Imprisonment Chic

Prison is The "In" Thing this year. More than one person said nervously, "Think what Tom Wolfe could do with this!" We were, after all, going to jail with the Beautiful People, being taken into fashionable custody. Richard Avedon never had a hair out of place throughout the whole polite ordeal; I bet even his mug shot was flattering. We had the very den mother of radical chic, Felicia Bernstein, along with us. Large as her apartment is, she could not invite a whole jail in for the evening. This time she would not be able to gratify her sewery yearnings from afar; she had to move right on down, not only to Washington (comedown enough) but into the city's jails--all the way, dans la bone down.

Everyone involved could recite Wolfe's objections by heart; and, the night before, at the Dupont Plaza Hotel, almost everyone did. Singer Judy Collins said she had not called her friends together to see them jugged but to do something useful. Joe Papp, one of the friends she had called, said, "I like theater, but...." He may be the only modern director so secure in his reputation as to have a C. B. De Mille flunky tag after him, bringing hot coffee and telephone messages. "I have a very important meeting I must get to." For five hours, various people told us how valuable their time is. Arlo Guthrie sat in the back looking stunned, a child who could not understand why grownups shout so at one another. People went on egotistical rhetoric jags to explain why getting jailed is just an ego trip. Even jail, I thought, could not be this boring (but I was wrong), so I split.

What good, after all, would it do to go to jail? We were just chic if we did and chicken if we didn't. The whole thing was hopeless--like everything else that had been done against the war. The big bad Wolfe would get us for our empty gesture--or, more likely, would scare us off from making a gesture. The Beautiful People were either too good for the lockup or not good enough. Still, I wished some had come to feel that even important people can go to jail.

The next morning, there was more jawing and a jaded aftertaste in the mind, the moseying about of men and women who had come to do something noble and now felt just silly. Still, we were asked to eat a good lunch, just in case. I found myself talking too much to take the advice--trying to talk myself into something, I guess. I was tired of hearing so many people try to talk themselves out of things.

The march began like most, with mating initiatives between "spokesmen" and the cameras, Gloria Steinem and Mario Thomas photogenic up front. We had a big petition done in fancy calligraphy, "Petition of Redress," it said, with a pious nod to the First Amendment. Marcus Raskin had written it--"We are citizens and not hostages." There was a lot of scribbling being done in this compulsively literate crowd. "Where are you going to write it up?" was a commonplace of conversation. It confirmed me in my own first resolution, the only one I was still sure of, after the disillusionment of the night before: I wouldn't write anything about this. It wasn't worth it. Besides, this was the first protest of any sort I had participated in; I had kept my coverage of such affairs hygienically separate from active involvement, at once enjoying and earning a spectator's immunity. To be on the other side, I thought, demanded a symmetrical abstinence, and I'd be damned if I'd take any notes (and would damn myself afterward because I didn't take them). When, the night before, Howard Zinn read the long press release meant to explain our long petition, I just listened, bored, wondering how some of the journalists involved could think so unquotable a document was newsworthy. I confess I did slip around to Howard after the reading and ask him to trim back a tautology--"can possibly" to "can." Shame knows some limits, and we were supposed to be literary heavies.

We waited for the cameras across from the Supreme Court, the explainers explaining, all very glib--and right, of course. But we had all written against the war. We didn't have to come here to do that. Why, despite our glibness, were we here? I still didn't know--the explainers did not really explain it to me. March, petition, protest--the same old things. We didn't have much imagination. Admittedly, we were dealing with the same old thing--TV announcement, victory in the offing, bombs, incursion, bombs, mining, bombs, honor, bombs. But was lack of imagination in our adversaries any excuse for us? Joe Papp had his justifiable point: Couldn't we at least do something that was good theater? This was far from that--which made us chary of the whole thing while wanting to support it, hot and cold by flashes, feeling we stood where prominence was betrayal and the cameras our enemy. While the core of our group orated, the fringes were muttering. Still, habit lured me over in time to the journalists, at home among those taking notes even while I could not, and I had to wonder what I would say about me if I were watching me--that I looked out of place, I guess. The thing could not even be treated as a lark. Momentary discomfort is no martyrdom, and publicized discomfort is a mockery of real pain. We were a bunch of pretenders. Even if we negotiated our problematical trip to jail, it would be nothing but make-believe--or so we made ourselves believe, not really wanting to bring it off. Who knows whether any of us might be a Sydney Carton, given the secret choice? But without the secret choice, there is no sense to a Carton's sacrifice.

It was bright and hot when we reached the pillared Capitol, where Bella Abzug waited for us on her canted-pillar legs, her thick slant of hat obvious from a distance. We were kept there for more oratory in the sun. Congressman John Conyers did his impeaching bit and another in our Congressional greeting party dissociated himself from it. Then we were admitted to the House wing in driblets, guards checking all purses and packages. Carl Albert is too shrewd to say a simple yes or no to anything; he took our petition, thanked us politely and said he would remand it to the appropriate committee. Committees are all so many plots in our country's legislative graveyard, and we were here to talk about graves of a different kind. Robert Lefton, the Yale psychiatrist, had become our spokesman and spoke well--stuff about national emergency, inadequate response, the dereliction of Congress, criminal to recess until action had been taken, etc., etc. Good stuff, all of it, as good as it had been two years ago, or four, or five. Bella, meanwhile, was trying to get a recess, for reception on the House floor of some spokesmen from our group. She used the precedent of interruption in House business to applaud and listen to an astronaut. Hale Boggs thought she was out of order, and so did Albert. He had already taken care of us.

Some Congressmen came out to talk with our group, Don Riegle plugging his new book, Gerald Ford trying to act like a host whose hospitality not even lepers could ruffle. Karl Hess, the Pat Buchanan of 1964 campaign oratory, pushed forward to remind "Jerry" of their speechwriting days together in the assault on "uncrowned monarch Lyndon." Ford answered stiffly that he always supports a President when the nation is at war. Hess looked deflated, and a hippie type we had picked up somewhere shouted obscenities. Ben Spock used his best (unavailing) pediatric techniques to quiet him. Closing time came and went, more cops sifting toward us, though some Congressmen were still mixed in our number. Capitol police now bluntly invited us out over bullhorns. Some of us claimed we were exercising our First Amendment "right to petition." But the guards answered that we could talk to Congressmen on the steps outside; that Congressmen have immunity, but we did not; that the building was closed, but we'd be given 15 minutes to leave it. I remembered the late Duke of Windsor's advice--on a tour of honor, use the John when occasion offers; it may not come your way again--and crossed the foyer, descended stairs, asking cops the way, all the way, to identify myself as coming from the inside; but, sure enough, when I tried to climb the stairs again, a new cop shouted from an upper level that the building was closed. "I know, but we were given 15 minutes to leave, and that's not up yet."

"That was only for those who want to get arrested. Do you?"

"I don't know. I want to rejoin my friends during the waiting period."

"All right," he said, in a you-asked-for-it voice, and accompanied me across the foyer, down the hall, telling each cop we passed, emphatically, "This one wants to get arrested." I didn't, really--or hadn't, up to then. Something in the way he said it made it suddenly plausible, put a halo of his hatred all around the idea. I guess I did, in fact, want to go to jail. If he thought I belonged there, then I must.

It came with the tense slow-motion procedures I had watched before. Women first, they would go to a precinct station--there were only 27 of them. The men, 67 in number, would have to go to "central lockup." I was, of course, interested in other chroniclers of arrest who had not undergone it--like Francine Gray, the Berrigans' lanky blonde Boswell, who was here with her painter husband, Cleve. I was also interested in how the group solidified itself, at last, sitting on the marble floor and singing, Judy Collins amazing us with Grace--amazing, at least, all those who had heard her argue against arrest the night before. She had often protested in song, but never from behind bars. Those who had spoken against arrest must have got as tired as we did of hearing how important they were: They talked themselves out of it so long that they talked themselves into it. As the Judy Collinses and Felicia Bernsteins were collared, I began to wonder--if prison has such snob appeal, why is middle-class poet Judy Viorst being led off to a van while radical mannequin Steinem tactfully disappeared before arrests began?

Not that it was not chic, our advertised (and mercifully brief) incarceration. I have never been so applauded in my life--at arrest, going down the Capitol steps, getting into the van, getting out of it. When there were no bystanders, we clapped for one another. Raskin, whose genius is for affection, watched with a teary kind of pride as they took away his writer-wife, Barbara. Even Marc, who had stood trial with Dr. Spock in Boston for encouraging draft evaders, had never technically been arrested. His codirector of the Institute for Policy Studies, Richard Barnet, sitting next to me, had not even marched or demonstrated, much less been jailed. He thought the pen mightier than the sword, as had we all; and we were here in penitence.

