The World Has Changed (25 page)

 

H.Z.: You’ve been to Cuba a couple times—I think I may have told you I was at Vassar and saw Angela Davis, and she said she had just been to Cuba with you.

 

A.W.: We took $5 million worth of antibiotics, and it was very funny because of course they can use every little bit of that, it would go to all
the hospitals and all the clinics, but when we were talking to Fidel later, he kind of pulled on his beard and said, “I think antibiotics are overprescribed.” I said, “Thanks, Fidel, that really makes us feel just dandy.”

 

H.Z.: $5 million of antibiotics, just like that.

 

A.W.: It was very funny, though, and it’s true, they are. It is true. In Cuba and Nicaragua now, and a lot countries, there is a lot of dengue fever, and there are all these other viruses and things, so they can actually use antibiotics.

 

H.Z.: I’m sure they can, though the Cuban medical system is a wonderful system.

 

A.W.: Well, it has been wonderful, it is not as wonderful now because it has suffered really badly, really terribly.

 

H.Z.: One of the things about people who go to Cuba, like you, Angela Davis, the Pastors for Peace, all sorts of people have been bringing things to Cuba, and then they come back—and I think one of the good things about it is they’re trying to bring attention to this ridiculous policy that the United States has of starving the people of Cuba. I mean, on the grounds that of all the dictatorships and tyrannies in the world, this, Cuba, Fidel, is the one that has to be singled out.

 

A.W.: Well, it’s Fidel, I think. Because of his attitude, the man has a real attitude, he’s always had it, he’s going to die with it, and they have to get used to it, you know. He is definitely who he is, and it’s so wonderful to see. I have never seen anyone go through so many changes in being himself in a conversation, even. That’s lovely. The second time I went it was right in the depths of the hard times, and you could actually see that people had lost weight. It was so hard to bear. It was very hard, too, to see people try to get from their houses to work on foot; this was also before they got a lot of bicycles. But then, the last time, it was much, much better, because they’ve really been working very hard to improve the transportation—and food too, food production, and they’re doing something that’s really wonderful, they’re growing more soybeans, and they’re making this incredible soybean yogurt.

 

H.Z.: Well, I knew you’d approve of that.

 

A.W.: I do. It’s such a mess: because of the embargo they can’t get the cattle feed, the cattle feed doesn’t come in the country, so the children don’t get the milk they’re promised by the revolution. They are supposed to have milk every day until they’re fourteen or something, and they had to stop having milk at age seven. So now they can use soybean products to bring up their protein.

 

H.Z.: This government has this thing about Castro; it seems to go even beyond ideology to a fanaticism about Castro. I have a suspicion that, aside from politics, they simply resent that he is so impressive, because they figure if you keep seeing him on television being interviewed by Baba Wawa [Barbara Walters], that people will compare him to Bush. I’m not giving a 100 percent endorsement to Castro—I want him to know that—but he is a remarkable figure, and I think they don’t like that.

 

A.W.: I figure that Fidel’s imperfections are about as big as he is, but still he is formidable. I’m not saying I know anything about his imperfections, I just assume that people do have their flaws, and you have to take that along with whatever else they have, but I often think about what a wonderful thing it would be if Clinton could be personable enough to try to learn from him. I think that he could learn so much from this person.

 

H.Z.: I’m sure Clinton would love to hear that from you. We’ll see. Clinton is the man who got up at Nixon’s funeral and said that Nixon had struggled all of his life for democracy and freedom.

 

A.W.: See, I didn’t go to that funeral. Some funerals I don’t go to.

 

H.Z.: I don’t like to think about it. But you’ve also been to Nicaragua?

 

A.W.: Oh yes, I went to Nicaragua many years ago.

 

H.Z.: What I remember, shortly after you went to Nicaragua, you came to Boston, and you stayed with us—which is a real sacrifice—and you were going on a television thing. You spent the night, and in the morning
this somebody came and picked you up, I don’t want to say what came and picked you up, it’s embarrassing, it came and picked you up for this television thing. We watched you, naturally, since you were our guest. And it was this interviewer, you know, one of those interviewers who had never read anything—not just not read anything of yours, not read anything of anybody’s. At one point, she asked you where you’d been or something, and you said you just came back from Nicaragua. This kind of startled her, and she said—this was the only spontaneous thing she said—“Why did you go to Nicaragua?” Because Reagan and the contras were fully at it at the time, she said. “Why did you go to Nicaragua?” and you said, “Because I love the Sandinistas.” And I thought, “That’s Alice.” How many people say that on television? You know, people say it secretly, but not on television.

 

A.W.: Well, she didn’t know who they were.

 

H.Z.: That’s what has struck me. I just want to make up a little for the poem. Just a little, but I don’t think I’ve ever said to this to you, but since we’re here alone—

 

A.W.: I know, you can’t see them at all.

 

H.Z.: What I always really loved about you, Alice, was that even with all of that stuff, success, Pulitzer, all of that stuff, all of that, you never retreated from your political beliefs, and that’s something you don’t often see. That retreat is so easy. I’m not going to say anything good about you anymore.

 

A.W.: That’s fine with me, but let me tell you something about you. Part of it is that you were my teacher. It meant a lot to have an example of someone who stood by what he believed. You know, you were out there all the time, and this is something that has meant so much to me, my whole life, and I really truly, deeply appreciate it.

 

H.Z.: We’re going to have to start saying negative things. Let’s talk about the film. The book. The film, the difference between the book and the film. How did you come by the title [for
The Same River Twice
]? I always wonder how people come by titles, because I always have a tough time.

