Love, Amy by Clampitt Amy; Spiegelman Willard;

Author:Clampitt, Amy; Spiegelman, Willard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT014000, Literary Criticism/Poetry, BIO007000, Biography & Autobiography/Literary
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

17 October 1969

Dear Beth—

There are golden-crowned kinglets in the catalpa trees underneath my fire escape again. They have been there several mornings lately, on their way through to wherever they go for the winter, making little lisping sounds that keep bringing me to the window to look. It’s finally fall, though we still haven’t had any frost; the leaves are falling and the days are getting shorter. In some ways it’s hard to believe that it’s now nearly two months since we all converged out there. So much has been happening that I’ve hardly been able to keep track of what day it is.

This week especially. I’ve been involved in the Moratorium, as you probably won’t be surprised to hear, and there have been meetings and telephoning to plan and round up volunteers. Last Saturday we were already on street comers, handing out leaflets and buttons; and I could tell that it was going to be a big thing, because the buttons kept running out. It was like the beginning of the McCarthy campaign, only bigger. On Wednesday my job was to send out crews of people with leaflets and buttons and black armbands to set up card tables around the Village—and already at eight that morning I had almost more volunteers than I could give assignments to. We ran out of black armbands almost immediately, and a volunteer went off to look for black ribbon; by noon there wasn’t any more to be had anywhere in the neighborhood—and we’d taken in about $350 in contributions. Counting out the change and depositing it in the bank took us about an hour. There were rallies all day long, all over town. I got into the one where Senator McCarthy and Mayor Lindsay spoke; an hour before it began, the park was already full, and we kept being packed in tighter and tighter. It wound up just at sunset, with the cast of Hair taking their place on the speakers’ platform. Judy Collins was there, and Peter and Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, and a lot of other people.

At the end of that rally I came downtown and joined a sort of straggling procession into Washington Square Park, with everybody carrying lighted candles. Under the arch, people were reading the names of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. It was very quiet and strange, with a little sliver of new moon just about to go down in the background. After a while the whole procession started uptown to Rockefeller Center, carrying candles and pretty much stopping traffic. I wanted to go too, but after having been on my feet all day I concluded that I’d never make it. [ … ]

In the midst of everything else, a Black and Brown Caucus has appeared at St. Mark’s, and a couple of Sundays ago they startled all the rest of us by getting up and reading a list of demands and asking those who supported them to walk out of the service. Most of

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