an Indian woman, I am one of you. (Or, I am not one of you, in thecase of white women.) The feeling of being in the room with Latinas,
Black women, as a belonger, not an outsider. It was good, Michelle·. The
loneliness subsided. I went back to my own room at 2:00 in the morningand cried again . I have shed so many tears this past weekend! Perhaps I
feel the salt water will wash me clean and brave. My Tarot cards always
come ·up with the Strength card. It is a bridging card. Bridging soul andbody. I have never felt comfortable with it, but now I think about it,
laying in bed, not sleeping.
The next day, a workshop that opens the conference up. Mab andCris from Feminary, talking heartfully about being Southern white women, what that means in their quest for anti-racism in their lives. I was

33

very moved by Mab . She spoke about there being no Indians in the Southbecause we were either killed or driven west . Hattie was on the panel andspoke of her sisterhood with working-class women, her expectations fromworking-class women. I'm sure Adrienne filled you in on the details ofwhat was said. When the unfortunate woman from the bookstore began
her rap , it was apparent to me it was going to be horrible. I prayed forher to shut up . The things she said! Oh God , how many times have wesat and listened to it? - "You should ," "they," "women of color need toknow they're not invisible ," "racism is a problem that should be dealt
with." How many times have we said the same things, in our light skin?
My shame for her was mingled with my shame for myself. I was sittingwith the colored contingent. We were rude, talking and whispering andgiggling. At one point we thought of walking out en masse.
It was so difficult to speak up. At last some white women asked her
for clarification and not to speak in such generalities. Michelle, it was
obvious something was going to happen. A Latina woman stood up andsaid , ''We don't want your separate bookshelves , we don't want yourpictures of us hanging in your windows, and don 't defend yourself because we don't want to hear it." My heart was beating, thumping. Tears
were forming in my eyes again and again. D.l. asked the white woman
how could she be sure that the "handful" of colored women who visited
her bookstore were the only ones . "Look at the women in this row . We
are all different , all colors, all shades. Don't be too sure that the woman
you think is white, is not really colored." More tears , more burning in
the throat. Woman after woman, standing up and speaking. White women
not apologizing, for once. White women giving support to the woman on
the panel , while addressing her racism . Something new. I want to speak
but my tongue is tied. I want to tell the white women in the room about
my father's graduation from college. The fust one, you know? It was a
big event. Relatives from Canada coming. Old Indian men in rusty suitswith incredibly starched collars and cuffs on their white shirts. Old Indian
women in print rayon dresses , wearing black oxfords and heavy cotton
stockings. Hats on their heads. Small straw pillboxes with veils.
We arrive at the auditorium . I am thirteen years old, embarrassed byeverything and everyone , as usual. We are a different looking lot. I imagine
everyone's eyes are on us , this obviously Indian-looking family. But I am
so proud of my father, too . I am at war with myself, as usual! My father
goes to get his cap and gown-he comes back empty-handed. There has
been a fuck-up. Guess who doesn't get his robe? I am panic-struck, I start
to cry. I am afraid my father will "stick out" from the rest. I am afraid
he is crying inside. But my family!! They nod and go on with sitting
down. They expected no more than what they got!! and it was this I
wanted to tell the white women in the room ; we never expect more than
the racist, offhand treatment we get. This is a given to us! They wanted
my father to be the fool, the outsider. I told this story once to a white
woman friend of mine - "an unfortunate incident," she said. We don't

34believe it. Nothing is ever a mistake, or unfortunate to us. It is the way
things are. As my father moved up the aisle in his suit, his dignity andstrength was a present to me. As he walked on stage to accept his diploma, I thought my heart would encompass the whole room . I feel thesame today. My aunts and uncles sat in their chairs nodding their heads,
occasionally wiping an eye. Another place, another time, we would havebeat the drum and danced an honor dance . The singers would have sungof his bravery in the face of the enemy.
This is what I wanted to tell the white women. In spite of you, weexist, we burn brightly . But the time has come when we have to makethe flames together. There is no hope other than our movement, and it
must be our movement , all of us , all kinds of us, all colors of us. Michelle,
I felt that most of the women in that room understood. It was different.
Gone was the indulgent, prostituting kind of guilt and defensiveness thatusually comes from white women. Gone was the "listen to my story , I'll
tell you how horrible my life is, how oppressed I am above all others"
that has come from us colored women in response to white women's
racism. That sticking in the knife, twisting it. I know I have enjoyed using
my knife in the past. I can no longer enjoy such a useless endeavor. I
thought of my Grandma and the many ti~es I betrayed her in the nameof normality, whiteness. My shame, my shame of my people. Our Indianness, our darkness, our ways. And my shame at my lightness, my eyesthat shine out blue, my hair that is brown and thin . My shame at myquietness even now. I write the words, the secrets, but can't force themfrom my throat except in very small groups of women, and sometimes
not even to them. I know this is part of my culture. We Indians do not
speak easily to people we don't know. The fear -don't trust, don't trust.
But we have to, don't we?
I feel so much a part of you and your life. When I think of womenlike you, Cherrie, Mirtha, I know I am not alone in the isolation thatwhite skin has put me in. I do feel crazy sometimes. I almost feel I am
proving to myself as well as others, as if others sit in judgment and arewatching for mistakes. I am the greatest judge of myself. I torture myself
with shoulds and shouldn'ts. The calm times are becoming fewer andfewer. So much to do. Is time running out? Do you feel this? These arebad times we live in. Fascist times, scary times. It becomes more andmore important to give ourselves the names. To call ourselves what weare, and who we are.
We can grow from such encounters, such as the one last weekend. Itmeans responsibility, faith, and true hearts. Last night, Denise read my
Tarot again-and once again the Strength card looked out at me. And the
Death card and the Magician. So many signs pointing to change, to waysof channeling power inward and outward simultaneously.
I feel that way as a lesbian/feminist who is a Third World woman. So
many don'ts crowded into those descriptions. So much power concentrated in those descriptions. I long for changes and never knew I could35

be a means to a way to that change. To know this is an awesome feeling.
To dare to take this thing on-Racism.
Dearest friend, this letter has been long, you must be tired. I lookforward to seeing you soon.
Sisterhood and Love
Bethonditiona magazine of writing by women wi
an emphasis on writing by lesbians"CONDITIONS is highly recommended for academic libraries and isessential for all collections of lesbian/feminist writing."-Library Journal"There is no magazine I look forward to more eagerly than CONDITIONS .... CONDITIONS is essential reading."-TILLIE OLSEN
Subscriptions: $11/3 issues; $6"hardship" rate, $22 institutions ;$15, $25, $50 supporting subscription; $4.50 single issue.
Indicate with which issue your subscription should begin. Card will besent with gift issue or subscription.
CONDITIONS : FOUR and subsequent back issues still available.
CONDITIONS
P.O~ Box 56
Van Brunt Station
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215

36

Diane Ayott, "Self-Portrait." Pencil, 1980.

Diane Ayott, "Nadine." Pencil, 1980.

Diane Ayott, "Self-Portrait, N.Y. Hotel." Pencil , 1980 .

wendy stevens

THE NOURISHMENT OF SMALL THINGS

There are many things which we keep from one another-they are notlies, they are omissions. These are the gaps which haunt us at moments
when we wonder why we are unable to share them with someone. Perhaps
it is not the event that stalks us, but the confusing knowledge that thisis not something you can tell. You should tell no one about this. It is
like making love, like being adopted, like being working-classTHEN:
It was a sharp day, two years ago this October. I have never blurted
it out to a stranger in a bar. At ftrst I feared that the only other person
who knew would not regard it as forbidden or sacred. I was afraid that
we would be found, like young arsons, with hundreds of burned matches
in our pockets, and they would explain my carelessness as a desire to getcaught. I carry this with the same joy that I carry bombs into governmentbuildings in dreams.
You're expecting that it's going to be something dirty like "single girlpicks up man in stairwell." That's all you can ftgure that a woman would
want to keep ·to herself. You think I was raped and am ashamed. No, I
would probably be accused of "manslaughter" before he got accused ofrape and it would make the local section of the paper "rapist stabbed todeath by 31-year-old woman" (read that: crazy white woman)
Anyway, that's not the story I am trying to tell you.
BEFORE THEN:
Frequently, I would take my dog to work. She would spend the day
dozing near the stool in the bookstore and then sometimes on the way
home from work I would run some blocks with her and we would arrive
home breathy and hungry and hotcold sweaty, like animals in a damp
jungle of our own.
After crossing the avenue, I would get close enough to my apartment
so that the faces would begin to look familiar. Sometimes at the bus
stop on the corner, the woman from the luncheonette would stand withchange in her hand. I had bumped into her one day. She had been sitting
on a bench which faced the street, chewing a wrapped-up sandwich withher mouth wide-open. Too naturally I turned away, but it was the ftrst
time I had seen her outside the luncheonette and I wanted to say morethan hello.
"Even eating their food on your day off?" I kidded.

40

"No, I hardly ever eat their food."''Why not? Don't they feed you when you work there?""No," she said, with bits of tuna hanging from her mouth. "I have to
pay for everything I eat there. Full price!""Do you live near here?""Not far ," she offered, "sometimes I walk on nice days. And you?"she quizzed, her jaw dropping and showing a mass of mayonnaise and tunaand egg and rye bread and lettuce and tomato and pickle.
"Not far."
REALIZING NOW:
I do these things. I stop on the street to talk with people to counterbalance the city. Sometimes, I forget, I walk brisk and bitchy down thestreets and each time someone passes, especially a man, I grab the cementwith my eyes, like Kindre, my dog-hiding her head under the bed thinking
that she can't be seen, if she can't see me. But, the men still stop rnidsentence when I pass by them, convening on the corners and stoops liketollbooths. I pay my way and sometimes I stare back, watching them suckme up, wondering which one of their clan has me every night.
THEN :
I passed the woman from the luncheonette that night. Still not knowing
her name, I nodded. She waved with a closed fist, her bus change in her
hand. It was an October evening and just beginning to get dark. I stopped
to buy some crackers to nibble on the way home. The older man who
stocked the shelves was still into this thing of asking me to go out with him.
It frightened me because I got the feeling that he was serious. I didn't understand. He was about thirty years older than me and that day while I reachedto get the crackers off the shelf, he came along and kissed me on the neck.
BEFORE REALIZING:
It is not your grandfather kissing you on the neck-he is a man, a stranger.
You have no allegiance to him. He is Susan's neighbor in the third grade who
showed himself to you as you walked past his house each day. We wouldn't
tell anyone because he was Susan's neighbor and what if your father did
the same thing to little girls as they walked past your house when you weren't
home. I mean, besides the fact that he pressed his penis to the window onlunch hours, he was a good man and, of course, Susan's neighbor and perhaps
someone's father and someone's grandfather. No one knew but Susan and I
and perhaps the hundreds of other small girls who passed by the house andtold no one.
THEN:
I continued to walk home that night with Kindre. The night seemed lit
by fluorescent bulbs, like the evening before a snowfall. It was a clear
night, where buildings and trees take on new edges.

41

BEFORE THEN :A few weeks before I had gone to the ocean alone. There was a lightrain and the heavy clouds were getting dark with nightfall. It was an etching done only in greys and I was a lone pink figure stripping myself of myclothing and then slowly making my way into a wild , excited ocean. I
bravely walked in, as if being taken by an old friend, not a new lover. I
held my hands over my belly and loosened myself to the chill. Before I
make love I am like this-always afraid that I will not be able to be takenby the moment , always afraid that a greater sense of something will comealong and grab me before these few delicious minutes. But I fell into theocean, cold as it was, without question. My body was suddenly charged
with energy. I laughed and breathed and swam all at once, wondering how
I could possibly grasp a breath between strokes; I continued to swim. At
some point, I realized that I had no intention of turning back. Turning backmeant lists and going to the bank and getting up each morning with only a
few duplications of the intensity of this moment spread through the mundane- a teasing of sweet butter with the margarine. I wanted to keep swimming. I didn't want to end my life, I just wanted to keep this motion. But
no one would understand if I gave myself to the ocean this time. I turned
around and slowly swam in. I was a child coming home late, knowing I
would be beaten.
THEN:
Sitting on a low brick wall as I turned the next corner was Mya. She
was tossing a ball into the air and letting it bounce , then trying to catchit. Kindre became fascinated by the game and ran over to the wall before
I had fully turned onto the street. Mya knew Kindre and threw the ballacross the lawn for her.
"Does Kindre always bring the ball back?" Mya asked me .
''Yes, almost always.""How did you teach her to do that?""I'm not exactly sure , I guess she figured out that if she wanted me
to throw it again she had to bring it back.""Where are you coming from?""Work.""Work at the bookstore?""Yeah, I still work there. Did I tell you I worked there?""Don't you 'member the day you were walking home with that book andyou sat and showed me the pictures?""Oh.""What are you eating?""Crackers, wheat thins, would you like one?""Sure, can Kindre have one too?""Okay, but not too many."
She held the small cracker out to Kindre and then let Kindre lick thesalt off her fingers. Mya kissed Kindre's nose and turned to me for a42

handful of crackers. I looked at her small feet dangling over the sides of
the wall and the blue jeans that were swaying above her ankles , too shortfor her long, stretched legs. Her tee shirt read : sometimes it is difficult
for a woman to make herself heard.
"Who bought you that tee shirt?""My Aunt Jean got it for me and another one too."
Then she held out her cupped hands for some more wheat thins.
"Are you really that hungry?"She nodded.
''Well then why don't you just come home with Kindre and me andwe'll fix some dinner?"
We sped down the street like hikers in the desert .
BEFORE REALIZING:
There is an apprehension which comes with the end of afternoon. As achild it .was the time when I felt most alone. It was that time toward even·ing which most reminded me that I was captive. Each night I had nochoice but to return to my parents' house . I was an obscene library bookthat everyone wished would fail to show tip in the return slot one night.
I wished and dreamed that someone would come along and , realizing
what my parents were doing to me, take me away with them. I knew
this couldn't happen. I was my parents' child and theirs to do with as they
wished . I was maintained because well-to-do families did not go around
farming out their children.
As the street lights went on, I felt lost in my own house. I wanderedfrom room to room bolstering my breath enough to begin a sentence,
only to be told to tell it to someone else. Tell it to the ice that has formedon the driveway, tell it to the leaves that have collected on the lawn, tell
it to your father and my father would listen like the ice on the driveway
and my tears , which came with his silence , refused to show my pain until I returned to my room and dug my teeth into the pillow.
Late nights were filled with dreams of escape, dreams of being old
enough to leave ..I would go to houses filled with warm people and be
asked to stay. No one would notice that I was missing. I would pack mybags and read by flashlight under the covers, journeying with Clara Barton,
Helen Keller, and Madame Curie .
I am no one's child. No one can cover up this pain. You have made me
need you. No one else is allowed to give me the ache and nothingness you
bestow on me. Wrapped in my bedspread , perhaps in the warmth of myown wine , I imagine myself held. I imagine holding someone who does
not begin to walk away while I am still hanging on, someone who does not
quickly release me when they hear someone coming as if I were fucking
their husband.

THEN:
We chattered the rest of the way home.