 

A.W.:
The Same River Twice
? It’s just a way of dealing with the reality, you know, you look at a river, you think it’s—well, this is very old, everybody’s heard this—but you go to a river and it looks the same, but actually it’s completely different from moment to moment, so it’s impossible, then, to step into the same river twice, even though you step into the same river twice. And you yourself change, so you’re not the same river ever, and of course this is one of the great things about being alive, and that’s how you tell you are alive: you are a different river. So when I came to work on this book, I was thinking how this is revisiting something that was very difficult ten years ago; what did it mean? I was looking for meaning for myself, in a way also to move into a different river with it, and ultimately go on to a different river altogether.

 

H.Z.: You couldn’t judge the film simply by the book, because it was a different river. A lot of people made that mistake.
The Color Purple
had such an impact on people—here’s another thing I never told you.

 

A.W.: Is it going to be negative?

 

H.Z.: Not to you. I was in Hawaii—I like to drop these places, I just happened, like you, “I just happened to be talking to Castro.” You have Castro, I have Hawaii, and I was sitting in the student cafeteria, and a student was just introduced to me, and she was reading
The Color Purple
. Well, I couldn’t let her go on, I didn’t rush to say, “That was my student, I taught her how to write that,” I didn’t say that.

 

A.W.: Right, the language and everything.

 

H.Z.: I didn’t say that. The only thing I said to her was—and this was very strange—“Do you like that book?” And she said, “It changed my life.” Really. But anyway.

 

A.W.: I think that was very nice.

 

H.Z.: Yeah, but you must get a lot of letters like that, that say things like that. But, given the impact of the book, it was a real risk to do a film, so hard to have people satisfied with that film, and you had a hard time being satisfied with it.

 

A.W.: Oh yeah, I had to accept that it was a different film—you know, it was different. There are so many ways of thinking about why you decide to collectively do something rather than stay in your solitude, and for me one of the things that happened was that I was always thinking, growing up. Eatonton was totally segregated, and the theater was totally segregated, so white people would be down below and we would be up in the gallery, where the broken seats were. And I had never seen a film that had black people in it, in real character roles, where they were actually real people—you know, they were servants and maids and stereotypes and caricatures—and so I never ever thought that one of my books would become a film, never, it just never occurred to me that that would happen. And so I think when Steven Spielberg appeared, there was a part of me that really saw it as a magical thing, you know, and it presented kind of a challenge about whether—it’s a great risk of course, because I didn’t know Steven yet—but there was something about this person appearing, openhearted, good-hearted, very intense, loving towards this book. So I don’t think I would have said no, just because of my own circumstances, of my childhood, and because it seemed to me something that just appeared that was very positive.

 

H.Z.: Well, you were taking a risk, but you say at one point in the book [
The Same River Twice
] that Steven Spielberg said that his favorite film of all time—you don’t want me to say this?—was
Gone with the Wind
. I’m sorry.

 

A.W.: And that his favorite character was Prissy. Maybe he was joking.

 

H.Z.: So generous of you to let a guy whose favorite film was
Gone with the Wind
do your book.

 

A.W.: Howie, it was not like that. He mentioned this when we were almost to the end of filming. He waited; he was waiting. It was true, I felt like, Oh, my God, you know, this is really—I do have this saying that I have made up my own self, that it is always worse than you think, you know. But I think it turned out okay. It’s still not the script that I wrote myself, and it mattered to me to have it as a record, because what happens to us, I didn’t even know, but when you write, when you write a script for these people at Warner Brothers or whatever, they actually
take the copyright and own it, and so I actually had to go through some small changes to be able to print my own script. And I didn’t really know what had happened to it, or that people had been reading it, until I was down in L.A. giving a lecture, and some film students came up, and they started trying to engage me about my script, which they were being taught by, I think, Peter Guber, in his film class; he’s a producer. So I realized that my script was actually out there, and I would really like to have it somewhere that people could actually see this is my script, and this is what I wrote about, and this is how I envision a film made about my book. I think that one of the reasons the film that we have is so far from my script is because people down in L.A., in Compton, were very upset about the lesbianism in my script, which they hadn’t seen. But they decided to go after Steven and Quincy [Jones], and they made threats, and they wrote letters, and they had little clubs all over the country. And then, of course, on opening night, they picketed the movie.

 

H.Z.: Your mother wasn’t happy about the lesbianism, was she?

 

A.W.: Well, my mother was a Christian—a Jehovah’s Witness when she died, and before that a Methodist. And she had actually learned, through her religious indoctrination, that this was a bad thing, and that somehow it meant that you were not quite right. And she had learned that very same thing about Jews. My mother had never met a Jew in her life. So when she met the man I was going to marry, she stood there completely perplexed trying to figure out, “How do I greet this person? I’ve never met a Jew before.” Then she remembered where she had seen a Jew before, and it was in the Bible, and she took his hand, and smiled at him, and she said—can you imagine what she said to him?—she said something very upsetting. And of course, I, you know—

 

H.Z.: You don’t want to say?

 

A.W.: It’s very hard. My point is, here’s a woman that was very open, very loving, and had no way of knowing hardly anything outside of her community unless you told her. Which was one of the reasons I was always going off and bringing stuff back. Her religion actually told her how to look at Jews, and how to look at lesbians, and how to look at the world, and it was a very narrow way of looking at the world.

 

H.Z.: Lucky you didn’t have a Jewish lesbian.

 

A.W.: The thing is, though, my mother came to visit me, and she met my lesbian neighbors, and she adored them. Because they were living exactly the way she had lived when she was in her happiest period, in the’30s, and to meet women who actually grew their own food, who lived in the house they built themselves, who raised goats, who had animals, she was just in heaven. So I had to, again, bring her from this little town all the way out here, and to share this experience with her in her last days. That period, she was so happy with me and my lesbian friends, that was the last time she was actually able to walk. After that, she really just declined.