Happy, Happy Birthday Brother Frankenstein-On the 200th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s Avenging Angel “Frankenstein”-A Comment

Happy, Happy Birthday Brother Frankenstein-On the 200^th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s Avenging Angel “Frankenstein”-A Comment 

A link to a 200^th anniversary discussion of Mary Shelley and her “baby” Frankenstein on NPR’s On Point. 

http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/02/12/working-in-the-lab-late-one-night

By Lenny Lynch

We all know in the year 2018 that it is impossible to create a human being, maybe any being, out of spare stitched up human parts, and a few jolts of electricity. At least I hope everybody short of say Hannibal Lecter, Lucy Lane or some such holy goof who thought he or she could “do God’s handiwork” on the cheap, out of some “how to manual” knows the ropes enough to have figured that out. You have to go big time MIT scientist and MGH doctor routes running through DNA, RNA, genetic matching and such to do what back in the day only a scary primitive amateur guy working in some foreboding isolated mountain retreat would even dare to contemplate. Back in that 1818 day when Mary Shelley (she of the thoroughbred breeding via Earth Mother feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and French Revolution-saturated  anarcho- philosopher William Godwin and later channeling Romantic era poet husband Percy Shelley who hung around with ill-fated heroic Lord Byron and that crowd ) wrote her iconic classis Frankenstein former idea, the stitch and sew part, seemed pretty far out on the surface and would go on to sell scads of books to titillate and disturb the sleep of fevered.  

I like the Modern Prometheus part of her title better since like I said science was pretty primitive on that count, not much better that the Greeks creation from earth’s laden clay process, about the way our brother was put together in a slapdash manner but provided an impetus to further discovery. Today where through genetic engineering we have a better understanding of science and medicine who knows what the possibilities are for good or evil. Although at times we need to treat science, maybe medicine too, like a thing from which we have to run. (Example, a very current example, running the rack on discovering everything there is to know about the atom and then have such a discovery threatening a hostage world with nuclear weapons once the night-takers latched on to the military possibilities. At that point running away from the results of the creation like cowardly Victor Frankenstein doesn’t mean a thing, not a thing.)      

Still Mary Shelley was onto something, some very worthy thoughts about human beings, about sentient and sapient beings, about where women fit into the whole scheme of things if we can at the flip of a button create life without human intervention which has already accrued to us today in marginal cases and probably would have shocked her 19^th sensibilities. A better result if humankind can make itself out of odd spare parts, a little DNA splicing here and there, that also puts a big crimp in the various ideas about God and his or her tasks once he or she becomes a sullen bystander to human endeavor. Not a bad thing not a bad thing at all. But the most beautiful part of her story is the possibility, once again, that we may get back to the Garden to retrofit that Paradise Lost that the blind revolutionary 17^th poet John Milton lost his eyesight over trying to in verse form how we lost our human grace. Yeah, tell us that we might be able to get back to the Garden. Nice choice Ms. Shelley. 

We know, or at least I know, that Frankenstein aka Modern Prometheus, has gotten a bad rap. Prometheus remember him from subtle Greek mythology and how he was able to create his brethren out of clay. Nice trick. Better, the brother did not leave humankind hanging by offering the gift of fire to move human progress at a faster clip. To keep the race from cold and hunger. Took a beating from psychopath Zeus for his lese majeste by having to roll that rock for eternity. Mister Frankenstein really has been misunderstood especially since the rise of the cinema starting from that first libelous presentation in 1931 which turned him from that misunderstood and challenged youth who was orphaned by a unfit “father” into a scary monster who made kids afraid on nighttime shadows on bedroom walls. There are a million ways that piece of bad celluloid got it wrong but if you will he remember actually learned English, despite being “born” out in the wilds of 19^th century Germany, so movie audiences could understand what he was saying. Does that sound like a monster to you? I thought not.

The bad ass in the whole caper is this dolt Victor Frankenstein, the human so-called scientist who built a thing from which he had to run like some silly schoolgirl. If the guy had the sense that God, yes God, gave geese he would not have abandoned his brethren, his avenging angel. Wouldn’t have started a string of murders for which he not his so-called “monster” was morally responsible for. Instead the dink just let the bodies stack up like a cord of wood as he let his “creation” get out of control.

On this site my fellow writer Danny Moriarty has recently taken it upon himself to smash what he has called the unearned reputation of one Lanny Lamont, aka Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes the so-called deductive logic detective who also let innocent bodies pile up before he got a bright thought in his dope-addled head about how to stop the carnage. That Danny’s take, Danny not his real name by the way but an alias he had been forced to use to protect himself and his family who have been threatened by a bunch of hooligans who are cultist devotees and aficionados of this Lanny Lamont known as the Baker Street Irregulars.

I don’t know enough about the merits of Danny’s crusade to decide whether he too is also an avenging angel, a blessed brethren in the fight for human progress against the night-takers, against the “alternate fact” crowd. But I do know that the idea behind what he is trying to do is solid. In his case the bare knuckle blowing up of an undeserved legend. This bicentennial year of the existence our beautiful Mister Frankenstein, the Old Testament avenging angel, I am proud to defend his honor against all the abuse he has taken for far too long. That may be a tough road but so be it.         

Mary Shelley started something for us to think about on letting things get out of hand though and now we have to try to put the genie back in the bottle. 

