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Rebellion in a Curious Way | Poem

 

REBELLION IN A CURIOUS WAY by Jodey Bateman
 

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CHAPTER TWELVE
      The days were hotter now, an almost angry heat. The dream-like parts remained in the early mornings and just before nightfall. Sometimes just as the sun went down, the clouds would gather and there would be a sudden splash of rain - big flashes of lightning and loud thunder that was pleasant to go to sleep to. Then the next day would be hot and at Clu’s all the windows would be open and an old electric fan would be going in the living room. We drank lots of her lemonade and grape juice mixture. 
     I didn’t tell Clu about the episode with Rollo and Les. She would just say, "See, that’s what comes because the Organization is so undisciplined. Do you see now why the Vanguard forbids even pot?" 
     And I would have said, "But you smoke it anyway!" and we would have been at it, which would do us no good in the heat. So I just told her about getting the story on Will and Pete into the ARMADILLO TIMES and that the message was really getting through to the G.I.’s at fort Holden. 
Steve and Annie were gone from the apartment next to mine, to wherever the addresses and phone numbers from Bump would get them - far from Steve’s draft physical. I was alone upstairs. Clu was all alone too. I could hear her walking up and down the hall at night. Sometimes she would call Don in New York. When the conversation wasn’t strictly business, her voice would quiver with anxiety. Then when she would be on the phone with Will down in Pronghorn she would glow all over, no matter what they were talking about. 
     And things started happening like sudden thunderstorms out of the hot, still days. 
     It was Sunday night. I had been back four days. Clu and I were over at Nick Arnold’s house for his  twentieth birthday. Nick was a tall, skinny student with curly black hair, very active in the Organization. He was a sociology major, only a sophomore, but he had already amazed the prof’s in the sociology department by some brilliant papers on student political attitudes and on the relationship of the behavior of the university’s administration to the economic interests of the Board of Regents. He was working on another paper on the political and economic significance of our famous football team. 
     Nick’s father was from our state, but his mother was an Italian-American from New York. She had been a union organizer in her youth, very close to the Commies. And she also knew a lot about pasta and lasagna and she taught it to her sons, so Nick had cooked a huge Italian birthday supper. 
     Clu and I went to the party with Harry Holtzenheimer, our friendly neighborhood pot dealer. He had gotten Clu and me a little high before we got to the small house Nick rented. Harry went over in a corner and whispered to a couple of Organization people who were present. Then Harry said, "Nick, are you sure you have enough of an appetite?" 
     "Huh? What do you mean?" Nick asked. 
     "Come on out in the back yard," Harry said. "I have a birthday present for you." 
     I didn’t have a clear idea of what was going on and I followed them out, as far as the back yard. 
     Harry and the others led Nick into a clump of tall bushes by the back fence. Then I saw the tiny glow of Harry’s pipe. 
     Nick had always told me, "The Vanguard is right about no pot. We shouldn’t break the law just for the sake of breaking the law. There are too many people we have to reach who don’t understand. Socialism is a big enough outlaw idea to get across without trying to put over anything else." 
     Then they came out of the bushes. Harry and the other guests were laughing. Nick was ducking his head with an embarrassed smile on his face. I walked back into the house with them when the phone rang. 
Nick picked it up, "It’s the Organization National Office," he said. Nick’s phone number was the only one that the National Office had in out state besides Clu’s. They just got a call from the chapter down at X university!" Nick announced, "Somebody found Glen Medard dead - shot in the back in the walk-in at the convenience store where he was working." 
     We all just stood there like stone statues. Nick’s voice was perfectly calm. Then we began to move again. We were normal enough, but our movements all seemed to be in slow motion. I had known civil rights workers who had been killed in the Movement down south. It was always a reminder that we were fighting for serious goals and other people were seriously trying to keep us from getting those things. I knew I would never get used to it. It says something about our Movement that an office whose staff members made $10 or $20 a week tried to call members of their  organization in a distant city about the murder of another member who lived in yet a third city. 
     I felt a little scary feeling spreading inside my chest. 
     I started singing quietly - one of those little Commie Sunday School songs that became as much a part of you as "Jesus Loves Me." 
