Black Power in the Courtroom, Cont.

3. The Summer

June’s Diary

My beginning this description by jumping from the morning to the night may reflect what was to be the foreshortening of the whole summer, although the days were the longest in the year.  I thought of Igls as a parody of Stifter’s Nachsommer:  in the morning the garden beckoned with its reclining chairs temptingly and unobtrusively placed near the protecting branches of rose and jasmine trees, their fragrant blossoms a memory, their heart-shaped leaves reality.  I evoke Whitman.  I read Thomas Mann. Je pense à Goethe.  At eleven-thirty the sun’s rays penetrate my leafy bower, summoning me to the cooling waters of the small artificial pool, and I climb the verdant slope leading to this square prison of mountain streams, there to disport myself in company of sun-kissed children and fatigued travelers, all refreshing themselves in the healing waters.  Wending my way hotelwards, oft pause I under the leafy roof of Father Cherry Tree and partake of his succulent fruits, offered temptingly to linger the wayward guest on his way to the shadowed lodge,  the snowy cloth, the sparkling wine, and congenial companions.

            --I live in Hanau, said the plainer of the two ladies.

Hanau.  Bang-o, right back to the present.  Good bye, Adelbert.  There was a US Army barracks in Hanau where something happened--oh, yes, the soldier who fell out of the window.  Or was pushed.  I wondered if I should bring this information into the conversation.  Did you know that there is an American Caserne in Hanau where a friend of an acquaintance of mine recently pushed a friend or an acquaintance of his out the window?  The soldiers there live in a former Nazi barracks and I sometimes wonder if the spirit of fascism or perhaps something inherent in the nature of all capitalist armies--or all armies...? 

No.  They would probably ask to have their tables switched, complicating life for the benevolent dictator of a headwaiter.  Maybe he would give me a table alone?  Hardly likely.  No room.  He would just put me with two or three other ladies.  If I had enough imagination, I could start talking about fascism and the US Army at every table in the joint, the gadfly of the hotel, breaking all the rules of good manners.  Buttonhole politics towards the bourgeoisie.  Ruin everyone’s vacation and what good would it do?  Not even get me my own table.

            --There is an American Army base in Hanau, I  said, nothing if not a compromiser.

            --Yes, agreed the plain lady.  Are you American?

I said I was.

            --I have always wanted to go to America, said the other lady, the blond one.  But finally one is so tired when the vacations come, I always return here.  The meals are very good.

I don’t remember where the blond one worked, though she told me.  The other was in a travel agency.  She was planning to go to Rhodes next year.

            --I should take advantage of it, she told me, because of the rates.  But this year I was so tired, I felt I needed a rest.

Everyone is exhausted here but me.

            --Tonight we have vol au vent, announced the blond lady and excused herself. 

She was always first at table.  If you came late, you sometimes missed out on a delicacy or got a boney part of the chicken.

            --She lives for the meals, said the travel agency lady.  At lunch she’s already looking forward to dinner.

Hunger marcher.  Where was that?  Tobermory.  Almost a hundred years ago.  Nothing new under the sun.  I wondered if that was what I would come to if I went on vacationing in places like this.  Hunger-marching.  Maybe it was that same evening I received the phone call from Martha.  That was the name of the character witness for the defenestrating young man in the stockade.  The head waiter called me to the phone just as I was starting on the apple pie.  At first I thought there must be some mistake.  I had only given my phone number to my daughter in case of emergency, and I didn’t believe in emergencies.  The voice on the phone was strange, a woman’s voice saying, Hey, June.  This is Martha. Martha Albertson.

Martha Albertson.  She came back to me easily enough.  Although the murder case had been minor, except for the victim, no one who had ever seen the 160 pound Martha would easily forget her.  Philadelphia possibly excepted where, I discovered there were others like Martha, but in white Europe she was a definite novelty.  There was too much of her to give an impression of fragility--more of vulnerability--affronting the world with a 160 pound volume to defend, like an unarmed soldier guarding an atomic stockpile.  Except Martha was not unarmed, she had a gun which she sometimes took out and waved around and checked out, or gave to other people to check out, Hey, check this out.  But her insecurity, if that is what it was, was not one where a gun would be much use, except as one of the ruses and tricks to frighten away the enemy.