43

''What would you like to eat?"''What can I have?""Let's see, we can have grilled cheese sandwiches and soup, or eggs
or fruit and yogurt."
We agreed on grilled cheese. I asked her what she was doing in school.
I asked her if she had many dinner invitations like this one.
"No," she said. "This is special. We are buddies, you and me and Kindre."
NOW REALIZING:
We were children and friends and lovers. Looking back, I do not understand. The invitation had jumped from my mouth before I even knew I
was thinking it.
BEFORE REALIZING:
It was a picnic lunch with a stranger. It was an older woman hugging
me because she had no one left to hug. It was secretly feeding all thestray animals near the house and bringing home injured birds in shoeboxes.
When I was eleven, I met a monk who lived in the monastery up thehill from my house. My parents wanted me to have nothing to do withhim and so once a week we met secretly in a field near my house, by astone wall. We would sit on the wall and he would teach me Spanish,
slowly saying foreign words to me and then opening his small book toshow me the way they looked on the page. It was ~s if it were an ancientreligion. He was a pious man in every way . He was thin with white silver
hair and his yoice wove its way out of him. I hoped that someday hewould not hump all my trust away on the soft dirt by the wall. One
day he did not appear; I waited until it got dark, thinking that perhaps
I had transmitted those fears to him and that I had insulted our silent
reverence. I was deserted. I dreamed that night that he had died -and so
the next day, I skipped school and hiked up the hill to the brown carved
building, only to find all the monks in silent mourning. I asked if I
could join them for a moment to talk with my friend for one last time.
They shook their heads; no women were allowed inside.
THEN:
With grilled cheese sandwiches fixed we sat down next to each otherat the table. Kindre curled up under Mya's chair, knowing that she would
be the more likely of us to slip bits of melted cheese and whole wheat
bread under the table.
"Are all these books yours?""Yes, in a way it's silly for me to work in a bookstore. I wind up
owing them more money than they pay me. But I love being aroundbooks all day. Sometimes they are better friends than people.""Do you live here all alone?""Just Kindre and me ."44

''Where is your mother and your father?""They are both dead.""How come?""Last year they were killed when a train hit their car. They were
stuck on the tracks and suddenly a train appeared and before they could
do anything it hit them.""Do you miss them?"
BEFORE THEN :and the whistle as it screamed down the tracks and turning your head toknow that it is yelling at you-i am going to hit you-i am death-you must fear me and there is no time to say yes i am afraid yes you
are more powerful when we meet on these terms I relent. give me a moment sir and I will move out of the way-there there sir now you may
pass as you please i have always known your power but never this closeand now i have felt your steel i will never be the same
hit by a train how short death must be at that instant you are aware thatyou are dying being dragged down the tracks like another railroad car ora busted roadblock unable to withstand the momentum. driving throughohio expecting to live and the railroad tracks will always be a cemeterythe crossing the markers railroad tracks will always be tombstones and thewhistles a cry of anger
the child you drove crazy mourns you she is sorry you took so muchenergy to scar her and when the bandages were taken off the wounds
guilt oozed rampant from closed sores still-I didn't know you very
well you were only the faces behind the hurt
at first you were the reason i decided to never have children of my own-put to an early grave as most children are i refused to pass on toanother generation your ugly work-until I can clean up this splatter irefuse to carry on in your shadows.
THEN :''Would you like to hear a story?" I asked after dinner. "I love reading stories, would you help me read one?""Sure, what stories do you have? Do you have a television too?"
And in the silent part of the evening, the part of the night when thewhole world with families of their own come together again and eat ·dinnerand bicker and wash dishes and don't think that there is anyone anywhere
not doing that. No one in the world without daughter or son, mother orfather-Myra and I sat on the floor and looked through my books until
we found one that we wanted to share. Her fmgers and eyes were flashing.
I warmed some milk on the stove, made hot cocoa and we began to read.
By the time the story ended Mya was asleep with her head resting on
my thigh. Her breathing was shallow and her small body was stretchedout loosely along the rug. I lifted her from the floor and brought her
over to my bed. I pushed a pillow under her head and untied her sneakers. I

45

laid down next to her and began to read until I , too, drifted.
NOW:
I did not want you to be mine Mya. I wanted to share you. I wanted
to share a child in a world that does not go halvsy on children. In a time
when having a child is still a weight that each woman must carry separatelyI cannot take that burden.
THEN:
I woke up a few hours later, a book tucked under me and Mya on one sideof me and Kindre on the other. The scene was deliciously close to sleep . I
looked at the time and shook Mya.
''Mya, Mya wake up. You must go home.""No, what?" she mumbled .
"Go home , but let's not tell anyone that you came here for dinner tonight. I don't think they'd understand, do you?""Oh, hi," she smiled as she became alert . ''What shall I tell my mother?"''Tell her that you took a walk and got very lost and was tired and fell
asleep and then someone found you who showed you the way home . Tell
her that you are fme and that you will n!)ver do it again. Okay?""I was lost. Then I fell asleep and some nice person took me home .
Have I been gone long? What I'm saying really isn't not true. I mean,some nice person really did find me."I zipped her jacket and walked her to the corner that we had met atthat afternoon . I hugged her and she kissed Kindre and me.
''This will be our secret?" she asked . "Kindre and you are my special
friends." .
"Special like the ocean."NOW REALIZING:
I told no one for two years. I kept it to myself like a murder. But it
was no crime. I stopped and talked with Mya many times after thatnight but we rarely mentioned it. I asked her once and she swore she had
told no one and that her mother had just put her to bed quickly thatnight.
I must tell someone . I refuse to remain silent. For one night I defied
all the voices that harbor children in safe living rooms and pain-filled kitchens; I must defy all the voices which tell me to stay hushed and makemy special moments criminals .

46

Martha Nichols

ALL ABOUT EVE
These sad , star-broken eyescome down on
jagged fingers .
We are always
sticking our hands in dirt;
grasping, clawing,
the mustiness slithers up
into the joints.
A must of water-logged leaves:the insistence of rusty wood bark.
Those clutched dreams
hang like milky tits
between our fmgers.
I squeeze them ,as Adam squeezed knowledge out of Eve.
And the runny milk falls
with the caked mud
under my fmgernails.;
I scrape the sludge out,
scratching for a secret.
There is nothing pure.
All lives have
god 's dust
blown across their patterns.
Crystal clear sight ,extreme cleanliness,
are a sand-strippedskull, rotting ,bleaching, blanching,reflecting voids .
Better to slide one 's belly
along theraw roots of earth;like a .serpent ,muddying a scaly oilskin ,her beaded eyes
as shiny rocks ,I insinuate
myself into
the breath of life.
47

Diana Bickston

WATCHING YOU LEAVE

staring at the ceiling, a smile threatens to crack my jaw
the old grey cat with light green eyes cries at my window ,his paw resting in the torn screen savoring my verses withparticles of sun and clouds; he smells the scent of deathrising from my pores, rotting in a concrete cage
I have nothing but a 1000 lines
of an unfmished poem that will soon cast and forge the wordsof our death; as your simply going

ON ALL FOUR WALLS

The mind has shown itself
as the silence unrolling before me
and in the evening the crickets forget me.
I am old and all the worlds
have crumbled somehow in the fading duskof artificial light & bars nailedon the image of my lust that falls at twilightmaking the mourners blush.
I would be a child for those who mournbrushing my wings against their painted cheeks
delighted by the human
if I weren't surrounded by pigs & chainsas someone unknown & nameless who nevertheless saw
one word from the beginning to the end
on all four walls ,guilty.

48

GRAVE BONE GARDENS

the longing in my being to fill the holewhere the dog dug up the daisies, the spacethat should not be there, that wasn't there before
when we first loved and laughed, we planted gardens
in each other's anatomys; before the dog
before the daisies that mark death's restinga hole housing my emptiness without you
barren except for the bones the dog forgot to bury

NO, I'VE NEVER HAD THE PLEASURE TO WORKAT THE JACK IN THE BOX
I groomed German Shepherd seeing eye dogs once
til' the owner caught me with them all in the yard.
16 of them playing in the hose water.
I tried a lot of factories but the monotony & marijuana
always implanted new ideas for longer lunch hours
and more "sick leaves".
Being a janitor was great-cleaning & browsing
I found all kinds of "goodies" in desk drawers
and closets . . . moving from area to area
I discovered the storage rooms in an escrow office
filled with blank checks the banks accepted easily
afterwards, sitting in the back of a police car
I realized I was beginning at the bottom ofa life long occupation .. . from forger I progressedto an ex-con with a gun & no, I've never had thepleasure to work at the Jack in the Box, but
I've robbed many of them.

49Selma Miriam
ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE LESBIAN COMMUNITY:
A Collage of Mostly Bad News by One Jewish Dyke

I

First the good news. A couple of years ago Kathie Bailey wrote a
letter to Lesbian Connection called "I Hate Christmas."l She described
herself as a middle-class WASP. She writes, "The very existence of Jewish
and other non-Christian cultures is totally denied by the media, stores,
and people who sellebrate. People who don't celebrate are ignored at best,
hated, mistrusted, and made to feel guilty for being a Scrooge . .. . People
who don't do the straight family lifestyle have more self-hatred and loneliness causing the most suicides of the year; and Jewish and other nonChristians are made even more invisible and oppressed."
Like many other Jews, I had been brought up not to confront thedominant culture's assumption that my values and traditions were thesame as if I were a Christian . Some Jews end up "doing" Christmas as a"folk holiday" (for the children) and often these same families send theirchildren to Hebrew school even though they don't believe in religious
teachings so that their children will remember they are, and remain, Jews.
As a mother, I wouldn't "do"* Christmas, and except for a liberal periodof trying to believe that Christians were really trying to be good in theirchurches, I have resented the smugness of Christians-their assumptionthat I believe what they do and that their belief system is the underpinning of all ethics whether or not we (they or I) believe in god. So Kathie
Bailey's letter brought up a lot of pain for me. I was very grateful to havea non-Jew understand at last.
Maybe because of Kathie Bailey's letter, I began to think about myJewishness in the context of feminism. Raised as an atheist, I'm not looking for my Jewish religiOUS roots, just shocked when no one else notices
Christian arrogance within my own community; that is, in the world oflesbian women, the newspapers, magazines, and books that help me think
through what I believe and to evaluate all our varied stories.
II

Catholic Tales
Roman Catholic girlhoods are rich in lesbian lore, perhaps because
many Catholic lesbians are surrounded by strong women-nuns-in theirformative years ....
·"Doing" means no conviction; celebrate implies joy.

50

Though less exotic than Catholic lesbian stories, Protestant stories
have their own appeal, especially when the theme is triumph over puritanical and repressive religion . .. .
Several stories by Jewish lesbians have already appeared in print ,including Loretta Lottman's article , "I was the Dyke At My High School
Reunion," in Lavender Culture, edited by Karla Jay and Allen Young .*When I saw this page in Lesbian Path, I had trouble getting past it. I'm
glad to read both Catholic and Protestant coming out stories, but must I
be told that Jewish stories as such need not be included, since they canbe found elsewhere? (There are articles by Jewish women in Lesbian Path,e.g., by Alix Dobkin and Joan Nestle.) So I wrote the editor a polite complaint and she wrote back an apology, all of which should settle the matter. What is bothering me is that no one else seems to have noticed thispage, nor did Margaret Cruikshank think it necessary to make any sort ofpu):>lic mention that this editorial comment is uncalled for and offensive.
III
Writing in New Women's Times Feminist Review about the benefits ofwhite women studying Black women's literature, Adrienne Rich says,
Emecheta depicts both the sorority and the antagonisms of women
living on the edge, raising children and taking comfort from each otherin a different kind of "terrible place," in which they are labelled "problem families." As in welfare America, "Separated women were notallowed to have 'fancy men ,' the phrase for men friends."
Yet In the Ditch ends with a telling incident, one which sweeps away
illusions of any sisterhood which depends solely on either shared female
or economic oppression. Adah's white friend Whoopey has taken up
with an African boy-friend; Adah, who has no illusions that African men
are more dependable than Englishmen, fears the worst for her, but
Whoopey is sublimely optimistic. As they walk together,
The doors of the pub opposite them were thrown open. A group ofwhite and black regulars straggled out . . .
"Hello, sister," said one of the black men to Adah. She laughingly
hello-ed back. She had learned from experience never to rebuff menof her own race; they were more sensitive than others. Even the roadsweepers would invariably greet her and she would answer back witha nice "hello, brother." She was not sure why she had this attitude
in England; at home she would have ignored them but here she felt .
that a black man working by the side of the road or in the companyof white friends needed to have his morale boosted. Whoopeyasked
if she knew the men before and she said no. Whoopey frowned andbit her lips, puzzled.
"You must come and see me sometime," Adah invited.
"Yes, I'd like to do that but you're always out aren't yer?"
End of the novel. Adah's sisterhood with the white woman does notprevent the white woman's total misreading of the exchange she has*Margaret Cruikshank, ed., The Lesbian Path, Angel Press, 1980, p. 73.

51

seen. Adah's beleaguered connection with black men in a white worldis read as promiscuity, as part of a sexual pattern. There is much forwhite feminists and lesbians to consider in this brief fmal scene.
When I read In the Ditch, I also found:
Yes, she could start work the following day . . . something, something, something ... she was too nervous to listen properly.
"Now your pay," said the guv'nor. He seemed to have an almost
triangular face, the upper part of which was wide, with cheeks slanting
gradually away until they fmished in a sharp and pointed chin. The chinstood out at what looked like a good ninety degrees. His mouth was
small with surprisingly full lips. He had little hair, but what was left of
it was black with lots of grey. He blinked frequently as if he had sand in
his eyes ....
Adah was angry. All this fuss just for a cleaner's job. She did not care
. any more. The man was as narrow as his narrow face. He's a Jew, probably, she thought, though she did not really know any Jews or anything
about them ....
Even if the man was not a Jew he behaved like one . He was mollified.
He guessed that Adah was telling him the truth. ''Well, if you want it
you can have it, but to me it looks like exploitation .... "He gave Adah a twinkle with his bright eyes at the last statement.
Poor old Jew; he thought Adah was a typical case of an easy conquest.
"You know the trouble with you, you should marry a rich man." TheManager had a sense of humour, all right.
For a Jew, it is no surprise to fmd these lines, so fmding them was lessdepressing than realizing they were invisible to the reviewer. Again I
wrote a polite letter; again I received an apology; again I require that it
be public to be adequate.

IV
Conditions V: the Black Women 's Issue published Judy Simmons'poem ''Minority,'' which included the lines:
mine is not a People of the Book/taxed
but acknowledged; their distinctiveness is
not yet a dignity; their Holocaust is lower case 2
and which some readers found to be anti-Semitic. This inspired a series of
conversations between Jewish and Black lesbians in Boston which was reported in Conditions VII. 3 That same issue of Conditions contains a review of Top Ranking4 by Cherne Moraga, who has both criticism andpraise for that pamphlet. But so far, no one in print seems to have noticed
this passage in Top Ranking:... of that number only about seven million [Black slaves] ever reached
the western hemisphere alive. What happened to the African continent
as a result of the slave trade makes the horrible and horrendous crimesof the Nazi's fascism almost child's play. [pp.8-9]

52

This, from a man, was quoted by the two editors in their opening article,
otherwise an extremely valuable history of American racism. Is anyone
else offended by it?
In many of these examples, I wonder whether I'm being unnecessarily
sensitive. As one of the women in the dialogue between Jewish womenand Black women in Conditions VII points out, women of color are facing life and death situations (witness Atlanta)-so why get uptight overthe "almost child's play"? Maybe the writer of that phrase didn't mean
only Jews. Maybe he meant everyone-gays, gypsies, and others, too. I
don't know. But I was more upset at "almost child's play" than over
Judy Simmons' apparent ranking of oppressions.

V
Have you seen the Winter Solstice issue of Womanspirit 1979, in which
there is a Christmas nativity play where the "savior" is a Black girl? This
is not an isolated instance of feminists romanticizing Black people as thetruest Christ figures. It appears as the theme of Dorothy Bryant's The Kinof Ata, and in the expression by an MCC minister in her unpublishedthesis 5 that Black women were closer to the real meaning of Christianity
and that lesbian criticism of the established church might possibly bringto it "the good news," just as Jesus tried to bring the good news to the .
Jews, who of course wouldn't listen. "There are irreconciliable contradictions involved in being a lesbian/woman and a Christian ... I see our relationship to Christianity as similar to Jesus' relationship to Judaism . ..
His preaching was experienced as 'good news' by the common people ofhis day." And also, "There is a Third World Lesbian Writers Conferencein the Women's Center in Manhattan and I stop by .. . a poetry reading
is going on .... It is a worship service .... We sing the African chants together. ... And then the gospel songs . . .. I am ecstatic. We hold hands,
Circling the room. The energy is collected and directed . And we singraucously, -powerfully, swinging our joined bodies, 'This little light ofmine / I'm gonna let it shine / let it shine / all the time.'" While Ziegler
sees Black women's African dances and songs as another valued form ofChristianity: I am left with the impression that my Jewish songs anddances are less appealing, since my people never embraced Jesus' good
news.
VI

Then there's Sisters United, a magazine from Kansas which frequently
declares lesbianism to be the best current application of fundamentalist
Christianity ; ..
"Blessed is she that believeth, for there shall be a performance of
those things which were told her from the Lord." These words were*See Bessie Head's The Collector of Treasures (Heinemann, 1977), to learn how destructive Christian values were to African people.

53

spoken to Mary as she was told she would give birth to the Christ-child.
They are again being spoken this day, unto YOU who are the mothers
to be who shall birth Christ in this age. All that God needs is somestaunch BELIEVERS!
Can Christians imagine how it feels to a Jew to be told God loves you if
you'd only believe in him? To me Christianity is the most arrogant ofproselytizing religions. There are· four of us in our collective, and theother three who were raised as Christians will not read Sisters United. I
do . It's overwhelmingly Christian and I'm grateful to be nowhere near
Kansas . It's not that this magazine is in any way specifically anti-Semitic .
It's knowing that the closer you get to fundamentalism, the closer you
approach Jew-hating.t The best I could hope for in that world is to beinvisible, and usually I am. It's very hard to explain my uneasiness about
Sisters United. Still I read it, trying to understand why the two women
who write it get so much comfort from a belief system so dangerous tome . In a sense I admire these two women's survival, their struggle to beopen lesbians in their context, and to write about it, but I am also suspicious, because by Christian definition I am both condemned and evil tothem :We recently received a letter from a dear Sister who asked a very
sincere, logical question. Her question is this:" ... Barbara and I come from very different places spirituallyeven as opposed to religiously (her being Jewish and me being Catholic)since she does not believe in God and I not only believe in God but thewhole thing, your spirits (angels?) the saints, the hereafter, etc. How
will we be together in the other world, which is sort of what I wascounting on since we can 't be together in this world, if we might bothbe going to different places because we both believe in such different
things? .. . . "I know it's hard to take her problem seriously. The editors go on towrite about death and future lives, and there's not an anti-Semitic wordin it. However, the July-August 1981 issue recommends the merging of
religions into Christianity:
The United States has served as a "melting pot", a place where
various races have integrated and intermarried, thus bringing to an end
the PURE RACE BLOOD. Even the staunch Jews have intermarried in
the United States and we are even now beginning to see the mixture of
BLACK and WHITE coming into existance.

In the same issue there is a shocking article claiming to explain Black skincolor :
Black people are thus for a reason,just as all races are what they aret As Judith Plaskow and Annette Daurn have pointed out in Lilith magazine no. 7:"Blaming Jews for the Birth of Patriarchy" and "Feminists and Faith." Also more
specifically at the anti-Semitism workshop at NWSC in Storrs, 1981, Plaskow spoke ofthe relationship between fundamentalism and anti-Semitism.

