In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning
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 my reference to the “Paleolithic” is not a satirical comment about Smith’s traditions or student culture. It’s about what I studied there.
Paul Shepard’s typewriter. Photo credit and courtesy of Anthony Wheeler.
PAUL SHEPARD: SUBVERSIVE ANIMAL
(1925–1996)
The genetic human in us knows how to dance the animal, knows the strength of clan membership and the profound claims and liberation of daily rites of thanksgiving
—P.S., THE ONLY WORLD WE’ VE GOT, 1996
Paul Shepard dashed into the biology lab in a flurry, the stack of papers in his arms flying up and hitting his blond beard. With such unselfconscious actions, he let us see that he had another life outside the academic domain of microscopes and reptile brains. Little did I know that this absent-minded professor was a genius and a soon-to-become maverick innovator in his field. Perhaps his unfolding as a subversive could have been predicted by the fact that, unlike any biology teacher in high school, he spoke of a little-known area of study called “ecology.” But, really, who cared? Biology existed in my life only to fulfill a requirement before I could get on to courses in my major, and my major was definitely not biology.
I had no idea, though, that down the line Paul Shepard was to have a major impact on my life’s work. At that very moment in 1966 when I took his biology course, he was in fact working on a book called Man in the Landscape that he punched out on his portable Olivetti Lettera 32. The book would lay the ground for his life’s work, while I was just striving to get through the formaldehyde session with the dead frog.
I never saw Professor Shepard again after that semester at Smith College, but some twenty years later I came across his name as the teacher of a workshop in a California Institute of Integral Studies catalog. He was giving a weekend class on animal totems, and the announcement for it sat on the exact opposite page from a session I was offering. Thus began our correspondence—and ultimately his wife Flo’s unexpected and most welcome gift to me: the very Olivetti Paul had used to type his books.
Simply put, the gist of Paul Shepard’s work is that humans are animals who belong in the natural world just as giraffes and fireflies and manatees do. Whether looked at from the perspective of ecology, psychology, culture, politics, or health, our severance from the world shared by all the other creatures has been a failure. His next book, The Subversive Science, introduced the field of