Mankiller, page 19
Hugo and I came back from our honeymoon only to go our separate ways. It was not that we wanted to be apart, but we had no choice. Neither of us had a place big enough for both of us to live. I squeezed back in with my younger sister at my parents’ home in Hunter’s Point, and Hugo went to his apartment. It was only temporary. After just a few days of searching and telephone calls, we found a place. Hugo and I moved in with his cousins, Rose and Tito Bastidas. They generously made room for us in their house in the Mission District. Hugo’s cousins Tito and George Bastidas, who were brothers, were very close to each other and to Hugo. Rose and Judy Bastidas, married to Tito and George, respectively, were my closest friends during that time. The men all played soccer while we cheered them on. We held large family gatherings after the games. We shared the births of our children, our twenty-first birthdays, and the transition from youth to womanhood. Our friendship has stood the test of time.
We settled right into our new roles as husband and wife. Hugo took a job working the night shift with Pan American Airlines while he finished the course work for his degree at San Francisco State. I continued with the finance company, but my job was not very challenging. Most of the time, it amounted to tracking down people who were delinquent in their loan payments. It was all rather unpleasant. I would call them, ask them to come up with some money toward paying off their bills, and then write down whatever they said to include in our files. There was not much satisfaction in doing that same old thing day in and day out.
In January of 1964, just a couple of months after Hugo and I were married, I was home alone one evening when I suddenly felt very ill. I was not sure what was wrong. I became feverish, had pains in my back, and was unable to keep any food down. It was getting worse and worse. Finally, I called my father, because Hugo was at his night job at Pan Am. Dad came right over and took me to the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital. They put me through tests, and after several hours of anxious waiting, a doctor came out to tell us they had found the source of my problems.
He told me my back pains and fever were caused by a kidney infection, which could be treated. When I asked about the nausea, the doctor smiled. He said that was the result of yet another condition—pregnancy. I was going to have a baby.
That news was astounding. For all my street smarts, I still did not have the kind of knowledge needed to prevent pregnancy. Like other eighteen-year-olds at that time, I suppose I suffered a little bit from the “it can’t happen to me” syndrome. Hugo and I had talked about taking precautions and I had planned to see a physician to discuss birth-control options, but I just had not gotten around to it.
The doctor at the hospital was correct. Some prescription medicine cleared up my kidney problems—at least at first. None of us knew it at the time, but that initial kidney infection was only the symptom of what eventually would be diagnosed as a very serious disease. But that was far from my mind. I had my first pregnancy to deal with.
I did not have an easy time. It was so difficult that I had to quit my job early on, and I stayed sick throughout the pregnancy. My problems included high blood pressure and profound edema, swelling caused by an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the cells and body cavities. The kidney infections also returned, with such fury that I was forced to spend much of the time bedridden. Sometimes, because Hugo was so busy with his job and school, I went to my parents’ home so my mother could watch over me. I thought my ordeal would never end.
On August 11, 1964, the time came to deliver my baby. I was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital. It was only fitting that the top tune on the charts that week was the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” I was in for a strenuous ordeal, and neither my husband nor my mother could comfort me. I asked for my father to come to the hospital to be with me, and he did. I knew he would have to miss work to be there, but at that point, I did not care, and of course, neither did he.
At last, after I had endured twenty-seven exhausting hours of exertion and pain, the doctors induced labor and my child was born. A little bit of simple arithmetic showed us that the baby had arrived almost exactly nine months after my marriage. I had conceived during our honeymoon in Chicago. Something positive—a new life—had come out of that November week when so much else in this country went wrong. Now I had a healthy daughter. We called her Felicia, a name that means “happiness.”
Shortly after my daughter’s birth, we moved from the home in the Mission District that we shared with Hugo’s cousins. We rented a house all our own in a pretty San Francisco neighborhood. It was quiet and tidy, and there were shops nearby. Hugo kept up his schedule of going to school by day and working for the airline every night. I stayed home with my baby daughter. I kept house, shopped, cooked, and cleaned. I evolved into my role of young wife and mother. I felt there was some order, perhaps some of that old Cherokee balance, in my life, but I was not completely sure I was comfortable with my situation. That feeling would nag at me for a long time.
I was very busy with my baby and keeping up with my brothers and sisters and their families. Then in June of 1966, less than two years after Felicia was born, I had my second daughter. We named her Gina. She was born by natural childbirth, and I had little difficulty with her delivery. I was delighted to have two healthy children.
Shortly after Gina’s birth, one of Hugo’s younger brothers from Ecuador moved to San Francisco. His name was Santiago. Unlike Hugo, he used the family’s entire last name, Olaya de Bardi. At our invitation, Santiago lived with us for a short time. He was not an unpleasant house-guest. I liked having him around. He was very mellow and laid back, and I thought he made a good contrast to his big brother, who often was just the opposite.
By then, Hugo and I had been married for about three years. We had two children, a home, and security. But despite all that, I was beginning to think that our relationship had become somewhat damaged or fractured. No major fissures were yet evident, just the tiniest, the slightest of cracks. As is usually the case, I first noticed our problems arising from seemingly insignificant causes.