54

for a reason .. . . It is said that Cain of the Bible, was the first man toturn black when God put a mark on him because of his sin. We wellknow that the entire human race has sinned and is yet sinning, and weare not all black, so why this distinction? I am of the opinion that God
did this as a SIGN unto all peoples that SIN is indeed black. He wanted
them to know the results of Sin in a way that they would never forget
it and therefore the Black race came into being. These people were as amonument to remind all other races that Sin has dire consequences .
VII
After Sisters United, it's a relief to recall reading Maureen Brady's
review of Micnelle Cliffs Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise 6 :We were meant to walk out of this classroom chanting: assimilate,
assimilate. I remember the emphasis on the' failures of those who did
not properly pass into the bland blend , and the correlations with theirplace on the economic ladder. The melting pot has since been moving'
directly along toward meltdown.
This emphasis on being stirred into sameness is one of the greatest
forces that we as feminists must be consciously fighting , even though
we often compromise our material means by doing so. Each of us musthave solid footing to move from , and that requires the ability to search
our origins, comprehend their meaning to us, and when we share themas Michelle Cliff has done, expect other women to recognize the wealththat lies in that sharing. I believe our movement will only move on therecognition of difference , and on understanding the composition of thediffering soil on which we grow.
I have often thought that being a Jew , a dissident , has been my best
preparation for being a lesbian and that passing is the same experience inboth cases.
VIII
The Spring Equinox 1981 issue of Womanspirit contained a long letterfrom Barbara Mor. Two issues earlier she had written about patriarchal
religions, generalizing a lot in a way I agreed with, though in two passages
she had made Jews responsible for the very concepts used by Christians
to persecute and murder Jews:
Downhome , throughout Biblical history , the Judeo-Christian [emphasismine] idea of a Devil has led to the phenomenon of devil-projection , inwhich people become pathological in their fear of invisible "evil forces" ,and in their anxiety to project responsibility away from themselves andonto scapegoats , self-righteously oppress and massacre whole groups of"other people", i.e . the heathens , the infidels, the Devil's Brood . Devilprojection, as a psychotic process, works to distort the perception ofreality ; in polls, over 60% of the American people declare they believethat "the Devil" is responsible for our current economic, social andenergy problems.
There is one more principle, the fmal Christian prinCiple, that is truly

55

nihilistic and disgusting. It is the belief that only one creature born inthe 5 billion years of our universe has actually been "born of God". All
the rest of us are dust and shit. I would say that no person of goodwill
could believe such garbage; and no woman who believes it-whether
Christian or Jewish (for it was a Jewish postulation)-can possibly be afeminist.
When called anti-Semitic for this by Jane Litwoman, Barbara Mor
responded:
The epithet "anti-Semitic" is inaccurate. Jewish and Semitic are notsynonyms. The Semites are a blood-group of Caucasoid people locatedin the eastern Mediterranean region; they include the Syrians, Arabs,
Jordanians, Egyptians and Libyans, as well as most Israelis. Jewish refers
not to a "race" of people, but to a religious and cultural body of traditions and history.
There are many Jews who are not Semitic, while the vast majority of
Semitic people are not Jewish. Not to make this distinction is to be, I
think, very chauvinistic and insensitive to the realities of MidEast geopolitics.
She goes on to quote chapter and verse of the Old Testament to showwhat Jewish religion is really about. She does admit:
As for "saviors", we all realize the Jews did/do not accept Jesus as theirlong-prophesied Messiah. But the idea of a virgin-born, spirit-generated
Redeemer is textually prefigured in the O.T.
One of my partners found the whole article upsetting, especially thesemantic game with the word anti-Semitic. Presumably we know what
racism is-the ·oppression of people of color by whites. Presumably weknow what sexism is-the oppression of women by men. Whatever anger
is felt or expressed toward whites by people of color is not called racism.
Whatever anger is expressed toward men is not called sexism, thoughsometimes these are called reverse racism, or reverse sexism, probably
because of the power differences implicit in racism and sexism. Or atleast this is the distinction listed at the back of Top Ranking. Yet antiSemitism can't be an accurate term since Arabs are Semites and, theassumption must be, the Jews are powerful! Barbara Mor responded to
my partner's letter with seven typewritten pages, which she urged us toshare with others. Here is some of it, starting with a discussion of theword anti-Semitism.
The racist use of the term (as you point out in your letter) has its history & origin among Europeans; i.e. it signals the prejudice of European
people against Jews. At the time, Europeans had little or no contact
with non-Jewish Semitic peoples-there were no Libyans, Egypts,
Syrians living in groups in Europe, to my knowledge-& so the word
Semitic was used as a synonym for Jewish; I presume, without anyone
caring that these words are not really equivalents.
And that was the historic situation thru WW2. It is now 1981, and56

everything that's happened in the MiddleEast in the past 40 years reallyrequires us to redefme the term anti-Semitic- or, as I'd suggest, throw
it out altogether. Because the term is now used quite carelessly to defme
a post-WW2 situation involving political & religious conflicts, not racialconflicts; & as a definition of this situation , the term is wholly inaccurate.
I've heard so many politicians & journalists use the term "antiSemitic" erroneously-& grotesquely-that I've built up some kind of
pet peeve about it. For example , do you remember back when Billy
Carter was first revealed to be dealing with the Libyans; Bill Brock,then National Chairman of the GOP, came out and made a widely
quoted statement that Billy Carter was "anti-Semitic ."Then it turns out that American "manifest destiny" derives directlyfrom... the old Hebraic idea of themselves as a Chosen People. I think thatidea is a bad one, a spiritually arrogant one; it caused much suffering
when the Jews were in power, & persecuting all those who would not
bow to their male god. And in its evolutions thru the western-Christianworld, via the Bible, it has helped breed religious fanaticism, spiritual
megalomania, & imperialistic political doctrines in which countries like
America, for example, go around ripping off the world's people & resources in the Bible-inspired belief that we are "God's Country" & have 'a "Manifest Destiny" to lead the world to righteousness. I do not blame
the Jews exclusively for introducing this notion of a Chosen People tothe Western world; but I don't exempt them entirely from responsibility
either. Many individual Jews take it upon themselves to denounce thisold idea of a "Chosen People of God"-but I'm not aware that the Jewish
people as a whole have renounced this idea, officially, I mean, via theirleaders in Israel, let's say.
Finally, to return to World War II, even though it is forty years ago :I know that 5-6 million Jews died in WW2. I also know that 40-45
million people altogether died in that war. So what's the point? There 's
nothing I can do to prevent WW2 , or the crimes committed against
humanity in it. (And I think of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki as being eqUivalent, as crimes against humanity, with
Dachau & the other camps; i.e. they all result from the patriarchal lustfor power over life, i.e. Death.
And if Jewish women were genuinely clear & honest in their griefover the hideous torment of women & children in the concentration
camps, I believe they would be pointing their fmgers at the Hebrew
patriarchs, just as angrily as they point at the Gobineaus & Nietsches .
For the hatred of what is dark, fleshly, other, & impure did not begin
with the German Nazis. All males must acknowledge responsibility for
their life-hatred , including Jewish males.
Adrienne Rich pointed out the need for white women not to misconstrue Black women's relationships with Black men (see her comments
about In the Ditch.) Barbara Mor evidently believes a similar understanding of Jewish women's connections to Jewish men is not legitimate.

57

Jewish women should be blaming Jewish men as they go off to the concentration camps.
As for the rest of Barbara Mor's thinking about Jews, some women
will undoubtedly agree with her, and there is nothing I can say to them.
In fact, I fmd it impossible to explain at all how awful and how dangerous
her perspective is to me. Those who care will have to figure it out forthemselves.

IX
My parents' atheism was a set of ethical beliefs and concerns that I
could call religious if I did not prefer the term political. Whether it wasinterest in and support for unionism and socialism in the thirties, reading
Richard Wright and Lillian Smith in the forties, they formed my politicalconsciousness. While I don't assume all Jews grew up the same, I suspect
my parents' Jewish attitudes were common enough. In an article called"Liberal Ladies Beach," Sue Davidson explains one woman's activism:That political history had its roots in the Seattle home in which she
spent her childhood. Her parents, Eastern European Jews, were interested in trade unionism and socialism; they subscribed to a variety ofliberal and left wing periodicals; and they contributed money to a stringof left wing political causes. Above all, Ruth was influenced in her homeby "the depth of feeling surrounding notions of justice, equality, andliberty.
"It wasn't so much that political matters were discussed. It was theemotion, the passion that I caught, like some communicable disease . I
was yo~g, but I was very aware of how my parents were responding
to the rise of fascism in Europe, the rise of Nazism in Germany, becausethe radio would come on, and they would burst into tears, or they would
scream. I <lon't know at what point I began to feel it. It's as though it
was always there, from as early as I can remember. The feelings camefirst. And then, as I began to move out, as a more independent person,
as an adolescent, and to look a little bit at the society-to see how badly
people were treated, to be aware of poverty-I don't view myself even,somehow, as ever having had any choice. The world we lived in was so
unjust, and so many people suffered as a result, that one simply had todo something."7
A few months ago I would have paid little attention to the familiarityof this description. Reading it now seems important. My story is notunique; at least there are some other Jewish women who can describe
their political consciousness in Jewish terms, coming out of a Jewish pastwith pride.

X
And there's more good news, too. I noted Conditions VII, with thearticle ''The Possibility of Life Between Us." Especially interesting to me
was a talk on "Lesbian Ethics" by Sarah Lucia Hoagland, reported in the
Lesbian Inciter. She speaks of the need for us to listen to each other58

about our varying oppressions:. .. how are we to begin a bonding process? In the first place , I think
we have to recognize that we have tremendous amounts of violence andanger inside of us .... Everything in our world encourages us not toconsider ourselves, encourages the self-doubt and self-hatred of victimization. Expression of anger is taboo among us .
. . . Secondly, we must learn to be witnesses to each other's pain
while not trying to make it go away ... .
What I want is a witness to my pain .. . . That's very hard, especiallyfor us as nurturers, because we want to come in and make it all better.
My mother always wanted to come in and make it all better. And what
she did to survive when she couldn't make something all better was tonot see it ....
Thirdly, we must fmd a time and space to witness the pain we've
caused each other. Simply having our pain witnessed is a first major stepin the healing process. This was apparent last weekend at the National
Women's Studies Association. I went to a workshop on Jewish Lesbians.
There were several non-Jewish wimmin there, myself included. There
was tremendous pain and anger coming out in that workshop . I gave aworkshop on the Lesbian perspective in academia, and there were heterosexual women there-and they got an earful , let me tell you. The factthat they were there listening to our anger was healing for us. They
didn't get all defensive, they didn't run out screaming and crying-theylistened and they heard us . There is tremendous anger, I think, between
Black and Jewish wimmin, particularly among Lesbian feminists . .. .
Some Jewish wimmin ... [have] said, ''When we were young, ourparents told us that if we were in trouble and there was no one Jewish
around, to find someone who was Black. They are safe since they knowwhat discrimination is." And some Black wimmin have told me thatwhen they were young they were told if they were in trouble and there
were no other Blacks around that they should fmd someone who was
Jewish. Since then there have been betrayals on both sides . . .. All of
this anger has got to be heard and gotten out. And we must be prepared
to go through this with each other. 8
I need to hear non-Jewish lesbian women listening for and objecting toanti-Semitism when it happens. Peg Cruikshank's collection of stories isvaluable despite her carelessness-but why has no one noticed? Emecheta's
work (especially, I think, her discussion of pre-Christian Nigerian values
and customs in The Slave Girl, The Bride Price, and The Joys of Motherhood) is important for women of all races and ethnic backgrounds toread, as is Bessie Head's The Collector of Treasures. In fact I fmd bothwriters reassuring in that an Blacks aren't natural Christians. But why was
this instance of ugliness in In the Ditch not noticed by Adrienne Rich?
Top Ranking has so much that is valuable in it, why make the Holocaust"child's play"? How do lesbian-feminists raised as Christians react toSisters United? What do they really think of a lesbian version of fundamentalism? As for Barbara Mor, my initial admiration is quite gone . Is
anyone a witness? Jews have been so typically unwilling to call attention
to our own pain-but won't any non-Jews take notice?
59

NOTES
1. Lesbian Connection, Vol. IV, Issue 7, November 1979.
2. Conditions: Five, Autumn 1979, p. 93 .
3. Beverly Smith, ed., with Judith Stein and Priscilla Golding, "The Possibilityof Life Between Us: A Dialogue Between Black and Jewish Women" in Conditions:
Seven, Spring 1981.
4. Joan Gibbs and Sara Bennett, eds., Top Ranking: A Collection of Articles on
Racism and Classism in the Lesbian Community. February 3d Press, Brooklyn, N.Y.
11238.
5. Karen Ziegler, "A Radical Feminist Theology of Ministry," Union TheologicalSeminary, 1979 .
6. Maureen Brady, "I Am a Woman of Color": review of Claiming an Identity They
Taught Me to Despise in New Women 's Times Feminist Review, April/May 1981.
7. In Backbone no. 3, Seal Press, Seattle, Washington, 1981.
8. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, "Lesbian Ethics" in the Lesbian insider/Insighter/inciter,
no. 2, January 1981.

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60

Barbara Sm ith

THE CONVERT''The aesthetic ramifications in a work of this magnitude have not,even after three hundred years, been fully explored. The creation of
Milton's epic can be considered on every level one of the pivotal cultural
moments in the history of our civilization."
Louise closed her notebook and without blinking stared past Mr.
Stevens who stood at the front of the room. His words droned on but
she was missing them. Her concentration had slipped upon that lastphrase, become fixed upon that word "our.""Our civilization."
Whose? Yours and mine? Not likely. Not if Louise herself were any
part of it. If Louise were included in the "our" then Mr. Stevens' statement made little sense. Louise was eighteen years old and she was discovering every day that when people up here said "our," Black people
like herself were no part of it.
"Our history, our literature, our language, our culture, our houses, ourcars, our maids, our money," were not, she was positive, anything thatbelonged to her. These kinds of thoughts were always breaking into herconcentration, in lectures, in the dining room, while talking, and of course
when she was alone. Just one more thing that was not right about thisplace. She hadn't wasted time thinking about the hidden meanings ofsimple words when she was at home, before she came to college last September. Who and what "our" was, was one of the more apparent facts
she had been forced to grasp growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. "Ourpeople," a phrase she often heard at home and school and church, werequite simply Black people. Their people were of course white and everything in Baton Rouge was decided according to this simple axiom.
Only when Louise came to this tiny town in Connecticut and to thethird oldest women's college in America did she begin to wonder about
matters that had seemed clearer, if not necessarily easier before .
"Our people, our people!" She heard her grandmother's urgent voice.
Depending on who said it the whole meaning changed.
A bell rang and suddenly Louise was awake again, felt Mr. Stevens
looking at her curiously, tried to rummage casually for her books andcoat.
"Is the assignment more of Paradise Lost?" she asked the girl next to
her.

61

"Ahunh, books seven and eight.""Thanks. "Lord, I'm not even fmished with three and four yet, Louise grimacedto herself as she rushed out the door to get to the dorm in time to eat
in a hurry and then waitress for lunch.
It was beginning to snow again, yet the sky was glaringly bright andthere were birds twittering above her and pecking along the path. How
she hated this weather, this grinding cold.
I'd better slow down or I'm going to break my neck, she thought as
she slid along the walk. Waitressing was such a pain, but it was the best
job on campus and of course there weren't any other jobs to be had in
the tiny, block-long town. Usually freshmen didn't get assigned waitressing jobs because it was thought to be too time consuming for a newstudent adjusting to the absolute mountains of work. But a junior in
Louise's dorm had gone home with mono and she had been chosen to
replace her. Of the one hundred girls in the dorm, hers was the greatest
fmancial need. They had to wear awful blue smocks to do it, Louise
assumed so that they would look more like the servants they were. The
poorest girls on campus were the waitresses, but in her dorm most of theother waitresses had fathers who were things like college teachers andministers instead of doctors and company vice-presidents. To Louise they
were all rich. Only the fifteen other Black girls on campus seemed toknow what poverty actually meant, despite the fact that the others
searched day in and day out for a defmition in her Social Problems class.
Louise's dorm was one 'of the most remote on campus, on the far sideof a small lake, which she did not appreciate especially on a day like
today, sludging through the wet snow. This place was so country. Moretrees than people. True, it had been beautiful in the fall , the bright leaves
shimmering, but Louise had been too lonely and too scared to noticemuch. She still felt that lost way a lot of the time.
The only relief were the letters she got from home, from her mother,and her aunt, and especially from her older sister. Maybe there would bea letter today. How she wished she was at home this minute, in theirsmall warm kitchen. Momma telling her to get her books and paraphernalia off the table so they could sit down and eat. Home , where there
were people to talk to easily, people to take care of her . Here she had
the feeling that people could not even see her, let alone be concernedwith her existence.
The other source of comfort that had grown throughout the fall was
being with the group of Black girls themselves, particularly her friend
Alice. She knew all fifteen by name and they stuck together a lot, especially the freshmen . Louise smiled wryly at the words "stuck together."
Alice had told her how some white girls had said it upset them that theBlack girls always seemed to "stick together." Now whenever she andAlice went some place they would tum to each other and ask sarcastically , ''Why do you girls always stick together!" Then they would giggle,

62and shake their heads in despair at the dumbness all around them.
Of course they all didn't stick together . Some of their small numberLouise seldom saw. She supposed they were studying or had boyfriends
at other schools. She never saw the girl named Janice from South Carolina who hardly spoke when Louise happened to run into her outside.
Janice didn't seem snobbish, just very preoccupied as she huddled inside
her gray, battered-looking coat. Once, when Louise had seen her in thelibrary, she tapped her on the shoulder and Janice jerked around with alook of absolute terror in her huge dark eyes. Janice seemed lonely andunhappy, but none of the sisters questioned why. They knew why only
too well, because they felt it too.
Louise did question, though, what was to become of Janice, of her
friends, and of herself. If there had ever been any Black seniors on campus, they had all disappeared, implying that this place could devour Blackgirls alive. Whenever any two of them got together they talked incessantly
about leaving, but this was of course impossible because after lives of"exceptional" achievement, they had been transformed into average students almost as soon as they entered Collins' gates. Their grades justweren't good enough, their scholarships weren't transferable either, sothey would have to stay or maybe drop out of school completely. Talking about leaving was a great comfort, though, even if it wasn't remotely
possible.
Louise fInally reached the path that led to her dorm's front door,
when she thought she saw something move high upon the hill which
faced the lake.
What was it. An animal? As she got closer she could make out a light
blue strip of color. Maybe it was a person, but what would they be doing
way up there where there was nothing but ice and bushes? Maybe it was
one of the crazy white girls whose actions and words Louise found mostly
inexplicable. Just before she entered the dorm she looked up again to see
the tlgure moving toward her rapidly down the hill. Suddenly, she felt she
knew who it was. Janice-in her long gray coat, a blue muffler wrapped
many times around her head. But something else was strange . Janice did
not have on any boots or stockings. She was running barefoot in thesnow.
Louise stood absolutely still. What was happening, what was this, why
was Janice there? Should she run up the hill herself and try to catch up
with her or instead run inside and pretend she hackl't seen? She stood
hypnotized by Janice's careening movements. Just as Louise made a step
toward the loping girl, she changed directions and ran back up the hill.
Louise stopped. This was horrible. What was happening? She walked alittle way up the hill almost falling down from the ice but couldn't see
anything. Maybe Janice had doubled back and gone around the otherside. Her chest filled with fear, Louise turned back to the dorm. Had
Janice seen her watching and run away? She needed to tell someone, to
fmd Alice, and fIgure out what to do.

