Twelve:

Fort Benning, Georgia

Have you ever stuck around after they’ve all gone home? After the march has passed through, the rally run its course? There isn’t a whole lot left. Papers littering the ground announcing upcoming events, pleading for a wealth of good causes. Posters pimpled with the imprint of street and sole, leaflets tattered and grimy. Trash cans towering, cathedral-like, amid variegated landscapes of aluminum and plastic, a topography molded from the drained and consumed. Wind shuffling these crumbs about, or stillness amplifying their silence. These intersections are the loneliest of poems, the ghostliest of towns. Everyone gone back to their bunkers to wrestle with the same doubts and the same people they wrestled with the night before. The echo of songs and speeches, of outrage and hope and entreaty, bouncing against the concrete and glass like rubber balls in a lockbox.

Later the city’s forces will emerge—those forces that tidy and groom the apparatus being protested—to clean it all up. Laborers who can’t afford to live in the city they clean will sweep away what remains, and the next day the apparatus will trundle on, humans in tow like ducklings. One day closer to demise. Nothing lasts forever, and that which consumes its own flesh falls a good deal short of forever.

I return from New York feeling ambivalent. I am inspired by the protests, by their range and creativity. But I am also decidedly pessimistic about my own place in this movement, and dubious about what our organizing is achieving. I have no doubts about the power of civil disobedience and direct action. But I am clear that both are most effective within the framework of a broad strategic resistance. Direct-action organizing, in contrast, seems to operate in emergency mode: a war arises, a multilateral trade talk is scheduled, and we rush to react. Within that urgency, we summon the energy to achieve amazing things through inclusive processes. But it’s not enough. Our activism is rushed and lacks the grounding and alliances that grow from proactive, consistent, and patient organizing. Moreover, it lacks sustainability. If we are constantly stressed and harried doing the work of change, then we aren’t living the world we say we want. And if we can’t live it, how can we build it?

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I’m starting to think our vision must be broader, our goals larger. The models are out there: India, Ecuador, Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela—movements in villages and cities are pressing and hammering this world into a new mold. We need to build our connections with these movements, learn from them. We need to continue to develop our vision of what we want and our analysis of how to get there.

And indeed this is happening: the World Social Forum—an annual meeting of global justice advocates from all over the world to coordinate campaigns and share and hone strategies—is about to enter its fifth year. This is a young and vibrant movement, and thankfully, given its openness, there is ample room to grow, and in a variety of directions. But I’m not sure of my place within it.

I am increasingly convinced that tactical nonviolence is not enough. Gandhi and King maintained that civil disobedience must be more than symbolic and strategic. To be effective, it must also be principled. In 1930, after marching to the seaside to protest the British salt tax, hundreds of satyagrahis were beaten savagely as they approached the Dharsana salt deposits. Yet they kept coming, columns of them, without fear or fight. Gandhi’s Salt March is generally recognized as the turning point in the Indian resistance to British rule. In 1965, in Selma, Alabama, when police turned tear gas and billy clubs on the nonviolent civil rights marchers, they knelt in prayer. This event too is now recognized as a turning point: the nation clamored in protest, and two marches and five months later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. The Sarayacu are winning because their forms of resistance align with their deepest-held values. The strategy shaping their campaign is grounded in their spirituality, wisdom, and culture. Stemming from a nonviolent vision of interconnection with the earth and humanity, their means are congruent with their ends.

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I do not feel like our means are congruent with our ends.

I go to direct-action organizing meetings and return disheartened. My fellow organizers have so much compassion for the oppressed, but they often completely demonize the police, the government, the people who work in corporations. Why should we have compassion for them? a friend asks, laughing in disbelief. They perpetuate and profit from a system dependent on slave labor, highway robbery, environmental devastation. Why? Because they suffer too. Because they’re so busy pushing away their own suffering that they can harden themselves to the suffering of others. Because hating them certainly won’t open their hearts. Not to mention that we’re also a part of the same system. So you’re going to love them into starting a revolution? Think of it as tough love. Like Gandhi said: “I can combine the greatest love with the greatest opposition to wrong.” Compassion doesn’t turn a blind eye to consequences. But when compassion exiles any human being, it lacks wisdom. Okay, Marisa, whatever. Like anything’s going to change that way.

Then Bush wins. Fox, CNN, and The New York Times all attribute his victory to the “moral values” votes of the religious right. I am stunned, dismayed. All that energy and commitment in New York, all the grassroots organizing to get out the vote, all the young people newly politicized by his first term, and still we lost. Republicans now control both houses of Congress. We have a president, vice president, and secretary of state who are all former executives at energy corporations. Two of the three have more years of experience in energy companies than in government. The nation’s left rants, tears out its hair, grieves, and collapses in a stupor of exhaustion and befuddlement.

Back home, Code Orange slowly falls apart. There are questions we have delayed addressing that now, if we are to continue organizing, demand our attention: Do we want to be an affinity group or, as we’ve sometimes functioned at major demonstrations, an organizing collective—planning actions for others beyond ourselves? Do we want to commit to one or two ongoing campaigns or mobilize on an action-by-action basis? We try to answer these questions but repeatedly become mired in process. Interpersonal issues arise, along with communication glitches. It seems we lack the energy to address it all. We limp along for a while but eventually stop meeting altogether.

How dare you look at me like that?

You, yes you, with the tie-dyed shirt and tie-dyed skirt. I saw that sidelong look. Who dressed you, anyway? Haven’t you ever heard of solid fabrics? Very much in demand these days. One tie-dye at a time, how’s that for starters. Or perhaps let’s take a stab at limiting ourselves to ten colors in combination, shall we?

As for you, I saw that. I saw you cut in line. Think you’re better than all the rest of us, don’t you? I know your type. Weekly pedicure followed by a satisfying whine at the injustice of the world over hundred-dollar lunches with your face-lifted pals in Sausalito. Just because everyone else is too spineless to do anything doesn’t mean I didn’t notice. If I could only talk, you’d be up to your ears in it right now. Speaking of which, I’d seriously consider getting those mothers pinned a few inches closer to your head. You’ve obviously got the resources.

For now, I’ll content myself with a malevolent glare.

And you behind me—yes you, I know who you are, the one with the face only a mother could love—if you step on my shoe one more goddamn time I swear to Jesus I’m going to turn around and throttle you. Can you imagine it? All these timid do-gooders. “Now, dear, let’s cast our minds back to right action…” What if I picked up a kitchen knife and started yapping like a dog? Would they break silence? Maybe bray faintly? I’m about ready to do it. Where’s the knife? Someone hand it to me so I can save us all from ourselves.

I’ve had it with these retreats. Why am I here? Why choose to torture myself like this? Surround myself with people thinking all manner of foul things about me? (I know they’re thinking about me, they must be, I’m far too compelling for them not to be.) What the hell was I thinking?

Wait, what the hell am I thinking? Where is my mind?

I’m evil. I’m a bad person surrounded by good people who are thinking nothing but virtuous thoughts. I am utterly vile. I honestly cannot stand myself. How can anyone stand me? I’ve fooled them, evidently. On top of it all I’m ugly as sin. My hair is more like a hairball, my hips elephantine, and I look like I haven’t slept in the entire Cenozoic era because we have to get up at the freaking crack of dawn to meditate. What’s so urgent about sitting on your ass watching your breath that you have to get up at 5:30? I should just go back to my tent right now. I don’t deserve to be here. I don’t deserve to eat lunch, and I’m harboring strong suspicions I don’t deserve to exist. Surely they can tell. They can all tell how despicable I am. And did I mention self-obsessed, neurotic, and paranoid?

