[nfbmi-talk] FW: [stylist] creative nonfiction essay "Clan of the One-breasted Women" by Terry Tempest Williams one of my favorites

[Fred wurtzel]

hello,

Now, here is some powerful writing which came from our writers list.  The
topic is not blindness, however, if you read it, you can see that struggle
against injustice has no boundaries.  We are always talking about real
people with real feelings.  It may be hard to understand but the opressors
are hurting.   They hurt others with no compassion, no matter the excuse,
being national defense, lack of funds, lack of time, the non-cooperation,
laziness and defiance of clients, you name it, they always have an excuse
for creating fear, intimidation and pain in others.  

We need peace and justice and we need it now.

Warmest Regards,

Fred

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Bridgit Pollpeter
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 10:00 PM
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
Subject: [stylist] creative nonfiction essay "Clan of the One-breasted
Women" by Terry Tempest Williams one of my favorites

This is one of my favorite CNF essays by Terry Tempest Williams. I
thought I'd share it for others to read. I'm sure it will resonate with
many of you for many reasons.
 
The Clan of the One-Breasted Women

Terry Tempest Williams

426

I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers,
and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who
survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.

I've had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small
tumor between my ribs diagnosed as a ''borderline malignancy."

This is my family history.

Most statistics tell us breast cancer is genetic, hereditary, with
rising percentages attached to fatty diets, childlessness, or becoming
pregnant after thirty. What they don't say is living in Utah may be the
greatest hazard of all.

We are a Mormon family with roots in Utah since 1847. The "word of
wisdom" in my family aligned us with good foods-no coffee, no tea,
tobacco, or alcohol. For the most part, our women were finished having
their babies by the time they were thirty. And only one faced

 


The Clan of One-Breasted Women         427

 

breast cancer prior to I960. Traditionally, as a group of people,
Mormons have a low rate of cancer.

Is our family a cultural anomaly? The truth is, we didn't think about
it. Those who did, usually the men, simply said, "bad genes." The
women's attitude was stoic. Cancer was part of life. On February 16,
19^1. the eve of my mother's surgery. I accidently picked up the
telephone and overheard her ask my grandmother what she could expect.

"Diane, it is one of the most spiritual experiences you will ever
encounter."

1 quietly put down the receiver.

Two clays later, my father took my brothers and me to the hospital to
visit her. She met us in the lobby in a wheelchair. No bandages were
visible. I'll never forget her radiance, the way she held herself in a
purple velvet robe and how she gathered us around her.

"Children, I am fine. I want you to know I felt the arms of God around
me."

We believed her. My father cried. Our mother, his wife, was thirty-
eight years old.

A little over a year after Mother's death. Dad and I were having dinner
together. He had just returned from St. George, where the Tempest
Company was completing the gas lines that would service southern Utah.
He spoke of his love for the country, the sandstoned landscape,
bare-boned and beautiful. He had just finished hiking the Kolob trail in
Zion National Park. We got caught up in reminiscing, recalling with
fondness our walk up Angel's Landing on his fiftieth birthday and the
years our family had vacationed there.

Over dessert, I shared a recurring dream of mine. I told my father that
for years, as long as I could remember. I saw this flash of light in the
night in the desert-that this image had so permeated my being that I
could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon,
illuminating buttes and mesas.

"You did see it." he said.

"Saw what?"

"The bomb. The cloud. We were driving home from Riverside, California.
You were sitting on Diane's lap. She was pregnant. In fact. I remember
the day, September 7, 1957. We had just gotten out of the Service. We
were driving north, past Las Vegas. It was an hour or so before dawn,
when this explosion went off. We not only heard it. but felt it. 1
thought the oil tanker in front of us had blown up. We pulled over and
suddenly, rising from the desert floor, we saw it. clearly, this
golden-stemmed cloud, the mushroom. The sky seemed to vibrate with an
eerie pink glow. Within a few minutes, a light ash was raining on the
car."

 




428            PART IV   Anthology

 

I stared at my father.

"I thought you knew that," he said. "It was a common occurrence in the
fifties."

It was at this moment that I realized the deceit I had been living
under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking
contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated
breasts of their mothers, my mother-members, years later, of the Clan of
One-Breasted Women.

It is a well-known story in the Desert West, "The Day We Bombed Utah."
or more accurately, the years we bombed Utah: above ground atomic
testing in Nevada took place from January 27. 1951 through July 11,
1962. Not only were the winds blowing north covering ''low- use segments
of the population'1 with fallout and leaving sheep dead in their tracks,
but the climate was right. The United States of the 1950s was red,
white, and blue. The Korean War was raging. McCarthyism  was rampant.
Ike was it, and the cold war was hot. If you were against nuclear
testing, you were for a communist regime.

