******The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

******The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

 

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

Laura Perkins was talking to her daughter, Emily Andrews one afternoon in April when she went to visit her and the grandkids up in Londonderry that is in New Hampshire, after returning from Florida, down Naples way. Laura had spent the winter there, a pilgrimage she had been doing the past five years or so since she, New England born and bred had tired, wearily tired of the winters provided by that section of the country and joined the “snow bird” trek south. Been doing more of the winter since she retired as a computer whizz free-lance consultant a couple of years ago. Emily the first born girl from the first of her three marriages who now had a couple of kids of her own although she has retained as is the “new style,” post-‘60s new style anyway, of women retaining their maiden name, or went hyphenated, kept Andrews in the bargain although Laura had given that name up minute one after the divorce which was messy and still a source of hatred when Emily’s father’s name is mentioned and thereafter kept her maiden name through the subsequent two marriages and divorces. During the conversation Laura commented to Emily, having not seen her for a while, on how long and straight she was keeping her hair these days which reminded her of the old days back in the romantic early 1960s when she used to hang around the Village in New York at the coffeehouses and folk clubs listening to lots of women folksingers like Carolyn Hester, Jean Redpath, Thelma Gordon, Joan Baez, Sissy Dubois and a bunch of others whose names she could just then not remember but whose hair was done in the same style including her own hair then.

Laura looked wistfully away just then touching her own now much shortened hair and colored a gentle brown with highlights, how much and for how long only her hairdresser knew and she, the well-tipped hair-dresser, was sworn to a secret Omerta oath even the CIA and Mafia could admire in the interest of not giving into age too much, especially once the computer whizz kids started showing up younger and younger either looking for work or as competitors. Meanwhile Emily explained how she came to let her hair grow longer and straighter (and her own efforts to keep it straighter) against all good reason what with two kids, a part-time accounting job and six thousand other young motherhood things demanded of her that would dictate that one needed a hair-do that one could just run a comb through, run through quickly.       

“Ma, you know how when you get all misty-eyed for your lost youth as you call it you are always talking about the old folk days, about the days in the Village and later in Harvard Square after you moved up here to go to graduate school at BU, minus Dad’s part in that time which I know you don’t like to talk about for obvious reasons. You also know, and we damn made it plain enough although you two never took it seriously, back when we were kids all of us, Melinda and Peter too, hated the very sound of folk music, stuff that sounded like something out of the Middle Ages and would run to our rooms when you guys played the stuff in you constant nostalgia moments. [That Middle Ages heritage, some of it, at least the rudiments, actually was on the mark if you look at the genesis of say half of the Child ballads which a folk enthusiast by that name in the 1850s over on Brattle Street in Cambridge collected, a number of ballads which ironically got picked up by the likes of Joan Baez in the late 1950s and played at the coffeehouses like the Club 47 and Café Nana just down from that Brahmin haven street. Or if you look to the more modern musicologists like the Seegers and Lomaxes who went down South, down Appalachia way, looking for roots music you will find some forbears brought over from the old country, the British Isles, that can be traced back to those times without doing injury to the truth.]

“Well one day I was in Whole Foods and I hear this song over their PA system or whatever they call it, you know those CDs they play to get you through the hard-ass shopping you need to do to keep the renegade kids from starvation’s door. The song seemed slightly familiar, folkie familiar, so I asked at the customer service desk who was singing the song and its name which I couldn’t quite remember. Of course the young clerk knew from nothing but a grey-haired guy, an old Cambridge radical type, a professor-type now that I think about what he looked like probably teaching English Lit, a guy you see in droves when you are in Harvard Square these days doddering along looking down at the ground like they have been doing for fifty years, standing in the same line as me, probably to return something that he bought by mistake and his wife probably ran his ass ragged until he returned the damn thing and got what she wanted, said it was Judy Collins doing Both Sides Now.  

That information from the professor, and that tune stuck in my head, got me thinking about checking out the song on YouTube which I did after I got home, unpacked the groceries, unpacked the kids and gave them their lunches. The version I caught was one of her on a Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest series from the 1960s in black and white that was on television back then which I am sure you and Dad knew about and she had this great looking long straight hair. I was envious. Then I kind of got the bug, wanted to check out some other folkie women whose names I know by heart, thank you, and noticed that Joan Baez in one clip taken at the Newport Folk Festival along with Bob Dylan singing With God On Our Side, God-awful if you remember me saying that every time you put it on the record-player, had even longer and straighter hair than Judy Collins.

“There she was all young, beautiful and dark-skinned Spanish exotic, something out of a Cervantes dream with that great hair. So I let mine grow and unlike what I heard Joan Baez, and about six zillion other young women did, including I think you, to keep it straight using an iron I went to Delores over at Flip Cuts in the mall and she does this thing to it every couple of months. And no I don’t want you to give me your folk albums, as valuable as they are, and as likely as I am to get them as family heirlooms when as you say you pass to the great beyond, please, to complete the picture because the stuff still sounds like it was from the Middle Ages although Dylan sounded better then than I remember, better than that croaking voice he has now that I heard you play one time on your car radio when we were heading up to Maine with you to go to Kittery to get the kids some back to school clothes.”        

Laura laughed a little at that remark as Emily went out the door to do some inevitable pressing shopping. After dutifully playing with Nick and Nana for a couple of hours while Emily went to get some chores done at the mall sans the kids who really are a drag on those kinds of tasks and after having stayed for supper when Sean got home from work she headed to her own home down in Cambridge (a condo really shared with her partner, Sam Lowell, whom she knew in college, lost track of and then reunited with after many years and three husbands at a college class reunion).

When she got home Sam, making her chuckle about what Emily said about that guy in the line at Whole Foods looked like and tarring Sam with that same brush, working on some paper of his, something about once again saving the world from the endless wars of the American government (other governments too but since as he said, quoting “Che” Guevara, always Che, about living in the heart of the beast the American government), the climate, nuclear disarmament, social inequality at home and in the world, or the plight of forgotten political prisoners, which was his holy mantra these days now that he was semi-retired from his law practice was waiting, waiting to hear the latest Nick and Nana stories instead she told him Emily’s story. Then they started talking about those old days in the 1960s when both she and he (he in Harvard Square having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston and her in the hotbed Village growing up in Manhattan and later at NYU where they went to school as undergraduates) imbibed in that now historic folk minute which promised, along with a few other things, to change the world a bit.