          "To you beloved comrade, we make this solemn vow 
          The fight will still go on, the fight will still go on." 
     My voice was unsteady - not weepy, just scared and a little in awe that this was the real thing - the first time since I had learned the song. 
          "Like you, beloved comrade, we pledge our bodies now 
          The fight will still go on, the fight still goes on." 
     We went in the living room and sat down and didn’t say much for a while. But we were young, our bodies were hungry. I’d had nothing but some grape juice and lemonade mix all day. We went back into the dining room and ate up all the birthday supper. 
     When Clu and I went back to her place, she called up Will’s lawyer, Ben Markovitz, supposedly to ask for details about Will’s new court martial. But she kept on the phone going over the same questions again and again, like she just wanted to hear Ben’s voice in her shadowy house. She didn’t have tears in her eyes but her voice at times had traces of weeping. 
     Finally, she explained what happened to Glen - she had only met him once at an anti-war conference, but his death was a reminder. Glen was in the Party, supposedly an enemy of the Vanguard, but at this moment he was a friend who had lived next door to her all her life. This is what a movement is about. 
     I couldn’t hear what Ben was saying, but Clu closed her eyes and bowed her head and her lips moved like she was trying to drink in comfort. She grabbed my hand. Finally I could hear Ben saying, "That’s about all I can tell you, Clu." 
     Next night, Clu and I called Miriam, who was now a widow at age twenty-two. 
     "Hello-uh Miriam?" Clu said with a little nervousness and uncertainty in her voice. "This is Clu Proctor. We met at the anti-war conference this spring. Uh-oh yes, we argued a lot. Well-uh I heard what happened and I wanted to let you know we are all with you a hundred per cent. Uh-Dale Fields is here with me," and she shoved the phone into my hand and I put it up to my ear. 
     "Oh wow, Dale, is that you?" Miriam’s voice sounded like she had been hit very hard, but she was still as strong as ever. 
     "Yeah, it’s me. How are things down there now?" 
     "Oh, a lot of people have been great to me Dale," Miriam said. "They helped me get back where I could stand on my feet again but - Dale, you don’t mind if I tell you something do you?" 
     "No, I don’t mind, Miriam. Go ahead and say what you want." 
     "Dale, it’s weird. I used to giggle about the liberals, but all my liberal friends have been just fantastic. So have a lot of people in the Organization. It’s just that there’s some people I had known since I first got into the Organization - real, real good friends, and there still seems to be a wall there because Glen and I were in the Party. You know, like Drake and Suze Loupess..." and Miriam started to cry. 
She made a couple of loud sniffles and started over again, "I told these people, ‘Look, this hurts!’ and they said they were sorry about Glen, but they were gone real quick - people I really love, it’s like we didn’t really make contact. I won’t leave the Party just to get a kind word!" and she started to cry again. 
     "Miriam," I said, "you’re going to have to forgive me for that. I’ve felt there was kind of a wall between me and you all. And I do have to be cautious with some of my business..." 
     "Oh, I can understand that," she said, "but there were some people, I saw after Glen’s body was found. It was like they were trying to console someone they hardly knew! I wanted to say ‘Oh come on, mother fucker!’ like I used to  in debates at chapter meetings - but then I really didn’t want to say that either! I shouldn’t have to pretend to be a macho man just to be listened to! Oh, and you know who came by this morning?" Her voice brightened a little. 
     "Who?" I asked. 
     "Lester Olin - speed freak Les! I’ve had people like that, street kids and people that worked with Glen in restaurants or warehouses or wherever - all letting me know how much they appreciated Glen! Les just hugged me, that was all, but..." 
     "I wish I could be there with you right now," I said. I gave her Clu’s address and phone number and said, "just write or call us anytime." 
     "Oh this is fine, Dale," Miriam said. "For two days I’ve had to be brave and smile through tears and all that - I just wanted to say something. I love you Dale!" 
     "I love you too," I said and we both hung up. 
