Meditations on Integration

17.

I have to hand it to the San Francisco Unified School District. For all the grief I put them through as a substitute, organizing parents, disrupting their public meetings, helping to bring radicals into power in the teacher’s union, they went ahead and finally hired me. True it was only part time, and it was at a lesser rate than an elementary teacher, but it was a real job as a teacher in the after school program run by the Children’s Centers department. I still had my share of discipline problems. It took me a couple of years before I learned how to force a large group of kindergarteners to take a nap. But the staff and the administration were not as uptight as in the K-12 system, the adult-child ratios were better, and the curriculum was friendlier to children, full of lots of play.

I worked in the annex to a church for just a few months before an even more exciting development occurred: the school district decided to open a child care center in Geneva Towers itself. Since I already lived there, I was the first teacher hired for the new program. Now I could ride the elevator to work! Starting a program from scratch with all new materials was also thrilling. We had a good team. Mary Moore was the head, and and Lorene and Sally and none other than my good friend Deloris Wilson, a powerful black woman who was also active in Jim Jone’s People’s Temple.
Ever since those early ecstatic acid trips, my favorite piece of music was “Meditations on Integration” by Charles Mingus http://s0.ilike.com/play#Charles+Mingus:Meditations+On+Integration+%28Or+For+A+Pair+Of+Wire+Cutters%29:1862152:m1931645 which debuted at the Monterrey Jazz Festival in 1964. It’s a rollicking piece that starts off with a melody, descends into chaos, and culminates in an explosive profusion of melodies. To me, it captured every nuance of the concept of integration, racial integration to be sure, but psychic integration and the integration of one’s life as well.

My life with Earldean in Geneva Towers was approaching the kind of integration I’d been seeking. I was with a woman who fully shared my politics; my living, political organizing, and work life were all of a piece, working together like Mingus compostion. A few years later, some guy called me “the most integrated guy in San Francisco,” by which he meant racially, and I beamed at the compliment.
“Unburdened” of a wife who didn’t share my politics and whom the party didn’t support, I threw myself into the “struggle for communism” as we were starting to call it (we planned to skip the socialist stage). Earldean and I sold more Challenge’s – about 30 a week – then anyone else, and we were made circulation managers for the city. I got on the city committee, a leadership post. We were even among the few comrades who were able to organize “communist cells,” as the party line called for. I remember Hari saying, “You and Earldean are the only people carrying out the line,” a line I later learned Hari didn’t support.

I started a new novel. I had abandoned my first attempt, Come Over the Mandalan Freeway, when Sasha disparaged my work when we first got together. I’d written one short story about the guy killed during the oil worker’s strike, and a few things for children. The new novel was to be about Earldan’s life, called Sister of the Revolution. It described how she lost her faith when she caught her father molesting her mentally retarded cousin. It wasn’t very good, but the energy I got from writing it led me to conclude that activists like myself were the ones who needed to write the fiction, do the art for the revolution, as non-activists weren’t sufficiently in touch with the masses. I believe this thought comprised my first published letter to Challenge.

Earldean moved in with me, followed by her 18 year-old son, Richard, who worked at the local gas station. He was a wizard with cars, always willing to help anyone who asked. Benjy and Zena came every weekend. I was determined to stay close to them, to not allow the divorce to hurt them too much.

There was a telling moment on our first Christmas in the Towers. Benjy was born December 7, and like most December babies, tends to get screwed out of presents. I gave him a walkie-talkie for his birthday, which was more expensive than I could really afford, working part time. So I told him it would be a combined Chrismas-birthday present. Come Christmas itself, I got Zena a Viewfinder with all her favorite Winnie-the-Pooh stories on it, and I got Benjy a Velcro dart board. When he saw his present, he burst into tears, and my heart broke. I picked him up and held him while he cried.

One of the first things I discovered upon being hired by Children’s Centers is that aides in the program were restricted to working three hours per day. This seemed patently unfair. I decided to file a grievance. The grievance procedure didn’t require going through the union, but we did notify them. We gathered about 15 different aides from different sites for a meeting with Christine Simmons, head of Children’s Centers. The union rep showed up. People testified as to how difficult it was to survive on 3 hours pay. We had to go one more level in the grievance process, but we won, the restriction was lifted. Aides were now allowed to work 6 hours per day. What was unique about the victory was that it was really mine. I just saw an injustice and did what I could to right it. My heart began to flush with confidence, a new experience.