Laura, as Sam was talking, walked to a closet and brought out a black and white photograph from some folk festival in 1963 which featured Joan Baez, whom the clueless media always looking for a single hook to hang an idea on dubbed her the “queen of folk (and Dylan the king),” her sister Mimi Farina, who had married Richard Farina, the folk-singer/song-writer most poignantly Birmingham Sunday later killed in a motorcycle crash and Judy Collins on stage at the same time. All three competing with each other for the long straight hair championship. Here’s part of what was said about the picture that night, here’s how Laura put it:    

“Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway, the part you want to connect with. Remember Sam how we all called folk the “new dispensation” for our generation which had begun back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, slightly before our times when we caught up with it in college in 1964. So maybe it started in reaction to the trend when older guys started to lock-step in gray flannel suits. That funny Mad Men, retro-cool today look, which is okay if you pay attention to who was watching the show. In the days before Jack and Bobby Kennedy put the whammy on that fashion and broke many a haberdasher’s heart topped off by not wearing a soft felt hat like Uncle Ike and the older guys.”

“Funny too it would be deep into the 1960s before open-necks and colors other than white for shirts could be worked in but by then a lot of us were strictly denims and flannel shirts or some such non-suit or dress combination. Remember even earlier when the hula-hoop fad went crazy when one kid goofing off threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, to be tossed aside in some dank corner of the garage after a few weeks when everybody got into yo-yos or Davey Crockett coonskin caps. Or maybe, and this might be closer to the herd instinct truth, it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not, wear their sideburns just a little longer, even if they were kind of wispy and girls laughed at you for trying to out-king the “king” who they were waiting for not you. I know I did with Jasper James King who tried like hell to imitate Elvis and I just stepped on his toes all dance when he asked me to dance with him on It’s Alright, Mama.”  

“But maybe it was, and this is a truth which we can testify to when some girls, probably college girls like me, now called young women but then still girls no matter how old except mothers or grandmothers, having seen Joan Baez on the cover of Time (or perhaps her sister Mimi on some Mimi and Richard Farina folk album cover)got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was in, curly, twisty, or flippy like mine, whatever  don’t hold me to all the different hairstyles to long and straight strands. Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover, the folk scene was too young and small back in the early days to cause such a sea-change.”

 Sam piped up and after giving the photograph a closer look said, “Looking at that photograph you just pulled out of the closet now, culled I think from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Archive Society, made me think back to the time when I believe that I would not go out with a girl (young woman, okay) if she did not have the appropriate “hair,” in other words no bee-hive or flip thing that was the high school rage among the not folk set, actually the rage among the social butterfly, cheerleader, motorcycle mama cliques. Which may now explain why I had so few dates in high school and none from Carver High. But no question you could almost smell the singed hair at times, and every guy I knew liked the style, liked the style if they liked Joan Baez, maybe had some dreamy sexual desire thing about hopping in the hay, and that was that.”                   

“My old friend Bart Webber, a guy I met out in San Francisco  when I went out West with my old friend  Josh Breslin in our hitchhike days with whom if you remember I re-connected with via the “magic” of the Internet a few years ago, told me a funny story when we met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British Beatles/Stones  invasion).”

“He had first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc when the place had their weekly folk night (before every night was folk night when Eric Von Schmidt put the place on the map by writing Joshua Gone Barbados which he sang and which Tom Rush went big with) and they had a coffee together. That night she had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Bart thought she looked fine. Bart, like myself, was not then hip to the long straight hair thing and so he kind of let it pass without any comment.”

“Then one night a few weeks later after they had had a couple of dates she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth in his folk historian gravelly-voiced way. She met him at the door with the mandatory straight hair although it was not much longer than when he first met her which he said frankly made her face even longer. When Bart asked her why the change Julie declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic, very Spanish.”

“Of course he compounded his troubles by making the serious mistake of asking if she had her hair done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go. So she joined the crowd, Bart got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl, and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched Catholic school shirt things she used to wear.”     

“By the way Laura let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Bart back in the early 1960s since his Emma goes crazy every time anybody, me, you, Bart, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan mentions any girl that Bart might have even looked at in those days. Yeah, even after almost forty years of marriage so keep this between us. She and Bart went “Dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. They were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other enough to be more than very good friends after the first few dates but folk music was their bond. Just friends despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Bart hanging around all the time listening to her albums on the record player they had never been lovers.

“Many years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to me since I had gone with them with my date, Joyell Danforth, as we waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with us to see if I remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while I thought I remembered I was not sure.

I asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.”

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work in that folk minute and later speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who as mentioned before was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk times (think Pack Up Your Sorrows). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time anyway, should remember that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo as proof.           

In Search Of The “What If’s Of History-Walter Pidgeon’s Man Hunt-A Film Review

In Search Of The “What If’s Of History-Walter Pidgeon’s Man Hunt-A Film Review

 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Man Hunt, starring Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders, directed by Fritz Lang, 1941    

A lot of people, myself included, like to think about certain historical events in the conditional-the “what if’s” of history. You know what if Robert E. Lee’s orders had not gotten into Union Army hands before Antietam, what if Joe Stalin had listened to his well-connected spy networks and acted on the information that Hitler was going full force to invade the Soviet Union, and would the ensuing escalation of the Vietnam War have happened if Jack Kennedy had not been assassinated. And with certain limits such speculation is worthwhile, especially to historians. Those limits being that other things actually did happen and one should not go too far in such speculations. Obviously, and the film under review, Man Hunt, about a fictional scenario involving the possible assassination of Adolph Hitler in 1939 bears this out literature and cinema have wider scope for such conjecture.        

Here is how this cinematic “what if” played out. Well-known African safari hunter Captain Alan Thorndike, played by Walter Pidgeon, tired of the same old, same old, at least that is the story he would tell later decided to see if he could hunt big game. Could pull off an attempt on Adolph Hitler’s life out in his rural retreat. He actually pulled it off-theoretically-but failed to kill the beast since (a) he was only stalking, had only been in it for the hunt not the killing, or (b) a sentry happened upon him to spoil his possibilities. That former argument is the one he made when captured and interrogated by a Major, a high German security officer, played by villainous George Sanders, who naturally did not believe him but who for his own purposes and that of his Fuehrer tortured him in order to have him sign a statement that he acted as an agent of the British government by his action (and obviously the intense reality  for war Europe in 1939 that statement might have been a tipping point for the madmen to jump the gun and roll over Europe right then). But the Captain was made of sterner stuff and balked as that request. The Major though deviously decided that the Captain could be used to further his aims if he got rid of him and substituted one of his own men in his place. But the planned killing didn’t work and the Captain escaped. Now the chase, now the man hunt of the title was on for real.                     

