inside this rotting grapefruit are seeds that hope for a future, to become trees. the beat of my heart, the workings of my mind, the air in my lungs, the tissue of my aching muscles feel like this rotten fruit. i should listen to wise voices, some asking me to check where the rot attacked the fruit, make its autopsy, remember that i created the conditions for this disintegration, i placed the grapefruits in a plastic bag, and instead of storing them into the fridge, i forgot them in a corner in the hot kitchen. i should listen to kind, scared voices, my eighty-years-old mother begging me to say nothing. ‘don't get involved, listen to me, daughter, the phone lines have ears. stop talking about him.’ ‘but how can i? this is not your totalitarian romania, mother. i came here to be safe.’ ‘you are safe,’ mother snaps. ‘you are millions of people. it's gonna be alright.’ people are in the street, protesting. he barricaded himself in his tower, built a wall of sacks of sand. i don't have strength to join them. i've been through enough civil unrest at the fall of communism. i can't i can't i can't live through four years of shame, disgrace, the president hurled on us the laughing stock of nations, war monger bigot. i ask mother tips about baking a traditional romanian cake, cozonac. she applauds my interest. this is what we should be conversing about over skype, not elections. so, woman go back to your kitchen, oven of life you are. the rotten grapefruit goes to the compost pile. i still have two healthy glowing yellows. i zip them up separately and send them to the fridge hibernation. can't i do that too? wake me up in four years? no, i can't. rot would eat my entire pantry. must stay vigilant.
I’ve written this piece in 2007, based
on a recording I made during a work-in-progress rehearsal for a show called Fifty
Sons and Daughters that gathers my college
teaching experiences in New Jersey. I preserve for now its loose structure,
because it intrigues me. Okay… [Laughs] Today it was a
miracle day. It just came out of nowhere. The bottom line is that I teach in
New Jersey, so this college is like an octopus college, has a campus in
Westchester, New York, two campuses in New York City, one in Newark, one in Woodbridge,
but they call it Middlesex, so I don’t understand… but the train takes me there,
so it’s alright, but the bottom line is that we had a faculty day that happens
once a quarter, once a term, when we get together and talk. Only the adjuncts,
like I am, don’t get to talk! We don’t get to talk. We just listen to the full-timers.
[Laughs] But the full-timers from
Newark, not just one of them, but all of them were in an uproar that it’s just
terrible there because it’s a new campus and it’s in a building that,
especially for those who teach in the evening, there is no security there,
there’s no staff, there’s nothing, and one of the teachers was in such an uproar
she was trembling, that students cursed her and said fuck off and go fuck
yourself and fuck and fuck and the woman said she needs to have a phone in the
classroom, she needs to have somebody on that floor because it’s really our of
control and you’d ignore her, thinking that she is just another neurotic
teacher like myself, but another guy who thinks he is a macho guy, he presents
himself like that, he has a pony tail, otherwise he is balding, but he’s a hippie,
whatever, so he also said the same story! That these guys don’t show up to
class and when they show up they expect to pass without pulling their weight
because probably this is the way they were handled in high school!
I have proof it’s true they expect to pass: one of my students, today, this
week, it was conferences week, that is I had students come with their portfolios,
which they posted on the Internet on the Blackboard, this is a software for
teaching for those of you who don’t know, you can put there everything, you can
put their essays there and the machine tells you how much they copied from
another website and if it’s over 30% that means they are plagiarizing and according
to the college policy they are expelled, out they go, but they don’t because we
want their money. Not me, the college.
Anyway, so here is this professor, I don’t know, he has a P in his name,
Phifer, Phifer, the hippie. He says it’s a problem, and there have to be
drastic changes! There have to be drastic changes! And what’s up with the
parking cost, he said. We are full time people, we were told that when we go
there they pay for our parking, but there is no parking lot, so each time I go
to work to teach, I pay $12. This is not fair. I was not told this from the
beginning! Something has to be done.
And I am singled out. I, a mere adjunct! There are a hundred faculty there and
my chair of the department, singles me out, the humble adjunct who ass-kisses
him, he says, but Peter why are you complaining about? For example Ella, and
here I am, it was my lucky day that I freshly washed my hair that day otherwise
they were looking me who is this pitiful creature sitting next to Tom, Tom is
the Chair. [Laughs] He says, Ella,
for example, pays $200 every month to come to work. What is the difference?
Well, the difference is that we were told at the beginning that we will be paid
the parking and here we are and we are not paid and it’s not fair and bla-bla-bla!
Well, I say to Tom, [Whispers] Tom,
it seems these people don’t want to teach in Newark. I want to go teach in
Newark! Because I had a breakthrough with my so called obnoxious students, I
had a breakthrough, I turned them into gentlemen and I’ll tell you how and I
really want to not commute for two hours to West Patterson, I’d like to commute
for half an hour. Send me to Newark! And they sent me to Newark. From 1st of April I’ll be
in Newark.
Now, I was afraid that maybe they’d shoot me, maybe it’s dangerous, but it
doesn’t matter, I go to Newark, but the thing is that all of a sudden I was so
popular, all of a sudden I had three classes to teach in Newark, because nobody
wants to go there, then somehow one of the classes didn’t come thru because it
was too early, and I get a class in Woodbridge, Middlesex. What is this name? Middle
Sex? I do not understand, but it doesn’t matter. The problem is how am I get
myself from Newark
to Woodbridge
to New York City
and how much is this gonna cost?!
It so happened that I had another matter to tend at the New Jersey Transit
Customer Service window, Penn Station. Exactly a week ago I was waiting for my
train in Paterson around 1:30, sleepy, I wake up at 5:45 a.m., so here I am the
wind blowing on the platform. In New Jersey they didn’t figure it out to make
some shelter for passengers to sit during winter, so I have to kill ten minutes
until the train comes. I have the ticket to get on the train, but wanting to do
something during those ten minutes I go to the ticket machine and I punch in
two tickets round trip to Paterson off-peak hours, so give me four tickets, and
give me a receipt because I want to tax deduct it. The machine says give me $18
dollars. Well, should I charge on my debit card? No, I’d rather insert a bill.
So I insert a $20 bill. I’m sleepy. I hear the machine making weird noises and
I should, like any normal person, I should just pull the bill out, but no, I
watch how it rumbles and I watch how my $20 disappears and then to my disbelief
I watch how it does nothing! And the screen says again NJRail and no tickets!
And welcome to New Jersey Rail! Do you prefer English or Spanish?! [Laughs] No receipt, no nothing, and
here is the train and I ask the conductor look, what happened. He tells me to
go to the customer service window when I get to Penn Station and complain to get
my money back, they’ll ask for a ticket booth number. What is the number here? There,
in the corner, 479. Okay, off I go with the train. I get off at Secaucus to
switch trains, wait, here comes the train, then I get off New York City, I go
here, no, you have to go there, then there, and there, finally here I am at the
customer service window.
A very polite clerk, unbelievable handsome on top of it, anyhow it doesn’t
matter because I’m not into it right now, but [Laughs] he was really impressive that I told him, Listen, the machine
got my money! Believe me, you are not going to get away with it. This time I’m
gonna follow thru. Last time when the train just passed by us saying it goes to
Hoboken instead of saying it goes to Suffern and I complained, and other five
travelers complained, and you guys didn’t do anything about it, and I eventually
let it pass because I said I’m stressed out, but now, even if I am stressed out,
believe me I’m gonna come here again and again until you solve it! Please!
He asks, Where do you come from? I say, I’m from Romania. He says, I’ve been
there! And he says a few words, very bad accent. Ce facii? You don’t say ce
faciii you say ce faci? But he thinks
he speaks six languages! Why do you need to speak six languages? Because I
travel a lot. I’ve been to Portugal, I’ve been here, there. Fantastic, but I
really didn’t care about it, though he was so handsome and his hair was all styled
with jell to look disheveled, very not New Jersey Rail, so I thought. For sure
he’s an actor and models and blue eyes and sun tanned, he just came from the
beach from somewhere. And a kind person. And he takes the data down, a I told
him also about the Hoboken situation, you know the train whistling by us, and
bla-bla-bla! and he writes it down too. I want my $20 back! He said for sure
the machine was full. We gonna follow thru. I’ll get you a number for the
complaint case and I’ll e-mail my boss about it.
But it seems he wants to talk about Romania, and I don’t want to talk again about
Romania, how nice and hospitable are people there, and how beautiful it all is.
I’m just amazed how nice is this person, why can’t I find such a nice guy who
is also sane and doesn’t have any problems?
Anyway, today it’s been a week, he didn’t call back, I’m going there. He gave
me his name and number at work, his name is Dutch! I just got rid of this gay
Dutch guy who was leading me on! [Laughs.]
No, I’m not kidding. His name is Dutch! So Dutch is there and I tell him do you
remember me, and my complaint bla-bla-bla? He goes to check in the back office.
Meanwhile I trouble the other clerk to find out how much would cost me to commute
from Newark to Woodbridge to New York City and back. Is it more than two
hundred, because then I need a raise.
Dutch comes back and tells me that this is my complaint number and while
waiting for the resolution would I want, listen to this, would you like to have
two tickets within the state of New Jersey, wherever you want to go? It doesn’t
click in my mind that this is a miracle. I am suspicious, does he just want to
get rid of me? because he won’t get rid of me, and I say I want four tickets to
Paterson and back, that’s all I want! No, he says, look, would you like to go
to the beach or to Six Flags? or something where we go up and down on the
roller coaster, have inane adventures. I say, No, I would not like to go. Now, I
changed my mind, maybe I should go. He says again, Look, you can have two
tickets, and each ticket price is $36 and I can give it to you as a gift, two
tickets to the beach. We have beautiful beaches in New Jersey. What do you think?
I think, well, maybe he doesn’t play a dirty customer service trick one me,
maybe he’s really gonna give me those tickets. And he asks for some ID number bla-bla-bla,
and he brings me two tickets and then I realize: I piggyback on the hospitality
of my Romanian folks, who probably bestowed their kindness on this Dutch guy.
When you go to Romania they baby-sit you around. If they catch you, they
baby-sit you around, they feed you, they put you up for the night to sleep. They
love foreigners to death. So he tries to be nice to me, and I said, Well, that
means that God wants me really to go to the beach now!
And that was my miracle. I was impressed, you know, I told him you are my New Jersey
Transit angel. You made up for a lot of crap that I went thru in New Jersey. He
said he just was sorry I had been put thru this, and he looked sympathetic. That’s
not why we are here. I said I’ll give you a Romanian fairytale book I
translated, so you can brush up on your rusty Romanian, but then I realized
since I translated it, it’s in English…
Anyway, my angel just came out of the blue. It will be adventure. He got to
know my country, so he returned the courtesy and wants me to know his country.