As much as I loved my family and home, I was starting to feel restricted by the routine required of the traditional wife. I had not yet celebrated my twenty-first birthday. Sometimes, I wanted to get out of the house and flex my wings a little bit. It did not take all that much to make me happy. For me, the ideal way for us to spend an evening together was to go to my folks’ house to play cards. That was really all I needed to stay content.
Hugo needed more. He, too, was restless. I think he missed the old days from our whirlwind summer of courtship, before the girls were born. He longed for the times when he did not have so much to worry about. Whenever we had a chance to step out, Hugo wanted to do more than sit around with my family shuffling cards at the kitchen table. Our personal tastes and backgrounds were so dissimilar. He was interested in the more formal style of socializing, going to clubs and parties. At first, none of those differences was too troublesome. I grew more conscious of them the longer we were married.
Regardless of our disparate preferences and priorities, Hugo and I had no problem with our location, although sometimes we flirted with the idea of moving to the suburbs. San Francisco was an exciting place to be for nearly everyone, but especially those of us who were caught up in those times and everything that was going on around us. Turn-of-the-century novelist Frank Norris once described San Francisco as “a city where almost anything can happen.” His words were still true throughout the 1960s. During those early years of my marriage, I became more aware of the San Francisco I had not had the opportunity to learn about while living in Daly City and at Hunter’s Point. For that, I am grateful.
The entire Bay region—from Sausalito to Berkeley—has always served as a magnet and proving ground of the arts and culture. In the mid- to late 1950s, when my family was still shaking the Oklahoma dust from its clothes, an arts movement that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance was under way. A group of bohemian artists and writers emerged, calling themselves the Beat generation. The high priests of that movement included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure. They gathered at City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s North Beach bookstore, to argue, discuss, and read one another’s work.
At the “hungry i” and other local nightclubs, folk singers, balladeers, and comics performed. The Kingston Trio and the Smothers Brothers were there. Ken Kesey and his busload of Merry Pranksters were preparing to go on the prowl. Dr. Timothy Leary held forth on the merits of LSD beneath a perfumed cloud of marijuana, Bob Dylan sang from the depths of his soul, and out of Carmel and the Big Sur country emerged Joan Baez with her sweet laments. Abstract painters and sculptors, drawn to the city, turned to a new realism. It was a time when prose writers, poets, and playwrights lived in “pads,” experimented with pot, and practiced Zen. Each evening, they met at one of the city’s many cafés or coffeehouses to sip espresso or glasses of golden Napa wine while devouring freshly composed poems.
By the time the 1960s were under way, any self-respecting radical, nonconformist, or renegade knew the place to be was San Francisco.
The Bay area was very much a place of ferment and apprehension. In cosmopolitan and compact San Francisco, bounded on three sides by water, a tremendous building boom in the 1960s altered the way of life. The skyline was transformed when a flock of skyscrapers rose like phoenix birds out of the landfills and climbed the city’s steep hills. Many residents found the growth repulsive. They described the new building craze as the “Manhattanization” of their treasured city.
By that time, the Bay area, including Oakland, had become a center for relocation of native people from all over the United States. As families arrived, usually fresh from rural isolated communities, the earlier relocatees would help them adjust to the sometimes bewildering new lifestyle. The new relocatees were accustomed to living with few amenities or even basic necessities, but at least at home they had been surrounded by family, friends, and neighbors who were willing to share what little they had with one another. In the Bay area, they were exiles living far from their native lands. There were lots of other poor people who cried out for decent places to live. Minority racial forces were gaining strength across the country, and their voices were heard loud and clear in California. They were on a quest for better housing, more jobs, and an end to discrimination.
After the devastating Watts riots of August 1965 and March 1966 in Los Angeles, a smaller disturbance erupted in September 1966 at Hunter’s Point, my former home. That riot, much like those in Watts, stemmed from a police incident. At Hunter’s Point, a police officer shot a suspected teenage car thief. Like the outbursts in southern California, the riot occurred on a hot day when everyone was on edge. The gunplay and brutal weather were key factors in the disorder, but many residents knew it was only a matter of time until the lid blew off the pressure cooker. Hunter’s Point lay there like a cauldron—a neighborhood where a riot was waiting to happen.
For too many years, the black families who came to San Francisco after World War II had been pushed into bad flats in isolated ghettos—the inadequate housing at Hunter’s Point or the decaying Victorians in the Fillmore district, where slum landlords got away with charging exorbitant rents. I knew from my own experience that because of the level of poverty, widespread unemployment, and broken families, residents from those neighborhoods had very little, if anything, to look forward to in life. But some of them did retain their pride and, if they were lucky, their dreams. That is what got them through.
We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome some day
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe
We shall overcome some day.