The young officer who took me was a fumbling sort, for some reason more nervous than I was, unable for a while to spell Baltimore when I told him where I live. We posed for two Polaroid shots together--Francine Gray said she and her policeman wore self-conscious smiles, like newlyweds at a Coney Island concession. The tin insides of the paddy wagon were sizzling--it had been parked in the sun--and it was a relief to clump out of it, dripping wet, into a dark police basement. We were held until all 67 were delivered, so the sergeant would not have to repeat his pitch: "I run a tight ship here--just ask the doc." Spock had been arrested the week before in the Capitol rotunda. There was a cheer for Joe Papp as he emerged from one wagon: "I thought you had an important meeting tonight!" He smiled ruefully, looking embarrassed and proud, and embarrassed to be proud. Keys were the only thing they took from us at that point--they, too, did not think much of the pen as a weapon; though, at this literal level, I would rather be stabbed with my hotel key than with a ballpoint. We were counted off, four to a two-man cell, to wait--interminably, as it turned out--to be booked. And no phone calls till we had been processed.

The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind. One might expect the same thing from jail--or from the prospect of jail, which was about all I would get from this brief stay inside. Pent up physically, mentally thrown back upon oneself, you begin to hope this is a "concentration" camp, at least in the sense of focusing the mind. But no: What life in a cell actually does is fragment and fray out one's sensations. We were four men in a lightless 5'x7' cell--small open stool and basin, iron-ledge bunks with no mattresses or covers. We were stilled inside a vast hive of activity and din, only scattered parts of things decipherable. One drifts automatically to the bars because, from the (continued on page 244)Imprisonment Chic(continued from page 154) inner part of the cell, people pass by this brief lens opening on the world, this little cell eye, too rapidly to be recognized. One sends out antennae through all the near yet unknown regions--who is in the next cell?; what is happening to us?; when will we see a lawyer?; what did the new arrivals say?; what order are they taking us out in? Prison is supposed to have a lively grapevine, and certainly rumors spread among us in no time; but they were often uncheckable, contradictory or merely wishful. We heard from eight P.M. to three A.M. that bond was being posted for us, that we would be out any minute now.

It was good company. Karl Hess, abashed that he had been intimidated by his old buddy Ford--as if he were a school kid trying to get the teacher's attention. "There is something so debilitating when a man stands there and tells you a defiant lie." Ken Iverson, mathematician from Philadelphia, accountable to the great computer in the sky while most of us were self-employed or had sympathetic employers. The fourth man was young Tom Hirsch, who had been to the Paris peace talks and worked for Liberation magazine. Since Tom is a pacifist vegetarian, he was forced to keep fast that night: Our dinner, which came promptly, to the dark cell, was stew in a Styrofoam cup--not bad. despite a natural suspicion of any food one cannot see. Its very heft and beefiness were, for us nonvegetarians, the only obstacle to eating it, since we had to use ridiculously nonlethal paper spoons, which went soggy in no time.

Booking was an almost comic take-off on bureaucracy. Endless forms filled and refilled by polite, bored desk men. And just when I think I've put my prints on every paper in sight, the process starts all over again. The man handling the prints has a remote air and undeflectable skills, rolling my fingers and thumbs this way and that, like things detached from me, stamping the thumb quick-quick-quick in the lower corner of eight carbon copies expertly fanned out to leave just that key spot bared. The ink is more like the grease that frames a mechanic's nails, making them look naked. It is spread in a thick film over a little cookie tin; my fingers are made to pick up exactly half the film in a set of expert rolls and then centered in ten little windows of a metal card holder; then, after some stamping here and there of individual fingers and (mainly) thumb, the tin is turned around and I pick up the other half of the grease. Even so, by the end, my thumb is made to dart back to the few remaining smudges on the tin, so that my prints stare back at me like clear little eyes from even the dimmest of carbons. It was odd to watch all this going on, as if from the side, my digits turned into stamps in a semiautomatic process, feeling like a puppet, not wanting to feel that, yet knowing things would go better if I went along with the situation, consenting, to accomplish two interdependent things--make the process easier on me, because I was making it easier for the worker on this human assembly line. One doesn't, of course, want to make his life more troublesome--the war is not his fault; but I sense why a prisoner must feel "co-opted" when he cooperates even in little things--each act is an admission of sorts, a recognition of one's total disposability at another's word. No man in prison is ever on his own. He has no choice over when or what he will eat, how he will divide his time, move, act, exercise control over himself. Authority is omnipresent, intrusive, abrasive in its hourly effects--and what a goad that must be to rebelliousness.

From fingerprinting to the mug shot, this time no Polaroid arrest shot, but with a number pinned to one's suit, as in Wanted signs--a new way to play post office. I started to pull up my tie, left loose as a hangman's knot since that ride in the paddy-wagon oven, but then I remembered my greasy fingers. In honor of such chic imprisonment, I had worn my expensive tie--I don't know the designer's name, but Tom Wolfe could tell at a glance (come to think of it, I did not even notice what Felicia Bernstein was wearing when nabbed). Anyway, rather than stain the tie, I let it dangle in an appropriately criminal way. No wonder everyone (except, no doubt, Richard Avedon) looks like a mug in his mug shot.