Unless he works on getting good PR for NJTransit, and saw I wouldn’t give up
until I got my tickets.
So then I wanted to give him a poem by Mihai Eminescu, I don’t know why, what
is going on in my head, but here is the Romanian poem, it’s roughly translated:
“Children…” If you yawn again, I’ll stop it. So, “Children We Were…” Now
Eminescu is a famous romantic poet, Our National Poet. Do you have National Poets
here? You have, but you update them. Well, Our National Poet, for the last
three centuries stands in front of the Opera House in a loin cloth, shivering in
wind and cold winter, he’s always there Our National Poet, and he is a
homophobe and a pig chauvinist and a Jew-hater, but he’s THERE! I’m conflicted because I love his poetry. On top of it, Romanian is not my
real mother tongue. Romanian language is my
ethnic-cleansed-shoveled-down-my-throat mother tongue, which I grew up with,
and I loved without knowing that it was ethnic-cleansed-shoved-down-my-throat,
so here it goes: Children We Were the Two
of Us, my brother and I. From walnut shells we made oxen-pulled carts and we
harnessed it on old snails with horns. I know snails have feelers, or antennas,
but in the poem is horns and you
can’t say horny snails. So ox snails…
And he was reading Robinson, and
retelling it to me; I was building the Vavilon Tower… that’s the Babylon
Tower… out of playing cards and I’d wedge
in a silly word or two. Often we went bathing in the wood’s eye…
in the glen of the forest, arriving at
its large pond and swimming to its middle, to the green island. I built out of clay and tall, thick reeds
a proud fortress with tall tin towers, surrounded by walls.
And my brother, being the Emperor, made me his Envoy Extraordinaire. Unyieldingly
I went to the frogs to call them to war--to see who is the strongest.
And the Frog Emperor with a mighty proud oacaca consented, and ordered his
armies to stir the pond and we went into the battle.
Alas, we caught loads of frogs--I think even the King--and we locked them up in
the Black Tower on that Green Island. Towards sunset we vanquished them.
Then we let the frogs free. They jumped with joy. They plunged deep into the
pond, never to surface again. We ambled home.
Then I asked for my reward for my mighty deeds--and my brother bestowed on me
the Northern Kingship over the Indian people.
The white tomcat was my treasurer, Mînzac, my one-eyed Minister--when I ask him
for my dues he meows sinisterly. Cordially I shook his paw.
And the most magnanimous Emperor gave me also a consort, a broom, his daughter
with lascivious laugh, stiff and full of come-ons named Tlantaqu-caputli.
I thanked the Emperor with a humble bow--wearing a mantle made of a kitchen
towel, and I went to my wooden mistress residing in a corner behind the clay
stove, at the saintly monastery.
And oh and wow! she was so dear to me! Gently I spoke to her but she was not
responsive and full of spite I threw her into the fire.
And we romped on the barn roof, over its reeds and straw and imagined we were
on top of the mountains, marching side by side on the drumbeat.
And my paper helmet swelled in the wind. A handkerchief tied on a stick was our
battle flag. We sang: Trarara!
Oh, you went away dreams, away you went! Dead is my brother. No one closed his
eyes in foreign lands. Maybe they're still open in his grave. But often in my
dream his large blue eyes shine, a smile of two purple stars wakes my soul up.
I? Do I still have my childhood heart?
Oh, often as if I hear an old song. As if it's ringing-echoing sweetly in my
ear: World, world and world again! [Sings a Romanian folk tune.]Lume,
lume şi iar lume!
Thank you.
It is still not clear what the piece says.
Besides the small kindnesses it speaks of ethnic politics and writers, caught in
the hatreds of their times. Then it is a nostalgic piece, missing Romania,
missing childhood. When I wrote it I didn’t realize it but the Dutch guy looked
a bit like my blue eyed brothers, the younger one dearly departed.
Well, here you have it: If you’d like to throw a bit of money my way to keep my endeavors going, and also enable me to spread the money to my various causes, witnessing democracy, freedom of speech and faith, and engineering social change thru art being some of them, I’d be grateful.
Louisiana,Summer 2001
This interview is part of I Left You In The Dust, a collection of life stories told by the people of Louisiana to me. For
three years I lived on the Lousiana State University campus, and only upon
graduation, a few weeks before moving to the East coast, I realized I didn’t
know much about Louisiana’s people. So during the time left I endeavored to
meet them. I was surprised how in spite of the bad deal they had, from cancer
alley to hurricanes, they loved their life, and they doggedly endured no matter
what calamities. Tom, is one of them. In his youth he suffered from leprosy, also
named Hansen’s Disease. In Carville, a small town nearby Baton Rouge, the National
Hansen's Disease (Leprosy) Museum is located. Many years ago, before the
illness had a cure, it was the National Leprosarium.
So there was plenty to inquire. Ella: Another reason I’m using
the tape recorder is because as you said I’m not an English native speaker, and
I don’t wanna go home and write nonsense. Tom: Well, don’t feel bad. I’m an
English speaker but because my throat is fouled up even Americans don’t
understand me. Ella: I do. Tom:Okay, good! Good! Ella: You were saying that you’re uncomfortable
with journalists because we don’t keep our promises. Tom: Oh, no, I’m uncomfortable with
some journalists. Often times they want to write what they want to write. And
we have had that experience many, many times. As long as you understand that I
will tell you what I want to tell you, the way I want to tell you, you can ask
all you want. Sure. Ella: Okay. Then maybe we should
start saying that I’m here in St.Gabriel visiting a very kind gentleman who will
tell me a few things about his life and a few things about his experience here.
I would like to find out how you got to Carville, if you feel comfortable
telling me about your life there… [Wall
clock chimes.] Tom: In a car. [Laughs] Mr. Eugene: I warned you. Ella: Yeah. [Laughs] I feel like when I ask this kind of questions that you are
used to hear, it’s like my son feels, my son is very bright, he’s eleven, and
grown-ups when they want to start a conversation always ask him, “How old are
you? What’s your name? Do you like it here?” and his image of adults now is
that these people are very limited, you know. [Laughs] Tom: Sure. I was pulling your chain.
On the other side I have never been accused of being bright. So, let’s say my
life started when I came here, I came here in 1946 from the military, I came
here under guard, I had guards with me to come here, and that was the law then
that a patient from there must not travel by himself, I came here in a car, in a
railroad car, that was rented for me. Yes, and I was fed in a paper plate. And
a military guard was posted outside my door. They didn’t want me to escape, I
was a menace to society. I spent… I stayed in the biggest military hospital on
the West Coast, Letterman Army Hospital, which is at the foot of the Golden Gate
Bridge, and I was confined to one room but at times I could go exercise, if the
powers at be decided that I may exercise, then two guards would accompany me,
and I would walk up to the Golden Gate Bridge and look around and come back—you
know, that was my exercise. I was watched, most of the time. I was in a… I’m
trying to think of,--when you get old you forget what the hell the next word
is,--I was in isolation in a room for
four months without being told what my problem was, and that was a kind of a
pain. They had some pretty nurses working there, and military officers. I think
I proposed to two or three of them during the time that I was there but anyhow
they treated me alright. The system didn’t know how to handle people like me.
So anyhow they brought me to Carville and they said, “Okay, this is where you
will now live. And you wanna change your name.” Everybody changes their name and
my name was Dillinger when I changed it to what it is now. And I spent several
years there, and at some point they decided that I could leave, if I made
certain arrangements, and I left. And that’s the story of my life. [Laughs.] But now you ask me whatever
you want to ask me. Ella:[Laughs] Well, thank you. I love your humor, and I’m very familiar
with it because in Romania, I don’t know if you were aware that we had
communism there. Tom: Yes, I am aware. Ella: And we were watched all the
time, and we were monitored, and the whole country was in quarantine at the
time, we were not allowed to talk to foreigners on the street. It was scary and
still we survived with a lot of humor, I think. We made the best out of the
situation and we turned tables all the time. Tom: Well, that’s my feeling that we
all have a short span of time here, and you spend as much of it laughing about
whatever and you spend as little time crying as you can. At some point you’ll
have to cry, but hold back the tears! They’re slippery! So, yeah, we will laugh
and, you know, when it’s time to go, it’s time to go. But go ahead, ask me
something. Ella: Well, I want to see if you
remember what your reaction was when you saw the human scenery inside the
hospital, and how did you process it… Tom: It was scary. Ella: It was scary? Tom: Yeah, because I was very
healthy, I thought, and I saw people who were not as healthy as I was. The
medicines had not been available for them before I got there. The more modern
medicine who were developed came around the time that I arrived so I had the
benefit of new medicines. That was the plus side; the minus side was they had
these new medicines but they didn’t know the dosage, so their attitude was: if
a little bit is good for you, a lot is better, and often times the high doses
of medicine were more crippling then your problem, your medical problem. So yeah,
I saw people helped there, and I saw people crippled up and the medical
fraternity would never admit to some of these problems. Something that was very
common, the reaction to your medicine. The reaction was… because you had received
so much more medication that it was killing bacilli in your body at a greater
rate then you can absorb and the path of dead bacilli is through the lymph
nodes, so that in time people got all crippled up and lost sensation in their
hands and in their feet, but this is also common to the disease. People… the
most common thing with Hansen’s Disease is that you loose sensation in your
hands, in your feet and you damage them because you’re not aware, because there
is no sensation, and you overdo things. You may hit yourself on the finger and
say, “Well, it’s alright,” but you might have even broken it and you’ll carry
on and you’ll traumatize what you’ve already hurt, even more so and that’s why
people get in trouble that have a problem like mine.
I want to let you ask something or lead me in some direction. Ella: Well, I want to lead you into
the direction of seeing the bright side, the bright side, because I don’t want
to sadden you, on one hand, but on the other hand, somehow I want to know more
about your experience also because I want to sort out things about
stigmatization. Tom: Of what? Ella: Stigmatization. Tom: Oh, alright, okay. Ella: Because me I'm a foreigner…. Tom: Right. Ella: …and things are very tough for
me… Tom: Yes. Ella: …at times, many people welcome
me here but many people give me a hard time, the run around, you know? Tom: Yes. Ella: …and somehow I think that
there is a common thing, you know, the stigma. And I want to hear bright things,
how you turned tables around, so I’d like to find out how was life inside your
community…. Tom: If you’ll excuse me: the
biggest enemy to the patients at Carville were the employees. In Carville, the
hospital was the only industry for this area at that time and a lot of people
from the area made their living there, and they were uncomfortable in some ways
with the patients being there, and they were uncomfortable…
Well, let’s take voting. Patients were not allowed to vote! They were not
citizens! They were convicts, felons, inmates. They were calling them inmates,
and the biggest block of voting were the neighbors and the people that worked
at the station, and the fear was that if they were allowed to vote in a small
community—at the time there was 400 and somewhat patients—well, the community didn’t
have, maybe twice that many people, they were scared that the voting block
would do things that they didn’t want to have done, so I think that was one
reason that they didn’t want us to vote.
