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II. EYES ON THE PRIZE IN CLEVELAND

The rest of the country is perversely wont to misunderstand Cleveland.

—MARK WINEGARDNER, CROOKED RIVER BURNING, 2001

BUT DEAR READER: BEFORE we jump headlong into the notorious political uprisings of the 1960s anti-war movement, let’s back up in time a couple of decades and focus on my place of origin … Cleveland, Ohio.

Some people call it the “Mistake on the Lake,” a term that dates back to 1969 when the chemically polluted Cuyahoga River that slices the city into east and west sides burst into flame. I would guess too that the observation that Cleveland is not worth mentioning on the national news springs from superiority complexes beleaguering both East and West Coasts. As an industrial city situated on the shores of Lake Erie, though, it grew to be a vital port for shipping along the Great Lakes passageway to the Atlantic, as well as becoming the Midwestern residence of J.D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and others of their ilk—thus making it home to a world-class art museum, symphony, and park system.

Such aspects of Cleveland’s economic ascent led to its vibrant radical history. After the freeing of African slaves following the Civil War, Blacks left the South to escape the barefaced racism there, and to find work in the industrializing North—for many, in the steel mills along Lake Erie. Then, concurrent with the arrival of thousands of immigrants through Ellis Island came the move west by those who could not make a living along the eastern seaboard. By the 1910s Cleveland featured neighborhoods of Italians, Poles, Russians, Irish, and Welsh, plus a vigorous Jewish community and the Glenville and Hough neighborhoods where African Americans lived. No surprise then: when in the 1930s uprisings of workers were erupting all over the United States, in Cleveland the workforce marched under Communist banners bearing slogans like “Fight, Don’t Starve,” 2000 hungry men stormed City Hall, and the first national meeting of the Unemployed Leagues took place in nearby Columbus.

March of the Young Communist League, March 7, 1930. Courtesy of Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland Memory Project.

Protest against Cleveland Sesquicentennial, July 22, 1971. “Settlers” had hoped to celebrate until the American Indian Movement showed up. Russell Means is on the left. Photo credit: Tom Prusha. Courtesy of Cleveland Press Collection/Cleveland Memory Project.

The ‘50s and ‘60s saw the emergence of the civil rights movement—with Clevelanders, both Black and white, joining Freedom Rides in the South; eruptions of riots; and the formation of the United Freedom Movement to desegregate schools. In 1957 the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs established the Employment Assistance Program to relocate Native Americans from the West to northern cities. When they were scheduled to begin their migration, the Cleveland Press ran an article, in racist reference to the Cleveland Indians baseball team, “Real Indians Soon to Call Cleveland Home.” Members of Pueblos and of Plains tribes streamed in, and in 1970 militant activist Russell Means (Dakota/Pine Ridge) founded the American Indian Movement in the city.

It was in this crucible that my first and most formative remarkable meeting took place—with my mother. It was from her that, starting in the second grade, I was given an education in love of beauty and the fight for social justice.

HOOKER GLENDINNING: DOING WHAT THERE IS TO DO

(1920–1985)

This is history!

—H.G., IN CONVERSATION WITH CHELLIS GLENDINNING, 1964

Mary Hooker Daoust Glendinning had to defend her name just about every day of her life. “The name ‘Hooker,’” she would glowingly reiterate with a chuckle, “has its roots in England and came over in 1633 with the Reverend Thomas Hooker who—after an argument over rights to land and voting with Massachusetts Governor Bradford (Hooker being the more equalitarian)—traveled south to become the founder of the Colony of Connecticut.” Continuing her introduction to the name Hooker, she would say, “Thomas Hooker’s descendant, General ‘Fightin’ Joe’ Hooker, of Civil War fame, was a raving drunk, so his commanders sent him west where he couldn’t mess things up for the Union. His troops got bored, and he requested that the army send them ‘some women.’” Here my mother would crook her eyebrows and lend a tilt to her head for the sake of suggestion. “Stage coaches of women arrived,” she would continue, “and they were dubbed ‘Hooker’s Girls,’ then just ‘hookers.’”

