When the Asphalt Bleeds

I see the world largely through the prism of women's lives, our rights and our issues. It's not, in anyway, at the exclusion of men, but I believe no matter what the struggles men have are, women are always trying to catch up, as it were. Many things have helped shape who I am today but none of them moreso than who I spent my first 51 years of life with, Sister, my only sibling. She was and continues to be the most powerful influence I've had.

There are many other women who have been changed my life in significant ways. One of these women is Lorraine, she teaches me things I've either forgotten or have never known about women. She brings the past of who women are and have been and blends it with the present, it's a gift of eloquence and sharing of knowledge I appreciate more than I can say.

That I have been invited to be a frontpager at Culture Kitchen is humbling and an honor. I thank Lorraine and Liza for that and will try my hardest to be worthy of their confidence in my writing and also in who I am, as a woman, as an American and a citizen of the world at large.

As a way to introduce myself, as a telling of how I became a Democrat and why I hold the present leaders of this party's feet to the fire is because they can do better, they must do better, they keep saying they are trying, it's time they understand it's not in the trying, it's in the doing that counts.

When The Asphalt Bleeds

The role of a dissenter and a feminist was not chosen but was born in me just as my laugh, my tears, my passion, my curiosity, my awe of life was. The first defining moment for me was when I took my first breath, looked at my mother and had my first real knowing of love. The moment that shaped me more than any other was when my sister held me in her arms, looked at me with eyes already filled with conviction along with a desire to teach me what she was born knowing, that we are put here to speak our minds, to say what we mean and mean what we say. In her eyes I saw a determination to never believe the world as it is cannot become the world it can be. It was then that my journey was revealed to me, a journey with these women of morals and values that spoke for every person on this earth. A journey that lasted over half a century.

It wasn't an easy task for Sister to show me who I could become, the person she knew I could be. She had to throw away my go-go boots and sit on me to listen to Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce and Mario Salvo. She read to me not of fairy tales or later Nancy Drew or Judy Bloom but articles about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and introduced me to the works of authors like Harper Lee and taught me who we are capable of being, good and bad, through the prose on the pages of To Kill A Mockingbird. She put us front and center of the TV with news reports of the lynchings of blacks in the South, James Meredith, Rosa Parks and the bombing deaths of four little black girls whose only crime it was to be born 'coloreds.'

Sister watched with me as we saw the signs for 'white' drinking fountains as opposed to 'coloreds.' We saw the courage of blacks sitting at the lunch counter in Woolworths and refusing to leave. We saw the violence in the streets, the blasting of firehoses that threw blacks against the sides of buildings or levelled them onto the asphalt. Sister would push the hair out of my eyes and tell me we were not special but we had been born the right color in a land where to be born otherwise was seen as a sin when the true sin was bigotry and prejudice. She told me to never forget, not for a moment, the things we had seen.

In 1963, on a June day that was already so hot it made the asphalt bleed, Sister took me to our neighbors house to watch the news of the latest assassination of a man whose only crime it was to stand up for his beliefs and loudly proclaim the rights for 'negroes' were the same right as for whites.

Shirley and Chuck Townsend handed us our own plane tickets that would fly us to Mississippi so we could experience the grief felt by a people that were only asking for justice in an unjust world. Sister kissed my cheek, took my hand and as we walked home told me not to say anything, she would tell Mom and Daddy, she would make sure we went to Medgar Evers funeral no matter what. I still don't know what lie she told them, it never mattered to me, the only thing that was important, then as now, was that I was the lucky one to have been born my sister's sister. We were 14 and 13 years old the day we landed in Mississippi but Sister had been teaching me since I was born to pay attention, to not forget, to wrap my very soul around the things I saw and heard. We met enchantment that day at Medgar Evers funeral. We heard sounds we had never heard before. We listened intently to the songs, the gospel-filled voices with a passion we had not yet encountered in our young lifetimes, we heard the steely determination, resolve and commitment to their truth that raised the rooftops and raised our consciousness as well. We weren't the same two girls who had left the safe haven of the bosom of our family, we had seen, heard and felt things that would never leave us. We had stepped over the boundaries that had been defined by our parents, we left them behind because they refused to go with us.

The assassinations of so many further shaped who we are. Malcolm X, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy. We saw in Angela Davis a woman who stood fearlessly in front of a microphone and said to our government, you have commited murder in all of our names and you will be punished. The Black Panthers stood up for who they were and thus became an example to us of how far the envelope must sometimes be pushed to be heard and to affect change, that no less than the right to stand tall was at stake, there was no glory in giving up, there was honor in violence but none in bowing down. Huey held his head up and so we learned to also. We watched the riots at Attica State Prison and wept for the lost lives of so many, the lives that are too easily dismissed with the wave of a gavel and the slamming of the door of a prison cell.

There was in us an innate sense that peace could prevail so as Lyndon Johnson stood up and spoke of change, when we saw the Voters Rights Act become the law of the land, when we had in our leader an advocate for poverty in this country, our attention turned to a war that was telling our teenaged friends they must fight. They didn't tell us why, they only told us they must. We were in high school, young and firm and ready to raise our own rooftops. We had seen strife, we had been raised in a time of dissent, it was second nature to us.