And the other was of course that you couldn’t go out. You could get a pass,
like once a year, for a limited time. You had to have somewhere to go to, you
couldn’t just go out and say, “Well, I’ll go get me a hotel.” They didn’t want
that. You could not travel by public service carriers, meaning no trains, no
buses, no airplane. You had to go by car. Private. [Coughs.] The mail that went out was sterilized before it went
out. Coca Cola was in the bottle not in the can, and you could only get Coca Colas
when they broke enough bottles at their factory or whoever brought these Cokes,
if they chipped them or dropped them, Coca Cola would amass these bottles, and
when they got enough of these they would send us say forty cases. They’d take
the chipped bottles and send them to us, and they didn’t want them back. [Clock chimes.] But since they were not giving you a pass, we would sneak out and, it was
against the rules, we even used to go to L.S.U. games! What we’d do is we’d call
a taxi cab and you’d talk—well, we had a contact—it would cost about 15 dollars,
and four or five of us would go and we’d split the cab fare and we’d go to the
game. Now the way we’d deal with the cab, we would tell the cab, “When you’re
approaching the hospital, flash your lights.” We’d be hiding in the bushes, so
when he’d flash the lights then we knew that was our contact and we’d expose
ourselves and he’d stop, take us to town and he would get an extra few dollars
and then pick us up after the game and drop us off to the same spot. We had
many, many contacts.
Sometimes we’d go see Tulane play, in New Orleans, or they had two casinos in
New Orleans—gambling was illegal except for Jefferson Parish—and they had two
casinos in New Orleans and we’d go there, shoot dice or play blackjack, poker, whatever,
and that was fun, it was different. Yes, some of us were stigmatized and I’m
one of them, probably. In fact, you’ve never met an American that’s never been
in a Loews, in a Wal-Mart, Home Depot, McDonald’s, Burger King. I’ve never been
to one of them. Ella: You’ve never been to one of
those? Tom: Every one that I’ve mentioned I’ve
never been to. Ella: You didn’t want to go? Tom: Did I want to go? Not at this
point; it doesn’t make any difference! Maybe at one time I did, but I’m indifferent
about it. With a computer I can buy anything I want and have much fun. She went
to town one day, she goes everywhere, to buy something, with our neighbor and her
man worked at the hospital, and she bought something and the woman took the
credit card and it was accustomed then to ask, “Where do you work?” or “Where
does your husband work?” and she said, “At Carville.” “Oh, my God, how could he
work there?!” I forget what she answered, she gets mad. [Laughs.] I think the woman had a bowel movement, but I’m not sure.
[Silence.] Ella: How does it feel to have
people just freeze? Tom: Well, when I was younger my
tendency, then I was very strong, and my tendency was to attack, or want to
attack. Now I just leave everybody alone and they leave me alone. I’ve got some
neighbors who gave me some plums and I manage well—I say that because my good
friend here gave me some plums—but let me say this to you, it’s very important:
when we moved here we looked for a place that wasn’t far from Carville because
one of the medications I was taking was the now famous Thalidomide. Thalidomide
had great value, it would suppress the reaction but it would make you drowsy as
hell, if you took one a day you would sleep at least twelve hours a day, if you
took three a day, somebody would have to come and change your sheets for you,
it’d really knock you out. So at that time they permitted me to go out, and I
would come and stay here but I couldn’t drive very far ‘cause I’d get drowsy
driving, so anyhow I moved here and I can’t speak for all of my neighbors but
some of my neighbors were very unhappy that one of me had moved here, and the
funny part about it is that their anxiety was that a beatnik, or a flower child,
or a Black, or one of them would move here! I moved here and I was worst
then them. So some of my neighbors were very unhappy, and I confronted one of
them and I told this person that I bought this place for our comfort, and would
not encroach on their space, I would not visit their house, I would not molest
anyone in their family and the retort was, “Well, there’s nothing I can do
about it.” So we lived with that for a few years! and I can tell you even if my
friend was not here, I have the best neighbors in the world. I have never been
so comfortable as I am here. And I can say that from this side to this side,
and for a good distance, all of the neighbors are very warm, and receptive and,
you know, I'm sure some of them may hold back a little bit, but for the most
part there are no finer people living anywhere then here. [Silence.] Ella: Maybe the hospital here helped
them in a way, no? They started to read more about the disease… Be more
comfortable. Tom: Well, I think… I put myself in
their shoes! You see, I said, “Okay, if I was one of them I wouldn’t want one
of me here either!” See, so they might have been the most reluctant to accept
and that was because they weren’t tutored about the problem, they couldn’t
differentiate between… A person could be all crippled up and be negative. A friend
of mine says, “Well, I’ve been cured of my disease but I still can’t hold a
cup.” Well, cured of the disease means that you’re negative but that you’re
crippled. That there’s damage, muscle and tissue damage. It’s just like if you
have polio, it hits you and it cripples you and then you’re negative, but how
do you get over the crippling?
So it was a problem in that people saw patients there first and said, “Well,
they’re curing these people, but I see them still crippled!” and also the most,
not all of the people, but most of the people were not intellectual giants. Some
of them could not read or write, and they were working there, that made it a problem.
The most moving time for me there was we had a party. I’d never seen a party
where you took the staff and the patients and they milled around together. And
the celebration was that a man had worked there for 55 years and his brother
had worked there for 45 years, so they totaled a hundred years of employment. They
didn’t have the disease. And there was a lot of good food and goodies there,
and that made people overcome some of the apprehensions that they had. “Oh, we’ll
have some of this and some of this,” I think everybody partook in the cookies,
in the cake, whatever it was there.
And that was a good experience for me there.
My best experience here was Halloween! Kids go around trick-‘n-treat, well, my
neighbors knew who I was, and they let the kids come and get their treats. I had
nothing to do with that. I didn’t buy, I didn’t give, I didn’t even scare them,
I didn’t even go out, but yet they’d came to the door, to get their treats. And
that was a great experience for me; kind of made me feel, [Laughs softly.] “Well, you’ve been accepted.” [Silence.] Ella: Thank you. You were saying
that you were the generation that they discovered the medicine, so they could
stop it. Tom: Yes. Yes. Ella: So how do you feel about that,
you know? Being in the right place at the right time, how do you feel about
humanity, about doctors, you know, about finding a medicine?
T: Yes. Well, that’s great! You know, I’m glad that they found some things
then, they might not be as effective now as they were then, because they
discovered as they’re discovering now, that you become resistant to certain
drugs, and they always try to keep two or three on the back burner, and so if
you become resistant to one then you go do another one. And because of that,
the mode of treatment now is what they call dual therapy, you get two drugs at
one time, and in case the bug is getting resistant to one, the other one overcomes
that. So, I’m glad, although the world doesn’t get all of the medications that
are available to us here, and [Clock chimes.]
if it was like the Dapsone that was the first drug used here for the disease, very
effective. But there are times when a patient will have a reaction to that
medication, and it might hurt him quite a bit, it might cripple, it may in fact
kill him! It doesn’t happen often, but it can. So that, like in Third World countries
where it’s not easy to get likeClofazimine and give it to a patient. Well,
if he gets in trouble then they don’t have the back up for that. Then let’s say
a Dapsone is a hundred milligrams a day, that’s a max, most of the time it’s
five hundred a week. When they came out with Dapsone they would give them six
hundred milligrams a day, so that people would say, “Well, I’ve been doing
pretty well without that medicine, and now that medicine is making me hurt,
there’s something wrong with this,” and again the aim of the physician was for
you to become negative, weather you lost an arm, or were all crippled up, or
lost your sight, to the physician that wasn’t important. What was important is
if he took a biopsy and there were no microbes there, then you’re well. You may
be a basket case, but you’re well.
That was the mentality of the time. Ella: Do you remember any doctor
that you were fond of or horrified? Tom: There have been some fine ones
here, yes, I’ve had some that I was very fond of, and I’ve had some that were
terrible. I’m trying to think of the bad doctors, and I can think of some bad
doctors but I can’t think of why they were bad. Mainly because they wouldn’t
listen to what you were trying to tell them, what was bothering you. It was, “Well,
if you hurt, here is some aspirin,” and that was it and it wasn’t much relief
for pain. When we had some very warm people there, very fine doctors…. During
the Vietnam War, we had a lot of young doctors. And I always laughed and told
them the government said, “Either lepers or Vietcong; what do you want?” So
they chose the lepers, and left the Vietcong alone. So we had some fine doctors
that were scared of the Vietcong, but were nice over here. [Silence.] Ella: I imagine that they were,
having in mind the lack of information at that time, I imagine that some of
them were brave, more special human beings… Tom: I’m sure, I’m sure… You know a
lot of the information that got out, we have to thank a patient for that, Stanley
Stein, a patient that was there that was anxious to get some information out,
that things were not as bad as they appeared and he gave his time, his
knowledge, and all to get the word out. And he was recognized as having done an
excellent job. Ella: How did it feel that you were
in a hospital, and at a certain moment you, the issue got so much attention,
that a few of the patients turned into little celebrities? Tom: Oh, it didn’t bother me at all.
I have always been behind the scenes, I’d rather pull strings then in upfront.
No, I’ve never looked for the applause, the stage. No. I was glad that somebody
was doing something to help everyone. The times that I have exposed myself I
was very reluctant to do it, and no one else wanted to do it or whatever and
some time I have spoken to a congressional committee about problems there. But it’s
not anything that I wanted to do… You know, how they say in Bulgaria: you gotta
sink or swim. Well, yes to that: either you gonna paddle or you gonna go down
and make bubbles. So… Ella: I'm like that now. [Laughs.] Tom:[Laughs.] Okay. Alright! Ella: I’m moving to New York City
and I have no connections. Tom: Oh, no, no! I lived in New York
City for years, and you’re going to make it good. You know why? I'm going to
tell you why. Because you sound like a Jew. Ella: I sound like a Jew? Tom: Yeah. Ella: How come? Tom: Just believe me when you get
there, you gonna see. And you just get yourself a Star of David and tell them
you belong to the tribe. Yeah, you’ll have no problem! New York City is nothing
but a bunch of foreigners. Ella: A bunch of what?! [Laughs.] Tom: Yeah, a bunch of damn
foreigners! [Laughs.] You’ll do fine.