Odd, how good it seems to greet one's cellmates after a mere half hour or so away from them. Out of the impersonal back to people. We are cramped, but we defer to one another somewhat elaborately, glad to have this jostle of too much humanity in too little space, aware that the opposite could well be our plight inside these walls. If ours were a "real" (i.e., nonchic) arrest, we would be coping with strange and probably antipathetic cellmates--a fact that was cruelly forced on the women when they were processed: A guard growled at them that he'd like to put them in with the Lesbian regulars. We might be caged for a while, but we were there in company, as a company. What a difference that made. Even we had felt slight hints of the helplessness that comes with surrender into another's control. What would it be like to face this prospect alone? Would that wonderfully concentrate the mind? Well, it would do something to it, we felt sure. We talked at a forced rate, keeping off such specters.

And that was the weird thing. The very protectedness of our own state made us dwell on all the "as its" of a prison cell. We kept assuring ourselves that we had it easy, we were not real victims--which, given the close malodorous aids hourly supplied to our imagination, brought the alternatives vividly to life for us. Hence our imperative laughter, our joint exorcisms of the real plight, which we were not undergoing. In order to dispel the specters, we unconsciously summoned them. The bare spotted stool was repulsive, but no real threat to us. Still, one wondered--what if your cellmate were a vomiting drunk or a diarrhetic? We did Alphonse-Gaston acts of courtesy, each of us proffering the others room on the iron bunks--but what if one were caged with a surliness denying even the few possible amenities, or making the achievement of them prohibitive on any but dehumanizing terms? Every slight comfort was humbling, one's few joys impressed by their fragility. We served as each other's crutches--and were made to realize how, in all things, others get us through. We sought out reasons for congratulating ourselves on our surroundings and almost threw a party when we found that none of us smoked--why, we had been worse off in the first-class section of an airliner when the big-cigar boys lit up!

But our abject dependence was symbolized in little ways--like having to ask for toilet paper each time it was needed. Some had to request, and wait a long time for, every paper cup of water, since their basin's faucet did not work. In the cell next to us, someone complained after a while that their stool did not work. Spock, directly across from us, said, "The little button in the wall, you have to kick it."

"We did. Nothing happened."

Spock, tall and strenuous, a sailor on the verge of his 70th birthday, said, "I don't mean kick it. I mean kick it."

There were noisy hangings on the iron wall, reverberating our own walls, then sudden reluctant thunder of the plumbing (everything is loud here, especially the clang of remote-controlled releasings and sealings of the cells). "You were right."

"Sure," Spock smiles, "the good old john in cell thirty-eight; I know it well."

As the hours went by, our mutually cheering conversations lagged a bit. I felt dehydrated and our little paper cup was disintegrating--one cannot talk much when drinking semiliquid paper. Young John Steinbeck, across the way, tried several times to entertain us with his flute; but each time, Howard Da Silva, in the same cell with him, roared, "Put away that instrument of torture! Or give it to someone who can make music on it. David? Where's David?"

David Amram, the composer, answered from somewhere down the line and Da Silva persuaded Steinbeck to baton his flute along, hand over hand around the screened parts of our cells, till it reached Amram, who made tentative attempts at fingering.

"David!" Da Silva again, in his booming actor's voice. "Give that back to Steinbeck."

Da Silva had last been to Washington as part of the cast of the musical 1776, playing Ben Franklin in the White House itself, at Poor Richard Nixon's request. He seemed the obvious choice to read our petition to Carl Albert. But the idea was rejected as too obvious. The theatrical people were being very careful not to show off. Despite Papp's complaint, most of us had shied away from theater, adopted a deflationary style, underplaying each situation. Da Silva was especially self-effacing, despite that voice, which could now be heard in every last cell as in the last row: "With all the effort to fill these cells with prominent prisoners," he muttered, "why didn't someone try to find a prominent bail bondsman?"

It was ten o'clock, five hours since our arrest; most of us hadn't been given our one phone call, and the only lawyer to show up in the early hours was Mark Lane, a signer of our petition, who explained in a loud voice how he tried to get arrested but just couldn't manage it; how the Government didn't have a leg to stand on, so we should all plead "not guilty" in the morning; and how our subsequent well-publicized trial would vindicate the antiwar movement. It was just what I expected of him, from his books.