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- “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   

It Must Be Saint Patrick's Day Coming- The Dropkick Murphys, Natch

It Must Be Saint Patrick's Day Coming- The Dropkick Murphys, Natch 



Click on link below for WBUR interview with the boyos:   

http://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/03/13/dropkick-murphys-st-patricks-day

From On Point Radio- The Dropkick Murphys- On Saint Patrick's Day, Natch

 The Dropkick Murphys- On Saint Patrick's Day, Natch

*********
DROPKICK MURPHYS LYRICS
"Peg O' My Heart"
Featuring Bruce Springsteen
Peg of my heart I love you
Don't let us part I love you
I always knew it would be you
Peg of my heart
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg of my heart

Peg of my heart, oh your glances
Make my heart sing how's chances
Come be my own
Come make your home in my heart

Peg of my heart I love you
We'll never never part I love you
I always knew it would be you
Peg of my heart
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg of my heart

Peg of my heart I love you
Don't let us part I love you
I always knew it would be you
Peg of my heart
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg of my heart
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg of my heart

Peg of my heart
Peg of my heart
Peg of my heart
Peg of my heart
*****
DROPKICK MURPHYS LYRICS
"Deeds Not Words"
Where you gonna run to? Where you gonna hide?
Bodies on the floor no one's getting out alive
Death is in the air there's trouble all around
Now you got it coming This time you're going down
Deeds not words you should've told the truth
You're a liar and traitor and now we got the proof

Liar and a traitor
And now we got the proof

Hindsight's twenty twenty it's so easy looking back
You made all the wrong choices Now you gotta live with that
But living's not the problem I got better plans for you
Like a bug I'm gonna crush you and then scrape you off my shoe
You've been thinkin' that you're safe but you're too blind to see
You turned your best friends into mortal enemies

Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive
Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive

Better watch your back you'll never get away
No talkin' your way out there'll be nothing left to say
I knew you as a child I hate you as a man
You're a two faced rat that nobody can stand
Deeds not words you should've told the truth
You're a liar and traitor and now we got the proof

Liar and a traitor
And now we got the proof

Deeds not words you should've told the truth
You're a liar and traitor and now we got the proof

Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive
Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive
Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive

[ www.plyrics.com ] All lyrics are property and copyright of their actual owners and provided for educational purposes and personal use only

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- For Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- For Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is

From The Archives Of Allan Jackson

[Unfortunately despite what Sam Lowell thought was a last minute breakthrough in negotiations with what almost everybody who writes for this publication was previous site manager and perspiration king for this series Allan Jackson things are still bogged down with the current site manager Greg Green’s unwillingness to let Allan write some updated introductions to each posting (or not, depending on whether there is further need talk about some topic raised by the sketch). For now Greg’s position as far as I understand it is that Allan can have a straight by-line tab like everybody else for the duration of the series. Hopefully that last hurdle, that possibility of an updated introduction not at all uncommon when a publication, on-line or hard copy) is reissued or revised. Until then I will do, at Allan’s request and with Greg’s cooperation I might add, to scotch the floodgate of rumors that have surfaced over the past almost year now originally about Allan’s whereabouts and now more about what he has been doing with his time since then.  

Hopefully Allan will get that introduction space he seeks and can bat down the rumors that have floated over his name particularly the most egregious ones (I only have time for those major dillies the minor ones he can tag if he feels it is necessary).The strangest one by far is the one that had him anywhere from Tibet to Argentina with the latter being the most prevalently named place running a high end brothel for Asian businessmen interested in taking a walk on the wild side, the kinky side, with his old flame Madame La Rue. (They never married but were close until she balked and figured with the three previous wives’ alimonies and kids’ tuitions she was better off running her own show-and she was right.)    

Not every young woman who came of age in the 1960s, maybe early 1970s, despite Allan’s somewhat naïve belief on very public display last year during his hysterical reaction to the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967 went the distance, kept the faith in the “newer world a-borning guys and gals like him have held onto ever since then. Despite the very real evidence that there has been a forty plus year counter-cultural backlash by the night-takers who got freaked out by the idea of the world turned upside down. Some people as in any social movement fall by the wayside or had been temporary fellow-travelers when the tide was running high and bailed out when the ebbtide hit. Or just had stopped by for a taste of something different on the way to whatever they were going to do anyway. That was Sissy Kelly, aka Madame La Rue.

Josh Breslin had first met her when he (and Allan, Jimmy Jenkins, Sam Lowell, the late Peter Paul Markin, and Frankie Riley I think this was before I went out myself for a short while) were riding high as kites on a yellow brick road former school bus turned travelling caravan led by a guy everybody called Captain Crunch. Met her in Ventura at a county fair where she was running a fortune-telling scam (and giving an off-hand blow job on the side) to make ends meet. She was young, maybe too young for all we knew, very pretty if not beautiful although that was always open to question especially by Allan who deemed her beautiful and ready to roam once the fair was over. And if she did not love sex (and dope back then and later whiskey) she was inventive and willing to share her skills. So she travelled with Josh and the crowd for a while until Josh ran into a young woman who called herself Butterfly Swirl down in La Jolla and she switched off to Jimmy next, I think, I know it was not Allan he would be next after Jimmy. That next lasted for a while until the early 1970s when Allan after his bit in the military decided to get serious about the publishing business and Madame La Rue, Sissy, then also saw that she was meant for a different road than the newer world.            

But they, Allan and Sissy anyway, always more or less stayed in touch if not regularly then enough not to worry about some unheard of strange fate. The way I heard the story was that Sissy headed toward Monterey where she worked the streets before landing in some brothel in Carmel which catered to rich businessmen mainly from Asia who were in the area to play golf at Pebble Beach and other courses along Seventeen Mile Road. That was when she approached Allan for some dough to start her own operation out of town toward Big Sur. Between her own work under the sheets and then her own brothel she was able to pay Allan back in a couple of years, maybe three. So Monterey, not Argentina, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong or wherever the rumors had them was where Allan went looking for dough after leaving Damask in La Jolla. Looking for a loan not to run a brothel, or to help run one, which would have been crazy for him to do but to seek the loan, He got it. And he got a little something else from Sissy Kelly which would make him smile all the way to Bar Harbor, Maine. Rumors! Jack Callahan]    

    

    

A YouTube film clip of Hank Williams performing You Win Again to set the mood for this piece.