Mr. Eugene: I call them Yankees. Tom: No, those aren’t Yankees. I
know Yankees. Those people don’t know what the hell a Yankee is. If you leave
New York City and go up to Connecticut, I’ll show you some Yankees, but not New
York City. So many foreigners have come there that all of the natives have
moved out. [Ella Laughs.] Yeah. You
know, New York City has eight million people in it, but the metropolitan area
has twenty million, so those that were there moved out and let some others come
in. Except for Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, they’re all foreigners, and it was
really pretty much always like that. The Italians came and some moved out, the
Irish came and some moved out, the Blacks came and some moved out, Puerto
Ricans came, they came by the millions, and then there was other Caribbean
islanders. Dominicans and all of that… Ella: I understand that also at
Carville you had a mixture of cultures… Tom: Yes, we did. Ella: So how did it feel? Tom: Most unusual, I thought, there
weren’t many killings. It really surprised me in that given these different cultures
that people didn’t attack each other more then they did. Most of the attacks
that I saw were the same culture to the same culture: Filipino to Filipino,
Anglo to Anglo, most of the time. Surprising. These human ethnic groups had different
lifestyles, different foods that they did so well, really, years ago you had
the Chinese house, well, that was at the end, two houses around the corner that
was for Blacks—all the Blacks lived there,--the next house all Chinese lived
there, the next house all Filipinos lived there. The rest was a mixture, we had
a lot of Acadians there, they call them Coon-asses somewhere else, but there they
were called the Acadians. We had quite a few of them there. Before you came we
were trying, I was trying to think and there is only one left, and he is a man
about seventy eight years old, he cannot read or write. He has the mentality of
probably an eight year old, a very nice person and he’s the only Cajun left
there. Ella: So they never mixed these
groups? Tom: Sure, they mixed all the time.
Oh, yeah. They intermingled. You chose who you wanted to intermingle with. We
had a ball team there, and we had teams come in from…. We could not go out to play;
they had to bring in their teams there. We were the only White team that played
Blacks, but we played Whites also. We had teams like one it was sponsored by a
Black fried chicken business called Chicken
Shack and they sponsored a team, and they would come there and they’d bring
their own umpire, but we had no problem with that. They were terrible players
that team, and I think that’s because the bad players would come, but the good
players wouldn’t. But we played some very good White teams. Then we played a
local team. Not that it was a lot of rivalry there, nobody ever hit someone
else with a bat or anything like that. [Second side of tape.] Tom: The person that he’s
speaking about, I knew myself very well, the staffer that supposedly had gotten
the disease. He worked there and couple of other brothers worked there. George
and a couple of others were his brothers, weren’t they? Yeah. And that man
first-hand learned how it was to be treated badly by your fellow men, we knew
how it was because we were treated badly everywhere we went. But here was a man
that was a community member, worked there and a very dedicated employee. And it
comes out with… They would test the staffers periodically to see if anybody had
caught the disease, he came up with a test that I suspect they would call today
a false positive, don’t know, but because of that they wouldn’t let him work
where he was working; now they made him work only with the patients. As a
matter of fact I managed the canteen at some point then, and his job was to
represent the government, because he was a government employee, and be in the
canteen with me at least four hours a day, and make sure that my entries from
the books were correct, so that he was protecting the government, and also he
was protecting the patients. So that was the job that they gave him. He was a
fine individual, and I am proud to have known him. And to add to this man that
was infected, he lived to be close to ninety, and he worked like a twenty-year-old
when he was in his late eighties, he had two or three jobs going, he ran cows,
everything. Fine individual. I’ll never forget him. He would ask me about three
times a week if I wanted to buy a horse. He had about eight or nine kids, and
he had bought them a horse. The horse was defective, and he wanted me to buy
this horse from him that had the pox, but we won’t talk about that, but anyhow
it was a defective horse and he would always laugh. I could have probably
bought the horse for five or six dollars then, but I didn’t. He was mistreated! You talk about stigmatized and ostracized: he
was. Ella: So, in the end he was ill or
he was not ill? Tom: No. He never had a problem, he
just kept having children. No, no, no problem. It was, I suspect it was an
error, a false positive, and because of that they did this to this man; it’s
kind of like putting somebody in jail who is innocent of a crime. If you call
being sick a crime… You know, the only person that thinks is a crime, is the
person that’s sick. He thinks it’s a crime that God imposes on you with this
sickness, you know, “Why don’t you have it? Why me? I didn’t do anything!” [Silence.] Okay… Ella: Nowadays they do experiments
on changing the DNA, so my understanding is that the basis of this is illness
is the fact that very rare individuals don’t have the immunity, so now what
they working are is changing the defective chromosome. So they hope that in the
future they can discover how to cure, you know, hereditary illnesses like schizophrenia
or other dreadful things… I was just thinking…. Tom: Well, I was one of the first patients
that they tried something on called Blood Transfer Factor, and… there are three
types of Hansen’s Disease. And primary it’s Lepromatous and Tuberculoid, and
one kind in between. And the Lepromatous is the bad type, the Tuberculoid is a kind
of a hit-and-run type, and at some point I was in trouble. And someone wanted
to do some research at the University of Rochester, and I had lost fifty five
pounds, and I was sickly and I was suicidal, but for a different reason…. My
want of destroying myself was to keep from being a hardship on her, she was the
one that took care of me and I was very hard on her when I was frustrated with
my body not doing what I wanted it to do, or being in pain, and I’d pop a lot
of pain pills. But anyhow, University of Rochester was doing a study on Lupus,
and they needed a living body, if you want to call me that then. They wanted to
see the similarity for some of the symptoms of Lupus and me. And I said, “Sure,
have at it, this body is no good anyhow.” They did a little bit of research,
but at the same time they tried Blood Transfer Factor, and they had to get a Tuberculoid
type like me. They found one at McGill University in Canada, and I got a donor
from there. And about once every other day… well, first they’d give me a drink
of something to set my thyroid off, and then the morning of the treatment they’d
give me a radioisotope IV. They’d lay me down on an operating table, but it
wasn’t, it was more like an X-ray table and they had these things called scintillators
they’d read radioactivity, and since I’d got radioisotopes, they’d put me here
and they’d give me blood from the Canadian, and at the site when they had done
this, they’d take a reading. And then every hour they’d take a reading to see
if…. There was a fear that it would be so effective that it would kill me. So
they’d come and read and, “Yeah, it’s working!” and they’re measuring in
millimeters, and you know, there isn’t much room and they’d get flustered after
three days that the only sign that they have gotten was one millionth of a
meter of an enlargement. So, “Well, we’ll do it again!” Anyhow they did it. On
two occasions I went there for three weeks at a time and they didn’t transfer
anything that I know of. I think they helped me, psychologically that I had elected
to die rather than come back here, and they assured me that no, this is not how
it used to be. [Clock chimes.] And in
the end the reason I came was I was in such pain, the snow was three feet deep outside,
and I was popping pills every fifteen minutes with no relief, and just
perspiring. And either I hadn’t had the nerve to kill myself or I didn’t want
to splatter myself in front of her, and I had no alternative, I says, “Well,
let’s go back to Carville,” and I said that’s the easy way out. Then she could
go her way and I could just end it here, and the minute I got here they says, “Hey,
Tom,” the minute they saw me, “you’re sulfa resistant.” Well, my doctor in New
York kept calling here for guidance. The doctor that was here in charge that
made all the determinations didn’t want to give them information, and he kept
on saying, “Send him on down here. We’ll take care of him.” That bastard just
died about four months ago, I had nothing to do with him, that doctor, okay! They’d
call him Dr. Bastard… that’s a Bulgarian word. Ella: Really? Tom: No. [Laughs.] Ella: I’m from Romania. Tom: Really? Okay, then it’s
Romanian. [Laughs.] Ella: But you know you were talking
about something that it’s on my mind. Tom: Yes. Ella: It’s a common place but now it
sounds so poignant to me that, that the difference between bravery and suicidal
behavior is very slim. I read this book and I couldn’t understand the psychology
of the doctors that would try to infect themselves, I couldn’t tell if they do
it for the sake of humanity, or because they were very unhappy and miserable
and wanted to risk death. Tom: I doubt that, but maybe there
was some of them. From my experience, from the few ones that I know that had
done that, were fine people and… on the positive side, if you’d look at an actuarial
table of the patients there and in spite of what you hear of all these terrible
things—Betty, whose book you’ve read, is alive and well. I talk to her every Tuesday,
she is ninety one or ninety two and she came there in 1926. When I go, they’ve
separated the hospital in that Carville houses thirty-nine patients and the
rest isn’t actually Carville. The medical treatment has relocated to Baton
Rouge, what’s the name of it? Mr. Eugene: Summit Hospital. Tom: Summit. Okay. And I go to town
and pick up a man who is ninety two, who left Carville in 1949, and I take him
up there for a check up and he’s ninety two. I knew two patients there. One
lived to be a hundred and six, and he died because he fell of a chair. He had
eaten a lot and he fell off the chair and he broke his hip, and he died. The
hundred and four year old man died because the orderly dropped him when he was gonna
get a bath and that was the end of him.
I’ve known several people in their 90s. A very good Chinese friend of mine died
a few months ago, one of the finest people I’ve known. He was about eighty-five
or eighty-six, had a garden as big as this, he had a little job on the side,
and then on top of that when he’d do his little garden and all, he’d go and circle
the golf course at a fast little pace, and then circle the lake, and then come
home and that was his exercise and then he’d do a little of that Chinese
leaning exercises you see, he’d do a little bit of that. And he died also, he
fell. He went to stay for a few days with his nephew who was a doctor—his
nephew’s two sons that are doctors, and the nephew’s daughter who was a doctor
married to a doctor, and they lived in a ranch-style home and in the excitement
of visiting with them he was talking and walking backwards and he fell one
step, and he hurt his hip and they X-rayed him and everything else, and they
said, “We didn’t find nothing,” and, “Go to OT,” Occupational Therapy, and “Give
him the heat,” and all that crap. He put up with that pain for about a year,
and finally one day I saw that he hadn’t eaten, and he hadn’t eaten for two
weeks, he was in such pain, and he’d ask for help and they’d give him an
aspirin. In the end they saw that he was in so much trouble that they turned
him over to a specialist and what they discovered was that when he fell he
broke his stomach sack, somewhere there was a little hole and the acid went onto
his hip bone, and it consumed the cartilage and the bone, that’s why he was in
such pain. In the end he had pain medicine, morphine, twenty-four hours a day, and
he died there in pain with the morphine, because of...