It was a time when nothing was taken seriously, yet everything was taken seriously. It was a war in Vietnam's time. A fine time to be young, a terrible time to be at war. I still think, in some ways, I truly came into my own in those years. It was as if we couldn't be silenced, we couldn't be stopped, we had already seen too much to give up. The reality is we were scared to death. We thought it was sex, parties, fleeting attachments, rock and roll, but certainly not fear. We didn't know we were dismissing those that dared to go to war as we were demonstrating against those that sent our children to war. Everything felt so free to us here; all we knew how to do was try to be wild. We were too young to know how to grieve.

The deeper we tried to get inside ourselves the more pain we seemed to feel. We didn't understand how we could be so hell-bent on having fun when half the world seemed to be dying. It seemed the more we danced, the louder we got, the more boys died. Why didn't anything work to drown out the tears, the moans, the last breath of so many of our friends and brothers? Why was a land so far away responsible for so much sorrow? We were supposed to be carefree, dammit, where was the immaturity, where was the youth, where was the aloofness, the casualness of being young? All of it was lost in a draft that said, number 161, you go, no name, just a number, you go.

I remember being old enough to have a baby, old enough to be working full-time. I remember boys old enough to go to war, to die, and yet we were all babies. We were so naive and idealistic. At nineteen I was old enough to be running a college bookstore, to be active in an anti-war movement, and old enough to organize the transportation for a moratorium that would consist of 500,000 people. Yet I felt so young, so immature, and so unprepared to know the answers.

I had a psychology professor at the time tell me that some people were too gentle to live among wolves. That's exactly how so many of us felt. Watching the news at night became like a catharsis. You could shed a whole skin watching one thirty-minute program and yet not be able to face the world. The partying continues, never enough places to go, never enough people to block the cries and gunfire from another world. Take another drink, another boy dies. Take another hit of acid, another boy dies. Take another hit off a joint, another boy dies. Never enough to make the death go away, never enough to silence the voice of the guns, to hold back the bombs, the napalm, the destruction, the callous loss of innocent life in a country that didn't want our presence or our killing machines.

By day I lived the life as a working mother, of an activist. At night I couldn't drink fast enough, do drugs fast enough, or have sex enough to make the chatter in my head stop. I had been raised by parents that told me everyone else was perfect, the world outside the walls of my life was perfect. I had no idea there were powers that be that would say no to me. I didn't know my friends would die 6,000 miles away, too far to reach, too far to touch, too far to hear their last words. I had no idea there were such wolves. My essence started to be shaped by hands other than my own. I felt powerless to do anything until I saw the results of our outrage. For the first time in my life I saw the results of my anger and involvement. I would never forget.

On Mother's Day, when Sister was 19, she told my parents she was pregnant. On my father's birthday I told my parents I was pregnant. I was 18. The year was 1966. Neither of us had a choice, both of us knew our lives had changed because we believed them, the boys who said they would pull out. We both married the boys and were subsequently both beaten by boys who had no business being husbands or fathers. After we left them they both loaded up their cars and drove away. They both went onto college, they both pledged and were accepted into the fraternities of their dreams, they both never looked back.

It was in the year 1966 that Sister and I both became feminists. During our high school years we had seen girls lying in blood after they had thrown themselves down the staircases of our high school. We had heard how a boy named Bobby had beaten his girlfriend in the stomach when she told him she was pregnant and thus had miscarried. We had heard how Charlotte had almost died over the weekend from using knitting needles to self-abort because she thought she was all alone. We knew the terror of missing a period, then two and knowing deep down inside that nothing would ever be the same again. We both felt the same outrage and anger against a government that gave us no options. We had been drafted into motherhood because we had no choice. It was then that we became political, it was then that we started fighting for Roe v. Wade and for the ERA, it was then that we understood we could never look back.

We were raised in a small town in Northern California, a town of 11,000 people. In our neighborhood, on our block 5 girls got pregnant within weeks and months of each other. All of us were the closest of friends and we still remain so all these years later. Three of us got married and divorced after we were brutally beaten by our husbands. One of the girls went to Reno and had an illegal abortion. One of the girls went to an unwed mothers home. The four of us who had our babies are like a family. We have known each other since we were 3, 4, and 5 years old. A half century of lives woven together first by happenstance and then by a bond made stronger by our shared experiences. Our children are like brothers and sisters, they are 39 and 40 years old now and they too have a bond that was cemented at birth.

Life goes on from where it began. I am a womanist today because of my past and because I saw in women from a very early age a hope and a promise for what we can all be if we stand side by side. I am a humanist because of one woman, I learned to see the world through the eyes of the most extraordinary person I have yet to know, Sister. April 14, 2000 Sister died in my arms at her home. As she looked into my eyes she gave me a gift, she let me know she will continue teaching me, guiding me and nurturing me, she had in her eyes a serenity and peace, she had gone ahead and knew where she was going as she had all through our years together. She saw what lies ahead and she told me without saying a word to not be afraid because she would be waiting for me so that one day we can continue our journey together.

For all the things I've gotten right in this world, I am those things because I was blessed to have Sister who never gave up, not even as she took her last breath.

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