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Josh Breslin had been since he retired a couple of years ago as a journalist writing for half the alternative and special interest newspapers and journals in the country, make that half the unread, mostly, newspapers and journals in those categories in something of a reflective mood. Not every day, certainly not on golf days with his golfing associates over at Dunegrass, when reflection over some missed chip or putt on the previous hole spelled the kiss of death for the round. Much better to keep an empty mind on those days and just hope enough muscle memory kicks in to survive the round. But enough of golf, enough of unread journals, hell, enough of retirement except as the cushion that Josh’s thoughts fell on one day when passing through his  old home town of Olde Saco, a town farther north in Maine than the one where he now lived, on some family business.

While there he passed by his old growing up house, as was almost always the case since it was located near a main town road which he would have to cross to get on to the main highway and not always in some fit of nostalgia.  Or rather he passed the plot of land where the old home was situated, an old house that had been little better than a shack, a cabin maybe then, maybe especially when his three sisters came of age and hogged the single bathroom and stuff like that. A place which left little room for a single growing boy to attend to his own toilet, his own sense of space, to any sense at all. The house may have been a shack, no, he thought better say a cabin but it had been located on about two acres of land and in the intervening years, years well after his parents had passed on and his sisters like him had left the dust of Olde Saco behind the land had become valuable and now had been developed into an eight-unit condominium complex. Not that his parents, not that his father Prescott Breslin derived any real financial benefit from that development since the house had been sold when he needed to go into a nursing home after Josh’s mother, Delores, passed away. Had been sold well before there was a resurgence in the Olde Saco economy which had taken a beating when the MacAdams Textile Mills shut down and moved south to North Carolina in the early 1950s and had only recovered with some “high tech” start-ups using the old factory space well after Prescott passed on. The sale of that old house had broken his father’s heart despite its shanty condition at the end. The damn sale of the cabin in any case had not brought enough money. Not enough to cover all Prescott’s increasing medical expenses which Josh and his sisters wound up subsiding. 

And so the passing of that lot got Josh to thinking about how Prescott Breslin never drew a blessed break in his hard-scrabble life. Never drew a break although he was a hard-working man of the old school-“a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages”-when he had work. Got Josh to thinking about the early 1950s when he was coming of age, when he started even if unconsciously, or maybe semi-consciously, to feel that some new breeze was coming, some new breeze that was going to break through and unfreeze that red scare Cold War time. And while Josh’s horizons in those days centered on the emerging rock and roll, coming from some “new” Memphis hillbilly sources, some black as night rhythm and blues sources, some down and out urban blues sources, again black as night, that was leading the jail-break out then his father’s fate was being sealed in another way. See Prescott Breslin was an employee, a machine tender and mechanic at the MacAdams Textile factory that was heading south and he had no other resources to fall back on. That last thought was pure Josh though, pure Josh remembering back to those hard days. Prescott Breslin, as he would be the first to say, and had probably said it a thousand times, with a wife and four children had no time to worry about whether he had resources to fall back or not. Josh chuckled to himself over that one, yeah, that was pure Dad.

As he travelled further along Main Street (really Route One but everybody called it Main Street since they had no real such street in the town) he passed by what in the old days was Millie’s Diner, now re-opened as Mildred’s, the one right across the street from the old textile plant where guys would go before their shift and grab a coffee and crullers, maybe grab a quick dinner if they were single, or maybe meet some sweetheart and talk before going off to work. He did not know this from personal experience but his father had once told him that right after World War II the plant was working three shifts and guys, and gals, were catching as much overtime as they wanted.

Millie’s did not long survived the shutdown of the mill and had been abandoned for a number of years (like a lot of other businesses in that section of the town that were dependent on the mill-workers) but had re-opened about a decade ago with the same “feel” as Millie’s including a jukebox which played current stuff but also stuff from back then, stuff that hard-working guys and gals would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in to listen to whatever was “hot” in those days. Josh knew all of this because a couple of years before he had been contacted by an old high school classmate, Melinda, Melinda Dubois (the place was crawling with French-Canadians including his mother, nee LeBlanc), who had read some old article of his and got in touch to invite his up for a class reunion. During that previous time in town Melinda had taken him around town and showed him what had changed and told him the story of Millie’s resurrection as Mildred’s.              

Something that day, probably the sight of the old homestead, maybe just the thought of Millie’s where sometimes when his father had been making good money he would take the family for an out of house dinner and where Josh on occasion had stopped in to play the jukebox and have a Coke while looking furtively around for any stray girls, prompted him to stop and go into Mildred’s for a coffee and maybe a piece of pie (that pie an iffy thing what with him and his new weight problem but he thought why go into a diner if you are not going to have something that is “bad “ for you). As a single he sat at the Formica-top counter complete with red vinyl-cushioned swivel stool to sit on and a paper placemat and utensils in front of him waiting for the smiling waitress to take his order (a career waitress as is usual in diners, middle-aged, her white uniform a little tight trying to look younger, pencil in her hair for ease of taking orders, chewing gum but friendly until you placed your order and then either still smiling or a frown if you only order coffee and, not the young college girls and guys you find in better restaurants marking time with a job to help defray college expenses or for “walking around” money). He placed his frowning order, coffee, black, and a piece of apple crumb pie with, yes, with ice cream (bad, indeed).

While Josh waited for his order he thumbed through the panels on the jukebox machine that was placed between him and the next placemat. And as if by some strange osmosis Josh came upon Hank Williams’ You Win Again, his father’s favorite song when he was young. (His father been in a pick-up band for a while working a circuit and along the Ohio River.) Josh  put his quarter in to play that one selection (yeah, times have changed even in jukebox land, no more three for a quarter ) and as Hank moan’s his lovesick blues that triggered Josh to start thinking about his father and where he had come from, where he would have picked up those country tunes in his DNA. And then he thought of that hard time when his father was so discouraged about his prospects when the mill had closed down temporarily and then when the final word had come that it would be closing for good and would play that song repeatedly as if to try and ward off some evil spirits. He could remember his father’s voice like it was yesterday as he sat beside him in Millie’s:                  

 “Jesus, it’s been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill keeps screaming at us. And also telling us not to trespass under penalty of arrest, Christ, after all the sweat we have given the damn MacAdams family. I still haven’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I don’t even have a high school diploma, not even close since I only went to eight grade and then to the mines, to do anything but some logging work up North when they need extra crews,” That is what Prescott Breslin, Josh sitting silently beside him, had half-muttered to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between the two, and by many previous parties on those self-same stools, took place, of course, right at Millie’s Diner right across the street from the closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.

