M M o RE

WE DO
ABORTIONS HERE

Wdo abortions here; that is all
we do. There are weary, grim mo-
ments when I think I cannot bear an-
other basin of bloody remains, utter
another kind phrase of reassurance.
So I leave the procedure room in the
back and reach for a new chart. Soon I
am talking to an eighteen-year-old
woman pregnant for the fourth time. I
push up her sleeve to check her blood
pressure and find row upon row of
needle marks, neat and parallel and
discolored .. She has been so hungry
for her drug for so long that she has
taken to using the loose skin of her
upper arms; her elbows are already a
permanent ruin of bruises. She is sur-
prised to find herself neatly four
months pregnant. I suspect she is of-
ten surprised, in a mild way, by the
blows she is dealt. I prepare myself for
another basin, another brief and chaf-
ing loss.

“How can you stand it?” Even the
clients ask: They see the machine,
the strange instruments, the blood,
the final stroke that wipes away the
promise of pregnancy. Sometimes I
see that too: I watch a woman’s swol-
len abdomen sink to softness in a few
stuttering moments and my own belly
flip-flops with sorrow. But all it takes
for me to catch my breath is another

Sallie Tisdale wrote this piece while warking
as a registered nurse in an abortion clinic.
Earlier this year she left ihat job to write her
third book. Her second book, Harvest
Moon: Portrait of a Nursing Home, was
published by Henry Holt in September.

66 HARPER’S MAGAZINE I OCTOBER

A nurse’s story
By Sallie Tisdale

interview, one more story that sounds
so much like the last one. There is a
numbing sameness lurking in this job:
the same questions, the same answers,
even the same trembling tone in the
voices. The worst is the sameness of
human failure, of inadequacy in the
face of each day’s dull demands.

In describing this work, I find it dif-
ficult to explain how much I enjoy it
most of the time. We laugh a lot here,
as friends arid as professional peers.
It’s nice to be with women all day. I
like the sudden, transient bonds I
forge with some clients: moments
when I am in my strength, remember-
ing weakness, and a woman in weak-
ness reaches out for my strength.
What [ offer is not power, but solid-
ness, offered almost eagerly. Certain
clients waken in me every tender urge
I have-others make me wince and
bite my tongue. Both challenge me to
find a balance. It is a sweet brutality
we practice here, a stark and loving
dispassion.

I look at abortion as if I am standing
on a cliff with a telescope, gazing at
some great vista. I can sweep the hori-
zon with both eyes, survey the scene
in all its distance and size. Or [ can put
my eye to the lens and focus on the
small details, suddenly so close. In
abortion the absolute must always be
tempered by the contextual, because
both are real, both valid; both hard.
How can we do this? How can we re-
fuse? Each abortion is a measure of our
failure to protect, to nourish our own.

Each basin [ empty is a promise-but
a promise broken a long time ago.

I grew up on the great promise of
birth control. Like many Women my
age, [ took the pill as soon as Iwas
sexually active. To risk pregnancy
when it Was so easy to avoid seemed
stupid, and my contraceptive success,
as it were, was part of the promise of
socialenlightenment. But birth con-
trol fails, far more frequently than lab-
oratory trials predict. Many of our cli-
ents take the pill; its failure to protect
them is a shocking realization. We
have clients who have been sterilized,
whose husbands have had vasecto-
mies; each one is a statistical misfit,
fine print come to life. The anger and
shame of these women I hold in one
hand, and the basin in the other. The
distance between the two, the length

[pace and try to measure, isrr’ the size of an abortion.
1he procedure is disarmingly sim-

ple. Women are surprised, as though
the mystery of conception, a dark and
hidden genesis, requires an elaborate
finale. In the first trimester of preg-
nancy, it’s a mere few minutes of vac-
uuming, a neat tidying up. I give a
woman a small yellow Valium, and
when it has begun to relax her, I lead
her into the back, into bareness, the
stirrups. The doctor reaches in her,
opening the narrow tunnel to the
uterus with a succession of slim,
smooth bars of steel. He inserts a plas-
tic tube and hooks it to a hose on the

machine. The woman is framed
against white paper that crackles as
she moves, the light bright in her
eyes. Then the machine rumbles low
and loud in the small windowless
room; the doctor moves the tube back
and forth with an efficient rhythm,
and the long tail of it fills with blood
that spurts and stumbles along into a
jar. He is usually finished in a few
minutes. They are long minutes for
the woman; her uterus frequently
reacts to its abrupt emptying with a
powerful, unceasing cramp, which
cuts off the blood vessels and enfolds
the irritated, bleeding tissue.

I am learning to recognize the shad-
ows that cross the faces of the women
I hold. While the doctor works be-
tween her spread legs, the paper drape
hiding his intent expression, I stand
beside the table. I hold the woman’s
hands in mine, resting them just be-
low her ribs. I watch her eyes, finger
her necklace, stroke her hair. I ask
about her job, her family; in a haze she
answers me; we chatter, faces close,
eyes meeting and sliding apart.

I watch the shadows that creep up
unnoticed and suddenly darken her
face as she screws up her features and
pushes a tear out each side to slide
down her cheeks. I have learned to
anticipate the quiver of chin, the rap-
id intake of breath and the surprising
sobs that rise soon after the machine
starts to drum. I know this is when the
cramp deepens, and the tears are part-
ly the tears that follow pain-the
sharp, childish crying when one
bumps one’s head on a cabinet door.
But a well of woe seems to open be-
neath many women when they hear
that thumping sound. The anticipa-
tion of the moment has finally come
to fruit; the moment has arrived when
the loss is no longer an imagined one.
It has come true.

I am struck by the sameness and I
am struck every day by the variety
here-how this commonplace dilem-
ma can so display the differences of
women. A twenty-one-year-old wom-
an, unemployed, uneducated, with-
out family, in the fifth month of her
fifth pregnancy. A forty-two-year-old
mother of teenagers, shocked by her
condition, refusing to tell her hus-
band. A twenty-three-year-old moth-
er of two having her seventh abor-

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tion, and many women in their
thirties having their first. Some are
stoic, some hysterical, a few giggle un-
controllably, many cry.

I talk to a sixteen-year-old unedu-
cated girl who was raped. She has
gonorrhea. She describes blinding
headaches, attacks of breathlessness,
nausea. “Sometimes I feel like two
different people,” she tells me with a
calm smile, “and I talk to myself.”

I pull out my plastic models. She
listens patiently for a time, and then
holds her hands wide in front of her
stomach.

“When’s the baby going to go up
into my stomach?” she asks.

I blink. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” she says, still smiling,

“when women get so big, isn’t the
baby in your stomach? Doesn’t it hatch
out of an egg there?”

My first question in an interview is
always the same. As I walk down the
hall with the woman, as we get settled
in chairs and I glance through her
files, I am trying to gauge her, to get a
sense of the words, and the tone, I
should use. With some I joke, with
others I chat, sometimes I fall into a
brisk, business-like patter. But I ask
every woman, “Are you sure you want
to have an abortion?” Most nod with
grim knowing smiles. “Oh, yes,” they
sigh. Some seek forgiveness, offer ex-
cuses. Occasionally a woman will
flinch and say, “Please don’t use that
word.”

Later I describe the procedure to
come, using care with my language. I
don’t say “pain” any more than I would
say “baby.” So many are afraid to ask
how much it will hurt. “My sister told
me-” I hear. “A friend of mine
said-” and the dire expectations un-
ravel. I prick the index finger of a
woman for a drop of blood to test, and
as the tiny lancet approaches the skin
she averts her eyes, holding her trem-
bling hand out to me and jumping at
my touch.

It is when I am holding a plastic
uterus in one hand, a suction tube in
the other, moving them together in
imitation of the scrubbing to come,
that women ask the most secret ques-
tion. I am speaking in a matter-of-fact
voice about “the tissue” and “the con-
tents” when the woman suddenly
catches my eye and asks, “How big is

68 HARPER’S MAGAZINE I OCTOBER

the baby now?” These words suggest a
quiet need for a definition of the
boundaries being drawn. It isn’t so
odd, after all, that she feels relief
when I describe the growing bud’s bul-
bous shape, its miniature nature.
Again I gauge, and sometimes lie a lit-
tle, weaseling around its infantile fea-
tures until its clinging power slackens.

But when I look in the basin,
among the curd like blood clots, I see
an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pen-
cilline ribs all in parallel rows with
tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards.
A translucent arm and hand swim be-
side.

A sleepy-eyed girl, just fourteen,
watched me with a slight and goofy
smile all through her abortion. “Does
it have little feet and little fingers and
all?” she’d asked earlier. When the
suction was over she sat up woozilv at
the end of the table and murmured,
“Can I see it?” I shook my head firmly.

“It’s not allowed,” I told her stern-
ly, because I knew she didn’t really
want to see what was left. She accept-
ed this statement of authority, and a

shadow of confused reliefn crossed her plain, pale face.
~ivately, even grudgingly, my col-
leagues might admit the power of
abortion to provoke emotion. But
they seem to prefer the broad view
and disdain the telescope. Abortion is
a matter of choice, privacy, control.
Its uncertainty lies in specific cases:
retarded women and girls too young to
give consent for surgery, women who
are ill or hostile or psychotic. Such
common dilemmas are met with both
compassion and impatience: they
slow things down. We are too busy to
chew over ethics. One person might
discuss certain concerns, behind
closed doors, or describe a particularly
disturbing dream. But generally there
is to be no ambivalence.

Every day I take calls from women
who are annoyed that we cannot see
them, cannot do their abortion today,
this morning, now. They argue the
price, demand that we stay after hours
to accommodate their job or class
schedule. Abortion is so routine that
one expects it to be like a manicure:
quick, cheap, and painless.

Still, I’ve cultivated a certain disre-
gard. It isn’t negligence, but I don’t

always pay attention. I couldn’t be
here if I tried to judge each case on its
merits: after all, we do over a hundred
abortions a week. At some point each
individual in this line of work draws a
boundary and adheres to it. For one
physician the boundary is a particular
week of gestation; for another, it is a
certain number of repeated abortions.
But these boundaries can be fluid too:
one physician overruled his own limit
to abort a mature but severely mal-
formed fetus. For me, the limit is al-
lowing my clients to carry their own
burden, shoulder the responsibility
themselves. I shoulder the burden of
trying not to judge them.

