Chapter 4 of “Evergreen” starts with a controversial speech by Stokely Carmichael given at Evergreen State College on Oct. 7, 1973. I was lucky enough to find an online archive of the Evergreen student newspaper (first called “The Paper” and then “The Cooper Point Journal”) as well as Evergreen’s weekly newsletters (“Happenings” and “Newsletter.”) Although around 95% of the novel is pure fiction, these and my other research allowed me to be as accurate as possible about some real events. Stokely Carmichael’s speech is a combination of quotes from the October 11, 1973 issue of “The Paper,” Carmichael’s “Black Power,” and a speech Carmichael gave at the Organization of Arab Students conference held at the University of Michigan in August 1968. The responses from the audience to Carmichael are all as reported by “The Paper.”
Chapter 4
October 7
“In order for the revolution to be successful, there must be a change of values. In America this change has not occurred yet. Laws are changed in America, but these measures haven’t helped the black man and America is actually becoming more repressive.”
“Mr. Carmichael, you seem to have given up on America. You currently live in Guinea, and it is said that you advocate scientific socialism. What kind of government do you believe would be right for the United States?”
“To save America, a socialist transformation is necessary. Capitalism is vicious, backward, barbarous, anti-human, and stupid. Ninety-nine percent of the students here at Evergreen are at school primarily for the money they would receive after graduation. The exploitation of man by man is necessary for capitalism to exist. The sole motivating force in capitalism is money, not people. Socialism is a planned society where men build the nation and serve the people. There are no conflicts of interest in socialism.”
“Do you believe that transformation could be achieved peacefully?”
“Violence is inevitable in a revolution. The democratically elected regime of Salvador Allende in Chile fell because successful revolutions can’t be accomplished through the ballot box alone. But the revolutionary can’t be ‘anti’ everything. He must create as well as destroy. Nobody wants anarchy. Law and order coupled with justice is a necessity in a society.”
“Mr. Carmichael, what do you think about the current conflict in Israel?”
“I think that the sooner the Jews are driven out of Israel the better. It’s the black man’s land and the black man should have it back.”
“Racist! Anti-Semite! Hypocrite!”
“The Jews say, ‘Six million Jews were murdered by Hitler, so we have a right to Israel.’ And that is a very dangerous thing. It is a fact that six million Jews were slaughtered by Hitler, but that six million Jews were murdered by Hitler does not give the Zionists the right to take Arab land.”
“If you’re such a socialist, why are you taking money for this speech? You say we’re all here just for the money, but I heard you’re making a thousand dollars tonight.”
“I will be donating my fee for this evening’s speech to charity.”
“Which charity?”
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
“I’m sorry but that’s all the time Mr. Carmichael has for tonight. Thank you all for coming and thank you to the UJAMAA Society for sponsoring this event.”
“Damn, that was crazy,” I say to Gabe outside the lecture hall where Stokely Carmichael has just finished speaking. People are milling about in small groups, conversing noisily. The residual tension from Carmichael’s contentious talk hangs in the air like a swarm of drowsy bees.
“Stokely laid it down, tellin’ it true,” Gabe says. “Some people may not like it, but that’s the way it is.” We are enveloped by an amoeba-like mass propelling itself slowly across Red Square in the direction of the dorms and the College Activities Building.
“But that stuff about Israel. Do you agree with him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know much about it. Why? Are you Jewish?”
“No, but . . .” We separate suddenly, our paths impeded by a cluster of angry students planted in the middle of the square, gesticulating wildly at each other, their voices pinched and shrill. I lose sight of Gabe. Red Square is dark; if there’s a moon it’s obscured by clouds. The mob thins as it disperses, most people heading toward the athletic building and the dorms beyond. I let the throng herd me in that direction, following blindly until I find myself in the middle of a group of women who respond to my unexpected appearance with looks of weariness and bile. When I extract myself, Gabe is a few steps in front of me.
“Hey, I wanted to tell you that I dug your bass playing at the retreat,” I say as I catch up to him.
“Ah, thanks, man, but I was struggling. I could barely hang with those guys.”
“Didn’t sound like it to me.”
