Saturday's Child (40 page)

From SAC, Tampa, Florida, to The Director, FBI
: A confidential source advised that Robin Morgan, white female, age approximately 30 years, has been active on campus of New College, Sarasota, Florida. … Morgan organized minor protests concerning Women's Lib [
sic
] activities. All have been peaceful and nonviolent. However,
source is concerned that violence may occur should she continue pushing her ideas. Bureau is requested to check indices on Morgan.

The protests were to pressure for the hiring of a female gynecologist in campus medical services, and the installation of better lighting near dorms where there had been a rash of sexual attacks. True, we did end up occupying the college president's office—which was not something I, as visiting guest professor for one semester, was supposed to do—but that was only
after
polite petitioning, picketing, and press conferencing had got us nowhere.

In sum, most of the time, the FBI and the local gumshoes got it
wrong
—missing what serious mischief I
did
do and fulminating over my innocuous acts. Meanwhile, I'd become more interested in bringing both sets of tactics I'd learned in the New Left (serious and innocuous, guerrilla actions and guerrilla theater) to working with women. Kenneth seemed to understand this well enough, but it shocked other radical men, who couldn't fathom why I might prefer attacking silly old sexism when I could continue to be a token woman in their impending apocalypse.

I remember a particular meeting in the spring of 1968. It was a gathering of the secret central committee of YIP (Yippee postured itself as leaderless and anarchic), at Jerry Rubin's “pad” on St. Mark's Place. Jerry was his usual manic self. Nancy Kurshan, then his lover, the only other woman present, was saying little. Tom Hayden was wearing his fetching Mao cap with the wee red star, Abbie was stoned as always, Rennie Davis was stoic as ever, and Kenneth sat off in a corner drafting some manifesto praising Jerry as “a young Lenin.” We were planning massive demonstrations—“Days of Rage”—to take place “spontaneously” at the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago.

Then I announced that I had decided not to go to Chicago after all, because I intended to organize a different protest.

There was shock, then astonishment, when I told them that I'd be going to Atlantic City—to take on the Miss America Pageant.

“That's
crazy
!” Jerry gasped, his eyes bulging as he sanely twirled his bandanna and passed a joint.

“No shit, man,” Abbie grinned foggily at me, reaching for it. “You're puttin' us on.
No
body's that wild. Oh wow. No shit. Bummer. Yeah.“

“Incorrect,” Davis pronounced flatly.

Expectedly, it was Hayden who was serious, albeit patronizing. His first, about-to-be-former wife, Casey, had been an early fomenter of “women's issues” and New Left women's caucuses. So
Tom
knew
all
about
women
.

“Robin. I realize women need to be taught political consciousness, educated to a proper analysis, and organized to fight against the war and racism. I understand Miss America would be a perfect symbol to attack, and it's a ripe media opportunity to spread the word. But you don't want to miss
Chicago!
There'll be riots in the streets! People will probably be killed! We'll make sure the whole world is watching! Don't you
get
it? The second American
revolution
will take place in Chicago!”

From the manifesto-writer in the corner came the mumble,

“It's
you
guys I think don't get it. Somebody pass the joint? My money's on the second American revolution taking place in Atlantic City.”

¹
Of the fortuitous explosion of feminist books at the start of this contemporary wave in the United States, almost all were authored by women who had never considered themselves serious writers: psychologists, academics, visual artists, theologians, attorneys, and so on, with one or two sometimes-joumalist types thrown in for good measure. I can no longer count how many times these otherwise brave women have expressed shock (sometimes admiringly, sometimes derisively) at the “personal” and “intense” quality of my writing—as in “You expose your own life so! How
can
you make yourself so vulnerable?” Only now do I realize that such reactions might have been based on a simple lack of understanding about the basic vocation that for me predated and transcended even the imperative of the politics themselves. To me, the question would be “How can I
not
draw from my own life?” This is what writers
do
.

