Barbara Deming: 1917-1984

The following article contains anti-Black racial slurs.

My friend Barbara Deming died early in the morning of August 2, 1984, on Sugarloaf Key, Florida. She was 67. I did not see her in her last months, cancer the size of a sweet potato hard in her stomach, bald but still beautiful, weighing under one hundred pounds, and naked, wanting to die that way. Surrounded in her home by women who loved her, she said her goodbyes to the people and the life she loved and lived so intensely. She was, in her own words, dancing towards death. I did not say goodbye to her then. I hope to do so now, somewhere in this writing. 

I met Barbara five years ago when I went down to the Keys with my friend Minnie Bruce Pratt to interview her. We spent four days talking steadily. For me, as for many lesbians my age, Barbara was our link to an earlier generation of struggle. 

Beginning in 1960, at the age of 43, she became active in the major moral and political movements of our time. That year she visited Cuba; the next, she fasted with others seeking the abolition of the CIA. In 1962 she participated in the Nashville-to-Washington biracial march for peace. In 1963 she was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for her work with Women Strike for Peace, and later that year she was arrested in Birmingham. In 1964 she spent almost a month in jail in Albany, Georgia. In 1967 she made trips to North and South Vietnam to protest U.S. involvement in the war there. Of all these actions, she wrote: "I stand with all those who say of present conditions that they do not allow men to be fully human and so they must be changed — all who not only say this, but are ready to act." 

Barbara's life offers a model for many people, men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, just as many heterosexual people offer models for my life. But gay role models for gay people are especially rare, given the invisibilities of the closet. 

 

Mahatma Ghandi's term, satyagraha, "clinging to truth," explains the quality in Barbara's life that I most need and admire. The older she grew, the more she became herself. Two of Barbara's lyric fragments, written in 1940 at the age of 23, show both the hard place she started from as a lesbian and the truth she would cling to as she continually reshaped her life to make it fully her own: 

That dream I had once of breaking through ice, through ice, through ice. Through bands. . . Have been buried alive. 

I have been not admitting it all to be present, and given. . . . This is not the devil. It is the devil who says this is the devil. . . . Will look at everything, will not turn eyes down or sidewise. For it is not for me to say where the hope lies, where death is made life. 

I often felt in Barbara the lesbian in me who had been entombed ("buried alive"), numb, despised. I struggled with her about this, with the arrogant demands people can make on those they need as guides. At the end of my first interview with her I pressed Barbara to talk about being lesbian. (Much of our discussion to that point had been more analytical than personal.) She faltered, then her voice broke. "Turn off the tape recorder," she said. Then she told us about saying to her consciousness-raising group in the early '70s, "I am a lesbian." Both of us in tears, she told me, "It was like bands around my body burst." 

Barbara knew at 23 that her love for women, whatever the world might say, was not evil; and that inner certainty eventually led her, turning eyes neither down nor sideways, to challenge all the other values of her culture. She was digging herself out: making death into life. 

 

Barbara first made love with a woman at age 16, in a garden. That first experience had all the sensual innocence lacking in later years of confused, repressed, or unnamed relationships. She showed me once the sketch of a gorilla, made by an early lover. "We had the feeling of being monsters," she told me, "She gave me this picture and we never spoke of our feelings again." In the old days, Barbara said, "I could always tell a lesbian by the half-quizzical, wounded look in her eyes. But now we have the clearest faces." Much of Barbara's early writing, more academic than personal and committed, show her dealings with themes of amnesia and paralysis. 

Her struggle for self-affirmation and clarity is described in her autobiographical novel, A Book of Travail — and of a Humming Under My Feet, begun in the 1950s and completed the year of her death. Set in the early 1950s, the book deals with the heroine's unrequited love for a female companion during a year of travels in Greece. The friend's rejection of her love leads the heroine to Delphi where, with her hand on the breast of a marble statue of a woman, she pledges never to deny to herself who she was. 

