Free Dance the Eagle to Sleep by Marge Piercy Page B

trying to make ready for the assault. Some people were preparing to resist arrest passively, others hoped to make a stand. Wet cloths and jars of Vaseline were going around. Girls were taking earrings out of their ears toprevent the lobes being torn, and tucking their hair in to discourage being dragged by it.
    Corey spoke briefly in his turn. “We’ve done our best to make this jail into a human place, living here together and communally. We belong to each other and we’re a people now. We no longer belong to them or their rotten system. They can’t hold us. We’re water. Only if they can scare us and freeze us can they break us up. We’re water and we can flow together. We’re one tribe and we ought to be ready to leave this ugly place anyhow. We must move out and reach our brothers and sisters everywhere and call them out to join us.
    “Soon we’ll be together in another of their jails. Soon we’ll be back out and free in the open again dancing together. We must not forget, we must not let them make us forget that we’re people of one tribe, the first tribe of a new nation of the young and the free. Now they’re coming and we must protect each other as well as we can. We belong to a new nation of the young and the free, and we’re going to win!”
    The police began hurling in tear gas canisters and grenades. Billy looked around quickly for Ginny, but he could not get to her, and then his eyes began to burn and he bent over choking. He would miss sleeping on the hard physics table. He would miss his crew. He would miss the rough meals in the lunchroom. He would miss the interminable meetings and speeches and hassles. It was all over, he supposed, but these had been by far the best days of his life.

How Joanna Accepts a Chain
    For the second time that year, the pigs shipped Joanna back to her parents in Fort Dix, where her father called her names and her mother got drunk as usual and wept and shook her by the shoulders and hair clumsily. They shipped her back to the hopeless box of being Jill. Back to the creepy school and the prison of the base and the generals’ sons who thought they were entitled to lay her because she had been around and her father was a flop—a permanent captain. Back to the world where people were numbers and little perches to defend and diseases. Back to the world where everything was known, and it all amounted to nothing more exciting than a laundry list.
    The world of people grinding each other. Owning each other. Her mother drank gin. Her father ate shit. All god’s children hated the nigger communist jew hippy bastards out there. The world of being excluded and exploited, or incorporated and exploited. You paid your life and you took your choice.
    She was sent home from school one day for not wearing a bra. “But a bra makes my breasts stick out more” she said to the counselor. “I don’t like my breasts to stick out.” She knew the woman wanted to punch her but did not dare, not quite. She had a good time with the counselor, playing with the word “obscene.” Joanna made a quick list of things she found obscene: powdering your face, wearing underwear that caused parts of the body to stick out or get squished in unnaturally, shaving under the arms or between the legs, dipping fingernails or toenails in paint
…
    She didn’t mind being sentenced to stay home for three days. She spent the time locked in her room rereading
Alice in Wonderland
and Sherlock Holmes stories and dancing to the radio. Sometimes she danced naked in front of the mirror, not to excite herself, because she did not find it exciting, but in order to study the movement of her limbs and muscles exactly. She improvised, then watched frowning and improved or discarded the step or gesture.
    It depressed her that she could only define herself in negatives. She wasnot like her mother, she was not like her father. The conventional masculine and the conventional feminine were for shit. The primary business of