The Recipe for Revolution. Carolyn Chute
in crazed minds, especially in Paris, and this Thomas Jefferson character who some call the “most dangerous radical in the world” is just one of many. Liberty! they shout. Obviously, its time has come.
Blame it on the printing press! Page numbering. And coal, the hot hard heart of progress. Blame it on time.
As a peculiar scum forms on some deep waters, so the talk of “liberty for common men” now squeaks all over Europe! Beware new leaders! Prepare! Be watchful for when the heads of monarchs and bishops lie in their baskets, for the job then for you is to pose the common man’s “earned wage” slavery as “liberty” and let him believe that his flag and his constitution are his liberty. The crystal clear and literal liberty must never be his.
And capital?
In this fashion, I dare say, the aristocratic men of new nations will someday be not men but systems. Yes, a montage of many machines and magicians. This is profound. Surely in this fashion nobody will be free! Every human head will BE a basket. Every human heart will pop in confusion, indecency, and fear; restlessness and stupors; structures and hollows; and continuous tiny civil wars. No conscience will rule. Even the cruelest monarch has had a moment of conscience, a powder flash of integrity! But not so with a god-sized system.
We have agreed on no censorship but I have to express my pure and colossal disgust over Montana’s last History as it Happens installment about Jane and state as fact that it is nothing to be proud of.
Bev and Barbara, two ladies who practically live here, have done a lot with Jane, even though I know it’s been a big inconvenience for them because of their living in town in that wicked modern yellow house with all the glass and grass. They are a couple of saints as far as I’m concerned. They’ve been the same way with a boy here who has a bad heart and with cantankerous old Marge. I don’t know when Bev and Barbara sleep, let alone the fact that you drive by their house and the grass is always cut and almost blue-green, no weeds, not even one proud-of-itself dandelion, and everything is kept spanking clean. And they keep a swimming pool. Mostly for Barbara. And a swimming pool doesn’t take care of itself. They have to treat it every day and vacuum the damn thing.
Some of us have helped a little with Jane, to take the burden off Bev and Barbara and Gordon. Old Lucienne has spent a few nights at Gordon’s place where Jane won’t budge from but rarely. And Lee Lynn brings little Hazel down some afternoons. Vic’s wife Ruth came once, the night of the solstice march. We are hoping Jane will settle in and feel more at ease and then eventually spend daytimes with the kids at the Shops, and get outdoors more, in the air. And then eventually take a liking to one of the families, a family who will take her in as their own. It would be nice for Jane to have brothers and sisters, to be included. Feel included. Because her mother Lisa is never going to get out of prison as long as this country is run by the esteemed and lofty in suits and robes.
Today I’ve encouraged Bev and Barbara to take a break, swim, rest. But they’ll use it to work on painting their garage. This is the way they are. God luv ’em.
This morning, I made up a satchel of stuff from the East Parlor. Some games, even that Cathedrals of Paris game Whitney made a few months ago. It has really cute little buildings of papier-mâché, modeled after real-life old cathedrals. Whitney is a real architecture nut when she’s not talking physics and the “big picture” or boys.
My two oldest kids, Gabe and Jetta, have “business” at the Shops, so it’s just me and Zack and the bag of games and books. Zack and the stuff rolled along quite nicely in the little wagon, as long as I stayed on the paths. Zack is almost two. They say “terrible twos,” but I like two-year-olds. I’m not crazy about new babies. They can’t talk. I like a kid to talk. I like it when they say cute things. Zack really comes up with some doozies. What a little monkey. What a doll.
Well, here we are in the kitchen of Gordon’s family’s old farmplace and I am trying to get Jane interested in going outside to play, maybe up to the old merry-go-round. It’s a deep-crackling-blue-sky day, room temp, not one of the abnormally thick and oveny sweatbath days we get nowadays for “normal.” I want to get out and feel real September’s arms around me.
But Jane just stands there by the table with her arms folded and stares at the phone. She says, “My mother is going to call me today.”
Well, I don’t know what to say about that. Bev didn’t mention her mother calling. And at the jail you don’t just pick up the bedside princess phone and poke buttons at your leisure. But I don’t want Jane to think I don’t trust her, so I say, “Well, let’s just see what’s in the satchel.” I get out one of the games. Candyland. It’s good for kids Jane’s age. The cathedrals game might be a little too sophisticated. Sometimes I’m not sure I follow it. “Want to play Candyland?”
Jane says, “Okay.” Her eyes are very, very dark. The irises are as black as the pupils. And they shine. Really beautiful eyes. But sulky. In fact, right now you might say her eyes show contempt. She hates me and Zack. It’s plain to see. She keeps her arms folded across the chest of her satiny shirt. It’s a bright orange top, almost like a halter, the side and back cut low. A kind of Saturday night top. Her skin is gorgeous. Darker than mine even, a really velvety dark gold. And her hair! Jesus. Thick ringlets, dark brown, really long if it were straight. She wears it up in a beaded squeegee. She is a gorgeous girl. I guess that’s what you get when you combine liony Africa with shamrocky Ireland, an almost mythical little goddess, at least in looks. But everyone says inside Jane is plain fear. Wellll, there’s where I draw the line. There is nothing plain inside that kid.
Okay, so I explain to Zack about the Candyland game, though I know all he’ll want to do is carry the draw cards and plastic men around and grab our pieces off the board and chirp things like “He wee goooo!” So I can see there is going to be work here for ol’ Bonnie Loo. It’s okay. I’m just glad the humidity has let up. If the mosquitoes from the marsh would leave us be, the day would be perfect. I’m even going to say I’m having less nausea today, knock on wood. Just one little wave when I first woke up.
Jane’s cold steamy black eyes watch my hands gathering up the little piles of draw cards. “Come help me do this,” I suggest pleasantly. She slowly turns her head from side to side, her eyes on my face. I try another approach. “Which one of these stacks of draw cards would you like to shuffle?”
“Neither one,” she replies.
I look up at her face. You can see the African ancestry across her eyes and nose, mixed in with Indian or something, but her mouth is a small curved “white” mouth. Her tongue, it’s one of those things you inherit from your folks . . . a tongue that you can roll like a tube and also you can point it. It’s an inherited thing. Jane is presently using the point of her tongue to stroke her top lip in a gesture of bored sensuousness.
If I get nervous, I talk too much. Why am I nervous? Why is it important to me what this nearly-seven-year-old brat thinks of me? I am talking away and when I look up, she is not listening, just looking at the phone or out the window or at the refrigerator or at one of Gordon’s heaped desks.
When I say, “Ready to start? Which of these men you want? This green guy or the yellow?” she says, “I’m not playing.” Her eyes sweep all over me.
The phone rings. Black. On the wall. Still has a dial. Jane hurries long-leggedly and grabs it. She tells the caller in her husky confident voice, “He’s not here. Would you like to leave a message?” And then she listens. Shrugs. Sighs. Holds the phone out to me with two fingers, like a dirty diaper. As I take the caller’s message, Jane storms out of the kitchen with a rattle and slam and errk of swollen old doors that lead into the other rooms.
After the call, I get Zack out of the biscuit wood cupboard, where he has found a cat, and the cat is scratching Zack on the