Rusty is screaming her head off, I’ll bet she’s caught something!
(No, she hasn’t.)
She’s grown very big in the past few weeks and is beginning to lose all of her maidenly charm. In fact, there’s a lecherous old tom who’s already begun serenading her from the backyard, probably setting the poor dear up for an early conquest, you cats is all alike, man. Carol wants to get rid of her. She says it’s because the landlady has been prowling around suspiciously outside our door, certain we’re harboring boys. But I think it’s because Rusty still seems to prefer Carol’s bed to the litter pan we’ve put under the sink. I must admit the place is beginning to smell. We take the cat out every now and then for exercise, hiding her under our raincoats to sneak her past Mrs. Cooley, but we look like three-breasted creatures when we slink down the stairs that way, and besides it’s getting too warm to be wearing raincoats, and it hasn’t rained once since the beginning of the month. But the last time Carol suggested that we dispossess the cat, I said, “Okay, let’s tie a brick around her neck and dump her in the Charles,” which shocked her out of her pants. I guess I like that old dumb cat.
Look at her.
She knows I’m writing about her.
I’m still not too thrilled about going up to the Cape next month, especially since my mother informs me that there’s no sewing machine in the house they’ve taken. I recently had to shorten all of my skirts (again!) and I began to get the sewing itch, and was planning on making myself some clothes this summer. There are so many great styles coming in, Wat, and I’ll bet I could whip up some of those Marimekko things in a matter of hours. Of course, it’s the material that makes those look so great, but maybe I can find some cool material when I’m in New York. Without a machine, though, it’d be murder. And who wants to hear glove anaesthesia discussed by a multitude of shrinks as the sun sinks into the Atlantic and their wives envy my boobs and tell me I was but a mere child the last time, etc. etc. etc.? Not me. I want to come to Hawaii and be with you.
Incidentally, I have a nomination for the Tyler-Castelli Fire and Brimstone Award for June, and I’d like your opinion on it. I think it should go to Billy Graham who told 19,000 listeners in London, “I fear that sex has become our goddess — and has that one-eyed thing in our living room become our God?” Is sex your goddess, Wat? I thought I was. And what about that one-eyed thing in the living room, huh? I keep talking to Carol about it, but she insists it must be one of my friends, as all of hers have 20/20 vision. Let me know about the R and R, and also about Billy Graham, as I want to contact him immediately if he’s a Recipient. Actually, though, I think he’s an Evangelist.
P. S. Your description of the base camp perimeter was very illuminating. You’re under arrest!
June 17, 1966
Dearest Wat,
I miss you so much I can’t think straight. How many months do we have to go? I know you have the days marked off out there, but I keep forgetting whether we have to count a year from when you went into the service or a year from when you got to Vietnam. Please tell me. Please date your next letter very carefully, and state in it exactly how many months and days it will be until you can come home. Then I’ll mark it on my calendar, too, and at least that part of the uncertainty will be gone.
Too many things have been happening here at home. And a thing that seems terribly important when it occurs is almost immediately overshadowed by something even more important. I don’t think I told you that James Meredith was shot eleven days ago down in Mississippi. He was on U. S. Highway 51, a few miles outside of Hernando, when a white man wielding a 16-gauge shotgun stepped out of the bushes on the side of the road and began yelling his name, “James Meredith, James Meredith, I only want James Meredith,” and then tiring four loads of birdshot into the highway. I guess he was avenging Ole Miss for being forced to admit Meredith as its first Negro student back in the Dark Ages of 1962, or maybe he wanted to prove to Meredith that it was not safe for a Negro to walk from Memphis to Jackson in an attempt to inspire voter-registration. Luckily, he didn’t kill him. But that wasn’t the end of it, Wat, which is what I meant about more important events overtaking those that seem terribly meaningful at the time.
The shooting drew Negro leaders to the South from all over the country, naturally, some of them seeking publicity, I guess, but all of them determined to finish Meredith’s march for him. But they ran into difficulty again just yesterday in the town of Greenwood, where the police wouldn’t let them pitch their tents on school property and where Stokely Carmichael of SNCC was arrested with several other Negroes. He’s now been let out on bail, Wat, but when they freed him, he yelled to the assembled crowd, “We want black power! Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down to get rid of the dirt.” As you know, Carmichael’s sentiments tend to be Black Nationalist, so the important thing wasn’t his racist vehemence, which was expected, but the way the Negroes in the crowd isolated only two words of his outburst and began chanting them like a slogan, “Black power, black power, black power.”
I can remember a girl who had to quit B.U. because her father was being transferred out to California someplace, telling me she was never quite certain about what she should call herself, the derogatory expression nigger having derived from Nigra, which was a mispronunciation of Negro — so was it okay to call herself a Negro? Wasn’t that only a refined way of saying nigger? She had never heard a Negro woman referring to herself as a Negress, for example, because that was certainly derogatory. (Didn’t the Nazis use the word Jewess in much the same way?) And whereas she thought it might be okay to call herself a colored person, she felt her uncle was putting on airs when he referred to himself as a person of color. So where did this leave her? Well, I think Mr. Carmichael has started something down there in Mississippi, for better or worse. I think Negroes will know what to call themselves from now on, even though black may be only another misnomer. (Have you ever met a black Negro?) It scares me, Wat, all of it. Martin Luther King keeps urging peaceful protest, but I sense that even his patience is wearing thin, and I wonder how long he can sustain his grander vision and his larger dream? Bobby Kennedy gets up on top of a car outside racist Johannesburg and tells the gathered people, “Hate and bigotry will end in South Africa one day,” and he’s really saying to the world that it will end in America, too. I say aluvai to both of them. I’d like to invite them to dinner one night. I think they would like Rusty the cat.
Hey!
Lenny and Roxanne have finally decided to get married after only two short years of sleeping together! The decision was all very sudden (though I’m sure she’s not pregnant) and the wedding is set for June 25th, which is a week from tomorrow. I’ve been asked to be one of the witnesses. They’re getting married by a justice of the peace, so it won’t be a big production, but there’ll be a reception afterwards at the 79th Street apartment, and I’m very excited about the whole thing. In her letter to me, by the way, Roxanne reported a fine piece of graffiti she spotted in the ladies’ room of Schrafft’s 88th Street, and which I now pass on to you: