12-21-06, 10:00 am
Editor's Note: Marge Piercy is the author of 16 novels and 16 books of poetry. Her latest novel is a work of historical fiction that depicts the post-Civil War women's equality movement and is titled Sex Wars (William Morrow 2006). Her latest books of poetry include The Art of Blessing the Day and Circles on The Water. This interview was conducted by Michael Shepler.
PA: You were born into a working-class family during the Great Depression and I believe that one of your grandfathers was a union organizer. What do you remember of the Depression and the war?
MP: I remember a great many family stories. I remember my mother's brother Danny coming to stay with us as he was out of work. I remember living with another family in a little apartment – Lucy and Lon up from Appalachia where the pigeons cooed right outside the window by my crib. That was where my mother hid the last cash in the house in the oven and then when Lon brought home a chicken, she turned on the oven and burnt the dollar bills to ashes.
Later on I remember visiting Lucy and Lon at the farm where they were tenants and her killing a chicken for us to take home. I remember plucking the feathers and cleaning the birds and my mother making soup with the shell-less eggs still in the chicken.
I remember living on oatmeal for a week or more. I remember lots of fights about money.
As for the war, I remember a lot more. We drove down to Florida in 1941, stopping in tourist cabins and those tourists homes that used to take in travelers. In Florida, my mother pointed out to me the high water marks from a recent hurricane. She had to watch the clipper ships taking off for Europe. She said that soon there wouldn't be any planes going back and forth and that over there, where the planes went, they were killing us for being Jews.
I remember when war was declared, my mother sitting me down in front of the radio and telling me to remember, and President Roosevelt in his sonorous voice making the hair stand up on my arms. I remember being scared when my grandma, who lived with us part of the year and shared my bed, would read the Yiddish newspapers and weep.
I remember scrap and newspaper drives at work. I was very zealous about collecting metal scrap and papers for the drive and won little ribbons for my efforts, dragging an old wagon around that had belonged to my older brother.
Suddenly my father and my brother both had jobs and we ate meat sometimes. My father was very good repairing heavy machinery and suddenly he was important. He could fix the machinery in aging steel mills in Michigan and the paper factories. He was a kind of genius with old machinery. In fact for several years in the 1960's when Westinghouse had closed down the Detroit operation, where for the last few years he had been the only employee, finally promoted to boss of himself, he went on working part time because the factories would call him to fix old machinery nobody else could get to run.
I remember the fear that possessed my mother and my grandmother. Buying defense stamps and filling up books with them to become war bonds was very important at school, but I seldom had much money to spend on them. The Silver Knights would stand on the street corners as the guys left the factories handing out leaflets denouncing Jews and African Americans, or as they called us, k***s and n***s. We were always lumped together and I grew up in a predominantly African American neighborhood. I remember the voice of Father Coughlin on radios in just about every white-occupied house in the neighborhood blaring out his anti-Semitism.
I remember when my brother was drafted into the Marines. I remember him marrying Florence, his second wife, while he was home on furlough before being shipped off to the Pacific. She was pregnant soon with my niece Susie with whom I am still very close. We communicate via e-mail several times a week.
I remember VE Day and VJ Day. Us kids marched around the block in Detroit beating on wash pans and kitchen pots. One boy had a drum. My parents took me downtown to join the mobs celebrating. Fireworks and music and people just screaming themselves hoarse.
PA: You attended college at the University of Michigan during the period which came to be known as the era of the 'Silent Generation.' Did any of the instructors inspire and encourage your writing?
MP: I was politically active in college. We were involved in early civil rights struggles – protesting a derogatory float in the homecoming parade, trying to integrate barber shops. When I was the personnel chairman of the Intercooperative Council, I refused to give the university information on race of students applying through us. We collected goods and food for registration drives. I brought in Pete Seeger when he was black-listed. I remember to arrange it nothing could be done over the phone, but I met him in Detroit and we talked in the backseat of a car.
Professor Robert Haugh encouraged my writing and was instrumental in getting me a scholarship my last year which covered more than tuition, which I had always had and maintained. It made my last year much easier, as I didn't have to work. I had held at least two jobs at a time.
PA: You spent some time in Paris during the period of the Algerian struggle for independence from France. Were did you become active in this struggle?
MP: My husband Michel had been. He had been arrested and probably tortured by the police, although he could never talk about it with me. He could only refer to it.
PA: When you returned to the United States you lived for a number of years in Chicago. Can you talk briefly about that period when you were trying to establish yourself as a poet and novelist?
MP: In those days, real wages being much higher even for unskilled jobs than now, it was possible to live modestly [i.e., sort of upper poverty] on a part-time job. I worked various part-time jobs for years and wrote the rest of the time. My poetry began to be published early, but it was impossible then to publish serious fiction about women's lives then. The women's movement had to begin the so-called second wave and have an impact before the kind of fiction I wanted to write had any chance of being published. In Chicago I met regularly with a group of African American and white writers who were at that time largely unpublished. Without that group, I would not have stopped writing, but I would have written more slowly and in greater despair.
PA: Can you tell us about your experiences in the civil rights movement and in SDS? What, in your opinion, happened to derail the movement in the years following 1968?
MP: In the civil rights movement, I was just a body. In SDS, I was a very active organizer. I joined SDS in 1965. I knew some of the people who started it and went fairly regularly to Ann Arbor in the early days, even before I joined. I was also one of the founders of NACLA – the North American Congress on Latin America, which still exists. I worked on power structure research there. I was one of the founders of MDS – the off-campus arm of SDS, organizing teachers, city workers, affinity groups, neighborhood-based groups, day care, publishing company workers, etc. I began doing off-campus organizing for SDS out of the regional office in 1967. In 1969, I left to organize women exclusively for some years.
What happened? Cointelpro combined with intense frustration at having given our lives for years to trying to stop the war, and the war continued to escalate. We were infiltrated and we imploded.
PA: Given what often seems an endless struggle do you still feel optimistic about the achievement of a more egalitarian world?
MP: I come from peasants and coal miners and seaman and ghetto dwellers, a long line of people without much choice in the world. I think of the choices my grandmother had, the choices my mother had and the choices I had plus what young women can do now, and how can I despair. If we work, if we organize, if we make coalitions, we will make progress no matter how things go with three steps forward and two steps back. Nothing will ever be given us.
PA: What do you feel the artist's role is in society?
MP: Same as anybody else's.
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