Sunday Mar. 15, 2015

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Consuming Desire

I’m not making this up. In Cafe Latte’s wine bar
one of the lovely coeds at the next table
touched John on the arm as if I wasn’t there
and said, Excuse me, sir, but what
is that naughty little dessert?
And I knew from the way he glanced
at the frothy neckline of her blouse,
then immediately cast his eyes on his plate
before giving a fatherly answer,
he would have given up dessert three months
for the chance to feed this one to her.
I was stunned; John was hopeful;
but the girl was hitting on his cake.
Though she told her friend until they left
she did not want any. I wish she wanted
something—my husband, his cake, both at once.
I wish she left insisting
upon the beauty of his hands, his curls,
the sublimeness of strawberries
and angel food. But she was precocious,
and I fear adulthood is the discipline
of being above desire, cultivated
after years of learning what you want
and where and how, after insisting
that you will one day have it. I don’t
ever want to stop noticing a man like the one
at the bar in his loosened tie, reading
the Star Tribune. I don’t want to eat my cake
with a baby spoon to force small bites,
as women’s magazines suggest. And you
don’t want to either, do you? You want a big piece
of this world. You would love to have the whole thing.

“Consuming Desire” by Katrina Vandenberg from Atlas (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Katrina Vandenberg. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.  (buy now)

It was on this day 50 years ago in 1965 that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech demanding legislation to guarantee equal voting rights for all Americans. The televised speech was delivered before a joint session of Congress. It was titled “The American Promise,” but it is usually called the “We Shall Overcome” speech.

Eight days earlier, on March 7th, 600 people had started marching east out of Selma, Alabama, headed for the state capitol of Montgomery. They were marching in a demonstration for voting rights, and in protest against the murder of civil rights activist and Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson. Activists John Lewis and Hosea Williams led the group of marchers, who made it only six blocks. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, they were violently attacked by local and state law enforcement with clubs and tear gas. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. The violence was televised across the country; on ABC, it interrupted a film about Nazi war crimes. Activists flocked to Selma, including Martin Luther King Jr. On March 9th, King led a group of marchers back to the bridge, where they knelt and prayed but then turned back. That night, a white minister from Boston who had come south to march was assaulted, and he died two days later.

Legislation for a new voting rights bill was already in the works, and in the days after Bloody Sunday, pressure mounted for Johnson to unveil the bill. The Justice Department worked on finalizing the draft, and on March 13th Johnson gave a press conference condemning the violence in Selma and promising to deliver the bill soon. He said that by Monday the 15th, he would have a written message to Congress.

It wasn’t until a Sunday evening meeting that Johnson decided to give a public speech, since the public was becoming increasingly agitated by the events in Selma. Aides began work on the content through the night, and the next morning, Johnson’s chief speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, was informed that he had about eight hours to write a speech that would be delivered that evening. Johnson said that he wanted to use “every ounce of moral persuasion the presidency held” to make sure that the bill was passed, and that he wanted to include his personal experiences.

Goodwin got the speech done in time, and Johnson delivered it that evening, to Congress and to 70 million Americans who were watching it on television. The speech was interrupted by applause 36 times. Johnson used the phrase “we shall overcome,” invoking the protest song that had become a civil rights anthem. He said: “Their cause must be our cause, too, because it’s not just Negroes, but really, it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

And he said: “The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.”

As he walked down the aisle after the speech, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee congratulated Johnson and promised to begin hearing on the bill the next week. Johnson replied that no, he expected the hearings to start this week, and to continue into the night.

The following Sunday, 3,000 marchers set off once again from Selma. They reached Montgomery five days later. After arriving in Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the crowd and said: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave Negroes some part of their rightful dignity, but without the vote it was dignity without strength.” Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in August of 1965.

It’s is the birthday of the playwright and folklorist Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (books by this author), born in Galway, Ireland (1852). Lady Gregory is best remembered as an instrumental figure in the Irish Literary Revival. At age 28, Isabella Augusta married the 63-year-old widower Sir William Henry Gregory; the couple’s estate at Coole Park became a haven for Irish Revival writers, including W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O’Casey. Yeats actually wrote several poems set at the estate, including “The Wild Swans at Coole.”

Lady Gregory cofounded the Irish Literary Theatre with Yeats in 1899, which became the Abbey Theatre Company. Encouraged by Yeats, Lady Gregory collected regional folklore and published numerous translations and retellings of local mythology, including Poets and Dreamers (1903) and God and Fighting Men (1904). Lady Gregory’s first play was Twenty Five (1904); in the next eight years she wrote 19 original plays and seven works of translation, all for the Abbey, including The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1906), The Image (1909), and McDonough’s Wife (1912).

It’s the birthday of literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, born in Highland Park, Michigan (1918). His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. He went to Yale and decided to do his dissertation on W.B. Yeats, who had just died and who, as Ellmann put it, “seemed at that time a subject suspiciously and brazenly modern.” But he chose Yeats anyway, and was partway through his dissertation when World War II began, and he left to join the Army. While he was stationed in London, he took a vacation and went to visit George Yeats, the poet’s wife, who greeted him warmly and happily shared stories of her husband, and granted Ellmann numerous interviews. He published Yeats: The Man and the Masks in 1948 and went on to write biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde (1989) won the Pulitzer Prize, and Anthony Burgess called James Joyce (1959) “the greatest literary biography of the century.”

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