Thoughts Engendered By A Friend's Curiosity

 A friend, when he discovered I rarely watch film and television, asked with shock, "What do you do all day?" It's a monastic existence, I admit, but still rife with anticipation. How many miles to go before I sleep, and what will I do with them? As my friend, Mr. Priestly, said, "I have always been delighted at the prospect of  a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning." 

So, I got to thinking: how does this writer spend his day? I have no meetings, script conferences, no long term planning sessions. Phone calls are few and mostly unanswered. Not yours, of course. I'm talking hucksters and scam artists, although if they were truly artists they would have caught me. Details. It's all in the details. Pay attention. So many details take up so much time that the day passes without knowing where it went. (We joke about watching paint dry, but what could be more Zen? The sound of one hand clapping? Really?) Just suppose you believed that all the earth and everything in it were sacred, so much so that every step you took was taken on hallowed ground. Every step. Everything you smelled and touched. Just sayin'. Everything you saw and heard. Suppose you believed that every pebble, every beetle, every mote of dust were somehow sacrosanct? Chris Hedges, a radical journalist with whom I currently disagree, said the point is, "To tie the most mundane moments of existence to the eternal mystery of the cosmos."  I think about the Buddhist monk whose words taught me to "chop wood, carry water." How to transform the most basic of tasks. To do what you do and not do anything else but that. To pay attention. Just stop and think it through. To follow the connections. To grasp that one is a part of all this. It takes thought and attention to detail and that takes time but time passes and so does the day. Is there always magic waiting somewhere behind the morning? Of course not, but there is always that possibility. 

And so I spend my day kind of meandering from one moment to the next, dawdling as much as I want, establishing the flow, or so I try. And try. And try.

The Buddha was sitting under his tree when a horseman raced by.

    "Where are you going?" asked the Buddha

    "Ask my horse," answered the rider.        

Morgan - A Girl I Once Knew

1962

    I remember her walk. I'd be sitting in the student union when she'd come in, smile, and walk over to me. She had a wonderful walk -- slow and easy, fluid, without a hint of effort. She'd walk over to me and then we'd sit there and talk, about nothing much.            

    Marion Tyree was in the Ira Aldridge Players, the school's drama society. Now that I was sort of a playwright, so was I. I don't remember what she did in the group nor do I remember how we met, but being in the club broke down barriers, and we began to talk. Her voice sounded so pleasant with just a hint of a southern accent. She was slender and very dark. I was Jewish and pale as a biscuit. We must have had crushes on each other, but I remember being with her was like a slow canoe ride across a lake rather than the turbulence of shooting whitewater. I don't remember being on guard for rocks, but I imagine I was, and I imagine she must have been, too. After all, it was 1962 in a city that slanted south. She was Black, and I was White. Yet, I don’t remember an issue, nothing fraught, no sense of anything we shouldn’t have been doing, no conversations I couldn’t have had with someone else. We were still children of the fifties, innocent and pristine. It was enough to simply sit together in the student union between classes and just talk.

    Somewhere in here Dr. Turpin, mentor to the drama society, producer and director of my play, a fine man to whom I owe the beginning of my writing career, told me he'd made arrangements for the play to be produced in New York. The Ira Aldridge players, cast and crew, would be headed for the bright lights of Off-Broadway on stage at the Columbia Teachers College way uptown but a bite of the Big Apple nonetheless. Marion and I would be hundreds of miles from our hometown. We never spoke about it, but I doubt that was lost on either of us. This is what I remember: not a lot about rehearsals or performance but a taxi ride with Marion Tyree down to Greenwich Village to see Jean Genet's "The Blacks'' starring a young actor named Louis Gossett. Another couple shared the cab with us: a friend and fellow student from Morgan, another Marine as I had been, Reg Kearney, and his date, a coed from Barnard. I still don't know how he managed to pull that one off in the limited time we were in the city, but he did. Reggie had hit his trifecta: she was zaftig, white, and Jewish. Reggie was in heaven. All four of us were in the back seat, so I sat as close to Marion as I'd ever been. I cautiously put my arm around her, and she settled in. Nestled in. It was a small move and gentle, and felt so right. After the show (which was electrifying) we walked to a restaurant, and, for the first time, we held hands, right there, out in the open, we held hands. At first I thought every set of eyes in New York City was on us, and then I realized none were. We held hands and walked to the restaurant, and I was happy. I was a produced playwright, and I was holding hands with Marion Tyree.

