Love Across Time

For the past 30 years I’ve loved a woman who had already died. In photos I see a woman with tall and willowy body, with a gaze that sees right through your fears. Her eyes reveal something of herself that, in turn, shows me what is possible. She teaches me to think about my place in the world. She lets us know we are capable. And by we, I mostly mean women.

I first met Barbara Deming in a spacious but warm room, with high dark wooden wainscoting, and chairs that ask you to sit and stay for a while. I was somewhat casually doing criminal justice research at the Dartmouth College library when I found her on the pages of Prison Notes. It was an old copy of a long out of print book, and the simple brown paper jacket that Grossman Publishers created looked a bit like how I used to wrap my textbooks in high school. There was a simplicity of design that spoke to my senses, though at that time I didn’t yet realize I was a Quaker. When I opened the book there was a noticeable crunching sound coming from the binding, as if it hadn’t been read in a very long time.

I could easily have missed our library encounter. Barbara’s story was different than much of the other prison reading I was doing at that time. In the chair in the corner, well-lit from the summer sun bellowing in through the ornate windows, our stories began to merge. I wrangled with the story of Barbara’s short jail stay alongside the prison writings of revolutionaries like George Jackson and Sam Melville who I’d been reading about before. But Barbara had been arrested for the simple act of walking with a racially integrated group of peace activists in Albany, GA during the early 1960’s. She held steadfast to her belief in racial equality, but she didn’t stand there knowing her side would win this battle, that it would turn out that she was on the right side of history. Indeed, she walked through the segregated South not with assurance, but experientially, with courage and faith that helped nourish the soil on which we stand today. Her actions stood apart to me as uniquely courageous, opening my mind to what it meant to speak up for what is right and true with all the strength a body can offer.

I hadn’t yet personally experienced civil disobedience in my bones like this. By the time I read her prison experience I’d already seen the inside of prison. For years I had been visiting a young man in Walpole State Prison, with its high stone walls trying to neatly contain that which society thinks should not be seen. First doing so individually, then later with the Alternatives to Violence Project. When Barbara wrote of her jail experience, I began to understand what strength in the face of fear looked like. I thought about her slender frame, dressed in a plain skirt, her white shirt partially dirtied from her physical ordeal, but her bobbed hair still not tussled. She was frail even then in her youth, and I questioned if from the dead I could somehow summon her courage to stand up for what I knew to be true. The photos of Barbara and her jailed comrades published in the centerfold of the book have continued to beckon me. Yes, sit and stay for a while.

I came across Prison Notes about a decade after Barbara had died of ovarian cancer. I missed meeting Barbara, but through her writing I found the opportunity to know her. You see we grew into our love, discovering it over time. Throughout her life she passionately experimented with active nonviolence, active resistance. And through her many writings she made visible to us all the deep connections between feminism and nonviolence. Whether in her passionate letters where she dared to show her lesbian self, long before this was acceptable even to her most liberal, fellow instigators. Barbara dared to share what was true for her, and through that, made her world visible to us all.

On an early adventure to learn more about Barbara I was secretly passed a small, crocheted pouch, given me by Barbara’s old friend Kady. “These are some of Barbara’s ashes. Please have them.” This was the first time we touched. They’ve moved me with nearly 20 times since then. Kady joined me for part of a 400-mile peace walk I organized in Barbara’s memory. Women from Barbara’s life came and walked alongside me in New York during the summer of 1996. Blue Lunden came up from the intentional community she had lived in with Barbara for the decade before Barbara’s untimely death. Blue’s stories are helping keep Barbara’s memory alive. We donated Barbara’s books to libraries along the way – books which Barbara had bought back from the publisher who was threatening to destroy them because they were not selling. Each a further invitation to live passionately by the values one holds deeply. Blue and I spent many days walking together, talking or in comfortable silence, and were given dinners and places to sleep by many Quakers along the route. This is how I discovered I was a Quaker, from roots that decay slowly, feeding the land.

It is over twenty years later, in a different library, with large, shared desks and carts full of carefully numbered boxes blocking the aisles I found some answers to questions I would have, no doubt, asked Barbara over tea. I still want her to help me find my purpose, to know how to overcome fears, and discover how to maintain strength while holding tightly to a principle. To ask about finding and maintaining an inner calm under extreme pressure. I discover some of these answers within the thousands of documents at the Swarthmore Archive. Others come from different grey boxes on smaller carts rolled into the archive reading room at Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Both hold personal secrets that Barbara dared to share with those willing to sit with her and look. I have long searched for these clues to not only discover Barbara, but to see my own self more clearly.

Longingly, at those archives, we touched again. With a gentle caress I unfurled notes passed between the jailed walkers I’d read about in Prison Notes. Documents preserved so lovingly in their original presentation – handwritten diaries on scrolls of toilet paper. There’s Barbara’s handwriting, tiny, faint, shaky in appearance, but large, firm, and bold in my imagination. In other documents she makes visible her powerful love in her letters to first Vida, then Mary, and then to Jane. I begin to see her thought process in these, with lightly penciled edits on thousands of pages, with special attention in choosing each word. These were part of our knowing each other. All ways I have been nourished by the roots of justice Barbara Deming planted long ago.

Yes. Sit and stay for a while. I’ve loved a woman who was dead before we met, and yet this is our shared story.

Donna McCabe is a long-time member of Berkeley Friends Meeting. She teaches audio production courses at the College of San Mateo, is a tinkerer, and is writing various works on lesbian nonviolent peace activist Barbara Deming (1917-1984).