Me, age 6, Huasna Road, Arroyo Grande

This is a second attempt to make sense of horrible crimes. I taught a man who is now in the county jail on $7 million bail on 31 felony and misdemeanor accounts of molesting at least nine little girls. “At least” because these are the little girls that sheriff’s deputies have so far been able to identify. There are more.

The news hit Elizabeth and me exceptionally hard, because she taught him, too. We were close to the alleged molester’s family.  And the news came in a week when a friend and colleague at Arroyo Grande High School whom I respected and admired–and feel so much the same for his wife and for his three children, all students of mine–died unexpectedly. It has been a steep and sobering tailspin.

As to the crimes, I have been dismayed by the comments that have followed the news stories about the accused man because they call for summary and vigilante justice. That solves nothing and helps no one. It only makes us all complicit in a different kind of savagery.

I find it just as difficult to summon any sympathy for the accused, if the accusations are true. I can find none. Child molesters are narcissists; they see other human beings as objects, as manipulatives, in their drive for gratification. They lack any kind of empathy (it is said that the accused man abused animals, as well). There must be something dead inside a person who does these things. Yes, the accused was more than likely physically and sexually abused himself. So was I.

And this is what growing up as a victim–if that’s what you choose to be–of violence and sexual abuse is like: every conscious moment is lived in fear. There is a constant undercurrent of dread, of impending doom, that you can never push aside. People like me have a sense of hypervigilance and a pronounced startle reflex: we jump at a dog’s bark or a Fourth of July firecracker. The anxiety is so pervasive that the most reliable palliatives are alcohol or drugs. Those are the only things that consistently and reliably push the fear aside, that allow a fleeing moment of release and self-acceptance, because abuse victims very often are generous, compassionate people with everyone except for themselves.

That is the kind of life that at least nine little girls, who will of course blame themselves for what happened to them, might live out.

They are not doomed to that. It will take an immense amount of hard work on their part, built, I believe, on a foundation of prayer, on our part, to bring them the healing they deserve.

What was done to these little girls was evil and it was powerful. Evil always presents itself this way, as something that is powerful, insurmountable,irresistible. But this self-infatuation is its weakest point. Evil cannot outlast the good will of all of us who love children. I became a teacher because I love children. One of the kindest compliments paid my teaching wasn’t about brilliant lectures. It was about providing a classroom that was safe and accepting.

And evil cannot outlast the power of God, who loves children most of all. These little girls are wounded. They are not damaged. Nothing and no one can violate the loving intention with which they were made.

Because these little girls are incarnate proof of God’s love for all of us, they have every chance, with our help, to become strong, loving and beloved women someday. They may themselves become the mothers of little girls of unimagined–even wondrous– strength and compassion.

This is how the cycle of abuse is broken. I hope it will be broken, too, in the accused man’s family.

But it takes time–God’s time–and in the meantime, the hurt we feel for little girls we may never know sears us. That is God’s intention, I think, as well. He is reminding us in our own pain, and our anger, that we are alive, that we care, that we love, that we endure.

And the Lord, as my  Book of Common Prayer would remind me, endureth forever.

The view from our Nice hotel when we took AGHS students there.

I have never been fond of jokes about the courage of French. They are not funny, they are inaccurate, and they reveal only one thing: the joke-teller is a juvenile.

Go to the Ossuary at Verdun, where there are basement galleries heaped with the bones of young men who will never be known except to God. Or go to Fort Douamont on that battlefield, the fortress taken, and re-taken, that consumed 100,000 soldiers between February and December 1916. Go there to tell jokes about the French.

My students and I visited Verdun in perfect silence.

We visited Nice, too, where there was a cowardly and despicable terrorist attack today. The people of Nice know about such things. We saw there a beautiful neoclassic arcade flanking a square in this town on the Mediterranean coast, a place God intended to be known by the perfect clarity of its colors, where cowardly and despicable men—Nazis—executed 27 young people, members of the Resistance, in 1944.