     The night before Glen was killed the great black uprising broke out in Detroit -what the bourgeois press called a riot. There had been another one in Newark less than two weeks before while I was in Pronghorn with Bump. When I came back Clu pointed out burning buildings in Newark in the LIFE magazine photos - buildings she used to pass by every day when she worked in the Organization’s Economic Project in the black ghetto. But Detroit was even bigger. It went on for five days. In the hot early afternoon, when the sky over us had a golden, metallic glow, sometimes there would be little strands of cloud that seemed to have drifted from the gigantic pillars of smoke in the magazine photos of Detroit burning. 
Starting shortly before Glen’s murder and going on into the days of the Detroit uprising, Clu got a lot of phone calls from Will and attorney Ben about still another court martial - Stan Bennett’s. Now all of the trio of G.I.’s who had first visited us at the Committee meeting had been prosecuted by the army. Stan had been visiting with Jim Ed and Lou at the Barrage. Two Military Intelligence agents stopped his car and asked to see his pass. He didn’t have one. This was such a common and trivial offense that usually nothing was done about it. Stan was court martialed the third day  of the Detroit uprising. He was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen days in the stockade. He was led off to the stockade hand cuffed, guarded by another soldier holding a rifle ready. No one had expected such a severe sentence. The G.I. who had to hold the rifle on Stan was so disgusted that the next day he ran away, into the world of deserters in Pronghorn’s Impact Area. 
     On the last day of the Detroit uprising, we got a call from Ben - he wanted Clu and me to come down to Pronghorn July 29th, two days before Will’s court martial and meet with him and Will at the Big Chief motel as soon as Will got off duty. We drove to Pronghorn in the mid-afternoon. We were going to the Barrage to see our friends before we went to Ben’s motel. Then  one of these things happened. 
     On the way to the Impact Area we drove past the Mountain Springs swimming pool which was surrounded by a high fence. On the sidewalk, along the fence was a long line of black teenager boys and girls, singing civil rights songs and clapping rhythm. There were cops and TV cameras all around. At the head of the line of black youths was a short sturdy woman in her forties with deep golden-brown skin. She recognized me as we drove by and waved and called out as loud as she could, "Hey Dale, come over here and talk to me!" 
     This was Bertha Soaper, a black school teacher who had started sit-ins by black high school kids at segregated restaurants in our state capital city back in 1958, two years before the sit-ins in North Carolina got nation wide attention. When I was seventeen, Mrs. Soaper came down to Pronghorn with her high school students to try to integrate the Mountain Springs pool. I had joined their demonstration and gotten arrested with her and the others - the first time I had ever been involved in civil rights. I was in some other sit-ins with Mrs. Soaper after that and when I went south, she kept up with me, calling the civil rights offices down there to see if I was all right. 
     Well, after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Mountain Springs pool turned itself into a private club and stayed segregated. Somehow whites could get a club membership card just by walking in the door and paying to swim one time. Blacks had to fill out application forms and wait for a reply that never came. 
     So here was Mrs. Soaper in 1967, with Detroit in flames, having the same kind of demonstration that was supposed to have ended in 1964. The teenage boys and girls with her were all from respectable black business and professional families, but they were wearing blue jackets with red letters - YOUTH COMMANDOS. Those words had looked harmless to Mrs. Soaper when she designed the jackets nearly ten years earlier, before the cities in the Northeast blew up. Now the TV people were eagerly focusing on the YOUTH COMMANDO jackets and people were shouting from across the street, "Go away niggers! We don’t want your riots here!" 
     When Clu parked her car and we got out, Mrs. Soaper hurried toward me as if there were no cops or news people or hostile racists. She had a huge beaming smile as she grasped my hands in hers. "This is something else!" she called out with delight. 
     "Mrs. Soaper," I said. "I’d like to introduce you to..." but as I looked around, the TV news people were surrounding Clu. One of the reporters had recognized Clu from Will’s first court martial and led the whole pack to her. 
     "You were down here at the Will Orry court martial, weren’t you?" one asked. 
     "Yes, I’m Clu Proctor, of the Independent Committee to End the War in Vietnam." 
     "Will you be down here for Orry’s court martial on Monday?" 
     "Yes. The Committee will have a caravan down here to support Private Orry." 
     Suddenly a reporter from the Pronghorn paper asked Clu, "Are you a Communist?"
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