I have come to recognize my aversion phase. It happens early on at most retreats. I dislike everyone and logically presume everyone dislikes me. But this retreat is different. By this time I’ve been practicing daily for over three years. But I’m still astounded by what hits me. Every retreat I sit with what comes up, both unpleasant and pleasant. This time, I’m bowled over by it.

It is a women’s retreat taking place in a county park. We sit in a circle, outside, beneath madrone and redwoods. Grief pins me, anger rages like a forest fire, and hatred throws fists, knives, Molotov cocktails at all of it. What is this torment? Who knew it was in me? For days I sit with my own fury and hatred, watching them storm, wondering if I’m strong enough to overcome them. Yes, I think, I can beat this.

It hits me with such impact that my eyes startle open.

Madrone trees arching red. Dead leaves skittering across the tarp.

It dawns on me that I am fighting the grief and the anger with hatred. And it is fueling the cycle. This resistance is simply a different kind of clinging. It depends upon what it reacts to for its own survival. I begin to practice metta, giving all of it love. And the war starts to subside.

What I have been stymied by my whole life is the why of it. Why is there so much unnecessary suffering? Why do we keep engaging in actions that are obviously destructive? In wars, occupations, economic policies that rob from the poor to ornament the rich? Why, when people, I am convinced, are fundamentally good?

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Because we do not see our own goodness.

Every action I take is a reflection of my own heart. It’s not simply that in harming others I hurt myself. The harm I inflict on others reflects where I am myself broken, or barren. How much love I can give others is an indication of how much love I allow myself. The woman in New York I hated for her privilege—how could I not see that what I loathed in her is what I loathe in myself? Guilt is just anger turned inward. The violence I despise in the world is the same violence I push away within. We aren’t separate, and neither is our suffering. There is no enemy, or at least none that doesn’t exist within our own hearts. It is in me, all of it—the terrorist and the president, the homeless man and the CEO—and it’s just a question of how much I’ll let myself look at. How much compassion I can allow. How much faith I can have in myself, in others, in the universe. In a sense, it’s really about saying yes. Until I can look at and hold—with patience, if not love—the ways that I have been hurt, that I am still hurting, I will not understand how they govern me. I will be unconsciously reacting instead of consciously acting. I will be unable, moreover, as Joanna Macy pointed out, to clearheadedly discern whether my actions are actually helping or harming. “For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?” Kahlil Gibran asked. “Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.” We cannot see our own goodness because we are terrified of letting ourselves come to know all the ways it is blocked. We are invariably well-intentioned. But our own unacknowledged pain, our ignorance of our own hearts and motives, defeat us.

The revolution is happening. Right now as I study the faces around me, each is astonishingly lovely, really, in its own way. One biting her lip, lost somewhere far from here. Another nodding, giving in to sleep. A third with tears skidding down her cheeks. It’s happening quietly, one by one. Within, and then without.

How much of my activism has simply been a vehicle to justify my own anger and hatred?

I pull back from organizing direct action. It just feels wrong. I don’t like who I become at the planning meetings I attend. I find myself defensive, harshly critical of my harshly critical friends. I realize that the work and growth I need to do require some space to germinate.

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I returned from South America determined to write, and knowing what I wanted to write about. There is a relationship between our own consciousness and a globalized economy playing demolition derby with the planet. Just as the Sarayacu’s processes and councils are manifestations of their shared consciousness, so our systems and institutions are manifestations of our collective consciousness. Corporate globalization is a highly convoluted form of escapism, a marathon race away from ourselves and each other. We are letting fear dictate. We are buying and selling and voting for fear. But until we stop running, until we pause and look at the violence within us, we will continue creating violence in the world. What we are facing is not simply a political or economic predicament. It is a spiritual crisis. As such, it requires a spiritual accounting. I begin reading voraciously in the areas of economics, spirituality, philosophy, ecology, and psychology. I take a part-time position as a nanny and spend the rest of my time reading, organizing my ideas, and writing.

I recognize that I am ready to leave this phase of organizing—for now, at least—in order to do the work I feel I need to. But this realization also saddens me and leaves me feeling estranged and frustrated. Inner work is crucial, but so is wise action. Our situation is too dire to do otherwise. Where can I put my activist energy now? What will feel right?

“There is a great spiritual pain that progressive movements have not addressed,” says law professor Peter Gabel. The audience roars its approval. “The right has addressed this, within a narrow moral discourse. But it is time now.” He holds his hands aloft in petition. “It is time for us progressives to build a spiritual politics that speaks to the universal human need for meaning.” He gets a standing ovation.

It is the first morning of the first ever Spiritual Activism conference, organized by Tikkun at U.C. Berkeley in July 2005. It feels more like a revival. The goals of the conference are to challenge the misuse of God and religion by the religious right, and to build a space for people of faith within the culture of the left. I am invited to speak on a panel addressing a values-oriented economy, and also to sing.

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Far more people come than can be registered. The huge plenary hall is packed to the gills for the entirety of the four-day program. At every workshop I attend, people are exulting and effusing over walking into a community of the like-minded. According to the most conservative estimates, 78 percent of Americans believe in God. Bush won on “faith” votes. It is patently obvious to me—and the others here— that we on the left are overlooking something fundamental and profound. The conference is a massive celebration, a giddy and jubilant stampede out of the secular closet. “It is in the convergence of spiritual people becoming active and activists becoming spiritual,” says Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, “that the hope of the world rests.”

Amen and hallelujah.

I leave feeling affirmed and elated. I’m eager too, like I’m five years old and just met my new best friend: I can’t wait to have her over for a tea party and play with my favorite toys. For the first time in months —to my immense relief—my old comrade, hope, returns for an extended visit. She has a few gray hairs and crow’s-feet, but she’s still lugging her backpack crammed with maps and tackle, still flaunting sequin-green satin with her workboots. Still keen as mustard.

“So, what kind of Buddhist are you?” Sheilan asks.

“Well, I’m not really a Buddhist. I’m a Jew.”

“Oh. So why—”

“What I mean is, I was raised Jewish and I love the culture and have no desire to stop being a Jew. But my main practice is vipassana, insight meditation, and it’s been no less than transformative. I guess—I suppose— well, if I had to label myself I’d say I’m a Buddhist practitioner.”

In November 2005 I move into the San Francisco Buddhist Alliance for Social Engagement (BASE) house. The vision of the house is for us to support each other in both our inner work and our work in the world. I see it as an opportunity to try to live what I preach. Community, as the Sarayacu showed me, is where we need to put our ideals into practice. If I want to change the world, I need to figure out how to start at home—with what I have before me, with friends who are also committed to this path, and with all that comes up as we negotiate it together. As I discover, living in an intentional community has its challenges, but the shared commitment to developing our awareness and compassion establishes a crucial groundwork of trust. We implement a number of processes to facilitate our practice and strengthen our community, among them communal weekly dinners. One week, the Buddhist ethic of “right action”—acting with wisdom and compassion—comes up within the context of social change work. Spring, one of my housemates, asks the table what the point of right action is when the system operates by no such ethos, and activism so often feels like a losing battle. We all have a lot to say in response, but Diane puts it best.

