Thurgood Marshall and the Sunnyland Case

A few weeks ago my brother stumbled upon a cool postscript to my book, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, about our dad’s involvement in the early civil rights movement in Tallahassee, Florida.  We’d known he’d been arrested and that his lawyers had appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.   What we didn’t know was that one of those lawyers was Thurgood Marshall, the famous civil rights attorney who later became the first black Supreme Court Justice.

This shouldn’t be a huge surprise.  Marshall was the Chief Counsel for the NAACP from 1940 -1961.  During that time, he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them.   My dad's case Leonard D. Speed, Joseph Spagna, and Johnny Herndon v. City of Tallahassee came in 1958, but Marshall never got the chance to argue it since the high court justices refused to hear the case, citing issues of procedure and jurisdiction.

It’s enlightening, nonetheless, to read the transcript of the appeal which has recently come available – for a pretty penny – from The Making of Modern Law.

Readers of Test Ride will recall the gist of the story.  My dad and five other young men – three of them black, three white - tried to test Ordinance 741, a law that gave Tallahassee bus drivers authority to assign seats based, supposedly, on passenger weight and the “maximum health and safety” of the riders.  

When my dad and his friends boarded a bus called the “Sunnyland”, the driver, Emory Elkins, assigned them seats as you might suspect: whites in the front, blacks in the back.  Mid-way through the ride, my dad and two of the black guys moved seats so now they sat together as interracial pairs.  The three who moved seats were arrested, and they hoped to take the case to court to prove that the law violated their rights under the 14^th Amendment.

They started by pleading “Not Guilty.”

According to federal appeals court judge Dozier Devane, a known segregationist, that was their big mistake.  Instead of entering a plea, they should have entered an affidavit citing the unconstitutionality of the law.  Since they were inarguable guilty of breaking the ordinance, there was nothing to appeal.  End of story.

That’s not a complicated position.  But the prose in response to the appeal, written by Tallahassee attorney Leo L. Foster, is so convoluted as to be almost unreadable. He refers repeatedly to a seating chart admitted by the bus driver as evidence, a chart which didn’t specify race.  Therefore, Foster argues, race was not a factor in the seating decision. In the eyes of the court, in fact, the defendants could’ve been “six negroes” or six white men.  Huh?

Thurgood Marshall’s prose, by contrast, is clear, easy to read, and to the point.  He makes a thorough condemnation of Ordinance 741 not by addressing what goes unsaid – that seating will be determined based on race – but what is said.  The ordinance is “so vague as to make an innocent act a criminal one.”  He uses the example of a married couple.  If a man gets on after his wife, and sits next to her without the express permission of the driver, he has committed a crime.  How is a “reasonable man” to know what he can or cannot do?   

As you read, you get a keen sense of why Thurgood Marshall won so many cases.  Because he was articulate.  And because he was right.  It’s easier to make sense when you’re telling the truth than when you’re lying.  I’m pretty sure the attorneys for the city weren’t lying, but they were going to great lengths – the whole nation was – to sidestep the truth.

It Don't Come Easy

OK.  I admit it.  Sometime in the middle of my long stint on the road last month, I started to feel sorry for myself.  I’d made the mistake of taking the ’98 Buick we inherited from Laurie’s parents on this little 3000 mile jaunt because of the smooth ride and the great stereo and because I was thinking more about the cool stories I’d be chasing than about, say, the possibility that belts might fray and snap or that the water pump pulley might work loose and go bouncing down I-80 behind me.  Never even occurred to me.   Nor had I suspected how difficult interviews might be to schedule.  Or re-schedule.  Government officials needed permission from D.C.  (Huh? What country do we live in?)  Meeting locations and times were changed.  Or I changed them.  People got sick or forgot.   Then there was the weather.  Snow, rain, sleet, wind.  No fewer than six of the mountain passes I crossed required chains in last week in March. (I never put them on.  Don’t tell the CHP.)  And right about the time I was white-knuckling it over yet another one, Ringo Starr came on the radio: “It Don’t Come Easy.”  Damned straight, I thought.

Nope.  It didn’t come easy.  But it was worth it.

I talked with three amazing women in their eighties who have achieved great things.  Beverly Ogle of the Mountain Maidu tribe in Northeastern California has been working to reclaim ancestral land in Humbug Valley from Pacific Gas & Electric.  Phyllis Clausen helped lead the movement to remove the salmon-blocking Condit Dam from the White Salmon River.  Pauline Esteves chaired the committee that negotiated the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act to return land to her tribe in and around Death Valley.  Each of these women is sharp and gracious, humble and wise.   Each has a clear-eyed intelligent gaze.  You’d think they’d revel in retelling the stories of their triumphs.  But no. 

