A Tyranny of Petticoats

  “And then they went ape,” Diane says. She’s talking to Tom but looking at me. She’s watched me like an obsessive hawk ever since I took up with Floyd. I knew she would, but I didn’t know how guilty it would make me feel.

  “Are they still having the march?” I ask Tom. He’s an officer in Students for a Democratic Society, so he’s plugged in with the marshals who are organizing the protests. “Or did the pigs make them cancel?”

  “People are still lining up on Columbus, but they don’t have a permit yet,” Tom says. “They say they’re going all the way to the Amphitheatre to protest the peace plank getting voted down.”

  We all look down. We’d been so sure the plank would pass. I didn’t want to believe there are people who don’t want the war to end, but I guess there are, and I guess a lot of them are Democratic delegates.

  They’ve been voting all day at the Amphitheatre, five miles south of the park. That’s where the actual convention is happening. The delegates are shuttling back and forth from the Amphitheatre to the glittering hotels lined up on the other side of Michigan Avenue. Hiding in their sky-high penthouse suites, it’s easy for them to pretend we don’t matter. Even though we’re shouting right under their feet.

  “Let’s go,” Floyd says. “I’ll show those pigs at the Amphitheatre where they can stick their peace plank.”

  Diane rolls her eyes, but Floyd doesn’t see her. She’s never thought much of Floyd. To be honest, neither had I. Not until a few weeks ago.

  A group of hippies passes us. One of the men knocks me with his elbow by accident. He turns, sees me, and nods, his lip twitching with surprise. “Sorry about that, sister.”

  “It’s all right.” I resist the urge to roll my eyes too. No one calls Diane “sister,” but I’ve gotten it a dozen times a day since we’ve been here. I think it’s because there are hardly any other Negro girls around.

  No, not Negro girls. I’m supposed to say black women. It’s been nearly a year since I left Tennessee, but I’m still getting used to how people talk up north.

  I learned most of it from Diane. She’s white, and from Ohio instead of the South, but she showed up on our first day at Barnard College just as green as me. She figured out how to fit in faster, though. Her dorm room was right next to mine on our freshman corridor, and we became best friends the day we moved in. There was something about the warm look in her green eyes that made it impossible not to trust her.

  I was so nervous those first few weeks of college. I’d never seen that many white girls in cashmere in all my life. But by our second day there, Diane already knew everyone. She introduced me around, and soon after that she introduced me to the men she’d met at Columbia too.

  Later on, as Diane and I spent more time together, there were other introductions. It turned out there were things more startling than a dormitory full of white girls in cashmere.

  “Are we really supposed to march all the way to the Amphitheatre, though?” Floyd says as we trudge through the trees. “That’ll take for daggone ever. The convention will be over before we get there.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Diane says. “The pigs will never let us out of the park to begin with.”

  “When did you get to be such a negative chick?” Floyd asks her as he loops his arm around my waist. Diane waits until his back is turned, then sticks out her tongue. I glance from side to side to make sure no one saw, even though I can’t help giggling.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have linked up with Floyd as quickly as I did. I wouldn’t have done it at all if my father hadn’t decided to visit. He called me on the hall phone three weeks ago and said he hadn’t seen me since Christmas and he wasn’t going to wait any longer. He was driving all the way from Tennessee that very day, in his ancient Dodge with the brake lights taped up and the front bumper sagging. I knew he wouldn’t be happy to see me with a long-haired white man, but that day, all I could think was that he’d never forgive me if he knew I was with a girl. Even with my fancy New York clothes and my natural hair and my white boyfriend, he’d still see me as his baby girl. If he thought I was going against the word of the Lord God Himself, though, that would be another thing altogether.

  My father raised me to stay away from the police but to be polite if there was no avoiding them. “Yes, sir.” “As you say, sir.” “Of course, Officer.” Daddy grew up in the height of Jim Crow, shuffling along in the street. In the world he knew, only whites walked on the sidewalk. If my father ever saw me running from a blue-helmeted police officer with his club held out to strike, he’d lock me in my old pink-ruffled bedroom until I was ninety.