I said hello and asked how she had found me.

            --Cora gave it to me, Mary—she’s fantastic.

Well, she got at me there, of course.  Always a good idea to praise people’s children to them.  And I had given Martha’s address to Cora before she left for the States.

            --You saw her in America?

            Obviously.

            --You didn’t get her letter?  She spent two weeks with me in Philadelphia.  She’ll tell you all about it--I don’t want to go into it on this phone.  But what I want to know is, can you and Max come up here and help me?  I’m here with two sisters.

            --Where?

            --In Frankfurt.  At the Sun Hotel.

            --The which?

            --The Sun.  It’s somewhere near the Zoo.  Cora and I chose it; we looked up all the hotels in Frankfurt and it was the cheapest we could find.

She laughed.

I was still being pleased that Cora had been so helpful to this black militant from Philadelphia.  The idea of Frankfurt in August, Frankfurt at any time of the year, was such a strong inducement to say no that I immediately said yes.

            --Max is on vacation, I said.  But I can come up.

            --June, that’s fantastic!  When?

            Having committed myself, I had earned the right to a little time,

            --Saturday.

            --What time?  It doesn’t matter; we’ll wait for you all day.

            --No, don’t do that.  If I leave here in the morning, I should be there around four-thirty or five.

            --Oh, June, that will be out of this world.

I might have had sense enough to worry if she had said that I was out of this world, but I thought it was our future collaboration being out of this world.  Well, I was right, it was in a way, but I probably would not have left Igls if I had known in exactly what way it was going to be.  Out of this world.  In fact, as soon as I hung up, I began to regret saying yes.  Cora’s letter might help a little to explain what I was getting myself in for.  Not that I didn’t have an idea.  It wouldn’t be the first time I had been asked by some militant from the World to help them “do GI work.” Most GI support was done by affinity groups.  By affinity, I mean something less than friendship and something other than political militancy, which is based on some sort of agreement on political principles and aims.  Like a communist party, for example.  I personally found political organization very tiring, political work very tiring, all work tiring smile.  Either you don’t have to think about it because you are on an assembly line and that is tiring in itself or, in political work, you think about it all the time because you are holding onto a rope.  This rope leads you into an unknown future, up a never-to-be-scaled mountain, and though you may have every confidence in your rope, and that is not always so, you also know that when and if you get to the top, you are going to see another mountain.  Another political problem.  To complete this analogy, the rope is the common political ideology you and your fellow climbers are tied on: you test it together and it unites you.

In affinity groups there is no rope, and you are not tied together; you are only holding hands.  At any moment anyone might let go, either because she or he is frightened and thinks she can save herself alone, or in order to get a better grip on the next person’s hand and missing, or she could be shot down.  It is much safer, particularly in the last instance, to be on a rope.  If you decide to let go, you have to announce this to the others and stop and untie yourself.  If, by some completely unforeseen chance you do fall, many of you fall together.  I am still in the mountains, so please note the parallel between the first ascent of the Matterhorn and the Russian Revolution.  You cannot stay on top forever, and it is the descent that is to be feared.  Climb if you will, but take each step carefully and weigh well at the beginning what is likely to be the end. Edward Whymper, first man to climb the Matterhorn, where his whole party crashed down when the rope broke. 