We returned this afternoon from the American Music retreat, held at an old army base a couple of hours north of campus. At the faculty concert that kicked off the retreat Friday night, Mr. Coleman played piano, another teacher played vibes and drums, and a couple of students, including Gabe, took turns on bass. The hour-long concert evolved into a jam session that went on till after midnight, and Gabe was called on to hold down the low end for much of the jam.
“I was kind of embarrassed,” he says. “That other bass player, Charlie, he knew all those old jazz tunes. I had to let him take over when anyone called a standard.”
“He was good, but I liked your playing.”
“Thanks. I’m going to try to take lessons from him. Mr. Coleman said they could arrange for Charlie to get credit for teaching me, and I wouldn’t have to pay him much, if anything. I want to learn how to play all that: all those changes. I’m not that into the mainstream groove, but it’d be good to know those tunes. Where were you chillin’? I hardly saw you all weekend.”
“I ended up hanging out with a couple of people I met on the bus on the way up. A fiddler and guitar player who are into bluegrass.”
“Bluegrass, huh? That hillbilly racket? You dig that?”
“Yeah, among other things. I’m thinking I might concentrate on that this semester. I asked Mr. Coleman about joining the jazz improv workshop, but he says it would be tough for an acoustic guitar to fit in with horns and drums and electric instruments. It’s probably beyond me at this point, anyway. I might try to dig up an electric guitar next semester. We’ll see. But I met with Mr. Emerson, the guy who’s doing all the country and bluegrass classes. He’s a good banjo player and knows a lot about that stuff. I’ve been to a few bluegrass concerts, but this is the first time I’ve met anyone who knows anything about it.”
“Huh. I thought bluegrass was like . . . you know, redneck music, cracker shit.”
“Really? I don’t know. Mr. Emerson doesn’t strike me as a redneck. He’s a journalism professor. He was enlisted by the other American Music faculty because he plays bluegrass and folk music.”
“Hey Gabe, we’re going over to Darby’s in ASH. You in?” A voice emerges from the dark woods behind us. We’ve reached the spot where the paths to the different housing compounds diverge. It’s still crowded, and I can’t see who’s talking. Gabe stops, the crowd flowing around him. I look back and recognize the student issuing the invitation: one of the drummers at the retreat.
“Sure,” I hear Gabe say. “She still got the sweet ganja?”
“No doubt.”
“Hey, Lucas, I’ll see you around.” The crowd has pushed me along, and I’ve lost sight of Gabe, but I call into the night, “OK, see ya.” I’m disappointed that the invitation wasn’t extended to me, though I don’t know the guy who invited Gabe. Maybe he doesn’t know that I’m a musician, too. Gabe could have invited me, though. Oh well, I’m not a pot smoker anyway.
My lack of interest in getting stoned is likely one reason I was so comfortable around Sally and Eric, the fiddler and guitarist I met on the way to the retreat: neither of them smoke or drink. Not that I have a problem with either, but I get tired of having to explain my abstinence, especially since I have no particular reason for it. Drugs and booze just don’t appeal to me. I bought a lid and Zig-Zag papers when I was a sophomore in high school and lit up a few times at home, when my parents were out, but I never enjoyed it. There’s still half a baggie hidden at the back of my desk drawer at home.
While helping clean up the beer cans, cigarette butts, and joint ends left over from the Friday night jam, before the Saturday morning meeting with Mr. Emerson and students interested in bluegrass and folk music, Sally mentioned that she didn’t smoke pot or drink, and when I said I didn’t either, Eric said, “I assume the reason people take drugs or drink to excess is that they’re bad at small talk. Drugs are a way to retreat into yourself while supposedly shedding your inhibitions. It’s like saying, ‘I’m willing to jettison all my hangups for you people and party down,’ when what you’re really doing is creating a socially acceptable persona. Maybe it’s just the people I’ve known, but shedding your inhibitions chemically has a tendency to reveal the moron within, the vapid personality that makes some people more fun to be around. You shed your outer, socialized skin to reveal your pink, camo underwear and Captain Beefheart T-shirt, while the real you, the flesh and bones, remains cloaked in an impervious shell.”