The Captain through stealth and deviousness got himself back to England but with the Major and his entourage hot on his trail. He was almost caught except for the good graces of a young working-class girl in London, okay, okay streetwalker,  played by the fetching Joan Bennett, who helped his through thick and thin, helps him because he treated her like a lady, helped him because she was half- schoolgirl in love with him, and helped him in the end by her own death at the hands of the Nazi scum. As for the Captain and the Major, after a lengthy game of cat and mouse the Captain proved to be the better hunter killed the Major after admitting that he hated Hitler and all his stood for. As the film closed we saw the Captain parachuting out of airplane, long-range rifle on his breast ready to attempt the deed against Hitler-again. Yeah, but what if he had not hesitated that first time. Enough said.   

*From The Archives- Why I Will Not Be A United States Presidential Candidate In 2012...Or 2016

Click on title to link to Spartacist No. 61 Spring 2009,a publication of the International Communist League, for a very full discussion about the question of running for executive offices in the capitalist state, "Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics", that forms the backdrop to my commentary.

Media Flash: A. F. Markin, long time anti-capitalist, pro-socialist militant and creator of the blog “American Left History”, has announced today that under no conditions will he be a candidate for President of the United States in 2012. Paraphrasing the great 19th century Northern Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman, Markin stated that 'if drafted he will not run and if elected he would not serve' in that post. He, however, did not rule out the possibility of running for some legislative office like the United States Senate or House of Representatives.

Commentary

I know that the long suffering readers of this blog have been waiting breathlessly for me to announce my intentions for the presidential campaign of 2012. Wait a minute! What kind of madness is this on my part to impose on readers who I am sure are still recovering from the shell-shock of that seemingly endless and mendacious 2008 presidential campaign. Well… Okay, as usual I want to, for good or ill, make a little point about running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state now that I have gotten ‘religion’ about the necessary of radicals and revolutionaries NOT to do so. I think this point can really be driven home today now that we have a ‘progressive’ Democratic president, one Barack Obama, as a foil.

I have detailed the controversy and checkered history in the international workers movement, and especially in the Communist International in its heroic days in the early 1920's, surrounding the question of whether radicals and revolutionaries, on principle, should run for these executive offices of the bourgeois state. I need not repeat that argument here. (See June 2008 Archives, "If Drafted I Will Not Run, If Elected I Will Not Serve-Revolutionaries and Running For Executive Offices", dated June 15, 2008). I have also noted there the trajectory of my own conversion to the position of opposition to such runs. Previously I had seen such electoral efforts as good propaganda tools and/or basically harmless attempts to intersect political reality at times when the electorate is tuned in. Always under the assumption made clear during the campaign that, of course, if elected one would not assume the office.

In any case, I admit to a previously rather cavalier attitude toward the whole question, even as I began to see the wisdom of opposition. But having gone through the recent presidential campaign and, more importantly, the inauguration and installation of a ‘progressive’ black man to the highest office attainable under the imperium I have begun to wipe that smirk off my face.

Why? I have hardly been unaware throughout my leftist political career that Social Democratic and Communist (Stalinist/Maoist varieties especially) Party politicians have, individually or in popular front alliances with capitalist parties, wreaked havoc on working people while administrating the bourgeois state. I have, in particular, spent a good part of my political career fighting against the notion of popular front strategies as they have been forged in the past, disastrously in places like Spain during the Civil War in the 1930’s or less disastrously in France in the 1980’s. However, this question of the realities of running the imperial state in America really hit home with the coming into office of Barack Obama.

Certainly, Obama did not have, and in the course of such things could not have any qualms about administering the bourgeois state, even if such toilsome work contradicted his most basic principles. Assuming, for the sake of argument here, that Obama is not the worst bourgeois politician, progressive or not, that has come down the pike. Already, in a few short weeks in office, he has escalated the troop levels in Afghanistan. He is most earnestly committed to bailing out the financial heart of the imperial system, at the long term expense of working people. Where is the room for that vaunted ‘progressive’ designation in all of this? Oh yes he has is against torture and illegal torture centers. That, dear readers might have passed for progressive action- in the 17th century. Jesus, is there no end to this madness in taking grandstanding kudos for stuff that Voltaire would have dismissed out of hand. So the next time someone asks you to run for President of the United States (or governor of a state or mayor of a city)take the Markin pledge - Just say NO!

In Honor Of Women’s History Month- “Big Bill” Haywood’s Nevada Jane

In Honor Of Women’s History Month- “Big Bill” Haywood’s Nevada Jane    

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Nevada Jane-Utah Phillips

Are the linens turned down in folds of glowing white?
Are you lying there alone again tonight?
He’s marching with the men through the cold November rain,
But you know he’ll come back home, Nevada Jane.

(Chorus)
Have you seen the way he holds her as thought she was a bride,
Children riding on shoulders strong & wide?
She never thought to scold him or even to com-plain,
& Big Bill always loved Nevada Jane.

And when he stumbles in with blood upon his shirt,
Washing up alone, just to hide the hurt,
He will lie down by your side and wake you with your name,
You’ll hold him in your arms, Nevada Jane. (Chorus)

Nevada Jane went riding, her pony took a fall,
The doctor said she never would walk again at all;
But Big Bill could lift her lightly, the big hands rough and plain
Would gently carry home Nevada Jane.

The storms of Colorado rained for ten long years,
The mines of old Montana were filled with blood and tears,
Utah, Arizona, California hear the name
Of the man who always loved Nevada Jane. (Chorus)

Although the ranks are scattered like leaves upon the breeze,
And with them go the memory of harder times than these,
Some things never change, but always stay the same,
Just like the way Bill loved Nevada Jane. (Chorus)

*******

Nevada Jane

I've been told that I'm wrong about this song. I don't know whether I am or not, since Bill Haywood, who was with the Western Federation of Miners and was the first Secretary-Treasurer of the Industrial Workers of the World, never mentioned his wife in his autobiography except very briefly, so I can't tell whether he really loved his wife or not.

I do have stories from old-timers who tell me about when Bill Haywood was working in a mine camp, basically doing a job of de-horning. His wife, Nevada Jane, had been crippled by a fall from her pony, so she couldn't walk. Bill had a house on the edge of town, and he would carry his wife down to the railroad station every morning. She would sit there and talk to the women of the town about what they could do to help organize the town, while Bill was brawling at the bars. He'd come back at the end of the day, pick Nevada Jane up, hang one of their kids off of each shoulder, and every night you'd see him carrying the wife and kids up to the house.

Most of the songs about labor struggles are full of loud shouting and arm-waving and thunder and rhetoric. It's good for me, every now and then, to try to take a look at the human side of it, right or wrong.