Much has been written about this "American nuclear tragedy." Public
health was secondary to national security. The Atomic Energy
Commissioner, Thomas Murray, said, "Gentlemen, we must not let anything
interfere with the series of tests, nothing."

 Again and again, the American public was told by its government, in
spite of burns, blisters, and nausea, "It has been found that the tests
may be conducted with adequate assurance of safety under conditions
prevailing at the bombing reservations." Assuaging public fears was
simply a matter of public relations. "Your best action," an Atomic
Energy Commission booklet read, "is not to be worried about fallout." A
news release typical of the times stated. "We find no basis for
concluding that harm to any individual has resulted from radioactive
fallout."

On August 30, 1979, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, a suit was filed,
Irene Allen v. The United States of America. Mrs. Allen's case was the
first on an alphabetical list of twenty-four test cases, representative
of nearly twelve hundred plaintiffs seeking compensation from the United
States government for cancers caused by nuclear testing in Nevada.

Irene Allen lived in Hurricane, Utah. She was the mother of five
children and had been widowed twice. Her first husband, with their two
oldest boys, had watched the tests from the roof of the local high
school. He died of leukemia in 1956. Her second husband died of
pancreatic cancer in 1978.

In a town meeting conducted by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, shortly before
the suit was filed, Mrs. Allen said, "I am not blaming the government, I
want you to know that. Senator Hatch. But I thought if

 




The Clan of One-Breasted Women         429

 

my testimony could help in any way so this wouldn't happen again to any
of the generations coming up after us ... I am happy to be here this day
to bear testimony of this."

God-fearing people. This is just one story in an anthology of thousands.

On May 10. 1984, Judge Bruce S. Jenkins handed down his opinion. Ten of
the plaintiffs were awarded damages. It was the first time a federal
court had determined that nuclear tests had been the cause of cancers.
For the remaining fourteen test cases, the proof of causation was not
sufficient. In spite of the split decision, it was considered a landmark
ruling. It was not to remain so for long.

In April 1987, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge
Jenkins's ruling on the ground that the United States was protected from
suit by the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, a centuries-old idea
from England in the days of absolute monarchs.

In January 1988, the Supreme Court refused to review the Appeals Court
decision. To our court system it does not matter whether the United
States government was irresponsible, whether it lied to its citizens, or
even that citizens died from the fallout of nuclear testing. What
matters is that our government is immune: "The King can do no wrong."

In Mormon culture, authority is respected, obedience is revered, and
independent thinking is not. I was taught as a young girl not to ''make
waves'' or ''rock the boat."

"Just let it go," Mother would say. "You know how you feel, that's what
counts."

For many years, I have done just that-listened, observed, and quietly
formed my own opinions, in a culture that rarely asks questions because
it has all the answers. But one by one, I have watched the women in my
family die common, heroic deaths. We sat in waiting rooms hoping for
good news, but always receiving the bad. I cared for them, bathed their
scarred bodies, and kept their secrets. I watched beautiful women become
bald as Cytoxan, cisplatin, and Adriamycin were injected into their
veins. I held their foreheads as they vomited green-black bile, and I
shot them with morphine when the pain became inhuman. In the end. I
witnessed their last peaceful breaths, becoming a midwife to the rebirth
of their souls.

 The price of obedience has become too high.

The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed
rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons
is the same fear I saw in my mother's body. Sheep. Dead sheep. The
evidence is buried.

I cannot prove that my mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, or my grandmothers,
Lettie Romney Dixon and Kathryn Blackett Tempest,

 




430            PART IV   Anthology

 

along with my aunts developed cancer from nuclear fallout in Utah. But I
can't prove they didn't.

My father's memory was correct. The September blast we drove through in
1957 was part of Operation Plumbbob, one of the most intensive series of
bomb tests to be initiated. The flash of light in the night in the
desert, which I had always thought was a dream, developed into a family
nightmare. It took fourteen years, from 1957 to 1971, for cancer to
manifest in my mother-the same time, Howard L. Andrews, an authority in
radioactive fallout at the National Institutes of Health, says radiation
cancer requires to become evident. The more I learn about what it means
to be a "downwinder," the more questions I drown in.

What I do know, however, is that as a Mormon woman of the fifth
generation of Latter-day Saints, I must question everything, even if it
means losing my faith, even if it means becoming a member of a border
tribe among my own people. Tolerating blind obedience in the name of
patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.

