That's Not History, That's My Life

It was sometime between 1963 and 1969, homework on my lap, G'ma in the kitchen, rubbing Twinkle on the bottoms of her Revere ware pots.

She wore gloves for this, long to her elbows, yellow, rubber gloves.  

That's the crucial to the vivid-to-this-day image I have of her standing in the foyer across from my surprised self on the couch, eyes blazing, arms encased in yellow rubber gloves raised in cactus pose

responding to my simple request for a quick answer.  

Mom, where did Patton fight?

Cue loud noise from kitchen, fast stomping feet, and there was my mother, typically a dispassionate and reserved woman, informing me in no uncertain terms, in that voice that mothers' have, loudly and passionately that it was Italy, God Damn It!  My brother fought there!  That is not HISTORY..... that is MY LIFE.

She went back to the sink, nodding her head .... in satisfaction? ..... dismay?.... who knows?  

I have never forgotten the two lessons I learned that night: Patton fought with my Uncle Paul (who never ever except once talked about WWII) in Italy; and History is in the eye of the beholder.

The war ended some 24 years before that conversation.  I've been substituting FlapJilly wondering about Bush v. Gore or 9/11 to get a sense of what she was feeling.  It's a decidedly odd experience.

I'm thinking about all this because I've put Challenger aside for the moment and have been engrossed in  Clara Bingham's The Movement.  

That isn't history; that's my life.

I was in 7th grade in 1963.  I graduated college in 1973.  I'm reading an oral history of the characters I came to know through newspapers and magazines and college courses.  Betty Friedan''s The Feminine Mystique;  Simone de Beauvoir's Marxist The Second Sex;  Eldridge Cleaver's profoundly disturbing  Soul on Ice were foundational texts at Cornell.  

Suburban Long Island was not a hotbed of radical thinking.  I thought these ideas had been out there forever and I wondered why I was just considering them now.  

The interviewees are presented in their own words after Bingham's brief introduction to each section, giving an overview of what will follow.  I've begun to see that what I thought of as common sense and what ought to be was, in fact, being fashioned not out of whole cloth but out of the lived experiences of the humans who transformed America.

It's transfixing.  It's very funny.  It's quite moving.  It has exposed the gaps in what I thought about so many things.  For example, why have I not been a champion of Shirley Chisholm?  She voted against every military spending bill to come before the House of Representatives unless an equal amount was spent on serving families and education.  How did I not know this?

I'm up to the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and those women who refused to be silenced or barefoot.  The intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement birthed the Women's Movement; when the patriarchy became too much to bear the women went elsewhere and organized for themselves.  

It's empowering and humbling and very easy to read, even for me, a reluctant non-fiction person. I'm considering buying my own copy and sending it around to my friends.  It's not an eBook yet; check out the library if spending $32.50 isn't in the budget.