This city has several “crisis preg-
nancy centers” advertised in the
Yellow Pages. They are small offices
staffed by volunteers, and they offer
free pregnancy testing, glossy photos
of dead fetuses, and movies. I had a
client recently whose mother is active
in the anti-abortion movement. The
young woman went to the local crisis
center and was told that the doctor
would make her touch her dismem-
bered baby, that the pain would be
the most horrible she could imagine,
and that she might, after an abortion,
never be able to have children. All
lies. They called her at home and at
work, over and over and over, but she
had been wise enough to give a false
name. She came to us a fugitive. We
who do abortions are marked, by
some, as impure. It’s dirty work.

When a deliveryman comes to the
sliding glass window by the reception
desk and tilts a box toward me, I hesi-
tate. I read the packing slip, assess the
shape and weight of the box in light of
its supposed contents. We request fa-
miliar faces. The doors are carefully
locked: I have learned to half glance
around at bags and boxes, looking for
a telltale sign. I register with security
when I arrive, and I am careful not to

bang a door. We are all a lit-

e tle on edge here.oncern about size and shape
seem to be natural, and so is the relief
that follows. We make the powerful
assumption that the fetus is different
from us, and even when we admit the
similarities, it is too simplistic to be
seduced by form alone. But the form is
enormously potent-humanoid, pow-

erless, palm-sized, and pure, it evokes
an almost fierce tenderness when
viewed simply as what it appears to
be. But appearance, and even poten-
tial, aren’t enough. The fetus, in be-
coming itself, can ruin others; its utter
dependence has a sinister side. When
iam struck in the moment by the con-
tents in the basin, I am careful to re-
member the context, to note the tear-
ful teenager and the woman sighing
with something more than relief One
kind of question, though, I find con-
siderably trickier.

“Can you tell what it is!” I am
asked, and this means gender. This
question is asked by couples, not
women alone. Always couples would
abort a girl and keep a boy. I have
been asked about twins, and even if I
could tell what race the father was.

An eighteen-year-old woman with
three daughters brought her husband
to the interview. He glared first at me,
then at his wife, as he sank lower and
lower in the chair, picking his teeth
with a toothpick. He interrupted a
conversation with his wife to ask if I
could tell whether the baby would be
a boy or a girl. I told him I could not.

“Good,” he replied in a slow and
strangely malevolent voice, “’cause if
it was a boy I’d wring her neck.”

In a literal sense, abortion exists
because we are able to ask such ques-
tions, able to assign a value to the fe-
tus which can shift with changing cir-
cumstances. If the human bond to a
child were as primitive arid unflinch-
ingly narrow as that of other animals,
there would be no abortion. There
would be no abortion because there
would be nothing more important
than caring for the young and perpet-
uating the species; no reason for sex
but to make babies. I sense this some-
times, this wordless organic duty,
when I do ultrasounds,

We do ultrasound, a sound-wave
test that paints a faint, gray picture of
the fetus, whenever we’re uncertain
of gestation. Age is measured by the
width of the skull and confirmed by
the length of the femur or thighbone;
we speak of a pregnancy as being a cer-
tain “femur length” in weeks. The
usual concern is whether a pregnancy
is within the legal limit for an abor-
tion. Women this far along have bel-
lies which swell out round and tight

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like trim muscles. When they lie flat,
the mound rises softly above the hips,
pressing the umbilicus upward.

It takes practice to read an ultra-
sound picture, which is grainy and
etched as though in strokes of char-
coal. But suddenly a rapid rhythmic
motion appears-the beating heart.
Nearby is a soft oval, scratched with
lines-the skull. The leg is harder to
find, and then suddenly the fetus
moves, bobbing in the surf. The skull
tunis away, an arm slides across the
screen, the torso rolls. I kn~w the
weight of a baby’s head on my shoul-
der, the whisper of lips on ears, the
delicate curve of a fragile spine in my
hand. I know how heavy and correct a
newborn cradled feeis. The creature I
watch in secret requires nothing from
me but to be left alone, and that is
precisely what won’t be done.

These inadvertently made beings
are caught in a twisting web of motive
and desire. they are at least inconve-
nient, sometimes quite literally dan-
gerous in the womb, but most often
they fall somewhere in between-
consequences never quite believed in
come to roost; Their virtue rises and
falls outside their own nature: they
become only what we make them. A
fetus created by accident is the most
absolute kind of surprise. Whether
the blame lies in a failed IUD, a
slipped condom; or a false impression
of safety, that fetus is a thing whose
creation has been actively worked
against. Its existence is an error. I
think this is why so few women, even
late in a pregnancy, will consider
giving a baby up for adoption. To do
so means making the fetus real-
imagining it as something whole and
outside oneself. The decision to ter-
minate a pregnancy is sometimes
so difficult and confounding that it
creates an enormous demand for im-
mediate action. The decision is a re-
jection; the pregnancy has become
something to be rid of, a condition to
be ended. It is a burden; a weight, a
thing separate.

Women have abortions because
they are too old, and too young, too
poor, and tOOrich, too stupid, and tab
smart. I see women who berate them-
selves with violent emotions for their
first and only abortion, and others
who return three times, five times,

70 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / c:>crOBER

hauling two or three children, who
cannot remember to take a pill or
where they put the diaphragm. We
talk glibly about choice. But the
choice for what? I see all the broken
promises in lives lived like a series of
impromptu obstacles. There are the
sweet, light promises of love and inti-
macy, the glittering promise of educa-
tion and progress, the warm promise
of. safe families, long years of inno-
cence and community. And there is
the promise of freedom: freedom from
failure, from faithlessness. Freedom
from biology. The early feminist de-
fense of abortion asked many ques-
tions, but the one I remember is this:
Is biology destiny? And the answer is
yes, sometimes it is. Women who
have the fewest choices of all exercise
their right to abortion the most.

Oh, the ignorance. I take a woman
to the back room and ask her to un-
dress; a few minutes later I return and
find her positiohed discreetly behind
a drape, still wearing underpants. “Do
I have to take these off too?” she asks,
a little shocked. Some swear they
have not had sex, many do not know
what a uterus is, how sperm and egg
meet, how sex makes babies. Some
late seekers db not believe themselves
pregnant; they believe themselves im-
pregnable. I was chastised when I be-
gan this job for referring to some cli-
ents as girls: it is a feminist heresy.
They come so young, snapping gum,
sockless and sneakered, and their
shakily applied eyeliner smears when
they cry. I call them girls with mater-

nal benignity. I cannot
T imagine them as mothers.

.the doctor seats himself between
the woman’s thighs and reaches into
the dilated opening of a five-month
pregnant uterus. Quickly he grabs and
crushes the fetus in several places, and
the roomis filled with a low clatter
and snap of forceps, the click of the
tanaculum, and a pulling, sucking
sound. The paper crinkles as the
drugged and sleepy woman shifts, the
nurse’s low, honey-brown voice ex-
plains each step in delicate words.

I have fetus dreams, we all do here:
dreams of abortions one after the oth-
er; of buckets of blood splashed on the
walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I
dreamed that two men grabbed me

and began to drag me away. “Let’s do
an abortion,” they said with a sicken-
ing leer, and I began to scream,
plunged into a vision of sucking,
scraping pain, of being spread and
tom by impartial instruments that do
only what they are bidden. I woke
from this dream barely able to breathe
and thought of kitchen tables and
coat hangers, knitting needles striped
with blood, and women all alone
clutching a pillow in their teeth to
keep the screams from piercing the
apartment-house walls. Abortion is
the narrowest edge between kindness
and cruelty. Done as well as it can be;
it is still violence-merciful violence,
like putting a suffering animal to
death.

Maggie, one of the nurses, received
a call at midnight Qat long ago. It was
a woman in her twentieth week of
pregnancy; the necessarily gradual
process of cervical dilation begun the
day before had stimulated labor, as it
sometimes does. Maggie and one of
the doctors met the woman at the of-
fice in the night. Maggie helped her
onto the table, and as she lay down
the fetus was delivered into Maggie’s
hands. When Maggie told me about it
the next day, she cupped her hands
into a small bowl-“It was just like a
little kitten,” she said softly, wonder-
ingly. “Everything was still at-
tached.”

At the end of the day I clean out
the suction jars, pouring blood into
the sink, splashing the sides with
flecks of tissue. From the sink rises a
rich and humid smell, hot, earthy,
and moldering; it is the smell of some-
thing recently alive beginning to de-
cay. I take care of the plastic tub all.
the floor, filled with pieces too big to
be trusted to the trash. The law de-
fines the contents of the bucket I hold
protectively against my chest as “tis-
sue.” Some would say my complicity
in filling that bucket gives me no right
to call it anything else. I slip the tissue
gently into a bag and place i\t ih the
freezer, to be burned at another time.
Abortion requires of me an entirely
new set of assumptions. It requires a
willingness to live with conflict, fear-
lessness, and grief. As I close the
freezer door, I imagine a world where
this won’t be necessary, and then re-
turn to the world where it is. •

Black Men and Public Space, by Brent Staples

Brent Staples (b. 1951) earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and went on to

become a journalist. The following essay originally appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1986, under the title,
“Just Walk on By.” Staples revised it slightly for publication in Harper’s a year later under the present
title.

My first victim was a white woman, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I came
upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent

neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the
avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not
so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man – a broad six feet two

inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky
military jacket – seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up

her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross
street.

That was more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly
arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls

that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into – the ability to alter public
space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or

worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless
wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken – let alone hold

one to a person’s throat – I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight
made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was
indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the

surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast,
unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians – particularly women – and me. And soon

I gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a
corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer

somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and
weapons meet – and they often do in urban America – there is always the possibility of
death.

In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar

with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car
stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver – black, white, male,

or female – hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I grew
accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the other side of the street
rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with policemen, doormen,

bouncers, cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals
before there is any nastiness.

I moved to New York nearly two years ago, and I have remained an avid night walker. In

central Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-one-one street
encounters.

Elsewhere, in Soho, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings

shut out the sky – things can get very taut indeed.

After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear
the worst from me. They seem to have set their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps

strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves
against being tackled. I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a
hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and young black men

are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are
no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome

entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.

It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being
conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in
Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960’s, I

was scarcely noticeable against the backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I
grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fist fights. In retrospect, my shyness

of combat has clear sources.

As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several too. There
were babies, really – a teenage cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his
mid-twenties – all gone down in episodes of bravado played out on the streets. I came to

doubt the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a
shadow – timid, but a survivor.

The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor.

The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when
I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was
writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken as a burglar. The office manager

called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the labyrinthine halls, nearly
to my editor’s door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward

the company of someone who knew me.

Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an interview. I
entered a jewelry store on a city’s affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself
and returned with an enormous red Doberman Pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She

stood, the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of

her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her goodnight.

Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He

went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a
murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled
him from his car at gunpointe and but for his press credentials, would probably have tried to

book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales like this all the time.

Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not
to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less

threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to
nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have

exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some
people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as

not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare
occasions when I’ve been pulled over by the police.

And, on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-
reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular

classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem
to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that

a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It is
my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.

45

/^>(0. I roll the dice—a six and a
1 -y two. Through the air I move
^ ^ my token, the flatiron, to Ver-
mont Avenue, where dog packs range.

I The dogs are moving (some are
limping) through ruins, rubble, fire
damage, open garbage. Doorways are
gone. Lath is visible in the crumbling
walls of the buildings. The street
sparkles with shattered glass. I have

Ihever seen, anywhere, so many broke

n

windows. A sign—”Slow, Children

|at Play”—has been bent backward
by an automobile. At the lighthouse,
the dogs turn up Pacific and disappear.
George Meade, Army engineer, built

•the lighthouse—brick upon brick, six
hundred thousand bricks, to reach up
higli enough to throw a beam twen-
ty miles over the sea. Meade, seven

: years later, saved the Union at Gettys-
burg.

I buy Vermont Avenue for $100.
My opponent is a tall, shadowy figure,
across from me, but I know him well,
and I know his game like a favorite
tune. If he can, he will always go for
the quick kill. And when it is foolish to
go for the quick kill he will be foolish.
On the whole, though, he is a master
assessor of percentages. It is a mistake
to underestimate him. His eleven car-
ries his top hat to St. Charles Place,
which he buys for $140.

• The sidewalks of St. Charles Place
have been cracked to shards by
through-growing weeds. There are no
buildings. Mansions, hotels once stood
here. A few street lamps now drop
cones of light on broken glass and
vacant space behind a chain-link
fence that some great machine has in
places bent to the ground. Five plane
trees—in full summer leaf, flecking the
light—are all that live on St. Charles
Place.

Block upon block, gradually, we
jre cancelling each other out—in the
blues, the lavenders, the oranges, the
greens. My opponent follows a plan
of his own devising. I use the Horn-
blower & Weeks opening and the
Zuricher defense. The first game draws
tight, will soon finish. In 1971, a group

people in Racine, Wisconsin, played

A r i E P o r i T E n A T L A I I G E

THE J E A K C H FOK M A K V I N G A R D E N 5

E U6″L

>

• pe

for seven hundred and sixty-eight
hours. A game begun a month later
in Danville, California, lasted eight
hundred and twenty hours. These are
official records, and they stun us. We
have been playing for eight minutes. It
amazes us that Monopoly is thought
of as a long game. It is possible to play
to a complete, absolute, and final con-
clusion in less than fifteen minutes, all
within the rules as written. My op-
ponent and I have done so thousands
of times. No wonder we are sitting
across from each other now in this
best-of-seven series for the international
singles championship of the world.

On Illinois Avenue, three men lean
out from second-story windows. A girl
is coming down the street. She wears
dungarees and a bright-red shirt, has
ample breasts and a Hadendoan Afro,
a black halo, two feet in diameter. Ice
rattles in the glasses in the hands of the
men.

“Hey, sister!”
Come on up!

She looks up, looks from one to an-
other to the other, looks them flat in
the eye.

“What for?” she says, and she walks
on.

I buy Illinois for $240. It solidifies
my chances, for I already own Ken-
tucky and Indiana. My opponent pales.
If he had landed first on Illinois, the
game would have been over then and
there, for he has houses built on Board-
walk and Park Place, we share the
railroads equally, and we have can-
celled each other everywhere else. We
never trade.

In 1852, R. B. Osborne, an immi-
grant Englishman, civil engineer, sur-
veyed the route of a railroad line that
would run from Camden to Absecon
Island, in New Jersey, traversing the
state from the Delaware River to the
barrier beaches of the sea. He then
sketched in the plan of a “bathing
village” that would surround the
eastern terminus of the line. His pen
flew glibly, framing and naming spa-
cious avenues parallel to the shore—
Mediterranean, Baltic, Oriental, Vent-
nor—and narrower transsecting ave-
nues: North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
Vermont, Connecticut, States, Virginia,

Tennessee, New York, Kentucky, In-
diana, Illinois. The place as a whole had
no name, so when he had completed
the plan Osborne wrote in large let-
ters over the ocean, “Atlantic City.”
No one ever challenged the name,
or the names of Osborne’s streets.
Monopoly was invented in the early
nineteen-thirties by Charles B. Dar-
row, but Darrow was only transliterat-
ing what Osborne had created. The
railroads, crucial to any player, were
the making of Atlantic City. After the
rails were down, houses and hotels bur-
geoned from Mediterranean and Baltic
to New York and Kentucky. Prop-
erties—building lots—sold for as little
as six dollars apiece and as much
as a thousand dollars.. The original
investors in the railroads and the real
estate called themselves the Camden
& Atlantic Land Company. Reverent-
ly, I repeat their names: Dwight Bell,
William Coffin, John DaCosta, Daniel
Deal, William Fleming, Andrew Hay,
Joseph Porter, Jonathan Pitney, Samu-
el Richards—founders, fathers, fore-
runners, archetypical masters of the
quick kill.

My opponent and I are now in a
deep situation of classical Monopoly.
The torsion is almost perfect—Board-
walk and Park Place versus the brilliant
reds. His cash position is weak, though,
and if I escape him now he may fade.
I land on Luxury Tax, contiguous to
but in sanctuary from his power. I have
four houses on Indiana. He lands there.
He concedes.

Indiana Avenue was the address of
the Brighton Hotel, gone now. The
Brighton was exclusive—a word that
no longer has retail value in the city. If
you arrived by automobile and tried
to register at the Brighton, you were
sent away. Brighton-class people came
in private railroad cars. Brighton-class
people had other private railroad cars
for their horses—dawn rides on the
firm sand at water’s edge, skirts flying.
Colonel Anthony J. Drexel Biddle—
the sort of name that would constrict
throats in Philadelphia—lived, much of
the year, in the Brighton.

Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken is on
Kentucky Avenue. So is Clifton’s Club
Harlem, with the Sepia Revue and the

46

“All right, but promise you’ll come in and go to bed the
instant you do discover the meaning of it all.”

Sepia Follies, featuring the Honey Bees,
the Fashions, and the Lords.

My opponent and I, many years ago,
played 2,428 games of Monopoly in a
single season. He was then a recent
graduate of the Harvard Law School,
and he was working for Milbank,
Tweed, looking up law. Two people
we knew—one from Chase Manhat-
tan, the other from Morgan, Stanley—
tried to get into the game, but after a
few rounds we found that they were
not in the conversation and we sent
them home. Monopoly should always
be mano a mano anyway. My oppo-
nent won 1,199 games, and so did I.

Thirty were ties. He was called into
the Army, and we stopped just there.
Now, in Game 2 of the series, I go
immediately to jail, and again to jail,
while my opponent seines property. He
is dumbfounding])’ lucky. He wins in
twelve minutes.

Visiting hours are daily, eleven to
two; Sunday, eleven to one; evenings,
six to nine. “NO MINORS, NO FOOD,
Immediate Family Only Allowed in
Jail.” All this above a blue steel door
in a blue cement wall in the window-
less interior of the basement of the city
hall. The desk sergeant sits opposite the
door to the jail. In a cigar box in front

of him are pills in every color,
a banquet of fruit salad an
inch and a half deep—
leapers, co-pilots, footballs,
truck drivers, peanuts, blue
angels, yellow jackets, red-
birds, rainbows. Near the
desk are two soldiers, wait-
ing to go through the blue
door. They are about eight-
een years old. One of them is
trying hard to light a ciga-
rette. His wrists are in steel
cuffs. A military policeman
waits, too. He is a year or so
older than the soldiers, taller,
studious in appearance, gen-
tle, fat. On a bench against a
wall sits a good-looking girl
in slacks. The blue door rat-
tles, swings heavily open. A
turnkey stands in the door-
way. “Don’t you guys kill
yourselves back there now,”
says the sergeant to the sol-
diers.

“One kid, he overdosed
himself about ten and a half
hours ago,” says the M.P.

The M.P.’, the soldiers,
the turnkey, and the girl on
the bench are white. The
sergeant is black. “If you
take off the handcuffs, take
off the belts,” says the ser-
geant to the M.P. “I don’t
want them hanging them-
selves back there.” The door
shuts and its tumblers move.
When it opens again, five
minutes later, a young white
man in sandals and dunga-
rees and a blue polo shirt
emerges. His hair is in a
ponytail. He has no beard.!
He grins at the good-looking
girl. She rises, joins him. The
sergeant hands him a manila
envelope. From it he re-
moves his belt and a smallj

notebook. He borrows a pencil, makes
an entry in the notebook. He is out
of jail, free. What did he dof He
offended Atlantic City in some way.
He spent a night in the jail. In the
nineteen-thirties, men visiting Atlantic
City went to jail, directly to jail, did
not pass Go, for appearing in topless1

bathing suits on the beach. A city statH
ute requiring all men to wear full-
length bathing suits was not seriously
challenged until 1937, and the first
year in which a man could legally go
bare-chested on the beach was 1940.

Game 3. After seventeen minutes, Ii
am ready to begin construction on

48

• J t

B e f o r e y o u s e e i t

i n w h i t e

The Sugarbush Inn

overpriced and sluggish Pacific, North
Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Nothing
else being open, opponent concedes.

The physical profile of streets per-
pendicular to the shore is something
like a playground slide. It begins in
the high skyline of Boardwalk hotels,
plummets into warrens of “side-ave-
nue” motels, crosses Pacific, slopes
through church missions, convalescent
homes, burlesque houses, rooming
houses, and liquor stores, crosses At-
lantic, and runs level through the
bombed-out ghetto as far—Baltic,
Mediterranean—as the eye can see.
North Carolina Avenue, for example,
is flanked at its beach end by the Chal-
fonte and the Haddon Hall (908
rooms, air-conditioned), where, ac-
cording to one biographer, John Philip
Sousa (1854-1932) first played when
he was twenty-two, insisting, even
then, that everyone call him by his
entire name. Behind these big hotels,
motels—Barbizon, Catalina—crouch.
Between Pacific and Atlantic is an oc-
casional house from 1910—wooden
porch, wooden mullions, old yello

w

paint—and two churches, a package
store, a strip show, a dealer in fruits
and vegetables. Then, beyond At-
lantic Avenue, North Carolina moves
on into the vast ghetto, the bulk of the
city, and it looks like Metz in 1919,
Cologne in 1944. Nothing has actually
exploded. It is not bomb damage. It is
deep and complex decay. Roofs are off.
Bricks are scattered in the street. Peo-
ple sit on porches, six deep, at nine on a
Monday morning. When they go off to
wait in unemployment lines, they wait
sometimes two hours. Between Medi-
terranean and Baltic runs a chain-link
fence, enclosing rubble. A patrol car
sits idling by the curb. In the back seat
is a German shepherd. A sign on the
fence says, “Beware of Bad Dogs.”

