say was that we should take to the barricades—that we should be out fighting, rather than just sitting watching a play.”2
So what was it that Raskin advocated being up against? The war or the wall? Both? Vietnam was a shooting war and a societal wall. When I checked in with him, his answer across the years from the 1960s was unambiguous, despite Heller’s contemporaneous memory of the moment. “I yelled from the back of the theater, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker!’” Raskin told me, adding that the performance was a fundraiser for the National Lawyers Guild, “the old lefty organization that revived in the 1960s because of young lefty lawyers like my friend Bernardine Dohrn and my wife Eleanor Raskin.” He insisted he would not have even considered substituting “war” for “wall” when he disrupted the curtain call. “I don’t mess with classics of street slang. Didn’t then, don’t now.” And a classic of street slang it is.
Perhaps the phrase originated in the poem by LeRoi Jones, “Black People,” in which the text instructs: “All the stores will open if you say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick up!” During the 1967 Newark, New Jersey, riots (which he identified as “rebellion”), Jones was charged with resisting arrest and carrying an illegal weapon. At his trial later that year, Judge Leon W. Kapp read from the poem. Jones was found guilty and sentenced to three years in state prison, a sentence overturned when an appeals court ruled that Judge Kapp’s recitation prejudiced the jury.3 In a 1991 interview, Jones (by then he called himself Amiri Baraka)4 said Judge Kapp “decided to prove I had caused the riots by reading from a poem […] [a poem] not even published until after the riots were over. I objected that I was being tried for possession of two poems, and I was right.”5 Or perhaps Jones wasn’t the original author of the call to action but incorporated the line into his poem because Newark police were apt to use it when arresting black citizens.6 Whatever its origin, from the Lower East Side to Columbia University and thence across the continent, the phrase became common currency for rebellion. A posse of self-styled revolutionaries headquartered Downtown in New York City adopted it for their moniker and Mark Rudd, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia, incorporated it into his open letter to the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, and credited it to LeRoi Jones (“whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot,” he added as an aside). The call became a rallying cry of the strike. And a year after Raskin’s yell, in 1969 on their Volunteers album, the Jefferson Airplane sang out, “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” for the chorus of their anthem “We Can Be Together.”
The call, without the oath, dates to ca. 1910, according to the British lexicographer Jonathon Green. It originated as military jargon meaning serious problems, according to Green’s research, “reinforced by the 1960s radical slogan, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker!’”7 And the military jargon originated with the reality that firing squad victims often are literally up against the wall.8 And up against the wall were piles of corpses during the murderous days of the Mexican Revolution when Pancho Villa, Emilio Zapata and the federales shot each other down with ease and glee, as civil war bled the country between 1910 and 1920.
Up against the wall, motherfucker: Patty Hearst apparently used the line when she famously participated in a bank robbery and called the cry out while cradling a machine gun—although it seems the coopted newspaper heiress dropped her voice at least for the final word of the order; lip readers working for federal prosecutors reconstructed the full sentence.9 I probably heard it—of course not for the first time—but repeated as Hearst’s quote during testimony at her 1976 trial, a bizarre show I covered as a correspondent for NBC News.
Even without the expletive, the up against the wall imagery is clear: stuck, nowhere to go (except—with luck—through it, under it or over it). Language, especially slang, mirrors reality. Balls to the wall. Hitting a wall. Breaking through the wall. Climbing the walls. Off the wall. Back to the wall. Banging your (my?) head against the wall. “Walls have an aroma of betrayal and death about them,” is Professor Raskin’s point of view. He tracks his awareness of walls to the short story “The Wall”—the 1939 Jean-Paul Sartre existential study focuses on firing squad executions, the victims up against a wall. “I’ll think about how I’d like to get inside the wall, I’ll push against it with my back […] with every ounce of strength I have,” one of the condemned tells others in his cell, “but the wall will stay, like in a nightmare.”10 Intriguing: my Casino rendezvous with Jonah Raskin in Bodega occurs proximate to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Running Fence” site—the artists’ 1976 installation of an 18-foot-high and 24.5-mile-long fence made of nylon. The piece ran from U.S. Highway 101 to the Pacific across Marin and Sonoma counties. This too was no impenetrable wall. The design allowed for cars and trucks, livestock and wildlife to cross the fence path.11
Good fences make good neighbors? Robert Frost takes on the aphorism in his classic 1914 poem “Mending Wall.” Working with his neighbor to fix their common stone wall he muses the now-classic wall critique, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What was I walling in or walling out, / And to whom was I like to give offence.” And then he knocks down the concept of walls with his coup de grâce. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.” And yet walls remain ubiquitous—the metaphoric, the exclusionary and the confining.
Encountering Borderlines
The first time I encountered an obstacle separating my home state California and our southern neighbor Mexico was back in my high school days. Two chums and I were on a road trip in a rattletrap VW Beetle, vagabonding along the Pacific for a summer adventure. Just below Ensenada we were stopped at a roadblock by federales who demanded travel documents. They looked at our papers and ordered us to turn back toward the States. Gringos under the age of 18, they informed us, were forbidden to drive further down the Baja coast without a letter from their parents authorizing the trip. In those pre-Internet days we couldn’t send an instant text missive back home for the required permission slip.
These days of course it is the U.S. government working overtime controlling the border with Mexico.
“I will build a great, beautiful wall on our southern border,” thundered Donald Trump, first as a candidate and then as president, and his followers bellow back, “Build the wall! Build the wall!” On the east side of San Diego, just over the border from dusty Tijuana shanties, test prototypes were built in 2017 to show the world how that wall might look: monoliths of steel and concrete launched skyward. The Trump wall samples stood tall as political threats, reminiscent of the bloody gash the Iron Curtain made across Europe.
But along much of the Mexican-U.S. border—a sprawling land mass where the First and Third Worlds meet—there’s been a hefty impediment preventing easy access into most of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas since not long after my underage friends and I were kept out of Mexico. For some miles it’s a fence, in other places poles stuck close together. Harsh weather and landscape do the job for long stretches of the boundary. And in especially well-traveled urban zones it already was a wall long before Trump grabbed the border as a cause célèbre. Not that any of those variations along the dividing line keep the hearty and determined from crossing the frontier.
“They use a ladder.” I met U.S. Border Patrol officer Eduardo Olmos at a place where the borderline is a steel wall. A seasoned expert in border security work, he was matter-of-fact about the simple tools and techniques used by border jumpers to get over the existing wall. “They put a carpet or a blanket on top of the concertina wire, and then they’ll have a rope ladder on the other side.” Olmos explained defeating walls with the same simplicity employed by Vicente Fox. A hop, skip and a jump from Mexico into California.
We humans have been building walls—physical and conceptual—since Adam and Eve were forced across the line out of Eden. Not all walls are of the brutal Berlin Wall-type, designed to keep us in or out against our will. Consider the front
