The Gringa by Andrew Altschul

Author:Andrew Altschul [Altschul, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2020-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Marden Lee, who since 2002 has served as a California state assemblyman for an East Oakland district, remembers Leonora Gelb as “crazy smart, a little confused about things.” In his description her ardor and focus were miscast among students who viewed protest as another form of résumé-building and social justice as a competitive arena.

“She was pure East Coast, you could see that,” he told me. “She dressed different, talked different. Maybe she had unrealistic expectations about what she was ready for. But this stuff was real to her, I’ll give her that.”

They saw each other throughout the fall of 1990, though he doesn’t characterize the relationship as a serious one. They frequently went out after Zamir’s seminar, ending the night in her co-op’s kitchen, where they’d share a bottle of wine while Marden recounted his trip to El Salvador, or talk about his childhood on the south side of Chicago. Leo could hardly mask her admiration: here was someone who saw the bubble from the outside, who knew it for the cruel, racist lie it was. She spent weekends at the house in Berkeley where he lived with six activists and community organizers, all black, all several years older. They greeted her with nods and polite smiles, referred to her as “Marden’s groupie” or “the white girl.” She knew she deserved their suspicion. Why should they accept her when she’d done nothing to earn their respect?

Marden took her to lectures and gatherings in Oakland, angry meetings in mold-stained venues that bore little resemblance to a Stanford classroom. Political discussion alternated with tutorials on the rights of citizens arrested during civil disobedience, self-defense demonstrations, lessons on how to withstand the effects of tear gas, what to say in an interrogation. She knew she was getting closer, becoming someone Cannondale wouldn’t recognize. She relished the thought of her mother seeing her there, of meeting her brother across a barricade. She relished their fear.

In November, she and Marden joined a protest outside the office of Stanford’s president to demand the hiring of more minority faculty. When Marden and a handful of others forced their way into the building, he told Leo to stay outside. They were arrested an hour later, dragged onto a bus while reporters trotted alongside. She watched from a bench as they pumped their fists out the bus windows and flashed victory signs.

“I should have been inside,” she said that night, after bailing him out of jail. “I shouldn’t have listened to you.”

Marden lay on the bed, hands clasped behind his head. “Wasn’t the place for you. How’s it gonna look if you’re on that bus?”

He was still glowing with the day’s success. Through the floor she could hear music, his housemates joking in quick, easy voices. She crossed her arms and said, “It would look like solidarity. Who cares what it looks like?”

“Like white guilt,” Marden said. The phrase stung. All quarter, sitting to the side while Zamir’s grad students clustered at the seminar table, she’d struggled

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