Just then Prescott, hey, no Pres, or PB, or any such thing, not if you didn’t  want an argument on one of his few vanities, fell silent, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as he thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that came creeping through his brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, first told him the plant was shutting down for good and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from his eastern Kentucky roots. Then it was just a second of self-doubt but now the thoughts started ringing incessantly in his brain.

Why the hell had he fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles), stayed up North after the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that he had worked in his youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks, and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, girls and one boy with Delores. Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.

The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. He reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and played Will The Circle Be Unbroken, a song that his late, long-gone mother sang to him on her knee when he was just a tow-headed young boy. That got him to thinking about home, the Harlan hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when eight kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on the table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-down, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girl’s stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.

Then Prescott thought about the Saturday night barn dances where he cut quite a figure with the girls when he was in his teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. He was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Uncle Eddie’s just-brewed “white lightening.” And he heard, just like now on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through Will The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances.

As Millie asked him for the third time, “More coffee” he came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, he said no to himself with that same kind of December resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again he let out his breathe and said to himself one more time- “Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, Jesus, but Delores, the four kids, and he would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.”

And as if to put paid to that resolve, as Josh made a funny face in recognition, Prescott had put a coin into the jukebox and played You Win Again, which he always said brought him good tidings, or at least made him feel better. A few minute after the song was completed and he and his father were ready to leave after saying good-bye to Jack Johnny Dubois came through the door and yelled, “Hey, Prescott, Jack, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months work clearing some land up North for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, he was going too.

From The Left-Wing Archives-The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee (1970-1972)

The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee

By SOL STERN

an Rafael, Calif. -- The drive to the Marin County Hall of Justice is north out of San Francisco on Highway 101, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through a widening peninsula of rolling green hills and sun-speckled canyons. To the east is a curving bayshore studded with yacht harbors, houseboat communities and tiny tourist towns with mellow sounding names like Tiburon and Belvedere. To the west, beyond a magnificent stand of giant redwoods, is the beginning of 100 miles of the most beautiful Pacific coastline in the state.

Marin County is a commuters' paradise that measures up to every travel magazine's stereotype of California good living. The average family income is $13,000, and the rich WASP Republicans who are in the majority seem to get along with the hippies who have settled there in increasing numbers. There is only one tiny black ghetto (in Marin City) and, on the whole, county residents have been spared the urban violence of the past decade.

One reminder of the agonies they have escaped is San Quentin, the oldest, biggest and most notorious facility in the bloody battleground that is the state prison system. Quentin is hidden away in an isolated cove overlooking the bay--an eyesore that might be ignored, except that the county is responsible for administering justice when there is any violation of state law within the prison's walls. And so in recent years an ever longer parade of inmates has been trucked north several miles for court appearances at the sumptuous Marin Civic Center, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed structure surrounded by lagoons and water cascades and bright, orange blossomed Clivia beds. The Hall of Justice, housing the courtrooms and the county jail, is an incredible caterpillar-like structure, with a pagoda-style roof, spanning two hills. In this blue and gold judicial Shangri-La reality-- nineteen-seventies American-style--finally caught up with Marin County.

On Aug. 7 last year, Jonathan Jackson, a tall, thin black youth from Pasadena walked into one of the circular, walnut-paneled courtrooms carrying three guns underneath his coat. In the middle of the proceedings he stood up, brandishing his weapons, and shouted, "O.K., this is it! Everyone freeze!" Jackson gave the weapons to the defendant, James McClain, who was on trial for a prison stabbing at Quentin, and two other inmates, William Christmas and Ruchell Magee, who were there as witnesses for McClain. Together they rounded up Judge Harold J. Haley, the D.A. and three jurors as hostages, and marched the five whites out of the courthouse to an adjacent parking lot. They piled into a yellow van and started moving in the direction of Highway 101, but before they could get out of the parking lot, a gun battle erupted. When the smoke had cleared, the judge, Jonathan Jackson and two of the Quentin inmates were dead; Ruchell Magee, the D.A. and one of the jurors lay seriously wounded.

The "Marin shootout" stunned just about everyone in the Bay Area. Civic leaders in the county demanded that the state hold all future trials of convicts behind San Quentin's walls. Security was tightened not only in Marin but in all Bay Area courts, as frantic officials speculated about more armed attempts by revolutionaries to free prisoners. (Most Bay Area radicals regarded the escape attempt as a revolutionary act.) Later, despite all the additional security, the Marin Hall of Justice was bombed by the revolutionary underground.

A few days after the shooting, Judge Haley was eulogized at a gentle funeral in San Rafael. Jonathan Jackson and William Christmas received a "revolutionary funeral" at a black church in Oakland, their coffins draped with the Black Panther flag and surrounded by an honor guard of leather-jacketed Panthers. In the streets outside, 3,000 black and white revolutionaries raised their fists in salute as they stood before loudspeakers, listening to Huey Newton's eulogy:

"Our comrades Jonathan Jackson and William A. Christmas have taught us a revolutionary lesson. They have intensified the struggle and placed it on a higher level.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but action is supreme. Comrades Jonathan Jackson and William A. Christmas have made the ultimate sacrifice. They have given the revolution their lives."

In the next issue of the Panther newspaper, Berkeley revolutionary Tom Hayden offer this fantasy:

"A revolutionary funeral guarantees that guerrilla ghosts will haunt the reactionaries, reminding them of their guilt, until warriors among the living take their ultimate revenge."