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“You have to remember interdependence,” she says, “if you want your work to be sustainable. We need to recognize that our actions are only a small part of a huge web. It’s a challenge because we get so attached to having certain results. But interdependence also means that every action we take does matter, that any action that comes from a place of wisdom and compassion will bear fruit, whether or not we can see its effects. The key is going ahead and acting anyway, but with an understanding of our own place in the scheme of things, and without being attached to the results.”

“Is it possible to act without being attached to results?” Scott asks.

“Yes. Gandhi did it.”

“Oh sure, Gandhi. A walk in the park.”

We begin opening our home up to the greater community. We start a weekly meditation group for activists, and a monthly speaker series on Spiritual Activism, drawing from recognized leaders and thinkers in the fields of nonviolence and social change. Every two months we plan an engaged retreat, where we spend one day practicing together and a second day volunteering on a project in our neighborhood. One afternoon Spring asks me if I would talk to the house about globalization and direct action. Sure, I say, and attempt a brief synopsis for my housemates. They are an attentive and curious circle of listeners. They share my view of the correlation between our systems and our consciousness, and their responses add significantly to my own thinking. I am midsentence when it occurs to me that perhaps the next locus of my activism has located me.

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Hey hey hey, justice will have her say.

Maybe. No, not quite right. Makes justice sound mouthy and ineffectual. Definitely wrong. Justice is A-OK? Lord, where have my creative juices run off to? Wait, wait, I’ve got it: Justice will make you pay. Right. Maybe coming from the German-accented cop-gone-cracked in a B flick. Then there’s the blue version: Justice could use a good lay. Now that’ll get the people to rise up. Until they sprout a few grays, that is, and start taking long walks on the beach with their Volvo station wagons and 401(k)s. Okay, enough now. Concentrate. I’m feeling it. It’s coming.

Justice is on her way.

Could work. Simple but rousing. I try it, humming low, bouncing around in my seat as I experiment with rhythm and pitch. Hey hey hey, justice is on her way, close the gates on the SOA, close the gates—

“Ma’am?” A sternly courteous gaze is leveled my way.

“Yes?”

“I was just asking what beverage you’d like with your snack pack.”

“I’ll take a glass of peace, no ice, and the veggie justice meal, please.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tea. I’ll have a tea.”

Yesterday I spoke with David, who was already at Fort Benning. “Write songs,” he instructed. “Bring music. We’re in the Southgate Apartments, building 21. There’s no power and the plumbing isn’t working. But we are right outside the gates.”

I’ve been hearing about the annual School of the Americas protest for years. Multiple VW-busloads of global justice activists went directly from Miami to Fort Benning in 2003. David was over to dinner a few months ago when he mentioned he was going. “I’ll be with the Puppetistas,” he said. “Making giant puppets and art.” He encouraged me to consider coming, telling me that it was a faith-based movement started by a priest, Father Roy Bourgeois. “Over the past few years it’s been thoroughly infiltrated—and influenced—by our global justice friends. Now it’s a really interesting merging of the two movements.”

“Where do I sign up?”

I’ve read about the horrors perpetrated by graduates of the School of the Americas, a combat training school for Latin American soldiers based at Fort Benning, Georgia. Over the course of six decades, the SOA has trained more than sixty thousand soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, commando and psychological warfare, interrogation tactics, sniper fire, and military intelligence. These techniques have been used by its graduates against their own people, to enforce U.S. economic policies that have an uncanny tendency to benefit wealthy elites and arouse the ire of the impoverished majorities. Powerful corporate investors view Latin America as a convenient backyard to the U.S., rich with resources and cheap labor.

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In this yard, the SOA graduates are the cruelest of bullies. They have been responsible for the massacre, assassination, torture, rape, and “disappearance” of hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans. Union organizers, educators, religious workers, student leaders, indigenous populations, and antipoverty activists are chief targets. More than six hundred SOA graduates are documented human rights violators. At least twelve graduates have attained the status of dictator within their home countries. In 1993 a United Nations Truth Commission reported that forty-seven of the sixty officers guilty of the worst atrocities during El Salvador’s civil war—including those responsible for killing Archbishop Oscar Romero, for murdering four American Maryknoll churchwomen, and for massacring nine hundred villagers at El Mozote in 1981—were trained at the SOA. Among its many critics, it is often called the School of Assassins.

In 1996 the Pentagon released seven manuals used for intelligence training in Latin America and the SOA. These manuals explicitly advocated torture and promoted human rights violations. On December 15, 2000, in response to public outcry, the SOA was closed by a vote of the House of Representatives. The same vote, however, approved a proposal for a new school. One month and two days later, face-lift complete, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation opened its doors.

On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter were massacred in El Salvador. A U.S. Congressional Task Force report identified nineteen of the twenty-six soldiers responsible as SOA graduates. The annual demonstration at Fort Benning takes place in late November each year, in commemoration of these murders.

Eighteen years ago, one sunny afternoon in a schoolyard on the edge of an all-white city at the very tip of Africa, I summoned up the nerve to say no. No, I said, I don’t believe whites are any better than blacks. Six years later I did it again. No, sexism won’t cut it. And then no to the violence perpetrated by my people on the Palestinians. No to the walls we build between us, to a globalized economy that fortifies and whitewashes those walls, to the violence that such vast imbalance incites and institutionalizes. The School of the Americas embodies all that I have spent my life fighting against. And the movement looking to shut it down exemplifies all I have been trying to do. Yes, says this movement, every life is inconceivably precious. Only love can end hate, so we will uproot violence with principled nonviolence. And in the face of death and destruction, we will bear witness, we will speak boldly and clearly, and we will build.

“That must be it, over there.”

“There? Ma’am, I think those buildings may be abandoned.”

“Probably.”

Across the street: K.W. MILITARY SUPPLY. And FREEDOM HOUSE. The cab driver deposits me in the parking lot closest to building 21. I lug out my backpack and head toward the single lighted window. Apparently someone got the power hooked up.

Two kids are playing cards in the doorway. They look up as I approach.

“Excuse me, is this where the Puppetistas are staying?”

“Yeah,” says one, examining me through narrowed eyes. Gauging for any red flags of the law-enforcement variety. He’s about fourteen, with a disorderly array of teeth and eyes a startling blond. “I’m Quentin. Go on ’head.”

I press on, through a tiny kitchen chaotic with pots and dishes, and into what was once, in its heyday, a living room. The carpet is an indeterminate shade of filthy. The walls are scored and scuffed and shedding, the windows broken. A single set of warped miniblinds dangles at a haphazard angle. I barely have time to absorb this before I’m accosted.

“Hello! And who might you be?” A puppy-eager pair of eyes peers at me from under a massy halo of brown. I take in the wide skirts, the stiletto-heeled leather boots. I’m a friend of David’s, I tell her.

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“Oh, yes! Are you the singer?”

Her enthusiasm renders me instantly dour. “Uh-huh. Is he here?”

“Yeah, but he’s in a meeting right now. So are you in a skit yet?”

I fix her with a blank stare, but she is undaunted. “You know, a skit for our sideshows on Saturday. I know he’s going to try to steal you for his, but we really need another woman in ours. I mean, we’re commemorating the four churchwomen murdered in El Salvador, and so far it’s only me and three men. Ridiculous. Say you’ll do it. Please!”

“Uh. Okay.”