Just as the trip brought a turning point in the heroine's sexuality, I am sure that similar private, sacred moments of truth — as well as her reading of Gandhi — brought Barbara to her years of political struggle and witness. It would take another 10 years of struggle to bring her to the moment when she could say to others, "I am a lesbian." (The complexities of the closet are hard to explain to people who have never lived there: how it is not so much one room with a door as a series of Chinese boxes.) 

When Barbara discovered the Committee for Nonviolent Action in 1960, it was for her "like entering a new world," with "the only free people I have met in a long time." She found men and women with a history of jail sentences, tax resistance, refusing the draft, and protesting capital punishment, segregation, and imperialism. She loved what she called their "extraordinary spontaneity" and the assurance they brought her that "the individual can act and has weight." Barbara thus began more than a decade of radical activism and journalism. 

Barbara's work in the South during the civil rights movement seems to have been the most transformative experience for her in a decade of transformations. "I had felt for a long time that the two struggles — for disarmament and for Negro rights were properly part of the same struggle," she wrote in an essay describing the Nashville-to-Washington biracial walk for peace. As more black people joined the walk through small Tennessee towns, they met with increasing white hostility. "I hear they're going to shoot you a little farther down the line," taunted a bystander; and another said, "Good place for you to be walking, I hear they're going to hang you all there." In the essay Barbara describes a night spent in an isolated one-room black church with white men outside throwing rocks at a window. Two of the peace walkers went outside to talk. The white men finally dispersed, and one actually returned to ask further about issues the pacifists had raised. The experience of this march led Barbara to join the demonstrations called in Birmingham in the Spring of 1963. 

 

Those days in Birmingham taught Barbara new lessons about courage and freedom. During her first day in the city she went to the recently bombed home of black leader A.D. King. She felt there her own whiteness and the suspicion she generated in black people on the scene. At a mass meeting later that evening she decided to join the next day's demonstrations in spite of her fear. "The people I move among give me their courage," she wrote. "There is contagion to it. . . . I catch it through closeness. They make me one of them." The second day she attended another mass meeting at the church while Bull Connor's policemen stood outside, arresting sympathetic whites who tried to enter. The black people in the church warned Barbara, then disguised her in men's clothes and smuggled her out. Again she felt the distance narrowing. "They have wrapped me in their gaiety and courage," she wrote. "I am no longer the same." 

By the third morning, inspired by thousands of black children, Barbara was arrested and went off to the white part of the Birmingham jail. Though initially afraid, she worked to close the distances between her and the other women prisoners. "Every woman in there was sick and in trouble. I had only to express the simplest human sympathy, which it would have been difficult not to feel, to establish the beginning of a friendly bond." 

Barbara spent her last day in Birmingham hiding from the police, who roamed the district clubbing people at random. The sight of white men on the street made her queasy. Her instant reaction was, "What is he going to do?" Then, she thought, "So now I know what it is like. Now I am a Negro. Except that I can drive away from it." 

Barbara embraced the spirit she heard in the songs and mass meetings, in the sounds that "swell and shake the walls." She wrote, "I know myself — with awe — to be at the wellspring of that which is human — which insists that it is, which at long last is sure that it is, and affirms it: 'Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!'" 

 

In 1966 and 1967 Barbara's revulsion against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War took her first to North and then to South Vietnam. She witnessed the effects of U.S. bombs: "the wreckage of hospitals, of Buddhist pagodas and Catholic churches, of cultural centers, and the wreckage of the houses of workers and peasants." She faced the difficult truth that "for every guerrilla we kill, we kill six civilians, and . . . four of these six civilians are children." Back in the U.S. she found many unwilling to listen to what she had seen. "I am frightened that we Americans are on our way to becoming the world's bullies . . . all the while the majority of us confident in our hearts that we are well-intentioned people and therefore incapable of atrocities." 

