In Search of Mary (26 page)

But not much evidence of witchcraft. Although admittedly I’m not entirely sure what to look for. Wait, look! Here’s her cat. A solemn old feline walks over with a forbidding stare. “This is Mr Tickles,” says Deborah adoringly. Rarely have I met someone so inappropriately named. Will shouts for joy and lunges at Mr Tickles, who leaps onto a chair and frowns angrily down. “He might not like the baby,” she adds. “In fact he’s quite a vengeful cat. If you annoy him, he’ll scratch you or urinate on your stuff.”

“Nice to meet you Mr Tickles,” I say convincingly.

Unlike her cat, Deborah is all sunshine. As well as being a witch, she’s an artist and a feminist therapist. And she’s giving me and Will a place to stay even though she’s never met us before. She hands me a house key, saying: “Just let yourself in and out whenever you please.” Another witch will soon be
joining us here for dinner. This one’s something of a celebrity: a founder of the Reclaiming Coven and a bestselling author. Her name is Starhawk. Deborah reverentially calls her Star. Deborah and I sit and chat for a while as we wait for her to arrive.

Eventually the doorbell rings, and slow steps come up the stairway to Deborah’s home. It takes a while. She shouts up a greeting to us as she ascends. We greet her back, and she’s still only half way up. I look down and can only see a large dark figure coming up through the shadows. I hear her huffing and pausing for breath. A few more steps, and finally Starhawk emerges into the light.

She is substantial like Deborah, but rounder, with curly grey hair and dark eyes. She and Deborah greet and hug warmly. I hop about nervously in the background then tentatively hug her too. Starhawk does not disappoint on looking like a witch. Perhaps not the wicked witch of the north – certainly not Glinda the good witch – but wise-looking, and a little bit scary.

We order in some Chinese, and I put Will to bed in the travel cot. He promptly falls asleep with his bum sticking up in the air. We sit down, pour out some wine, and I switch on my recording equipment while they catch up on each other’s news. Starhawk is running a new programme in San Francisco’s poorest neighbourhood: they have six permaculture trainees who grew up in public housing. I have of course read about Starhawk, her decades of political battles, her classes and workshops and activism, and her magic.

“What kind of magic do you do?” I ask breezily, as though I am personally familiar with several kinds. Starhawk just
smiles and stares at me. She has a penetrating gaze, and I’m beginning to feel stupid when Deborah kindly enters into the pause with an answer of her own:

“Back in the day, we did a lot of political magic around stopping nuclear power, for those years we did all kinds of political action – and we still do that, and we still train activists.”

Starhawk joins in: “In the Eighties our strategy was to get arrested for peace. But now it’s more: let’s try
NOT
to get arrested. Well, there are some actions, like the Tar Sands action – but mostly these days we’re trying to stay out of jail.”

“It’s not easy though,” says Deborah. “Even today campaigns can get divided. You might get a completely peaceful march, and then someone just goes off.”

“Isn’t this one of the problems?” I say. “Identity politics is so splintered. It ends up feeling like a kids’ party – everyone clamouring around shouting: ‘But what about me? What about ME?’”

Starhawk takes a deep breath. “There are millions of different strands within feminism – you can go back in the Appalachians and find people still speaking sixteenth-century English – they spell women with a Y. They won’t allow trans women, because they’re not womb women! These communities are out there. Also I think for younger women we made enough gains that the oppression became a lot less visible.”

“And what about ‘Having It All’?” I go on. “Was the unintended consequence that you
had
to have it all and then we all got exhausted and rejected it?”

“I question the term,” says Starhawk. “When a woman wants to have a child and a career it’s called ‘Having It All’, but with
men it’s assumed you will have both. There isn’t even a phrase for it. But if you want to see how bad it was before, then just watch
Madmen
.”

“That is THE most feminist show,” says Deborah. “That’s how it was. Secretaries were all sexualized, and working women were fetishized. But in many ways lives are harder now. Even the richest people: I have clients who work for Google and Apple, and they simply never stop working. One told me he had to go on a Google away day: ‘It was on work-life balance. Now I have to work an extra day to catch up!’ This is the kind of crazy-ass shit that happens.”