“Fantastic,” she says. “I’m Bonnie.” She informs me that there will be a planning meeting for our skit in five minutes, and that Jamie, another member of the group, is on his way. In case you’re hungry, she says, there’s tons left over from dinner—brown rice, collard greens, black beans, and miso soup. She points to the meal preparation and dishwashing schedule on one wall, suggesting I sign up, and to the schedule of the week’s activities on the other wall. “Meet you on the couch in five.”

I lay my backpack down on the cushion-free couch.

“Hey you guys!” Enter mammoth dreadlocks attached to a human being. “Check out what we dumpster-dived! Two boxes of cookies!”

“Oh my God!” Bonnie literally jumps up and down. “Yippee! Dessert!”

“Dumpster-dived?”

“Yeah, from behind the market down the block.” Both of them slowly turn to me. “Dude, are you trying to say you’ve never gone dumpster-diving?” His voice is low with awe.

“I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say.”

“Well my friend, you are missing out.” Spreading his arms wide. “Every piece of furniture in this room, fresh from the dumpster.” I examine the couch dubiously. And my backpack on top of it. “Great.”

“I’ll say. I’m Shawn.” His blue eyes glint out from the narrow white patches of his face uncolonized by facial hair. “Welcome to the Pup-petista Lair.”

I thank him, and ask where I should set up my sleeping bag.

“Wherever.” Bonnie is dismissive. “I’m in building 19, which is way worse. Officially condemned. No power or plumbing. But there may still be space in the bedroom here if you want to check.”

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At a rapid clip, I head toward the door she indicates.

“There aren’t beds or anything, but you can just lay your sleeping bag on the floor. And hey—”

I turn. “Yeah?”

“Just to warn you, you may want to keep an eye out for the roaches. There’s like a million of them.”

I wake groggy, but with a clear recollection of something crawling over my belly during the night. Thankfully, the pill I took knocked me out sufficiently that I gave a few drop-kicks and went on sleeping. And the judicious employment of earplugs enabled me to sleep blissfully through the 7:30 a.m. meeting. I spoon myself some gluey oatmeal, slug down a few shots of cold coffee, and head, armed with notebook, into the Georgia morning.

While I came here to demonstrate and to make art, I also came to write. I am not sure where or what I will be publishing this time, but I want to record what happens here, so that I can tell this story to others. I’m not on assignment, and I may not get paid for it, but I have reached the point where I am doing it for myself. I feel blessed to have been witness, a number of times in my life, to what I see as history in the making. And I want to get it down on paper.

It is a dazzling day already, sunlight swiping hard over the wide expanse of green between buildings 21 and 19. The apartment right next door to ours is frenetic with activity: police march in and out, murmuring or barking at each other, radios blaring static. I inquire of a floating Puppetista what’s going on.

“The cops are moving in. They’re making it a base for the weekend.”

Now, I wonder how that’s going to affect property values. “Maybe we should send over a pound cake.”

Plywood has been set atop sawhorses on the lawn to make worktables, and Puppetistas are busily stenciling and cutting out props. I peer into the bottom floor of building 19, which has been converted into a workspace. David and some others are drilling and sawing away to a curiously harmonious medley of death metal and jazz.

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“What are you making?” I yell at one of them, a middle-aged man with a thick red beard, a balding pate, and a total of two red dreadlocks jutting, like a Hare Krishna gone feral, from the back of his head. He gives me a ragged, toothy grin, and holds up a narrow wooden post. “What do you think?”

“No clue. Rapiers? Vampire stakes?”

“Close but no cigar. Stilts. For the giant stilt-walking bugs.”

He introduces himself as Jake and curtsies with genuine grace, plucking at the edges of his baggy pants. I introduce myself, bow deeply, and ask whether he by any chance is privy to the whereabouts of a lad named Shawn. “That fair gentle,” he tells me, “was last sighted taking some sun in the meadow.”

I spot the dreads skulking about on a workbench. Shawn is doing a video project, and last night we discussed teaming up on interviews. Together we head over to the building housing the SOA Watch media and communications office for the week. SOA Watch is the D.C.-based group that organizes the annual protest, along with smaller demonstrations and ongoing lobbying efforts. This office was set up days ago in one of the Southgate apartments. It contains six laptops, six harried young activists—one with a baby placidly surveying the agitation from her lap—and what sounds like seventeen phone lines beeping and ringing ceaselessly. “Christine at KPFK? 4 p.m. Pacific? Great.” “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Have you spoken with—yes, of course. Of course they got the release.” Punk crashes at low volume from a small stereo. Wires are taped to the walls and ceiling, congregated in bunches in the corners. Today is Wednesday. The countdown to the weekend’s demonstration is just hitting its stride.

Father Roy Bourgeois doesn’t look much like what I expected. Not that I realized I had expectations until he fails to fulfill them, resembling neither a priest nor a radical. He is younger than I’d imagined, dressed in a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and when Shawn and I knock on the door of his office asking to interview him, to my delight, he waves us in. “Sure, sure, we can chat, but just for five minutes. This is such a busy time.” He ends up talking with us for over three-quarters of an hour.

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Bourgeois’ home is directly outside the gates to the base. Step out the door, down the stairs, and there it is: WELCOME TO FORT BENNING, U.S. ARMY. “The movement started right here,” he tells us. He gestures around him to the walls of his small office. They are adorned with photos of the assassinated: the four Maryknoll churchwomen, the indefatigable human rights defender Archbishop Oscar Romero. “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” a sign reads, “for they shall never be unemployed.” On another wall: Rosa Parks. Two Muslim girls, smiling from their hijab. “I’ve experienced firsthand the brutality of the military to the poor in Latin America,” he explains, speaking rapidly, urgently. After five years of human rights work in Bolivia, he was interrogated, tortured, and banished from the country. During his following stint in El Salvador, he traced a string of killings—including the murders of the four churchwomen and of Archbishop Romero— to the SOA. In 1980, back in the U.S., he spent seventy days in jail after splashing a vial of his own blood on the Pentagon to protest Romero’s assassination. After the report emerged that those responsible for the 1989 massacre were trained at the SOA, Bourgeois felt called to come to Fort Benning and investigate. He rented this apartment for $175 a month, and thus was born SOA Watch.

“I called up friends from the Bay Area. Our first action was a thirty-five-day water-only fast, to expose the school. Our next action took place on the first anniversary of the 1989 massacre. Three of us poured our own blood on photos of SOA graduates and instructors.” Bourgeois served fourteen months for this action. In total, he has spent four years in jail for nonviolent civil disobedience in protest of the SOA. I scribble desperately as he recounts his story, trying to catch it all, overcome with admiration for this man and his commitment.

“We started to gather at the main gate in November. The first year, there were ten of us.” He smiles. Bourgeois smiles a lot, like a kindly history teacher, or an affable oncologist. “The second, a hundred. Then five hundred, a thousand. Last November there were over fifteen thousand. The school became a PR nightmare for the Pentagon, so they changed its name. Now they say they’re teaching democracy.” He gives a hoot of a laugh, his blue eyes scorching. “You don’t teach democracy behind a chain-link fence. You don’t teach democracy in an undemocratic institution, from behind the barrel of a gun. It’s so offensive, the Pentagon saying, ‘we’re putting the past behind us.’ The victims—like Carlos Mauricio, who will be here—they say: you do not decide when it’s time to move on.” An index finger slashes through the air, pinning any argument to the desk. “There can never be healing and reconciliation without truth and justice.”