Later, Barbara joined another delegation to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Not wanting to be prematurely expelled from Vietnam, the group maintained a policy of secrecy about the nonviolent action planned for the end of the trip. Unlike their usual policies of complete openness, the secrecy split the group, as different people had different views as to whom to trust with what information. They began to wish each other out of the project. "Nothing could put us in such danger as precisely as this relation to each other," Barbara realized. She concluded: "If we do become more and more bold, and therefore more effective, I think it is fair to predict that our government will, in turn, move more and more boldly to discourage us. And then if we do not all stand together, helping always whomever is singled out for punishment, our effectiveness will end." 

In 1968 Barbara clarified a decade's action and reflection about nonviolence in her essay "On Revolution and Equilibrium." She saw nonviolent action as "radical and uncompromising," a bringing to bear on one's adversary of "what economic weight one has to bear, what political, social, psychological, what physical weight." A double vision guided her nonviolent action: solicitude for the person being challenged in combination with a "stubborn interference" with his actions. Do not deny the humanity of those who oppress you, even if they deny yours — that is the most difficult lesson that Barbara's life and work teaches. She believed that nonviolence is not only morally but also strategically superior to violence: "We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern." In this way, she said, we avoid the "giddiness" and "vertigo" of violence, and maintain instead an "equilibrium" which leaves us more in control "of ourselves, of the responses to us which adversaries make, of the battle as it proceeds, and of the future we hope will issue from it." 

 

Barbara's life underwent another deep transformation in the years between 1969 and 1971. In the late 1960s the love relationship Barbara had been involved in for many years came to an end. She began another relationship with Jane Gapen, an old college friend. Jane was leaving her husband and there was a custody battle over their two children. The battle wore Barbara out and left her with a fear far worse than what she felt from Southern sheriffs or state power. The custody fight in North Carolina was "utterly lonely," with the two women up against Jane's husband and a phalanx of males — ex-husband, lawyers, judge — and yet "dreaming of sisterhood." Although Barbara and Jane eventually won the custody battle, the fight left her exhausted. In a poem from this time Barbara wrote, "I lie at the bottom of my spirit's well." Feeling herself out of equilibrium, Barbara decided not to take part in an action to deface draft files. She feared she was dropping out of the antiwar struggle altogether. 

She tried to explain her feelings to her black friend Ray Robinson, who had chastised her for forgetting political struggle in her time of personal crisis. "Because I am homosexual I know in my deepest being what it feels like to be despised," she wrote to Robinson. "I was called a degenerate. My pride for the first time assaulted in its depth. One's sexuality — well, it is so at the heart, the heart, the heart of one. Any bully or group of bullies now recalls to me those other bullies who touched my pride where I could not bear to have it touched. . . . I have to find how to quiet this trembling in myself. . . . I have now to face squarely my own particular oppression." 

Then Barbara began to see that the same powers who supported Jane's husband in his desire to control his wife and children also supported troops and the napalm in Vietnam. She saw that what she had called "the state" had a male face; and she came to believe that patriarchy aptly described the powers she had opposed for over a decade. She had not dropped out of struggle, but into a deeper, more personal level of it. This custody battle turned her toward feminism. "I think the root of violence in our society is the attempt by men to claim women and children as their property," she wrote. 

"On Anger," written in 1971 as a speech, is the first essay that shows the effects of feminism on Barbara's life. For the first time she speaks of her homosexuality to friends and comrades from years of struggle. In answering criticism from young women that her pacifism is a repression of healthy rage, Barbara meets her own anger "rising from my toes with a force that startled me." Looking back on her civil rights work, she admits that in some ways she had dealt with her own oppression "by analogy" because she knew in her soul, "something of what it is to be a nigger" but could not deal at that point with the depth of her own anger and pain. In the essay she recommends that each individual recognize her "most particular, personal oppression," thus waging other struggles more effectively as well because of a "more conscious solidarity." Yet Barbara stubbornly insists on nonviolence. Once anger is acknowledged, she maintains, it must be channeled, transmuted from the murderous anger that is "affliction" to the focused anger that is "determination to bring about change." 