  I close my eyes and give my head a tiny shake. If Daddy knew where I was right now, he’d drive that old Dodge back up north again, charging straight over the curb and into the park. He’d throw open the passenger door, haul me into the car, and tear out of Chicago with the tires squealing.

  The sun is fading fast. We’re near Columbus Drive, so we can see the protesters lined up in the street. There have got to be thousands of them there already, filling the street as far as we can see in both directions, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s actually marching. They’re all standing in rows, chanting.

  “PEACE NOW!” most of them shout, holding up their fingers in the V sign. A new refrain is working its way back from the front of the line too: “DUMP THE HUMP! DUMP THE HUMP!”

  The convention delegates are supposed to vote tonight on the Democratic nominee for president. Everyone knows it’s going to be Humphrey. President Johnson has already kept us in Vietnam for four years, but Vice President Humphrey will keep us there another ten if he gets his way. And he will, now that the delegates have voted down the peace plank.

  The Democrats had a chance to stop the war today, but they decided to be cowards instead. Now they’re going to nominate a president who thinks peace is the same thing as weakness. We might as well just vote Republican.

  I graduated high school last year in a class of fifty. Twenty-six girls and twenty-four boys. Since then, we’ve already lost three of those twenty-four boys to the war.

  All three enlisted the first chance they got. Even before the war started, most of the boys in our town went straight into the military out of school; getting a scholarship to a faraway college was nothing but a crazy dream for most of us.

  Two of those boys from my class died the first chance they got too.

  The third boy simply disappeared. The best his parents can figure, he was taken prisoner. Reverend Taylor still prays with the congregation every Sunday that this will be the week Jesse comes home safe.

  I don’t pray anymore. I stopped last spring after I saw a photo in the paper of wounded soldiers being dragged through the jungle. One of them was writhing on the ground in pain. At the edge of the photo, one soldier had his arms raised to the sky. The newspaper said he was signaling for a helicopter to come get the wounded men, but to me it looked like he was shouting at God for leaving them behind. I wanted to shout at God too.

  A new chant rises up from the crowd. “HEY, HEY, LBJ! HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY?”

  “Why isn’t anybody moving?” Floyd says.

  Tom shrugs. “Still waiting on the march permit, I guess.”

  “PEACE NOW!” The shouting from the crowd has changed back. “PEACE NOW! PEACE NOW!”

  I nod along with them. There’s something hypnotic about a good protest. Standing with dozens or hundreds or thousands of people who all want the same thing you do. Calling out for it together from the depths of your soul.

  “I’m getting in line,” I say. “Who else is coming?”

  “I want to go talk to the marshals first,” Tom says. “I can’t believe they’re serious about marching all the way to the Amphitheatre. They’ve lost their damn minds.”

  “Okay,” Diane says. “You guys go and we’ll wait here. We can meet up afterward.”

  It’s a relief when Floyd unloops his arm from my waist and heads south with Tom. It’s always a relief. At first being with h
im feels just fine, but then once he’s gone I realize how much better things are without him.

  It’s starting to get dark as Diane and I wade into the crowd. She smiles big at me now that the men are gone. I check to make sure no one’s watching us. Then I smile back.

  I didn’t even know women could be with women until I got to New York. I was in government class the first time I heard about it. We were having a discussion about feminism and what it meant for society. A bunch of the girls — women — in the class, mostly the ones wearing the cashmere sweaters, were saying feminism would destroy the family as we knew it. Another woman, who had long hair and wore sunglasses even though we were inside, kept saying, “No, no, feminism is the future, man, get it?” One of the women in cashmere — the one with the blondest, curliest hair — said, “So why don’t you go try being one of those radical lesbian feminists, then, if you’re so keen on it?” and the girl with the sunglasses said, “Yeah, I tried out the lesbian trip. I don’t know if it’s for me, but if you’re curious, man, you should definitely give it a go.” Everyone laughed nervously, and the teaching assistant dismissed us early.