Sitting on the bunk was not easy; it had a sharp little retaining ridge, to hold our nonexistent mattresses, that bit into the backs of our knees--until I padded it with my suit jacket. Tom Hirsch had jackknifed himself into a corner of one bunk and gone to sleep. How nice to be young, I thought; he must be the only one able to sleep here --till I looked across the aisle. Spock's white hair and tanned arm, dim under the bottom bunk, showed he had dozed off on the floor (too tall to use a bunk, even if he had wanted to claim a whole one from the three other men with him). And I realized that my first reaction had been right--how nice to be young.

At last I was taken out to the one pay phone--since some would never get to it, I could hardly complain. We had all urged one another to be brief, and I was. I called my wife, who was matter-of-fact about things; she had been sure I would get arrested, surer than I had been--which obscurely pleased me (prison, no doubt, brings one's idiocies to the surface). But I was vaguely saddened once the call was made--it had been the one definite thing I could look forward to, and now that was gone.

Finally, a young lawyer, Susan, she called herself, worked her way around to our cell, asking if anyone wanted bail--it would cost $40 merely to get us out from sometime in the early morning until nine A.M., when we must show up for arraignment. I was the only softy in our cell. All I wanted by then was a stiff drink and a shower and different walls around me--or, for preference, no walls. I said sure to her question and gave her my name. She recognized it, said she had heard about my Sunday commencement address. Though she looked like a teenager, she had worked, three years ago, on the D. C. Nine case of priests and seminarians who had destroyed Dow Chemical files--that explained her knowledge of Baltimore clergymen and of the fact that I had addressed the graduates of their seminary three days before the arrest. The ceremony took place in church and marked my first, probably my last, sermon--some parents seemed disconcerted at talk of the war as their sons were graduated. Part of that sermon went like this:

We gather here today at Pentecost, the feast of gathering ("all were together in one place" goes "Luke's" text), of the people sharing a covenant. Pentecost is the New Testament's answer to that great Old Testament symbol, the Tower of Babel--articulated fiery tongues that, speak to difference, over against Babylon's attempt to forge unity out of sheer power. The tower is meant to intimidate, to give clout--"to make a name for us," as the text of "Genesis" puts it; "to maintain our credibility as a great nation," in the words of Nixon and Kissinger. And God confounds the effort of Babel, divides men one from another when they try to impose a brute unity of power.

Other men, this very clay, are trying to use the tongue against physical terror, to speak on a human scale at the mere bulk and huge sprawl of the Pentagon. They are demonstrating not far from, here, and I think it is fair to ask why we are not there. Was it not the task of those God threatened at Babel to oppose the tower, speak out against it, tear the bricks down one by one if they could, or at least make the effort? The Old Testament God pardons other cities of sin for a few just men within their walls, for even one voice lifted against injustice....

Was that what I was doing here--tearing bricks out of the tower? It seemed unlikely as our midnight ache and sleeplessness settled in. More likely, making an ass of myself. Being chic. I wondered how Mrs. Bernstein felt--her Panther party had ended in time to be reported in the 10:30 P.M. edition of the Times. Jail is, altogether, a longer kind of party--and the longer it became, the more dubious its purpose seemed. Rapid chatter still broke into the uneasy silences, but at longer intervals. An extraordinary oscillation of mood was signaled in the brightening and dimming of voices all around. I had been told that men in prison suffer this openness to incursive unforeseen moods, helpless in their ebb and flow, victims of prison's true powerlessness. Now I believed it, having seen it, if only from afar. We bobbed on a comfortable raft, in no danger of drifting off from shore; but we were a little way into the night surf and could look out from land with new feeling for those lost out there, for the truly uncharted experience imprisonment is.

It was doubting time, all down our cell block. The first team-cheering spirit had evaporated. I had my own futile catechism to run through; why had I done this--to end the war? It couldn't. To feel noble? I didn't. To accomplish something? What? I was less sure the longer I stayed; and my mood was obviously shared by others, since the laughter was rueful when Marc Raskin mused humorously in one of our longer pauses, "Did you ever wish you were for the war?"

Never till now, was the first answer of instinct in me. Then: Never less than now. For what jail was giving me was just that possibility of regret. Opposition to the war had never cost me anything. I did not have to defy the draft, disobey an order, displease a superior. I had just talked a lot in favor of people taking those risks. Tonight was my chance to join them in some minimal gesture, as a first motion toward them.

But this was not really joining them. True--yet most of them, I hoped, would understand the gesture. Besides, to say it is "only" a gesture is to move it into the realm of symbol, make it a thing freighted with meaning beyond itself, if for no one else, then certainly for me. And I had to puzzle out that meaning.