 

Barbara never delivered these words written as an address for the War Resisters League national conference in 1971. She was seriously injured in an automobile accident on the way to the conference. She never fully recovered her strength and she and Jane moved to Sugarloaf Key, seeking a warmer climate. With her mobility seriously limited, for the next decade her writing became more theoretical. Often it took the form of long letters to her old allies in the Left or her new allies in the women's movement, pressing, arguing, developing ideas. Her home was open to any woman passing through, and those who came found not an arrogant star but a keen questioner and avid listener. Openly claiming her lesbianism, with sisterhood for support, Barbara was hurt and angered by the refusal of her male allies from the pacifist movement to support lesbian or feminist struggles. She turned more of her energies to women, but always argued for, and insisted on, the humanity of men. 

She now found the source of violence to be the false split into "masculinity" and "femininity"; "the one sex supposedly by nature dominant, the other supposedly in happy surrender." But, she wrote, "Dominance and submission produce only distortions of community." The result is "lost women nurturing men who become the exploiters of others, and of Nature itself." This split also deeply damages sexuality, which Barbara by then understood to be the force which makes us part of one another. Sexuality is "given to us so that we can commune with one another — and with our universe" because it can "dissolve the boundaries of our individual selves." When it is damaged, as patriarchy has damaged it, the result is individual isolation and the disruption of human community. Nonviolent action, she believed, is essentially androgynous, combining the "masculine" impulse of self-assertion and the "feminine" impulse of sympathy. The "genius of nonviolence" then, is showing the two to be indivisible and so "restoring human community." Barbara developed these ideas in letters and essays in the final decade of her life. 

 

In February 1984 doctors in Miami told Barbara that she had cancer of the stomach and she went to New York for treatment, staying with her family there. Determined to live, she sent word to friends that she wanted no one around her who did not believe that she could. When I heard that, I was afraid for her: that she was too far gone, that this woman who had looked at life so steadily would be slipped up on by death. Later I found a sentence from one of her short stories that helped to explain: "Death must surely value less those who run to him uncombative." 

On March 28, she began her last poem, "A Song to Pain": 

 

This is a song of grunts and groans 

A song of moans 

Song of the turning axis of my life 

Which strives — hu! — ah! 

Against the grain 

Strives to cross and recognize 

This — uh! — difficult last line — — ah! 

 

After three months of chemotherapy and radiation she returned to the Keys, hopeful that the cancer was receding. But in July she became very sick and flew to Naples, Florida to a specialist. She was quite weak — almost dead — and finally she accepted the fact of her dying. "But not here!" She determined, "I will die at home among my friends." She summoned up what those who witnessed it say was an incredible energy and returned to her cottage among the coconut and lime trees. 

Women from all over the country began to gather, to write and call. They met each night to sing and chant, never knowing which evening would be her last. "One night as we chanted," wrote Minnie Bruce, who was visiting at the time, "she stood, raised her hands and danced a little in her own elegant, angular way." During the day she called women aside to say personal goodbyes and to convey her particular love. Barbara told her friend Grace Paley over the phone, "I'm dying but I'm very well. Everyone's here and I'm well." As Minnie Bruce wrote, "During the time of her dying, the love that she had given to so many returned to her, so that she said she was happy because she knew, at the end, that she was loved." 

Fifteen years before, Barbara had lain "at the bottom of her spirit's well," her pride — because her love — assaulted in its depths, fighting an utterly lonely battle and dreaming of sisterhood. Then she had set herself the task of quieting the trembling in herself by finding her pride in its fullest. She was a woman raised to think her love was monstrous. "This is not the devil. It is the devil who says this is the devil," she had written 44 years earlier. During her last living moments, she breathed in and out the love of that lifetime's work of affirmation. If her dying leaves us bereft, it also gives us joy. For who are we to say where the hope lies, where death is made life? 

And Now My Spirit Guides 

Hail Me And Smile 

I've Sung Myself Beyond 

This Life's Pale 

(Last lines of "A Song to Pain," 

written in the night, July 25, 1984)