Each focused on the future and the new challenges that face the people and the places that they love. Beverly Ogle told me about how few speakers of the Maidu language remain.  Phyllis Clausen worries about the threat development now poses to the White Salmon River.  And near Pauline Esteves’ home on reclaimed land in Death Valley, the tribal offices have been locked and security cameras put in place by a rival faction in cahoots with the BIA.  At the heart of the problem: the politics of gaming.  When I tried to steer the conversation to the successful negotiations back in 2000, Pauline would have none of it.

“This is the present,” she said.  “I was taught: don’t always be talking about the past.  Sure, it’s a good foundation, but go forward.  You talk about the circle of life.  See, we’re not going through that circle at all.  We’re not moving.  We’re stuck.”

What doesn’t come easy?  Change. Reclamation. Making things right.

“We were told in one of the legends that we were going to be stuck sometimes,” Pauline continued, “but never to give up.  If you fall, get up, and if there’s something in your way go around it, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

I’m home in Stehekin now to sort through the hours of interviews, to think and write about the struggles and triumphs.  But if I’m prone to self-pity, I will think about these women and the many good people who have worked with them, and I’ll remember to stay focused.   Water pumps can get repaired.  So can rivers.  Doors can be unlocked.  Or so we hope.

Death Valley: Reclaimed Homeland

Last winter around this time my mom and I were trying to decide where to travel together. Some place sunny, some place we’d never been. Death Valley, she suggested. Perfect.

On the way north, from the eight-lane interstate to the two-lane highway, we marveled about how only a few years earlier, as she battled cancer, we thought she’d be gone. Now she’d get to see Death Valley before she died. We speculated about the wildflowers which might be great – or not – the wildflower watch on the Internet urged us not to get too excited. So there we were on the open road, not knowing what to expect or hope for.

Even before the trip I’d been thinking about reclamation, about hydropower and dams and how the combination of outsized vision and the communal will of New Deal America managed to reclaim so much. For better and for worse. When I was young, I harbored Ed Abbey fantasies of dams blasted to smithereens, and I am as happy as the next monkey-wrencher to see the Elwha come tumbling down. But lately I’ve grown a strange and desperate faith in reclamation in all its meanings:

To take back. To make right. To make useful.

So there we were in Lone Pine. We spent an afternoon at Manzanar, the former internment where Japanese-Americans have reclaimed their history. Then the next morning, we entered the park in all its stark grandeur, and we passed this sign:
Check out the phrase at the bottom: "Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone." I was floored. I know enough of the sordid history of Indians in National Parks to know how uncommon such an acknowledgement is. When I opened the park map and saw that it was not merely a nice gesture, but reclamation at its most raw and right. The Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act in 2000 had granted 300 acres in the park and more than 7,000 in the surrounding lands back to the Indians.

Since then I’ve read everything I can find about the tribe’s history and their activists like Pauline Esteves and Barbara Durham, and I’ve interviewed several of those involved in the Homeland Act negotiations including Charles Wilkinson, author of a terrific history of modern Indian movements, Blood Struggle. My obsession with reclamation has grown even bigger and more unwieldy (outsized?) moving in several directions at once … like the very best projects. But despite my best efforts, I have yet to talk to the Timbisha. I have not given up hope.

Five things a writer needs to be able to do a lot of

Last week, I visited Minden Elementary School near Reno, Nevada as part of the sixth grade lecture series. The series is organized and run by a hard-working student committee that assembled a list of questions ahead of time, prepared an introduction, set up the tables and chairs in the library, and best of all, provided the treats for the occasion. Last year the series featured scientists. This year it’s writers, and I was the first. So I decided to go with the basics: How do you become a writer? What do you have to do?

I made a list for the whiteboard (which was, by the way, electronic – yikes! – luckily the committee trained me up in no time):

1. Read

What inspires you to write? the students asked. The answer: What I read. From Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was a kid to Zadie Smith last week.

2. Sit in a chair

As anyone who writes seriously can attest, this is a lot harder than it sounds. How long does it take to write a book? the students asked. Well, my first book, the novel I wrote sitting in a bean bag in second grade, The English Girl from Canada, took 10 days. Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus took five years. That’s a lot of sitting.