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The sun is setting outside his window, now, and it is not going down easy. Behind a mangle of black branches, the sky is glowing, sparking, mounting to a formidable blaze. We sit silent for a minute. I am rigid, a gritty determination rising in my chest, edged with outrage.

“So,” Father Roy Bourgeois resumes eventually, his face ember-bright in the dim office, “the struggle goes on.” We nod, somber. “And this weekend”—smiling again, hugely, so magnetic that I feel my face stretching involuntarily—“it’s gonna be a big celebration of hope.” He wags his head. “Something happens here. People start feeling more empowered to speak out. Now is the time, you know.” His conviction so ironclad it can’t help but carry a few thousand with it. “I’ve learned in this movement: we can all do something for peace, and do it well.”

I walk out of that office feeling like I’ve been healed of a malaise I didn’t know I had. Shawn and I stand together wordless, staring at the livid sky, and at WELCOME TO FORT BENNING, etched in scarlet before the yawning gates.

“Point of order.”

“Yes.”

“We are the Puppetistas.” Jake gesticulates extravagantly at the circle. “We are therefore obliged to play games.”

“Right.” Bonnie is facilitating. “We’ll break every fifteen minutes for a quick game to keep us on our toes. Okay, folks, it’s Thursday night already, so let’s get moving.” She runs through the agenda for the meeting: group check-ins, review of the weekend’s plans, housekeeping and workspace-related issues.

“Point of clarification.” Bruce raises his hand. “In which game shall we indulge?” His caterpillar brows are lifted high. Bonnie asks him if he has a suggestion, and he deliberates briefly with the orange hand puppet on his left arm. “We humbly propose butt charades.”

“Any objections?”

None. I dump a spoonful of steaming black beans over the rice on my plate and head toward an open spot on the carpet, settle down cross-legged. Some primeval relic of a survival instinct inspires me to turn my head. Jutting above the window ledge directly behind me: a writhing pair of antennae. Fight or flight? I screech, leap up, and swiftly relocate to a spot next to David. Safe. For now.

“All right people. Let’s get started with group check-ins.” Bonnie is no-nonsense. “Giant stilt-walking bugs?”

“Right here.” In the corner, Abi perks up. She’s fresh-faced and lovely, her cutoffs spattered with paint. “The stilts are made, but we could definitely use help with the bug-faces and bodies. Oh, and whoever’s going on a supply run, we need more duct tape.”

“The Madres?” Bonnie turns to me. I turn to Jamie. He looks from me to Bonnie and meekly obliges.

“Comin’ along nicely.” Jamie’s hair curls down his neck, and his Southern accent is thick as peat. “We’s about done with the four churchwomen, could use some help with the giant birds from any new folks.” He glances about the circle at the people who arrived today.

“The Carlos Mauricio group?”

“We’re painting up the contestoria, the pictures to tell his story.” David taps items off on his fingers as he speaks. “Got the Carlos puppet and the church workers and the torturing generals done. Still working on the jail-turned–commemorative museum. I spoke with Carlos today and he’s going to be arriving Sunday morning. He’s looking forward to joining all of us.”

“GI Joes?”

José rouses himself. “We’ve been making the guns.” With crooked glasses and a paunch, José is Jerry Garcia’s brown-skinned doppelganger. “Anyone feel a hankering for constructing AK-47s, come to us.”

“Great.” Bonnie glances at the agenda and reviews the plans for the weekend. Saturday we will be doing our sideshows, moving between three marked-out performance spaces in the crowd. Sunday we will be parading up through the crowd to the stage, where we will perform our grand pageant. On Saturday, Bonnie announces, each group will do their skit three times, except for the bugs, who will be in the crowd. And each group, she concludes, will need a clown liaison to move people out of the way and synchronize our timing.

David raises his hand and asks how the clowns will be coordinated.

“Each group,” explains José, who sidelines as a clown when not full-timing as a Puppetista, “is autonomous in how they want to handle their clown liaisons.” I am pondering the rich hermeneutics extractable from this seemingly simple statement when Eric, the event coordinator of SOA Watch, walks in the door. In a Pavlovian instant, the room is in uproar.

“Olé, olé olé olé,” chorus the Puppetistas of yore, “shut down the SOA. Olé, olé olé olé…” Eric gamely performs a jig in the middle of the room. “Butt charades!” Bruce hollers. “It’s been fifteen minutes. Eric, you’re up.”

“Okay, okay.” He turns around, diligently proffering his rear end. “The subject is: things you find in a dumpster.”

It’s Friday, the last full day of art-making before the weekend’s extravaganza. Sheets billow gently from a line strung across the lawn. LA VIDA reads the drying paint on one, and LA LIBERTAD on another. A black-shrouded cardboard coffin leans up against one of the trees. Beside it rests a line of cardboard rifles. A host of local kids have joined our efforts. They dip brushes contemplatively into reds and yellows, spread the paint over cardboard flowers with all the absorption and care of young neurosurgeons. Over near the worktables, Neil is getting fitted with a giant gauzy pair of green wings. At the lawn’s edge, David tries out the Carlos Mauricio puppet, moving gracefully beneath its weight, slowly extending one arm to raise a giant hand.

And like a quiet benediction over all: the sun, filtering down through the massive old oaks in leisurely kaleidoscope. I discover myself awash in a coppery upswell of happiness.

“Hey you!” It’s Quentin, loping toward me coltlike. Quentin lives in the Southgate apartments with his grandmother, and over the years he’s become an ardent Puppetista. At one point during the week he makes off with my notebook, and when I recover it later I love U has been scrawled on one of its pages. Now he slings an arm over my shoulder, brings his face close to mine, narrows his eyes and cocks his head. “What you up to, girl?”

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“I was going to check out the silk-screening. Looks like I got a partner now.”

We climb the stairs in building 19 to another ad hoc workspace. Five women and two men are hard at work pressing, lifting, and hanging swatches of fabric with assembly-line efficiency. The ramshackle unit has been strung about with clothesline, and red RESIST flags are pegged up neatly against a backdrop of shattered windows and crumbling walls. On an ancient couch lies a pile of clothes ready to be silk-screened, my red T-shirt among them.

Back outside, Abi is about to mount her stilts.

“Don’t move, Matt,” she yells. “I’m in a very precarious position.” She is standing atop a dumpster, Matt squatting behind her, fiddling with the segmented exoskeleton on her back. The giant bug-head and cellophane dragonfly wings are already in place. Jake supports her from below, stabilizing the stilts as she steps into them.

“Is that comfortable?” He adjusts the stilt-shoe around her foot.

“Yeah, fine.” Her face is rigid, her eyes looking anywhere but down. Jake unrolls the elongated black stilt-pants until all that shows beneath her mile-long legs is a miniature pair of shoes. He peers up at her, asks her if she’s ready to try it.

“I guess so.” She pushes the bug-head up higher, then leans forward tentatively on her hand-poles, swallowing. “I think so.”

Later, when she’s back on her land-legs, I ask Abi why she comes. I’m here because I believe in the power of creative resistance, she says. A lot of the activism I was involved with before was angry. But this feels joyful to me. It comes from a place of love instead of fear or anger. Rather than focusing on the negative, we are creating something different. And we’re doing it collaboratively. We’re living it. “All right.” She inhales sharply. “Here goes.”

And she’s off! The organic farmer/Puppetista/dragonfly stilt-walking natural as a calf unfolding placenta-wet onto its feet. Look up, high up, and you will witness a mystical specimen of a type common as mud—an audaciously dreamed, painstakingly realized portent of a better world, wings catching and refracting the late-afternoon light.

