Just As I Thought (18 page)

We want an end to the arms race. No more bombs. No more amazing inventions for death.

We understand all is connectedness. The earth nourishes us as we with our bodies will eventually feed it. Through us, our mothers connected the human past to the human future. We know the life and work of animals and plants in seeding, reseeding, and in fact simply inhabiting this planet. Their exploitation and the organized destruction of never-to-be-seen-again species threatens and sorrows us.

With that sense, that ecological right, we oppose the financial connections between the Pentagon and the multinational corporations and banks that the Pentagon serves.

Those connections are made of gold and oil.

We are made of blood and bone, we are made of the sweet and finite resource, water.

We will not allow these violent games to continue. If we are here in our stubborn thousands today, we will certainly return in the hundreds of thousands in the months and years to come.

We know there is a healthy, sensible, loving way to live and we intend to live that way in our neighborhoods and our farms in these United States, and among our sisters and brothers in all the countries of the world.

—1982

The Seneca Stories: Tales from the Women’s Peace Encampment

My friends and I came to the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment from Vermont. No matter what else we saw in the five days of work/action/arrest/talk, we felt the wide eventful sky above us, a blazing place from which sudden thunderstorms attacked. We had driven south out of the Green Mountains, out of the hills where cows pasture on narrow spiraling terraces down to great flat fields of corn, long, barely sloping acres of soybeans. So much horizon!

We came into a careful, conservative New York area that had once experienced extraordinary history. In the 1590s, the women of the Iroquois nation had met in Seneca to ask the tribes to cease their warfare. In 1848, the first Women’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls. During the 1850s Harriet Tubman led slaves north through this country. Her safe house still stands. The towns and countryside of Seneca County seemed to be a geography of American Herstory, where women of color and women of less color once lived powerfully and rebelliously, offering their female leadership in a dream of peace and justice for women—and men, too. In fact, the planned encampment was named just that, the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice.

There were many greeters when we passed the Amish farm and made a sharp right into the encampment. Women poked their heads into the windows of our car to assure us of a welcome, to tell us where to park, where the “Non-Registration” booth was, to tell any men in the car that they would be welcome in the large area around the house and garden but beyond the barn the women wanted privacy and safety. We bumped our car over the terrible corrugations that had once been the earth of a farmer’s cornfield. We learned that we were expected to put three hours of work into camp maintenance every day. We contributed seven dollars. We found out quickly that the condition of the soil beyond the parking in the tenting fields was also pretty poor. Corn uses the land up, and it was a hope often expressed that this land could be renewed, returned to the fertility of the green farms of the county.

*   *   *

Because of friends from New York and New England who had camped earlier we knew: Seneca was Stories. The story of the flag; the story of the TV camera crew; the story of the woman who climbed the army depot tower and painted out the words
MISSION FIRST
—leaving the words
PEOPLE ALWAYS
; the story of the astrologers who advised the protesters on what day and what hour to do civil disobedience; the story of the men who apologized, the women who joined us; the story of the woman who wore a shirt saying
Nuke the Bitches Till They Glow,
who was moved a tiny bit, so she removed the words
Till They Glow,
reserving further action for deeper thought; the story of boardwalks and ramps lovingly built to keep us all from twisting our ankles, and all that work—the plumbing and electrical work—done by women; the story of rumor, invention, and absolute factual truth in the lovely combinations that become myth.

Here are some of the stories I lived in or alongside of—and a couple of stories told me so often that I’ve begun to think I was a part of those stories, too.

On Saturday, July 30, 1983, about one hundred women left Seneca Falls to walk twelve miles to the encampment. They carried large cutouts of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and other women their walk honored. They intended to show the connections between the everyday killing oppression of women and the battering of our world in man-made war. They walked peacefully through uninhabited miles of field and scrub and small towns lined with American flags. When they came into Waterloo, they saw a huge sign stretched between two houses. It greeted them:
NUKE THEM TILL THEY GLOW. THEN SHOOT THEM IN THE DARK
.