It was kinda the old mentality, that we used to laugh, the patients did, if you
break your arm, you go see the doctor, the doctor says, “Oh, you’ve just got
leprosy, that’s all. Go on, here’s an aspirin!” and so everything was leprosy. And
now, when they see you, “Oh, I don’t know what that is, that isn’t leprosy, go
see somebody else.”
I’ll tell you one more story about the oddity of Carville: it was fenced. There
was a guard, a twenty-four-hour guard with a pistol! Do you know what a time-clock
is for a guard? Anyhow, they had stations throughout and there was a key at the
station and you stick it into your clock, this was old times, and that clock
would register that you had gone to that station, because each key was
particular to itself and it would register the time and the station. And an old
Black patient used to tell me, “Tom, they keep that fence up to keep the
patients from running away.” But at the end there were people, we had a theater
in there and people would come from up the road and sneak in the back, and ride
the bicycles and watch the movies and all of that, and he would say, “Now they need
a damn higher fence to keep the people out!” [Silence.] It’s your turn. Ella: Well, I read in Betty’s book about
the amount of vitality there, maybe you… Tom: Are you talking about sexual
vitality? Ella: Yeah, about romance. Tom: Romance! [Laughs.] Well, you know, I’ll tell you the truth: I knew a man and
I knew this lady, and it was obvious that they had been intimate. See, years
ago the nuns didn’t permit that, the men and the women to fraternize. There was
a tower built on the riverside, and the tower was built to permit the patients
to walkup to the tower. The tower was about three stories high and at the top
was a large room about twenty by twenty, it wasn’t a room it was like a little
porch. And there were fences all around but you could look at the boats go by. And
an old patient that I knew told me that he had come in there in 1901, and he used
to like to entertain the ladies, but there was nothing physical, just waving
and smiling and all that. On Sundays he’d get a rope and tie to it a Victrola,
and pull it up to the top of the tower, he’d play his records and aim the
speaker towards the ladies. To me it’s kinda like the plumage on a male bird,
this was his plumage, he showed them his feathers with that Victrola.
Later on, when I was there, they had one side for women, one side for men. The
ratio of men and women was always at least three or four to one. Fewer women
catch the disease than men for some reason. And so, the women were there and
the men here, and anyhow, back to the man and the woman that I knew: it was obvious
that they had been intimate because she started showing signs, and when this
thing erupted, it was twins! [Ella
laughs.] It was in her room, and he delivered them, so that was an oddity,
I think no one else had ever done that, but immediately those kids were taken
away. They weren’t left there, no! But there were some romances there, and
there were some that went sour. I know that they had brought a lady there who
was a, what would they call that, a liberal spirit or a… you know, a person
that was... Mr. Eugene and Tom’s Wife: A free
spirit. Tom: Okay, a free spirit. But this
was her business before she came there. And when she came there she found a
sugar daddy, and he would provide her with funds, and clothing and food and all
of that. And he was an older man. [Clock
chimes.] I think on the side she would pursue a young man, and he
discovered this. And he put a butcher knife in her. Ella: The young man? Tom: No, the old man. No, no, the
young man, this was just a relief for him, he wasn’t that interested in her.
This was just a physical outlet. The old man, he was splitting the bill, she
had crossed him so killed her right in his room. Ella: He really killed her? Tom: Oh yes, she’s dead, oh yeah. Ella: But what did they do about it?
He was a criminal! Tom: I’m glad you asked that, you
see everybody was a criminal there, because you have the disease! So what do
you do with him? He’s already fenced, he’s got a guard. They sent him out, I don’t
know where he went for a few months, and they sent him back. We had a fella
there who came from Ohio from a prison there, and he had butchered somebody up
and they sent him there! Now he was there and they turned him loose! But there
was a jail on the premises. They had a man there, they called Pole Chained Mac,
and he was there for years and years, and he had assaulted a nun. I don’t know
if there was any damage done, but he didn’t kill her. He was there for years
and years.
There was another man there for years who said to them, “I'm off my rocker.” Okay,
so they put him in there. A brilliant mind, but he said he was and they said, “Well,
okay.” They put him in there. There was a third man, and he knows about, called
Billy Demerit, and he was always in trouble. He’d run away, mainly he’d go to
Baton Rouge. One time he went to Boston. While he was there, he saw a policeman
eating in a restaurant, but the motorcycle was outside. He jumped on the
motorcycle and rode off with the motorcycle. They caught him and put him in
jail. He says, “I’m a leper.” “Leper?! Get out of here!!” So they got him the
hell out of there. He did that many times. But there was a jail there, as a
matter of fact that Demerit guy that I’m talking about, spent so much time in
jail that I went to see the M.O.C. there, the Medical Operations Center, to Doctor
Johansen that was there back in the early forties, and I could check him out and
take him fishing two or three hours a day and then bring him back. We had an
understanding that if he ran off from me, he wasn’t crippled but I would
cripple him, so we got along fine. Ella: What about the nuns? How many
nuns were there? Tom: I think the maximum was eleven,
I think. That’s a number that I remember. There were some nice ones and then
were some that weren’t very nice, some that weren’t very nice to each other.
But some that were fantastic people. They were professional. One thing you must
say about them they never dumped an obligation. If you had something coming at
two thirty, at two thirty you would get it. Never dumped that. So that was a
big plus to those that needed whatever they needed in the way of treatment.
Yeah, very dedicated people, my hat goes off to them. But I hated some of them;
some of them needed squashing bad. But I guess they had good intentions, but for
the most part, fine people. Ella: I met one of the Daughters of
Charity there at Carville, and she thought I write detective stories but I
don’t… [Laughs.] She likes detective
stories. Tom:[Laughs.] I wonder who that was, not Sister Francis De Sales? Did
you go to the museum? Ella: Yeah. Tom: Well, if the museum, would only
be two sisters, Sister Francis De Sales from Wisconsin, and there was another
one…. Ella: Well, we went around the
corridors and we met her, she was taking lunch somewhere. Tom: She was taking what? Ella: The lunch to somebody. Tom: Oh, lunch! Ella: But I think her name was
Francis. Tom: No, Francis would not do that.
The one that would do that was a thin nun. Her name was Sister Dorothy Bachelor.
And there’s one other nun that goes there a lot, the one from New Orleans, the
Italian, I can’t think of her name. She would take lunch there. There’s a nun
there that’s sick right now. All of a sudden they discovered she didn’t feel
good that day, and she’s one of these people that are always going, always
going. And she didn’t feel good, and they did a blood test on her, and they
panicked: her blood count was bonkers. They discovered that afternoon that she
had blood cancer, leukemia. She had the bad one. And they really gave her only three
weeks to live, and they gave her one of the new treatments. They said, “Well,
if she can handle this medication, eighty percent that handle it will live for
a year, but twenty percent would go beyond that.” So they think now that she’ll
go beyond that, whatever she’s been taking has been dramatic. And the power of
the Lord. Ella: So my understanding is that you
were married before going to Carville, no? Or, if you don’t feel comfortable
talking about being married while you were suffering... Tom: I told her, this is what I told
her, “Being married to you is so good that I wonder what it would be like if I
had three wives.” And she says, “Well, if they would do the ironing and the
cooking it’d be alright.” [General
laughter.] I didn’t answer your question I think; you might have to
rephrase it. Ella: Well, how should I rephrase it?
Were you married before being diagnosed with the disease? Tom: No, I’m not. Ella: You’re not married at all?! Tom: Look, we are married. We’re
legally married, yes, yes, okay. We are, aren’t we? [Laughs.] Tom’s Wife: Yes. Ella: You read in those books how
the family abandons the loved one. Tom: Right, right. She didn’t
abandon me. When I came there like I told you I was very healthy and strong,
and I became very involved in the American Legion Organization and I belong to
that and two or three others. One of the great helps to the patients was the
American Legion and in particular the American Legion post in Baton Rouge. Post
137, and we had a post here but it couldn’t support anything, it had no money,
so some wonderful people from Baton Rouge would come and they’d bring food and
they’d bring drinks, Fourth of July, not Fourth of July but other holidays,
they would bring spirits, Schnapps, a big bowl full of some concoction. They
would even hire a band, they would have dancers and help patients in any way
they could. Some of them would even,--when a patient wanted to run away he
couldn’t go out through the front, they wouldn’t let him do it,--but he might
have to go somewhere and it was important, or he just was tired of being there
and the only way to go was to run away. Well, some of these people if they were
approached, they’d say, “Okay, tell me when,” and on that evening, they would
do just like the taxi cab and you would have your luggage and get on; they
would take you to the bus station or to the train and you’d go where you were
going. So they did that and, some of those people that did that was her sister,
and her sister’s sister-in-law, and they were very involved in that, and her sister’s
husband. And she would help and come with them and bring all this stuff, and I
told her I wasn’t a patient, I was a staffer, [Wife laughs.] and I was very wealthy and very amorous. And all of this
sounded good to her, so we got married. And I was a liar for at least three of
those things. At least three I lied about. So we got married in… Mr. Eugene: Where? Tom: You know where we got married?
In Mississippi. And you know what? We didn’t know there were no blood tests in
Mississippi at that time. But yet if they took a blood test and I was positive,
the test wouldn’t tell them that. The test would say positive to something, and
what they would say right away? Syphilis. So anyhow, we got married, and she’s
been calling me a liar since. I had a good time, we’ve been married for almost
fifty two years. And I had a good time for the most part. She’s had a hard time
when I was so sick. I was a son of a bitch, that’s what they say in Sophia or
somewhere. Ella: Bucharest. Tom: Bucharest! [Laughs.] Okay. Ella: Why do you mix it up with
Bulgaria? Tom:[Laughs.] Yeah. [Clock
chimes.] I had a good time and even now as fowled up as I am, even mentally
and physically… I can’t tell you enough, and not because he is here, but I have
some wonderful neighbors. I have friends among the neighbors that don’t even
like each other, but they like me. This man that lived here, yeah, this man
that lived here, nobody liked him for some reason. But he became a friend of
mine, just unbelievable. Mr. Eugene: Do you know his
nickname? Tom: No. Mr. Eugene: Scungilli. Tom: But the man died. He had cancer
of the lung, and I'm very proud that when he was on his death bed for a few
months, and if I didn’t go there he would call me on the phone and tell me,
“Hey, you haven’t been here today.” So I hope that I lightened the load on his
trip. Mr. Eugene: You’d tell him a joke or
two. Tom: Yes, I’d tell him a lot of
jokes, and people want to know where you get these jokes. Women tell me these
dirty jokes. [Laughs.] They’re
terrible. And I just listen and repeat them; I figured they’re not bad if a
woman told me that dirty joke! [Laughs.]