239

It’s no small feat pulling together an event of this magnitude. Yesterday, Friday, Bonnie and I were the Puppetista representatives at the final coordinating meeting for the weekend. The SOA Watch facilitators began with a song and a review of consensus process, and then ran through every conceivable detail of the demonstration, from media to Spanish interpreters to the legal team supporting those who choose to scale the fence.

Today, the details that were twenty-four hours ago no more than ink on paper have assumed dimensions both material and human. The bland stretch of road in front of the gates is transformed: a high stage has been set up, strung with a banner reading CLOSE U.S. ARMY’S SCHOOL OF ASSASSINS. Thousands are already milling about expectantly before it. The army has erected three high fences just in front of the gates. Nonviolent civil disobedience is apparently as terrifying as ever to the armed-and-uniformed guardians of liberty and democracy. I spend some time browsing the booths lining the sides of the road: Veterans for Peace, Code Pink, SOA Watch, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Then I make my way back to the Southgate apartments. It’s time to rehearse for this afternoon’s sideshows.

I am standing, one flower in a row of flowers, and I am watching their faces.

“Sister Ita Ford,” calls Jamie, and the giant puppet moves slowly forward. I lower my flower, read a few words from this courageous woman who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered for her work with the poor. Then I put the words away, raise my flower. Hope, it reads.

“Sister Maura Clarke,” calls Jamie, and Bonnie reads out a quote. Then Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missioner Jean Donovan. When all four of the puppets are in front, a line of soldiers marches from each side, and the effigies of the women slowly descend to the ground. “We are here today to honor these four women,” says Jamie. We holding the flowers settle about the fallen women as the giant doves in the back rise, wings fluttering, and glide slowly forward.

I am squatting behind my flower and I am watching the faces in the crowd before us. Watching as their expressions shape-shift from delight to horror and eventually, mirroring what I am feeling, to grief. Noting in the silent motions the ungainly choreography of the same dance I know so well, the one we are all performing these days, but generally in the craters of our unconscious, or the solace of seclusion. I am astonished at the power of our performance, at what it elicits in our audience.

One, two, three, four.

I open my mouth to sing, and feel a rush of consolation as a chorus of voices rises in harmony. Some bright morning when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away. To a home on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away…

We rise, and walk slowly to our next site.

That night we Puppetistas head to a nearby Mexican restaurant to celebrate the success of our sideshows. We order beers and margaritas and toast to each other, the Puppetista revolution, a better world. “I have something I’d like to say,” Jamie announces, rising with awkward formality, glass aloft. “I’d like to thank every one of your for your creativity and inspiration.” He looks into each of our faces. “For me, coming here is like Christmas.”

Olé, begins someone, and the rest of the restaurant gapes in consternation as all twenty of us plus one goggle-eyed hand puppet take up the chorus. Jamie lowers himself into his seat, eyes wet. I sat down with Jamie to interview him a couple of days ago and was profoundly moved by his story. Most of my life I’ve been economically displaced, he told me. I was a wayward youth. I committed burglary at nineteen and served two years out of a three-year prison sentence. Generally I had manual labor jobs, which were seasonal, with no benefits. I was destitute during the worst times of the year. For a while I had a good job as supervisor at a recycling plant. Then the city privatized and I was made redundant. To achieve the American dream, you have to have ten pegs that fit perfectly into ten holes. You miss one, your chances are over. After dealing with it personally I began to think about how people are being treated in the rest of the world. For the past four years Jamie has been a Catholic worker at a shelter in Columbia, Missouri. I have great faith in God, he said to me. For me, God is the same thing as conscience. The splinter of your soul that is a piece of God can choose to follow his ways. My mission in life is to ease suffering, and the best way is to suck a little evil out of the system and swallow it. Tomorrow, Jamie will scale the fence onto Fort Benning property.

We exit the restaurant in small clusters. On the porch outside, two local boys are hanging out, smoking. One of them raises an eyebrow, gives us the once-over. “Hey, you all with the peace folks?”

“Yes, we’re the Puppetistas,” Bonnie says, executing a quick jig. She invites them to tomorrow’s demonstration, telling them our pageant will begin at twelve forty-five sharp.

His head sways slightly as he mulls this over. “Well,” he says, “I’m Kevin, and I’m going to Iraq in January.” His words are slurred, careening into each other like boxcars in a train wreck.

Bonnie and I stare. A heretic, before our very eyes!

He twirls an index finger through the air like a lasso. “We fight so y’all can do what you wanna do, you know.”

Kevin can’t be more than twenty-two, with the faintest dusting of blond facial hair. He’s good-looking, with the genial, skulking confidence of a high school baseball star. If he didn’t win “Most Popular,” surely he nabbed “Dreamiest Eyes” or “Best Smile.” He’s the kind of guy who would have copied my homework and minutes later forgotten I existed.

“But tell me,” Bonnie says, “do you honestly want to go?” She is brimming with compassion, scouring his face for signs of possible salvation.

“Yes, I do, because two of my best friends are there. I’m going so I can make sure no more of my friends get killed. I want to come back —I got a fiancée and two kids.” He looks to his friend, who nods firmly, eyes fixed staunchly on the floor. Right on, bro. “But I’d give it all up to protect my friends.”

Bonnie asks him if he really believes that Iraq is about spreading democracy.

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“Well, let me tell you,” he says philosophically. “I’ve wanted to be in the military and fight for my country since I was three years old.” This is a military town, after all. And a God-fearing one at that: the annual “God Bless Fort Benning” celebration is taking place this same weekend—not a counter-demonstration, the organizers assert, but rather a show of support for the soldiers. Held at the Columbus Civic Center, their free show with a big-name country-western star will attract a crowd of 25,000. For in addition to being a military town and a God-fearing town, this is a poor town. Driving around with Bonnie yesterday on a supply run, I eventually gave up counting the pawnshops and check-cashing outlets. Kevin takes a long drag on his cigarette, a swig from the brown-bagged forty lingering at his thigh. “Yeah, I always dreamed of being a soldier. And it’s either them or you. That’s what they teach us. I’d rather them than me.”

I feel a stab in my chest. Tears prick, and I focus on my notebook, on my pen that keeps moving.

“Innocent people are dying, you know.” Bonnie is deflated now. He’s already signed over his soul.

“Nobody should die for anything. But it happens.”

We nod glumly. What can we say to that? No, Kevin. We are capable of better. Of dreaming greater and imagining greater and then creating greater. You are capable of more, and your friends—well, maybe eventually they’d understand.

Kevin holds out his pack of cigarettes, nods for us to help ourselves, rocks forward with a lighter. “You know, you all are standing up for your beliefs. And I have to say that I appreciate that. Because it’s your right. So thank you for standing up for yourselves.”

Only Bonnie and I are still left on the porch, and David is waving at me to get in the car. Kevin glances at his friend, examines the glowing tip of his cigarette. “So hey, why don’t you gals give me your numbers.”

I thank him for talking with us, and tell him we have to go. I take his hand and shake it, forty and all. “Good luck to you.” Please don’t get killed or wounded. Please look into the eyes of the mothers and the children. Please be a good father. And I start walking away.

“Thank you. And just remember”—he’s coughing suddenly, choking on his cigarette or his beer or his words—“just remember”— hacking violently now, but determined to get it out—“remember we’re over there, and we’re fighting for you.”