Mediterranean and Baltic are the
principal avenues of the ghetto. Dogs
are everywhere. A pack of seven passes
me. Block after block, there are three-
story brick row houses. Whole seg-
ments of them are abandoned, a thou-
sand broken windows. Some parts are
intact, occupied. A mattress lies in the
street, soaking in a pool of water. Wet
stuffing is coming out of the mattress.
A postman is having a rye and a beer
in the Plantation Bar at nine-fifteen
in the morning. I ask him idly if he
knows where Marvin Gardens is. He
does not. “HOOKED AND NEED HELP?
CONTACT N.A.R.C.O.” “REVIVAL NOW
GOING ON, CONDUCTED BY REVER-
END H. HENDERSON OF TEXAS.”
These are signboards on Mediterranean

s e e i t i n c o l o r .

What is Sugarbush without snow?
It’s Vermont’s Green Mountains
turned to flaming foliage. (See
them from a room at the Inn or a
chalet, if you prefer.) Golf on our
18-hole RobertTrentJones course.
The flash of tennis whites on our
courts. Ride a gondola to peaks
that blush with brilliance, or per-
haps soar a glider through the
sky-washed mountain air. Hiking,
horseback riding, country auc-
tions, mouth-watering meals, eve-
ning entertainment and small talk
’round a blazing fireplace. It’s
everything you love to do in the
Fall at the Inn that’s unforgettable
all year ’round.

After you’ve seen it in color, bring
the family to our White Christmas.

For more information,
call (802) 496-3301 or write:

T H E

S U G A R B U S H

A IN I N Box 99, Warren, Vermor
where every season brings its best

49

B L

L . L . B e a n , I n c / s 6 0 t h Y e a r

H o w a C o u n t r y B o y f r o m M a i n e F o u n d

F u n a n d F a m e i n t h e S p o r t i n g G o o d s B u s i n e s s

B e c a u s e o f S o r e F e e t

Leon L. B e a n left school in 1886 a t t he age of t h i r t een . H i s
p a r e n t s h a d died a n d ” L . L . ” worked on a ne ighbor ‘ s farm to ea rn
his keep. H e comple t ed his e d u c a t i o n t r a m p i n g t h e M a i n e woods
wheneve r he could. ” L . L . ” loved to h u n t a n d fish. B u t t he boo t s

“of t he d a y were n o t su i ted to an ac t ive o u t d o o r s m a n . A n d , b y 1912,
he finally got t i red of h a v i n g wet , sore feet.

” L . L . ” dec ided to m a k e his own boots . H e c o m b i n e d l ea the r
tops wi th a l l – rubber b o t t o m s . F o r b a r e – g r o u n d wa lk ing t h e y were
l ight in weight , snug-f i t t ing, a n d cush ioned t h e foot. F o r w e t going
a n d wa lk ing in snow, t h e wa te rp roof b o t t o m s were ideal . W o r d

spread qu ick ly a n d ” L . L . ‘ s ” M a i n e H u n t i n g Shoe w a s a success. T o d a y i t ‘ s t he
most widely used spor t ing boot in the world.

Cont inu ing to mix p leasure w i th business, ” L . L . ‘ s ” o u t d o o r a d v e n t u r e s led
to other p r o d u c t ideas. In 191 7 he p u t t h e m toge the r in a mai l o rder c a t a log :
“We a re n o t t ry ing to see h o w m u c h we can sell, b u t i n s t ead to c u t d o w n to

the bare necessit ies in o rder to p ro t ec t our c u s t o m e r s aga in s t w a s t i n g one
dollar on unnecessa ry e q u i p m e n t . ”

The C h a m o i s C lo th Sh i r t was i n t r o d u c e d in 1927. ” T h i s is t he
shirt I persona l ly use on all m y h u n t i n g a n d fishing t r i p s , ” said ” L . L . ” ^H
and several mill ion s p o r t s m e n h a v e since been convinced to wear t h e
same. F i sh ing tack le was added . ” I t is no longer necessary for you to e x p e r i m e n t w i th

dozens of flies to d e t e r m i n e t he few t h a t will c a t c h fish. W e h a v e done
t h a t expe r imen t ing for y o u . ” M o r e a n d m o r e s p o r t s m e n c a m e to rely
on ” L . L . ‘ s ” p roduc t s .

B y 1934 he could b o a s t : ” O u r ca ta log n o t on ly goes to eve ry s t a t e
in t he Union , b u t t o eve ry civilized c o u n t r y in t h e

yg wor ld . ” A n d b y 1937 ” L . L . ” was selling well over a
rJ.^ million dol lars w o r t h of h u n t i n g , fishing a n d c a m p –

‘-“- ing special t ies, all pe r sona l ly t e s t ed a n d fully
*. -:•• g u a r a n t e e d .

So m a n y people s o u g h t ” L . L . ‘ s ” adv ice o n
o u t d o o r l iving t h a t , in 1942, he w r o t e his

own book. T h r o u g h the fifties a n d sixties his fame
cont inued to sp read . H e w a s t h e sub jec t of m a n y
national magaz ine ar t ic les a n d even a television
special. W h e n ” L . L . ” died in 1967 a t t he age of
ninety-four, his pass ing was acknowledged b y
hundreds of t h o u s a n d s t h r o u g h o u t t he wor ld . N o t
bad for a c o u n t r y boy from M a i n e .

“L.L.’s” unique approach to selling sporting goods continues
in our current catalogs. To celebrate our 60th year, we are using
“L.L.’s” favorite painting, “The Old Country Store” by P.B.
Parsons, on our Fall Catalog cover. Our current president and
grandson of “L.L.,” Leon L. Gorman, will be pleased to send
you a free copy of our Fall 1972 catalog. Write to:

L. L. Bean, Inc., 355 Main Street, Freeport, Maine 04032

L. L. Bean, Inc.
355 Main St., Freeport, Maine 04032

• Send Free Catalog
Name

Address

Zip_

L. L. Bean, Inc.
Outdoor Sporting Specialties

50

n

w
T h e b l a z e r

w a s n e v e r l i k e t h i s .

The knitted blazer
in hunter green.
Try it on at John Wanamaker
or other very good stores.

Pmcus Brothers-Maxwell, 1290 Ave of the Americas, New York
Independence Mall East, Philadelphia, Pa.

and Baltic. The second one is upside
down and leans against a boarded-up
window of the Faith Temple Church
of God in Christ. There is an old peel-
ing poster on a warehouse wall showing
a figure in an electric chair. “The
Black Panther Manifesto” is the title of
the poster, and its message is, or was,
that “the fascists have already decided
in advance to murder Chairman Bobby
Seale in the electric chair.” I pass an
old woman who carries a bucket. She
wears blue sneakers, worn through.
Her feet spill out. She wears red socks,
rolled at the knees. A white handker-
chief, spread over her head, is knotted
at the corners. Does she know where
Marvin Gardens is? “I sure don’t
know,” she says, setting down the
bucket. “I sure don’t know. I’ve heard
of it somewhere, but I just can’t say
where.” I walk on, through a block of
shattered glass. The glass crunches un-
derfoot like coarse sand. I remember
when I first came here—a long train
ride from Trenton, long ago, games of
poker in the train—to play basketball
against Atlantic City. We were half
black, they were all black. We scored
forty points, they scored eighty, or
something like it. What I remember
most is that they had glass back-
boards—glittering, pendent, expensive
glass backboards, a rarity then in high
schools, even in colleges, the only ones
we played on all year.

I turn on Pennsylvania, and start
back toward the sea. The windows of
the Hotel Astoria, on Pennsylvania
near Baltic, are boarded up. A sheet
of unpainted plywood is the door, and
in it is a triangular peephole that now
frames an eye. The plywood door
opens. A man answers my question.
Rooms there are six, seven, and ten
dollars a week. I thank him for the
information and move on, emerging
from the ghetto at the Catholic
Daughters of America Women’s Guest
House, between Atlantic and Pacific.
Between Pacific and the Boardwalk are
the blinking vacancy signs of the Aris-
tocrat and Colton Manor motels.
Pennsylvania terminates at the Shera-
ton-Seaside—thirty-two dollars a day,
ocean corner. I take a walk on the
Boardwalk and into the Holiday Inn
(twenty-three stories). A guest is regis-
tering. “You reserved for Wednesday,
and this is Monday,” the clerk tells
him. “But that’s all right. We have
plenty of rooms.” The clerk is very
young, female, and has soft brown hair
that hangs below her waist. Her su-
perior kicks her.

He is a middle-aged man with red
spiderwebs in his face. He is jacketed
and tied. He takes her aside. “Don’t

T h e p l a i d s u i t

w a s n e v e r l i k e t h i s .

The plaid suit now
in oversize plaid.
Very big at Marshall Field
and other stores you like.

PncuS Brothers-Maxwell. !290Ave of the Americas, New York
Independence Moll East, Philadelphia. Pa

JUSTERINI
Founded 1749 Oa

CO
o o
X

If a g o o d s c o t c h o f f e r s u n l i m i t e d

o p p o r t u n i t i e s f o r e n j o y m e n t ,

i m a g i n e t h e p o s s i b i l i t i e s w i t h

a g r e a t s c o t c h .

J < B

R A R E

S C O T C H

The Pleasure Principle.

**””””̂ 86 Proof Blended Scotch Whisky © 1972 Paddington Corp., N.Y.

54

Thoroughbreds—our marvelous bag, belt and shoe in

the print of the year — a mix of earth tones dashed

with rich brown leather (or in navy). Shoulder-envelope

bag, 50.00 and belt, in sizes 24 to 32, 20.00 on the

Street Floor; shoe with gilt-banded heel, 30.00 on the

Sixth Floor. Lord & Taylor, 424 Fifth Ave., New York

Reminiscent of the medieval mystique…a boldly dramatic pen-
dant, brilliantly burnished and hand-hammered in the golden
manner of Monet. From the “Paladin” collection… in gold, sil-
ver, or pewter finish… twenty dollars. At the finest stores.