In the months that followed, attention in the radical community shifted toward Angela Davis, whom the state had charged with supplying the weapons that young Jackson had brought into court. Later, a county grand jury returned an indictment against her, formally specifying counts of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy. When partial grand jury minutes were released, some of the state's evidence was disclosed: Witnesses had testified that Angela had purchased the guns, the last one several days before Aug. 7. The state also made much of an allegation that she had been working closely with Jackson, who was a member of the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. Jonathan's real brother, George, is one of the three blacks known as the Soledad "brothers," who are awaiting trial for murder of a guard at Soledad prison. The state alleged that the purpose of the Aug. 7 action was to use the hostages to free the men.

Maintaining the Angela is totally innocent, her lawyers have argued that the state has presented no evidence of her involvement in any conspiracy, and that the open purchase of guns, for which she had to sign her name, could not possibly be the act of anyone with a criminal intent.

Even before the shootout, Angela Davis was a popular figure among radical blacks and whites because of her forthright stand on the issue of her membership in the Communist party and her subsequent confrontation with the Reagan administration. She was fired from her position as a philosophy instructor at U.C.L.A. in 1969 after she admitted her party affiliation. After Aug. 7, when she went underground and made the F.B.I.'s most- wanted list, she became almost a legendary figure to the left. Radical households displayed posters which said, "Angela is welcome here."

In the meantime, 31-year-old Ruchell Magee recovered from his wounds and was taken back to San Quentin where he had already spent the last seven years of his life. A seventh-grade dropout from rural Louisiana, Magee had been sent up for a 1963 Los Angeles robbery-kidnapping conviction resulting from a typical ghetto hassle over a $10 marijuana transaction that ended with guns being pulled. No one was hurt but, unfortunately for Magee, the scuffle with another man involved took place in a moving car so that technically a kidnapping charge could be added--with a one-year-to-life sentence. He has been fighting the conviction ever since, claiming it was a frame-up, but now he was charged with the murder of Judge Haley, which for a convicted felon like Magee carries a mandatory death penalty. Magee was literally dragged, shackled and chained, into several pretrial hearings at San Quentin last fall. But at the time local radicals paid little attention to him.

With Angela Davis back in California, the Marin Civic Center is again an international news center, but the country-club setting has become more militarized. To get into the court building you must submit to a thorough pat-down body search, as well as pass through an electronic metal detector. Upstairs, in front of the courtroom where pretrial hearings take place, there is another metal detector and another thorough search. All spectators must sign in and show identification. Reporters are required to have their pictures taken and are fingerprinted. The hallway outside the courtroom is filled with a dozen armed sheriff'' deputies, as well as several plainclothesmen.

Miss Davis is held in a two-cell area of the county jail, adjacent to the courtroom but isolated from other county prisoners. Magee is brought in from San Quentin for the numerous hearings. Reporters and TV crews from all over the world pop in for a hearing now and then, as they wait for the big trial to get going. They come mostly to see about Angela, but inevitably their attention becomes riveted on "the other defendant," as he used to be called by the local reporters.

Magee is an accomplished jailhouse lawyer who practically learned to read in the prison law library. The hand-written petitions he has filed in his own behalf, with their raw grammar but punctilious attention to cases and precedents, have managed to get several judges removed from the case, and he has almost by himself tied up the case for six months--despite the fact that the court has refused to allow him officially to act as his own counsel on the basis of prison-administered tests which show he has an I.Q. of 78.

During the first months of the case, reporters were fond of comparing him, invidiously, to his renowned codefendant. How ironic, they suggested in their stories, that this uneducated, violent con should wind up in the same courtroom as the beautiful, talented professor.

The reporters are now taking Magee more seriously, though there are, no doubt, serious contrasts to be drawn. At the hearings, she walks in briskly, trailing her matrons behind her, and turns, very tall and regal, to give spectators the clenched-fist salute. She wears bright mini-dresses, and in the soft lights reflecting off the hand-rubbed walnut furniture (made by state prison inmates), she glows with a tawny, imperious beauty. At her table she sits upright and attentive, conferring animatedly with her lawyers, her dignity hardly bruised by six months in jail.

Magee comes in shackled, walking slowly in a prison gait and escorted on each arm by guards who chain him to his chair, which is chained to the floor. Dressed in a formless gray prison jacket, he is short and sullen--the blackest man in the court. He hardly has a word for his numerous court-appointed lawyers. He sits sprawled in his chair, his head cocked to tone side, seemingly taking in the proceedings out of the corner of one eye, insisting on his right to speak for himself.

A small defense group, consisting mostly of blacks with a few white radicals, has recently been organized to work with him, but so fare it has been ineffectual and without funds. He fights essentially alone, using only his painfully gathered knowledge of the legal systems and the notoriety of the case to get his message out: that he is innocent because he was imprisoned illegally in the first place, that he has been kept a "slave" for seven years and that what happened on Aug. 7 was, in his words, a "slave rebellion" to remove the conditions of his bondage.

Angela's lawyers are taking a different tack and their resources are more impressive. No less than six experienced, talented lawyers, several investigators and researchers and legal clerks are working on a defense that one of the lawyers estimates may cost up to half a million dollars.

Even more important, she has an unprecedented political campaign being waged for her release all over the world. It is not to belittle the seriousness of her situation to say that she has the best-organized, most broad-based defense effort in the recent history of radical political trials--more potent that that afforded to any of the Panther leaders or the Chicago Seven.

Much of the strength of the campaign is due to the considerable resources which the Communist party, U.S.A., still alive and kicking after many lean years, is putting into the struggle. And, as one Bay Area radical put it: "If there's one thing the C.P. does well, it's organizing a legal defense."

On Oct. 15, 1970, two days after Angela Davis was captured by F.B.I. agents in a New York City motel, a press conference was called in Los Angeles by the Communist party to announce that it was going to build "the largest, broadest, most all-encompassing people's movement the country has ever seen to free our comrade, Angela Davis-- political prisoner." The speaker was Franklin Alexander, a close friend of Angela's and chairman of the party's all-black Che-Lumumba Club. The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis was formed shortly thereafter, with Alexander and Fania Davis Jordan, Angela's 23-year-old younger sister, as national coordinators.

