treated me as if I knew anything, which maybe I didn’t, but the
boys were pretty ignorant pieces o f shit, I can tell you that. I was
confused by it but I kept working for peace. These boys all called
momma at home; I heard them. I didn’t. There were adults,
some really old, at the War Resisters League but to me they
weren’t anything like the adults from school. They were heroes
to me. They had gone to jail for things they believed in. They
weren’t afraid and they didn’t follow laws and they didn’t act
dead and they had sex and they didn’t lie about it and they didn’t
act like there was all the time in the world because they knew
there wasn’t. They stood up to the government. They weren’t
afraid. One had been a freedom rider in the South and he got
beaten up so many times he was like a punched-out prizefighter.
He could barely talk he had been beaten up so much. I didn’t try
to talk to him or around him because I held him in awe. I thought
I would be awfully proud if I was him but he wasn’t proud at all,
just quiet and shy. Sometimes I wondered if he could remember
anything; but maybe he knew everything and was just humble
and brave. I have chosen to think so. He did things like I did,
typed and put out mailings and put postage on envelopes and ran
errands and got coffee; he didn’t order anyone around. They
were all brave and smart. One wrote poems and lots o f them
wrote articles and edited newsletters and magazines. One wrote
a book I had read in high school, not in class o f course, about
freedom and utopia, but when I asked him to read a poem I
wrote— I asked a secretary who knew him to ask him because I
was too shy— he wouldn’t and the secretary said he hated
women. He had a wife and there was a birthday party for him
one day and his wife brought a birthday cake and he wouldn’t
speak to her. Everyone said he had boys. His wife was
embarrassed and just kept talking, just on and on, and everyone
was embarrassed but no one made him talk to her or thank her
and I stayed on the outside o f the circle that was around him to
think if it was possible that he hated women, even his wife, and
w hy he would be mean to her as if she didn’t exist. Y o u ’d thank
anyone for a birthday cake. From his book I thought he was
wise. I thought he loved everyone. And if he hated women and
everyone knew it how come they were so nice to him because
hate wasn’t nonviolence. When he died a few years later I felt
relieved. I wondered if his wife was sad or if she felt relieved. I
suppose she was sad but why? I thought he was this one hateful
man but the others were the great I-Thous, the real I-Thous;
fighting militarism; wanting peace; writing; I wanted to be the
same. The I-Its were the regular people on the streets dressed in
suits all the same like robots busy going to business and women
with lacquered hair in outfits. But when the boys who wanted to