But the nuns don’t listen to me. They go the other way, they say, “There’s a dirty
little man.” They go the other way. No, I tell a joke or two.
Ask me some more. I mean you got… Ella: I fear that you don’t realize
now that this is tiresome for you. It happens to me that as the interviewee
talk, they don’t realize how tired they are. But when I leave the room they
realize how tired they are and they are upset on me. Tom: No, you shouldn’t fear that
with me. No, if I was tired of you I’d tell you to hit the road. I’d walk you
out there. Oh, no, no, I have no problem with that. No, I’m fine and if you
have some more to ask. Ella: Well, I have a few only also my
son is at Mr. Eugene’s house. Tom: Alright. Ella: But I’d like to be back, on Monday
I plan to come back next Monday if you are in town. Tom: Okay, you may, you may, and I
should be here. [End of tape.]
Well, here you have it: If you’d like to throw a bit of money my way to keep my endeavors going, and also enable me to spread the money to my various causes, witnessing democracy, freedom of speech and faith, and engineering social change thru art being one of them, I’d be grateful. New York, August 9th, 2013
When
I was traveling to the heartland of America, in 1996, in a small town’s newspaper
editorial office I shuffled the Newsweek because the cover story was about
bisexuals. The cover photo showed a handsome African-American man who was
suckling his baby through a strange device attached to his chest. I read it
breath taken, but careful that the journalists around the office shouldn’t see
what I was reading, like I used to do in high school when I’d read furtively
novels during the Material Resistance class we were forced to take to make sure
we’d be useful citizens of our beloved communist society. I have a welder qualification
certificate under my belt.
I wanted badly to meet this person. And I did. Three weeks later on a Wednesday
at 5 p.m. I was waiting for Elias Farajaje Jones on a fence in front of Howard
University Library in Washington D.C..
A horrible day. I haven’t eaten anything all day, my braid from the dress I
loved was torn, and my period came unexpectedly. The man I interviewed before
was on a weight diet, and didn’t get the money he need in his mail, so his
voice was feeble and didn’t like to have my tape recorder tucked under his nose,
so I feared it didn’t record a thing. The situation was shitty. I was afraid I’d
make a bad impression on Dr. Elias Farajaje Jones, that I’d blow it and that
nothing good would come out of our meeting.
But I was wrong. My interviewee picked me up on time, and it seemed that he was
excited to meet me too. I told him I wanted so much to meet him and that I was
grateful, again, to God that He arranged all the coincidences for me. He also
said it was really strange that we managed to meet, had I called 5 minutes
later than I did, he wouldn’t have return my call only next day, when I would
have been traveling back to Europe.
At that time I was collecting narratives and interviews for a book, ‘Am I
Too White To Be a Gypsy?’ because I had
recently discovered that one of my ancestors had been a Gypsy, and I wanted to
deal with this news in a public way, since then, in 1996, it was a stigma to be
a Gypsy in Eastern Europe. So I went around asking people about how they dealt
with their hyphenated identities. And this is what Elias Farajaje Jones said: “I always tell my students who never heard about Gypsies, that they are the
blacks of Europe.
“I’m also Native-American, Cherokee. I think that there’s also close parallel
between Gypsy identity and Native American identity. In terms of how people
have viewed Native-Americans in this country and how just like someone would
say ‘Oh, you’re dirty like a Gypsy,’ or say ‘You’re dirty like an Indian! Stop
acting like wild Indians!’” “You don’t look like an Indian.” “Well, we shouldn’t assume things on the basis of appearance because it is
much more complex. Because for example if I would introduce you to my friends
here, because I consider Gypsies to be people of color, I would say that you
are a person of color. People would say ‘But she looks white!’ I’ll say, ‘Yea,
but look at my aunt or my cousin who also might look white.’” While he was driving me to the Union
Station, where we decided to have our talk while waiting for my train back to
Baltimore, we saw something which made me tell him that when I was with my
friends at a gay club in Budapest, the comic number in their striptease show was
a Gypsy transvestite couple, as if gay marginalized people need to further marginalize
others within their ranks.
Elias talked to me kindly and patiently, wanting to make himself understood.
Maybe he knew the effort it took me to acknowledge my Gypsy ancestry. Maybe he
saw how tensed I was not to lose any of the “message” God “delivered” to me
thru his words.
God might look like Elias. He had long dreadlocks, radiant face, serene smile
and a thundering laughter. He was tall and powerful looking, like Rubezahl, the
German wizard of my childhood fairy tales, who was so strong that could carry a
whole forest on his back. He spoke passionately and was amused by my adventures
in America.
And thus he spoke to me: “We were coming to Union Station, and we saw what I would call a
transgendered person, because I don’t know if it’s a person who is taking
hormones, or has an operation or is going to have an operation to go from ‘male’
to ‘female’ gender identity. This was an African-American person and these were
African-American kids. The reaction was one of laughing and the young boys
started to chase, or pretend that they wanted to chase, because I think this
person could just knock them all like that with one hand. But to me it’s like
the thing you said about the gay club in Budapest, that here is a person who is
not only African-American but a transgender person, so that means that’s a
person who is part of an oppressed group within the broader gay community,
within the black community as well.
“Transgender people have been in our community as long as we’ve been here, but
it’s something seen very negatively, as part of the whole homophobia. People
make jokes about this all the time, and has a lot to do with very rigid gender
role definitions, that, ‘A real man wouldn’t wear a dress on the street.’ But if
a woman wears pans no one thinks that a woman is cross-dressing as a man, you
know. I think that our community is - I only speak from my experience -
extremely uncomfortable with talking about sexuality.” “In general?” “Yeah, in general. To talk about it as such. Now, if you listen to popular
music, if you see popular films, they deal with sexuality, but to actually talk
openly about one’s sexuality, about the dynamics of sexuality within our
community, that is a big taboo. That’s why there’s a lot of strange reaction to
the work that I do. My theory is that the dominating culture is fueled by this
fear of the power of the erotic, and it has identified the erotic with all of
those groups that it seeks to oppress: people of color are supposed to have uncontrolled
sexuality, women have uncontrolled libido. You talk about how women have to be
controlled, women don’t have autonomy to control their own bodies, the
legislation makes laws about reproductive rights.
“In particular in the African-American community, because it had been
stigmatized so much, people just don’t talk about it! Because if we talked
about it then, some of us would think, ‘Oh, that will just confirm what white
people think about us already!’ Instead of subverting that whole thing! That
paradigm is not a correct paradigm, so we don’t need to try to fit into it. Maybe
we need to find some way of creating another discourse about sexuality. Does
that make sense?
“I talk a lot about sexuality in terms of relation between sexuality and
spirituality, and the heavy influence of the black church in the black
community and the very stringent homophobia, the sexism, so on and so forth.
For example me, to say that, ‘I’m bisexual,’ and to say it openly in the
national magazine made a big scandal. A lot of people said, ‘But there’s no
need to say that. Why do you need to say that? You don’t need to talk about
these things in public. Everybody knows that everybody does this, that, and the
other.’
“But because we don’t talk about it, what just happened on the street can happen.
We don’t recognize and affirm that there’s diversity of sexual identities
within our community, that sexuality is not something rigid, that sexuality is
something like spirals. It’s very fluid, it moves, it changes. People do
different things with different people, some at different stages in their
lives, others continually.
“One of the reasons that I do the work that I do is because of HIV and AIDS in
our community. Our community has been being affected by it because of the
silence that surrounds talking about sexuality. So you can have a situation
like... Well, let’s say for example: a man who was in jail. While he was in
jail has sex with other men, who maybe was having sex with men before he went
to jail, then he comes from jail and is in relationship with a woman, and won’t
use the condom for having sex because the use of condom would imply - in his
mind - for the woman that he had been having sex with men, or whatever. This
fear of talking about that then puts people at risk. You see? It kills people!
Silence really does equal death. It kills people.
“And as long as the silence is kept, then people can continue to think that
things function. ‘This group is here, this group is there, everybody is neatly
divided and separated,’ when in fact that’s not the truth, either in sexual
practice or identity, or in ethnic identity.
“All kinds of identities: racial, gender, sexual identities are very fluid, and
the systems of oppression that exist in the world have been able to get where
they are by making us think the world is divided into these very strict
categories.
“When we rob people who have diverse identities from expressing the diversity
of their identities, we continue to solidify this kind of binary way of looking
at the world, everything is ‘either - or’, and not ‘both’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’
and ‘and’ and ‘and.’ We might be many things, and we need to celebrate that.
For me the gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity are all very close
in the way in which they function. That just as people think I’m white, or I’m
black, or I’m this or that, or people say I’m gay or I’m straight...
“What is straight actually? You see, one never interrogates what does being
heterosexual mean. One says what does being gay mean, what does being bi-sexual
mean, what’s being lesbian mean, what does being transgendered mean?! No one
ever ask what does being straight mean! It doesn’t have to define itself, just
like being white. So of course when you actually ask the question, it’s sort of
a definition by negation of the other things. ‘Well, I’m not this, I’m not
that.’
“In this country, if you look at the people that are ‘white’ there are a lot of
people that aren’t actually, because they’re made up of other things that
aren’t white at all! But the dominant culture needs to take as many people in
its number as possible. There are white people walking around that think that
they are white, who are actually of mixed heritage.
“And that’s not really talked about a lot. If someone in your position… People
go generations in their family without knowing that there’s Gypsy ancestry.
What that does is: number one it allows you to reduce what the impact and the
importance of Gypsy culture is, by restricting it to, ‘Oh, that’s that group of
people over there that are identified by certain characteristics.’ Instead of
saying there is a whole segment of a population that is actually of mixed,
whatever, and Gypsy heritage. And when you look at Gypsy culture all over the
world, and all the places where it is and all the mixing that has gone on, it’s
not an isolated phenomena and it’s not some little tiny group of people there.
“But then that makes the people in the dominating groups question what is their
identity?! And if their identity is not nailed to the privilege of power that
they have as being part of the dominating culture, because they are actually
part of something else as well, then the whole thing would start to fall apart.
That’s why it’s so much in maintaining these rigid separations, you know?