The tune is by one of my favorite songwriters, Stephen Foster. I first heard "Gentle Annie" from Kate McGarrigle of Canada. The tune has too many wide-apart changes in it for me to sing the way Stephen Foster wrote it, so I changed it some –Utah Phillips

… and I will follow Utah’s lead

She knew she wanted him, knew she wanted “Big Bill” Haywood (nobody ever called him just Bill, not even his drinking companions, and certainly not his legion of lady friends who had a different take of that Big Bill notion, so Big Bill it was)  from the first time she set eyes on him. First set eyes on him in front of those Virginia City miners all hungry, sweaty, and dirty from the thankless work-a-day toil, listening intently at that meeting where he boomed out his message-his message that working men had to stick together against the damn (he used less elegant language but that conveyed the idea) bosses and their agents in and out of the government, that all working men were brothers (brothers in a time when that designation sat in for all humankind without I think showing disrespect just narrowness after all remember the heroic Lawrence strikers of 1912 who had many women textile workers out there fighting for their bread and roses) and that a better system, a system where the working man had a say in what the hell (again he used more salty language, language that the poor workers understood better than some intellectual mumbo-jumbo but that needed that too just didn’t need to be told they were the fucking wretched of the earth they knew that, knew that in triplicate) was going on and how to keep from starving for starters to boot.

He had more to say, spent the better part of an hour saying it with all those sweaty bodies filled with haggard eyes still following him, but she, Nevada Jane (although just Jane then, he gave her the Nevada part later, later after he had “conquered” her or that was the way he told the story) was more, uh, interested in the look of him, that big rugged man look, that take no prisoners look, that man of the West look, that had her entranced from that first moment. She had to have him, have him come hell or high water.

And she did, she did snare that man of the West by being a woman of the West, and just aiming straight for him. Oh, she used her feminine wiles for part of it, no question, but what Big Bill found interesting in her was that pioneer stock woman who asked for no more than he could give, and gave no less than she could give. Now everybody heard, hell, everybody knew, that Big Bill liked the ladies, had to have them, but even before her accident, her damn accident on that favored mare which crippled her up, she knew that when the deal went down he would always come back to her if he could. And after the accident he did, did more often than not come back, pleased to be with her back, back to his Nevada Jane.

But see Big Bill was a man of action and she knew, knew deep in her pioneer stock womanhood, that he had to do what he had to do. And so along with the joy at his sight when he showed up she had days and nights of anguish. Days and nights when he was on a miners’ organizing drive in some hellhole place like Bisbee, out in Arizona copper country, or over in the rapidly vanishing Nevada silver mines or up in Butte, up in Big Sky country where the mines stretched out over the high prairies  and hills. All places where the bosses’ had a bounty out on Big Bill’s hide.  Days and nights of worry about his health, especially that big heart that might break at any time, or that dead eye that might flare up and cause some hell. Days and nights of worry that he might drink that river of liquor, hard liquor, hard old whiskey, that he kept saying he needed to keep him fit for the work (except when he wanted to call a meeting and would literally close down every bar in some town, forcibly if he had to, to insure a proper attendance).

Mostly though she worried about the women, about some young thing, maybe a pioneer woman who was not crippled up, or maybe one of those New York society women who were all agog over him when he went East to raise money and support for the miners and for the IWW (Wobblies, Industrial Workers Of The World), but she worried. She worried and she kept his home clean and nice, pioneer simple but clean and neat, for his return. And he did return for as long as he could…

And hence this Women’s History Month contribution   

A View From The Left-No to U.S.-Backed Right-Wing Reaction!-Venezuela in Crisis-Break with Bourgeois Populism!

Workers Vanguard No. 1084	26 February 2016

No to U.S.-Backed Right-Wing Reaction!-Venezuela in Crisis-Break with Bourgeois Populism!

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

 

Venezuela is in the throes of a deep economic crisis fueled in large part by the collapse of world oil prices. The economy contracted by 10 percent last year and is projected to shrink another 8 percent this year. More than 95 percent of state revenue comes from oil exports, while the country relies on imports for most food, medical supplies and other necessities.

There are shortages of many basic goods—for example, rice, beans, diapers and toilet paper—which, while subject to price controls, are strictly rationed. Venezuelans are assigned scheduled days to line up outside stores to try to obtain such goods, but it is common to wait for six or seven hours only to get nothing. Many items are siphoned off by speculators who resell them on the black market at much higher prices. Inflation has hit triple digits and could surpass 700 percent by the end of the year. While the official bank exchange rate for the national currency, the bolivar, is ten to the U.S. dollar, on the black market a dollar now costs more than 1,000 bolivars—about three days’ pay for a minimum-wage worker.

The U.S. imperialists are salivating at the prospect of ousting Venezuela’s long-ruling bourgeois-nationalist regime, which was run by Hugo Chávez from 1999 until his death in 2013 and is now led by his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro. Chávez, a military officer turned populist strongman, used some of the country’s oil profits to institute social programs that benefited the poor and consolidated his support by denouncing Washington’s barbaric economic and military policies in Latin America and elsewhere.

The economic crisis that has engulfed the country has now been compounded by a political crisis. A U.S.-backed right-wing opposition coalition won December’s legislative elections and now threatens sweeping attacks on the workers and the poor. The country’s economic collapse and the gains of the reactionaries expose the bankruptcy of the nationalist populism of Chávez and Maduro. During Chávez’s presidency, a host of reformist leftists internationally hailed his policies as a model of supposed resistance to U.S. imperialism and even of “21st century socialism.” Though targeted by the U.S. rulers and hated by the dominant sectors of the local bourgeoisie, which are closely tied to Washington and Wall Street, Chávez, as we emphasized from the beginning, headed a capitalist government, as does Maduro today. Despite cheap “socialist” rhetoric and demagogic claims to be leading a “Bolivarian Revolution,” Chávez himself made clear over ten years ago that his “revolution” was “not in contradiction with private property.”

Chávez’s main concern upon taking office was to shore up the country’s faltering oil profits, long the lifeblood of Venezuelan capitalism. He moved to discipline the oil workers union and to increase the efficiency of the state-owned oil industry, while pressing the OPEC oil cartel to raise prices. Thanks to such efforts, and in the interest of political stability, he was initially supported by much of the Venezuelan ruling class.

As oil prices climbed, Chávez used some of the huge profits to finance his reforms. He tripled the education budget, instituted paid six-month maternity leave for women and set up free health clinics staffed by well-trained Cuban doctors as well as food distribution programs for the poor. But far from representing a social revolution, such measures were aimed at binding the dispossessed masses more firmly to the Venezuelan capitalist state. Chávez’s policies also permitted a section of the local capitalists—the so-called boliburguesía (Bolivarian bourgeoisie)—to line its pockets.