63When she got inside, the dorm clock said 11 :55 . Too late to eat now
and too late to track down Alice. Louise checked her empty mailbox,
ran back to the kitchen, dropped her books, tore off her coat , washedher hands, and began setting up her tray of dishes. She wished she could
get someone to waitress for her so she could fmd Alice, then together
they might be able to fmd Janice. But it was too late for that too. She
set the table for eight and then for the next half hour went back andforth, back and forth, between the kitchen and the dining room likesomeone on an oiled track. Where was Alice? She must have decided not
to eat, or to eat in town. Why wasn't she here, of all the days?
"Could you get some more butter?" one of the seniors interrupted
her thoughts. "Salad dressing too," added Melanie, a girl whose blonde
hair looked almost white, whose eyelashes were invisible, and who was
dressed as usual in a riding habit. Louise headed for the kitchen. She
hadn't even had a chance to really think about what Janice was doing up
there, what it meant for her to be walking barefoot in freezing weather
in the snow. Janice was so silent, kept so much to herself, Louise foundit impossible to think of any kind of motives, rational or irrational . She
just did not know her enough. Louise put the butter and salad dressing
on the table, lost in her own thoughts until words from the table brokein again.
''What did you do then , Luce?"''Well I just told Rich that if he didn't go to the Bahamas with us forspring vacation, I'd call the whole thing off. After all, Daddy is going to
pay for everything."''Maybe he just doesn't want.to have to hang around with your folks,Luce, even if it is a free vacation."''Why wouldn't he? I've visited his parents lots of times and believeme, they're nothing to brag about. Anyway I took off my ring and held
it out to Rich, but he wouldn't take it. He said he'd tell me for sure. thisweekend.""Is he coming down here?""I think so. I've got a lot of work to do though.""That would be a television first. When did you ever put work before
romance?" Luce made a sour face, they all giggled and began pushingback their chairs.
Louise picked up their dishes and hurried back into the kitchen forthe last time. Lilly, the cook, gave her a wink. "You must be in a hurry.""Defmitely!" she answered.
Lilly was one of the friendliest people she'd met on campus, although
she and her assistant were always arguing with each other. Louise grabbed
some cookies and took the elevator up to her room. She stopped on
Alice's floor fust, but no one was there.
When she got to her own room she collapsed on the bed . She felt
really tired as usual after waitressing, but she had to get to soc. class. At

64least Alice should be there since they were in the same section. Maybe
she should go back up the hill again just to look around . She looked ather watch. No time. Then she thought that maybe she should call up
Janice's dorm to see if she had come back. No that wouldn 't help . She
might be anywhere in that big old building and not get the message forhours. It would be better to stop by there instead. She got another set ofbooks, combed her hair, put on another sweater, and hurried back outdoors .
Whatever the reason Janice was on the hill Louise felt bad for her. As
she slogged through the snow she felt almost like crying herself. Why did
things have to be like this. Why did getting a "good" education have to .
be this hard? It wasn't just the work, though all of the Black girls agreed
that it was a killer. It was the whiteness , the pervasive whiteness that
infected everything. Even something as absurd as gym . One of the phys.
ed. instructors had told a girl from Chicago that the reason the Black girls
didn't do well in swimming, which was required , was because their bone
structure was different from white people's. According to her they were
physically incapable of floating. When this comment was passed among
them they all got furious. Just because this particular group of eight freshmen had five people in it who hated the water didn't mean that Black
people couldn't swim. The fact that there was no place in town to gettheir hair done when it got ruined twice a week by the water was much
more to the point. But you couldn't dwell on such foolishness , because
if you did in a place like this you would spend a life dealing with incidental trivia and have no time at all to deal with the deeper racist stuff.
Louise often considered how she had made a real mistake to think that
she wanted or deserved the kind of education that would have been completely closed to her even four years before. Why hadn't she gone to oneof the Black schools down South and saved herself the trouble? But she
also suspected that she might be considered a back number there, if she
didn't keep up with the partying and styling. She would have been justas poor down there as she was up here , but at least she and everyone else
would have been Black.
Louise fmally reached Janice's dormitory on the other side of campus
and found her room number at the desk. Then she remembered that she
hadn't thought of an excuse for being there in case Janice had returned.
Maybe I'll ask her to help me study for botany or if she has any notes,
since she's a bio major. Louise climbed up three flights of stairs thatlooked medieval. The whole place was so dark and forbidding. She thought
she'd heard that Janice was the only Black girl in this particular dorm.
When she got to Janice's door she stopped , afraid to knock. She
wished she'd gotten someone to come with her. She rapped softly andwaited . No one was coming. Maybe she hadn't heard . Just as she knockedagain the door moved away from her h~d. It was Janice .
"Hi, Janice. I didn't mean to disturb you. I was wondering if you

65could help me with my botany. I can't keep up and I thought you'd havesome notes," Louise spoke in a rush.
Janice stared at her for a long time as if she didn't know exactly who
she was and then mumbled, "Please wait."Louise was frightened . Janice's eyes were so wide and blank. Please .
What was wrong. She looked through the door that was only half open
and saw a morass of clothes and scattered junk. Papers, trays of dirty
dishes, everything looked upside down. The shades were pulled and a tinydesk lamp gave the only light. The desk itself, however, was absolutely
clean. She watched Janice kneel beside the closet and pull out a hugenotebook from a cardboard box. She looked at it as if she didn't quite
know what to do with it and then when her eyes caught Louise's she
seemed to jump as though she didn't know there was anyone else there.
She got up slowly and walked toward Louise. She was wearing furry
woolen socks. Louise sighed inside herself. Maybe she was all right. Maybe she was just doing an experiment or something. Or maybe she'd hurt
her foot and had to take off her boots. That didn't make sense. She
wasn't walking unevenly, only very slowly like she was moving throughwater and why would she take off both boots if only one foot was hurt?
Janice handed her the notebook and still said nothing. Louise wanted
to ask her something, something important , something kind, but she
didn't know what.
''Thank you. I can really use this ... all the help I can get."
Janice blinked so slowly Louise thought she saw the muscles of hereyelids working ."Do you have a cold or something?" Louise asked.
Janice shook her head and said in an almost whisper, "No."Louise wished she had kept her mouth shut, hadn't asked something
so stupid.
''Well I have to run to class in the soc. building now. Thanks for thenotes. I'll bring them back after the midterm."
She turned and walked not too fast, not too slow down the hall .
When she got to the stairs, she glanced back but Janice's door was shut.
When Louise got outside she knew she wasn't going to class. She had
to fmd someone to talk to. Alice should be in class. Just don't let it start
before I get there. Then she'd have to wait for Alice outside or just go inand sit through the endless lecture. Louise reached the building andrushed downstairs to the basement lecture hall. Alice was sitting near thedoor. Thank goodness the professor hadn't arrived yet.
"Alice, Alice, out here."
Alice was talking to the girl next to her and didn't look up.
"Alice!" Louise repeated.
Alice looked up and grinned.
"Hey, Louise. I saved you a seat."Louise pleaded, "Come out here. I've got to talk to you."66

Alice looked mystified, but quickly followed her outside.
''What's going on, Louise, aren't you coming to class?""No, I can't. I've got to talk to you. Let's get out of here before Mr.
Davis comes.""OK. This is about the only course I'm not worried about failing."
Alice went back for her books and coat and they hurried out into thebrittle air.
"Girl, you look terrible," Alice observed as soon as they got into thesunlight. ''What's happening?""I wish I knew. Where were you at lunch time? I tried to fmd you.""I needed to stop by the library so I bought a hamburger in town.
Sorry I missed you.""That's all right. You're here now." Louise took a deep breath andspoke even faster. "Listen, you know Janice, the junior who's a bio
major?""I think so. I've only seen her about twice since we've been here.""I know. I hardly ever see her either . But I saw her today. It waswhen I was going to lunch. She was way up on that hill that's behind
our dorm."''Wow. What was she doing up there? Collecting specimens?" Alicelaughed.
"Alice, this is serious. I don't know why she was up there, but there's
something else. Janice didn't have on any shoes or socks.""What?""I mean she was barefoot, walking in the snow."
Alice was completely attentive now, the frown creasing her forehead
mirrored Louise's.
''What ... why?""I don't know. When I tried to go after her she ran farther up the hill.
Then I had to go inside to waitress. After lunch I thought I'd better lookfor her so I went to her dorm. That's where I just came from."''Was she there?""Ahunh."''What did she say?""Hardly anything. I pretended that I wanted to borrow some botany
notes and she got them for me and then I left.""How did she seem?""Sort of out of it, like she was daydreaming or something. She hadon socks."
Louise stopped talking abruptly and turned to Alice. A knowing lookpassed between them. Besides fear, their faces shared a look of unsurprise,of resignation.
Alice whispered, "Let's go back to the dorm."
Louise nodded.
They walked in silence for minutes, the words about Janice a weight
between them.

67

"Alice, what do you think I should do?"Alice shook her head. This was a terror they had subconsciously anticipated, but still were not prepared for. The two of them together did nothave the experience or knowledge of a grown person. At least she didn't
think they did.
"I don't know, Louise. I never had to decide about anything like thisbefore," Alice said hesitantly. "Maybe it's not what you think it is. I
mean, maybe it's not so bad." Her words trailed off, stifled by her own
lack of conviction.
"Alice, you know it's bad. It doesn't make sense. It was wild for
Janice to be up on that hill in the freezing cold. It was something a crazyperson would do." The word "crazy" made Louise choke. She had felt
more or less crazy every day since she'd come to this silent place in thewoods, where nothing was familiar and everything was white. She felt
crazy every time she had to make some kind of truce between the person
whose life she had lived before and the new person of the moment, whostrugged every day to remember who that other person was.
"All right. Maybe it's crazy," Alice said, "but does that mean she'll
do something like that again? We could make a big fuss over it and it
could just be something that happened on this one day and she'll goback to being all right and we'll have caused a lot of trouble for nothing.
Anyway, who would we tell?"That was defmitely a problem. They barely knew their professors, thehousemothers were ancient old women who seemed distinctly upset that"colored girls" were being allowed to lower the standards of their almamater, they 'didn't know any of the doctors in the health center, they
didn't even know any older, wiser seniors who sometimes acted just as
disturbed by their presence as the housemothers. Who could they tellindeed?
"I don't know, but we probably should tell somebody. What if she
does it again, or something worse?""But there isn't anybody." They had often talked about their isolation,
how there were no other Black people around, on the campus, in thetown, nowhere. Now that fact became more than a personal source of
pain, it was terrifying because it insured their own and Janice's helplessness.
''Damn it! What are we supposed to do? Of course Janice is only aBlack girl. She should be happy to be at the third oldest white women's
college in America. She shouldn't let the fact that there are sixteen of us
and sixteen-hundred of them drive her crazy. Right?"
Alice looked into Louise's twisted face, could only grab her hand fora moment and answer almost to herself, "I know. They have us just where
they want us."
When they got back to the dorm, Alice offered to make coffee, but
Louise went straight to her room, unable to talk more about the things
she'd seen that day.

68She dropped her books and coat on the floor and fell onto her bed.
For once she was glad that the college hadn't seen fit to give her a roommate, that they were still experimenting with rooming arrangements forBlack students. Her head had begun to ache hours ago and now it waspounding. When she tried to sleep, however, the events with Janice kept
going through her head and her chest began to tighten. Finally she drifted
off. She began to dream.
She dreamed her family was at the college, standing in some importantlooking office and a voice was telling them something bad about Louise .
When her mother tried to defend her, the voice just laughed at her, at allof them-her aunt, her grandmother, herself. Then they were in a large
lecture hall and there were dozens of white faces laughing too. Their protestations made the laughing all the louder . And then the white people
turned their backs on them as if they were not even there. She saw her
grandmother dressed in an old dress, her hair in the rough braids she worearound the house. She was sitting in the lecture hall where they had theirsocial problems class. Her grandmother was at the center of the room.
Mr. Davis was saying something like, ''Today we will study the problemof the Negro. Here, class, is our exhibit." Then the whole class looked ather grandmother and the laughter began again. Their laughter was a thickroar which covered everything. Louise got up from her seat and tried totake her grandmother away from that place, but her feet would not move.
She began to scream, her face wet with tears. Her grandmother only
smiled.
Suddenly Louise jerked awake to the sound of laughing voices outside
her door. She was hot and sweaty from going to sleep in her clothes. Her
heart was racing. She tried to get her eyes to focus on her watch. Five
forty-five. She'd been asleep for hours and now she had to go down to
the dining room and get ready for dinner. She pulled herself out of bed,
feeling strange in the now dark room, not quite remembering why. As shereached for the light it came to her. "Janice," she said out loud . In thebathroom, splashing her face at the sink, the nightmare also returned.
They had been laughing at her grandmother. They had been laughing at
her. She did not want to go downstairs to wait on them, to be surroundedby their blank and staring faces. She went back to her room and sat on
the edge of her bed, slowly rocking back and forth covering her eyes withher hands. I have no choice, she thought, I have no choice. When she .
finally got up to leave, the words had become a chant, so regular they
comforted her. I have no choice, she repeated again and again to try to
make herself understand a fact that was incomprehensible. I have no
choice. Just like Janice, I have no choice.
For some days Louise was in a frightening place, but gradually the
day that Janice walked in the snow faded, was nearly erased by the routine of classes, exams, and her own aloneness. Occasionally there was a
respite, a movie or concert on campus, a "soul" weekend at one of the
men's schools that was perfectly awful, but at least provided an excuse

69

to get out . When Louise returned Janice's botany notes a few weeks after
borrowing them, she seemed distant, but otherwise OK. Still Louise
glimpsed something in her eyes that made her wonder. But, as Alice kept
reminding her, what could they do? One night , when she was in thelibrary, a group of them including Janice took a study break and went
over to town for sodas. Janice seemed almost happy that evening, although she said virtually nothing . She was very shy and undoubtedly,
Louise thought , as by herself as the rest of them.
At least the winter was breaking. Every day the weather became softer
bringing spring vacation nearer. Many of her classmates talked animatedly
about the trips they planned to the Islands or to Florida. Louise andAlice were just glad they could manage to go home.
The Sunday before vacation Louise found herself heading for chapel.
There was going to be a special service, a guest minister had been invited,
and Alice was singing some new music with the choir . Louise had foundthat one of the greatest advantages of being away from home was nothaving to go to church, but she promised Alice she'd come.
As she walked across campus some girls from her dorm caught up with
her and she found it easy for once to join in their chatter . A week fromnow I'll be home , she thought, and I won't mind going to church a bit.
She wondered what surprises Momma would have prepared for her arrival.
There was always something, a length of material for her to sew , maybe
one of Aunt Renie's yellow cakes, a bag of socks and underwear Momma
had got on sale. Since she had come here, home seemed more and more
like a haven,. a place where she could in all senses rest.
Inside the chapel Louise sat down at the end of a pew near the front
so that Alice would see her, then thought wryly there was no need forthis. Her color, so rare in this place, would be a magnet to Alice's eyes.
The choir marched in and the service began. Except when they sang,Louise's attention focused inward on pleasant visions of being home andof the summer break soon to follow . She wondered if she'd changed , if
this place that was so strange was making her into a stranger too. She
wondered if her constant efforts to protect the past that made her who
she was, had damaged her . Often older Black people at home talked about
the way going away changed their children. Louise felt that she was different, but she could not say exactly how. Only being at home again fora long time might show her.
The choir was standing up again. This must be the special music Alice
had described. Louise became completely attentive, yet as the singing
began, she thought how different it was from what she had grown up
with. So formal, the challenge was to sing it just as it had been written,
while at home the effort was to invent a sound that no one had ever
heard. Louise admired Alice, who needed music so much, she would singwith people who would never hear her own Black song. Louise imaginedthat she could hear Alice's voice separate from the rest sending a secretmessage directly to her .