“It’s the same thing with sexual identities. If you say that, ‘Okay, the gay
people are over there and the straight people are over here,’ and not deal with
the fact that they are... What does it mean when a gay man has sex with a
woman? What does it mean when a lesbian has sex with a gay man, with a straight
man, or with a bisexual man? Or straight people, who maintain straight identity
and the privilege of that but who have sex with people in their gender group,
what does that mean then? What does it mean if someone says, ‘I’m a straight
woman, but sometimes I sleep with women. But I’m straight!’ Well, that means
that straight is not really what one assumes it means, but it never has to define
itself. Do you see what I’m saying? Does it make any sense? You can tell me if
it doesn’t make any sense and I’ll start all over again, no problem!” “No, but I got stuck at... I was waiting
to hear how damaging it is for myself not to acknowledge that I’m partly
Gypsy... I... I’m ashamed of it. I was. Have you been ashamed of what you are?”
“Anybody who belongs to the group that’s not the dominating group, depending on
what kind of education you get in your early exposure in your family, in
school, so on and so forth... I think I was fortunate because I was given at
home a strong sense of my diverse identity - in terms of my ethnic identities -
that I didn’t have to be ashamed of being an African-American, and I didn’t
have to be ashamed of being a Native-American, I didn’t have to be ashamed to
be of Spanish and Irish descent. There was nothing to be ashamed of in that,
and that if that was a problem it was with people’s perception, it wasn’t with
me.
“But I think that was exceptional. A lot of people didn’t have that. They heard
all these negative things about their heritage, like for example here people of
Jewish ancestry. And the power of trying to assimilate kills in the individual
the possibility to understand what all of our pieces are, you know? A lot of
negative messages about being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered. Even
questioning what your sexuality is, it’s perceived as something negative by a
lot of people.
“I think I, like probably everybody who grew in this culture, had moments when
I was like, ‘Okay, I don’t want anybody to know, I won’t say it,’ or dara-rara-ra. It takes a toll, psychologically
and spiritually, the amount of energy that you spend trying to be somebody
other than who you are. Like the energy that it took you to spend to find out
actually that you are a Gypsy, and what that meant and how it was that you had
raised a child for three years without him knowing who he was. I think it’s
very damaging on a very profound level.
“If in your upbringing, if Gypsy culture had been discussed, if you knew you
were of a Gypsy descent and it was discussed as something positive, when
someone would have made some Gypsy joke or something, you could have said from
a place of strength, ‘You don’t talk like that in front of me, I don’t
appreciate that, I’m Gypsy.’
“The silencing of the various pieces allows oppression to continue... Your life
is your work, you know? and what you are writing about here, is really is about
you,you know? and as you
write it, it helps you to become more fully you, is that clear? Okay!
Question?” “Well, my boyfriend is bisexual, but he
won’t acknowledge it. He’s old school. Just when he’s drunk he says what’s the
difference, men, women, just the same!” “To me the sad thing is that the act of speaking, of transforming your
silence into action, is something that has a lot of risk involved in it! But do
you live your life without taking risks? In the Hebrew Bible there’s a story of
Queen Ester. She was living in the Persian Empire and she was married to the
emperor, but he didn’t know that she was Jewish because her uncle had told her,
‘Don’t tell, don’t say you’re Jewish because if you say you’re Jewish you’ll
never become the queen!’ So after she became the queen there was a plot to
exterminate all the Jews in the empire, so her uncle said to her, ‘Please go to
your husband and tell him he can’t kill the Jews.’ And she said, “I can’t do
that, because if I do that, he’s gonna ask why do you care about these people?’
and then I have to say, ‘I’m a Jew,’ and if I say I’m a Jew, then, then he’s
gonna... he’s gonna kill me! I won’t be the queen anymore,’ so on and so forth.
And the uncle says to her, ‘Don’t think that because you’re married to the
emperor, if something happens to the Jews, that you won’t be... your silence is
not gonna protect you.’ So she said, ‘Well, but it’s against the law to go, you
can only go at certain times before the king, and I’ve already gone, I can’t go
again...’ And he said, ‘Well, maybe the reason that you became a queen was
because this was going to happen and you could save the life of your people.’ And
so she said, ‘Alright, let me think.’ And she said she’s gonna fast with her
women and, ‘at the end of the fast I’ll go to the king, and if I die, I die.’
And what happened was because she went the massacre was stopped and didn’t take
place. She was able to save not only her life, but the life of the Jewish
people as well.
“To me that’s a very powerful story about what it happens when we let ourselves
be silenced. Because you can’t really live when you are always worrying about
when it shows up! ‘Oh, somebody’s gonna find out that I’m really a Gypsy, that
I’m not really Hungarian or Romanian!’ or ‘They’ll find out that I’m really
bisexual!’ or ‘They’ll find out that I’m lesbian!’ And you have to change
everything all the time when you talk about people and that kills you! Little
by little. The risk involved in living that kind of hidden life is that you
don’t avail yourself of what community there is available for you. There is a
gay community, there is a Gypsy community, there is a Jewish community.
“Sometimes the power of the hatred is so strong in silencing us that we think
oh! all these horrible things are gonna happen to us, but we don’t think about
the positive things that happen as a result of that. You don’t think of people
saying, ‘This helps me to live my life better, this helps me to understand who
I am.’ It’s really hard for people who live in isolated communities too. If I
would live in a small town, everybody would know all of my business probably...
And with that visibility comes vulnerability! But at the same time there comes
a freedom and also a chance to help other people.
“We have this crazy idea that the work of liberation is easy work. They will
say, ‘Oh, those people can do it! Let, let Ella, she can do it! She can talk
about being part Gypsy. But no! I don’t need to, as long as she’s doing that, I
don’t have to do it. And she’s at the university, and she’s this and she’s that,
and she’s more capable of doing it that I could ever be to do it!’ And that
takes away from us the possibility to take that risk as well. When people tell
me, ‘Oh, no! You’re so visible and you’re vocal and you let everybody in the
world know that you’re queer! We’re right behind you!’ I say, ‘No, the only
reason I do it is to open the doors so that you can speak as well!’
“It’s like... and I keep jumping back to the ethnic thing, or to the gender
thing because I see them being inextricably connected, in the way we view
them... You cannot continue to have oppressive policies towards the Gypsy
population, when you acknowledge that a large part of the so called non-Gypsy
population is actually part Gypsy. It challenges then the way you look at Gypsy
culture. You have to acknowledge that it’s not just some little tiny thing.
“Bisexuality does that same thing too, you can’t just say like... ‘Well, they’re
that little group over there, that’s a certain percentage of the population.’
When you acknowledge that there’s people throughout the population who have
experiences with people of their gender grouping, you can’t continue to say, ‘Well,
we are the majority and they are the minority,’ because it’s not really true!
“That’s why I don’t like personally using the term ‘minority’. Because it’s
based on this concept that there actually is a majority! But when you look at
it the majority is not really the majority! And that’s what frightens people.
But that can only become clear as people speak their stories. Back to your
friend for him to speak his story, to help other people speak their story as
well and help him also find a community so he doesn’t have to live in isolation,
or... ‘Okay, don’t tell anybody,’ or ‘Don’t call me at work!’ All these things
are just! Ha!
“I don’t know how people do it, I just don’t know how people do it anymore!
There’s a funny thing here: people would say, for example, if I’m talking to
somebody who’s in the closet, I’m talking to him at work. And when I’m talking
about their boyfriend they’ll go, ‘And then they called me,’ and I’m like,
’They?!’ I’m like, ‘How many people?!’ And then I’ll go, ‘Oh, you’re at work,
right?’ Because I don’t know where they’re calling from, and then I realize, oh,
he’s at work and he can’t say ‘he called me.’ But to say, ‘He called me, and he
came to my house,’ doesn’t mean anything! A man can call another man and come
to a man’s house without them sleeping together, but when you are in this fear!
You think immediately, ‘Oh, everybody’s gonna think that that means that this
is my boyfriend or my lover.’ You know what I’m saying? So we give so much of
our own power to this fear and I just think it’s a waste of life.
“I do a lot of work in the AIDS community and I’ve seen people who have spent
most of their lives not saying who they are. And they’re forced to say it
finally towards the end of their lives. How many have said to me when they’re
dying, ‘I wish I had lived my life the way I wanted to live my life, and it’s
too late now,’ You can imagine living like 30 years, 40 years pretending
constantly that you’re somebody else to have people appreciate you? And what
does it mean for people to appreciate you, when they’re not really appreciating
you, because you’re not letting them know who you really are, and maybe you
give them a chance to expand their horizons... That’s what I think... Is that of
any help?” “Yes... Would it be interesting for you
to talk about the pressure the African-American community puts on gay people or
bisexual people? In the Gypsy community, they don’t even talk gladly to them!” “In the Gypsy community they don’t talk to gay people?” “Yes. They don’t want to work with them,
even with white gay people. Male Gypsies don’t want to hear of this. One said
that the community would make them problems.” “I think it’s a combination of things. When you are in a group that’s being
perceived as being ‘minority’, ‘We already have enough problems with Gypsies,
people don’t take us seriously already, we’re not going to work in alliance or
coalition or solidarity with those white gay people, because then white people
in power will go like, “Oh, see!...Look who… look the people they’re with!
They’re nobody.”’ If you were a gay Gypsy, or a bisexual Gypsy, a lesbian
Gypsy, transgender Gypsy is like being a black gay person, lesbian, dara-rara-ra. Our cultural group wants
to say, ‘That doesn’t exist, you can’t be really black and be gay. If you are
black and gay, that’s because you’re influenced by white people.’ That’s a lot
of what’s said in our community.”
“One of the things that I like to do, is to say, ‘Well, you and I interpret the
Bible literally on that, okay... What do you think about the fact that white
people during slavery used the Bible to justify slavery? That they could open
the Bible and say, ‘Here, this says “Slaves be obedient to your masters!” They
could use the Bible, they could open it in Genesis and go to the story of Noah
and his sons and find a story of Canaan and say, “Oh, that means black people
are supposed to be slaves.” You don’t agree with that, do you?‘ ‘No! We don’t
agree with that!’ ‘Okay. You don’t agree with that. Well, then why do you say
that you can use the Bible against gay people?’ Which it makes people very
uncomfortable because, when someone shows you something faulty in your logic
and you know that it’s faulty, what do you do? Usually you get more strong in
your position, in reaction to that.
“If the black church in United States - which has certainly been an important
social agency, in terms of change, of organizing the community - had early on
said, ‘It’s our responsibility to struggle on the side of those people who are
perceived as being oppressed by the main culture. That your oppression as a
woman, as a Gypsy, is my oppression. That as long as you can’t be totally who
you are, I’m not totally free...’ if we had done that, then I think maybe our
community would not have been as devastated as it is by AIDS. But it was like,
’Well, those men having sex with men, that’s a sin, the Bible says it, and this
is God’s punishment!’