They turned the corner to cross the Waterloo bridge and were met by several hundred Waterloo citizens, nearly all holding little and large flags, nearly all screaming foul cries and words they hoped would insult the women: “Commies,” “Lezzies,” “Kill them,” “Nuke them.” Many carried flagpoles with pointed tips, and their enraged screams and jabbing terrified our women, who, after brief discussion, decided to sit down. (This is often done in confrontations to show that violence is not intended and also to give the sitters a chance to talk quietly about what to do next.) The sheriff, an elected official who had known all about the walk weeks earlier, had no way to control the infuriated crowd that consisted of his neighbors, who were, after all, voters. He offered a detour, which made sense to some women. But for the women sitting under the barrage of hatred, it seemed foolish to turn their backs. Besides, they felt somewhat stubborn about upholding their right to walk through an American town without vicious abuse. They thought that right was worth a good deal. Many women tried courageously to look into the eyes of the men and women barring their way … to somehow change the confrontation into a meeting. Finally, and ironically, the quiet women were arrested for disorderly conduct, while the screamers were allowed to go. One by one, the women were dragged off to become the fifty-four Jane Does who spent five days in the only jail big enough to hold them all—the Interlaken High School.

Among the women arrested was one prominent Waterloo citizen who was horrified by the behavior of the townspeople. Her daughter was one of the first to come to the encampment the next day to inform us that many of her neighbors were ashamed, that the hard screaming knot didn’t represent them, though it would be seen again and again—at the Seneca Depot truck gate, at the Interlaken High School, where thirteen brave vigilers who were keeping a watch at night were surrounded by huge trailer trucks, assuring darkness, invisibility, and terror. Here, too, the flags were used to poke and jab at the circle of women.

The green lawn outside the Interlaken High School was a place where lots of play happened, too. In the daylight we pantomimed the August 1 march for our Jane Does watching from distant windows. We played out the fence-climbing arrests, we sang to them and, in fact, sang so well that day by day, the taunters became quieter. If we shouted, they shouted. But when we sang, they listened. I listened myself. We were singing beautifully. And we were saddened for the opposition, which tried a couple of songs, worked on “Jingle Bells,” but foundered on “America the Beautiful,” which we joyfully took up.

A story: one of the vigilers at the Interlaken High School prison was approached by a man who told her he’d been one of the people at the Waterloo bridge. He hadn’t screamed, he said, just waved his flag. He asked what the whole thing was about, for godsakes. She explained the reason for the camp, the historical purpose of the walk. “Oh,” he said, “I thought you were all sitting down in the road because the VFW wasn’t letting any women be part of
their
parade. And I agreed with them. That’s why I was mad.”

Two days after the August 1 march, I was a greeter at the camp entrance. A big car turned in. Father and son. The father leaned out the window and said, “We came to say we’re sorry about everything. That’s all.” The son spoke through the far window. “We wanted to ask you women how you do it. Those people were really rotten to you. I heard them. They insult you and they call you names and you’re so calm. My father and me—we honor you. We don’t understand, but we honor you.”

Two young women came up out of darkness to join us in our night circle at Interlaken High School. Someone tells me they own or work in a restaurant near the depot. They sit with us as we go around the circle trying to see who will go home and who will sit the night out with a good chance of arrest. The two young women sit with us for about an hour, listening to us listen to one another, then proudly and deliberately walk past their neighbors on the way down to their car. The words “Traitor, traitor” follow them in a halfhearted way.

A great deal has been written about that hostility at Waterloo, as though a country that refuses to pass something as simple as the Equal Rights Amendment would not have pockets of vicious misogyny, as though a nation with tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, army bases, weapons factories in the midst of unemployment would not be able to raise a furious patriarchal horde.

