street by ourselves, a sorry privilege because when we got there, all the other kids were stuck on the other side. Later, at Smith, students were not permitted to stay out past 11 p.m., and then only with permission—yet I had grown up with little-to-no nocturnal restrictions. And now, for Chrissake, my own mother was a left-leaning activist!
My political career had begun at age eight—walking around and around the collating table, stapling the resulting information/action packets, stuffing them into envelopes, stamping and organizing them according to postal code. In 1964 my mother picked me up after school on a Wednesday. We met with Blacks and whites in a parking lot in downtown Cleveland and rode all night in a bus to Washington. On Thursday we spent the whole day picketing the White House. We rode all night back to Cleveland, and I missed just one day of school. These sorts of experiences were normal fare for me. So were the mother-daughter chats we had about what she was learning and grappling with, like the one about being a white homemaker in a people-of-color movement. Or the contradiction between sending me to private school while other young people had no school at all.
And there was the conversation about what it meant to be part of history. No excuse for sitting on the sidelines, she said. You have to do what’s there to do. First and foremost, my mother was a woman of action. She was dedicated to the electoral process—and for one brief moment I had a focal point for my own personal generation gap. She had grown up under FDR, after all; she was a flaming liberal, a “deluded” believer in working through “the system.” I, on the other hand, considered myself a radical. Maladjusted at Smith College, I had transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, and had just been released from jail after the People’s Park Mass Bust of 1969, wherein some 400 people had been hauled in opaque-windowed buses to the Santa Rita Detention Center. The phone call from my commune on Vine Street, in which I argued for a revolution and she was heartbroken, was one of just three arguments we had in our entire lives.
In the early ‘70s Hooker traveled to Paris to stand witness to the peace talks in process and to attend a meeting between North Vietnamese representatives and U.S. peace activists. (Here began a decades-long joke with William Sloane Coffin about a very special British umbrella she had left behind in a shared taxi and he had picked up—which was only resolved after her death via an exchange of letters between him and me about said umbrella, bristling with Daoust/Coffin humor of the madcap sort.) She went on from her civil-rights and anti-war activism to apply her artistic/organizing talents to local and national elections, marches for welfare mothers, efforts to save the endangered Everglades of Florida, and the feminist movement, including bringing Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” to Cleveland. She (the only non-lawyer) also sat on the board of the Ohio ACLU. In 1978 I swallowed my pride and called her to ask advice about how to navigate the thorny terrain of being a white person in the midst of people-of-color movements.
Around that time, my mother was diagnosed with kidney disease and began a life dependent on dialysis. Plus one failed kidney transplant. In typical form, she mustered her spirit to continue doing what there was to do. She took us kids on two vacations—one to Santa Fe, New Mexico; the other to Michigan. After my father died in 1982, she married her high-school sweetheart, honeymooned carting a home dialysis machine, and in good feminist spirit rejected the idea of changing her last name to his and moving in with him—all the while continuing her political work as best she could.
But, inevitably, the end was nigh. Lying in a coma in Intensive Care at the Cleveland Clinic, she was hooked up to all manner of tubes leading to indecipherable machines flashing digital numbers. A family dispute arose, with her new husband arguing that he wanted her to live no matter what vegetative state she might be in while the doctor was advising us that it was time to pull the machines’ electrical cords and let her go. It was Friday, and a brain scan was to be performed on Monday; if it was discovered that she had any brainwaves functioning, the hospital would be legally bound to keep her alive.
I had read Laura Huxley’s You Are Not the Target about her experience as her husband Aldous lay dying. At his request, she had given him LSD and then gently talked him through the passage. “You are going towards a greater love than you have ever known. You are going towards the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully,” she had said to him. “Light and free. Light and free…. You are going towards the light. Willing and consciously you are going…. Go into the light, go into the light,” she had repeated until he breathed his last.
I was startled. I felt that I could never do anything as brave as that. I would be too afraid, too frozen. But I did. During my Friday visit, I slipped her hand into mine and, adopting Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ message that a person in a coma is still aware, I whispered: “You have always lived for others. Through this illness you have begun to do what you want to do, for yourself. Now you face the ultimate choice: do you want to live? Or leave? The brainwave exam is scheduled for Monday. If you want to stay, we welcome you. If you want to leave, we are ready. All you have to do is go into the light, go into the light, light and free, go into the light,” I said as if some unseen sage were guiding my words. “Mimere is waiting for you on the other side. Pipere is waiting for you. Your brother Buddy is waiting. Martin Luther King. A.A. Milne. C.S. Lewis. Eleanor Roosevelt.” As if repeating a mantra, I named the people over whom she had twinkled those blazing blue eyes, who had subsequently passed on.
She left on Sunday morning.
In 1986 my mother was posthumously inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame—joining other distinguished Ohioans like Annie Oakley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lillian Gish, Frances Payne Bolton, Gloria Steinem, Ruby Dee, and Nikki Giovanni.
Psychologists say that the relationship with Mother is the most important in one’s life. I still grieve. But thank the Lord: I reside safely on the other side of that blasted generation gap, in full appreciation of all that she was and all that she gave me—not the least of which is a sense of being alive to history.
III. THE PALEOLITHIC AT SMITH COLLEGE
A colleague once defined an academic discipline as a group of scholars who had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions.
—MARK NATHAN COHEN, GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES, 2007
IT’S NOT THAT I wanted to go to Smith College. It was more like it was something that happened to me. No question: according to going opinion in Cleveland, I was to “go east” where the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges were. That much was clear. My idea was the far groovier Sarah Lawrence College north of New York City. My brother Sandy—who was into the likes of Nina Simone, Summerhill, and Segovia before anyone else I knew had ever heard of them—had told me that at Sarah Lawrence an aspiring opera singer would appear unannounced on the balcony of the dorm and belt out an aria. The problem was, I didn’t get in. The head mistress of my preparatory high school had gone to Smith and reveled in sending her students to follow in her learned footsteps. So there I was in 1965—a Smithy by somebody else’s design.
Students at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1964. Courtesy College Archives, Smith College.
The campus was very much like it had been for the previous fifty years. Students in saddle shoes, kilts, and round-collar blouses bought at Bonwit Teller and Neiman Marcus. Field hockey and rowing. Tea in the living room, bridge in the sitting room. Mixers at Yale. Not allowed to stay out past 11 p.m. People of color few and far between. Lesbians hidden away in the obscurity of their dorm closets.
But