We warned two years ago:

“Chávez was lucky: the price of oil rose from $10.87 per barrel in 1998 to $96.13 in 2013. However, the price of oil is notoriously unstable and the United States, the largest recipient of Venezuela’s oil, has cut its imports. The social welfare programs introduced by Chávez cannot be sustained in the long term under capitalism.”

— “Venezuela: U.S. Imperialism Fuels Right-Wing Protests,” WV No. 1043, 4 April 2014

This projection has now come to pass. As oil prices have plunged to less than $30 a barrel, the plight of Venezuela’s workers and the poor has worsened and social programs are unraveling. Some 26 percent of households were in poverty in 2008, a sharp drop from the early years of that decade. But by the end of 2014 the rate had climbed back to almost 50 percent. With many prices skyrocketing, gas was kept cheap enough to be affordable for the masses, but now the regime has hiked the price by 6,000 percent. On top of all this is the country’s looming debt crisis. Tens of billions of dollars are owed to American and other imperialist bankers, and an installment of $2.3 billion is due by February 26, mainly to hedge funds and other capitalist vultures.

The broad coalition that won the December legislative elections—an unstable alliance dominated by reactionary, pro-U.S. forces—managed to tap into discontent among the masses struggling to survive in the face of scarcity, corruption and crime. It is now seeking to use its control of the legislature to reverse Chávez’s reforms. A recently adopted bill would decrease and privatize the construction of housing for the poor, putting an end to a program that provided apartments for thousands of people formerly living in tin-roofed shacks with no electricity or running water. Vowing to resist such moves, last month Maduro declared a state of economic emergency.

The U.S. rulers have long seen Latin America as their own private backyard and have a bloody record of backing right-wing military dictators, overthrowing governments they don’t like and pillaging the resources of the region. In Venezuela, they have worked relentlessly with their local satraps to oust the regimes of Chávez and his successor. The U.S. imperialists backed an unsuccessful military coup in 2002, which was soon followed by the right-wing opposition organizing a lockout aimed at crippling the oil industry. Two years ago, Washington fueled street protests in affluent neighborhoods of Caracas and other cities demanding the salida (exit) of Maduro. Last year, the Obama administration slapped punitive sanctions on Venezuela and issued an executive order declaring the country an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. Down with the sanctions! U.S. imperialism: Hands off Venezuela!

Nationalist Populism and American Imperialism

While the rise of the pro-U.S. right wing is ominous, the nationalist populism associated with Chávez and Maduro is an obstacle to any struggle against imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation. Such a struggle requires the independent class mobilization of the proletariat standing at the head of all the oppressed. There can be no permanent amelioration of the plight of the urban and rural poor without replacing the capitalists’ state and their social order with the rule of the working class. A series of workers revolutions internationally is necessary to open the road to a global classless society in which all forms of exploitation and oppression have been eliminated. Radical-minded youth and workers must draw lessons from the current crisis. What is urgently needed is to break from chavista bourgeois populism and to forge a revolutionary workers party.

The anti-Maduro coalition is far from homogeneous. It includes forces ranging from frothing pro-U.S. reactionaries to disaffected former supporters of the regime. The dominant force in the new legislature, Democratic Action (AD), is one of the traditional Venezuelan bourgeois parties notorious for receiving funding from Washington. The core of the white Venezuelan ruling class has always looked with disdain at the indigenous and black masses who backed Chávez, himself of zambo (mixed black and indigenous) heritage. Expressing this contempt, AD leader Henry Ramos Allup ordered that all pictures of Chávez be removed from the legislature, saying they should be dumped in the slums or given to the building’s janitors. Ramos is pushing for a referendum to oust Maduro, declaring that there is no need to wait until the 2019 elections (Diario ABC, 3 February). It captures something of this individual that even the former U.S. ambassador privately called him repellent, complaining about his constant requests for money and other favors (“Acción Democrática, A Hopeless Case,” wikileaks.org, 17 April 2006).

The growing influence of China in Latin America is also of concern to U.S. imperialism, and various American economists are blaming China for Venezuela’s crisis. Over the last decade, Venezuela has received about $60 billion in loans and investments from China in exchange for often-deferred oil shipments. China is not capitalist but a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Thus, in sharp contrast to the U.S., its foreign investments are not primarily driven by the capitalist profit motive but by a drive to accrue resources for economic development.

Chávez was one in a long line of military officers in Latin America and beyond (e.g., Juan Perón in Argentina in the 1940s) who came to power on the basis of nationalist populism. The history of Venezuela and other Latin American countries has long been marked by two faces of capitalist rule, populist reform and U.S.-dictated austerity enforced by brutal repression of working people. These alternating policy prescriptions available to the national bourgeoisie are sometimes embodied in the same leader embracing one and then the other. An example is former Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez, who in his first term in the 1970s nationalized the oil industry (with compensation). High oil prices provided resources that he partly invested in social programs, education and health care. But in his second term, 1989-93, he did the opposite: faced with a crash in the oil market he implemented sweeping cuts and privatizations at the behest of the IMF.

Marxists support social reforms favorable to the oppressed and defend nationalizations in dependent countries against imperialist encroachment. But these are not socialist measures. In fact, capitalist regimes typically use nationalizations to tie the working masses to their coattails. And, especially in underdeveloped countries like Venezuela, reforms in the interests of workers and the poor are always temporary and subject to reversal.

Tellingly, on February 15, Maduro dismissed his vice president for the economy, Luis Salas, who had blamed the U.S. “strategy of economic destabilization” for Venezuela’s crisis. Maduro replaced him with Miguel Pérez, a former head of the Fedeindustria business association who is widely seen as more “business-friendly.”

Chávez’s rule was part of a wave of left-talking bourgeois regimes in Latin America over the past decade and a half, including Lula da Silva in Brazil, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. To be sure, these regimes were different from those of the neoliberal 1990s, which oversaw a yawning gap between the rich and the poor and a wave of privatizations and “free trade” agreements in the direct interests of U.S. imperialism. But all of the governments remained thoroughly in the framework of the capitalist-imperialist system. More recently, Latin America has experienced another shift to the right. Washington’s toady Mauricio Macri was recently elected president of Argentina, while the Brazilian government, led by the social-democratic Workers Party, has made a sharp turn to austerity and is increasingly unpopular.

