Notes for CUNY Women's Coalition WASP Talk
April 30th, 1982.
Just south of Plymouth, Mass is the closest thing to home, to me. And now and again, I return there – every year – to a little house whose bare wooden walls hung off a central-style chimney, a cupboard in the living room, by burlap, and throughout the house, by pictures. Those pictures have been the same pictures ever since I can remember. They were there when my father grew up there, when his mother grew up there, when her father grew up there. The pictures, and the artifacts, are mainly about pilgrims. There’s one picture of Joan of Ark, whom I took to be my model; she had a horse, walking through the woods with a nice, shiny suit of armor on. And it wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out about armor in prisons, and the women who wore it.
The pilgrim pictures show the women holding Bibles, and the men holding guns, as they walk with the children to church. The guns troubled me. When I voiced this concern in my family, I was told not to worry – my ancestor had been John Elliot, who hadn’t carried a gun. He had taken a Bible, and gone out, and done “good works.” “Good works” meant converting the Indians. I was supposed to feel proud of this heritage and I did not. I felt shame and a personal sense of guilt: personally connected to my family. I did not feel part of my family, and I did not feel a part of my country. I did not feel that the land was mine.
Very early as a child, I became, to myself, a fighter. And when we were dressed, as children, in little pilgrim costumes, and marched from Plymouth Rock through Plymouth Square, and up the hill to the church and the old graveyards so that the tourists could take pictures and remember the founding of this nation, I suffered and endured in silence. Learning precisely what I was supposed to learn: to suffer and endure. Even today, I have difficulty remembering to take an Aspirin, to relieve a headache; I learned so well that pain improves the character.
When I lay in bed at night, I would keep myself very still. I would squeeze my hands as close to my side as I could, to take up as little space as possible in the concentration camp. And I practiced holding my breath, not breathing, I didn’t want to take up too much space and I didn’t want any dead people to roll over on top of me, in the concentration camp. This was a fantasy. It was not my reality: it represented something about my reality. But I remember practicing at the dinner table: not taking salt on my meat because I didn’t think I would be served salt in the concentration camp. It never occurred to me, even during the war years, that if I were in a concentration camp, I might not have meat.
Holding my breath served another function. I told myself that I could learn to be a swimmer. Denied comic books as a child, I had smuggled one into the house. It depicted Florence Chadwick swimming the English Channel. In the upper left-hand part of the page, she swam deep beneath a steamboat to save her life and held her breath for an incredibly long time, her lungs bursting, to keep her down deep enough that the motor would not chop her to death in the water. I determined that I too would learn to hold my breath, dive deep in the water, and swim the English Channel. In high school, there was no swimming team for girls. I’d practice out with the boy’s team at Babson Pool sometimes, but never saw meet. In gym, there was no girls’ gym team. What I did do, at those meets, was not a sport, but a dance. Some of my buddies from the swim team who were also on the gym team and I learned an intricate and fast-stepping dance, practiced in bare feet between two wooden poles representing swords in a Japanese ritual. They were clacked together very hard (Tucker claps her hands) and we danced, barefoot, and sometimes bloody, between the wooden poles.
I was not surprised to learn, later, in 1966, after I had left New England, that Sylvia Plath, who had gone to the same high school and had the same English teacher as I, had written a poem called Daddy… that she too felt like a bit of a Jew. She saw in a father figure a Fascist, a patriarch, who silenced her tongue. We all had the same assignments. One of them was to enter the Atlantic Monthly writing contest held yearly. We wrote poetry, a short story, and an essay every year during our high school years, and submitted them to the Atlantic Monthly. One year, being very much in love with – and having my language for – a young woman named BJ, I wrote an impassioned essay on our friendship, and explained how ennobling it was to have such a relationship. She had given me a book called Leaves of Gold in which I found wise sayings by famous men throughout the ages, from Plato on down. Well I had read Plato in high school, and the other Greeks… I had read expurgated versions, and did not know that they wrote from a homosexual culture. Did not know the word “homosexual.” But I found quotes that suited what I felt, and thought, and I used them to express my feelings.
When it came time for us to read an entry to the class, my instructor asked me to read my short story. It was, as I recall, a story of a young boy who sees the sky reflected in a mud puddle. I didn’t want to read that story. I wanted to read my essay. He didn’t want me to read my essay, and told me it would be better if I read my story. I couldn’t see why it would be better if I read my story, and I stood up and read my essay. As I started reading into that space came a silence so profound that it began to tie my tongue. I stumbled, and, finally, I halted in mid-sentence, unable to go on, and looked around for help. No one said a word. I didn’t know what to do. I understood that I couldn’t read my essay in that space, although I did not know why. Finally, in the silence, I took my unfinished essay and sat down. No one said a word. The class resumed. No one ever said a word.