According to Alexander, there are now 60 fully functioning local committees in operation around the country. The national committee staff coordinates the work of the local committees, supplies them with literature, posters and speakers, and, in conjunction with the legal staff, sets the over-all political-legal strategy. The national staff also worries about money, and right now it is looking for a full-time fundraiser. So far, without really trying very hard, it has raised--and spent--more than $30,000 for the political work of the committee, but the estimate is that as the trial runs it course it will need up to 10 times that amount (excluding strictly legal costs). Full-time committee staff members (there are seven now) drew salaries of $75 per week each.

The money that pays the salaries and other expenses comes in steadily from a variety of sources: from people on traditionally liberal mailing lists who have been sent letters; from collection cans set up outside supermarkets; from spontaneous, unsolicited donations, such as the $10,000 recently given by an affiliate of the United Presbyterian Church, and from the profits of extravaganzas such as the birthday celebration for Angela attended by about 5,000 people at the Manhattan Center in New York last February, with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as speaker.

When people call and ask what they can do to help, local committees will often suggest that they have fund-raising parties in their houses. A recent successful and typical example was the dinner party thrown by a young couple living in the Berkeley hills. About a hundred people showed up, most of them white, middle-class liberals. They enjoyed a modest buffet dinner, watched a belly dancer named Sabah perform and listened to a committee staff member answer questions about the case. When it was over, the committee had collected around $300.

The committee is about to open a suite of offices in downtown San Francisco, but in the meantime the members operate out of a large, rambling redwood house in an integrated neighborhood in southwest Berkeley--a kind of political commune, since most of them live there as well. The house is owned by Roscoe Proctor, a black longshoreman and veteran Communist functionary, who has been working in New York on party business. Party dignitaries such as General Secretary Gus Ahall have often stayed at the Proctor house during their visits to the Bay Area. It is an open, informal place, full of dogs and neighborhood kids who come in to listen to soul music on the hi-fi. In the spacious living room, decorated with Soviet posters, the committee has held marathon staff meetings with the lawyers.

Often the discussions are punctuated by the crying of the baby that was recently born to Angela's sister, Fania, who has had to take something of a maternity leave from her hectic cross-country speaking tours for the committee. Fania looks so much like her sister that when she gets up on a platform to speak, some people actually believe they are seeing Angela. Politically, she also seems to be following her sister's footsteps. She worked with the Black Panther party in San Diego until, she says, "it was just about wiped out"; she has picked sugar cane in Cuba as a member of the "Venceremos Brigade," and when she came back from there last fall, she threw herself completely into the work of the committee. Now she says, "I am in almost total agreement with my sister's politics."

A frequent visitor to the house is Fania's mother, Mrs. Sally Davis, who will soon be taking a leave from her teaching job in a Birmingham, Ala., grade school to spend all her time working with the committee. She has already traveled extensively, speaking mostly in black communities. Other members of the family have done the same, including Angela's brothers, Ben, a 25-year-old defensive back for the Cleveland Browns football teams, and Reginald, who is 20 and a student at Defiance College in Ohio. Fania says that even her father, who runs a gas station in Birmingham and was initially reluctant to get involved politically, has begun to do some speaking.

The Davis children were raised on "Dynamite Hill" in Bull Connor's Birmingham; they knew the four black girls killed in the bombing of a church there in 1963. Political struggle is familiar to them. "My mother was very active in her time and for her age," says Fania. "She was very involved in the desegregation struggle in Birmingham, and she instilled in all of us a sense of dignity and human worth. I can remember times when she would go downtown and some white man would call her 'Sally'--and she really reacted! That influenced us."

And, says Fania, there isn't too much difference between the struggles in Birmingham and Marin County. "People's politics are constantly changing as they confront reality. I would say my brothers' and parents' beliefs are coming closed to Angela's as they work in her behalf."

The committee dynamo is 30-year-old Franklin Alexander, who has been working for the Communist party for 12 years. Alexander's sister is Charlene Mitchell, a high-ranking American Communist who was the party's candidate for President in 1968. He was, for a time, national chairman of the Du Boise Clubs and later devoted much of his time in Los Angeles to the Communist Che-Lumumba Club, which, with its all-black membership, seems to contradict the party's opposition to black nationalism and separatism. Padding around barefoot in the upstairs of the Proctor house recently, the tall, muscular Alexander interrupted a phone call long enough to explain:

"It was the view of the party when we created the Che-Lumumba Club four years ago that in this moment of history there was need for an all-black collective in the party to operate in the black community. It was a period when nationalist sentiment among our people couldn't be ignored and required a black confrontation with our problems."

It was Alexander and his wife, Kendra, who recruited Angela Davis into the club, at a time when she was still active in the Black Panthers. Her decision to join the Communist party was the result of considerable experience. As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, she spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris and got to know Algerian nationalist students. Later she did graduate work in philosophy in West Germany, and became active in the League of Socialist German Students, a counterpart of the S.D.S. Then there were her two years in San Diego studying with the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In San Diego, she came into contact with the Panthers, and later two of her friends in the organization were killed on the U.C.L.A. campus. Of her final conversion to Communism, she once wrote:

"My decision to join the Communist party emanated from my belief that the only true path of liberation for Black people is the one that leads toward a complete overthrow of the capitalist class in this country. . . . Convinced of the need to employ Marxist-Leninist principles in the struggle for liberation, I joined the Che-Lumumba Club, which is a militant, all-Black collective of the Communist party in Los Angeles committed to the task of rendering Marxism-Leninism relevant to Black people. . . ."

In the same vein, the committee to free Angela today looks to the black community for its main sources of support. That there is mass sentiment to be tapped is indicated by a recent Louis Harris poll taken among blacks in Los Angeles; 80 per cent of those questioned believed that Angela Davis could not get a fair trial.

The committee has an almost exclusively black leadership. "That is a conscious policy," says Alexander. "It's our view that there must be an organized, black-community base in this campaign. Angela is a symbol first and foremost to black people and their struggles. The organization of the black community around the issue of political prisoners is essential to victory."