    When Marion’s grandchildren were grown she told them about me. “He was a white boy,” she said. “No, grandma, no,” they screamed. “And he was Jewish,” she said. “Grandma, no,” they yelped in disbelief. Then came the kicker.” And he was a good kisser, too,” she said, and laughed when they squealed and went wide-eyed. “Oh, no, grandma, you didn’t!” “Yes, I did,” said Marion, totally delighted with their reaction. At that moment she became a legend to her grandchildren who couldn't conceive of grandma ever doing such a thing. But we did do such a thing, and it has become a cherished memory.

    If I had been born a ship I would have been a fishing trawler. My nets were out trawling for stories long before I even knew I wanted to tell them, countless details hauled around for years like heavy cartons of old books I could not leave behind. Thoughts and people; smells, colors, sounds. It’s not clear when things began to sort themselves out, but, when they did, Morgan was such a story. Marion Tyree was such a story, a story I will happily tell ‘til my gums dry up and my mouth withers away. It was all so nice and easy. We saw a play. We were hungry. We walked down the street looking for a place to eat, and we held hands. 

                                       THE END

Morgan - Northwood

Northwood theatre was a segregated movie theatre in a segregated shopping center six blocks from campus. Students couldn't eat in the restaurant, try on clothes in the store, nor take a seat in the movies. Mostly, it didn't matter: the food was terrible, and the clothes were out of date, but the movies, that was a different story. Even if all there were to see were Doris Day and Rock Hudson, that was date night, and everybody wants to go to the movies, especially one that was six blocks away. 

The student president (I believe his name was Reggie Louis) called a meeting of student leaders and proposed Morgan State spearhead an action to integrate the Northwood Theatre. Picketing, of course, but also trespassing, i.e., the possibility of arrest. We had to be prepared for that. I wasn't. A decision I regret to this day. I'd picket and do anything short, but I wasn't ready to get arrested. I was still tethered to my family in such a way that the idea of an arrest pumped fear into my guts, not so much of the police, but having to deal with my family's disdain and displeasure. I was in the process but not yet ready to completely sever my ties. I remember the shame I felt when I told Reggie Louis that my arrest was out. He said he understood, however, had I been he, I would have thought much less of him than before he admitted he didn't have the cojones to go through with it. I did picket (and never felt so naked in all my life), but an arrest was out. Dozens of students, many friends of mine, went to the slammer but not this one. It's one of those things in my life that if I had it to do over...you know what I mean.

Onward.

One big irony. Well, actually, two. Northwood Theatre was owned by the father of a friend of mine at the time, not a close friend, but a guy I sometimes hung with. His name was not Albert so I'll call him Albert. Al was always bugging me to take him with me when I went to parties at Morgan. I rarely went to parties myself, and I damn sure wasn't about to take him with me when I did go to one. Here his father wouldn't let them in, but Albert wanted to party. Draw your own conclusions. Once he saw me on the picket line that was pretty much the end of our relationship. I managed to navigate all my different worlds rather smoothly, going from one to the next simply doing what had to be done while there, but there were some relationships that had to be severed. 

About this time, Freedom Rides were being taken along the Eastern Shore, arguably the most racially hostile part of Maryland. Freedom Riders were integrated groups of Blacks and Whites who chartered buses in an attempt to integrate the restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, and other businesses in the area. The buses always faced hostility from white mobs, often met with outright violence. Firebombing a bus full of passengers was a favorite. One time an African diplomat, royalty in his own country, was refused service. He was not a freedom rider, only a diplomat (a prince, actually) in a private car headed to Washington, D.C. When the owner of the restaurant was told of this man's stature, his response was, "He looked just like any other nigger to me." Well, a girl I was dating at the time thought this was the funniest thing she'd ever heard, made her laugh so hard she damn near screamed, damn near peed herself she thought it so funny. I can still hear her. It was repugnant. I can't remember what I said or even if I were so disgusted I said nothing at all,  but I do remember turning and walking away, never to see her again. How dare she? How dare anybody?

I said there were two ironies. Here's the second one: the mayor of Baltimore was the father-in-law of my cousin. Legend has it that, after weeks of student protests and arrests, he strode into that theatre, pointed his finger at the owner, and ordered, "You will integrate this theatre now." And the waters calmed. And the Northwood was integrated." Such is legend. It made it seem as if it were the mayor's command - Moses parting the sea - and not the three weeks of blood, sweat, and tears endured by the students that broke down that barrier and integrated that place. No politician did this. No white saviour. Morgan did. It was an act of devotion and determination pulled off by a student body determined to be polite yet determined not to budge.