Chávez’s “Socialist” Advisers

Among the array of reformist groups that have politically supported the Chávez and Maduro regimes, one of the most shameless is Alan Woods’s International Marxist Tendency (IMT), a self-proclaimed Trotskyist group whose U.S. publication is Socialist Appeal. Spitting on the fundamental tenets of Trotskyism, Woods spent a decade advising the bourgeois demagogue Chávez on how to run his government. Today, the IMT continues to provide a left cover for Maduro, while complaining of a “capitalist fifth column within the Bolivarian movement” (marxist.com, 7 December 2015).

In one of his salutes to Chávez, an article titled “The Transition to Socialism in Venezuela,” Woods claimed that the government in Venezuela “has the power to carry through a revolutionary socialist programme,” but “what is lacking is the necessary will” (marxist.com, 9 February 2015). Such prettification of a capitalist government politically disarms the working class and the oppressed masses, leaving them defenseless in the face of resurgent right-wing forces.

For all his populist rhetoric, Chávez was no less the class opponent of the victory of the workers and urban and rural poor than his neoliberal opponents, and the same applies to his successor Maduro. We have fought to break the illusion held by working people and the oppressed—both in Venezuela and internationally—that these bourgeois regimes could implement a fundamental social transformation. In contrast, our reformist political opponents have accommodated and deepened such illusions. As we wrote more than a decade ago: “History will reserve a harsh verdict for those ‘leftists’ who promote one or another left-talking capitalist caudillo” (“Venezuela: Populist Nationalism vs. Permanent Revolution,” WV No. 860, 9 December 2005).

With the Chávez regime aligning itself with Cuba, the IMT and other reformists falsely compared Venezuela to the Cuban Revolution. IMT spokesman Jorge Martin claimed that the “dynamic of action and reaction of the Venezuelan revolution reminds us in a very powerful way of the first five years of the Cuban revolution” (marxist.com, 1 March 2005).

But the class nature of Venezuela was and is completely different from that of Cuba, which is a bureaucratically deformed workers state. When Fidel Castro’s guerrillas marched into Havana in January 1959, the capitalist state apparatus headed by the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista was destroyed. Facing threats from the American imperialists, in 1960-61 the Castro regime carried out a social revolution from above, nationalizing all U.S.-owned and domestic capitalist property and eliminating the Cuban bourgeoisie as a social class on the island. This was in no small part possible due to the existence of the Soviet Union, which acted as a military counterweight to the U.S. and provided Cuba with essential economic support.

Trotskyists stand for the unconditional military defense of Cuba and the other remaining deformed workers states: China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. The Stalinist bureaucrats who rule these countries uphold the nationalist dogma of building “socialism in one country,” in sharp counterposition to the program of international socialist revolution that animated the 1917 Russian October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky. We fight for workers political revolutions to oust the bureaucratic rulers and establish regimes based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. Our defense of the deformed workers states is part of our fight for new October Revolutions throughout the world.

For Permanent Revolution

The way for Venezuela’s workers and oppressed to free themselves from imperialist domination, poverty and oppression can be found in Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Latin America, a victim of colonial and neocolonial plunder, is a region of uneven and combined development, where the most modern industries coexist alongside the deepest poverty and rural backwardness. The weak national bourgeoisies are tied by a thousand threads to the imperialist economic and political order. They are too dependent on foreign capital and too hostile to and fearful of the proletariat to resolve any of the fundamental social problems.

The vital task is to forge revolutionary internationalist workers parties that break the working class from all variants of bourgeois nationalism and champion the cause of all the oppressed: black and indigenous people, peasants, women, the poor. Latin America has numerous concentrations of workers with potential social power, from the oil workers of Venezuela to auto workers in Mexico and Brazil to the miners of Chile, Peru and elsewhere. Due to its centrality in capitalist production, the working class has the strategic power to overthrow capitalist class rule through socialist revolution.

A social revolution that brings the working class to power in Venezuela with the support of the rural masses would undertake such urgent democratic tasks as giving land to the peasants. It would also repudiate the country’s foreign debt and expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class in order to establish a collectivized, planned economy in which production is based on social need rather than profit. The U.S. and other imperialist powers would certainly move to crush such a revolutionary regime. Key to the survival of a workers revolution in Venezuela would be its international extension to the rest of Latin America and to the U.S. itself.

As part of a socialist federation of Latin America, a Venezuelan workers and peasants government could begin to address the need for massive programs to build infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, highways and public transportation and lift the productive capacities of the society. But the conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the socialist revolution; it only opens it by changing the direction of social development. Short of the international extension of the revolution to the advanced, industrialized imperialist centers, that social development will be arrested and ultimately reversed.

Proletarian revolutionary internationalism is at the core of Trotsky’s perspective. The struggles of the proletariat in the semicolonial countries are necessarily intertwined with the fight for power by workers in the heartlands of world imperialism—not least in the United States with its millions-strong proletariat, including powerful black and Latino components. The International Communist League fights to build national sections of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, which will organize and educate the working class in the spirit of uncompromising hostility to the depredations of imperialism and to any and all faces of capitalist rule.

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From Women And Revolution-The Grimke Sisters-Pioneers For Abolition And Women's Rights

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From Women And Revolution-The Grimke Sisters-Pioneers For Abolition And Women's Rights

  

The Ghost Of Evangeline-With Jolie Blond The Cajun Queen In Mind

The Ghost Of Evangeline-With Jolie Blond The Cajun Queen In Mind

 

 

 

By Lester Lannon

“Where is my Jolie blond, where is my Jolie blond,” the fading voice of the fading Rene Dubois cried out in the darkened night of his sad end hospital bed. That sad end Veterans Administration hospital bed courtesy of a wound he had suffered back in his Vietnam day when “Charlie,” the name that the U.S. troops had bestowed on North Vietnamese regular army soldiers and South Vietnamese civilian guerillas which had never really healed properly since he had been left out in the field too long before the necessary operation could be performed and now was the frontal cause of his final decline. Yeah, the frontal cause but the wound that was really laying him and which he received even earlier in his youth was the one that never healed.     

“I’m right here, here next to your side, Mon Cherie, my love, and will be forever,” Louise Perot whispered barely containing a mass of built-up tears as she wiped the sweat from his forehead with her clenched handkerchief. Those endless tears the result of not finding her beloved until the previous week after searching for almost forty years by various means including private detectives, long journeys and just misses and only by chance had she by the virtues of the Internet been able to find him.

But more on that eternal search and its results later. For now we have to go back something more than forty years, closer to fifty really, and the night when against all reason the two lovers, lovers who had declared from their respective childhoods their eternal knot, had a knockdown drag out fight over some supposed belief, supposed on Rene’s part, that Louise was responding to the advances of Ben Smith. Ben, a guy from New Orleans who had arrived shortly before that night to run the Lafayette part of a family business and who was not even a Cajun, not one drop of Cajun blood. Bloody British as Rene found out when he did the research and Rene as a true son of the diaspora held the plight of his, and Louise’ s forbears from ancient Arcadie up by Nova Scotia, against every son and daughter of that equally ancient enemy.