When the Americans invaded southern France in Operation Dragoon that year, they pulled up infuriatingly short of Nice. The nicois, the Resistance, were appalled but they took it out on the Nazis, not the Americans. Outnumbered seven to one, armed with museum-piece firearms, some plastique, some land mines, but most of all with the Resistance weapon of choice, the Molotov cocktail, the nicois, young women and young men, rose up and drove the enemy out. Enraged, the Werhmacht machine-gunned the public buildings of Nice as they fled while the Gestapo crept like furtive spiders out of the Hotel Negresco, where they might have champagne and oysters in one room to fortify themselves for torture in another.

It took the nicois only 48 hours to humiliate the Nazis.

The Americans, expecting a Battle of Nice, arrived and were attacked instead with wine, flowers, and kisses. I doubt that those GI’s thought that jokes about the courage of the French were very funny, not on the day they liberated a beautiful city that had already liberated itself. The real cowards were gone.

The Americans arrive in Nice, 1944.

They came back today, and cowards always have days like today, they always shock and sicken, they always brutalize, but they always recede to become footnotes in the yellowing pages of dry history texts. Cowards cannot stand up, no matter how long it might take to defeat them, to men and women of courage—and of culture. France, despite her tendency to infuriate us English-speakers, her prickliness and her pride, is still France. The terrorists struck today in a city whose museums honor Chagall and Matisse. This may seem ludicrous to those who are ignorant by choice, but the cowards who attack a city like that are doomed.

In January 1941, Medal of Honor winner Otis W. Smith’s grandson, Johnnie, would enter an army belatedly preparing to fight an even more terrible war, this one against fascism. Hitler declared war near the end of that year, though he had no obligation to do so after the Pearl Harbor attack that had claimed two Arroyo Grande sailors on U.S.S. Arizona. The dictator was jubilant, thinking America decadent and Americans, in his simplistic and misshapen worldview, a “mongrel people.”

 
Prime Minister Winston Churchill was said at the time to have been nearly as pleased as the parochial Austrian dictator was. Unlike Hitler, Churchill knew about Grant and Sheridan, knew what the Iron Brigade had done at Gettysburg, and knew, as well, what Jackson and his “foot cavalry” had done at Chancellorsville. He admired Americans. After all, his mother, Jennie, had been born in Brooklyn.

Three thousand miles from Brooklyn, on the Pacific Coast, the Huasna Valley’s Johnnie Otis Smith was preparing to go to war. He was just one of over three hundred young men and women from southern San Luis Obispo County who would join the military in World War II, including the Gularte brothers, Manuel and Frank, whose parents came from the Azores, and the Fuchiwaki brothers, Hilo and Ben, whose parents came from Japan. All three Robison brothers saw action. In nearby Oceano, when Thelma Murray learned that her younger brother, George, had been killed on Tarawa, she became a Marine, too.

So this, too, was a brothers’ war, but in this war the brothers fought on the same side. Of course, that realization wouldn’t have had time to occur to Americans on December 7. They would realize it later in the war, when a California GI might write home to his family about the rifle squad that was his new family, write about his new friend, his brother in arms, a dogface from South Carolina. World War II, brutal as it was, would force Americans to rediscover themselves as a common people with a common purpose. The war did this even as it scattered young Americans around the world, to battlefields in New Guinea, the Solomons, and the Aleutians; to Cassino, Eindhoven, and St. Vith.

That rediscovery was in the future. On December 7, the first CBS bulletin had come at about 11:30 that morning to the people of Arroyo Grande. On hearing the news of the burning wrecks along Battleship Row, families here would have pushed listlessly at Sunday lunches for which they had no appetite. They would have been shocked and somber and tense, a father snapping at a mother who’d turned off the radio to try to recapture the kind of Sunday afternoon the family would never enjoy again. The war meant that some Arroyo Grande families would never be complete again.

 
A continent and an ocean away, in the depth of an English winter night, Winston Churchill was filled with hope. In an instant of clarity, he understood that now democracy would not—could not—perish from the earth.

I just found my Mom’s maternal great-grandfather, Patrick Fox, from the 1880 Pennsylvania Census. He was a coal miner. Mom’s paternal great-grandfather was also named Patrick, and his last name was Keefe.

My mother, Patricia Margaret Keefe Gregory, with my big sister Roberta, 1943.