Old religious song adapted for
the 1960s civil-rights
movement
Fortunately, no buildings were set on fire and no one was killed in the Hunter’s Point disturbance. San Francisco Mayor John F. Shelley, backed by the National Guard, quickly imposed a curfew and restored calm. Mindful of California’s law forbidding employment discrimination, Shelley openly condemned what he called “the medieval practice” of racial bias in some of the area labor unions. Hunter’s Point began to receive substantial annual grants from the Model Cities Program. Eventually, new businesses were launched and job-training programs were introduced in the community.
Still, many black people and other racial groups remained bitterly frustrated with their plight. Militancy became a preferred tactic in some circles. In October of 1966—just one month after the Hunter’s Point mêlée and one month before a conservative Republican by the name of Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California—Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panthers in nearby Oakland. Other fiery militant black leaders such as Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver came forward to repudiate the conventional white culture and to advance the war cry that for them said it all—“Black is Beautiful.” But beyond that catchy axiom was a definite self-help message in the Black Panthers’ rhetoric. They established free breakfast programs and alternative schools. During the group’s heyday, it was not uncommon to see Huey Newton on local talk shows discussing civil rights and police harassment of young black men. The first activist group I truly identified with was the Black Panther Party. They talked about problems I was familiar with. I had never before seen any minority stand up to police, judges, and other white people.
At the same time black militants in the Bay area and around the country were attempting to gain a different lease on life, Hispanics in California were making their presence known. For too many years, they had been acquiescent, fully resigned to their place in the barrios and the growing fields. But they also knew wholesale poverty and prejudice. They felt the frustration of sending generation after generation to public schools where their language and history were shunned. The Hispanics also desired change. They did not want to wait anymore.
My spirits were buoyed in the mid-1960s whenever I heard more news from the San Joaquin Valley about the National Farm Workers Association, led by Cesar Chavez, and their successful rallies and strikes against California’s major grape growers on behalf of the migrant workers, who labored under deplorable conditions. I could identify with that group of activists. I had worked on farms every summer during my teen years. I attended several of their benefits and consciousness-raising events held throughout the Mission District. I met several people who worked with Chavez, and later I became acquainted with his associate Delores Huerta.
Using the image of a black eagle as their symbol of solidarity, the farm workers fought off the rich owners and their thugs who were hired to terrorize them. It was a form of coercion not unlike the use of hired bullies to scare off Dust Bowl Okies when they came to California to rebuild their lives. In San Francisco in the mid-1960s, sympathetic longshoremen began to refuse to load grapes picked from the farms being struck. Nationwide product boycotts were launched. Chicano power had had an impact.
Of course, this restlessness stirred also in various groups of the white community. Driven by the spirit of change, civil-rights proponents came not only from the ghettos and barrios and inner cities, but also from middle-class America and college campuses.
As President Lyndon Johnson began to ship more and more combat troops to Vietnam in 1965, many young people already involved in the civil-rights struggle realized that the insanity of what some people were calling an immoral war traced its origins to the internal problems of our nation. Selma and Montgomery were important victories, but Da Nang and the Mekong Delta represented great setbacks. Our country had mixed up its priorities, and an ever-widening gap developed between those seeking peace and social progress and the false patriots and prophets of the status quo.
If we ever let the Communists win this war, we are in great danger of fighting for the rest of our lives and losing a million kids.
Bob Hope, 1969
War is not healthy for children and other living things.
Popular 1960s poster
What if they gave a war and nobody came.…
Popular 1960s slogan
A tangible feeling of skepticism and consternation with the leadership of the nation and state poured forth from the University of California at Berkeley, site of the “Free Speech” movement and a large number of protests throughout the decade. If San Francisco was the great bastion of liberalism in the 1960s, then Berkeley, just across the bay, had to be the inner sanctum for student revolutionaries.
A broad spectrum of America’s sons and daughters dared to question the prevailing Establishment. Many of those young people came together in San Francisco, a revered mecca. Most of them were about my age or a little younger. They had dropped out of school or had left upper middle-class homes to become part of the counterculture.
Adorning themselves with beads and tie-dyed T-shirts, feathers and fringed leather vests, they took on a sort of back-to-nature look with a definite Native American influence. They often lived together communally as family units or “tribes” in “crash pads” scattered throughout a neighborhood of old Victorian homes. It was not far from a strip of Golden Gate Park known as the Panhandle, near where two streets—Haight and Ashbury—intersect. Spiritual descendants of the Beats and bohemians of earlier days, these denizens of Haight-Ashbury were called hippies, from hipster, a term supposedly created by writer Norman Mailer.
By early autumn of 1966, new recruits were moving into the Haight area every day. Rock musicians also took up residence there, providing a rhythm and adding an air of celebrity. The Grateful Dead lived at 710 Ashbury, and the Jefferson Airplane could be found on nearby Fulton Street. Unfortunately, by the last years of the decade, the area had gone into decay. The peak time for Haight-Ashbury was in 1966, spilling over into the following year. Thousands of young people—literally with flowers in their hair, the scent of patchouli on their bodies, and love in their hearts and minds—descended on the city. Their favorite buzz words were peace, spare change, and freedom.