  That night I asked Diane if she knew what it meant to be a “radical lesbian feminist.” We were smoking and listening to music in my dorm room, lying on the rug, staring up at the stained white ceiling.

  Diane had already told me she was a feminist by then. This was our first semester, when the idea of being a feminist still seemed scary. It sounded almost as bad as being a communist.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard people talk about it down at the women’s collective,” Diane told me. “They call it existential lesbian feminism. It’s about teaching men a lesson. The only way they’ll learn we don’t need them is if we really don’t need them for anything. Get it?”

  I nodded slowly. Existential lesbian feminism. A political philosophy based around women having sex with other women. And I’d thought regular feminism was extreme.

  I wondered how women did have sex with other women. Maybe they’d . . . oh. Oh.

  I blushed harder with every passing minute. The political philosophy sounded crazy, but the women-being-with-other-women part didn’t sound like such a terrible thing.

  “I think I get it,” I told Diane.

  Two weeks later, Diane came over to listen to music again, and this time I definitely got it. We both did. It was amazing, actually.

  I’d never felt about anyone the way I felt about Diane. I’d had boyfriends in high school, and I’d flirted with men at college parties, but what she and I had after just those first few weeks was something else altogether.

  The problem was, by the time the spring semester started, Diane wanted to tell other people about it.

  “The whole point of being a lesbian feminist is to prove a point to the man,” she said.

  “Is this seriously just about politics to you?” I asked.

  “Well, no. I mean, I also like you. A lot. But the personal is political, get it?”

  “Not this time, it isn’t.”

  Diane and I had started hanging out more with Floyd and the rest of the Students for a Democratic Society crowd by then. The men in SDS were cool, but, well, they were men. One night after a meeting we stayed up late writing a Students’ Bill of Rights. It started off serious, with things like “Ban the draft” and “Freedom of assembly” and “Respect all people.” Then everyone started trying to be funny. The longer the night went on, the longer the list got. By the end Floyd and Tom had added “Free booze for all,” “Free dope for all,” and “Free women for all.” Diane and I told them to cross the last one out, but they just laughed and said, “Girls never get jokes, man.”

  After that, Diane wanted to tell them about us more than ever, but I wouldn’t let her. If men thought those sorts of things were funny, I figured that only proved they’d never understand about Diane and me. They’d never look at me the same. And their “jokes” would only get worse.

  Diane and I slide into line with the other marchers gathered on Columbus Drive. A woman at the end of a row with dirty hair and a stoned-out expression smiles and makes the V sign at me. “Right on, sister.”

  “Right on,” I reply, linking arms with her. Usually I stay away from the serious hippies — the ones who’ve been living on the streets so long they smell — but there are so few women here we’ve got to stick together.

  Diane links onto my other arm. “Thank God we got rid of them. Floyd is driving me batty.”

  I stop smiling. “Take it easy on him, would you?”

  “Oh, give it a rest. If you seriously like him, you should at least tell him the truth. Unless you want me to do it for you.”

  My heart thuds. “You wouldn’t really. Would you?”

  “No.” Diane sticks her lower lip out in a pout. “Not unless you said it was all right. I need to know, though. Are you serious about him, or was this just a short-term thing while your dad was visiting? Because you know it isn’t right to string him along like that. Any more than it is me.”

  The hippie woman next to me leans over. She’s watching our conversation, her lip quirked.

  “I don’t know,” I say, trying to ignore the hippie’s breath on my neck. “It’s complicated.”

  “You should’ve just lied to your dad,” Diane says. “Did you think he’d somehow suspect you were a lesbian unless you proved otherwise?”

  The hippie’s jaw drops. I wish we’d found a different place to stand.

  “You act like it’s so easy.” I try to keep my voice down so only Diane can hear. It’s hard in the crowd, though. “You know it’s not that simple. I care about Floyd, okay?”