The two Patricks were Famine immigrants from the same village, Coolboy, in County Wicklow, tenants to the same landlord, Lord Fitzwilliam. Fitzwilliam paid their passage to the New World because his tenants were so unfaithful to him. They kept starving to death, or more likely, dying of the typhus or pneumonia that hunger invites. The last thing the Famine Irish lost, according to contemporary chroniclers, who wrote of them in amazement, was their sense of humor. Once they’d stopped laughing, death was close at hand.

Long before that, they’d stopped knuckling their foreheads in deference to their betters who waited impatiently for them to die. Some of them had the audacity to refuse the sustenance offered them by Presbyterians in missionary kitchens that required only their conversion as the price for soup. (Before the great Famine exodus, every Irish family kept a hog, which had run of the place, cottage included. They sold it to market to pay their tithes to the Protestant Church of Ireland, to which none of them belonged. It was the law, you see.)

Fitzwilliam replaced his Irish families with sheep, generally easier to get along with than the natives and slightly cheaper to feed, although the variety of potato the Irish ate was so inferior that any self-respecting sheep would have turned it down. The vast majority of the Irish, in the 19th century, lived their entire lives without ever once eating meat, and this is a true thing that I am not inventing. They were the poorest people in Europe before the blight hit, when they were then transmuted from poor people into statistics.

A replica of the coffin ship Dunbrody in New Ross, Wexford. This is the port from which both the Kennedys and my family sailed for the New World.

But by 1849, my two ancestral families had come to North America, to Canada, at first. They survived Quebec, where, on Belle Isle, thousands died in quarantine once they’d been deposited there by the Coffin Ships.

Patrick Fox’s daughter, Margaret, married Patrick Keefe’s son, Thomas, so Mom’s name was Patricia Margaret Keefe. Margaret and Thomas went from a farm in Ontario to a Minnesota homestead to California orange groves, leaving a trail of children and grandchildren in their wake before they decided to divorce when they were in their seventies. My great-grandfather died in San Jose, my great-grandmother in Los Angeles. He was a Republican, she a Democrat. So it goes.

As to their children, most were named after ancestors, which simplified naming them at all. I guess a couple’s imagination for names runs thin by the time when they dry newborn #11 and wrap her in warm blankets, so the old standards serve best, and the families the size of either the Foxes or the Keefes would’ve easily filled almost a whole 19th-century row house in Boston or New York, with some of the kids spilling over into the flats of families named Berkowitz or Guggia and maybe absently getting adopted. It would’ve looked just like the “Every Sperm is Sacred” number from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.

One of the Foxes, Sister Loreto, bucked the naming trend, but that’s because she became a nun. Her order wore the same headpiece as Sally Field’s order did, but Sister Loreto did not fly much. Nor does she look perky, like Sally Field.  In the one photo we have of her. She looks Determined. She makes the late Mother Angelica look like a Mousketeer. Sister Loreto was a nurse in homes for unwed mothers in the Midwest. I do not want to think too much about that.

Sister Loreto, from a photo possibly taken in St. Louis.

By the way, Patrick Keefe never would have stooped to working in a Pennsylvania coal mine like Patrick Fox, Loreto’s father, did. Keefe preferred the Pennsylvania oil fields, preferred labor in forested derrick landscapes where the explosions at least had the decency to kill workingmen in the open air above ground and not bury them anonymously in collapsed tunnels below.

So did my Dad’s side of the family. The middle two of those roughnecks in the photo below are from his side, my great-uncles, at a field in Taft or Bakersfield. One of them became enraged at a rude and incompetent camp cook and shoved him into a boiler. We’re not sure whether it was lit.

My Grandfather, Edmund Keefe, was an oilfield worker, too–a “battice man,” which I’ve never successfully defined, before he disappeared in the 1920s, probably with a whore who’d ridden a motorcycle from Texas to take up trade in California. In the wake of his desertion, he wrote plaintive letters to my grandmother in Taft–we have one, post-marked in Long Beach–and even wrote a one-act play about her. She would not take him back.