“And on top of that then - because of those attitudes - people don’t talk! They
won’t talk about their sexuality! They’ll go to church, every Sunday. For
example D.C. is a very church-going city, a lot of churches are full on
Sundays. And in a lot of churches there is a lot of homophobic preaching. And
lesbian people, gay people, bisexual people, transgender people would go and they
won’t say anything. They just suffer in silence when the priest, their pastor
or preacher, begins this, ‘This is wrong and that is wrong’ and dara-rara-ra, and no one would challenge
it. So again that silence allows it to continue, to perpetuate itself, and a
lot of people are very miserable because of that.
“At the same time HIV statistics and many other things indicate that there’s a
lot more fluid sexual activity going on in our community than people want to
acknowledge, because they think to acknowledge that is to confirm the white
dominating culture’s attitudes about sexuality amongst black people. And
instead of saying, ‘We don’t care what your attitudes are, we need to be honest
so that we can save the lives of our people!’ we buy into the silence. Not into
the silence, but into these negative messages that are being constantly sent
out to people.
“So that even in 1995 the number of people within the black community who are
actually visible and vocal and out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or
people who question their sexuality, is very small, but there’s a whole lot
more underneath that... It’s very dangerous for our community. The silence is
very dangerous and it’s religiously fueled. On one hand you have the black
church saying it’s wrong, and then you have the black nationalist movement,
Afro-centric rigidly defined, saying that, ‘That’s a white thing, black people
don’t do that, if you do that kind of stuff, it’s because you’ve been too
influenced by white people, you studied in Europe, or you studied here or you
did that,’ so on and so forth, and that silences people. That makes people
afraid to say, ‘No, that’s not true, this is who I am.’ And it’s a bad
situation, it’s really bad. But it’s made even worse by this fear of the
reaction of the white dominating culture. If that weren’t there, we would be
very different in our expression. But the fear of that, which has formed for
centuries the way people think... It’s like it’s an embarrassment to our community,
when somebody says, ’Well, I’m a lesbian,’ dara-rara-ra.
“There are a lot of people in the black community, in the nation, who are in
very visible positions that a lot of us know that they’re lesbian or gay or
bisexual, transgendered but they’ll never say it publicly, because they don’t
want to ruin their reputation. But then, on the other hand, you have these
people saying, ‘Well, you know, real black people aren’t lesbians, a real black
woman is not a lesbian.’ When you actually have these people who are like icons
in the black culture, who are, but who won’t say it so that they can
maintain their credibility in the broader community. I think that’s very
dangerous. And it’s sad, it makes me really sad, it really does, because it
kills people, you know... it kills people.
“We talk about the Holocaust, and we talk about this and that. Dominating
cultures really have this idea that if you don’t belong to their group, they
can kill you! ‘You’re Gypsy, you’re nothing, we get rid of you! We can beat you
up! If you’re a gay person, you’re not a real person, therefore we can just
kick your ass on the street, or kill you or do whatever!’ And always have
people like, ‘Wow, he killed these Gypsies because he was defending Hungarian
honor, Romanian honor, he killed those gay people because he’s a real man!’ I
think it’s really frightening.
“We’re at a point now where there’s a lot of tension around that, because one
of the things affecting the black community is the rise of the radical right in
the United States that is very religiously fueled. These are usually white
conservative Protestants. They have discovered now - because a lot of black
religious communities are very conservative religiously, literalist in the way
they read the Bible - that they can make alliance with them, and through them,
begin to attack the other communities and that’s...
“The right is rising in this country. It’s coming out of closet. It’s like,
‘Okay we’re here, we have money, we have power. We wanna stop this, we wanna
stop that, we wanna stop!’ And they begin to take things progressively from community
after community after community. They go after women’s reproductive rights,
they go after gay rights, they go after affirmative action, they go after
immigrants coming into United States, and...
“But the problem is that all these diverse other groups instead of saying that,
‘We need to be together,’ they’re like, ‘Well, we don’t want to have anything
to do with that! That’s, that’s women’s issue! We don’t want to have anything
to do with that, that’s a gay issue!’ When the principles beneath them all are
the same and if we were together, if we were united, then we could resist, but
everyone is like, ‘This is my oppression. My oppression is worse than yours!
Your oppression can be... You can never understand my oppression!’ ‘Oh, you can
never understand my oppression!’” “Can we switch to talking about your
teaching?” “You’re in charge, whatever you want we can do. And I probably, in about 20
minutes, I need to go. I got my doctorate in Switzerland on deconstruction of
black identity around the various concepts of Africa.
“In 1986 I was offered a job at Howard, right after I finished, so I came here,
and I did my first work around African centered identity - looking at Africa as
a positive value - regain people to look at Africa as something important,
because that was not a lot of people’s attitude. Then I felt that it was
important to deal with diversities in our community and I was very concerned
about HIV and AIDS in our community, and so I began to teach a course of Sociology
of Religion - I have the Chair of Sociology of Religion and the History of Religion.
In Sociology of Religion, first I was using the European theorists, and I
thought, ‘Well, it would be more exciting if we would develop our own sociology
of religion of our experiences, of our diverse religious experiences,’ and I
said, ‘Let’s do that.’ So we looked at Palestine, we looked at Central America,
we looked at South Africa.
And then I said, ‘We really need to look at HIV, how does religion function as
a source of liberation, versus of oppression, in our community when it comes to
this issue.’ This was a very controversial course, but a lot of people were
taking it. As a result of that we had a lot of discussions around the Bible,
how do you interpret it, and then my work began to really deal with heterosexism,
sexism, classism, ageism. How does religion support these various forms of
oppression, or what are the ways in which religion challenges that in our
communities.” “What was controversial in your Bible course,
if you remember?” “Oh, I remember, ha! Well, a lot of people said...” “What were you saying?”
“What was I saying? I was saying that HIV is not a shameful disease. We
need to deal with it, we need to respond, that we have to take our own destiny
into our own hands, if we don’t do this, we’re gonna be annihilated and if we
sit around have these discussions about, ‘Well, I can’t deal with that because
those are people who use drugs, I can deal with that because these are the gay
people,’ by the time we’ll get through we’ll look around and there won’t be
anybody left in our community.’
“What had happened also was that it was a black group in congress that meets
every year at this big thing, and we had asked them to put HIV on the agenda
and they said, ‘It’s not that big an issue, we have too many issues in our
community.’ So what I did was to show how every issue in our community -
whether it’s the prison, homelessness, lack of health care, education, drugs -
they are all linked to HIV. Or violence! ‘Cause when we talk about violence, we
don’t talk about hate crimes against gay people, that is part of violence, and
that is, in violence, a health issue...
“A lot of people said, ‘This is not theology, this is no... This is not
anything! I didn’t come here to listen to this stuff! You’re not going to make
me believe, that I have to accept gay people. My God does not want me to accept
gay people!’ People were saying this in class! And that’s why it became very,
very controversial, because it made us start to talk about sexuality. People would
go to the Dean and say, ‘I don’t want to be in this class anymore, this man is
a heretic, and he just says these horrible things, I don’t have to listen,’ so
on and so forth and...” “And the Dean?” “The Dean? I don’t know what he said ‘cause he’d tell me one thing and then
tell them something else, but I think there was this feeling of not to upset me
because I was just so vocal. ‘Oh, you don’t like what I’m doing? I’ll go to the
press about it!’ I think that’s what they probably thought in their mind.
although I wouldn’t do that because I was very concerned always to protect the
school from any kind of negative image that is being the conservative school
that it really is! But on the other hand, because I said, ‘We’re talking about
this here, there are students in the school that have HIV!’ it was like ’Not
our school! Not our school!’ ‘We have students with HIV! I know because they
came to me and told me!’ ‘Oh, no, never here, never here! We never had anybody
with HIV here! That could not possibly happen here!’ and that kind of denial,
was just... I just put it in people’s face, ’We have to deal with this!’ It was
very, very difficult. “Can you talk about your baby?” “Oh, yeah, I’m in love, I love my baby!” “How comes that you have a baby?” “How do I have a baby? How did you have a baby?!” [Laughs] “Because you are bisexual!” “Yeah. I have a woman partner, and we’ve been together for many years. We
have tried for a long time to have a child and it didn’t work, it wasn’t
successful, and then about a year ago, it happened.” “How was it when you found out?” “Oh, I was scared, because I couldn’t... I was so used to it not working
that I was like, ‘Oh, we’ll never have a child!’ and when I found out I was
like, ‘Oh, no! This isn’t when I planned it to happen! This wasn’t supposed to
happen now! It was supposed to happen... Well, it should have, maybe if it
happen later one, then I could...’ dara-rara-ra.
I went through all of this stuff. Fortunately I have a lot of bisexual male
friends who have children, so I talk to them. Men came and we had ‘discussion
rituals.’ Probably after two weeks I started to be like, ‘I’m gonna have a baby?!’
I started to be very excited, very happy about it. I was happy at first but I
was scared, just like, ‘What am I gonna do now? This will change my whole
life!’ dara-rara-ra. You know the
things that people tell you all the time!
“I find that it hasn’t changed, turned my life around. Probably because I had
very close friends who had AIDS and I’ve been their caretaker. My partner had
AIDS, he died in 1992 and for the last two years of his life he was the focus
of my attention. You know, taking care of him and everything, so...
“I thought, ‘This is straight people who are used to getting married and have
their little life. It’s just the two of them, and then always they have a baby
and everything is changed.’ I realized that that was not my life before, and so
that my reaction having a child wasn’t to be the same as their reaction was.
“I just take him, put him in his thing and go wherever with him, you know. We just
came back home when you called today, in fact. And he’s a beautiful spiritual
being, he really is so... I really enjoy being with him as a person, you know...
I talk to him just like I’m talking with you, but I speak French and Spanish to
him.
“When I’m feeding him and he looks at me, he’s smiling... I think what’s he
gonna look like when he is a teenager, you know... He’s very... Everybody says,
‘Oh, this is such a beautiful baby,’ you know. Who would ever say that a baby
is ugly? You don’t say to somebody ‘You have an ugly baby!’ But... he’s just...
When you come back you have to see him the next time. I just feel that this is
the best thing that I could have done in my life, it’s just the best thing... I
just... I just go and sit. You asked me what my favorite thing was. I just go
and sit, stand by when he’s asleep, I just stand, look at him... This is like a
meditation, I could just look at him forever. Finally I have to go somewhere, ‘Okay,
I have to go to bed, I have to go to bed...’ I just stand... I love him.” Well, here you have it: If you’d like to throw a bit of money my way to keep my endeavors going, and also enable me to spread the money to my various causes, witnessing democracy, freedom of speech and faith, and engineering social change thru art being one of them, I’d be grateful. New York, August 5th, 2013
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