  Diane sighs. “Jill, I’m not asking you to break up with him. Just be honest. Tell him you’re a lesbian.”

  I glance from side to side again. I wish she’d stop using that word. “Look, I don’t even know if I am a lesbian. I don’t believe in this whole philosophy the way you do. I don’t think being with a woman proves anything except that it can be fun to be with a woman.”

  The hippie is gaping at us openly. Oh, well. It’s not like she’s going to tell anyone. Certainly not my dad.

  “All right, then tell him that.” Diane pulls her arm free from mine and throws her hands up in the air. “You act as if it’s something to be ashamed of.”

  “Well it is, kind of,” I say.

  Diane turns to me, her forehead creased. “You’re ashamed of me?”

  “Not of you, just —” I shake my head. “You don’t want your parents to know either. That’s because they’d think it’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  She shrugs and looks away.

  “Even in New York, even here, lots of people think it’s wrong,” I say. “You really want to shout it out to the whole world?”

  “No,” she says. “Just to your boyfriend.”

  I sigh. “You really think he’d keep it to himself? The whole school will hear about it the next time he gets stoned at a party.”

  “And that would be so terrible?”

  I shake my head. I don’t know what to say.

  “I just hate lying to our friends,” Diane says. “Especially your so-called boyfriend. God, even that word, boyfriend. It sounds like such a lie. It’s so conventional, and you’re so not.”

  I want to argue with her. I was as conventional as they came before I left home.

  Everything about life in New York felt so radical compared to what I’d known before. In New York, you can hear three or four different languages just walking down the block. Women wear pants every day. Black people and white people sit next to each other on the subway like it’s nothing. There are student demonstrations every week for peace, for poverty, for civil rights.

  I’ve only been there for a year, but that’s enough to know it’s where I belong. After Christmas break, I swore I’d never go back to Tennessee. I stuck around at Barnard for the summer session even though my father sent three letters pleading for me to come back. He’s been terribly lonely since my mother died thr
ee years ago.

  But I couldn’t face that house again. My little brother, counting down the days until he’s old enough to enlist. My grandmother, nagging me to get my hair done and to hurry up and find a husband so I can come back home.

  The sky is so dim it’s nearly dark. A new chant starts up at the front of the line. It echoes to the back so slowly we can’t even tell what they’re saying at first.

  “Having a boyfriend isn’t automatically conventional,” I tell Diane. “I like Floyd.”

  “Do you really?” Diane says. “Do you love him?”

  I laugh. “Now who’s the conventional one?”

  That’s one of the things that’s always frustrated me about Diane. She takes this all so seriously. Everything has to be a profound statement on something. If it isn’t politics, it’s love.

  Floyd is a lot of things, but profound isn’t one of them. Floyd’s feet are flat on the ground. Flat is a good word for Floyd, generally. He’s been pretty good about taking me out on dates and being nice to me at parties, but I can’t shake the feeling that he likes the idea of dating the black freshman girl with the natural hair more than he likes the actual me.

  I thought Daddy would be glad to see I had a boyfriend. A man to take care of me in the big city. It turned out I was wrong.

  My father found some cheap hotel in Harlem, but he could only stay for two days before he had to get back to work at the factory. We went on the Staten Island Ferry and baked in the heat while my father looked at the city skyline and shook his head as though he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I ordered takeout from my favorite Chinese restaurant and we ate it on the floor of my dorm room, my father fumbling with unfamiliar chopsticks. His eyes darted across the rows of thick textbooks with complicated titles, the ashtrays scattered around the room, the stacks of albums with long-haired white men on their covers. He was trying, I knew, but he didn’t understand why I’d chosen this world over the only one he’d ever known.

  When I introduced them, Floyd was polite, respectful, friendly. He went to prep school in Massachusetts, so he knew to wear a tie and call my father “sir.” But he didn’t know not to put his hand on the small of my back as we crossed the street to the fancy restaurant he’d picked out for dinner. When he touched me, I swear I saw Daddy’s heart break right in front of me.