70

In the midst of the singing there was suddenly a noise-a long cryarching above her containing both ecstasy and fright . Louise looked
around and saw a figure in the very back of the church. Even though she
didn't know who it was , she could tell it was someone Black. It was oneof them. The girl moved forward down the center aisle shouting and doinga jerky, awkward step, clapped and waved her hands high above her head.
Janice. It was Janice . Janice moved steadily on , rhythmically shouting
over and over, "He's got a hold on me , he 's got a hold on me . Hmmm .
Jesus got a hold on me , a hold on me ." The singing had stopped . There
was absolute stillness. No one moved , but hundreds of eyes stared, notbelieving or comprehending what they saw. Janice sobbed now , her words
all mixed up, but still she moved toward the altar . When it seemed that
she was going to climb into the pulpit, the minister finally moved toward
her , his hands extended. Louise could not tell if he meant to embrace heror push her backward . When Janice saw the minister, she immediately
darted away, ran quickly up the aisle screaming angrily , "Don't touch me.
Don't touch me! " Just before she reached the doors a group of men rosein front of her and blocked her way. There was a wall of white faces .
She ran in the opposite direction, but was blocked on that side by anotherwall of bodies . Janice ran back and forth , but the men had formed two
wedges and closed around her . Finally, she collapsed to the floor in thetiny space between their feet , sobbing and whimpering. As the men tried
to pick her up she resisted them , twisted and kicked , but after several
more minutes of struggling her cries stopped and they carried her fromthe chapel in a silent heap.
Louise stood absolutely still, astonished by what she was seeing, andyet she felt that she knew exactly what it meant. Janice had simply got
happy, like the countless people Louise had seen do the very same thingin her own church all through her childhood . The singing had given her
the spirit, but no one understood that except Louise. The faces aroundher were bathed in shock. They had no comprehension of what had
occurred and they talked and whispered to each other in hysterical voices .
They did not know that someone had gotten happy or what was needed .
When Louise was a little girl she had not understood either , had been
afraid 'of the high pitched screams and movement that suddenly filled a
Sunday morning. But her mother and grandmother had explained it toher, that the Lord was getting very close to the person and that the feeling was so great it had to go somewhere , so it arose in a shout and camethrough their mouths , went down to their feet and made them do a
happy dance . Momma told her she did not need to be afraid, but thatwhat the person wanted most was to hear the voices of everyone in the
church giving witness that they knew the spirit too.
Louise wanted to fmd Janice . She had to fmd her. She stood up justas the minister had obtained silence. As she turned into the aisle the choirbegan to sing . She looked back and found Alice's face . It was wet with71

tears. As Louise walked toward the back the hundreds of eyes stared ather with almost the same expression they had turned upon Janice moments before. She wondered why their eyes were fixed upon her so intently and then she remembered- that to them she and Janice must looka good deal alike. Louise did not care about their eyes . She had to fmd
her friend.
Outside on the steps, she looked for some sign of Janice or of themen who had taken her away. There was not a person in sight. The campus was as silent and empty as a deserted stage. Louise strained her ears
to catch a sound, looked everywhere for some sign of movement. There
was nothing. Where in the world had they taken her? She searched theentire campus and then walked aimlessly, not wanting to return to thedorm.
Later in the afternoon Louise found out that they had taken Janiceto the nearby state hospital. A few days after that someone in her familycame to take her home . Louise never saw her again.
Because Janice had kept so much to herself, her going hardly seemed
to make a difference in anybody's life, except for the initial sorrow andshame all the Black girls felt. For Louise, however, Janice turned into aghost whose presence hung over everything the rest of that year-a figure
who walked with her to classes, who was at her elbow when she waitressed, who silently stared at her when she tried to talk to the others,
and who watched her when she fmally went to her room, closed the door,
and wept.
copyright (c) 1981, Barbara Smith

72

Mary Ann Daly

BRIGID

It was one of those summer days when the sun's playing with little
wisps of cloud, and the air is thick and yellow, multiplying crickets ; andthen suddenly, for a moment only, it's full moonlight, silver : you hear
the mockingbird, grey and white ; and then the wisp trails away, or thesun rolls on, and it's yellow again. You can feel the blackberries ripening,
the stems get heavy, juice crowds the round skins. The tohee says, ''Drink
your tea." I sat in back of the house, dangling my feet in the weeds; felt
like a ripening blackberry myself.
Lila was bending in the garden several yards in front of me. Every year
we two women plant vegetables and every year we get herbs; they comeup of their own accord now, though at some point we must have planted
them: on her left , as she tends the radish, purplish mountains of comfrey,
like the Virginia hills that fold away from us on every side here ; on her
right , towards the house, yellow plumes of the dill; and behind her, looking into her seat, the surprised blue stars of the borage . "I, borage, bringcourage," they sibilate, wearing their white fur like frost.
Unlike us, the house is old . The timbers smell of compost, musty attimes, but most often sweet as dark, aging apple flesh: fermenting. Down
the hill an abandoned cabin dried out and collapsed under the willows;
but our house was built to last: far from collapsing, it stews in its own
cider. Our landlord, Mr. Mellis, remembers when this house was built: he
was a boy, his father a widower with a new young bride ; a white picket
fence divided their lawn frorn the fields. That fence has disappeared; andin its place, long tongues of grass lick the tops of the posts that hold thebarbed wire, as if to tease Mellis's cattle who wander at liberty among theirpatties on the shaven hills beyond. They come up to the fence and stareat us sometimes, at us and our overgrowth and our drunken house where
yellowjackets swarm out of the furniture and into the summer afternoons.
The cows moo at Lila and me, and then move on. Sometimes we moo back.
Some people around here still cultivate their pickets. A horse farm down
the road has miles of them, zigging over the property like mazes ; the lawns
they border are lush, perfect, horseless. Hesperus, the next property overfrom ours, is a working farm for the retarded: the pickets, pristine cottages,
pristine barns, salt licks for the cattle , beehives, pond whereon migrating
geese glide in harmony with domestic ducks: an idyll, everyone and everything in it forever young.
I sat out back watching Lila work and it was not as if she was working.
She was just out there, like everything was just out there, and I was just73

here, and Pooch just next to me on the walk, a concrete sidewalk that runs
from the gate to our back door; that seems funny now that 1 write about
it, as if a sidewalk here should seem out of place, but it doesn't, it's justhere. 1 breathed in my heart and out the top of my head, in my heart andout the top of my head, and it was as if the whole world-Lila, garden,
hills, sun-was a stream of light going through me. 1 closed my eyes andsaw Sai Baba, his curly head, his burnished face, standing, alive, and 1 sawthat he had a heart like Jesus's, into which the world flowed and whichpoured out the world; 1 opened my eyes and Lila was standing in a purple
flame, wiping her brow with her forearm .
Pooch began his little bark. He stood on the walk, waving his plumed
behind; his caved-in, half-blind face making sounds of indigestion at thegate, where a woman stood : Brigid , a girl from Hesperus. "Hi, Brigid," 1said. "Hi," she said. She stood_behind the gate without moving, barely
touching it; a cloud came over the sun. "Corne in," 1 said . She slid thelatch, the gate fell open. "Please close it behind you," 1 said. "The cows."
She turned back to shut the gate ; her pleated skirt swung with her, theheavy plaid skirt she wore in all seasons; and then its hem lay still against
her calves, against her knee socks, while she latched the gate. She carne
down the walk and stood over me, tall, plump, her yellow curls tanglingout of their ponytails : looking like an overgrown Heidi but for the factthat the right half of her face was gone, burned off, melted toward themouth in pitted swirls. The left side was fme, pretty, even. Lila looked up
at us, then walked into the comfrey. The sun came out.
"Hi," Brigid said again. "Sit down," 1 said , patting the pavement next
to me. She remained standing. Pooch waddled over and nudged my elbow
with his face. "Afraid of getting your clothes dirty?" 1 said. She nodded.
1 looked back out at the garden. Lila's head showed just behind a hill ofleaves, hatless, a wisp of hair lifting. When 1 didn't look at her, Brigid
seemed just another part of the scenery.
1 felt her tap my head and my hair spring back at her; 1 turned; pinkbuds appeared in the folds between the radiant ridges of her face. She
exaggerated each word the way children exaggerate lines in a play. "I'm aqueer," she said, pointing to her heart.
"What's that mean?" 1 asked.
"They said it . They said you're one too."''Who's they?""Bobbob and Angelo." She smiled her half-smile.
''Well, what do you think they mean by that? Sit down. Your skirt
won't get too dirty.""My skirt won't get too dirty ," she said. She sat down , hugging her
legs to her to keep them from entering the weeds. "I don't like that," shesaid.
"You don't like what, them calling you that?""No. That," she said, rocking toward the weeds.
1 felt glad the subject was changing. "It's a beautiful day," 1 said. 1

74

wanted her to like the weeds.
"Susan went away," she said.
''Who's Susan?"Brigid stopped looking at me. She looked out at the mountains, turned
the pretty side of her face toward me; it was as if someone had just tightened a loose bulb, making the light constant. "She fucked me," Brigid
said. "I fucked her, too . I liked that." She turned toward me again; thelight became jagged again; she said with reverence, over her bared knee,"She was prettier than I am. She let me see her with her panties down."
I tried to picture them together in Brigid's little cottage. I pictured theSusan who was one of the other twins in elementary school. They werewhat you'd call "cute," Susan and Sheryl , with little squat faces and naturally curly red hair. Joan and I had curly brown hair, but we weren't
identical. They were. Then Susan had Lila's body, and her breasts were
full, tipping slightly toward the mattress on either side. And then I wondered whether Brigid was scarred anywhere besides her face. I had always
thought of it as just her face.
''Do you like to fuck too?" she asked. "They said you're queer too.""Brigid, stop saying fuck and queer. There are better words for what
you're talking about .""There are?" she said, her face beaming with wonder. Then she let goof her leg and touched my shoulder gently, as though it were a fragile
bloom. She grew solemn . "Don't you want to fuck me?" she said.
"Oh, Brigid, I wish I did."Lila came up to us, stood in the weeds a few feet away. "Something's
eaten the cabbage ," she said. "And the peas, I can't even fmd the peas .
Hi, Brigid . But look." She held out five or six little bell peppers .
"Lila, Brigid's a lesbian," I said .
"Congratulations, Brigid," said Lila, going past us into the house.
"She's pretty," Brigid said .
"Yes, she is," I said . "I love her." I wondered if Brigid saw , looking atLila, anything like what I saw in her round face, her cornstraw hair, herfull knees: my world growing young, growing old; putting forth sunrise,swarms of butterflies, sunset , the night sky full of saucers and stars; holding me, covering the bone; getting up to pull an engine from a car. Or
was "pretty" just a word for women who could not inspire panic at firstsight?
"Me too," she said.
"No, Brigid. No, you don't. You don't love her. You think she's pretty.
Maybe you like her.""Maybe you like her," Brigid said . She had pulled her front shirttail
out of her skirt and was twisting it; the white cloth was already turning
grey under her thumb.
"Brigid," I said. ''We have some things to do around the house. I'mreal glad you came over, but you better go back now. It's starting to look
like rain ."75

"No," she said.
''They're going to miss you. They'll start looking for you. You bettergo back.""No . I don't like that. I'm not going to go there anymore.""But you have to go there. You live there.""No!""You can come back," I said. "This is my house . You don't live here.
You can come to visit. That's your house up there on the hill.""I don't want that house.""But it's nice. You have your room there." Brigid weaves mats withthe wool from the Hesperus sheep. She's good; her mistakes are the fruitsof an unconscious genius. A purplish knot in the corner is surrounded bybare threads leading into a field of dirty lumps like the back of a sheep.
Maybe they're not mistakes .
"No," she said. She threw her big arms around me and held me tightagainst her. Her shirt moved gently on my cheek; but I pushed up her
elbow and tore out from under it. I stood over her on the pavement.
"Get out of here," I said.
She sat there twisting her shirt again. Her breast heaved in big sobs,
but she did not cry. "I'm sorry ," she said.
"Go home." I turned toward the back door. Our house looked peaceful,damp.
"OK. ," I heard her say faintly as I went inside .
Lila sat on the edge of the bed, sagging the mattress, unlacing her boots.
Dirt fell from them to the floor .
"I saw your aura today," I said. She pried off her boot. "I don't see itnow." She pried off the other one and lay back on the pillow; the shirt,
half-open, lay flimsy against her chest.
"Whad it look like," she said. She reached behind her for the bedpost;
the mattress was about to roll her onto the floor.
"Purple. "''What's that mean?""Passion," I said, pulling my shirt over my head; we giggled like a
flock of girls, like twins, like the rain, which I heard falling everywhere
but on us, as I climbed over her into the bed . There was a lowing out inthe rain, as if the shower itself were longing for the barn.

76Valerie Miner

NOVENAIt all came back to Susan like the rosaries , one decade after another.
First her mother Mary's story and then Susan's own story. Sometimes
Susan confused the two stories, in the sense that we are all each other's
memories and premonitions.

Mary
Pubic hair, dark curls against blue-white skin, is all she rememberedof her own mother . Mary was seven-and-a-half when the "doctor" left her
mother dead on the kitchen table . They said her mother was a blonde,
but Mary didn't remember. They said her mother was French. Mary
appreciated that when she was older. (Stuart romance in Edinburgh's dourback streets.) The pubic hair, she did remember, was flecked with grey.

Susan
The blood on the sheets of the double bed came from her toes, Susan'smother said. From clipping her toenails too close. But it smelled of sex
and she couldn't fool Susan with this fairy tale . Susan was already eight,
so she knew she was too old to be an orphan and she remembered morethan pubic hair . Susan remembered that when her father was at sea andher mother slept alone, there was blood on the ironed muslin sheets. She
would crawl in next to Mom, snuggling away from the nightmares. Her
mother never revealed her own dark dreams. But Susan knew, even then,that the blood was too high up for toes.

Mary
Mary's mother's photograph stood on the bookcase for four years
after her death. Later Mary could never remember her mother's face, but
she did remember all the books, each by place . Fifty years later. The
Everyman volumes of Scott, the red leather Burns. And the Milton .
Mary's father would bring down Paradise Lost and read her the order ofthe world. He would leave her oatmeal bubbling on the stove each morning. Mary always came straight home from school and prepared his supper.
They took care of each other this way after her mother's death. But there
was never enough warmth for his cough.

77

SusanSusan's grandma, her father's mother, lived in the upstairs bedroom
and never cried. Sometimes the "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" under her
breath was more expletive than prayer, but Susan never saw the tears.
Urine bottle on the lace doily. ''Would you empty it dear?" Susan pretended it was orange juice and never smelled the difference. She took careof her father's mother the way she would have taken care of her father
if he had ever been home. The pus oozed from Grandma's leg ulcer as
Susan changed the muslin dressings. She washed yesterday's blood fromthese remnants. They dried outside on the line, slightly yellower than the
double bed sheets, the stains gone from both. Susan never heard hermother or her grandma cry. Not even over onions.
Mary
Mary bawled with anger. On a sunny Saturday morning riding thePrinces Street trolley down toward Leith and Portabello Beach. She wasgoing home, alone, from the Royal Infirmary. When they had registered
the night before, him alternately choking and spitting blood, he told her
not to worry . God would take care of them both. He reminded Mary
that HE would always be with her. And these people on the trolley, whatright did they have to live, to laugh. She would never forget him, never.
He would always be with her.
Susan
He came back periodically. Susan didn't remember much about her
father, but she did remember the Japanese stamps, the Easter cablegram
and a telephone call from Argentina just-to-say-hello. Her mother polishedthe Swiss music box, dusted the ivory elephant carvings from India andthe fat ceramic god Ho TaL Susan remembered her mother being happy
for days before he returned. Once he brought back three bronze busts, ofwomen in the traditional coiffures of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, cut
off just before the nipples. He would stay home for two or three months
at a time.

Mary
Broken chocolate and the News of the World. Mary would run down
Leith Walk for their treats and race back home for the two evening hours
before the coal fire. Her little brother Peter was there, too. Beautiful,blonde Peter. (It must have been true about her mother being a French
blonde.) But she was his daughter. "Remember you're a Gibson and I
love you," her father would say. She knew that, even the day he chased
her out of St. Mary's Cathedral with a switch. All right to play with Maria
Ciotti, to eat her mother's spaghetti, but never let him catch her again inthat Papist sanctuary. She remembered for a long time afterward, because
the switching was so unlike him.

78

SusanSusan's mother taught her the Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Glory
Be . Susan brought home the classroom rosary beads in the belly of thestatue of the Infant of Prague which opened at the bottom like a piggy
bank. Sister Matthew told them that the family that prays together stays
together. But one afternoon when Susan was sitting with her father
watching the Dodgers smash the Giants , he told her that her motherwasn't Catholic. She screamed and demanded he tell her she wasn't
Jewish. (Sister Matthew had warned about the Jews.) "Go ask yourmother," he teased, "go tell her you thought she was a Jew ." "Protestant," Mary said heavily. She put her arms around Susan and told her
God loved everyone. But Susan knew, then, that her mother Mary would
not be saved.
Mary
After his death, Mary's half-sisters were always around-like fadedaunts, somewhere in the background. They were kind to her , but restrained. Their mother, who was her mother, had run away to live withher father, who was not their father. Jennie , Kate, Patsy were older sisters
who treated her kindly, especially after everyone's mother died . Mary.
She was sweet, wee Mary. But neither Mary nor her sisters could forget
she was a Gibson.