With affinity groups you rarely got out of the ideological foothills.  The times you did get quite a way up the mountain, you often found you had taken the wrong path and were stopped by an unscaleable rock wall.  Or--and this had already happened to me--you crossed a party of roped-together alpinists who either passed you, or you passed, but never, although both groups might try, succeeded in getting their ends of rope spliced together.  Of course, all tying up together is no guarantee of safety; see above on the Matterhorn descent.  The point I am making is that your affinity comrades can, at any moment, drop hands and start scrambling up and down in all directions.  The last time this happened to me, I went on climbing up alone and tied onto the mountaineering group on the rope above; this had not gotten me to any summit but had kept me involved in politics.  Left wing understood.  If I had been a really effective political person, I would have gotten my own rope, rounded up my dispersed comrades, and started leading them up the mountain again. “Try, fail, fail again, fail better.”  Zizek.  Like Lenin and the Bolsheviks.  Thinking all this over during my last three days in Igls, I certainly did not have any illusions about pulling Martha up anywhere behind me.  First of all, she weighed 160 pounds.  Then she had been the one to start this particular climb, and would probably want to lead it; so we would all join hands and begin the ascent up the lower foothills: me, Martha, and her two sisters, whoever they were.

I had just gotten myself a pair of new mountain boots the day before Martha’s phone call.  Foothill boots, more exactly.  Nothing for the Matterhorn.  I did not suppose I would use them much that summer because the day after the phone call I received Cora’s letter, which dispelled my recurring temptation, first when I had put down the phone, and then the next morning at breakfast, to call the whole thing off.  If I had not had a quarrel with Max, and if he had not been away from Heidelberg, then I would have called him and told him to check out Martha and the sisters.  If, if, if.  I suppose I was more enthusiastic at the time than I am in retrospect.  Herewith Cora’s letter:

 Dig it.  Anyway, what I’m getting at is that Martha is going back to Europe for this soldiers thing.  I don’t think I can tell you what it’s about in a letter (security) and even if I could, it would take too long.  En gros, she will carry out an investigation on the situation of the 7th Army in Germany, and if she is able to prove what she wants to prove about racism in the Army and the lives of Black Soldiers in the 7th Army, the whole Black Caucuses will walk out of Congress, there will be a what-do-you-call-it (I forget the name, I think it is hearings) all over the USA for people to vote about getting the US Army out of Germany etc. etc....She’s got all sorts of things going.  Now, she will land in Frankfurt on the first of August—she’s with a crew.  They’ll be three or four in all.  What I want for you to do is, as they need someone to let them understand Europe as they made me understand the United States, is for you to sacrifice Austria and your vacacciones for them and help Martha do her thing and create the biggest upheaval the USA has ever gone through in its whole history (no joke).  It might be a change in WORLD history (No Joke)--would it be only for me (but I think you’ll dig the political consequences of Martha’s trip to Europe).  I ain’t  too proud to beg--do it!

The letter ended with an invitation to Martha to stop by Martinique on her way home, closing I   love you both, my beautiful sisters.  Outside of its emotional appeal to me, this letter presented no idea or theory that I had not rejected long ago--whether it was pressuring Black groups, in or out of Congressional caucuses, or believing all women were my sisters.  On the other hand, I was very glad that people had been nice to my daughter in Philadelphia.  I was thinking more of Mrs. Morrison, the murderer’s mother, than Martha.  No one over here, including me, was being nice to her son in the Frankfurt stockade.  It occurred to me that there seemed to be no question in Cora’s mind of giving up her own vacation, but then she considered she was going to Martinique to fight white imperialism in another sector.

            P.S.  From now on, the thought of Mao-Tse-Tung will guide me for the theory and the actions of  Martha will guide me for the practice (praxis)--No joke!

An affinity group:  a sixteen year old who wasn’t even going to be there, a social worker I had met twice, and two or three unknown sisters.  I wondered if Mrs. Morrison was one of them.  And me, a forty-four year old with a dwindling if still independent income.  The only thing that could unit us was our nationality, which I also did not believe in.