“Man, I thought you said you didn’t do drugs?” I said, trying to make a joke, at which Sally smiled, but Eric looked puzzled, questioning perhaps whether I was as apt a candidate for friendship as he had thought. They’re both a year older than me, Sally in her second year at Evergreen and Eric, like me, in his first—he took a year away from school for reasons he seemed reluctant to divulge. Sally told me they had met once before, at a fiddle contest in Vancouver, Washington, last spring, and were surprised when they bumped into each other at the Quantum Repair concert.
Before returning to Evergreen, the three of us spent the morning wandering the grounds of the retreat, a decommissioned fort that once guarded the entrance to Puget Sound, though for what purpose I couldn’t imagine. Discouraging rogue Canadian marauders from storming Seattle by canoe?
It rained steadily for much of the weekend, but when the sun came out after breakfast, we went for a walk up onto a rise overlooking the Sound, where we discovered the remains of some concrete bunkers that had housed gun emplacements when it was an active fort, and then down onto a quiet beach. The Sound was calm and still, more like a lake than the ocean beaches I know. It’s narrow at that point, just a mile or two across to the other side: the mainland, or maybe a large island. A ferry could be seen crossing between the far shore and a town a little north of the fort. Although the water was smooth and glassy, now and then a gentle wave, the diminishing wake of the ferry or some unseen vessel, would reach the shore, disturbing the pebbly beach and creating a hypnotic swirl of percussive sounds as the small, polished stones rolled and spun around one another.
After the walk, we returned to the barracks where we had slept the previous two nights, on rusty metal-frame bunk beds, and commandeered the large, unheated kitchen to play some music before it was time to board the bus back to Evergreen. We were excited about the opportunity to study and play bluegrass. Sally and Eric have more experience with the music than I do, but neither of them has friends who play it. Sally knows a dozen or more fiddle tunes and has entered a couple of local fiddle contests. Eric is an impressive guitar player and knows some of the same fiddle tunes Sally does. He also sings some bluegrass songs, and he took the time to show me the chords to each one before we started. I followed them reasonably well, and Sally taught me the melody to one fiddle tune, “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” which I managed to play with them at a moderate tempo before we had to leave. I even led one tune, “Lonesome Fiddle Blues,” which I learned from the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. As we were packing up, I asked Eric how he got into bluegrass.
“There’s a rock band in Portland I’m into that sometimes plays bluegrass sets, so it seemed like something I should find out about. I think it’s important to learn whatever’s at the heart of the music you play, so you can reference it intuitively. All the great innovators grew up in the music they innovated. They didn’t come from the outside, and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to add some classical harmonies to this blues music.’ That doesn’t work. It’s superficial and it doesn’t take long for people to recognize it. So, if you didn’t grow up with the music, you have to educate yourself, and then just follow the sound, play what’s in your head.”
Eric is prone to pontification, but in a quiet, nonchalant way, with no ego or air of superiority; he seems unaware that his pronouncements might invite ridicule. He just releases his thoughts into the air, unconcerned at how they’re received. Listening to him felt like the start of a friendship, although his manner doesn’t encourage comment or discussion; he doesn’t seem to expect a response. I wonder what he’s like in book group.
Jenny was also at the retreat, but I didn’t see her much. She sang a couple of songs at the Friday evening jam: a Linda Ronstadt song, “I Fall to Pieces,” and a jazzy Dan Hicks song that the band had trouble following. She has a warm, pleasant voice but is an awkward, though adorable, performer. Perhaps she was distracted by the musicians mangling the chord changes of the Dan Hicks song, “I’m an Old Cowhand,” which I made a mental note to learn. I was pleased to see that neither Tracy, the mandolinist from the Organic Farm, nor Jenny’s bearded friend were at the retreat, but every time I saw her, she was surrounded by a small, impenetrable, female entourage.