She instead married another Irishman named Kelly, a sergeant of police, who became my real grandfather.  Yet it was my biological grandfather, Ed Keefe, who remained the real love of my grandmother’s life, which was a long one. I suspect that his wasn’t. He died, in my imagination, in a PEMEX oilfield somewhere deep in post-revolutionary Mexico, a time when gringos were about as welcome as archbishops. Maybe he was shoved into a boiler, too. If so, he likely deserved it.

I’m reasonably sure this is true of every family: our ancestors were hard people, somehow capable of both love and great cruelty, and occasionally both at the same time. We inherited that contradiction, too, I guess, but we would’ve inherited nothing from them at all had they not been so determined to survive.

Marriage 007644, October 3, 1876, Northumberland and Durham, Ontario: My great-grandparents.

I don’t know how many times I’ve re-written the ending to Patriot Graves. Today I lucked into a discovery, revealed below, about Arroyo Grande farmer Otis W. Smith, who received the Medal of Honor after the 1864 Battle of Nashville.  So I will try this one out. It will change, too.

The last verified survivor of the Civil War died in 1955, at 109. The passage picks up with his death:

He was the last survivor of a war that, in many ways, has survived his generation and many since. It left battles that still needed to be won and others that still need to be fought for the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln identified in two transcendent minutes at Gettysburg. In January 1941, Medal of Honor winner Otis W. Smith’s grandson, Johnnie, would enter the army to fight for freedom in a new and terrible war. When Hitler joined it, at the end of that year, he did so jubilantly, thinking America decadent and Americans, in his simplistic and twisted Darwinian worldview, a mongrel people. Churchill was said at the time to have been nearly as pleased as the parochial Austrian dictator was because, unlike Hitler, Churchill knew about Grant and Sheridan, knew what the Iron Brigade had done at Gettysburg and he knew Americans—his mother, Jennie, was born in Brooklyn. As Johnnie Otis Smith, a soldier from the other end of the nation, from the Huasna Valley of California, prepared to go to war, Churchill knew with crystalline certainty that the two nations were destined to vindicate their faith. Democratic government would not perish from the earth.

My third great-grandfather’s will, 1812:

Washington, Kentucky

I Richard Gregory being of perfect mind and memory do make this my Last Will and Testement and revoking and disannulling all and every other Will or Wills before made by me. And first of all I give to my wife Anne Gregory the plantation whereon I now live and the first choice of two of my Negroes and also as many of Cattle and hoggs and Sheep as she thinks fit and one horse such as she may Choose and all the rest of the house hold furniture during her natural life. Also I give unto my Grandson Uriah Sandifer Gregory one negroe boy Named Stephan and one feather bed and one horse namely a bluish in stud colt that he has now in possession and also to divide equally with my nine Children in each division of my estate.

* * *

I thought I’d re-read some of the Ordinances of Secession, hip-deep as I am in the Civil War, to see just how Southerners justified their separation. I looked at those issued by South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. What I discovered was stunning.

Only one of them mentioned “States’ Rights,” and that was South Carolina’s, and it was not as that state’s rationale for secession.

States’ rights were mentioned, instead, in a clause that condemned the federal government for failing to exercise its power to return fugitive slaves from Northern states who claimed “states’ rights” as the basis for protecting them.

Every ordinance cited the incipient threat, posed by Lincoln’s election, to their right to own human chattel as the fundamental reason for secession. They also accused the new government of exciting “servile insurrection”–that’s a vile term, isn’t it?–and of advocating equality of the races–a clear violation, the Texas ordinance said, of God’s will.

That would explain, of course, the flag my second great-grandfather fought under as a Missouri secessionist in 1861:

This week the National Cathedral in Washington, good Episcopalians, decided it might be time to re-discern God’s will. Once they had, they decided to remove stained-glass windows put up in tribute to the Southern heroes, Lee and Jackson, with their Confederate battle flags. They’d been installed in 1953–the year before Brown v. Board.

White Southerners understood then and understand now what that flag represents. It flew in defense of slavery, and Southerners themselves were explicit about that in 1861. Read the ordinances of secession. A century later, it flew in the face of the civil rights movement, in response to what whites had once called “servile insurrection.”  The Confederate flag doesn’t belong in God’s house. Neither is it appropriate to validate treason in a National cathedral. The windows should come down.