Through chance or astrological inevitability, the quirk of ova or karma, this character became my mother. My brothers were Thomas Hooker Glendinning and, taken from our blood line flowing back to the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Bell Glendinning. And so the house on the corner of Edgehill and Kenilworth in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, became the Petri dish for all manner of comedy, calamity, insurgence, and quandary, and the forum for my political education.

Hooker had been the first woman in her family to graduate from college. Connecticut College, of course—where she distinguished herself as a champion fencer and as the art major who painted a picture of a girl boasting tresses blown by the wind in an easterly direction, while a tree above her head displayed branches thrust by the same currents toward the west. She worked as a draftswoman in downtown Cleveland during World War II, and she persuaded the family that she should marry one Paul Glendinning, a fellow Clevelander and Harvard graduate. The popular displays of all those shiny post-war refrigerators convinced husband Paul that she should be an in-the-kitchen wife. She was sorry to leave her job, never did like to cook, but like so many of her cohort, she gave in.

My mother Hooker, me, and grandmother “Mimere.” Cleveland Heights, Ohio, 1949. Photo credit: Alex Thiel. Courtesy of Chellis Glendinning.

As a 1950s housewife, her artistic talents were now funneled toward fabled Halloween costumes, clothes crafted with a Singer sewing machine on the floor of the TV Room, hand-designed Christmas cards, and great ideas for things to do. The union of her parents, Edward Chellis Daoust and Clara Louise Bunts, had spawned backyard theater, and like my mother before me, I too crawled up the back stairs to the attic of grandmother Mimere Daoust’s house on Stillman Road to delve into the steamer trunks and don velvet dresses, ankle-length beaver coats, and fairy costumes of past smash hits among the rose bushes.

Hooker also passed on the family Halloween tradition. From its creation in the 1910s, Stillman Road was a bona fide neighborhood, boasting unlocked doors and families sharing garden delights and practical jokes. Come October 31, Hooker and her siblings would stalk the ‘hood. If a house had lawn furniture on the front porch, they would heap it in a pile in the yard. The maples and oaks would be strung with toilet paper like tinsel on a Christmas tree. If a garden hose was to be found, one Daoust would ring the bell and aim the nozzle toward the front door while the other would wait to hear the signal that said door had opened and would switch on the faucet. I was encouraged to follow in her footsteps, and I did. And all this is not to mention my made-by-Mom costumes: one year, a window made of canvas complete with curtains and a paper black cat on the sill; the next, a pack of Lucky Strikes.

But the Daousts had also known tragedy. In 1935 Hooker’s beloved older brother Buddy drowned in a canoe accident. Her father, Edward Daoust, died in an airplane crash on his way to Washington, D.C., six days before she gave birth to me. Too, there had been World War I, the Depression, and World War II. My upbringing was tinged by the grown-ups’ remembrances of these histories.

And there was the tragedy that the brand-new picture box made public. In 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was hauled to jail for the “crime.” My mother was stunned. And upset. Having grown up with the one-liner “Slavery Was Abolished in 1865,” she had not been fully aware of the conditions that still prevailed. Suddenly the necessity for contributing to society instilled in her on Stillman Road flared up like a forest fire sparked by a lightning strike. That same year, my father was placed in a hospital in Philadelphia to recover from alcoholism. We rented a house in Swarthmore. There she met Presbyterian minister Joe Bishop and his parishioners, who told her about a nascent movement to demand civil rights. She spent that year learning U.S. history from the perspective of African Americans.

When we returned to Cleveland Heights, Hooker launched the process that would define her life: she stepped up to the plate of social responsibility and became politically active.

Picture our neighborhood: it boasted one humungous Gothic relic left over from the days of Rockefeller and Carnegie—now surrounded by blocks of newer and decidedly smaller middle-class houses, working-class homes, and apartment buildings. It was populated by WASPs, Italians, Jews, Poles, Romanians, Russians, etc. But African Americans were not welcome. The only ones who came up the hill from the Hough Area (seemingly) without fear were the maids.

And so it was something of a scandal when my mother began inviting her Black movement comrades to the house.