She goes on: “As a therapist I’ve had a whole bunch of Seventies mothers who were like: the revolution came first and the kids came last. They weren’t kid-focused at all. But their children backlashed and became mothers in the precious hyper-mothering way.”

Deborah’s words hit home. Germaine Greer once suggested children could just bring themselves up – parenthood as a casual afterthought – and look at us now, making our own kids do homework and violin practice. It’s the endless spectacle of the mighty backlash. Where will hyper-mothering take us? Will we end up going full circle? A cat who isn’t Mr Tickles jumps up onto the table and tries to sniff our Chinese takeaway. Deborah shouts: “Saturn, you get down from there right now.”

We’ve drunk the right amount of wine, and the feasting is good. It’s time to bring out the Crock. I tell them about it, adding “I’m worried I’m only looking at the parts that concern me personally. Shouldn’t we try to look at things on behalf of everyone?”

Starhawk perks right up with this. She shifts round in her chair to face me head-on.

“This reminds me of a great moment I once had, with a dear friend.” She fixes me with her dark gaze, head slightly on one side, and the room goes quiet. “Going out with my friend Mary, we’d take her little boy to the countryside. There are beer cans everywhere. We’re walking in nature, but there’s garbage and pollution all around. We see all this and we say: ‘The earth is fucked! It’s lost, ruined – how can this ever be cleaned up?’ Mary turns to me and says – and I never forgot this – she says: ‘Well, Star, I can’t pick ’em all up, so I pick up the pieces that land right in front of me.’ And that’s all you can do in life: you just pick up the pieces of trash that land right in your path.”

We pause to let this soak in. Something tells me “pick up the garbage right in front of you” wouldn’t have been good enough for Wollstonecraft. For her it would have been nothing less than the abolition of all garbage, for ever.

“I can totally relate,” says Deborah. “My son, as the child of a Greenpeace activist and a feminist – can you imagine, he’d say: ‘Oh, the ocean is dying, everything’s bad…” – it was too much. He once had to write a school project on some tree-saving campaigner person. So he wrote about her, and he added: ‘But there was one big problem.” Deborah pauses, dropping to a deep Hollywood villain voice: “‘Global capitalism’.” They both rock with laughter. “Right? Like, how do you pick up
that
garbage!”

“OK, but what about the question of privilege,” I spoil the fun. “What about all the really suffering people?”

“Oh yeah
that
…” groans Deb. “We used to call it the Olympics of oppression. That is just so unhelpful.”

Starhawk puts down her glass. “Oppression is a huge tangled yarn: it’s all interconnected, and you really do have to look at your own, otherwise you won’t be any use to anyone else. I say again: we should all pick up what’s right in front of us.”

We pour out more wine, and I can feel the burdens flying off my shoulders. Talking to Starhawk and Deborah is like taking off a rucksack full of old books. I’m feeling beneficent, almost saintly:

“Maybe if one group of complaining people causes changes that help other non-complaining people, then that’s good for everyone – showgirls, black women, whoever…” Another glug. “But then it’s probably easier to be heard if you’re white. Or middle-class.”

“That all depends on which group you’re working with,” says Deb, with a knowing laugh, and she and Starhawk exchange a glance.

Deborah scoops up a mouthful of noodles, chews contentedly and stretches out her arms. “For me, feminism was about telling the truth about my own life. Before feminism, people weren’t telling the truth of their lives. But the first part was to acknowledge all that icky shit, right? The rape, and the violence. I was totally part of that wave. No one was talking about it before. That’s part of being a feminist activist. It’s about keeping going.”

“Yeah, if you’re on it, keep going!” I add lustily, as though the words of my friendly traffic guru are a rock anthem that everyone knows. The chat moves off into other areas: one of
Star’s books is being made into a movie. She mentions her character Maya, “an oppressed revolutionary girlfriend”. Aha, one of those!

I jump in and regale them with Gilbert Imlay. I go on to the Romantics and how Mary Shelley too was a revolutionary girlfriend. These guys were just unbelievable… Gathering momentum, I drag in Professor Bettina Aptheker’s dad, and even my dad. Is there a pattern, these so-called radical men talking the talk, saying one thing while doing another to their families? Was this the case in your circles?

There’s a bit of a pause.

“You want to know the trouble with community?” says Deborah. We look at each other. “People. We’re the problem.” She repeats: “People are the problem.”