²
See?
Damnably
hard to resist. Along with Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and McDonald's, the U.S. infatuation with and export of “gender” is at this writing wildly popular in those geopolitical areas of the global Women's Movement where people clamor with equal ferocity to imitate the United States while denouncing its imperialism. That is to say, “gender” is popular in policy and academic circles—as opposed to the populace of those countries, where average people, in their varying languages, still relate to the concept of “women.” I could inveigh at length against the political manipulation inherent in the practice of replacing “women,” “women's studies,” “sexism,” “male supremacy,” etc. with the bland, obfuscating, and inaccurate idea and word “gender.” As someone who cares about the precision of language, I could also fulminate against the widespread misapplication of the word “gender,” even by well-meaning persons who innocently adopt this grafted-on word without fully grasping its implications. But I'll restrain myself, except to note that what Coke does to teeth and KFC/Big Macs do to cholesterol levels, “gender” does to that part of the cerebrum in which political clarity might otherwise reside.

³
One superb documentation of the civil-rights movement is
But Some of Us Were Brave
, ed. Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (The Feminist Press, 1982). Its title is based on black women's sarcastic phrase from that era: “All the men were black, all the women were white, but some of us were brave.”

⁴
Collected in
The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches 1968-1992
, Second (Updated) edition 1994 (W. W. Norton).

⁵
Misleading: we each read our own versions of transliterated poems by both classical and contemporary Vietnamese poets. Some of my versions were later published in my first collection of poetry,
Monster
(Random House and Vintage Books, 1972). We'd worked with translators to forge moving English versions of the poems—only some of which were openly against the war, but all of which revealed the complex aesthetics of Vietnamese culture. And we read our own poems against the war—as did other poets we knew—on the flatbed trucks and anywhere anyone would listen to them.

⁶
From the poem “(Working Title),” in
Color Photos of the Atrocities: Poems
, by Kenneth Pitchford (Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown, 1973).

⁷
Tactical Police Force—the mounted, heavily armed, notoriously testosteronic riot police.

⁸
The one exception to such trust was when I would get stoned on grass, or trip on mescaline or acid. Certainly there were great moments—eating a single grape for an hour, laughing until rib-ache set in, flashing on him as a Viking sailing into the dawn—but more often than not I'd hit a wall of paranoia that would include him as part of the problem, not part of the solution. This may have been based on the way hallucinogens had been employed to facilitate the earlier group-sex scenes. In any event, although grass was a frequent ritual and tripping a special occasion, I came to do less and less of both, since for me they had become highly unpleasant. As usual, I was sure this was
my
failing. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that many women of my generation had the identical reaction around their husbands or lovers. Imagine my greater surprise when I discovered that sampling such substances when alone or with other women (and even, years later, with certain men) yielded a delightfully different reaction.

TWELVE

Fits and Starts

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft
.

—
I
S
AMUEL
15:23

There's a riveting moment near the end of Arthur Penn's 1967 movie
Bonnie and Clyde
, when the bank-robber fugitive pair realizes that it's an ambush, that they are cornered and are about to be killed. They exchange a long look of complete understanding—then break into a grotesque dance propelled by the rain of machine-gun bullets sieving their bodies. That's a somewhat gruesome image with which to identify, but it's revealing that in the manner of some couples having “our song,” Kenneth and I considered that gaze “our moment,” like a signature chord of our marriage, as the 1960s drew toward a close. Our Us-against-the-World defensive posture gained greater validity every day, given the objective realities of the time.

Nevertheless, there were intermissions in the relentless drama of the period, and the good moments were very good indeed. The more frenetic the tantrums we threw in the outside world, the cozier an island Kenneth and I tried to create at home. We were house-proud, and wore the aches and scars to prove we'd earned that pride with our own hands. We took satisfaction in the gleam of our wide-plank floors, burnished to reflect the
dance of firelight in the hearth, the few paintings by artist friends shown to advantage on the whitewashed walls, stripped and refinished furniture we'd rescued from the gutter, the big slab of butcher-block wood we'd splurged on buying for the kitchen counter—and somehow, always, a few fresh flowers arching from a vase on our round oak dinner table.