Susan
When Susan told Ann Crisillo that her family was moving all the way
to Seattle for her father's shore job, Ann let Susan into the clique . Susan
was invited to play in the family room which Dr. Crisillo had paneled andhung with the heads of dead animals. There was an all-color gumball machine. In June, Ann Crisillo came around to the house and pressed her
nose on the warm backdoor screen . ''Mrs . Campbell, will you see Eskimos
in Seattle?" Susan was mortified by the question. She dreaded her mother's
honest, boring answer. ''There are snowy mountains," said her mother.
Susan interrupted, "And moose." Her mother continued, "and the Pacific
Ocean." The Pacific Ocean! Ann and Susan regarded each other seriously.
They 'were passionate friends those last three weeks in New Jersey on the
Atlantic Ocean.
MaryNow, Mary always thought of her favorite teacher, Miss Mackie, when
she started her shift at Fairley's Cafe. It was a kind of magic insurance
policy against Miss Mackie coming in and discovering that she wasn't going to be a bookkeeper after all. That day, two years before, when Miss
Mackie treated her to lunch at Fairley's had been the high point of Mary's
entire life. Better than being Top Student. Better than getting married
which Mary would never do anyway, because she was going to be a career
woman like Miss Mackie, as she had promised her father.

79

SusanSusan's chubby thighs stuck to the green naugahyde chair, She criedand cried. The kitchen chair had been baking on the sidewalk with therest of the furniture , ready to be confiscated by the Mayflower man. It
took a while for them to find her bawling in the street. "Some sight you
make, Clownface ," her mother said. "I won't go." "He'll always be withus from here on out," her mother said. "I won't go." Her mother hugged
her tightly. Susan didn't want to be childish, so she went into her empty
bedroom and played with the doll Ann Crisillo gave her to make them
blood sisters . The doll's arms fell off just before supper.

Mary
Mary saw them come in the side door. Miss Mackie and a pudgy little
girl smiling and chattering under her freckles and straw hat and red hair.

Luckily, Mary's morning shift was almost over . She had a date with thatsailor Andy Campbell who always wanted her to marry him and go off
to America.

Susan
It was late. Susan's father never came home before midnight now.
Because of this Alaska oil line , tricky business . So Susan would sit up
with her mother and talk about times as long ago as Ann Crisillo and themoose. Susan always fell asleep in algebra the next morning, but someone
had to stay up with her mother, to say he would be all right. Even though
the roads were slippery and he was a terrible driver, especially throughwhisky fumes. Susan longed for the Easter cablegrams and the calls from
Argentina. She knew it would never be all right and here they were on
the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Susan wished he would die, but instead,he and the bleach-blonde woman took off together for San Diego.

*****
Grey hair across the booth of the downtown diner. Mary's hazel eyesreflecting back to Susan what once was, what might have been. She cuts
the deck, deals them each a canasta hand and keeps an eye out for customers. An old lady, cashiering at an all-night coffee shop . A middle-aged
daughter, keeping her company. Hail Mary. Our Father. Glory Be . The
words slip out with the cards. Who said them? Neither woman acknowledges. But perhaps someday yet they will talk about the blood too highup for toes.

80Catherine Risingflame Moirai

FOUR POEMS IN SEARCH OF A SOBER READERI.

We have a history, yes
and it is full of women
who diedbecause some man
decided weshould be stoned orburned or shut up.
I carry with me visionsof Women screaming as
the flames rise as
the doors close as
the rocks fall
and they are visionsof us.
We have a history,
she and I
and we both know the feelof locked doors
our fists against the wall
the words no one wanted.
We have a history
and we know either of us
could have had electrodes
strapped on lit up
could have had stony streetsturn harder.
But we survived, yes
and I was proudof that and of our love
proud of her I drank
her like the coolest waterand every act of love
was also praise .
But it was not enough:our lover's knot couldn't bind
her into peace .

81

She's gone to live with a man
and on the walls
are cartoons of women.
She spends nights smoking
in the bars;
she tells me she will sellwhat is at hand. She wants to prove
she's normal
and I am left to mournher still living.
This is a social disease
the desire to benormally dead.

II.

A woman in the mills
who sweated out her lifeand each week watched her husband
pay her wages to the tavern
had cause to be mad.
Hunger and beatings breed
frustration and anothernine months later. Ragewas easy too, for a woman
standing without a votewatching a man stagger
from the saloon where he casther future, his wishes.
And the woman
helpless to save her daughter
from the man in her life
was foolish like a bird
beating against the bars.
We have forgotten why
women went with hatchets
to destroy the demon
drink. Our books show cartoonsof ugly faces beneath absurd
hats; we say those women werefoolish and neurotic.
We are embarrassed by thisevidence of women who moved
against the flow of reason.

82

Those were simple stories
too hard to tell in school.
But when men laugh, listen
closely. We of all movements
should know the power of bad press.
Ridicule is a powerful brew
and served to us for reason .

III .

When everything is connected
the smart man makes a profit
on the links. Consider shipping rum,
New England to Africa. Whitemen bought dark bodies and piled themtight as caskets in the hold.
The cost was low: a woman
for ninety-five gallons, a man
for thirty more. It was best
to mix the captives, never taking
many of a common language
lest they remember each otherinto freedom and revolt.
The middle passage was the hardest.
The cargo died inconveniently
or mutinied against the chains.
Some starved themselves; others found releasethrough the nets spread above the sharks.
At least ten of every hundred died .
A month before the end, the women
were bathed in salt waterand given to the crew.
In the sugar colonies
sale was quick. Demand was always high;a third of the arrivals died
\Vithin three years. Survivors
worked the cane : planted , cut, milled
and boiled . Yankee traderscarried home the sugar
and molasses for making rum
and so it began again.
This is historical fact.
The slick magazine , feminist83to the core, has pictures of the beautiful
people who drink
Puerto Rican rum. The bestof course is white,
very expensive. So are the people.
I imagine they speak
perfect English.

IV.

when I ask for free space
the woman over there
says we must keep our meetings
accessible and Fay, black,has more pain
and needs her drugs
to continue
and Angie, poor,
remembering rape, can
not go on
without her bottle
pounding on the waIl
til my hands are blue
I want to drink
to forget
my mother, stumbling down the haIl
did not drink because she was
Catholic divorcedon welfare with two children
or because my father
abused her and left
my mother, vomiting on the bed
drank because she did
not stop
watching a woman kill herself
by inches of a bottle
is nota revolutionary act84

Elva Perez-Trevino

MILAGRA:Character Sketch of a Woman Looking

All those that wish to die today are anxious for tomorrow when thepossibilities of meeting death grow greater . Tomorrow is like today andyesterday, each a more violent day of hungry souls grappling at faintimages of themselves. For them, the repetition heard in clanking chainsthat bind is a security: a deaf world is anxious for any sign . New visions
and new insights claim responsibility, momentarily expand to occupy
space on short notice, and then die for lack of attention. Sometimes
though, when connections of thought and attention are made, new images
form. They are blessed with a flair for movement, and their trails markspace with bands of fermented matter: large landscapes open where none
existed before. One thought lets go into a thousand and more pictures.
A new persona births and dies within split seconds, or it grows horns andtacks on colors and meaning to everyday existence by waiting ... observing ... studying the hues of sunsets leaves an impression of heat.
Today Milagra decided that she could not believe in anyone thought
long enough to see it give form . .. take shape. At thirty she has lost alluse of her mind ... she is busy being self-conscious. Too preoccupied
with impressions, she laughs and cries with herself. Either she functions
or she creates ... the fme edge of her creativity carves space with a thinblade ... here life slices into profane and sacred ... all is minor divisions.
Today she became sweaty when she caught sight of herself looking at
herself in the mirror: as a reflection she did not recognize herself. She
has been thinking about passion and tries to envision herself as lover . . .
she seduces herself into a tangent of thought. She avoids looking at her
reflection, but she needs to see.
Her mind, in order to restore its equilibrium, creates fantasy in anotherdimension. She paints new visions because she knows, that no matter
where, she is just a manifestation of static ... she represents the ultimate
in a process designed to complete divine desire into action. As her connections to pain and knowledge slowly dissolve into a still-picture, a new
vision spins off.
"A woman who disowns herself can sit on any beach," mumbles
Milagra's mind to itself. Milagra's usual state of waiting leads her into a85

diffused awareness where her senses do not yet shatter against rigid barriers. She withdraws to another part of her thinking. Totally immersed incontemplation, she stands before the mirror desperate to feel anything,even pain . .. to understand even the negative can be positive. In the
mirror, her face shys . Short bits of anxiety spring from old sores ... hereyes waver before themselves.
"In all honesty, I don't recognize myself . .. how strange ... I neverlook at my face, unless it's to pick at some flaw." Milagra initiates a selfcontemplation that leads to alienated feeling . .. the absence of firm
ground that nurtures seeds of knowledge not yet understood: ignorance
confronts its lack of self-respect. She reaches into the source that makes
her look, all the fertile memories of childhood, the want and the desperateness .
"These beasts of malcontent are suppose to die some time ... a lotof people accept that time will erase the most bitter of life . .. yet , I see
the necessity for full circles ... something continuous in my life thatmakes sense. I'm not comfortable not knowing what to choose for myself. After all, what do I do because I want to . . . how much of my life?
And why do I sound so melodramatic about it? What is necessary ...
which divisions .. . which circle?"This seventh morning in July , a woman stands on the beach. The day
barely lightens over the water. No gulls screech and the wind whips palm
leaves with steady intensity. The woman is alone . She scans the blended
horizon of-sky and ocean. Her footprints wash free with each wave thatsurrenders onto the harder sand made of cracked shells. On the wet sandtiny crabs scatter, preparing for the new day, they scurry for their foodand shelter . The woman stands silent, eyeing the vastness of unfumed
terrain, the lack of solid ground halting her deliberate, wandering step ofcuriosity and self-exploration .
Milagra never feels integrated during these moments of self-realization.
In a frenzy, anxious to feel relief in this microcosm, she reclaims random
moments from her life, no matter how painful or unnecessary. The work
involved in testing her instincts for safety, recalling dead and live fears,
are the measure of her personhood. To venture closer to shedding oldpatterns, to tentatively stroke new strengths, creases her forehead withconcentration. Accepting what she sees of herself reflected is a deliberate
and necessary process.
.
The woman sitting isolated underneath the sun shifts her eyes and herhead travels full circle. Her gaze focuses on two native women squatting
in a palm tree's shade . Her face intrigues them; with vacant eyes she
pierces their souls. She moves them from the abstraction of waiting to theconcrete wondering. They accept that this woman appears temporarily;

86intentionally brief, she lights on a petal of thought. Her eyes look inward
and the women know they must remain a silent refuge for this wanderingsoul. Her face wears the curious pout and downcast mask of the Uninvited ; her presentation remains constant. She is numbed against the world:
she is both microscope and specimen, another full circle which can respond in full form to its self-containment. She has come to this point
and this beach before, but always ignorant of her whereabouts. Convinced
in some mirror reflection, she visits with her only exclusive possessions ,her self-worth, though at times it be nothing more than a bitter pit.
In the mirror Milagra can see herself, naked body gold-gilded by candle
light. Her own hands run from her smooth throat to her shoulders aroundto her breasts. She cups her left breast and recalls her girlhood, the discovery of being able to lick her own nipple while she masturbates. She
grows hot with shame with the recognition of her intense sexual demands ,and she disputes with the feeling of shame. Old pain momentarily rears
its angry tail. She sometimes is still ashamed of her early introduction tosex. Sexual abuse memories surface daily and make her a deliberately
cautious woman . Then, from deep within her conflict, she loses sight ofherself as her head lowers towards her breast, towards forgiving that girl.
She regresses in honor of that moment and in the mirror Milagra releases
her mind. She can be spied suckling her breast. Sounds shift the small
candle flames with puffs of movement.
The two native women talk among themselves. Their facial expressions
direct a limited conversation of precise exchange and connection . In
appearance their similar dress blends them into a double image of thesame person. To the observing eye they are a vision of brown skin, dark
features, and strong builds . They rest on their haunches, their toes flick
sand at insects that pester.
"That one will learn not to wait ," Acatl , the older of the two natives ,says, motioning with a jut of her chin towards the isolated woman.
"We have watched and remained silent for too long. The mornings that
she has greeted the same dawn now accumulate the space and time ofmany 'years ." Santos is still young, and does not express herself well, butplain enough.
Acatl, intentionally greeting new information with a philosopher's ·fever, replies . "She will learn because in waiting she learns how time andits phases are relative. When she learns that she can forgive and still not
accept what she forgives she will move on to another moment that will
no longer concern our silence , nor this dawn." The two native women are
aspects of Milagra's inner dialogue with herself: two women whose existence lives in the hiatus between what Milagra knows and what she would
like to know.

87

Milagra's head slowly returns to an even level where her eyes meettheir reflection in the mirror. She licks her lips and spreads herself open
at the crotch. Her fmgers trace every fold of skin, as her own smell assails
her nostrils, she is gone again into her subconscious. She can be observed
twisting thought behind leveled eyes: small flames flicker ... it is a newlight. The look of self-containment can not be negated.
Milagra relaxes her hold on herself and begins to focus once again on
her body. Her hands extract themselves from within her female hole. She
turns towards the wash basin, runs cold water, and splashes her face, neck,and chest. She blows out the candles and moves into the sunny livingroom. Her thinking process is fully engaged in sorting through information
about who she is.
"Are my sisters as scared of daily routine as I am?" Milagra pushes thequestion as dialogue with herself.
On the beach Acatl and Santos have stripped their wrapped skirts
creating a multi-color canopy of shade. They flank the woman like mental
apparitions. They become the boundaries of an increased awareness whose
momentary presence creates a womb out of the entire of loose space.
Meaning attaches to life , reasons throw off defmitions. Milagra breaks one
connection and makes countless others. In another setting through an
open window, the sun can be seen aging. Shadows grow on walls, likeeven fungus when enough moisture remains to preserve microscopic life.
"How does. that feel Milagra?" She addresses herself. ''When I look atmyself it feels like I must diminish myself ... as I resolve who I am I
fmd I can't forget my audience. All those who have seen who I am ...
in my ignorance, my response has always been sincere." But, she fmds
little comfort in this last thought.
The setting sun throws amber shadows of swaying mesquites at her
feet.
"It feels tough to speak ... this is what my nightmares say! In them
I yank my gums and jaws in necessity to rid my mouth of what sticks:
old gum in the way of my talking. It's true." Here Milagra becomes awareof a defmite character to her existence, the firm belief in dreams sets astraight line she can follow.
She is drawn by the amber shadows of tree limbs grappling with theroom, an outward picture of what happens inside her head. She sits on
the floor, she sits within the casting rays of the dying sun.
"How much longer do I have to keep thinking about changing ...
transforming my visions into realities, before I change? I've self-arrested. . . I'm stuck ... on myself ... my mind can't breathe ... split second
leaping from faith to trust is still hard for me. Thinking it over, I don't
know how to be open . .. be vulnerable? . .. and still not be expectant of
those who open me up. How to change preoccupation to action . .. to88

act before thinking ... maybe I need to learn to let go ... not to holdon.
Steel grey clouds pierce the open, blue sky. Seagulls travel the single
whisper of wind and water. They hunt surface waters for fishes. They
form shadows over a private strip of land where all thought converges
into newness. Here anticipation and hunger wait in vain for a woman
who takes her time in arriving at new conclusions. Here reasons are notformed out of the systematic leaping of logic, but are found in the satisfied look a woman gives herself in the mirror . Recognizing the foreign
element narrows down the choices of deciding: to acceptance, or change,or death. This clarity has not been familiar, but the words are simple
and easily understood like hallucinations and dreams. The symbols andmessages are there, but what's important is the ambiance of their space... can it nurture.
Acatl and Santos hold firm to the fabric now a billowing wrap in a
new, more gentle wind. A cool shadow forms a larger canopy above thetrio. The two native women continue to be a staunch guard. The woman
for whom barriers are difficult to erect, keeps the guard, the key of her
journey, in check with her peripheral vision. She welcomes their beauty
as she notices how blowing sand turns their hair white, and she unfolds
into their significant presence. Milagra notices their warm smell andaccepts her curiosity. Without thinking, she stands up, turns her backagainst the water and the waiting. Two women of firm step follow her
into the thicker terrain, away from the water. Their procession is commanded by a single instinct: to follow the path that travelling day leaves.
"A woman who disowns herself can sit on any beach," Milagra's mind
mumbles to itself as it turns outward. Three women walking flow in asingle line against the horizon, blot out against the setting sun.

