I probably spent too much time drinking beer with Daniel and the other internationalists at Comedor Sara’s but I did manage to get out of Managua from time to time to do interviews. On one such occasion I interviewed a number of young Christians who were picking coffee during the harvest, some from the traditional peace churches. I was struck by their sincerity and commitment but I was at a loss as to how to respond to them when they asked me about North American Christians and their views on the Sandinista Revolution. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that most Christians in the US probably knew nothing of their struggle. Most, like me just a few years before, didn’t even know where Nicaragua was.
Chapter Six: A Dream Made of Red Stars and Black Roses
Toward the end of my time in Nicaragua I went to hear Ernesto Cardenal and Lawrence Ferlinghetti do a reading at the memorial amphitheater dedicated to Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the founder of La Prensa newspaper who had been killed for running articles unfavorable to Somoza during the dictatorship. I was stunned by the beauty of Cardenal’s translation of Ferlinghetti, and it struck me as I sat listening that I should translate and publish poems being written by soldiers, police, peasants, and youth involved in the poetry workshops being held all over the country under the Ministry of Culture.
I’d collected a large number of them, published in the popular magazine, Poesía Libre (Free Poetry), a publication of the Ministry of Culture that was printed on Kraft paper and bound with cheap twine. It was ubiquitous in Nicaragua, appearing even in the supermarkets where in the US one would find The National Enquirer. It sold for a few pennies and it had some really extraordinary poetry in translation from all over the world, and it also had copious amounts of poetry from the talleres de poesía (poetry workshops), a project of the Ministry of Culture that had become a national phenomenon.
I returned to the Bay Area and started translating poetry. At House on the Way I moved into the basement so I could be near the printing press. I wanted to master the craft of printing so I began sleeping on the worktable in the evening, right next to the wild animal I hoped to tame. Eventually the printing press submitted to my will and I embarked on my career as a printer. Only rarely did I get paid work, but I got in lots of practice printing small books of poetry, including Flamingos in Gangland by bob rivera, Similitudes by Eugene Warren, and my own first chapbook of poems, Names, a book I decided, a week after I printed it, wasn’t ready, so I recycled the entire edition. I found paper in odd sizes and quality at a local paper discount store run by Sikhs, and managed to find other print shops where I could make paper plates that I needed to print with. I began printing for Witness for Peace, Pledge of Resistance, and other political groups, but my options, and my equipment, were limited.
For the 1984 Democratic Convention Dave Smith and I printed up a pamphlet titled “Commies for Christ” that featured Jesus on the cover, gazing adoringly at an image of Karl Marx. We passed out a few thousand of the pamphlets, Dave showing up in his suit and tie on his lunch hour to leaflet. He’d taken a job at Wells Fargo in the financial district to try to save money so he could return to Nicaragua and work with TechNica, a solidarity organization of tech workers. I didn’t know how he dealt with the contradictions of having a job at a bank and working to overthrow capitalism at the same time, but that was his business.
Dave had to leave after an hour, but I stayed around for a hardcore-punk show with Dead Kennedys, the Dicks, MDC, and others. As the music ended, the audience formed a spontaneous demonstration that marched to the Hall of Justice where we demanded the release of a number of protestors who had been arrested on a march and tour of the bloody corporations of San Francisco that morning. When we got to the entrance to the Hall of Justice we saw that the exits were sealed off by uniformed police and we realized we had been trapped. Police on horseback charged into the crowd beating people with billy clubs and plainclothes cops emerged from the crowd and began jumping people and handcuffing them. Those trampled by police on horseback were later booked for “assault.” In the chaos I looked around for an escape and saw one person I vaguely knew.
“Over this way, there’s an alley!” he cried, also recognizing me. We ran through the confusion and he commented, “check it out: the plainclothes cops are all dressed the same. They’re the big guys in flannel shirts and jeans. They look like lumberjacks.” Sure enough, the cops were all dressed, as if in uniform, in plaid flannel shirts, blue jeans, and black jackboots.
We ran down the alley and then I remembered where I’d seen the man I was with. We’d met in the basement of a Catholic Worker house in Oakland where he had a printing press and was organizing a printing collective called “Red Star Black Rose Printing and Graphics.” His name was Ben Clarke and he and I would eventually become close friends and comrades over the coming years.
A few other contacts came out of our leafleting the Democratic Convention. The most significant one was Henry Noyes, the founder of China Books and Periodicals in San Francisco, who had been intrigued by the thought of Communist Christians and had gotten in touch through our post office box. He was a “young man” of seventy-four and had become politically active years before during the Spanish Civil War doing solidarity work with the Republic by raising money in England for ambulances. After getting his Masters at University of Toronto and his PhD at the University of London, he finally landed at the University of Missouri where he was head of the Creative Writing Department for six years. Somewhere along the way he’d become a communist, though exactly when, and how much of a “communist” he’d been, he guarded as a closely-held secret. He and his family moved to Chicago in 1945 where he taught in an adult school, but his defense of China and the Soviet Union got him fired. He went to work in a machine shop in Chicago where he became a union steward and, eventually, after being chased out of several jobs for his communist views, founded China Books. Eventually he moved China Books to San Francisco in 1960 and he began driving around the country selling Mao’s Little Red Book and other publications from China. It was largely, if not exclusively, due to Henry’s efforts that Mao’s Little Red Book fell into the hands of the Black Panthers, and from there to a very large part of the Left.
Henry was a delightful, brilliant gentleman and we hit it off from the first time I met him at his house in the Mission shortly after he wrote to us at Poor Konrad. He had me pegged as an anarchist, probably because I worked at Red Star/Black Rose and had no party affiliation. I surmised that Henry was a Maoist, but we had an “ecumenical” anti-capitalist faith and both were far enough from party politics that our political differences served mainly as the basis for long and engaging conversations that we both seemed to find productive.
Henry believed in “united fronts” for building a revolution, and so did I, but his dialectical materialist perspective also helped me move beyond the less productive political views and tactics I’d inherited from the “idealism” of the Anabaptists and Evangelicals. Often in those circles the emphasis was on civil disobedience and acts designed to “witness” against social evils. Henry didn’t find that approach to be of much value. “I only fight battles I think I can win,” he told me. The idea of tying one’s self up in legal problems to “make a statement” just didn’t fit in with his pragmatic revolutionary perspective. It made sense to me.
Henry was there when I was living on a shoestring and needed a place to stay, or if I didn’t have enough money for a meal he’d find something to cook up or invite me out to a local restaurant in the Mission. Though our friendship was tried much later after the Tiananmen Square massacre—which at first he denied, and then, incredibly to me, claimed was a CIA plot—he remained a friend and I still miss his bright optimism, his infinite curiosity, and his down-to-earth brilliance over a decade after his death in 2005.
Ben Clarke had saved me in more ways than just showing me an exit from the police riot at the Democratic Convention. Soon thereafter he began to send work my way from Red Star Black Rose and I made enough money to meet modest expenses while I lived at House on the Way.
Then on May Day of 1985 Gwen Gilliam danced into my life, introduced