 On Friday night I took a last walk after dinner up to the Casino Park, which lay on a small plateau above the road from the Waldhaus.  The Casino as yet had nothing to do with gambling; it was a new building which had been donated fairly recently.  There were various rooms of various sizes for bowling, ping pong, and dancing.  Young deer were enclosed in an acre of woodland behind it, and a gravel path wound in and out of the trees; low lamps lit benches, a fish pond, a playground, and a summer house.  There were even fireflies.  I strolled through all this, wondering for the last time why I was going to Frankfurt.  I had quarreled with Max, one daughter was doing her own thing in Martinique, and the other was in the Communist League in Paris for the summer.  I was supposed to be free.  Martha undoubtedly had other people on her list of contacts, although probably no one with enough free time to jump in a car and run up to Frankfurt.  My car obviously was an important factor.  However, a decision not to go would have implied a definite acceptance of my role alongside the middle-aged ladies in the dining room, except more privileged in that I did not have to work eight hours a day in a travel agency but could spend the rest of my life in the Waldhaus if I so desired, wandering about the woods.  Rejection of that world led to action in this.  As a conscientious capitalist, in praxis if not in theory, I chose action in Frankfurt with Martha and her sisters.  Sisters so to speak.

Saturday morning I started early, symbolically forgetting my boots under the bed, and took the Salzburg highway across the border to the Nueremberg-Frankfurt Autobahn.  It was a little longer than going over Munich, but the stretch through the Munich suburbs would be hot, and since I was starting something new, I thought I would try a new route.  The Nuremberg Autobahn was broken up by a detour, but at least we were bumper to bumper in the country.  Threshing machines winnowed their way across the golden farmland, tended by the bronzed arms of young men and women, part of the verdant--Autobahn restaurant.  My last stop before joining the coalition which, for the next three weeks, was going to color my whole view of this country, like the green glasses Dorothy put on to enter the City of Oz.  I forget what I ordered, but I remember being vaguely depressed by the German families, out in force on the hot Saturday afternoon, bored kids and mothers eating ice cream, fat fathers drinking beer, grandparents with whatever nourishment they required.  I suppose I was already fitting myself for the green glasses because generally I did not see Germans or any nationality, in such depressing generalities.  But Nature had been blotted out by the Autobahn and the undifferentiated middle class.  I was ready, dig it, for the Sun Hotel.

I had remembered Martha as big, but also as half cut off by a car door, the edge of a table in a restaurant, or half-drowned by shadows of trees outside the Miguel Arms.  In the summer twilight of early August, she became a fantastic apparition, skipping down the alleyway between the Sun and the outdoor cafe, wearing a black Afro wig, green slacks, a flowered blouse, carolling:  June, it’s fantastic to see you!

She was followed at a reasonable pace and distance by a woman about my own age, dressed in a long skirt and wearing a turban.  The Old South and the New Ghetto.  Did I mention that Martha was in her late twenties?  Beyond both of them was a young Black man in jeans and a torn black shirt. 

            --This is Montrice, one of the sisters who’s over here helping me, began Martha.  And this here is Dog.  We were waiting for you to go over to have dinner at Family Housing.  The other sister’s over there already.  This will be marvelous.

I was glad I had come and wondered if I could eat again in an hour.  Suppose they had arranged all this and I hadn’t come.  People waiting for people to show up who don’t has always easily upset me.  But I was here.  Martha told me to leave my car in the hotel parking lot, took me inside to register, and then accompanied me up to my room.

            --We wanted to get you a room near us, said Martha.  They didn’t have any free right now, but we can move you down in a few days.

By down, she meant to their end of the corridor.  There were no more than seven rooms on the floor, and I thought I was quite near enough.  Martha explained we would all go in Dog’s car, drop Montrice at the Family Housing so that she could help Mary Rose, the third sister, to cook dinner, and the three of us would go on to Hanau to pick up Charlie.  I asked how many GI’s were coming.

            --June, I don’t know.  I’ve been feeding GI’s since I got here, because the first thing I learnt, the Army doesn’t bother to pay the Black soldiers once it’s got them over here and away from everybody.  Isn’t that right, Dog? 

            --I know they sending me back next week, and I ain’t got paid for two months.

            --What are you going to do with your car?

            --I already sold it.

            --What kind of car is it?

            --A 1964 Plymouth.

            With holes in the upholstery.

            --I don’t suppose you got much for it.

            --You know I didn’t, said Dog.