89

Celeste Tibbets
BLOODLINESi.

i am not afraid of blood
red blood
not that of blood tests
or red cross donations
or cuts
not that which passes from me each monthin rich strong colors
i respect my red bloodit's not my bloodit's my bloodline that i fear
the blood i fear has no color
except the flesh tones
which shape it
the blood of my grandmothers
who live chained to food and toil
the blood of my father
who let go of truth
in exchange for money
the blood of my motherwho has stayed
thirty years in her marriage
because she is afraid to live alone
without a husbandn.
i was carved out from you
my scalp still holds the scar
where the knife slipped into my forehead
just inches above my eyes
had the cut been lower
would i still see your eyes in the mirror
would strangers still stop me90

in grocery stores to say:-you don't know me do you but i know that you're lyndal's daughter
you must be you have her eyes i knew your motherwhen she was thin and young as you
when you die there won't be the usual inheritanceyou sold your silver that fallwhen he left you
with little moneyand you were hungry and sickwe have no family jewels
except for your wedding ring
but diamonds never shone for me
there are no quilts to hand me down
no knitting needles
only the felt ornaments you sew each christmas
so when you die
it will be your eyes that you leave
long after your eyes shutunless i die first
i will have your eyesiii.

you gave me these scars in my eyes
your words cut me
cut through me
for years
you made me afraidof my face in the mirror
or in someone else's face
you made me afraid of you
i was 22 before i could look you
in the eyes
- afraid to not be perfectafraid to appear as blemishedas my adolescent skin
your fatherly warnings cut through me- you've been picking your face haven't you- you need a dermatologist-you're going to be pock-marked
your warnings scarred me afraid91

never good enough for you-why
didn't you make all A's, how come, huh?
i was afraid
to make mistakes
never good enoughfor anyone
else
as a teacher ,afraid to make mistakes
as a friend
afraid to make too manywith a lover
afraid to not be perfectafr,aid to not be perfecti have other scars from my childhood
scars on my knees frombike wrecks skates and skateboardsa chicken pox mark on my thighthey've mostly faded
but the scars on my eyes remain
afraid that if i'm seen too closely
i won't be good enoughthe scars in my eyes remain
but i've learned to ignore themas one learns, to ignore large birthmarks
and facial moles
i live in ignorance of them
until i come too closeand my eye contact begins to vanish
afraid to not be perfectnever good enough for you
afraid to not be perfectiv.
in your eyes
i can do little wrong
the fIrst grandchild on either side
i was a perfect baby the perfect childi can do little wrongi become your saviour at christmas
your breath of fresh air in perk's roomof ceaseless cigarettes and television
i am the future you never had
the youth you gave up at 1392

to marry
and at 14 to have my father
i am the lives you never led
the schooling the travels the freedom
you turned over to your men
you know my skin
but not my blood
not my rivers
or what makes me boil
you love what your minds have molded of me
but you don't know me
not my soil or sands or soul
you love the child you've made up
and in your eyes
i can do little wrongv.
i am not afraid of red blood
the blood i fear
has no color
except the flesh tones which shape it
it's my blood line that i fear
the tendencies and traits you passed down to me
the connections that i have had no choice ofi fearthat your blood in me might some day
run stronger than my own
that i'1l drown in your bloodthat it will cause me to chase comfort
instead of unanswered questions
cause me to lose control
and to grow obese and weary young
i fearthat i'1l be afraid to live alone
and that i'1l drownin your blood rust93

Paula Gunn Allen

THE LEGEND(Chaco Canon, Mesa Verde)
We never understood the significanceof the abandonment, whether
it was a cause of personality
or not. Certainly,
there were persons involved,
possibly goddesses, spirits and gods,
but whether they were simply
bullets shot from an unaimed gun,or whether one stood anddeliberately chose a target
was not said.
The oldest manuscript maintainedthat she had done it all,that had she moved
in certain ways uncongenial to her nature,
the collision of body and projectile
would never have occurred.
Later manuscripts analysed it differently,
and held the invisible hand responsible,
though there were those who would insist
that such collisions (collusions) werein the nature of things, andnot to be understood. Abundance
figured in it, they all agreed, but how
its lack transpired (luck) could not be
understood.
The elder tales were genially ignored.
(San Ysidro, Cabezon)
We went up the pass, she and I,
to see the mountain turning,watched it discoverits golden light
rejoicing
we followed a rutted roadcenter blooming and filled with rocks,
yellow, magenta and pale brown,that kept us twisting, unable to see
what was ahead, climbing

94

until the valley opened wide below
fading into simple blue as the sky,
revealing distance to our astounded eyes.
We were reminded of an old wanderer's dream,a stream fizzing and bubbling among the hills,
the blooming, smokable treesthe kind and perfect ease anyone would wish for,going so unbelieved.
I want to tell you this:the notion of how it ought to be,name of an Eskimo god who sits,
content, grinning. He understands.
And so do you, and I,
if only we could remember
the banks are steep,
the peaks so far away,
but in between
a careful space of perfect springs
and all we'd ever need,and swift winds on the peaks
where the light is clear.
(Jemez)Walking along the dry arroyo bed
we pick up bits of chipped,shaped flint, obsidian, fmd manos
scattered almost randomly
among the stones.
The air is warm.
Cicadas sing in the twisted junipers,
low wind builds behind, murmuring
old forgotten songs.
The women used to come here to work
before the land went slack
vacantand white.
It is important
to know how they thought ,the white ancestors of the woman
I walk beside: theyneeded something to fear,
something frightening to name,to speak about their inner senseof things.

95

And so it was.
Someone else reaped
their despair.
Over the next hill at the mesa's footthe village curls around itself.
There is a picture on a stone near my hand,
the line of eternal return, circling.

FALL RETURN
There is this:skimming light among the trees,
leaves sparking,old women facing destiny
blazing as gloriously:on their mark.
The set of their limbs is not grievous,
ready to make the last long arabesquethey go singing, thin wrinkled voices waveringon the turquoise air. Falling
toward the earth once and for all. They
counted all the years.

96Martha Boethel

THE FLOOD

Looking at old FSA photographs
on a winter afternoon in Brooklyn, New York.
Looking at : a sharecropper's hands,
small children on a rotting porch,plowed fields that have dried to dust.
Remembering you
and your garden of withered tomatoes ,bell peppers, mustard greens,on a farm near Valera, Texas.
Those rutted rows of grey soil.
The drought that hung on through winter.
Now I remember your husband's hands,
his grand pianoin the living room of that cropper house .
(You told me about the fllth you found ,how you shoveled a six-inch layerof rat shit and dirt off the floors ...)
His fmgers were red from the cold
as he played a cold, pounding Bach.
He refmished your furniture ,applied for professorships at small mountain schools
like the one that had let him go ,while the winter fields rolled around you.

• • •I came to visit on Sunday afternoons ,sat on the cedar bench to hear Carl play.
I drank tea
brewed with the water you hauled from town.
I watched your children
tumble with the collie in the cold:
the tumbling colors of brown, beige, blonde,
red-gold against the grey ground .
I imagined mud, grain , harvests,

97the colors of hay and wheat.
Your long hair loose in the fields.
Sometimes we all drove the thirty miles
across Coleman County to your parents' farm,where the weedy hills, pecan bottoms
and feed-lot cows were decoration,and the Colorado with its spongy water table
kept the wells from going dry.
We went there to swim.
(You told me
how the government took the river bottom;
how your father fmally endorsed the check
and used it to build an indoor poolat the top of the hill.)
We went to stand inside the plate glass walls,
to look through fog
at the fat green river down the hill.
We. went to dive into lukewarm waterand come up again, eyes stinging.

• • •We went there the last Sunday I saw you.
You left the kids at the house with Rosita.
You swam laps with your father,went on swimming
while he sat dripping in a lawn chair,drinking a Schlitz, talking to Carl.
You swam close to the edge, and slowly;
after each lap you slid another clothespin
down the string your father had stretched
across the corner of the pool.
I floated on my back,watched your steamy reflection in the glass,remembered walking in your back door,
fmding you in the bedroom, folding and refolding
towels. You said, "Carl knows."
Carl, at the piano, crying,
red fmgers pushing at his glasses .
He said , "Just don't shut me out."
He said , "I'll try to understand it,"and ''This is what she's always wanted ."Finally he said,"I can't think about it anymore.
I want to have an ordinary Sunday afternoon."98• • •
I got out of the pool when I bumped hard into Carl,
who was swimming laps now, too.
I went into one of the dressing rooms,
turned on the shower.
I wondered what I was going to do.
Then the shower curtain moved.
You were laughing .
You stripped off your suit and swimming cap
and slung them over the curtain.
You stood just under the nozzle;
I watched the water flood over you,soak into your hair, stream off your nose,
your shoulders, breasts.
Laughing, you turned your head up,
let the water run into your mouth,
and with a mouth full of water kissed me .

99

Judith McDaniel
THE PRIVILEGE OF CHOICE

A review of Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love
Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present by Lillian Faderman,
William Morrow & Co., 1981. $10.95.496 pp.
Lillian Faderman has written an important book, one which I hope wewill be exclaiming over and arguing about for years to corne. Surpassing
the Love of Men whets the appetite by satisfying a need we perhaps did
not even know we had: as a result the reviewer is tempted only to ask formore without noting profoundly enough the riches Faderman has provided.
I will try in this review to deal with the book Faderman has written, notthe four or five more books I hope she will write. But one of the richesof her subject is that it continually suggests areas, theories, problems which
will need the further attention of all of us-readers , historians, literary
critics, fiction writers, poets, and feminist theorists.
To describe Surpassing the Love of Men is to recognize that Faderman
has given us tluee books in one. The first is a history of romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the end of thenineteenth century. The second shows the transition from society's acceptance and approval of this love to an attitude of disgust and horror at suchlove as a perversion of "normal" heterosexual love. Finally, Faderman provides a brief account of the rise of lesbian feminism : our attempts in thelast fifteen years to counter the definition of love between women as "perverted," to build a strong and healthy base for woman-identification.
Using letters, diaries, poems, and other written accounts, the firstsection of this book copiously documents the phenomenon of primary
love and support between white women in the middle and upper classes
of western Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. Faderman disproves the frequent and self-serving assertion of heterosexual literary critics
that the expression of passionate, physical love between these women wasa "mere" literary convention without real meaning or substance in theirlives. Given the choice, most of the women Faderman writes about would
have chosen to live with, be with, sleep with their women friends rather
than the husbands to whom they were-most frequently~conomicallyand legally bound.
'
Lillian Faderman did not invent the definition of lesbian that insists weare only what we do sexually, specifically that a woman is only a lesbian
if she engages in genital sexual SOMETHING with another woman. (More100specific still, I was once told by a heterosexual woman, "After all, at mostyou're only a lesbian for a few minutes a day ," that is, we are only lesbians when we are engaged in a sexual act with another woman.) Nonethe-'less, Faderman is saddled with the inevitable question-did they or did
they not make love, have sexual contact as we understand it-since it has
been asked (or the answer assumed) about women in centuries past. From
the Ladies of Llangollen to Eleanor Roosevelt , IT seems to be the burningquestion, and part of the tact of Faderman's book is to not assume one
answer for all centuries. But almost invariably, for those of us who knew
ourselves lesbian before we knew sexual intimacy with a woman, the discussion seems irrelevant and misleading. And for those of us who are nervous about straight women taking on the name aesbian as a political identity
without giving up the perquisites of heterosexuality, the discussion seems
foreboding and potentially divisive. Faderman argues intelligently that theanswer is ultimately unimportant: what we must see through to is theneed of those asking the question-a need which is rigid and seeks to limitthe "perversion" of lesbian sexuality to a few oversexed , misdirected freaks.
But I disagree with certain aspects of Faderman's analysis. She argues that,usually, romantic friends were not lovers as we understand that word. Perhaps not. But the issue that interests me , which Faderman does not explore,
is whether two women could have chosen what was "unknown," sincelesbian sexuality was obviously undiscussed. If they chose to act against
the defmition of themselves as women (that defmition which said women
had no sexual feelings of any description), how might that have affected
the other choices which such women made in their lives? I wonder if such
women would have been more able to resist the patriarchy in other areaseconomic, social, cultural?
The question of choice is an important one in this first section of thebook in another way. Women who could choose how they would live
their lives were very few and very privileged. "I am well aware that there
are many fme men," writes seventeenth-<:entury novelist Madeleine de
Scudery, ''but when I consider them as husbands, I think of them in therole of masters, and because masters tend to become tyrants, from that
instant I hate them. Then I thank God for the strong inclination against
marriage he has given me ." Faderman comments that ''when their families
and fortunes permitted them j o avoid these entanglements, they did ; but
such freedom was rare" (p. 89). As a reader, it would have helped me inthis realization if Faderman had included some continuous reminder of theactual conditions of these women's lives, how thorough was their bondage
to men, perhaps some sense of what a luxury these friendships represented
when they were realized in full. It seems to me that the pervasive absenceof accounts of working-<:lass women (urban and rural) from this book ismore than just the absence of written records, although this is a real anddifficult problem in any historical analysis. But we are surely allowed, indeed , required to speculate on the conditions of life that produced romantic friendships and forbade them, and working-<:lass women need not be101

left out of that speculation. If, for example, as Faderman proposes, romantic friendships were in part a response to the enforced separation between
the sexes-that men and women lived and worked in an almost exclusively
same-sex environment-then I want to know whether that condition waspresent or not in other classes of the time . If so , would other factors haveprohibited loving friendships between women? If not , can we discoverwhether women formed these friendships in spite of the presence of men
rather than just in their absence?*
The second part of Surpassing the Love of Men is a profoundly disturbing account of the way in which female friendship became seen as a threatby men and was therefore-almost as a matter of course- declared abnormal
and immoral by men . Faderman's thesis is not very complicated; it doesn't
have to be. When women had no real potential for economic and social
independence through which they could realize their lives together apartfrom men, romantic friendships were harmless. Indeed , they served the
purpose of "controlling" women, allowing them an emotional release
which in fact reinforced their bondage to men, both by providing womenwith some satisfaction in their lives and at the same time keeping them in
the world of women, away from the lives and achievements of men . Assoon as that economic condition changed, as soon as capitalism required
more workers in the workforce and women became the available bodies,
another means had to be found to force them into marriage with men.
Faderman asks:
If they gained all the freedom that feminists agitated for, what would
attract them to marriage? Not sex drive, since women still were notacknowledged to have one ; possibly the longing for children .. .. Perhaps love for a man might draw a woman to marriage , but with thebattle of the sexes raging even more virulently than ever, how could
that magnet be relied on? . .. If women on a large scale now had nohindrance in their freedoms they might fmd kindred spirits, other women, and provide homes and solve the problem of loneliness for eachother.
For the first time, love between women became threatening to thesocial structure . (pp. 237-38)
Hence, female friendship had to become a vile social transgression. Faderman documents this abrupt and striking phenomenon, emphasizing as she
does so not that love between women is a fashion which comes and goes,but that love between women is an enduring constant which has been seen
as supportive or threatening to men in different times and places and,
therefore, encouraged or suppressed accordingly.
Faderman's account of the theories of the early "sexologists" is lucid
and frightening . Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Freud. Through their work
"love between women was metamorphosed into a freakishness." She de*Not available to Faderman when she was writing, but of equal relevance here, is Paula
Gunn Allen's essay, "Beloved Women: Lesbians in Native American Cultures," inConditions 7, 1981.

102

monstrates the inevitable linking of lesbianism and feminism, explaining
to me for the first time that word I found so many years ago in The Wellof Loneliness: invert.
A lesbian, by the sexologists' defmition, was one who rejected what
had long been woman's role. She found that role distasteful because
she was not really a woman-she was a member of the third sex. Therefore she did not really represent women. All her emotions were inverted,
turned upside down: instead of being passive, she was active, instead
ofloving domesticity, she sought success in the world outside .... She
loved womankind more than mankind. (p. 240)
I am not sure I can agree with Faderman's follow-up thesis, that as part ofa self-fulfilling prophecy many lesbians became transvestites and ''hutches
because such behavior demonstrated ipso facto that they were the genuine
article, that they must be taken seriously and not forced into heterosexual
patterns" (p. 245). This assertion is a throw-away, never mentioned again,
let alone developed, an example of several provocative speculations I wish
Faderman had either developed or left out.
Most of these problematic assertions occur in the fmal section of thebook, the account of the rise and growth of our current lesbian feminist
movement. Brief and necessarily unfmished-Iesbian feminists are still working to undo the damage of Freud, et al.-the account of the growth andhealing found by lesbians who are actively feminist is where I would send
writers in search of a book-or send Lillian Faderman herself for her next
four or five. For example, she asserts that there are benefits for lesbiansin the conjunction of the rise of feminism and the occurrence of the socalled sexual revolution (p. 377). I have myself doubted this, argued the
opposite, and feel it needs to be examined, not asserted. Writing as a literary critic, Faderman outlines a history of lesbian feminist literature so
briefly that it almost seems limited and exclusionary, rather than an opening out of possibilities of subject, style and form. And she states that theacceptance of lesbian literature by commercial presses is responsible forthe "slowing down of production among the lesbian-feminist presses,"
which is statistically incorrect, whether one measures the number of lesbian
feminist and feminist publishing companies or the number of books being
published by them in 1981 .
Nonetheless, Surpassing the Love of Men is a necessary book, one thatwill make other historical work possible. The thesis of this book is'dramatic
proof of the bonding between women (whether sexual, emotion, or both)and profound disproof of the twentieth-century myth that two women
cannot bond, cannot remain loyal to one another, carmot and will notchoo.se the friendship of women over patronization by men. It is a bookwhich ought to change the face of literary criticism and social history,
although I am afraid that unless women writers and critics take it seriously,
this "new" knowledge will almost certainly be ignored, re-buried, alongwith so much that we, as women, used to know. Finally, Surpassing theLove of Men can be read by every lesbian for her own mental and emo-

103

tional clarity. To know what lillian Faderman has unearthed for us is tochange the grounds on which so many of our battles today are being
fought. Love between women is the norm. Let those who disagree shoulder
the burden of proof.

