The Long Road to Angela Davis’s Library

Photograph by Visions of America / UIG via Getty

Who’s to say when the turn from girl to woman happens, or what’s in between, in that fold, which one might also call a fount? For some, it happens as early as thirteen, but I was a late bloomer. When I arrive on the West Coast—pouring myself from the Greyhound bus, green with sickness, at twenty-two—I, this fount, am also untapped. San Francisco comes to me, a dark crevice, downtown where the wind blows, and I am not thinking at all about gender or a plight, or about being of a darker hue, but I do feel explicitly young, as in tender. It’s apt that I caught some kind of flu on the bus and then spent the next five days at a sweet new friend’s apartment, sleeping on his sofa. The ache of transformation. What I did not and could not know: it would take me exactly two weeks to visit all the lesbian bars in town, even though I had a boyfriend en route from Connecticut to meet me. (He was driving his prized Toyota Celica and mailing me letters along the way addressed to Peanut, in homage to the David Lynch film “Wild at Heart,” which we both loved.) I could not know that, long before my year’s contract was up, I would quit the job I’d competed mightily for (against bright-eyed white kids from Brandeis, Swarthmore, Williams, and the like), co-directing the canvassing office of an environmental organization. Suddenly, the earnest environmentalism I was so good at spouting seemed pointless and stupid. And I could not know that meeting Angela Y. Davis, the public intellectual who was once a leader of the Communist Party USA, an associate of the Black Panther Party, and one of the F.B.I.’s “ten most wanted,” would help me to understand something that my experience made me ripe for, but that I hadn’t yet accessed. If I was the fountain, she was the crank.

I was raised in a small, box-like house in a residential section of a city whose most vigorous stage has long passed. Our house, when I was a girl, was located in one of those sections of Hartford that changed quickly, overnight it seems, from mostly white to mostly black. My family never talked explicitly about this shift. Instead, my father would say, “You know, another house down the block was robbed last week, and you know who did it.” The implication, obvious to us, was that the niggers did it. That this neighborhood was indeed getting too black, which meant more crime—which meant what exactly, because we were black, too? My father was a dark-skinned man from the backwoods of Florida, with the bold remnants of a country-ass accent, tragically undereducated. I think he finished high school, but that’s it. My mother earned a B.S. in biology from Bethune-Cookman, an all-black college in Daytona Beach just around the corner from the projects where she grew up. This achievement was a first in the family. Though my mother never said that the niggers did it, she was fond of the theory that things were better for black people when segregation was wound tight. “We stayed in our neighborhoods, they stayed in theirs,” she’d say. “We had our own schools, grocery stores, and churches, and back then the black community was strong. We weren’t killing each other and dealing drugs.”

What better motivator than survival to keep one in her place? (When I asked my mother what she was doing during the civil-rights movement, or during the women’s movement, she would say, without affect, “I was at work.”) My parents struggled financially. They purchased our three-bedroom square house in 1974 for twenty thousand dollars, with a thirty-year mortgage. My brother and I mostly took care of ourselves during the days after school, if you can call what happened to each of us “care”—but that’s another story. The fact that my parents worked all the time, had accumulated little or no savings, and had a mortgage payment of probably only a few hundred dollars tells me something about the paucity of their paychecks. When my father died many years after we moved into the house, long after I had gone to college and begun my career as a writer, he left a drawer full of spare change that I believe wasn’t meant for us but was, instead, a good-faith gesture toward remaining alive. My brother and I split the contents of the drawer.

When you’re poor or working-class in America, you’re not inclined to believe that you’ve been done some great injustice. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, a woman, fresh off the boat, or just washed up in a deflated inner tube barely clinging to life. Somehow, messages of worthlessness, of blame and shame, get caught up in our imaginations, even though those messages are only obliquely legible in the rhetoric of American opportunity. They go something like this: “Why should we help these people who won’t help themselves?” or, “We should give them a hand up, not a handout.” The poor become so predisposed to believe that we are at fault that the judgment inherent in this message begins to feel like part of our own thoughts. We believe that we are somehow deeply lacking whatever it takes to make and save money, or just damned from some pre-birth curse. I believe this about myself at this very moment—that there is some deep flaw in my character preventing me, no matter how much money I actually make, from accumulating wealth. This feeling persists and pierces through my opposing piece of knowledge: that wealth in America is an inherited enterprise, even if there are those rare souls, those bootstrap fools who are able, despite all odds, to make it. In 2007, the median household wealth for single black women in America between the ages of eighteen and sixty-seven was a hundred dollars; it was almost forty-two thousand dollars for white women, and almost forty-four thousand for white men.