The search for a chief trial lawyer with a proper black image for Angela took the committee to Howard Moore, a 39-year-old Atlantan who has defended Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael, and represented Julian Bond (Moore's brother-in-law) in his successful battle to be seated in the Georgia legislature.

Moore is a lanky, distinguished-looking man with a graying Afro and a Vandyke beard who can be, alternately, aristocratic and hip. Working with him as co-counsel is 26-year- old Margaret Burnham, a black who is an old grade-school classmate of Angela's from Birmingham. Four other local San Francisco lawyers--all white--with a wealth of criminal and constitutional experience have assisted them in various stages of pretrial work, in legal research and investigation. But Moore and Miss Burnham make it emphatically clear that blacks will be calling the signals.

"I would hate to see Angela, a beautiful black woman, having a white defense," says Moore. "She's going to get a black defense." Later, he elaborates on the meaning of a "black defense":

"Look, I have tried many cases before red-neck juries. When the jury knows you are committed and you are a true adversary, they respond in a positive manner. Especially when you deal openly and up front [frankly] with the question of racism. White people know they are racists, and if you conduct yourself in a manner in which you try to hide the fact that you know it, they don't respect you. You can't deal honestly with the kind of jury we're going to get unless you deal frontally with the question of racism. And that's what we're going to do."

Both the lawyers are particularly touchy about the role of the party in the defense, but Margaret Burnham meets reporters' questions on this issue head on:

"The party is playing a major role. Angela is a member and it is incumbent on the party to come to her defense. I say that because we want to be up front about it. There is no 'infiltration' in the case--they are there."

There are, of course, thousands of people who are supporting Angela Davis for their own reasons. The committee has a long, truly impressive list of support from such prominent blacks as Coretta King, Ralph Abernathy, and Aretha Franklin, who offered to post Angela's bail (if it were not granted) ". . .not because I believe in Communism but because she is a black woman and she wants freedom for black people." Organizations supporting Angela range from the Urban League to the Black Panthers. But it is clear that the Communist party people on the committee are making the key decisions about how this broad front is to be used in the legal battle.

Furthermore, according to Alexander, several top party functionaries, including Charlene Mitchell and National Chairman Henry Winston, as well as the entire Legal Defense Commission of the party, are working full time on the case. And all of this, concedes Alexander, is not too bad for the party's health:

"It has put the party in a position in which it is moving in wider areas that it has in the past. I would say the party has been strengthened."

The party's connections seem even more significant in the Free Angela demonstrations overseas. There isn't a day that goes by without the committee receiving word of some demonstration, protest or petition somewhere in the world. Here is a sampling from the committee's files:

In Ceylon, a three-day vigil by 2,500 women in front of the American embassy; in Sydney, Australia, a march by 700 women; a telegram demanding Angela's freedom signed by the entire cast and crew of the film "Z," including Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, director Costa Gavras and composer Mikis Theodorakis.

Sometimes, it is too much to handle. "We have received 100,000 pieces of mail from East Germany alone," sighs Rob Baker, the long-haired publicity director who is the only white on the national staff. "They're lying around in hundreds of mail bags unopened-- because we don't have a big enough staff to do the work."

Communist party-oriented mass organizations such as the Women's International Democratic Federation, with headquarters in East Berlin, have set up Free Angela committees in scores of countries. In the committee files is a letter from the World Federation of Democratic Youth, based in Budapest, telling the committee that "huge solidarity actions were and are undertaken by all our member organizations in support of Angela Davis."

"In some countries--in Italy, for instance--the party has taken a heavy responsibility," says Baker. "They have printed up thousand of postcards for people to send to Angela, with copies to Reagan, or Hoover, or Nixon. On the other hand, we get things like a letter from a woman who runs a coffee shop in Utrecht and wants to print up thousands of copies of Angela's statement to the court. I would say it is a mixture of party support and nonparty support in every country."

But what does the slogan "Free Angela" mean when it is carried in a demonstration in Sydney or East Berlin? Does the committee think such pressure might result in her being freed without a trial?

"Well," says Margaret Burnham, "we mean it literally. It is a bogus prosecution. The prosecution is a fraud. If she didn't have the color or politics that Angela has she would be free. Since she is going to be prosecuted, though, she should have a fair trial."

Howard Moore amplifies this: "She is in the clutches of the law. A trial is inevitable. She is being tried for her life. Given the deep-seated racial hatred and the political nature of the trial, the only way she can be freed is to bring enough pressure to insure that she has a fair trial. The outside pressure forces them to be more scrupulous. It is salutary."

The committee was given a considerable lift by the recent decision in Connecticut to drop the charges against Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, and the acquittal of the Panther 13 in New York City. "They were significant victories," said an elated Howard Moore recently. "They were victories for all people who are struggling around political trials such as the one we have here." When I asked Moore what specific lessons might be learned from those trials, he stressed the importance of getting a large number of blacks on the jury:

"We are going to raise the question of the national status of blacks in the courtroom. When we say that Angela should be judged by her peers, we mean by other blacks. What was significant and critical about the New Haven and New York cases was the number of blacks on the jury. It prevented the prosecutor from making openly racist appeals in court and it prevented white jurors from making racist arguments in the jury room."

Because of the small number of blacks in Marin County the lawyers are seriously thinking about requesting a change of venue to another county where they might be guaranteed a large percentage of blacks on the jury panel. "If we can get Angela a jury of her peers," says Moore confidently, " the question of the outcome of this trial doesn't even have to be guessed at."

Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty has publicly suggested that Angela Davis be deported to Algeria, while Los Angeles County Supervisor Warren Dorn has said that she "should be sent back to Russia, the country that she loves." Such traditional Red-baiting the committee was prepared for. What really has them shaking their heads is the flak they have been getting from the left.