Bonnie Zimmerman
TESTIMONIES

A review of The Lesbian Path, edited by Margaret Cruikshank. Publishedby Double-Axe Books, distributed by Naiad Press, P.O. Box 10543, Tallahassee, FL 32302. 248 pp. $6.95. We're Here: Conversations with Lesbian
Women, by Angela Stewart-Park and Jules Cassidy. Published by Quartet
Books, 1977, distributed by Horizon Press, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York,NY 10010. $3.95. 152 pp.
Despite erosion from within and attacks from without, it is as yet a
fortunate time to be a lesbian in the western world. A generation ago,
women could go only to the doom and gloom paperback novels for images
and stories of lesbian life . With the gay and feminist movements, all thatbegan to change and today we have novels, poetry, autobiography, andnon-fiction that present a rich and diversified picture of women-loving
women. A popular literary form used in many books-such as Lesbian/
Woman, The New Lesbians, Our Right To Love, and The Coming Out
Stories-is the short personal testimony or interview. These testimonies
give many women who are not professional writers the space to tell theirtales, breaking down the silence that reinforces lesbian oppression. We
fmd in these stories the similarities and differences that remind us no lesbian is alone or unique, that we all belong to a growing community.
Two new collections of lesbian voices have recently appeared: The
Lesbian Path, edited by Margaret Cruikshank, and We're Here: Conversations with Lesbian Women, by Angela Stewart-Park and Jules Cassidy(originally published in England in 1977 but newly distributed here.) The
Lesbian Path, subtitled "37 Lesbian Writers Share Their Personal Experiences, Viewpoints, Traumas and Joys," is described by its editor as "onework which marks the beginning of our literary expression. illustrating
our quest for new self images, it is a collective work-the autobiography
not of one woman but many. This book celebrates the survival of an

104

oppressed group by showing our strength and resilience . .. we have an
exhilarating sense of our power to say-sometimes tentatively-who weare." These diverse narratives (some actually poems and a few more likeessays) document lesbian history and culture through accounts of coming
out, struggles, literature, mothers, public lives and adventures.
Although The Lesbian Path is a "collective autobiography ," some parts
inevitably work better than others. I found myself excited by a few
entries, interested in many, bored by a handful, and even disturbed by avery few. I particularly enjoyed the coming out section, "Finding Ourselves." "A Flower for Judith" describes Sarah Spencer's gift of love toher best childhood friend which became a symbol of perversion to theirparents, and haunts her years later: "When I think of my coming out, I
think of the never-ending opening of the never-ending petals of a flower ,that special painful flower from so long ago." I was also moved by Margaret
Sloan's poem to the women of her family, in particular her independentunmarried aunt Johnnie Mae who died of cancer at age thirty-three, leaving words unspoken and stories untold . Jane Gurko, in "Coming Out inBerkeley, 1967," tells her story of a three-way relationship with a classically self-centered male and his wife ; Jane falls in love with the woman ,who is too frightened to leave her husband-that old painful story. My
favorite narrative in the book is another "Old Story": Joan Nestle's
account of being a fern in the fifties. Having myself come out toward
the end of the role-playing era when , despite my strenuous efforts, I resigned myself to being a fern , I have been waiting for Joan's story for along time. Since everyone I know claims to have been a butch in the olddays, I have often wondered who they were making love to: straightwomen? each other (goddess forbid)? Nestle, finally, explains what it
meant to be a fern lesbian: "'Fern' didn't mean passivity; it meant a driving need and it meant performance. I wanted to be the best woman in
bed for the woman who chose me. I wanted to be the reward for other
women's strength. I created homes for strong women who lived in small
uncared for apartments and all the time I knew the power of my own
hands but I kept them still."
Other stories in The Lesbian Path that I particularly liked include
Minnie Bruce Pratt's unsentimental account of lesbian motherhood , anecessary counterpart to the ideal relationships celebrated in lesbian mythology (such as the ftIm In the Best Interests of the Children.) Isabelle
McTeigue shares "An Incident in the Fifties" -queer-baiting by the Civil
Service Commission that, in the wake of Norton Sound and Billie Jean
King, doesn't read like ancient history. Finally, Audre Lorde's "Of Sisters
and Secrets," like the other short pieces she has been publishing recently,
is only a taste of a major autobiography to come.
But some sections of The Lesbian Path bothered me. Although I agreewith the moral imperative of "respecting every woman's process," I don't
believe we have to accept them all uncritically . The unexamined assump-105

tions of some stories might set certain readers on edge. For example, thebook is imbued, far too much for my taste, with Christianity, both in the
coming out stories of several women and in the continuing religious choicesof others. At least two of the authors are currently Christian ministers,
and while they acknowledge the homophobia and rigidity of establishedchurches , they do not question the inherent sexism of Christianity that
Mary Daly has shown us. "A Wedding in Carmel," an extremely idealistic
piece, does not evaluate the implications of lesbians participating ineither legally or extra-legally-the sexist and heterosexist institution of
marriage. Furthermore , the romantic, overly emotional tone found in somestories lessens their impact: "But here-at college, away from the townthat my parents called my home-I fmd peace at last, a beautiful, supportive women's community, and friends. I feel warm energy radiating fromthem and I lovingly return it with a strong and gladdened soul" (p. 24).
I often wished that the editor had encouraged more rewriting, or had provided a guiding, critical consciousness. As a result, I feel that The LesbianPath is a mixed collection, although certainly a valuable addition to therecord of lesbian lives.
We're Here struck me as being almost uniformly excellent and exciting.
My curiosity was aroused by the differences between lesbian life in theu.s. and in England . Perhaps , since I spent several months in England in1977 when this book was written, I was intrigued to learn more about alifestyle I only peripherally experienced. But We're Here also excited me
because it is a collection of excellent interviews by astute and probinginterviewers. While personal narratives can be self-indulgent, uncritical orsuperficial (as can poor interviews), sharp interviewers such as these womencan coax and pull strong statements and observations out of their subjects.
This is particularly true in We're Here since these authors are not neutral;although they vary their questions and their tone from interview to interview, they never mute the fundamental political purpose of their project.
The introduction immediately establishes the political agenda of thisbook: "Society doesn't like to give us any space to be ourselves openly
because we are an alternative. We're an alternative to heterosexuality ,which is projected as the norm. We question, just by being here, many
values which are a part of heterosexuality. We question monogamy. Wequestion marriage. We question women's dependence on men. We question
male/female role-playing. We question the sexuality of every human being
who thinks they're normal ."The women chosen to be interviewed in We 're Here thus tend to bepolitically involved, although not all are primarily activists. Several are involved in England's gay civil rights organizations or in the women's liberation movement. One woman became a celebrity after being kicked out of
midwifery school for her lesbianism. Another is the founder of Sappho
magazine , a Lesbian Tide-like publication . One is a well-known lesbian
feminist artist , another an English counterpart of pacifist Barbara Deming,106

and still another a member of a women's liberation rock band. Others are
not actively political , but through the editors' probing, all draw connections
between their individual lives and the politics of lesbianism.
These women are also diverse in age , profession, class and lifestyle ,although all are white. At least one woman belongs to England 's Irish
minority, and one is an American Jewish woman residing in England . The
absence of any interviews with lesbians of color is a serious flaw in thisbook. This is especially true as it becomes clearer that England , like theUnited States, is a multi-racial and racist nation. On the other hand ,several of the interviewed women are outspokenly working class, and it is. startling to note the clarity of their class consciousness in comparison to
the wide-spread American belief in our universal middle class. One woman
is an ex-prisoner and current welfare mother; another the illegitimate
daughter of a battered wife . Other women live middle-class lives ; some arein monogamous relationships, others in no relationships at all. Many havechildren. They talk about being closeted , coming out, relationships, sex,causes of lesbianism, prison experiences, classism, politics and the movement, men , role-playing , and even astrology and vegetarianism. The unifying thread in this collective story is provided by the authors, who keep
asking pushy questions until they uncover the real souls of these women.
Perhaps that is what makes We 're Here such a good book. I felt that I
got to know these women-interviewers and interviewees . Were I to meetthem on the street I could pick up the conversation where it had left off.
I got a sense of the English movement's consciousness and tone of voice:intellectual, political, class-conscious. I understand better the differences
and similarities between being a dyke in America and a dyke in England.
And I was very pleased to know that, indeed, we're here , on a lesbian
path that extends around the entire world.

tURtlE 4RanbmothER
Books

Mai I Order Books
Specializing in Worksby Women of Color
P.O. Box 33964
Detroit, Michigan 48232~,.

(313) 381-3550
Please send $1 for catalogue.

107

ANNOUNCEMENTS"Amazones d'Hier, Lesbiennes d'Aujourd'bui": Video for Lesbians only, made by
French Canadian Lesbians about themselves. English version is a voice-over of theoriginal French. Available in '%-inch or ~-inch tape. For further information orrental requests: Video-Amazones, c/o Ariane Brunet, Boite 429, Succ. Station
Victoria, Montreal H3Z-2V8, Quebec, Canada.
Anthology: What are white Ceminists doing to combat racism in the U.S.? Content
will include: political analysis and theory; personal stories and anecdotes; guidelines
for action ; possibly a directory/bibliography. The goal is to produce both a historical
document and a useful and inspiring guide/resource in which diverse women speak
Cor their (or their group's) experiences dealing with racism. Issues of classism andanti-Semitism will be addressed as they relate/are part of racism. For further information please contact: Tia Cross, 230B Pearl St., Cambridge, MA 02139 . (617) 4926434 .
.
Azalea: A magazine by 3rd World lesbians. Quarterly. Fiction, poetry, essays, reviews,
visuals. Subscriptions: $2 single / $6 yearly / $10 institutions, organizations / free towomyn in prison. Accepting submissions from lesbians of color only. Azalea, P.O .
Box 200, Cooper Sta., N.Y., N.Y. 10276.
Bloodroot: A Feminist restaurant-bookstore with a seasonal vegetarian menu.
Lunches, dinners daily (Sunday brunch) . 85 Ferris St., Bridgeport, CT 06605 . Tel.
(203) 576-9168.
C & H Publishing Services (now typesetting and pasting-up camera-ready copy for
Naiad Press and Sinister Wisdom) offers careful and accurate editing, copyediting,prootmg, typesetting, paste-up, and layout at reasonable rates. Founders and former
editors of Sinister Wisdom. Harriet Desmoines and Clltherine Nicholson, C & H Publishing Services, 10 Birch Rd., Shelburne Falls, MA 01370. (413) 625 -2888.
Cleis Press/P.O. Box 8281 /Minneapolis, MN 55408. A feminist publishing company
committed to serious woman-identified works, especially those by lesbians and womenof color. Our fIrst publications include Fight Back! Feminist Resistance to Male Vio lence, edited by Frederique Delacoste and Felice Newman ($13 .95) and On Women
Artists: Poems 1975-1980, by Alexandra Grilikhes ($4.95): $1 for fIrst item, .50 foreach additional item (postage and handling). We welcome manuscripts from all women.
SASE please.
Feminist Books is a new venture based in Melbourne, Australia. We aim to carry awide range of feminist/lesbian UK and USA publications at low prices for women inAustralia. Please send us any samples of journals, periodicals, books, cards, etc. forconsideration. 254 Rae St., N. Fitzroy, Victoria 3068, Australia.
Free to Women in Prison: Elly Bu1kin and Joan Larkin, eds., Lesbian Poetry: An
Anthology. Please request from: Persephone Press, Box 7222, Watertown, MA 02172.
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press is committed to producing and distributing thework of Third World women of all racial/cultural heritages, sexualities, and classes thatwill further the cause of Third World women's personal and political freedom . Resources needed: tmancial contributions (make checks out to Kitchen Table Press);materials, ideas, and contacts; manuscripts (send outlines for book projects afterJanuary 1, 1982); women of color in the New York area who want to be involved in
day-to-<!ay, unromantic, undramatic labor of love. Box 592, Van Brunt Sta., Brooklyn,
N.Y. 11215 .
Spinsters, Ink will be reading manuscripts from Feb . 1 to April 30th, 1982, for selection of two books to be published by fall of 1982. We will consider poetry and prose,
fIction or non-fIction, material which could be published either in pamphlet or bookform . We encourage women of all races, ages, and backgrounds to submit their work.
Please include SASE.

108

Third World Women's Archives. Purpose : to collect, preserve, and circulate multilingual materials about, by, and for Third World Women; to further the developmentof a network of information and support for Third World women in the U.S. andabroad. Materials will include: personal papers,letters, and diaries, photographs, tapes,
mms, unpublished manuscripts, articles, books,journals, flyers and posters, artwork,
sheet music and records, etc., etc. You can assist us by donating or lending materials
for our collection and/or contributing your time, money, equipment, etc. For more
information, write Third World Women's Archives, P.O. Box 1235, Yale Sta., New
Haven, cr 06520.
Womyn's Braille Press has'made a major change in policy. As a result, periodicals arebeing asked to produce their own taped version of each issue, which WBP will thenduplicate and distribute. To help Sinister Wisdom meet this responsibility, we are looking for women in the local area (including Boston) to volunteer a few hours every threemonths to read Sinister Wisdom onto tape. If you own or have access to a stereo deck,cassette recorder, or reel-to-reel recorder of good quality, and can volunteer some time,please send information, including phone numbers, to SW, Box 660, Amherst, MA
01004.
Billie Diffenbacher is a prisoner who would like pen-friends. Please write to her at:
Box 520, Walla Walla, WA 99362.
,"

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORSPaula Gunn Allen's A Cannon Between My Knees has recently been publishedby Strawberry Press, and her Star Child by Blue Cloud. Her collection of poems,
Shadow Country, was published by the University of California Press in 1981.
Gloria Anzaldua is the author of La Chingada: A Poem-Play with Music, Danceand Song, and co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Womenof Color (Persephone Press, 1981). She is presently writing Poetry and Magick: A
Practicum for Developing Literary and Psychic Skills.
Diane Ayott, artist and educator, is currently in transition from one place toanother.
Michele A. Belluomini, a Virgo, was born in 1949. She is part of a lesbian/feminist
writers group in Philadelphia. She has researched and facilitated workshops andclasses on the subject of the matriarchy.
Martha Boethal: "I'm a Texan; for as long as I can remember, I've been writing
in order to survive-and to understand-my environment. I'm just fInishing my firstmanuscript of poems."
Diana Bickston is a 27-year-<lld lesbian. She began writing in a prison workshop
in Arizona. She has a chapbook published by COSMEP, and is working on a manuscript of poems and short stories.
Beth Brant is a Mohawk/white lesbian/feminist/writer in Detroit, co-founder with
Denise Dorsz of Turtle Grandmother Books.
Mary Ann Daly saw her fIrst Dogtooth Violets in 1981.
Barbara Deming's two most recently published books are We Cannot Live Without Our Lives (distributed by Frog in the Well Press) and Remembering Who We
Are (distributed by Naiad Press). Born in 1917 in New York City, she lives now in
Sugarloaf Key, Florida. An interview with her appeared in the "Disobedience" issue
of Feminary (1981).
Jane Gapen has recently published her fIrst book, Something Not Yet Ended,
which has in it narrative, poetry, and drawings. She has two grown-up children,
works with battered women, and lives in the Florida Keys with Barbara Deming.
Pesha Gertler lives in Seattle, writes poetry, short stories, essays; recently published her first chapbook, Tales of an Immigrant Woman (Amy David Press); travels
giving poetry workshops and lectures on the New Woman's Genre.
Rebecca Gordon is an offIce worker recently relocated in San Francisco. She andSandra de Helen collaborated writing the play "When I Was a Fat Woman and Other
True Stories," based on Rebecca's poetry and produced by a women's theatre company in Portland. She's also published a [lIst collection of poems, By Her Hands.
Sarah Lucia Hoagland is a lesbian feminist philosopher and separatist who lives
and teaches in Chicago.
Judith Katz is a playwright and story-teller based in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Her work appears in The Coming Out Stories (Persephone Press) and Fight Back!
Feminist Resistance to Male Violence (Cleis Press). "Nadine Pagan's Last LetterHome" is part of a larger work in progress called "The Monster in My Mother'sHouse."
Judith McDaniel is co-founder and publisher of Spinsters, Ink.
Valerie Miner's second novel, Mirror Images, is being published by the Women's
Press, London. "Novena" will appear in her forthcoming collection, Movement, tobe published by Crossing Press in Spring 1982.
Catherine Risingflame Moirai lives on a farm in Tennessee. Her work has appearedin Southern Exposure and in Sinister Wisdom 17.
Martha Nichols lives in Pittsburgn, where she has been active in the Feminist
Writers Guild and in organizing a women's erotic art show.
Elva Perez-Treviiio is a Mestiza born in San Antonio, Texas. "I have been writing
creatively since the age of 7. The main influence on my work continues to be thelandscape and the sun: two principles that survive all the devastation that has been
inflicted on my race."110Selma Miriam writes : "I'm 47 years old . My mother named me Miriam (middle.name) to remember her aunt who in turn commemorated my mother's grandmother.
The dictionary says Miriam means bitter, and that pleases me . The women I workand live with-Betsey, Noel, Pat- nurture my hopes and encourage my anger."
Barbara Smith is co-editor, with Gloria T. Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, of All the
Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men , But Some of Us Are Brave: Black
Women's Studies, published in 1981 by The Feminist Press. She is one of thefounders of Kitchen Table-Women of Color Press, and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Wendy Stevens: "i am the echo in hallways / the stones in the wall of a gate / awoman who marks time/by the wear on her floor."
Celeste Tibbets lives in Athens, Georgia, supports herself frnancially by working
with emotionally disturbed adolescents, writes at night, and wants to one day be a
farmer as well.
Bonnie Zimmerman lives and works in San Diego. Her article "Lesbianism 101"
appeared in Radical Teacher no. 17.

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