For the volatile Rene, known far and wide in the wilds of Southwest Louisiana, around Lafayette mostly, as a tough, as a guy who was as likely to wield a whipsaw chain against an adversary as listen to reason was in no mood to see his ancient stock diluted by some tryst between his woman (and down in that part of Louisiana that was the word, that was the stark term of relationship which every red-blooded Cajun man used to define his nest) and the bloody historic oppressor. Louise was the only one who could reason with him when he got in whipsaw chain mood but this night her entreaties would go for naught against the sacred blood. Grandpa Dubois had taught his grandson well the ancient sorrows and the ancient wounds meted out in olden times forcing his people southward to hardscrabble Louisiana.           

Of course that supposed tryst between Louise and Ben was all in Rene’s rather weak-willed imagination since as Louise tried to tell him repeatedly that night when he confronted her with the “evidence” on the basis of hearsay put up from Pierre LeBlanc, a so-called friend who in the end turned out to have had his own very serious un-British designs on Louise. Louise since she had graduated from Lafayette High the previous summer had worked in the business offices of the Lafayette branch of Smith, Johnson & Sons out of New Orleans. Ben had been sent there by his father to learn the business and so since Louise even in the short time that she had worked there being an extremely intelligent girl who in a later age and place would have been prime college material was assigned the task of filling young Smith in on what went on in the offices. That was the sum total of their exchanges. But Rene, a true Cajun in that way too would having formed his opinion bolstered by the lying Pierre, not believed her story, her very reasonable explanation. That night all hell had broken loose in Rene’s head and Louise would later tell friends she for a moment feared that he might if she had not been a women been subject to one of Rene’s notorious whipsaw chain beatings.     

That night several hours after their heated exchange, really early that next morning Rene Dubois who had loved Louise since childhood (and she him) in the dead of night packed up his small bag of belongings and headed out to the Greyhound bus station for the trip to Baton Rouge to join the Army. That previous night would be the last that either Rene or Louise would see each other for over forty almost fifty years. Although not for Louise’s lack of looking, looking everywhere after she had gone over the Dubois trailer on Montmartre Street that next morning and was told by Mama Dubois that Rene had not come downstairs for his usual breakfast and that when she went up to knock on the door not hearing any stirrings at the knock opened the door to find Rene gone.  

Rene’s story is simpler to tell so it can be told first. After getting off the bus in Baton Rouge Rene headed directly to the Army Recruitment Station on Lamar Street and signed up on the dotted line. Signed up in effect for hell since the year he signed up, 1965, all hell was breaking loose in Vietnam and Uncle Sam was looking without question for anybody who would don the uniform and fight the hated commies. Rene, a good if not practicing Catholic boy had been bought up, as many others had who were not necessarily Cajun or Catholic into that script, had bought into the need to fight the commies, to eliminate the dominoes or something like that. “Push their faces into the ground and make them eat dirt” was the way Rene had put it to Pierre when they discussed in passing the fate of the Vietnamese Catholics one night after hearing about a commie massacre of one Catholic village by the commie rats. An event that never happened and which had been the orchestrated result of the South Vietnamese government’s very deliberate media blitz, just one of a stockpile of lies and deceptions by all sides in that civil war. But mainly young Rene was interested in “kicking ass” from Ben Smith messing with his girl to some enlisted men one Saturday night in a brawl after too much to drink to Charlie and his evil ways.     

Rene it turned out once he got some discipline via boot camp and Advanced Infantry Training was a born soldier notwithstanding that Saturday night melee act of indiscipline just mentioned and so he rapidly became a member of the elite 82^nd Airborne Division, a division which would take serious beatings in the battles again Mister Charlie. Of course depending on the day the fight could go either way but somewhere down in the Delta, the Mekong Delta, the rice paddles that produced the bulk of the country’s food supplies one Sergeant Rene Dubois’ luck ran out and he was severely wounded in three places, the shoulder, the right leg and very close to the heart, the latter a wound that never properly healed because despite the advanced medical rescue operation which saved his life Rene had been out in the field too long to have the operation he needed right away to be effective. Several month later he was discharged to ultimately receive 60% disability compensation for his physical wounds and from there he disappeared from any radar. Everybody knew from the reports by the Army officer in charge of notifications that Rene had slipped away to the Army after the fight with Louise, had gone to Vietnam and had been wounded. But Rene never even went back to Lafayette to see Pierre, his family, and certainly not Louise, that latter continued stubbornness was a Cajun trait too despite his continual love for her.

Rene when he came back to the “real world” which is what more and more returning veterans back then called coming back from Vietnam after his recuperation landed and had stayed in California, stayed for no other reason at first that it was not wounded, never healed Lafayette but the direct wounds of war left him helpless, left him with a sea change of heart about what he had done to people with whom he had no quarrel. That angst left him drifting from small job to small job as a mechanic, a skill which he had picked up enough down home working on every one of Jerry Jeff’s super-duper car to get jobs at service stations and small garages up and down the coast until a few years later when his drug habit (and occasional binge drinking, a habit easily picked up in Vietnam although back in youth Lafayette he hated to even hear of anybody using drink) got the better of him, couldn’t put out the fire in his head he found himself in the “brothers under the bridge” railroad “jungle” encampment near Westminster and he stayed with his fellow drifting Vietnam War brothers.

What had happened along the way was that between ‘Nam, the recuperation hospital and then out on the streets Rene had picked up a drug habit, mostly cocaine but later heroin because it made whatever suffering he endured easier to handle. He was able to work and do his share of drugs together for a while but then he just lost whatever motivation he had to move on and moved down instead, moved down with guys who knew his pain and who had created a haphazard raggedly old world for themselves along the riverbeds, arroyos, and under railroad bridges of Southern California. It wasn’t a good life, wasn’t any life really but it got him by for a while, a few years before those encampments kind of fell in on themselves and he wound up heading north to San Francisco and the flops of the Embarcadero. There he stayed for many years doing “pearl-diver,” day labor, bracero kind of work to feed his new alcohol habit after sobering up from the heroin which almost killed him one night. As he aged he became a sad sight around Market and Third, places like that a little raggedy, mumbling, never having any real friends except the occasional stew-bums who gathered together to buy quarts of rotgut wine, Thunderbird and Ripple the bottom of the barrel and swig away. No woman, no woman after Louise and that would have been that, another lost soul out of the ashes of war. Then one morning he had the DTs so bad he could hardly stand and some kindly cop got him into the police van and instead of bringing him to the station after seeing he was a veteran through his VA card brought him over to the Smiley VA hospital over near Seal Rock. And that is where he was and in what condition when Louise Perot finally found him after her long search. 