Those all around me tonight were the honored ones of our society--a Nobel winner, the recipients of many other prizes, holders of academic chairs, people whose names graced marquees, drew crowds. Not that we were all celebrities, by any means; but we were comfortably middle-class conformers, not "the demonstrating type." Why had we chosen, if only in symbol, this dishonor, most of us for the first time? First arrest, first night in jail, first guilty sentences, fresh criminal records--60 or 70 new records this night, and the promise of more to follow in the future. The whole thing was a play of symbols, a reversal of the customary language of recognition in our society, of honor as we had understood it. These were people grown partly ashamed of their honors, because they feared the honoring society. Their jailing was a little thing; but so is a medal or prize; so is an award. This jailing--the number pinned on, the mug shot taken, the grease marks paced out and out on paper (let your fingers do the walking)--all this was a cumulative anti-award. It cost little. But it did not--at least to us; not then, at least--mean little. It was only a symbol, as was the Star of David worn by some non-Jews in the Occupation. It was a declaration of solidarity with the hunted, not the hunters. We had been drawn into a fellowship of noncomplicity with what our Government was doing, our society condoning. We could no longer be sure where the guilt ended, could not satisfy ourselves that we did not stand with the war criminals until we had taken some (minimal) pains to place ourselves among the peace criminals, drawing on their merits, as it were, saved by our new fringe membership in their company, innocent by association.

And that had to be the point--not that we, in some spotlight, replaced true heroes of resistance. None of us dreamed we could do that. Brave as he is, Ben Spock is no Dan Berrigan. Visiting jails is not living there. And not one of us in that cell block thought ourselves, then or ever, the equal of Spock. Those who wore the Star of David in Denmark did it not only to save Jews but to be saved by them--saved from murder in its most cowardly form, murder by easy societal acquiescence. Ours was, thus, a homage to the real peace criminals, application for honorary membership, an attempt at a vicarious and saving guilt. Our hint of what real prisoners undergo was a shy move on our part toward fellowship with them.

In my "sermon" of the Sunday before, I had asked why my seminarian audience and I were not at one with the demonstrators in Washington--and then tried to trace a way in which we were. On that very Sunday, Nixon was trying to speak through interpreters on his way to the Moscow summit--while his planes blustered and mines whispered in various Babel threats across the world. Yet the meaning of all Meaning, it seemed to me, lay in Luke's tale of the divided yet uniting tongues--how all that we understand in ineffably private ways stands, yet, under a common judgment; how we meet each other in true understanding by way of our deepest burrowings, in our most private journeys, when we think ourselves most apart (as men counted off into separate cells). Perhaps Noam Chomsky, down the cell block from us, was getting at something like this with his concept of the inner preformed language given us in the mere act of being men, the abrupt light of intellection we discover in ourselves by discerning it in others. We speak to one another in the shared spirit, or not at all; and fiery tongues are our only true interpreters. Speaking to the class of theologians, I suggested that studies dedicated to the spirit constitute of themselves a war upon the tower and concluded:

Unless we have this prior way of using our voices "deep to deep," it is probably vain to try purifying the language of Power at the Pentagon or in Moscow. We would only be pitting new towers against the tower, adding further Babels to Babylon....When I turn over these thoughts in my mind, they reconcile me to our presence here, instead of in Washington--though I hope to see some of you over there, later.

Actually, I had seen some of these young men at earlier demonstrations and in Harrisburg for the trial of Philip Berrigan. And, once again, I was trying to join them, for I knew many hold a concept of ministry that will take them into risks not unlike Father Berrigan's. And the reference to Washington--to this night in jail--was, in my own mind, made because I wanted to buy the right to move in their company through crises yet to come, to keep writing "mere words" against the war and against our nation's war-making readiness.

But mainly, by now, I wanted out. Around one A.M., D. C. residents were released without bail, "on citation," as the term goes--so we lost Karl Hess. It made more room in the cell but left an emptiness, too. We were glad to see him go free--he was wondering, by this time, about his wife, who had been arrested with the women--but it was also sad to see our company dispersed. Susan, our lawyer, had gone to bed, promising the bondsman would arrive; but we were in for more hours of indeterminacy. A nice young Roman-collared minister across the way had not understood her rather breathless questions and was left behind, unlisted with the other D. C. residents. Now he could not even get onto the list of those to be bailed--though no results had come of that to this point. Only Joe Papp had been let out, his flunky scurrying to purpose, making separate arrangements for him.