When the New Left's white sons and daughters of CEOs and military leaders
¹
turned downwardly mobile, Ken and I were already
there
, at least in terms of income. Yet we lived well, if humbly. When the Left descended into anti-intellectualism, however, we balked. I recall one Weatherman snarling at us that the only good use for a typewriter was to heave it out a window onto the head of a “pig cop.” Other such troglodytes denounced us for having so many books, and demanded that we sell them to raise money for the movement. But we clung fiercely to our typewriters and never considered liquidating the library. If that meant we were reactionaries, at least we'd be literate ones.

Our household had become recatted early in the marriage. Since Bob had taken Castor, Pollux, and Helen with him in setting up a household with Frank, we began anew with Hektor and Cassandra. One of the things for which I'll always be grateful to Kenneth is that he introduced me to cats, the beginning of my passionate attachment to feline beings. At one critical point in the 1970s we were actually up to owning—or, more accurately, being owned by—as many as five cats at once. We eventually branched out in the name department, expanding from strict adherence to characters from the
Iliad
to the Cabalist classic
The Zohar
(from which we borrowed the seraphic name Sandalphan), Wiccean tradition (for Grimalken), the Welsh epic poem
The Mabinogian
(for Bran, singer-poet son
of the Great Goddess), and even science (for Phosphor, a lilac Siamese who did almost glow in the dark). Although we had sufficient space for such wildlife, we did have to engage in a twice-a-day spectacle not unlike feeding time at the zoo. It was especially challenging to persist in our perpetual renovation of some corner of the apartment with twenty tiny paws poking into every pile of rubble, scampering underfoot, rolling nails and screws across the floor, hiding behind stacked plasterboard, and playing spring-and-pounce with our ankles. But we managed. And I became a lifelong cat person, at this writing catless for the first time in decades, because I'm still mourning Bran. It was Bran who moved in with me after Ken and I split up, who outlasted all his contemporaries, and who died two years ago at the venerable age of twenty-one. Bran—who possessed not only intelligence but wisdom and humor—was a classic all-black cat, an ideal Familiar and, it must be admitted, the Cat of My Life.
²
He saw me through it all, purring in celebration at the highs and, at the lows, rasping away my tasty salt tears with his coral tongue and comforting me with his knowing, emerald-eyed gaze.

During the mid-1960s, I'd written a series of letters to Kenneth—not while traveling but while at home. There were things I simply couldn't say to him, which is not to imply that we didn't talk. We talked about everything. Especially the marriage. All the time. We were perceptive, eloquent people. We were also getting to be bored, morose people—or so I thought, which may have been a projection of what
I
was feeling. Neither of us was willing to admit being less than happy. But whenever we did admit it, then—since Ken could claim to have known “happiness” pre-marriage (a claim I wasn't sure I could honestly make)—we both blamed me. What Kenneth confusingly praised but also rebuked as “Robin's overly developed self-critical faculty” was based on my personal adaptation of Solon's statement “To a really good [wo]man, everything is [her] own fault.” I didn't yet know this was a socially fostered belief shared by many of my sex. In my case, it was also a residue of the childhood lesson that I was responsible
for, well, everything, and another facet of my insistent perfectionism, which was hard on those around me and harder on its judge herself.
³

But under the self-blame was anger, and more than a little of that was directed at Kenneth. I've never expressed anger well, although as a political activist (and, inescapably, former actor) I learned how to do
public
anger apparently well enough to be called a “harpy” and a “man-hater,” as well as your basic termagant, bitch, gorgon, and shrew. But both my mother and my husband conveyed anger so effectively there seemed to be no space left for mine; I felt theirs sucked up all the air, like the old wives' tale about flowers in a hospital room, making it impossible to compete or even get heard enough to be a contender. Consequently, I would stake out the placid, “rational” approach in arguments—but I'd manage to
leak
anger well enough. This self-censoring tic was another trait that I would come to realize many if not most women shared across geography and culture. Exacerbated by my personal background, it resulted in my rarely being able to speak anger clearly and cleanly, especially to Faith or to Kenneth. Hence the letters—some loving and tender, but the bulk written out of choked feelings I feared I could never articulate.