M o n e t s
Master Jeweler

16 East 34th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016

say ‘plenty,’ ” he says. “Say ‘You are
fortunate, sir. We have rooms avail-
able.’ ”

The face of the young woman turns
sour. “We have all the rooms you
need,” she says to the customer, and,
to her superior, “How’s that?”

Game 4. My opponent’s luck has
become abrasive. He has Boardwalk
and Park Place, and has sealed the
board.

Darrow was a plumber. He was,
specifically, a radiator repairman who
lived in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
His first Monopoly board was a sheet
of linoleum. On it he placed houses and
hotels that he had carved from blocks
of wood. The game he thus invented
was brilliantly conceived, for it was an
uncannily exact reflection of the busi-
ness milieu at large. In its depth, range,
and subtlety, in its luck-skill ratio, in its
sense of infrastructure and socio-eco-
nomic parameters, in its philosophical
characteristics, it reached to the pro-
fundity of the financial community. It
was as scientific as the stock market.
It suggested the manner and means
through which an underdeveloped
world had been developed. It was chess
at Wall Street level. “Advance token
to the nearest Railroad and pay owner
twice the rental to which he is other-
wise entitled. If Railroad is unowned,
you may buy it from the Bank. Get out
of Jail, free. Advance token to nearest
Utility. If unowned, you may buy it
from Bank. If owned, throw dice and
pay owner a total ten times the amount
thrown. You are assessed for street re-
pairs: $40 per house, $115 per hotel.
Pay poor tax of $15. Go to Jail. Go
directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do
not collect $200.”

The turnkey opens the blue door.
The turnkey is known to the inmates
as Sidney K. Above his desk are ten
closed-circuit-TV screen s—assorted
viewpoints of the jail. There are three
cellblocks—men, women, juvenile
boys. Six days is the average stay.
Showers twice a week. The steel doors
and the equipment that operates them
were made in San Antonio. The prison-
ers sleep on bunks of butcher block.
There are no mattresses. There are
three prisoners to a cell. In winter, it
is cold in here. Prisoners burn newspa-
pers to keep warm. Cell corners are
black with smudge. The jail is three
years old. The men’s block echoes with
chatter. The man in the cell nearest

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plastic Clorox bottle sits on the driver’s
seat. The wind has pressed newspaper
against the chain-link fence around the
lot. Atlantic Avenue, the city’s prin-
cipal thoroughfare, could be seventeen
American Main Streets placed end to
end—discount vitamins and Vienna
Corset shops, movie theatres, shoe
stores, and funeral homes. The Board-
walk is made of yellow pine and Doug-
las fir, soaked in pentachlorophenol.
Downbeach, it reaches far beyond the
city. Signs everywhere—on windows,
lampposts, trash baskets—proclaim
“Bienvenue Canadiens!” The salt air
is full of Canadian French. In the
Claridge Hotel, on Park Place, I ask
a clerk if she knows where Marvin
Gardens is. She says, “Is it a floral
shop?” I ask a cabdriver, parked out-
side. He says, “Never heard of it.”
Park Place is one block long, Pacific
to Boardwalk. On the roof of the
Claridge is the Solarium, the highest
point in town—panoramic view of the
ocean, the bay, the salt-water ghetto. I
look down at the rooftops of the side-
avenue motels and into swimming
pools. There are hundreds of people
around the rooftop pools, sunbathing,
reading—many more people than are
on the beach. Walls, windows, and a
block of sky are all that is visible from
these pools—no sand, no sea. The pools
are craters, and with the people around
them they are countersunk into the
motels.

The seventh, and final, game is
ten minutes old and I have hotels on
Oriental, Vermont, and Connecticut. I
have Tennessee and St. James. I have
North Carolina and Pacific. I have
Boardwalk, Atlantic, Ventnor, Illinois,
Indiana. My fingers are forming a
“V.” I have mortgaged most of these
properties in order to pay for others,
and I have mortgaged the others Jo
pay for the hotels. I have seven dollars.
I will pay off the mortgages and build
my reserves with income from the three
hotels. My cash position may be low,
but I feel like a rocket in an under-
ground silo. Meanwhile, if I could just
go to jail for a time I could pause there,
wait there, until my opponent, in his
inescapable rounds, pays the rates of my
hotels. Jail, at times, is the strategic
place to be. I roll boxcars from the j
Reading and move the flatiron to
Community Chest. “Go to Jail. Go
directly to Jail.”

The prisoners, of course, have no
pens and no pencils. They take paper

59

I t ‘ s a l s o a n i c e p l a c e

t o v i s i t .

Our version of Cowboy.
They wear football helmets

instead of 10-gallon hats.
Because our Cowboys are \
World Champions. There’s alsc
major league baseball…
pro basketball, hockey and
soccer…and world
championship tennis. Even
rodeos! How about it, sport

This is what people
do to you on the street.
Smile at a stranger here, and they

smile back. Isn’t that nice9

And service everywhere is the
good, old-fashioned kind.
Gas station attendants clean your
windows without being asked…

a surly waiter is unheard
of…and when they say

“Y’all come back!”,
^ V they mean it

Water, water everywhere
Seems like half the neighbors

go fishing or sailing every weekend.
Because Texas has more inland fresh water

in any other state, with 55% of
it close enough
for a 1-day drive.

w

V
I The stars

at night really are
big and bright.
Here’s why:

The Urban Institute ranks
urarea lowest in air pollution among

the 18 largest U.S. cities. And we
intend to keep it that way.

•Ml
uess how much?
it costs $39,950 on-

Long Island,
probably costs $25,000 here.
Because our housing costs are

‘nd lowest among the 18 largest
U.S. cities.

If y o u l i ke w h a t y o u see ,
do s o m e t h i n g .

Like ma i l t h i s c o u p o n .

Name
Title
Company
Address
City Stale Zip
Telephone
Please send free information on:
• The Southwest Metroplex
• Industrial Sites
• New Airport
• Office Space • Quality of Life
Mail to:
Mr. Richard D. Jones
Executive Director
North Texas Commission
600 Avenue H East, Suite 101
Arlington, Texas 76011
Telephone 817/265-7101 NY-9

Culture, too.
Everything except those $15

orchestra seats! We have road
shows and resident theatre.
Symphonies and summer
musicals. Horse opera and

Grand Opera. Light shows and
lectures. Ballet and

botanical gardens. Art Fairs and
the world’s grandest State Fair.

©NTC 1972

^ D a l l a s / F o r t W o r t h

T h e S o u t h w e s t M e t r o p l e x

60

1—-«
III

i &

‘•

J

>

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napkins, roll them tight as crayons,
char the ends with matches, and write
on the walls. The things they write are
not entirely idiomatic; for example,
“In God We Trust.” All is in carbon.
Time is required in the writing. “Only
humanity could know of such pain.”
“God So Loved the World.” “There
is no greater pain than life itself.” In
the women’s block now, there are six
blacks, giggling, and a white asleep in
red shoes. She is drunk. The others are
pushers, prostitutes, an auto thief, a
burglar caught with pistol in purse. A
sixteen-year-old accused of murder was
in here last week. These words are
written on the wall of a now empty cell:
“Laying here I see two bunks about six
inches thick, not counting the one I’m
laying on, which is hard as brick. No
cushion for my back. No pillow for my
head. Just a couple scratchy blankets
which is best to use it’s said. I wake up
in the morning so shivery and cold,
waiting and waiting till I am told the
food is coming. It’s on its way. It’s not
worth waiting for, but I eat it any-
way. I know one thing when they
set me free I’m gonna be good if it kills
me.”

How many years must a game be
played to produce an Anthony J.
Drexel Biddle and chestnut geldings
on the beach? About half a century
was the original answer, from the first
railroad to Biddle at his peak. Biddle,
at his peak, hit an Atlantic City street-
car conductor with his fist, laid him out
with one punch. This increased Bid-
die’s legend. He did not go to jail.
While John Philip Sousa led his band
along the Boardwalk playing “The
Stars and Stripes Forever” and Jack
Dempsey ran up and down in training
for his fight with Gene Tunney, the
city crossed the high curve of its pa-
rabola. Al Capone held conventions
here—upstairs with his sleeves rolled,
apportioning among his lieutenant
governors the states of the Eastern
seaboard. The natural history of an
American resort proceeds from Indians
to French Canadians via Biddies and
Capones. French Canadians, whatever
they may be at home, are Visigoths
here. Bienvenue Visigoths!

My opponent plods along incredibly
well. He has got his fourth railroad,
and patiently, unbelievably, he has
picked up my potential winners until
he has blocked me everywhere but
Marvin Gardens. He has avoided, in
the fifty-dollar zoning, my increasingly

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I F Y O U H A V E A H A R D T I M E

T E L L I N G O N E W I N E F R O M A N O T H E R ,

I R E A D T H I S .

First of all, don’t feel alone.
Probably 99% of the population can’t tell a

Pinot Noir from a Zinfandel. Or a great Cabernet
; Sauvignon from a so-so one.

t But where
do you go to
find out1 You
read what the
wine experts
have to say

[ and they all
disagree. You
read all the

I wine ad ver- Cyrano could have used a larger glass.
tising and Ora smaller nose.
everbody’s trying to sell his own product.

Nobody has really taken the time to sit down
and explain even the most basic things about wine.
Until now.

We at Inglenook Vineyards are doing it because
fit’s in our best interest to have you know a great wine
when you taste one. After all, that’s what we have

no sell.
HEIGHTENING YOUR SENSES.

First get yourself a wine glass that exposes the
wine to plenty of air. The more air you can expose
wine to, the better you can taste it.

And be sure you can get your nose in the glass.
That’s important because in wine tasting, the nose
does 75%, of the work. A glass with a 3-inch brim is
best for most wines. But if you have a larger than
average nose, you’ll need a larger than average glass.

NEVER TASTE WINE OVER
A CHECKERED TABLECLOTH.

Fill the glass about a
third full and set it down on
a white tablecloth. That’s so
you can see the wine’s true
color.

Now really look at the
wine. Check its color. That’s
the first clue to a wine’s
taste. Usually,
the darker the

Take a good sniff.
This is hard to explain but your nose should

confirm everything you’ve seen with your eyes. A
rose that looks brilliantly clear and is of delicate body
should smell that way too.

WHISTLING AT T H E TABLE.
Now take a sip of wine, hold it in your mouth,

and whistle. Whistle in, not out. Try to get a nice
gurgle going.