243

Un niño de diez meses, hijo de María Argueta.

From the stage, they are calling out the names of those who have been murdered. I lay the staplegun slowly down on the table, watch as the black fabric spools off the edge. I walk to an open swath of lawn and lower myself carefully down onto the grass.

Ana María Sosa, forty years old.

I ease my bag off my shoulder, my notebook out of my bag. I start writing.

Jorge Valencia, treinta y tres años de edad.

I put the notebook down. Gaze at the final preparations going on around me: touch-ups, last-minute meetings, rehearsals. I am on the outside of a porthole, looking in, and the audio is oddly out of sync with the video.

Carmen Gómez, twenty-three years old.

Now both reels stick. The noise around me cools to static. I bring my hands over my eyes, lower my face onto my knees, and imagine her. Carmen. Thick-lipped and dimpled, black eyes startling awake as sunlight slipped slim fingers through chinks in the wall. Carmen, who loved to play pranks on her friends and sit gossiping in the fields. Who told her right hand from her left by the tiny scar whittled from a childhood of thumb-sucking. Who was one month pregnant with her second child, a boy, although she’d never know it.

Un niño de seis anos, hijo de Cristina Martínez.

A nameless child, six years old. Let’s call him Tomás. A quiet and watchful boy, Tomás. He decided on the first day of school that he wanted to grow up to be a schoolteacher. He watched his mother wrestling with the washing and the maize, his father wrestling with alcohol, and he practiced his letters diligently in the dirt. When no one was watching, he stole down to the river, to the secret alcove where he stored his treasures: one speckled near-perfect blue egg, a fistful of feathers, mottled and striped, a gold button rubbed to a high shine, the impossible elegance of a hummingbird skull.

Child, age unknown, daughter of Francisca Chavarria.

A nameless ageless child. A girl. Francisca was in labor for twenty-two hours with her; this was her first and last child, and the midwife heaved a sigh of relief when the tiny dark head finally crowned. This girl, whom I will call Teresa, had the café skin and broad bones of her people. She sang loudly as she followed her mother through the day, and she talked to the grasshoppers, the fireflies, even the wildflowers when no one was near. When her father disappeared, she stopped talking. When the soldiers came through her village, she watched silent as they set fire to the huts, dragged her mother out ten feet past the doorstep and raped her as she screamed ay, dios, no, por favor, no. She watched quiet, nailed to the doorframe, when one of them turned her way, pants open and bloodied, mouth gaping like a fish drowning in air, and pointed at her, and came for her.

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Un niño de cinco años, hijo de—

I stand up, wiping at my face with my sleeve. I feel like I am suffocating, like my chest has a boa constrictor around it squeezing tighter, tighter. I can hardly bear it. I can hardly bear the knowledge of what we do to each other. I gather my notepad and pen, walk rapidly across the lawn to the fence. Cling to the chain-links to steady myself. Press my face up against the cold resilience of wire. There they are: twenty thousand strong, marching in slow procession.

Lucía Márquez, fourteen years old.

Intoned from the stage in a supple, quivering female voice. There is a crack of drums, a sea of white crosses rising. And from the marchers: Presente. The chorus spilling out of twenty thousand throats like a lament from the earth itself. An eloping of proteins, a millennial rush of blood, a flicker of pulse.

Presente.

And they are present: their bones slackening to the tug of roots, the damp press of soil, the ministrations of blind and hungry creatures. Their souls sliding light as the wind against my cheek. They are here. They are clinging to the fence and they are watching the living march by. They are looking on as grief assumes its rightful place among the ranks of experience. They are walking slowly and holding their heads high, they are running and not looking back, they are darting among us in frantic search. Presente.

They are here.

I walk down the length of the fence, through the gate, into the procession. Needing to be among the bodies. Slipping into them like a robe.

Arlen Salas David, San José de Apartado.

This is a name I recognize. Arlen was a leader of San José de Apartado, the oldest and largest of Colombia’s peace communities. In 1997 its two thousand war-weary residents asked the army, right-wing paramilitaries, and leftist guerrillas to stay out of their village. Fifty other communities have since followed its example, refusing to give information or sell food to armed groups. Arlen was killed three days ago.

Presente.

The mobile cemetery rising, falling, and rolling on to the next location.

Unnamed child of Bojaya, Choco, Colombia.

Presente.

Beside me walk two ancient men. One of them holds the other firmly by the arm. His friend’s murky eyes leak rivers onto the front of his shirt. Before me are students, caps propped backward reading CLOSE THE SOA. They raise their crosses, which have been carefully printed with a name and an age, as have they all.

Unnamed child of Bojaya, Choco, Colombia.

Presente.

I step slowly in time, letting the familiar tide of grief rise and swamp me. Letting it seep through the seams, roll across the sand to the advancing edge of ocean, which is roiling, devouring, colonizing. For we are not separate, and neither is our suffering. And we who walk in witness are fused together in our mourning, recalled by grief.

Unnamed child of Bojaya, Choco, Colombia.

Presente.

Unnamed child of Bojaya, Choco, Colombia.

Presente.

The outermost fence blocking the gates to Fort Benning has become a thing of great beauty. A garden, blooming flowers of a most exotic nature: paper chains of orange and blue and purple, a rainbow of origami cranes, flags and ribbons and cards and photos and even the odd rose, wilting and dwarfed by its cardboard neighbors. And like wild grass, the kind that sprouts in hardy clumps and clings stubborn to the earth no matter how you pull at it: white crosses, strewn at every possible angle. A weave of crosses so dense that it obliterates the fence, leaving not even a single square inch of window to the fort within. Here is where the procession ends. Here is a garden where every flower not only has a name but also bears that name upon its petals in proud capitals. Even if it is an UNNAMED. Because we are humans, and so we name what we love, what we recognize and wish to remember. DANIEL ROMERO. INEZ MARTÍNEZ. I whisper the names, marveling over the sight before me. A holy wall, this one, like the Kotel. A wall overflowing with words. WHAT YOU HAVE DONE CANNOT BE BURIED. NO MÁS SILENCIO.

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A wall of prayer. Made sacred through remembering, as is every sacred thing.

It is in darkness that we begin. In darkness the first pulse flickers, the eye blinks open. In darkness the seed splits. In darkness the stars hang, the planets wheel, the blood sings. Darkness is immense and terrifying, and no doubt darkness is chock-full of demons, but there is magic in darkness, and then there is the word. For the no and the yes, the how and the why and the thank you, these too issue crumpled and damp from darkness. Darkness yields myth, darkness yields all stories old and new. Only darkness knows light, and it is into our own darkness we must now venture.

“Marisa! We gotta go!” Bonnie runs up to me, grabs my arm. “It’s nearly time for the pageant.”

“Okay.” I turn to Jamie. “Good luck, my friend. May we meet again.”

“Next year in Fort Benning,” he says, grinning huge. “Break a leg.”

We hug, and I spin around to look at the Puppetistas, standing ready for the pre-pageant parade. The giant bugs are high up on their stilts, and the puppets of the Madres and Carlos Mauricio sway faintly in the breeze. There are the GI Joes, and the doves, and the flowers. Hope. Imagination. Peace. A wrench of sadness, a premature nostalgia, for the week is swiftly drawing to a close, and I will soon part from this ragtag band of dreamers and creators, they who have restored my faith in our ability to build the world we want.