It’s about time.

Muhammad Ali’s nemesis, Joe Frazier, was a counterpuncher—I used to teach Frazier to my high school students to help them learn how to write argumentative essays—but that label belies his savagery. Opponents said that Frazier hit so hard that they thought they were going to die. Frazier hit so hard that the disbelief on Ali’s face when the Philadelphia fighter knocked him down is indelible. Frazier hit him just as hard in the rematch, the “Thrilla in Manila”—he said afterward that he’d hit so hard that he landed punches that would’ve knocked down the wall of a house—but Ali took them, kept talking to him, kept making delicate little circular gestures to Frazier with one glove, goading him to come in closer.

Ali’s left jab was his most famous and most electric weapon, but what finally put Frazier away was a staccato series of rights, the last one quick as a cobra strike; it traveled only a little more than eighteen inches and it left Frazier on the canvas in the fetal position. Death would travel more slowly than Ali’s right, but this was the night that both men began to die.

* * *

From The Telegraph (UK), from an interview with Ali’s business manager, Gene Kilroy:

I remember a lady came by our camp in Zaire and said her son was sick.

“Ali said: ‘We’ll go visit him.’ She took us to a leper colony. The staff would put the food down and walk away. Ali was soon lying down with the lepers, hugging them. I took about 10 showers when we got back. Ali just said: ‘Don’t worry about it, God’s looking out for us.’”

* * *

At a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria before leaving for the 1974 Zaire fight against George Foreman, the “Rumble in the Jungle,”, Muhammad talked about his training:

“I’ve wrestled with alligators,
I’ve tussled with a whale.
I done handcuffed lightning
And throw thunder in jail.
You know I’m bad.
just last week, I murdered a rock,
Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick.
I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.”

* * *

The novelist Norman Mailer, going into that fight, said that Muhammad was afraid. Foreman had destroyed Frazier, destroyed Ken Norton—two fighters who had beaten Ali—in two bouts that had lasted two rounds each. Mailer implied that the volume of Muhammad’s poetry was in direct proportion to the intensity of his fear.

But Ali had watched films of the fights, and when Foreman had knocked those men down, he’d meekly and quickly retired to his corner, breathing heavily. He didn’t have the stamina it would take to escape the trap Ali was laying for him—a fight intended to be a marathon. As Foreman pounded a crumpled Ali, gloves up, forearms locked at the elbows, in merciless showers of blows that would have hospitalized most men, Ali whispered to him, from the ropes, after one particularly jarring punch, “That the best you got, George?”

In the end, Mailer probably was right. Ali, the victor, was afraid of George Foreman. That is why he was so remarkable. George Foreman grew to love Muhammad Ali. That is why he is the greatest.

* * *

My late brother-in-law, Tim O’Hara, then living in Los Osos, took my nephew Ryan, then a little boy, to meet Ali at a Los Angeles-area sports-card show and signing. Ali signed a pair of boxing gloves, and took a moment to look at Ryan and remark on something I’m not sure Ryan had ever much liked. “I love your curly hair,” the Champ said softly.

* * *

In Famine Ireland, an English clergyman and his companion climbed into their carriage to leave a stricken town. A thirteen-year-old girl, expressionless, her clothing in tatters and so exposing ribs like an accordion’s bellows, her clavicle and shoulder joint with their contours visible just below her skin, began to run after the carriage. When the horses picked up speed, so did she. The clergyman, distressed, kept looking out the window and the girl and her long, bony legs were keeping pace with them. She did so for two miles. The clergyman could finally take no more, ordered the driver to stop, and gave the girl money. She took the money, expressionless and silent, and turned her back on them to walk home.

In the film When We Were Kings, African children, in the same way, ran after Ali’s car. They weren’t expressionless. Their faces were radiant with joy. They weren’t silent. They sang for Ali when his car stopped for them, a call-and-response song so beautiful that it makes you shiver to hear it. What the clergyman gave the little girl would have kept her alive, but only for a short time. What Ali gave these children would feed them all their lives.