3. Find something you love to write about

For me, the lifelong urge to write turned to desperate compulsion when I landed in Canyonlands National Park in Utah just out of college, then later when I stumbled into Stehekin. I loved being outdoors, immersed in such beauty, loved the people I met and the adventures I had, and I wanted to write about all of it. So I did. Over and over and over again.

4. Work with other writers

After I left Minden, I headed up to Lake Tahoe to teach a private workshop on the bridge between essay and memoir writing. Six devoted writers offered each other support, encouragement, and much needed direction. All of them – all of us, I should say – marveled at how much gets accomplished when we’re around other writers rather than in our own little cubby holes.

5. Accept rejection

Back at the elementary school, this offered a great chance for guessing game. I told the students that I have, as of now, about seventy published short pieces. To get to that point, I asked, how many rejections did they think I’ve received? Hands shot up. Ten? Nope. Twenty? Nope. A hundred? Up and up and up the numbers went. (When I described this to my mother on the telephone, she said: just like The Price is Right.)

Five hundred, I said at last. I keep track. Five hundred rejections. And counting.

Of course the one obvious thing a writer must do a lot of that does not appear on the list is – duh! – write, so we spent some time on three short writing prompts that maybe the students can work into something in the days and weeks to come.

Then it was over. Time for refreshments. The only caveat was that, in order to partake of the cookies and Rice Krispie treats, the students would have to be talking about the presentation either with me or with each other. (Not, their teacher Ms. Bertolone-Smith noted, merely hanging out with their “stalemates.”) So they gathered around and asked some great questions: how to write a climax scene, whether you can work on more than one book at once, what’s different about writing fiction vs. nonfiction.

Looking back, I realize I did skip over one thing writers have to do a lot of: give readings and presentations and visit with readers. I’ve been doing plenty of that in the past year, and I have to say, the morning at Minden Elementary was one of the most enjoyable.

Excerpts, Covers, News

Some nice press this month has brought some amusing, uh, juxtapositions.

An excerpt from Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus appears in the Autumn 2011 issue of Portland: The Magazine of the University of Portland. This is a fabulous alumni magazine, regularly lauded as one of the best, edited by the indominable Brian Doyle, and the excerpt, from the chapter "Heroes and She-Roes" is fabulously presented. Since it's the scene of John Lewis' speech at the 50th anniversary of the Tallahassee bus boycott, a fine portrait of Congressman Lewis accompanies the text.

This excerpt appears in an issue for which the cover story is:"Why Be A Priest?"



Meanwhile an excerpt from Potluck appears in the Sept. / Oct. issue of Utne Reader. A section of the title essay, retitled "Pass the Populism," appears in the Gleanings section of the magazine, another fine publication with a wide distribution. The excerpt was even noted by a NY Times writer in the Dining section of the paper on Sept. 13. That is, by Stehekin standards - by any standards, I suppose - a big deal!

This excerpt appears in an issue for which the cover story is:
"21st Century Sex: What Are You Looking At?"



In neither case is the excerpt related to the cover story, but the contrast tickled me no end.

Then came Oregon Quarterly where an excerpt from Potluck, "Saw Chips in My Bra" appears in the Fall issue alongside an essay by Robert Leo Heilman about the legendary woods-working co-op, the Hoedads. This time, the cover photo fit with my story a little better, just right even. The only downside was the news that long-time friend, supporter, author, and OQ editor, Guy Maynard, will be stepping down this winter. He will be sorely missed.


Meanwhile, I have new short essays forthcoming in Bellingham Review and Matter 14: Animal, and a short story for kids in ColumbiaKIDS.

And ... in the best news of the month, Test Ride was named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in biography / memoir. A fine honor.

The History of Skagit Dams - Seeing Things Anew

I’ve driven Washington’s Highway 20, the North Cascades Highway, for years. I used live in Rockport right along the highway, and I used to work for the national park that straddles the highway, and for one interminable summer when Laurie worked on the east side of the crest and I worked on the west, I commuted over the highway. I’ve been wowed by the mountains and soothed by the rivers, sure, sure. I’ve hiked from trailheads and watched wildlife and even taught writing at North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake. It was there, at the Learning Center, that I first thought seriously about the dams.

To reach the Learning Center you drive right across Diablo Dam. Overhead the power lines buzz. But when writers sat down to describe their surroundings, they usually wrote about birds or fish or trees or clouds. Never the dams. I was as guilty as anyone. The three dams that line the Skagit River – Gorge, Diablo, and Ross – are all more or less visible from the highway, but, in writing as in life, I’d mostly ignored them. Why? I knew the answer: because we nature-loving types have a kneejerk reaction against anything human-made. While we’re in the woods, we want to see the woods. But part of why people come to the Learning Center is to learn about things they know little about, to appreciate them anew. For me, I realized, that meant the dams.