At last, at three A.M., word came that ten of us could leave on bond. Others now wished to join us, but Susan was not there and guards cannot solicit for a bondsman. I wrote six shouted names and gave them to our bondsman on the way out; but he just shoved them into his pocket and headed for the precinct house, where women prisoners awaited him. Five of us jammed ourselves inside a cab--it seemed spacious; it was not a cell. We were a bit punchy, slaphappy with mere ability to go where we wanted to go, eat what and when we wanted to, bathe, shift scenes, breathe different air. The cabdriver laughed with and at us. We must have seemed like a carload of kids, drunk from our long sobriety--what a sight: just childish, learned, paunchy, overaged school kids giddy to be out on holiday.

Our first stop had to be the railway station. Poor Martin Duberman, the critic and playwright, had sweated out the morning hours knowing he had left a manuscript he had worked on for four years in a 24-hour locker there; had it been found and thrown away? We bantered on the drive about Carlyle's famous loss, but we were all writers in the cab and knew this was no laughing matter. At the station, we tumbled out, wanting food and drink--not that we were really hungry, but hours of being unable to eat, even if one does not need to, triggers some urge toward self-preservation. We descended on the milk and candy machines like calorie freaks.

The manuscript recovered, we went back to the cab, poet Kenneth Koch asking, "What was all that crap about jail as an ego trip? My ego never felt less traveled!" At the hotel we parted, live men who had never met until last night, all backslaps and comic affection like Chaplin and the drunk in City Lights, knowing that tomorrow our odd link would be broken and we would be strangers again.

We couldn't get much sleep. We were on the day's docket, which meant showing up at nine A.M., though we would not be processed till after lunch. In the hotel coffee shop that morning, Da Silva read the Times account of our arrest and said, "I've had better reviews." At the courthouse, we met the women again and heard of their night--five in a cell, with only a low bench, not two bunks. Francine Gray said, "Dr. Spock was right. It is like losing your virginity--it's even more boring, and hurts more, than you had expected." She had been trying to see her husband, who had stayed in jail all night, to tell him she would plead not guilty and prosecute the state--her own kind of imprisonment cheek.

We were advised by our lawyer to plead nolo contendere and get off, most likely, with a $25 fine (or two days). While pleading nolo, we would be allowed to make a statement, and Redress organizer Fred Branfman urged us all to make an individual declaration of conscience and to subscribe to one written in the yard that morning by those who had stayed in jail. (Scribble, scribble--what a crew.) I tried to think of something pithy for the judge and stenographer but could not. The dull petition had said it all. Anything I came up with for on-the-spot elocution would be too pompous or too elliptical. The only thing I can do with words is write them--after consideration. The pen may be the weakest of weapons--it has certainly been less mighty than the sword all through this war--but the falsest thing about my night in jail, I began to realize, was my pretense that I could escape the pen and typewriter. I am doomed to them, whatever. I have to turn words over on paper, try to link them, simply to make my mind work. I had gone to jail thinking it absurd to write about a few hours' experience, when so many men have years of ordeal to record. But already my own first impressions were fading--as they would, indeed, if I stayed inside for a decade. And if I did stay longer, I would perhaps be too dulled, or not dulled enough to the pain, to get the thing down on paper. So, despite all our resolute mental drill to convince ourselves it was no big deal to go to jail, I began to wish I had taken notes. I have spent far worse nights, and in far more dubious company, yet there is, after all, something different about being in jail.

The urge to take notes would grow, and finally triumph, as I listened to the personal testimony of the others facing our judge. Their halting words were especially eloquent for me, tongue-tied as I am with a pen out of my hand. And some spoke movingly by their very silence. Tom Wolfe had dwelt on Felicia Bernstein's practiced voice and dramatic reading at the Panther party. Here, she stood silent, after the clerk proclaimed the adversaries ("The United States versus Felicia Montealegre Bernstein") and then stamped Guilty on her thick legal-length folder. Howard Da Silva muted his Ben Franklin roar and only asked the judge if those who had stayed in jail all night could be processed quickly. Dr. Spock, unshaven but still courtly in his rumpled suit, pleaded not guilty with his imperturbable humor and politesse. Waked at three A.M. with word that his bond had been paid, he asked the time, said it would only disturb his Washington hosts if he dropped in on them now and went back to sleep on the floor. Not, however, until he had grinned and mumbled an answer to a guard taking Martin Duberman out of the cell block. "A writer, eh?" said the guard. "What do you write?" Before Duberman could answer, modestly, "This and that," Spock mischievously volunteered, "Cheap novels. Just cheap novels." In court, he and the judge knew each other, from his arrest in the rotunda, and Spock now assured him, "My reappearance does not represent any disrespect for the court, your Honor." Always the gentleman.