We already know why Rene left, why his massive Cajun pride got the best of him when he thought, as we know erroneously, that Ben Smith was stealing his time, stealing his girl and she was letting him. When Rene left, left without a word, left for the Army was all she heard from that bastard Pierre she started to succumb to Ben’s advances for a while. But it was not to be because she was still in love with her Mon Cherie, her Rene. That love would take her many places and many wrong turns before she wound up at the Smiley VA hospital. Once she knew she could not love or marry Ben she left Lafayette, strangely enough left for Baton Rouge which seemed to be then the gateway out of Cajun country. She stayed there for a while but eventually headed for Chicago. Chicago one of the main points, Old Town anyway, of connection to the new cultural happenings which would become known as the”1960s,” the counter-culture, the hippies.

While in Baton Rouge she had met up with some “freaks” who were heading west and they turned her on to some drugs, not an uncommon occurrence then either in Vietnam or the streets of America. Not hard drugs like parents used to dread would come unto their children, morphine, opium, or heroin but stuff like grass, bennies and mescaline. “Trip” stuff, magical mystery tour trip stuff when all the non-military, non-square world was getting high on life, high on whatever was new in the world. In Baton Rouge she also lost her virginity one night to a Buffalo Bill kind of guy complete with buckskin jacket, moccasins and cowboy hat from Wyoming and they settled in together in a house, a commune they dubbed it as was the style then, with a revolving cast of residents, about par for the course then. But soon Baton Rouge and that life was not big enough for her and one night she split with just her knapsack and a small handbag and headed to the Greyhound bus station for up-river Chicago. A part, a big part of her leaving the communal scene and her buckskin cowboy who took her virtue although she was pleased to do have him do so, as it would be in the future was that she still couldn’t get Rene out of her mind, couldn’t get over the idea that she would never go to bed with him. And it would be in Chicago in the late 1960s where she would decide that she had to find Rene one way or another. Find out if he still cared for her, or was still holding that Cajun blood grudge.

Louise as the years passed by was mainly true to that idea, to that quest, but as with lots of things in life not everything goes onward and upward the way you like it. Louise, no question, ever since she first got “turned on” in Baton Rouge by those freaks and later by that doped-out silver glass cowboy loved her drugs, loved bennies best of all for they would give her a great deal of energy but after a while that intensity, those three day rushes, wore her down and that was when she, after meeting a girl at a bar on Division Street when she was looking for work as a waitress, got into cocaine, developed a serious attachment to the stuff (they said it was not addictive unlike heroin but don’t ever tell Louise that, not after she got sober). That cocaine madness took her pretty far down into the mean streets before she got up on her feet again. Obviously a young woman with a habit like that, no real resources, no real job skills, and no interest in men, men to be used as sugar daddies, or protectors until she found her Rene needed to find work that would pay the freight for getting high.

Once night she was sitting in Benny’s, the one off of Division, not the one up by the Loop wondering where she was going to get the money for rent from when this big brawny guy came up to her and whispered in her ear that he would give her one hundred dollars if she went with him to his hotel room. He said he had some coke too. Now a few years before she might had thought that advance was kind of raw, such talk she thought would have had Rene shooting from the hip if he had heard about it but just then she took about five seconds to grab her coat and go out the door with him. That first “trick” would not be the last as she thereafter used Benny’s (giving owner Benny his cut and his occasional piece of her which was nice, everybody agreed nice as she earned her dough the hard way) as her place of business for a number of years. Too many.

But the drugs, the hard life on the bed, the hard life on your back took a lot out of Louise, and she did not age well so her clientele since she could not be as choosy dropped down in class too. Some nights she would go down on guy out in Benny’s back alley for a few lines of coke, not much more. Then one day she heard a guy, a Vietnam veteran named Phil who had been through it all as he was willing to tell anybody who listened, talking about a bunch of guys down in Southern California who didn’t belong back in the “real world,” didn’t fit in after ‘Nam (she did not know what that meant then but she soon found out) and who were hanging under a railroad bridge. When Phil was out there, having sobered up himself beforehand, he had stopped by to see if he could help his brothers out, see if he could bring them back to the real world. He mentioned one guy, a crazy Cajun guy from Lafayette who was so surly that nobody wanted to mess with him. Something out of a Nelson Algren novel, a real bad boy especially when he got that cheapjack wine down his throat. While nobody wanted to mess with him nobody was going to throw him out either since he was a “brother.” Louise immediately thought Rene. After asking Phil what the Cajun looked like and finding the description could have been of Rene she asked where the encampment was and he told her Westminster down below Los Angeles.

Louise decided that very night to sober up and head out there to find her man. But like the man said not everything is forever onward and upward so sobering up was not easy for Louise and she fell down a few times before she kicked the jams out of the habit. Took a couple of years to get the kinks out. Stopped giving blow-jobs in back alleys and other indignities as well for lines of coke. But eventually after that couple of years she was ready to go to Westminster. Problem was when she got there the encampment had been busted up by the cops and most of the guys had headed north. So Louise headed north working her way slowly up the coast asking around for the local “railroad jungles” and wound up in San Francisco, working in a bar for tips and not much else. Along the way up the coast Louise would always when she hit a town check the VA hospitals to see if they might have a line on Rene. In Monterey near old run-down Cannery Row made famous by John Steinbeck she got a lead that a Cajun crazy speaking patois (although the person who gave that information did not know what that meant when she asked if he spoke corrupted French) had been there but had moved on a couple of months before.

By the time she got to Frisco town, got a room, got that bar job for tips she had an idea that she was close to the end of her journey. By chance she had stopped at the library off Market Street to check on various locations where a street guy might wind up in the town. She asked the librarian on duty to help her and that librarian directed her to a computer, the Internet and the wonders of Google. After showing Louise what to do she went to town getting a ton of information which she started to use the next day. There were, unfortunately a million places where bums, hoboes, tramps and crazy Cajuns might hang out. It was not until two weeks later that she found pay dirt, found that Rene had been staying at the Cider Inn, a place for homeless veterans no questions asked. Once there a staff social worker told her Rene was at the Smiley VA hospital near Seal Harbor. And that was how Louise wound up forty almost fifty years later sitting next to Rene in that fading hospital bed.      

In Honor Of Women's History Month- From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-The Clash Over The "Color Purple"

In Honor Of Women's History Month- From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-The Clash Over The "Color Purple"