I flounder, looking from one witch to the other. I dipped my own childhood into that stream of resentment – this is personal. I’m lost for words as they both continue.

“Yeah, we’ve dealt with a lot of people.”

“Including each other, ha ha ha!”

“We could save the world ten times over, if it wasn’t for other people.”

“It’s true.”

Pause.

“People are the biggest problem!”

Bigger pause.

“We agree on that.”

They carry on pausing, and I carry on staring in disbelief.

They burst out laughing again and exclaim: “We’re just a problem!”

What?
I’ve given them an open goal for slagging off hippy men, and they won’t even take a shot. I can’t believe it. This is the theme I’ve nurtured for most of my life. And now I’m right here with the frontline warriors, and they’re completely forgiving. The original Second Wave feminists are simply refusing to do the one thing they’re most famous for.

I persevere, clinging on to my male-hippy-blaming: “But come on, it must have happened to you? Didn’t it? Ever?”

Starhawk looks into me, speaking with a gentle voice. “If you want to grow a garden and you don’t want a load of thorns and thistles in it, from the point of view of permaculture you have to prepare the soil and create the conditions that will favour the kinds of things you want. And right now we live in a society that favours the kind of behaviour that is appalling.”

Well I certainly wasn’t looking for some bloody gardening tips. The two of them carry on chatting away, and I stare down at my tangled noodles. They don’t notice that they’ve made casual mincemeat of my ancient sinewy grievances. I move a chopstick to the other side of my plate and then back again. These women apparently possess the power to laugh problems into complete oblivion. It’s horrible. All at once my trusty old indignation feels small, unoriginal, not worth it.

The anger shifts and moves around. It’s trying to find a place to land. Saturn is sitting by the doorframe with his tail over his feet, and he catches my eye. What, are you going to lecture me as well, treacherous feline? He blinks. I scowl at him and try to cover up my discomfort with another glug from my glass.

We’ve nearly finished the wine as I eavesdrop on their internal witch gossip. There’s a big Coven meeting coming up in the
summer, and one topic is looming large: what will become of the Goddess? Some of the Reclaiming Coven are post-gender, but Deborah and Starhawk love their Goddess: “We fought for her! That was a hard-won victory.”

“It’s like, feminism’s gone so far they don’t even want any kind of gender?” says Deborah.

“Yes,” says Starhawk. “It reminds me of a big climate-change meeting back in 2008. There were lots of people I didn’t know. Twenty-three of the twenty-five representatives in the circle were men, and the twenty-fourth was a transgender person. One young woman in the audience spoke up, saying: ‘Look at the gender bias here.’ And another person got up and screamed at her: ‘How dare you assume to know what anyone’s gender is!’ We were so flabbergasted it took us most of the meeting to figure out how to respond. Is that a sign of the times or what?”

Gradually recovering from my fit of pique I ask: “And this Coven meeting, it isn’t all female then?”

“Whatever female is,” they both shout. “How dare you assume?”

And I nearly choke on my chow mein as we all collapse laughing. My face aches from laughter. We sigh, lean back and crack open our fortune cookies. Star’s says: “Your life will be prosperous if you use your creativity”. Mine says: “Treat yourself to something of quality, you deserve it”. Deb’s says: “You find beauty in ordinary things, do not lose this ability”. We munch.

I check on Will, parked nearby in the travel cot. All our laughter and shouting hasn’t shifted him one inch. He’s still
fast asleep with his bum up in the air. And when I go to bed there’s nothing in my head at all. I sink directly into an enchanted deep mound of endless layers of embroidered silk with roses in different colours and lace and velvet and sparkle. It’s like being swallowed by a giant flower. I vanish immediately.

At six o’clock the next morning I’m woken by a combination of Will singing and Mr Tickles coming to have a look. I jump out of bed and into my clothes before Mr Tickles can get up to any of his vengeful tricks. I lift Will out and hug him. He’s raring to go: his legs are actually running before they reach the floor.

Will sprints at full pelt towards the Elvis altar and starts harassing the King. I peel a mini-Elvis statuette from his fingers, and he runs off and finds some glass beads. He starts hiding them behind cushions. Looking around, I see that every surface is heaped with small glittery dainty fragile things, perching exquisitely. It’s not a toddler place to be.