I do not think of my mother as a political person. She has never described herself as a feminist, even though I believe that she believes in women’s rights. She has never been to a protest march, though she may have signed a petition or two. She goes to church every Sunday, or almost every Sunday now that, in old age, her mobility is limited. In her thirties, she was the kind of woman who worked all day—“on my feet,” as she liked to say—as a day-care-center teacher, chasing around other people’s children, and then arrived home, underpaid and exhausted, to attend to my brother and me and make us balanced meals. One night, when I was by her side, my hand in hers, her other hand clinging to her pocketbook, she was robbed of her week’s pay in cash, at gunpoint. It was the first time I’d seen my mother cry.

Escape comes when I’m twenty-two. I pack what I can load into the shipping compartment of a Greyhound bus, and with a thousand-dollar graduation gift from my parents I head West to California. It’s all the money I have, probably all the money they had. I was a self-defined environmentalist and a feminist, with little race or class politics to speak of, though I did once have a “Free Apartheid” sticker on my white Datsun B-210. My environmentalism was born of my own youthful optimism and my chance encounter, as a sophomore at the University of Connecticut, with a beautiful, cult-like public-advocacy nonprofit that became the center of my political education for several years. I’d answered an advertisement in the classified section of the Hartford Courant that read something like, “Spend Your Summer Changing the World.” I didn’t even know what the issues we’d be working on were, and I didn’t care. I wanted to change the fucking world.

Let me tell you a little secret: before Christine Quinn was a powerful New York politician, she was a charismatic activist. It was her sitting in the middle of the room—she was then a senior at Trinity College, I believe—when I arrived for my interview. The way Chris talked about our mission—the toxic-waste sites all over Connecticut, the contaminated drinking water, the mutant babies, what’s in your own backyard—was invigorating. We were going to knock our fingers raw on doors collecting donations and membership fees, and advocate on behalf of citizens until the whole state was free from this scourge, this imminent threat. The thing is, I believed every word she said. Every summer for the next three years, I was bursting to knock on strangers’ doors—clipboard in hand, withering under the hot sun or the chilling rain, didn’t matter—for five hours a day. And I was amazing at it. Once, I put my foot in a door as the guy was closing it in disgust and ended up getting thirty-five dollars out of him.

I rose quickly up the ranks of the public-advocacy organization—from canvasser to field director and then, by the time I moved to the Bay Area, to canvass director. I spent my days in the lingo—“hot turf,” “dead turf,” “renewal turf,” “quotas.” It must not be true, but when I try to remember the regional-canvass-director retreat held on a Big Sur campground, I can’t recall a single other brown face among the hopeful. The violent Pacific Ocean smashed against the rocky coastline while my young, bright-eyed comrades and I role-played indefinitely, inventing clever mind-fuck responses to citizens who objected to giving us money after we banged on their doors, inevitably interrupting dinner. In so many ways, who cares? We were caught up in being good at what we did, and self-righteous.

Weeks go by. Three or four, maybe, after the retreat. The shine of my canvass-directing job was dulling fast. After all the doors I’ve banged on, after all the money I’ve pried from the annoyed dinner-eaters, the world is still polluted, the beggars still at the bread-room door. I am supposed to canvass at least twice a week as a director, but I never do. My co-director has a crush on me so is willing to join me at Mission District bars for most of the week when we should be working. Everything in my life is wound into a tight knot. I break up with the boy who wrote to me and called me Peanut, and we weep together. He tells me that he was planning to ask me to marry him. The knot gets tighter. I’m secretly going to gay bars and having sex with a woman. The job I’ve become disillusioned with pays so little—thirteen thousand dollars a year—that I have to beg money from my parents more than once, knowing that they might have to delay paying the electric bill or miss a car payment.

That year, San Francisco, along with the rest of the country, watched the United States bomb Baghdad on TV. We left our televisions for the streets and found tens of thousands of other people marching up Market Street toward the Civic Center. Did the police pepper-spray some people in the face? Did they wait until some marchers were trapped in a short, alley-like street and beat them with batons without cause? Did some younger protesters break off from the larger group after dark, bash the windows of R.O.T.C. centers, and throw burning trashcans inside them? Yes, but in fact I witnessed with my own eyes that the pepper-sprayed and batoned protestors were peaceably marching in order, to say something back to the government, however small or large the gesture of a hand-scrawled sign. Those mandated to protect us, the structures meant to honor and lift, I began to see, were fighting instead to keep silence, to keep the status quo, and to protect the institutions themselves.

After I quit the boyfriend, I quit my job. I was too poor to work there anyway. I came out as queer. I moved into a new apartment share, a small room in Haight-Ashbury. I applied to graduate school. At anti-war protests, I met a group of radical students of color, Roots Against War, who had formed out of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade. So I began my migration from the rigid enclosure maintained by the environmental white kids into the one sculpted by the youth of color. The difference: instead of organizationally induced shared language, the rigor of study groups; older Latinas in southern California who had re-imagined the environmental movement to mean “environmental racism”; and bold lesbians who reminded all of us about the malleability and playfulness of our sexual bodies. For me, getting to know these women—from the mean old bar butches to the newly landed ingénues, black and brown women almost exclusively—was a falling into a neglected self. I was a cliché. It felt so good.

