The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

challenge had been taken up. It turned out that she had used

the wrong key in grading the test; the answers she wanted me to

give were for some other test. I was good but not that good.

I wanted out, Tangerine lipstick notwithstanding. I wanted

smart people whether or not their noses shined enough to

illuminate a room or a house or a city. I wanted someone who

cared about me in particular, as an individual, enough to

notice that I could not get a zero on a vocabulary test because

25

Heartbreak

I had too big a vocabulary. I was so worn out by Miss Fox that

when she graded an essay on contemporary education a B

because, as she said to me, some commas were wrong and it

wasn’t anything personal, after a halfhearted and utterly futile

argument I accepted the B. She even put her arm around me,

genuinely adding insult to injury. I knew I’d get her someday

and this is it: eat shit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood was

easy.

26

The High School

Library

Nowadays librarians actively try to get students Internet access

to pornography, at least in the United States. Organized as a

First Amendment lobby group, librarians go to court - or their

professional organizations do - to defend pornographers and

pornography. Truly, this does not happen because James Joyce

and Henry Miller were banned as obscene a hundred years

ago; I once wrote an affidavit for a court on the differences

between Nabokov’s Lolita and a pimp’s pictorial with words,

“Lolita Pissing. ” These are some of life’s easier distinctions. I

used to ask groups of folks how the retailers of pornography

could tell the difference between Joyce and hard-core visual

pornography. I noted that although, generally speaking, they

weren’t the best and the brightest, they managed never to

stock Ulysses. If they could do it, I thought, so could the rest

of us. Instead, the idea seems to be that keeping a child -

someone underaged - away from anything is akin to treason.

One is violating sacred constitutional rights and assassinating

Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln (for the second time).

27

Heartbreak

In my high school days, librarians were the militia, the first

line of defense in keeping the underaged away from books, al