This technique also allows you to taste the wine
for a longer period of time. For it extends that single
instant when wine, air, tongue, gums and nose come
together for the first time. Thus, it enables you to
have more time to make an initial judgment. Keep in
mind everything you’ve experienced with your eyes
and nose, should be confirmed with your mouth by
this technique.

BUILD AWINE CELLAR IN YOUR BRAIN.
When you actually start your wine tasting edu-

cation, be sure to follow the chart below. The order
is important because you’ll be going from light to full
bodied in the white wine spectrum. The red wines
are listed in a similar fashion. You should work your
way through them after you’ve mastered the whites.

INGLENOOK’S SUGGESTED WINE PROGRESSION CHART
White

White Pinot
Pinot Chardonnay
Grey Riesling
Sylvaner Riesling
johannisbcrg Rieslit
Chcnin Blanc
Dry Semillon

Red
Camay Rose
Camay Bcaujolais
Pinot Noir
Zinfandel
Camay
Charbono
Cabernet Sauvignon

Heavy wine forms
“sheetsr

Light wine forms
“legs”

color, the fuller the wine.This applies to
whites too, which can go from a pale straw
to golden. With rose, look for a crystal
clear light pink, with no muddiness.

Now swirl the wine in the glass. A
full bodied wine will come down the glass
in “sheets”. A lighter wine will break into
“legs”. A good rose should come down in
thin “legs”, which indicates delicate body.

:• ESTATE BOTTLED

PINOT CHARDONNAY

A W O R D OF WARNING.
If you’re going to put this much time and effort

into learning something about wine tasting, then go
for the most expensive wine you can afford. High
priced wine is high priced for a reason. Namely,
better grapes, and more care goes into the making
of the wine.

That said, Inglenook Estate Bottled Wine is the
most expensive wine made in America. It all comes

from the Napa Valley, which wine authori-
ties agree is one of the finest wine producing
regions in America, if not the whole world.

And it all bears a vintage date, which
is a rarity in American wines today.

Estate bottling means we make it
from varietal grapes grown in vineyards
under our constant supervision.

So if you can swing it financially, get
your wine education from Inglenook.

Any good education costs money.

I N G L E N O O K
We make the most expensive wine in America.

This ad is one of a series. If you’d like copies of the other ads, send your name and address to The Cellar master, Box G, Inglenook Vineyards, Rutherford, CA 94573-

62

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petty hotels. His cash flow swells. His
railroads are costing me two hundred
dollars a minute. He is building hotels
on States, Virginia, and St. Charles.
He has temporarily reversed the cur-
rent. With the yellow monopolies and
my blue monopolies, I could probably
defeat his lavenders and his railroads.
I have Atlantic and Ventnor. I need
Marvin Gardens. My only hope is
Marvin Gardens.

There is a plaque at Boardwalk and
Park Place, and on it in relief is the
leonine profile of a man who looks like
an officer in a metropolitan bank—
“Charles B. Darrow, 1889-1967, in-
ventor of the game of Monopoly.”
“Darrow,” I address him, aloud.
“Where is Marvin Gardens?” There
is, of course, no answer. Bronze, im-
passive, Darrow looks south down the
Boardwalk. “Mr. Darrow, please,
where is Marvin Gardens?” Nothing.
Not a sign. He just looks south down
the Boardwalk.

My opponent accepts the trophy
with his natural ease, and I make, from
notes, remarks that are even less grace-
ful than his.

Marvin Gardens is the one color-
block Monopoly property that is not
in Atlantic City. It is a suburb within
a suburb, secluded. It is a planned com-
pound of seventy-two handsome houses
set on curvilinear private streets under
yews and cedars, poplars and willows.
The compound was built around 1920,
in Margate, New Jersey, and consists
of solid buildings of stucco, brick, and
wood, with slate roofs, tile roofs, multi-
mullioned porches, Giraldic towers, and
Spanish grilles. Marvin Gardens, the
ultimate outwash of Monopoly, is a
citadel and sanctuary of the middle
class. “We’re heavily patrolled by police
here. We don’t take no chances. Me?
I’m living here nine years. I paid sev-
enteen thousand dollars and I’ve been
offered thirty. Number one, I don’t
want to move. Number two, I don’t
need the money. I have four bedrooms,
two and a half baths, front den, back
den. No basement. The Atlantic is
down there. Six feet down and you
float. A lot of people have a hard time
finding this place. People that lived in
Atlantic City all their life don’t know
how to find it. They don’t know where
the hell they’re going. They just know
it’s south, down the Boardwalk.”

—JOHN MCPHEE

A big promotion,
$4,000 more in salary, and

his wife is in tears
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i \ \ \

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J o r g e

B o l e t ‘ s

A c c o m p a n i s t

I c e d T e a b y L e n o x

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L E N O X C R Y S T A L

Frequently Requested Documents
© The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”
[16 April 1963]

This version of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” appeared in his 1964
book Why We Can’t Wait.

(view the statement that prompted this letter)

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my
present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and
ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little
time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no
time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your
criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be
patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here In Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view
which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with
headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the
South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share
staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in
Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were
deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So
I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I
have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth
century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of
their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of
Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of
freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call
for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by
in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat
to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single

Frequently Requested Documents: Letter From the Birmingham Jail

http://www.

stanford.edu

/group/king/frequentdocs/birmingham.html (1 of 11) [12/18/2000 2:13:58 PM]

http://www.stanford.edu/group/king/copyright.htm

http://www.stanford.edu/group/king/frequentdocs/clergy

garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to
live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States
can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say,
fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am
sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that
deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that
demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white
power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether
injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these
steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this
community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its
ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the
courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham
than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of
these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently
refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic
community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants–for
example, to remove the stores’ humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human
Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we
realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the
others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep
disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby
we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local
and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process
of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked
ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of
jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except
for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic
withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time
to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we
speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the
Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the
run-off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run-off so that the
demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr.
Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in
this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

Frequently Requested Documents: Letter From the Birmingham Jail

http://www.stanford.edu/group/king/frequentdocs/birmingham.html (2 of 11) [12/18/2000 2:13:58 PM]

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better
path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action.
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community
which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize
the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the
nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word
“tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent
tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a
tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the
unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for
nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark
depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will
inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too
long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather
than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in
Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to
act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must
be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel
that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr.
Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to
maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the
futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from
devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil
rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that
privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and
voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to
be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it
must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that
was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.
For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing
familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our
distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of
Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still
creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is
easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you
have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers
at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers
and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an
airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue

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twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she
can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears
welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous
clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her
personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to
concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored
people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after
night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you
are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first
name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last
name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when
you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at
tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer
resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will
understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs
over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can
understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate
concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954
outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us
consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and
obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I
would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility
to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree
with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or
unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust
law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas
Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that
uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation
statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the
segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation,
to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for
an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is
not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul
Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic
separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey
the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey
segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a
numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on
itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels
a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

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Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of
being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the
legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected?
Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming
registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority
of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances
be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested
on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which
requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain
segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading
or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks
an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that
an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the
penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in
reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in
the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the
ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who
were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to
certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today
because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party
represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the
Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in
Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided
and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles
dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s
antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess
that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have
almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride
toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate,
who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence
of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with
you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who
paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a
mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient
season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute
misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than
outright rejection.

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I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of
establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured
dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand
that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious
negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and
positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually,
we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the
surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen
and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened
with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the
tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before
it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because
they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man
because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning
Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated
the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like
condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s
will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have
consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic
constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed
and punish the robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the
struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All
Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that
you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to
accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems
from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in
the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used
either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time
much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation
not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the
good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless
efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an
ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is
always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our
pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national
policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow
clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact
that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of
complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so
drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and
in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security

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and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of
the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to
advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up
across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement.
Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this
movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated
Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the
“do-nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is
the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the
influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.

If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be
flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers”
and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to
support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace
and security in black-nationalist ideologies–a development that would inevitably lead to a
frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually
manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has
reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be
gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black
brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the
United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial
justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily
understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments
and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer
pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides–and try to understand why he must do so. If
his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through
violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your
discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled
into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think
about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an
extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,
and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for
justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not
Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not
Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John
Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And
Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that an men are created equal . . .” So the question is not
whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate
or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In

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that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three
were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and
thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and
goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world
are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I
expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can
understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have
the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am
thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this
social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still too few in quantity, but they are big
in quality. Some–such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann
Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle–have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms.
Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy,
roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty
nigger-lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the
urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease
of segregation.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the
white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful
of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you,
Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your
worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for
integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with
the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong
with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its
bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as
the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a
few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers,
priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been
outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders;
all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the
anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious
leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern,
would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I
had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a
desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare:
“Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In

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the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on
the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty
struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those
are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches
commit themselves to a completely other-worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical
distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On
sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches
with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive
religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people
worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett
dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave
a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary
Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of
creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the
church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep
disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I
am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of
preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and
scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced
at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a
thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that
transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in
power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of
the peace” and “outside agitators”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a
colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in
commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and
example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an
uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the
presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s
silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture
the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and
be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I
meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the
status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual
church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am
thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from

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the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom.
They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They
have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to
jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops
and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil
triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the
gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of
disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church
does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the
outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will
reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is
freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.
Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the
majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For
more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton
king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful
humiliation–and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the
inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We
will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are
embodied in our echoing demands.

Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me
profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and
“preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you
had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so
quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of
Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young
Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to
observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our
grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this
sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To
preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that
nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to
make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it
is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps
Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in
Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end
of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the
right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime
courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation.
One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble

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sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering, and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing
loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro
women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a
sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with
ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is
at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel
and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly
going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children
of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American
dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation
back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their
formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time.
I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable
desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters,
think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable
impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates
my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to
forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it
possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow
clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon
pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities,
and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our
great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Frequently Requested Documents: Letter From the Birmingham Jail

J U D Y B R A D Y

I Want a Wife (1971)

Judy Brady’s essay became an instant classic when it appeared in 1971 in the premier
issue of the feminist magazine Ms. As you read, analyze the definitions of “husband” and
“wife” that Brady uses, and consider why this essay became so powerful in the 1970s.