I got a job as a “bottles girl” at Club Q, a queer dance party on Divisadero. One night, I met a woman, the woman who became my girlfriend for the next four years, Shakira, while picking up other people’s liquor refuse. Shakira was taking a course taught by Angela Davis at San Francisco State University, the school where I would end up getting a master’s degree in poetry writing. She and Angela became friends in the way that professors and students become friends, weighted with reverence and with that built-in barrier against too much knowing or intimacy. Shortly after Shakira and I began seeing each other, Angela needed a dog-sitter. She asked Shakira, and I tagged along.

Angela Davis’s house, in the Oakland Hills, is where I got my first sunburn. I have a photo from that day. I’m wearing a white, sleeveless shirt, and my long dreadlocks are pulled back tightly into a ponytail. The sun is as sneaky as it is lip-blistering. In part because we are dog-sitting, and in part because Shakira is friendly with Angela, we arrive early that afternoon for a political barbeque. Angela and some other women are in the preliminary stages of founding what I believe ended up being Critical Resistance, a group dedicated to ending the prison-industrial complex in America. Some notable writers and activists were present. So was Jonathan Jackson, Jr., whose father was shot and killed by Marin County Courthouse police in 1970 after he tried to obtain the release of the Soledad Brothers by taking hostages. Angela looked at us and said something like, “Doesn’t he look just like his father?” We smoked cigarettes on the deck until the gathering ended naturally. People left without staying too long or drinking all the alcohol. Shakira and I were left alone with Angela’s aging dogs for the weekend. Night fell. After a long soak in the hot tub, we browsed the library.

I’d read bell hooks and Barbara Smith and Gloria Anzaldúa before, but so out of context that I could not connect their writings to my own experience, let alone to that of my mother, although she was the woman for whom many of them spoke. To read them here, in Angela’s living room, alongside the wreckage and memorabilia of the Black Power movement, alongside Bettina Aptheker, Karl Marx, and Jürgen Habermas, Huey P. Newton, and Assata Shakur, opened a small door in my sealed heart. To watch all the videos on the Black Panther Party, the Hoover administration, and COINTELPRO, and then, on other nights, to drink port wine from tiny port-wine glasses with Angela at her kitchen island, many of us having just escaped some rally or another, helped us to channel our anger toward a potentially transformative rage. “That we find ourselves in jail, beaten on the streets, or killed is not the work of accident or coincidence,” Angela would tell us. I began to understand—I don’t remember exactly how—that my mother, a working black woman who came of age in the late nineteen-fifties, was not absent from the struggle, as I had once half accused her of being. She was the site of the struggle itself.

I can almost hear Angela’s voice in my ear as I write, when thousands of Americans of all races have taken to the streets to protest the recent grand-jury decisions not to indict Darren Wilson, the white cop who killed the unarmed black teen-ager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Daniel Pantaleo, who choked Eric Garner to death while Garner repeated “I can’t breathe.” Who was the first? It’s impossible to say. The first black body strung up or burned or shot dead? There have been hundreds of thousands of Michael Browns and Emmett Tills in our history (we forget the names of the women and girls). The year after I met Angela, Rodney King was savagely beaten by several police officers while others watched. When the police were found not guilty, we marched against the verdict, as many of us are doing right now. The protesters were angrier at the Rodney King protests than they had been at the anti-war marches, and so were the police. They corralled us on their dirt bikes during the King verdict march. They ran toward us in riot gear, batons raised, and when we scattered like cats they chased us into corners, busted some skulls, arrested others.

What, in the end, is politicization? Is it when you recognize that things are wrong and unjust in the world, or is it when you understand how powerful the powers are that seek to prevent you from changing anything? We learn, over time, that social and political change is made so incrementally that the present can look exactly like the past. The insight I gained during the informal teach-ins at Angela’s took place in the small crack between recognizing injustice and recognizing that the institutions created to protect us often end up repressing us. As Huey P. Newton once wrote, “the only reason I started studying the law in the first place was so that I could become a better burglar.” I consider those years in California an introduction, not only to how things work but to how to live a meaningful life.

Once in a while, Shakira and I would stop by Angela’s house toward dusk. She would pour us a tiny glass of something, and we’d talk about the ways our shared reading fit into the folds of her own life, her experience on the run, on trial, those eighteen months in jail. By then, I was in graduate school and reading a whole other library, from Stéphane Mallarmé to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, poets who were indicating to me that there might be limits to the power of language, but that resistance might come from using language differently. I joined Roots Against War, but only briefly, and organized a bit with the Southwest Organizing Project, a conduit for me between ecologically focussed environmentalism and poor-people-focussed environmentalism. But that’s hardly the point. The point, I guess, is that becoming “politicized” was just a beginning. My beginning was a series of counter-educations, newly illuminated rooms in the imagination, ones that offered me an invitation to slip my mother’s hand into mine.