She also began to attend meetings in the inner city and to participate in organizing. In 1962 a Cleveland minister practicing civil disobedience against the construction of a segregated school was crushed to death under the treads of a bulldozer. In 1963 a bomb exploded in an Alabama church where civil rights meetings took place; four Black girls were killed. The following year in Mississippi three civil rights activists—one local and two northerners, all of whom had participated in Freedom Summer’s campaign to register Black voters—were abducted by Ku Klux Klan members and shot at close range; their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam. Things were on edge. Black Nationalist leader Harllel Jones came to the same meetings that Hooker attended. Sometimes she was appreciated for her intelligence, but other times she was reprimanded for not organizing her own people to quell racist practices and dissolve racist institutions. Fortunately my mother was not burdened by the hubris that she knew everything. She took in criticism, was not uncomfortable with ambiguity—and never once considered dropping out. Following the directive, she sought out like-minded white folk in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, where Clergy and Laity Concerned had been formed.

In the mid-’60s Hooker met an ambitious African American man named Carl Stokes. Son of a laundryman and a cleaning lady, he had dropped out of high school, then after World War II had put himself through Cleveland Marshall College of Law, joining the Ohio bar in 1957. Now he strove for a heretofore unimaginable target: he wanted to run for mayor of Cleveland. After watching my mother in action as a thinker and organizer, he asked her to serve on his campaign committee.

She had what are called blazing blue eyes: they radiated a hue reminiscent of a Canadian ice lake. When impressed by a person or an experience, she had a way of intensifying those blue eyes until they caused painters to abandon whatever style they were pursuing and become colorists. Knowing Carl Stokes and being asked to contribute to his run for office caused her eyes to blaze brighter than the stars in a Van Gogh sky. After all the work to pull off the historic campaign, he won. He won! History was made: Stokes was the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city.

I try to imagine my mother’s exhilaration at the election night party, as I wasn’t in Cleveland. I had gone off to university, first for two years at Smith College, later to the University of California, Berkeley, to do what a college-age woman does: make her own way. And rebel. By the time I got to the West Coast, the generation gap was in full swing. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much to rebel against: my brothers and I had been the only children on Edgehill Road allowed to cross the street by ourselves, a sorry privilege because when we got there, all the other kids were stuck on the other side. Later, at Smith, students were not permitted to stay out past 11 p.m., and then only with permission—yet I had grown up with little-to-no nocturnal restrictions. And now, for Chrissake, my own mother was a left-leaning activist!

My political career had begun at age eight—walking around and around the collating table, stapling the resulting information/action packets, stuffing them into envelopes, stamping and organizing them according to postal code. In 1964 my mother picked me up after school on a Wednesday. We met with Blacks and whites in a parking lot in downtown Cleveland and rode all night in a bus to Washington. On Thursday we spent the whole day picketing the White House. We rode all night back to Cleveland, and I missed just one day of school. These sorts of experiences were normal fare for me. So were the mother-daughter chats we had about what she was learning and grappling with, like the one about being a white homemaker in a people-of-color movement. Or the contradiction between sending me to private school while other young people had no school at all.

And there was the conversation about what it meant to be part of history. No excuse for sitting on the sidelines, she said. You have to do what’s there to do. First and foremost, my mother was a woman of action. She was dedicated to the electoral process—and for one brief moment I had a focal point for my own personal generation gap. She had grown up under FDR, after all; she was a flaming liberal, a “deluded” believer in working through “the system.” I, on the other hand, considered myself a radical. Maladjusted at Smith College, I had transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, and had just been released from jail after the People’s Park Mass Bust of 1969, wherein some 400 people had been hauled in opaque-windowed buses to the Santa Rita Detention Center. The phone call from my commune on Vine Street, in which I argued for a revolution and she was heartbroken, was one of just three arguments we had in our entire lives.

In the early ‘70s Hooker traveled to Paris to stand witness to the peace talks in process and to attend a meeting between North Vietnamese representatives and U.S. peace activists. (Here began a decades-long joke with William Sloane Coffin about a very special British umbrella she had left behind in a shared taxi and he had picked up—which was only resolved after her death via an exchange of letters between him and me about said umbrella, bristling with Daoust/Coffin humor of the madcap sort.) She went on from her civil-rights and anti-war activism to apply her artistic/organizing talents to local and national elections, 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.