So I was delighted this spring to see that my old friend Jesse Kennedy would teach a class at the Learning Center on the History of the Skagit Dams. Jesse can bring enthusiasm to any subject (you’d have to attend one of his defensive driving classes to believe me) and in this case, the subject could not have been more perfectly suited to him. Dr. Kennedy, who studied both ophthalmology and diesel mechanics extensively before migrating into cultural resources, described dam construction with an engineer’s precision and told the story of J.D. Ross and his battle to bring public power to Seattle with a historian’s heart. Turns out it’s a wild story with several wild subplots. Ross single-handedly fought off proponents of privatization and brought the dams in on schedule and under budget to provide more people in Seattle with more power sooner than in other American cities. Ross was also a renowned expert on lilies and tea plants, who borrowed monkeys and albino deer from Woodland Park Zoo to place on islands in Diablo Lake. The animals – along with a colorful light show and a hearty chicken meal and a ride up the dramatic cable incline used in dam construction – served as attractions for generations of city folks Ross wooed upriver for inexpensive tours from the Depression through the 1960s. When he died, Franklin Roosevelt offered space in Arlington National Cemetery, but Ross had specified that he’d prefer to lie for eternity along Highway 20 in Newhalem. A plaque at the site quotes Roosevelt who heralded Ross as one of “the greatest Americans of our time,” which is particularly impressive considering that Ross was Canadian.

When at last we visited the dams, we saw a rare sight. The dams, overfull from late snow in the high country, were spilling. The spill would be dramatic in any case – all that water, all that power – but when Jesse turned our attention to the construction, the graceful concrete arc to keep the force of the water from shaking the dam to the ground, my heart swelled the same way it does to see the larches on Liberty Bell backlit in fall. Pure beauty. And this, I realized, was why I’d come. Sometimes it takes a little knowledge to nudge you out of your ideological safety zone, a few good stories, to make you see things anew, to make you think.

These days, I’m thinking a whole lot about reclamation. More on that soon.

Rust Fish

Each day before I begin to write, I try to read something, anything, that inspires me. Lately, I’ve been turning more and more often to poetry, and most recently it’s been Maya Jewell Zeller’s terrific first collection, Rust Fish. I heard her read from the collection at Burning Word festival in Leavenworth, Washington in May, and ever since then, I’ve been hooked. I want to say entranced, but it’s nothing that otherworldly or dark. Mostly, I’ve been charmed.

Rust Fish is a coming-of-age collection, more or less, and part of what Zeller does so well is conjure childhood without a hint of romanticism or regret or even ruefulness. There’s real childhood friendship (“The World at Eleven”) and real childhood meanness (“Revenge” “Serape”). There’s the chalky mouthful of powdered milk I remember so well, and there’s a sweet lullaby sung to a beloved stuffed snake, despised by her mother. Then there’s G.I. Joe come to life (my favorite line in the book: “GI Joe loved lambsweed with warm government cheese”) then GI receiving the mutilation treatment we’ve so often seen Barbie endure (“Sibling Rivalry”).

Through it all, the natural world – a distinctly Pacific Northwest version – weaves into and out of the poems the way, on the west slope of the Cascades, blackberry vines choke rotting barns. There’s skunk cabbage and balsam root and thistle, cedar and salmon and smelt, and lest you think things might stray into too-pretty description or green forest cliché, there’s the flood strewn bloated cow carcass thrown in for good measure.

Zeller’s voice is straightforward and plainly feminist (remember the treatment GI Joe got?) and unyielding without turning belligerent. She doesn’t so much confront class issues as inhabit them. Her parents owned both a tavern and a tow truck. In the last section, her poem “For a Student Come Back from the Quiet Beyond” culminates in a wrenching set of lines: “She is the student who made me cry the most./ She loves her job at a dry-cleaner’s/ where the chemicals give her hives/but her boss says she’s the best employee he’s ever had.”

Of all the aspects of Zeller’s poetry that I admire, her humility stands out the most. She’s as eager to point out irony as anyone – the new Jack in the Box on the road to Olympic National Park, say – but when she does it, with all her earnest understated passion, guess who’s in the drive thru line?

If you’re looking for inspiration, pick up Rust Fish.