Saturday afternoon there was a meeting of all the guitar players, including Eric and Andrew (the highlife fan from book seminar), a few rock-oriented electric guitarists, and some beginners. Eric, Andrew, and I seemed to be the most advanced of the acoustic guitarists, and Mr. Emerson suggested that the three of us meet once a week to exchange ideas and share what we are working on. He also proposed that the advanced players could take turns leading a beginning guitar class, but someone suggested that it might be easier to schedule individual lessons with specific people. In introducing ourselves, we talked about what kind of music we were into, so the beginning students were invited to pick their own teachers. I was pleasantly surprised when Angelica chose me. She told me afterward that it was because we were in the same book group, so it would be easy to arrange lesson time, and because I said that I had played Joni Mitchell and Neil Young songs with friends in high school (she’s a big Joni fan). I don’t know why I mentioned that, and in retrospect I might regret it. What I didn’t say was that I don’t know any Joni Mitchell songs, having only followed my friends’ leads, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend time with someone so attractive and intelligent, although I suspect Angelica is way out of my league.
I’m beginning to wonder if any of the women at Evergreen are “in my league.” Maybe it’s because the natural look favored by most Evergreeners is so appealing to me, or that my platonic relationship with Emily left me wondering if anyone would ever be attracted to me.
I miss Emily. I wrote her a letter soon after I got to Evergreen, but she hasn’t written back. Not that she has any reason to. She’s in her senior year of high school, with plenty of friends, schoolwork could be a bear, and taking the time to write her college . . . what? Not boyfriend. Friend? Former friend? Well, it’s hard to imagine her with the time or desire to write. I’ll see her at winter break at any rate.
I barely remember how we started hanging out. By the time I left for Evergreen, it had become so natural, our regular musical outings assumed and predictable. One day, while having lunch in the SEA School lounge near the beginning of the school year, I casually mentioned to the small group sprawled on the lounge’s overstuffed chairs and pillows that Doc Watson was playing at McCabe’s that weekend, and Emily had replied, “We should go.” That was it. I never knew whether her invitation had been directed solely at me but, since nobody else responded, we agreed that I would pick her up around six the following Saturday night. It wasn’t a “date.” I was just her ride. We had both eaten dinner already, so the evening proceeded simply: drive to Santa Monica, find parking, buy tickets, see the show, and drive home. Platonic and prosaic. We both enjoyed the concert, and we chatted easily on the way to Santa Monica and back, more comfortably than I ever had with a girl, especially an attractive girl sitting inches away from me in my dad’s tiny Honda 600 sedan.
After that first concert, we went to as many shows as we could afford, mostly at small, folky clubs like McCabe’s and the Long Beach State College coffeehouse, but occasionally at one of the larger LA venues, the Troubadour or Ash Grove. We even went to a couple of arena shows. At one, I suffered through Seals and Crofts’ third-rate CSN&Y and faux bluegrass only because Emily was so into them, though I enjoyed sprawling together on the arena floor with other SEA School friends, most of the time with Emily seated directly in front of me, leaning back against my accordioned legs. A graduate student of my father’s who had worked as a road manager for Rod Stewart got me free tickets to some bigger concerts—theatrical rock shows like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust/Spiders from Mars tour and Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick tour—but Emily declined to join me at those. We did go to a Joan Baez concert at the Long Beach Arena, but it started nearly two hours late, and by the time Joan came on, Emily was so annoyed she decided she was done with arena shows.
“How does she get away with that? She’d never have the nerve to do that at McCabe’s.”
“She’s probably too famous to play McCabe’s.”
“Maybe so, but still, it’s rude and there’s nothing to do while you’re waiting. These plastic arena seats are torture. At least at a folk club you can get something decent to drink and the seats won’t cripple you.”
I’ve never been on a real date. With Emily it was a matter of asking if she liked someone’s music or a recent album. “Do you want to go hear John Lee Hooker tomorrow night?” wasn’t asking if she found me attractive and wanted to spend a romantic evening with me.
Janie had mentioned that Naomi, a fellow SEA school student, a very attractive fellow student, had a crush on me, and I wonder if I had missed something. Naomi was a regular at all the SEA school events—parties, beach bonfires, group movie nights—but I don’t remember any interaction with her that might have been construed as flirting. Am I unable to tell when someone is attracted to me? I have no problem noticing when other people are flirting. Tracy and Jenny at the Organic Farm, for example. Do I just assume that I’m not attractive to women, so I don’t recognize flirting when it’s directed at me?