I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife. And, not al-
together incidentally, I am a mother.

Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a
recent divorce. He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife. He is look-
ing for another wife. As I thought about him while I was ironing one evening, it
suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would like to have a wife. Why do I want a
wife?

I would like to go back to school so that I can become economically inde-
pendent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon me. I
want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while I am going to school
I want a wife to take care of my children. I want a wife to keep track of the chil-
dren’s doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine, too. I want a
wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. I want a wife who
will wash the children’s clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife who is a
good nurturant attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling,
makes sure that they have an adequate social life with their peers, takes them to
the park, the zoo, etc. I want a wife who takes care of the children when they are
sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the children need special care, be-
cause, of course, I cannot miss classes at school. My wife must arrange to lose
time at work and not lose the job. It may mean a small cut in my wife’s income
from time to time, but I guess I can tolerate that. Needless to say, my wife will
arrange and pay for the care of the children while my wife is working.

I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife who will
keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after my children, a wife who will
pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended,
replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in
their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a
wife who cooks the meals, a wife who is a good cook. I want a wife who will plan
the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them
pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up while I do my studying. I want a wife who
will care for me when I am sick and sympathize with my pain and loss of time
from school. I want a wife to go along when our family takes a vacation so that
someone can continue to care for me and my children when I need a rest and
change of scene.

1

From Ms. Magazine, 1972. Copyright © 1970 by Judy Syfers. Reprinted by permission.

I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a
wife’s duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to ex-
plain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies. And I
want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.

I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life. When my wife
and I are invited out by my friends, I want a wife who will take care of the
babysitting arrangements. When I meet people at school that I like and want to
entertain, I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal,
serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt when I talk about things that in-
terest me and my friends. I want a wife who will have arranged that the children
are fed and ready for bed before my guests arrive so that the children do not
bother us. I want a wife who takes care of the needs of my guests so that they feel
comfortable, who makes sure that they have an ashtray, that they are passed the
hors d’oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the food, that their wine
glasses are replenished when necessary, that their coffee is served to them as they
like it. And I want a wife who knows that sometimes I need a night out by myself.

I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love pas-
sionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied.
And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention when I am
not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete responsibility for
birth control, because I do not want more children. I want a wife who will remain
sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life with
jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may entail
more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate to
people as fully as possible.

If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I al-
ready have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one. Natu-
rally, I will expect a fresh new life; my wife will take the children and be solely re-
sponsible for them so that I am left free.

When I am through with school and have a job, I want my wife to quit work-
ing and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completely take care
of a wife’s duties.

My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?

Q U E S T I O N S F O R D I S C U S S I O N A N D W R I T I N G

1. Explore Brady’s use of the lines of argument—where does she use arguments
from the heart, from character, from values, from facts and reason? Which uses
seem the most effective? Which seem less effective? Why?

2. Brady’s essay uses stylish language to help make her point. Using Chapter 14,
find examples of her use of figurative language. How do they help her argument?

3. What assumptions does Brady make about her audience? About wives? Her essay
was written in 1971—does it still make sense today? Why or why not?

2 BRADY I Want a Wife

.{:F
$i.–#

I was saved from sin when I was going on

rirteen. But not really saved. It happened

-ie this. There was a big revival at
my Auntie

:-,eed’s church. Every night for weeks there
:ad been much preaching, singinE, PraY1ng,

-nd shouting, and some very hardened
sin-

:ers had been brought to Christ, and the

LANGSTON HUGHES
Langston Hughes was one of the maior figures of the Harlem Renaissance’

a cultural

moiement th.at spanned ttti tSZOs and 1930s. His writings describe the common

experiences of African Americans and the fficts of racism by exploring music,
humor,

and.faith. Liitenfor his unique uoice as you read this memoir’

membership of the church had grown by
leaps and bounds. Then just before the re-

vival ended, they held a special meeting for

children, “to bring the young lambs to the
foldJ’ My aunt spoke of it for days ahead’ That

night I was escorted to the front row and
placed on the mourners’ bench with ali the

CHAPTER 33 Memoirs

other young sinners, who had not yet been
brought to Jesus.

My aunt told me that when you were
saved you saw a light, and something hap-
pened to you insidel And Iesus came into
your life! And God was with you from then
onl She said you could see and hear and feel
Jesus in your soul. I believed her. I had heard
a great many old people say the same thing
and it seemed to me they ought to know. So I
sat there calmly in the hot, crowded church,
waiting for Jesus to come to me.

The preacher preached awonderful rhlth-
mical sermon, all moans and shouts and
lonely cries and dire pictures of hell, and then
he sang a song about the ninety and nine safe
in the fold, but one little lamb was left out
in the cold. Then he said: “Won’t you come?
Won’tyou come to lesus? Young lambs, won’t
you come?” And he held out his arms to all us
young sinners there on the mourners’ bench.
And the little girls cried. And some of them
jumped up and went to fesus right away. But
most of us just sat there.

A great many old people came and knelt
around us and prayed, old women with jet-
black faces and braided hair, old men with
work-gnarled hands. And the church sang
a song about the lower lights are burning,
some poor sinners to be saved. And the whole
building rocked with prayer and song.

Still I kept waiting to see Jesus.
Finally all the young people had gone to

the altar and were saved, but one boy and
me. He was a rounder’s son named Westley.
Westley and I were surrounded by sisters and
deacons prayng. It was very hot in the church,
and getting late now. Finally Westley said to
me in a whisper: “God damn! I’m tired o’ sit-
ting here. Let’s get up and be savedl’ So he got
up and was saved.

Then I was left all alone on the mourners’
bench. My aunt came and knelt at my knees
and cried, while prayers and songs swirled all
around me in the little church. The whole
congregation prayed for me alone, in a
mighty wail of moans and voices. And I kept

waiting serenely for lesus, waiting, waiting-
but he didn’t come. I wanted to see him, b-:
nothing happened to me. Nothingl I wanre:
something to happen to me, but nothirl
happened.

I heard the songs and the minister sa1 –
ing: “\.\ihy don’t you come? My dear chilc
why don’t you come to Jesus? ]esus is waitir-r
for you. He wants you, \A/hy don’t you come’
Sister Reed, what is this child’s name?”

“Langstoni’ my aunt sobbed.
“Langston, why don’t you come? \\11

don’t you come and be saved? Oh, Lamb :,r’
God! \Mhy don’tyou come?”

Now it was really getting late. I began i:
be ashamed of myself, holding everything u:
so long. I began to wonder what God thougt:
about Westley, who certainly hadn’t seen Jes’;*
either, but who was now sitting proudly on ti:.
platform, swinging his knickerbockered lees
and grinning dor.rm at me, surrounded by dea-
cons and old women on their knees pravin!
God had not struck Westley dead for takir:
his name in vain or for $ing in the temple. !:
I decided that maybe to save further trouble
I’d better lie, too, and say that fesus had come
and get up and be saved.

So I got up.
Suddenly the whole room broke into .

sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves ,::
rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped i:
the air. My aunt threw her arms around me
The minister took me by the hand and led me
to the platform.

\.\4ren things quieted dor,nm, in a hushe,:
silence, punctuated by a few ecstatic ‘Amens.’
all the new young lambs were blessed in the
name of God. Then joyous singing filled the
room.

That night, for the last time in my life bu:
one-for I was a big boy twelve years old-,
cried. I cried, in bed alone, and couldn’t stop. I
buried my head under the quilts, but my aun,
heard me. She woke up and told my uncle i
was crying because the Holy Ghost had come
into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. Bur I
was really crying because I couldn’t bear to tel

her that I had lied, that I
body in the church, that

had deceived every-
I hadn’t seen Jesus,

Nguyen: The Good tmmigrant Student ffiffi#ffiffi
and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus
any more, since he didn’t come to help me.

A CL€SER LOOK AT

Sa,lvatior] : ,

This memoir uses sound to add intensity to the
scene. Read through this selection again, underlin_
ing the moments in which sound plays an important
part in the story itself. How is sound used to add en_
ergy? How is it used to reflect the emotions of the
characters? \rVhat kinds of words does Hughes use to
describe the sounds around him?

Hughes describes one of the primary differences be_
tween the ways children and adults view the world:
children generally think in concrete terms, while

adults are also able to think in abstract terms. Do
you think this difference is the root cause of the con-
flict in this memoir, or do you think something else
is causing it?

3. \\4rat is the theme that holds this memoir togerher?
In other words, what is this story really about? Obvi-
ously, Hughes’s experience as a 12-year-old had a
profound impact on him. \A/trat did he learn from
this experience? How do you think this changed him
for life?

2.

Untitled Document

Mr. Claro — Modern Nonfiction

Reading Selection by Joan Didion

Holy Water

JOAN DIDION is a fifth-generation Californian, born in Sacramento (1934), who took her B.A. at
Berkeley and lives in Los Angeles. Between college and marriage
to the writer John Gregory Dunne, she lived in New York for seven years, where she worked as an editor
for Vogue and wrote essays for the National Review and the Saturday Evening Post. In California,
Didion and Dunne separately write novels and magazine articles and collaborate on screenplays.
Didion’s novels are Run River (1963), Play It as It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), and
Democracy (1984). Her collections of essays are Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White
Album (1979), from which we have taken this selection, and After Henry (1992). She published Salvador
in 1983, in 1987 Miami.
Joan Didion is one of our best nonfiction writers. She describes the alien, simple California she grew up
in and the southern California where she now lives – a landscape of drive-ins and orange groves, ocean
and freeway, the Manson murders and ordinary, domestic, adulterous homicide. She has done witness to
the turmoils of the decades, especially the sixties – drugs, Vietnam, and personal breakdown. Expertly
sensitive and inventive with language, she is most talented in the representation of hysteria. While her
book about El Salvador mentions politics, it is essentially the record of a sensibility, sensitive to fear,
exposed to an atmosphere that engenders it: “Terror is the given of the place.”
Much of Didion’s journalism derives from interviews. She has written of herself:
“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and
so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best
interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody
out.”

In an essay called “Why I Write,” she remembers how she tried to think in abstractions when she was an
undergraduate at the University of California. “I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the
specific, to the tangible. . . . I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself
concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window.” She was a particularist, not an
abstractionist; finally, her particulars are not the world outside the window but the words she puts on
the page. She is a writer, obsessed by the language she manipulates: “Grammar is a piano I play by
ear. . . . All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the
meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of
the object photographed.”

