gutless teacher, who said that she was Jewish and she sang
“Silent Night' so why didn’t
a female collaborator, or the first one that I remember. They
left me alone in the empty classroom after that. I wasn’t a
religious zealot; I just didn’t like being pushed around, and I
knew about and liked the separation of church and state, and
I knew I wasn’t a Christian and I didn’t worship Jesus. I even
knew that Christians had made something of a habit of killing
Jews, which sealed the deal for me. I was shunned, and one of
my drawings, hung in the hal on a bulletin board, was defaced:
“kike” was written across it. I then had to undergo the excruciating process of get ing some adult to tell me what “kike”
meant. I thought my teachers were fascists in the style of the
Inquisition for wanting me to sing “Silent Night” when they
knew I was Jewish, and I stil think that. What they take from
you in school is eroded slowly, but this was big. I couldn’t
understand how they could try to force me. Transparently,
they could and they did. Force, punishment, exile: so much
adult firepower to use against such a little girl. To this day I
think about this confrontation with authority as the “Silent
Night” Action, and I recommend it. Adults need to be stood
up to by children, period. It’s good for them, the adults, I
mean. Pushing kids around is ugly. The adults need to be
saved from themselves. On the other hand, students should
not, must not shoot teachers. The nobility of rebellion student-
to-teacher requires civil disobedience, not guns, not war -
pedagogy against pedagogy In this context, guns are cowardly
I was, however, in crisis. I had read
probably a hundred times, and like Scarlet I was willful. My
problem was the following: abortion was illegal and women
were dying. How could this be changed? Was the best way to
write a book that made you cry your heart out and feel the
suffering of the sick and dying women or to go into court a la
Perry Mason and make an argument so compelling, so truthful and poignant, that people would rise up unable to bear the pain of the status quo? You might say that in some sense I was
fully formed in the sixth grade. My frame of reference was not
expansive - I did not yet know about Danton or Robespier e
or any number of referent points beside Perry Mason - but in
formal terms the dilemma of my life was fully present: law or
literature, literature or law? By the end of that year, I had
decided that they could stop you from going to law school -
and would - but no one could keep you from writing because