I honestly don’t understand the concept of male beauty, except when someone has been tagged as handsome or resembles a famously handsome person: Robert Redford, Paul Newman, someone like that. If a man looks like a movie star, I assume that most women would find him desirable. But other than that, I don’t have a clue. Physical fitness would be one marker, I suppose. But I’m skinny, my shoulders are narrow, and I don’t have much muscle on my arms, which might be attractive if you like long-distance runners or ascetic, monkish types. Maybe ectomorphs are attractive to some women, but I can’t think of a famous example.
Emily once told me about this good-looking, athletic guy at her previous high school whom everyone had a crush on. But he tended to treat his admirers as if they weren’t worth a second of his time, so that when he did bestow his attentions on someone, she felt special and beautiful, desired by the coolest guy in school. This made it easy for him to go out with and sleep with whomever he wanted, often with unfortunate consequences for the girl.
“He treats everyone like shit, so when he starts paying attention to you, you think you’re really something, and you’ll do whatever he wants,” Emily told me on a long drive back from a concert at the Troubadour (Commander Cody, I think). “He screwed over a couple of my friends pretty badly. He didn’t physically hurt them, but he didn’t have to. I’m glad I’m too frumpy for him, not enough of a girly girl, you know?”
“You mean you’d go out with him if he asked you, even though you know he’s an asshole?”
“No. I don’t know . . . probably not,” she said, with a dismissive chuckle, and immediately changed the subject.
The crowd on the path thins as people break off to go to their dorms or perhaps a late swim in the Rec Center or surreptitious doobie on the athletic field. It’s still early, even for a Sunday night. I take the path to the main dorms and pass a handful of people huddled outside A Dorm smoking, laughing, drinking. My building, D Dorm, is quieter, and neither of my roommates are home. I’m tired, so I climb up onto my bed, four feet off the ground, and pick up the novel that has fallen between the wall and my pillow: Look Homeward Angel. But I have trouble concentrating on Thomas Wolfe’s rhapsodic rambling.
Carmichael’s speech—lecture, polemic—had saddened me, partly because I had been looking forward to the chance to hear a radical thinker of considerable renown in person. I read Carmichael’s Black Power while researching the paper I wrote about the Black Panther Party for my SEA School social studies class last year. The book was illuminating and, as I interpreted it, almost hopeful, laying out a framework for defeating white supremacy, but the defensive and argumentative tone of this evening’s diatribe was disheartening, maybe because it made me realize how out of touch I am with the movement. The Black Panther Party has been neutralized, done in by Hoover’s FBI, and Black Power, the book, is nearly five years old. Most of what Carmichael advocated in the book has not happened, and seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. But I have fond memories of reading him as well as Eldridge Cleaver, Malcom X, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, and others, back when I too thought of myself as a revolutionary, an enemy of every evil. But that was before the 1972 election and Nixon’s sobering annihilation of George McGovern, whom I campaigned for in the months leading up to the California primary, though I was too young to vote.
After McGovern’s loss, and the continued infighting among the radical left, I consoled myself with the revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Panthers and Black Power movement, immersing myself in books and political tracts, without realizing that the Black Power movement had been mortally wounded, then watching in disgust as Watergate unfolded and Nixon’s administration revealed itself to be more corrupt and venal than we naive humanists/optimists ever imagined. Watching the hearings on TV last summer could have left me enraged and emboldened to fight the system, but instead I just became alienated by politics and the seemingly irredeemable US government.
My radicalization likely began with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, accelerating with readings of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. As a high school sophomore, I fell in with a few other “radicals” (misfits who found an outlet for their outsider status in leftist politics) and bought myself a Little Red Book, a blue Chairman Mao cap, and a used copy of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, essential gear for the suburban revolutionary. After chickening out of marching at Long Beach’s only serious antiwar demonstration, I realized that I had little affinity or stomach for civil disobedience and the life of an outlaw, so I reframed my political future, imagining myself a crusading, politically aware lawyer, the next William Kunstler. I enrolled in debate class, which, perhaps fortunately, revealed the pedantic underbelly of the legal profession, saving me from wasting a small, borrowed fortune on the pursuance of a law degree. After three or four months of debate research—filling stacks of index cards with notes on the topic “Resolved: that the jury system in the United States should be significantly changed”—my shaggy-headed debate partner, a fellow suburban radical, and I lost our first competition because of some arcane technicality and our slovenly appearance—“tie was loose and jacket had patches” wrote one judge— so we quit the debate team in (silent) protest against the reactionary bullshit of the National Forensic League.