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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find
excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert
from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink
tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens
River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades
down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain
pipes and siphons. As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant
meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the
waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and
forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water
projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the
Gun Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to
sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the
Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand – the tailrace at
Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct
water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before – and finally I replay a morning when I
was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus
Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I
was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through
which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.

I suppose it was partly the memory of that delirium that led me to visit, one summer morning in
Sacramento, the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project. Actually so much
water is moved around California by so many different agencies that maybe only the movers themselves
know on any given day whose water is where, but to get a general picture it is necessary only to
remember that Los Angeles moves some of it, San Francisco moves some of it, the Bureau of
Reclamation’s Central Valley Project moves some of it, and the California State Water Project moves
most of the rest of it, moves a vast amount of it, moves more water farther than has ever been moved
anywhere. They collect this water up in the granite keeps of the Sierra Nevada and they store roughly a
trillion gallons of it behind the Oroville Dam and every morning, down at the Project’s headquarters in
Sacramento, they decide how much of their water they want to move the next day. They make this
morning decision according to supply and demand, which is simple in theory but rather more
complicated in practice. In theory each of the Project’s five field divisions – the Oroville, the Delta, the
San Luis, the San Joaquin, and the Southern divisions – places a call to headquarters before nine AM.
and tells the dispatchers how much water is needed by its local water contractors, who have in turn
based their morning estimates on orders from growers and other big users. A schedule is made. The
gages open and close according to schedule. The water flows south and the deliveries are made.

In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds

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and that of a Univac 418. In practice it might be necessary to hold large flows of water for power
production, or to flush out encroaching salinity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the most
ecologically sensitive point on the system. In practice a sudden rain might obviate the need for a
delivery when that delivery is already on its way. In practice what is being delivered here is an enormous
volume of water, not quarts of milk or spools of thread, and it takes two days to move such a delivery
down through Oroville into the Delta, which is the great pooling place for California water and has been
for some years alive with electronic sensors and telemetering equipment and men blocking channels and
diverting flows and shoveling fish away from the pumps. It takes perhaps another six days to move this
same water down the California Aqueduct from the Delta to the Tehachapi and put it over the hill to
Southern California. “Putting some over the hill” is what they say around the Project Operations Control
Center when they want to indicate that they are pumping Aqueduct water from the floor of the San
Joaquin Valley up and over the Tehachapi Mountains. “Pulling it down” is what they say when they
want to indicate that they are lowering a water level somewhere in the system. They can put some over
the hill by remote control from this room in Sacramento with its Univac and its big board and its
flashing lights. They can pull down a pool in the San Joaquin by remote control from this room in
Sacramento with its locked doors and its ringing alarms and its constant printouts of data from sensors
out there in the water itself. From this room in Sacramento the whole system takes on the aspect of a
perfect three-billion-dollar hydraulic toy, and in certain ways it is. “LET’S START DRAINING QUAIL
AT 12:00” was the 10:51 A.M. entry on the electronically recorded communications log the day I visited
the Operations Control Center. “Quail” is a reservoir in Los Angeles County with a gross capacity of
1,636,018,000 gallons. “OK” was the response recorded in the log. I knew at that moment that I had
missed the only vocation for which I had any instinctive affinity: I wanted to drain Quail myself.

Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries,
even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirectly, every day. “Indirectly” is not quite
enough for most people I know. This morning, however, several people I know were affected not
“indirectly” but “directly” by the way the water moves. They had been in New Mexico shooting a
picture, one sequence of which required a river deep enough to sink a truck, the kind with a cab and a
trailer and fifty or sixty wheels. It so happened that no river near the New Mexico location was running
that deep this year. The production was therefore moved today to Needles, California, where the
Colorado River normally runs, depending upon releases from Davis Dam, eighteen to twenty-five feet
deep. Now. Follow this closely: Yesterday we had a freak tropical storm in Southern California, two
inches of rain in a normally dry month, and because this rain flooded the fields and provided more
irrigation than any grower could possibly want for several days, no water was ordered from Davis Dam.

No orders, no releases.

Supply and demand.

As a result the Colorado was running only seven feet deep past Needles today, Sam Peckinpah’s” desire

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for eighteen feet of water in which to sink a truck not being the kind of demand anyone at Davis Dam is
geared to meet. The production closed down for the weekend. Shooting will resume Tuesday, providing
some grower orders water and the agencies controlling the Colorado release it. Meanwhile many gaffers,
best boys, cameramen, assistant directors, script supervisors, stunt drivers, and maybe even Sam
Peckinpah are waiting out the weekend in Needles, where it is often 110 degrees at five P.M. and hard to
get dinner after eight. This is a California parable, but a true one.

Sam Peckinpah American film director (1925-1984).

I have always wanted a swimming pool, and never had one. When it became generally known a year or
so ago that California was suffering severe drought, many people in water-rich parts of the country
seemed obscurely gratified, and made frequent reference to Californians having to brick up their
swimming pools. In fact a swimming pool requires, once it has been filled and the filter has begun its
process of cleaning and recirculating the water, virtually no water, but the symbolic content of
swimming pools has always been interesting: A pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real
or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is, for many of us in the
West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made
available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that
only recently In my memory California summers were characterized by the coughing in the pipes that
meant the well was dry, and California winters by all-night watches on rivers about to crest, by
sandbagging, by dynamite on the levees, and flooding on the first floor. Even now the place is not all
that hospitable to extensive settlement. As I write a fire has been burning out of control for two weeks in
the ranges behind the Big Sur coast. Flash floods last night wiped out all major roads into Imperial
County. I noticed this morning a hairline crack in a living-room tile from last week’s earthquake, a 4.4 I
never felt. In the part of California where I now live aridity is the single most prominent feature of the
climate, and I am not pleased to see, this year, cactus spreading wild to the sea. There will be days this
winter when the humidity will drop to ten, seven, four. Tumbleweed will blow against my house and the
sound of the rattlesnake will be duplicated a hundred times a day by dried bougainvillea drifting in my
driveway. The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live
here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable
transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have
also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was
running dry.

“The West begins,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “where the average annual io rainfall drops below twenty
inches.” This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read, and it goes a long way toward
explaining my own passion for seeing the water under control, but many people I know persist in
looking for psychoanalytical implications in this passion. As a matter of fact I have explored, in an
amateur way, the more obvious of these implications, and come up with nothing interesting. A certain
external reality remains, and resists interpretation. The West begins where the average annual rainfall

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drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of
control. Some fifteen years ago I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my
kitchen wall. This fragment of paper is now on the wall of a sixth kitchen, and crumbles a little
whenever I touch it, but I keep it there for the last stanza, which has for me the power of a prayer:

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.

I thought of those lines constantly on the morning in Sacramento when I went to visit the California
State Water Project Operations Control Center. If I had wanted to drain Quail at 10:51 that morning, I
wanted, by early afternoon, to do a great deal more. I wanted to open and close the Clifton Court
Forebay intake gate. I wanted to produce some power down at the San Luis Dam. I wanted to pick a
pool at random on the Aqueduct and pull it down and then refill it, watching for the hydraulic jump. I
wanted to put some water over the hill and I wanted to shut down all flow from the Aqueduct into the
Bureau of Reclamation’s Cross Valley Canal, just to see how long it would take somebody over at
Reclamation to call up and complain. I stayed as long as I could and watched the system work on the big
board with the lighted checkpoints. The Delta salinity report was coming in on one of the teletypes
behind me. The Delta tidal report was coming in on another. The earthquake board, which has been
desensitized to sound its alarm (a beeping tone for Southern California, a high-pitched tone for the
north) only for those earthquakes which register at least 3.0 on the Richter Scale, was silent. I had no
further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day. I wanted to be the one, that day, who was
shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. I want it still.

AFTERWORD

Somewhere Didion writes: “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most
obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he really makes it in
his image.” Whatever she speaks of, she will always discover the extreme; the middle way does not
interest her. (Even as a child, “I can recall disapproving of the golden mean. . . .”) Surely we can imagine
a middling essay on water, all statistics and predictions, which would interest nobody. Information in
“Holy Water” supplies a frame, and we would miss it if it were not there, but it is not the essay’s heart.
With Didion, information is the ephemeral flesh; feeling is the skeleton that endures. She will not work
herself up to write unless “the extremes show up.
This extremity is a matter of personal feeling, it requires the letter “I.” Feeling requires someone to do it.
In her essay called “Why I Write,” Didion says, “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of
imposing oneself on people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.”

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BOOKS AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

After Henry. New York: Random House-Vintage. Essays.

Play It as It Lays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Novel.
Run River. New York: Random House-Vintage. Novel.

Salvador. New York: Random House-Vintage. Nonfiction.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Essays.
The White Album. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Essays.

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Wednesday, January 29

Hi, Everyone—

Here is your HW for Monday:

(1) Read the link to “50 Rhetorical Devices,” available under the Pages link and also

here

. If you’re inclined, use some of that knowledge in what you write for (3) below.

(2) Read the first two paragraphs of at least 6 pieces of writing. These writings can come from Canvas (i.e., under the Unit 2 folder, or the Pages link), or from tetw.org, or from other sources that you find for yourself.

(3) Pick 2 of these pieces of writing—2 that you might want to cover—to fully read. For each of those 2, after reading them, do the following:

a. In about 250 words, propose how you’d want to cover it. Take the example below as a guide for what I’m looking for in how you propose:

“I read “I Want a Wife” by longtime wife Judy Brady, a sarcastic article written for the first issue of Ms, a feminist magazine, in 1970, about her frustrations at all the things that wives do for husbands. I liked not only its syntax—its use of anthypophora and anaphora to rant—but also how it expresses frustrations about wifedom that many women would agree with, but that wouldn’t have been understood by others at that time. In my essay, I’d like to do the same, but about a different experience: getting a college degree. In my cover, I’d use my own rhetorical stance toward that issue—I’m a college student, and I have specific experience with that similar to how she wrote as an expert on being a wife—to rant about the expenses of getting a degree that will laden me with debt for the next 25 years. This would be similar to Brady’s rhetorical stance in that, like her, I’d write for people who already agreed with the opinion (she wrote for women who were wives, and I’d be writing for kids who are in college), but also, I’d provide an opinion that not many others had thought about that way (in my case, the Boomer generation, who still thinks that if you just work hard, everything will be okay).

As in the above example, make sure to describe what you find interesting about the rhetorical similarities between the original and your proposed cover, and note specific rhetorical devices they use that you find interesting that you might want to emulate.

b.

Be ready to talk about this stuff in conference with me on Monday.