Writing in an Age of Silence. Sara Paretsky
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Martineau wrote of a southern politician that “he was born old.” This is how I often feel on looking back on my childhood.3 The first chapter in this collection, “Wild Women Out of Control,” discusses that part of my life.4
When my parents decreed that I had to attend the University of Kansas if I was going to go to university at all, I made a private vow that I would spend my summers away from home. The first year, I earned a scholarship to Vienna to study German; the second summer, in 1966, I went to Chicago to do community service work on the city’s South Side.
The summer I spent in Chicago changed my life in almost every important way. I wasn’t then imagining that I would be a writer, but the people I worked with and the work I did shaped the way in which I looked at the world around me. Those were turbulent times, but also times of great hopefulness among those who longed for social justice. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was organizing in Chicago during the summer of 1966 and I was on the periphery of his great work. The way in which my experiences of that epoch became a major influence on my novels is the subject of the second chapter, “The King and I.”
My father was a mercurial man, charming, nervous, but subject to rages that were all the more bewildering because we never knew what might trigger them. For the first twenty years of my life, he dominated almost every aspect of my existence. When I finally started university, he even decided what courses I would take. It took many years of many different kinds of support–from the man I later married, from psychotherapy, but above all, from the women’s movement of the seventies—before I gained an independent voice. The third chapter explains the importance of Second Wave Feminism in my life. It was feminism that triggered my wish to write a private eye novel, and it shaped the character of my detective, V I Warshawski.5
The private eye is America’s unique contribution to the crime novel. It comes out of our fascination with the loner heroes of the old West. The fourth chapter, “The iPod and Sam Spade,” discusses the way in which American mythology glorifies the individual often at the expense of society. I also explore the ways in which my own understanding of the individual and society invert this mythology.
The town where I grew up in the fifties was obsessed by the threat of Communism. Freedom committees, the John Birch society, and other right-wing groups monitored everything from school curricula to books in the library; they ran a sideline in monitoring whether African-Americans were using public facilities. They forced the resignation of a high school teacher because he was getting a PhD in Russian history—proof in their eyes that he was a Communist.
The McCarthy hearings, which took place when I was in primary school, left the adults in my life very cautious in what they said politically, and who they said it to. My parents had friends who were blacklisted; it’s possible that because my father had leftist relatives my mother’s military brothers were kept from being promoted.
Like all Americans, I am the descendant of immigrants. Some of my ancestors came here for adventure or to make a better living, but most of them, on both sides of my family, came here to escape religious persecution. For my paternal grandparents, America meant the difference between life and death.
I grew up with a very idealized vision of what the country should be and could be. I grew up believing in the America of the Statue of Liberty. The Lady with the Lamp said to the world, “Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor/the wretched refuse of your teeming shores/send these, the weary, tempest-tossed to me/I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
When Congress passed the USA Patriot Act in the weeks following 9/11, the name of the act itself seemed to me to be Orwellian, the kind of title Stalin or Hitler or Franco might have chosen, one that tried to force people to choose sides. “You are either with us or against us,” Mr. Bush famously told the world, but he was delivering the same message at home. “You’re a patriot or a terrorist,” the Patriot Act screams in its very title. Indeed, in the run-up to the now-famous elections of 2006, when the Republicans lost control of Congress, Mr. Bush toured the country, proclaiming that a vote for Democrats meant, “The terrorists win and America loses.”6
Overnight, Congress and the President had created a law which undercut our most cherished liberties, including the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. In the five years since the Act was passed, we citizens have been given no credible examples of its use in stopping terrorism, but it has been extensively used to curtail civil liberties at home.
I am writing this in the late fall of 2006. I can’t possibly predict the direction the new Congress will take in redressing some of these issues, but I am troubled by their unwillingness to revisit the Military Comissions Act, or the Patriot Act, which was both reauthorized and broadened by the outgoing Congress.
I began speaking on the topic of speech and silence to state library associations in 2002, since libraries were on the frontline of some of the Act’s most pernicious sections. In May, 2004, Booklist, one of the journals of the American Library Association, published a portion of my lecture. The title, “Truth, Lies and Duct-Tape,” comes from the administration’s witty advice to a nation terrified of biological warfare: we were told to seal up our houses with duct tape, which caused a run on the stuff, and at least had the benefit of driving up the manufacturer’s per-share price. The fifth chapter in this collection is a substantially rewritten, updated version of that essay. The middle three chapters, “The King and I,” “Not Angel, Not Monster, Just Human,” and “The iPod and Sam Spade,” have never been published. In the course of any year, I deliver about six to ten public speeches. Portions of all five chapters have been used in some of my lectures. People who have attended have often asked for written copies of them—here they are, expanded, rewritten, updated.
Because this memoir is short, focusing on questions of voice and voicelessness, I couldn’t find an appropriate way to write about a number of people and events of great importance to me. Above all, my husband, Courtenay Wright, deserves a book of his own (indeed, he is very worried about my efforts to write his autobiography). He is a man of humor, a brilliant particle physicist, a former radar signal officer in the Royal Navy (General Eisenhower used my husband’s ship, the HMS Apollo, as his headquarters when he sailed to Normandy on D-Day plus 1. My husband was the serving officer on the bridge when the ship went aground. As the most junior man present, he wisely—and uncharacteristically—kept his mouth shut, but the General’s startled face was inches from his own as the ship pitched to one side). Above all, my husband is a man of great integrity. I have never known his equal.
Notes
1 For the interested reader, my older brother became a Dominican priest. He taught in Rome for many years but currently works in New York. Daniel, two years younger than I, is a veterinarian in northern Wisconsin. Jonathan, nine years younger, is a Kansas lawyer, a magician, an astronomer. He and Nicholas, the youngest, used to play table tennis together in a room in our basement that had once been a hiding place on the Underground Railroad. Nicholas recently completed a PhD in sociology, with a brilliant, beautifully written thesis on the way in which multi-nationals affect government economic policy.
2 Her dedication to books and children’s literacy led the library to name the children’s reading room for her. The day of her funeral, they had to close the library, since all of her co-workers needed to say farewell to her.
3 Martineau was writing of South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, who was the south’s leading apologist for slavery. It’s the image of my own life, not the subject of his work, that I find applicable. Calhoun rightly pointed out the economic benefits the north reaped from slavery, which made them reluctant to seek its overthrow.
4 A portion of “Wild Women Out of Control” was published in Family Portraits, Doubleday & Col, 1985.
5 First Wave Feminism is usually thought to have started with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, in which women first formally came together to demand suffrage and an end to their legal and economic subjugation, and ended with the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted women suffrage in 1920. Second Wave Feminism doesn’t have such a definable beginning point. Just as First Wave Feminism grew