It first came into the open last Jan. 23 when the Black Panther paper published a statement by Eldridge Cleaver from Algiers. Cleaver made the startling charge that the Free Angela movement was started by the "Communist party in collusion with the U.S. fascists," in order to divert attention, resources and support away from the trial of Bobby Seale in New Haven. Cleaver's accusation was easily turned aside by the committee, but the extravagance of it all obscured an ideological rift of substance about how to defend "political prisoners."

The Panthers, at that time, were publicly despairing of the efficacy of fighting in the courts. Their model still seemed to be the Marin type of "revolutionary violence"--and if you had to be in court you should present a "revolutionary" defense. The Communist party, on the other hand, believe in the mobilizing broad, united-front support groups and legalistic defenses.

The most public aspects of the controversy died quickly. After the Newton-Cleaver split, the Oakland-based Panthers began to retrench and rebuild their shattered alliances in the black community. Huey Newton publicly affirmed the Black Panther party's support for Angela Davis and her defense committee.

What lingers is an undercurrent of suspicion, particularly among white radicals, about the motives and politics of the committee. Much of this centers on the committee's relationship, or lack of it, to Ruchell Magee. He, after all, is the lone living symbol of Aug. 7, which the committee seems to want people to forget--even though Angela herself has praised the courthouse shootout as "an insurrectionary act."

Speaking of the committee's official coolness toward Magee, a young radical lawyer said, "How much of this is the ideology of the C.P. and their political line of the united front, and how much she approves of, I don't know. I have a feeling she is more radical than that. But they certainly give you a strong feeling that they are going to steer clear of Magee."

Such feelings are fed by every reported instance of friction in the courtroom between Magee and the Davis lawyers. He has, several times, denounced them openly in court for failing to support some of his motions. On one occasion, he managed to disqualify a judge, just as her lawyers were getting ready to argue substantive pretrial motions. Their annoyance with him was obvious. Outside the courtroom one of her attorneys commented on "the irony of this unlettered man," raising such complicated legal points. At a National Lawyers Guild meeting at which Margaret Burnham was speaking about the case, someone in the audience asked why the committee wasn't doing more for Magee. Alan Brodsky, another of Angela's lawyers, started to reply by reminding the audience that Angela is innocent. Afterward, he explained that he did not mean to imply that Magee was guilty, but some people felt damage had been done to Magee.

Sandra Close, a local radical journalist who has taken an interest in the Magee case, is convinced that incidents such as this one reflect a widespread attitude. "The whole idea that has been pervasive throughout this case is that Magee is finished, that his goose is cooked and he is going to the gas chamber," she says. "That has enabled people to put the priorities on Angela Davis. No one in that courtroom is on his side. He stands alone. He isn't a celebrity. He represents poor people who have to get by on their instincts and their cunning--who, when they are trapped and backed into a corner, like he is, have to learn, on their own, how to survive. If there had been no Angela case, no one would have cared if Magee was guilty or innocent."

The committee, sensitive to the increasing criticism, has been going to considerable lengths of late to express solidarity with Magee. In court, the lawyers support his motions more frequently. In a recent regional conference of West Coast defense committees, national publicity director Baker made a speech in which he said, "We must recognize that Ruchell has educated all of us"; he spoke about the necessity of expanding the narrow defense of Angela into a broader movement to defend prisoners such as Magee. So far, thought, this has not happened. The Magee committee functions without any material support from the Davis committee. It is clear that the broad base of support for Angela would be undercut to some extent if there were a "United Committee to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee."

A good deal of the friction has to do simply with the objective differences in their respective current legal predicaments. Since Magee is already on a life sentence, he is desperately flailing about, using every legal maneuver he can think of to dramatize his plight. He is in no hurry. The Davis attorneys, in contrast, obviously want the proceedings expedited at this stage. Their client has been kept in solitary confinement for six months without even having had her substantive pretrial motions heard yet.

That is why the committee made a strategic decision several months ago to focus on a broad political campaign to secure bail. A petition addressed to the California Supreme Court, on which they still hope to get a million signatures, is circulating around the country. The petition compares her case with that of Lieut. William Calley, pointing out that although she has never been convicted of any crime (or even arrested prior to the current case), she is "held under punitive conditions of detention while awaiting trial, and Lieut. William Calley, a felon convicted of the premeditated murder of more than a score of Vietnamese civilians, is released to his own quarters while appealing that conviction."

A major role in the bail campaign was played by David Poindexter, the "mystery man" who was arrested with Miss Davis in New York and subsequently acquitted in Federal District Court of aiding and abetting her flight. Poindexter went on a major speaking tour in the Midwest and the East. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League and the California Federation of Teachers came out in favor of bail.

With Angela out on the streets, many of the ambiguities about the case might be resolved, and the conflict with Magee could be tempered. She would be free, presumably, to speak out, and would be in a better position to help Magee if that is her inclination, as many people believe it still is. The lawyers could afford to take a little more relaxed attitude toward the pretrial process and thus to Magee's own efforts. She would also be an enormous asset in rallying more mass support to the defense.

When a bail hearing was finally held in early June before Judge Richard E. Arnason, the latest judge in the case, the defense presented stacks of petitions and several bound volumes of resolutions and statements favoring bail from countless labor groups and prominent individuals. Arnason seemed sympathetic to the lawyers' arguments and their hopes were high. Later, the county Probation Department also strongly recommended bail for Angela. But on June 15, the judge ruled against her release, indicating he did not think there was a risk of flight but that the law prohibited bail in her case. He also stayed all further state proceedings until Magee's petitions for removal to the Federal courts were disposed of. Thus, no one is even talking about a trial date yet.

Davis committee members and supporters were visibly disappointed as they came out of the court. An angry Franklin Alexander told a quickly assembled press conference that this was no the end of the effort to get bail. The lawyers were going to appeal but, more importantly, said Alexander--to shouts of "Right on!"--"the only place justice is going to come from is the streets. Ours was a method of bringing together the legal and mass struggle," he explained. "But the scales are unbalanced now, and we're going to have to go into the streets in Sacramento to see that justice is done."

Sol Stern is a freelance writer and a contributing editor of Ramparts magazine.

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