As I would soon discover, one feels strange and exposed facing a judge, waiting for sentence, even one so slight and foreseen, and my admiration grew for those who tried to voice their most private feelings in undergoing this first symbolic break with the social system that had coddled them. The note most often heard was one of wistful love for that system and mourning for it. David Amram said:

"Your Honor, in 1945, at the age of 14, I went with my mother to Pennsylvania Avenue, to watch Harry Truman light the Christmas tree. I was so impressed I made a water color of the event when I got home that night. I was brought up to respect the office of the Presidency and the other branches of our Federal and municipal governments. Now, in 1972, at the age of 41, I have committed civil disobedience and spent a night in jail, for the first time in my life.

"I feel my crime of illegal entry is morally justifiable, since it was an attempt to petition Congress in protest of a totally immoral war. All of us, as extremely active leaders in our various professions, do not relish the idea of any more days or nights in the cell block. But many of us may go to jail again, if necessary, to help bear witness to all of the young people of this country who have died, or who have been physically, psychologically and spiritually maimed by the unjust war their elders have forced upon them.

"I am a veteran, a taxpayer, and I love this country and the people I meet, as I travel all over America, giving concerts. Enough of us here today [sufficiently] love and respect what is stated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights to go to jail again, if necessary, as a part of a new consciousness that wishes to restore America's soul, by ending this war so we can bring peace, love and justice to all of our citizens."

Cynthia MacDonald, poetess from Sarah Lawrence, said:

"When I was a child, I was a baseball fan and I used to listen to the New York Giants games over the radio, which is what we had in those days. Alone in my room. I always stood up when The Star-Spangled Banner was played. As I didn't have a flag, I used to look at something red, white and blue, and think of it. I love my country, but I detest what it's doing in Vietnam...."

Even recent beneficiaries of our greatness had reason for regret. Mia Adjali, of the United Methodists, was born in Algeria:

"I have only been an American citizen for five years. But before I became an American citizen, I grew up in a country which fought the revolutionary war. I fought, in many words and in many letters, what the French did in Algeria, what the French did in Indochina, and when I became an American citizen, I saw my new country involved in the same struggle. I could only do one thing. I have never been arrested before. I have tried many means, perhaps not all of them, but I wish that Congress had, perhaps, shown the kind of understanding you are showing now, and perhaps had met last night, and acted in its own way to end this war."

I had moved to the front bench and my pen was out now--I would later verify what was being said from the transcript, but it had lost something by the time I read it coldly put down on paper. The words had special urgency spoken in voices furred with shyness and sleeplessness. But it was difficult to hear them in the spectators' part of the courtroom. Judy Collins, the archcommunicator, chatting with the judge, brought this up: "It's too bad there isn't a little better acoustical system, which I would always insist on if I were singing." I had learned that she had sat on the precinct steps after her release the night before and had rapped with policemen going off their shift. Now she asked the judge what he thought of those who acted from conscience--a question he deftly, politely deflected.

Others asked him to sign our petition, or to think of judges who had preserved their rectitude while Germany was pursuing covert genocide. He was inflexible but genial; and he had, after all, rejected the Government's request that our nolo pleas not be accepted. Judge Goodrich was a patently honorable man--and so are they all.

I scribbled as fast as I could. Maybe I could be the acoustical system Judy Collins wanted. These few tongues, in their unifying diversity, might have no effect--the tower might not fall--but the effort had to be made and recorded; and I have tried to put it down here. Judy ended her talk with the judge this way: "I would like to offer you my thanks, first of all. And, secondly, I would like to ask you to join us, because, perhaps, if you would join us, your court system can speed up and get on with the business that you should be involved with, and we can stop murdering babies, and women, and men. Thank you."

Then there was Patricia Simon, a gold-star mother, a schoolteacher with other children to raise, giving every spare moment to the son she can no longer care for: "I have spent enormous amounts of energy, time, money and health in protesting the death of my son, other American sons and the suffering and death of the Indo-Chinese people, in all the legal, nonviolent ways my imagination could produce." Has any other mother of a slain U. S. soldier gone voluntarily to jail to protest the war in which he fell?

There was nothing for me to write down as Joe Papp took his sentence, untheatrical to the end--it was two P.M., the time of that important meeting he had to get to. Only later did I find out what he missed. He was one of the recipients of New York State's award for cultural contribution, to be given in splendor by Nelson Rockefeller--another of society's honors for our honored company. But he was not there, he was with us in the courtroom. The medal was awarded in absentia, while he received our D. C. anti-award. His wife told New York's governor she had never been prouder of him. And so, without her right to be, was I. By God, I did go to jail with some beautiful people.