Outside of school, I worked for McGovern, assiduously strolling the suburban beat (“canvassing in the canvas”—a reference to my recently acquired Top-Siders) until—on the evening of the California primary at McGovern’s Long Beach campaign headquarters, as I tried to discuss with a cute Long Beach State freshman, while waiting for vote totals to come in, anything other than how “dreamy” Georgie Mac was—I received a valuable lesson in personality politics. McGovern was not all that I wanted him to be (if you had called me a communist at that point, I wouldn’t have disagreed), but I was pragmatic enough to accept his shortcomings and lack of leftist cred because he was by far the best of an uninspiring lot of establishment Democrats. But I was put off by the McGovern staffers who seemed to think of him as the second coming, hushing the assembled precinct workers and gofers every time his name was mentioned on the small TV balanced atop a PA speaker provided by the preppy rock band that had been hired to rouse the crowd.
Despite my readings on the Black Power movement and Panthers (and research for another paper on the American Indian’s treatment by the Bureau of Indian Affairs), my interest in politics in any organized form waned, partly because I became more interested in music and the company of other human beings. Most of the friends I made at SEA School were politically inactive: leftie/liberal if pressed, but not inclined to think too much about the state of the world outside their upper-middle-class, alternative-school bubble.
Tonight’s reaction to Carmichael’s speech was another example of what had soured me on politics. I expected more from Evergreen students. Carmichael’s abandonment of the American political battleground for a nascent African socialism is confusing, easy to idealize or demonize, and it’s natural to wonder why he’s touring US campuses when he has little hope left for any positive political change in the States. And while his view of Israel seemed intentionally provocative and was undoubtedly offensive, was it really disturbing enough to dismiss everything else he had said? Enough to warrant shouts of “Traitor!” and “Racist!” and ill-informed accusations of perfidy and greed? I also noticed that, aside from Gabe, none of my new friends—Sally, Eric, Jenny, Andrew—had attended the speech.
I wonder if my political activism really began to fade in January of this year, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which effectively ended the Vietnam War. Last March, during the final draft lottery, my birthdate was drawn at number 154, a little under halfway (not particularly good or bad), but as of June 30, the Selective Service stopped inducting draftees. I’m not completely free from the military’s clutches, since the draft can be reinstated at any time, if Nixon decides to invade Cambodia, say, or send troops to the Middle East. I was surprised when Carmichael was asked about Israel. There had been rumors about an attack in the Sinai Peninsula last week, but detailed international news is hard to come by at Evergreen. Maybe there will be something about it in tomorrow’s school paper. If not, I’ll try to find a TV around news time. I heard there’s one in the CAB basement.
But I have stopped worrying about the draft or what I would do if I were called up. I’m a dedicated pacifist but with no proof of my principles that would be acceptable to the Selective Service. A couple of years ago, when the war seemed destined to drag on into my draft-eligible years, I looked into becoming a conscientious objector and even attended a Quaker meeting to see if joining the Friends might be a workable plan. But after an uncomfortable, silent hour on a hard, wooden bench in a humid Quaker house of worship, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to feign the Friends’ stony religiosity long enough to qualify for conscientious-objector status.
The other way to avoid a fitting for fatigues and an M16, of course, was to escape to Canada. Had Evergreen’s proximity to the Canadian border influenced my decision to choose this Northwest hippie enclave over California institutions like UC Santa Cruz or Sonoma State? Possibly. I still have a few more years before I become ineligible for conscription by the US military, but clandestine emigration is unlikely at this point. I may occasionally lose sleep from an overactive geopolitical imagination—Nixon fueling a conflict in some remote part of the world to deflect the public’s gaze from his Watergate crimes, for example—but such fears usually fade in the light of day.
It’s unclear to me how much of my political activism has been in response to the war, and the possibility that I might be forced to pick up a gun and engage an invented Communist threat. Now that I no longer fear for my life, is it a coincidence that my interest in politics has diminished? If I’m honest, I have to admit that it is not.