From that rage of flags that seemed so pervasive in the towns of Seneca County we must go back to the days before the camp’s opening. A Waterloo man came to the already exhausted, worried organizers and maintainers of the camp and said, “Take this flag and place it at the camp entrance, or else we will tell the world, the media, the town, how you refused the American flag.” The women met to discuss this—as we were all to meet time and time again in large and small circles. There was so much strong feeling on either side that a committee of fifteen was charged with resolving the problem: five women in strong opposition, five women in determined support, and five easygoing intermediate mediators. After seven hours under the only shade tree in that part of the camp, it was suggested that women could make their own flags. And many flags
were
made, not national flags, but painted and embroidered banners with pictures and sayings about our lives—also a couple of handsome handmade American flags—and all these were hung on lines in the front yard of the camp, along the road. However, the flag of the provoker was not accepted. As a result, the flag entrepreneurs of Seneca County did an incredible business, as anyone driving through the red-white-and-blue towns will tell.

In the Nicastro Restaurant a couple of miles up the road, the encampment leaflet and vision statement are tacked to the wall right next to two awards to Mr. and Mrs. Nicastro: Parents of the Year. In their guest book we have all written our thanks for the decency of this family to all the women who drank coffee and ate fine celebratory dinners after jail. They allowed their place to be used during the summer for meetings between the campers and the community.

*   *   *

On August 1, about 2,500 women marched from the nearby Sampson State Park to the depot. It was a long, hot walk, stalled by the sheriff every twenty-five feet or so; he was waiting for state troopers. He feared another confrontation. The angry opposition had already entrenched itself and its flags at the truck gate. But this time a band of very brave Waterloo citizens stood with their children not too far away, holding signs that said they’d fight for our rights whether they agreed with us or not.

Once at the gate, women came forward to transform the military steel mesh into an embroidery of banners, dolls, children’s photographs, quilts, christening dresses, lovers’ photos. Then they stepped back, and the women who planned the civil disobedience came forward. Immediately women began to climb over the high fence. I thought it was rather ridiculous, but as I and my Vermont affinity group of six women looked and looked, it became more interesting. It was the riskiness of the fence. I thought, This may be the last fence I’ll be able to climb in this life (I’m sixty and I see a fence shortage ahead), so I joined the others and we climbed that fence that looked to us women—young or old—a lot like the school fence that encircled girlhood, the one that the boys climbed adventurously over again and again. We were carted off by young soldiers—many of them black and Hispanic—all of them perplexed, most of them quite kind. There was a physical delight in the climbing act, but I knew and still believe that the serious act was to sit, as many women did, in little circles through the drenching night and blazing day on the hot cement in front of the truck gate with the dwindling but still enraged “Nuke Them Till They Glow” group screaming “Lesbian bitches” from their flag-enfolded cars.

To this gate the curious citizens of Waterloo or Romulus or Geneva came. Folks who’d read of this excitement brought their children and their coolers to watch silently, and sometimes speak, asking the hard questions again: “What about the Russians?” or “We have to make a living, don’t we?”; and sometimes to say sadly, “Did you really burn a flag and then urinate on it?” No. No. No.

So we
had
troubled them. And we asked: Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if hundreds, thousands of Germans had sat down before the gates of the Krupp gas-oven plants and troubled the contented hearts and minds of the good German people? They might have also asked those first two questions.

*   *   *

On Wednesday, August 3, people gathered at the fairgrounds in Waterloo outside the big corrugated-metal building in which the trial would be conducted. Lots of visible media—meaning TV. Our Jane Does had continued their resistance: they were carried into “court,” then back out into the yard as the judge tried to conduct one trial after another. They demanded a common trial and dismissal of unjust charges. We, their supporters, were removed from the building. Singing again. Finally the senselessness of individual trials became clear. Three women were allowed to speak for the group. Then the judge dismissed the case and ordered the charges dropped. He, like the sheriff, was an elected official but saw the wind blowing in a different direction. Outside in the terrible heat, I walked among the men and women, the cameras, the stalwart youths standing like statues holding enormous flags on thick flagpoles. And found a group of Waterloo women with cardboard signs.
WE SUPPORT YOUR RIGHT TO WALK THROUGH OUR TOWN. THE CONSTITUTION SHELTERS YOU
. Our Seneca sisters were hugging them, thanking them for their bravery. “Oh,” said one of the women, surprised and embarrassed, “we didn’t think we’d be so important as all that.” “You’re the most important of all to us,” we answered.