“Come on, honey.” Bonnie takes my hand and pulls me like a wayward child. “Let’s go. The musicians are all up there already.”

247

She steers us adeptly through the crowd, around the stage, and up to the backstage area. She tells the man at the gate that we’re the singers for the Puppetista pageant, and he smiles and lets us through. We climb the stairs up to the stage and hover at the back. Now I have a bird’s-eye view, and I am overwhelmed with awe at all these people, twenty thousand of them from across the nation, saturating this bleak street with color and song and humor and prayer. Then I feel a pang of terror. That’s a whole lot of people to sing in front of.

One of the musicians points me at a microphone, and I take small tentative steps toward it, hum a note into it. Yes, it’s definitely on.

“Hola Marisa. ¿Cómo estás?” I turn to my left, to the person standing at the next mike.

“Hola Carlos, estoy bien. ¿Y tú?”

“Bien.” Carlos Mauricio smiles at me, pats me on the shoulder. He points ahead, beyond the crowd. “Mira, here they come.”

What a sight. Dragonflies tall as trees spindling delicate down the road. Faces large as my body, faces of grieving and fear and serenity and joy rocking gently forward, silent and eloquent as mystics. Doves skating through the air, flowers bobbing, coffins bumping, soldiers marching. An entire jail jogging rawboned toward us. And finally the drummers, pounding away, holding the entire cavalcade to swaggering lockstep. The crowd parts before them like the Red Sea, in gleeful cahoots with the forces of liberation. Down toward us they proceed, and when they reach the stage they spread out. Flourish on the drums, and then silence.

It is time for Carlos to speak.

“I was in the classroom teaching when the men came,” he begins, and the giant puppet sways forward. “I was blindfolded, handcuffed, and taken to a place where I was tortured.” He speaks rapidly, holding in front of him the text that is the barest summary of his life, pausing between sentences as the pageant is acted out below us. “I was a science professor, but everyone knew I was against the government’s killings. I spent nine days in the chamber of torture.”

For me it is difficult to talk about torture, Carlos told me this morning, when I interviewed him. But I have to do it. I speak for those who can’t because they were killed and tortured. Carlos was blindfolded, deprived of sleep and food, and left hanging by his arms. If he leaned against a wall he was beaten. His torturers broke two of his ribs and permanently damaged his vision in one eye. But unlike the estimated seventy thousand people killed during El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war, Carlos miraculously survived. He fled to the U.S. Together with two other torture survivors, Carlos sued two of the generals in charge of Salvadoran security forces during his imprisonment, men who had since settled in Florida. In July 2002, a U.S. federal court found the generals guilty, and the three plaintiffs were awarded $54.6 million. Carlos used his share to expand the Stop Impunity Project, a group he founded in order to organize the survivors of torture and fight the amnesty granted to Salvadoran combatants. We are seeking to bring the perpetrators to justice, and also to preserve the historic memory of what happened in El Salvador. We want to establish a museum so none of this is forgotten. If it’s forgotten, it will be repeated.

Last week the former Salvadoran vice minister of defense was found guilty of crimes against humanity.

“Thousands have been killed by death squads, by soldiers trained right here at the School of the Americas,” Carlos cries, and the GI Joes raise their flags, and the soldiers move in, and the Madres slowly go down. I look at Bonnie to my left, and Bonnie looks back at me, and I count us in. Some bright morning when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away. The guitar swings in, and the banjo twangs, and the drums kick steady. To a home on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away. I’ll fly away, oh Lordy, I’ll fly away. We sing through the chorus once, and then halt abruptly. Silence.

“But while we grieve for the victims, we also hold the perpetrators accountable,” Carlos declares, looking up from the paper, out into the crowd. “The people are rising in the name of justice. In the name of peace we are making our voices heard.”

The flowers shoot up. The birds take wing. The walls of the jail open out; when they close again, it is a Museum of Human Rights. The Puppetistas are whooping and ululating, the crowd is cheering and clapping, and on every face hope beams fierce as the sun and joy glitters like a river. This is it. These too come from darkness, the hope and the joy. From walking into it, with courage and with friends. Listening to the names, moving through the anger, moving through the grief, we emerge dazed and squinting and emptied and ready. For anger and grief have their place, but so do joy and celebration, and if they are not present, nothing will grow. Nothing will dance, or sing, or stretch its arms to the sky. Tragedy birthed this event, tragedy heaped upon tragedy, and most of us run mute from such horrors. But there are those who pointed the way into tragedy, who walked boldly into the night, and discovered that in the night the moon rises ivory, and the water mirrors or transforms it, and the curling night-flowers blossom fragrant. I am quiet, taking in the jubilation. I am thinking of the country of my birth, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of how the people took a good long look at the atrocities and the pain, and then were freed to move on. Out of the tragedies we are mourning this weekend has emerged an event of great beauty, and when this brand of tragedy ends, as it will, so shall the event. But we will carry its legacy forward with us, unfold it like a rainbow tent at the next carnival of salvation. We will lay out our pens and our paintbrushes, our pots and our shovels, and we will only dream bigger. For what are creation and faith without each other?

I look down, and I realize David is staring up at me urgently, and that the musicians are waiting, and that it is time. Fear hits me clean in the groin and I buckle, for an instant, but then I remember that fear is just fear and it’s not real, that this is what is real, these faces before me, these words. I step toward the microphone and sing.

Many lives on the line
Reckoning in pennies, buying time
Too many lost, too many mourned
Families broken, communities torn

I look to Bonnie, and to the circle of musicians, and then down to the Puppetistas. I can’t stop smiling.

Hey hey hey

and Bonnie lilts in with the harmony

Justice is on her way

the Puppetistas belting it out raucously

Close the gates on the SOA, close the gates on the SOA

I wonder when I’m going to get a chance to breathe, but I manage to holler “sing with us” out at the audience anyway, and a few hundred new voices join in, then a couple of thousand more, and by the fourth chorus everyone is singing and bouncing to and fro, and as for me I’m not just dancing I’m soaring, bounding miles off the stage and back again.

Hey hey hey

and the Puppetistas are starting to move

Justice is on her way

dancing around the stage and past the fence and out

Close the gates on the SOA, close the gates on the SOA

I look down and wave. There goes Abi, there go Shawn and Jake and Bruce and José and David. I lift my face to look at the tossing, rollicking sea before me, but my vision is blurring, and a peculiar thing is happening because the faces out there are growing familiar, like I am remembering I used to know them. There among the crowd stands Mario, and next to him Maureen is doing the toyi-toyi. Kiran has his arm slung around Abdul Bakr, and Rufo is laughing with Miguel.

Hey hey hey

And the largest of the coffins is passing the fence now

Justice is on her way

where it pops open, and a human being clambers out

Close the gates on the SOA, close the gates on the SOA

and is propelled above the crosses to the top, where he lays cardboard over the barbed wire and perches, for a minute, hand raised in a peace sign as the crowd cheers, and then hops over, to join the 181 others who have been arrested over the years, who have served an average sentence of six months for that splinter of their soul known as conscience or God.

Hey hey hey
Justice is on her way
Close the gates on the SOA, close the gates on the SOA

I shut my eyes, retreat back to the place where I end and voice begins. Softening, listening as the melody is carried. Then I open them wide—I want to miss no part of this—and keep on singing.

Imagine no weapons
no fences too
billions are dreaming that dream
that dream is

you