When the Atomic Energy Commission described the country north of the
Nevada Test Site as "virtually uninhabited desert terrain,'' my family
and the birds at Great Salt Lake were some of the "virtual
uninhabitants." 

 

One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing
fire in the desert. They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in
their bellies and wax and wane with its phases. They mocked the
presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that they would
never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as
sparks broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.

And they sang a song given to them by Shoshone grandmothers:

 

Ah ne nah, nah                           Consider the rabbits

nin nah nah-                             How gently they walk on the
earth-

ah ne nah, nah                             Consider the rabbits

nin nah nah-                             How gently they walk on the
earth-

Nyaga mutzi                               We remember them

oh ne nay-                                We can walk gently also-

A'yaga mutzi                              We remember them

oh ne nay-                                We can walk gently also-

 

The women danced and drummed and sang for wreeks, preparing themselves
for what was to come. They would reclaim the desert for the sake of
their children, for the sake of the land.

 

 




The Clan of One-Breasted Women         431

 

A few miles downwind from the fire circle, bombs were being tested.
Rabbits felt the tremors. Their soft leather pads on paws and feet
recognized the shaking sands, while the roots of mesquite and sage were
smoldering. Rocks were hot from the inside out and dust devils hummed
unnaturally. And each time there was another nuclear test, ravens
watched the desert heave. Stretch marks appeared. The land was losing
its muscle.

The women couldn't bear it any longer. They were mothers. They had
suffered labor pains but always under the promise of birth. The red hot
pains beneath the desert promised death only, as each bomb became a
stillborn. A contract had been made and broken between human beings and
the land. A new contract was being drawn by the women, who understood
the fate of the earth as their own.

Under the cover of darkness, ten women slipped under a barbed- wire
fence and entered the contaminated country. They were trespassing. They
walked toward the town of Mercury, in moonlight, taking their cues from
coyote, kit fox, antelope squirrel, and quail. They moved quietly and
deliberately through the maze of Joshua trees. When a hint of daylight
appeared they rested, drinking tea and sharing their rations of food.
The women closed their eyes. The time had come to protest writh the
heart, that to deny one's genealogy with the earth was to commit treason
against one's soul.

At dawn, the women draped themselves in mylar, wrapping long streamers
of silver plastic around their arms to blow in the breeze. They wore
clear masks, that became the faces of humanity. And when they arrived at
edge of Mercury, they carried all the butterflies of a summer day in
their wombs. They paused to allow their courage to settle.

The town that forbids pregnant women and children to enter because of
radiation risks was asleep. The women moved through the streets as
winged messengers, twirling around each other in slow motion, peeking
inside homes and watching the easy sleep of men and women. They were
astonished by such stillness and periodically would utter a shrill note
or low cry just to verify life.

The residents finally awoke to these strange apparitions. Some simply
stared. Others called authorities, and in time, the women were
apprehended by wary soldiers dressed in desert fatigues. They were taken
to a white, square building on the other edge of Mercury. When asked who
they were and why they were there, the women replied, "We are mothers
and we have come to reclaim the desert for our children."

The soldiers arrested them. As the ten women were blindfolded and
handcuffed, they began singing:

 




432            PART IV   Anthology

 

You can't forbid us eveiything You can't forbid us to think- You can't
forbid our tears to flow And you can't stop the songs that we

 

The women continued to sing louder and louder, until they heard the
voices of their sisters moving across the mesa:

 

Ah ne nah, nah nin nah nah- Ah ne nah, nah nin nah nah- Nyaga mutzi oh
ne nav- Nyaga mutzi oh ne nay-

 

"Call for reinforcements," one soldier said. 

"We have," interrupted one woman, "we have-and you have no idea of our
numbers."

 

I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine
other Utahns for trespassing on military lands. They are still
conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours was an act of civil
disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more
than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the clan of
One-Breasted Women.

As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked
my body. She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.

"And these?" she asked sternly.

"Weapons," I replied.

Our eyes met. I smiled. She pulled the leg of my trousers back over my
boot.

"Step forward, please," she said as she took my arm.

We were booked under an afternoon sun and bused to Tonopah, Nevada. It
was a two-hour ride. This was familiar country. The Joshua trees
standing their ground had been named by my ancestors, who believed they
looked like prophets pointing west to the Promised Land. These were the
same trees that bloomed each spring, flowers appearing like white flames
in the Mojave. And I recalled a full moon

 




The Clan of One-Breasted Women         433

 

in May, when Mother and I had walked among them, flushing out mourning
doves and owls.

The bus stopped short of town. We were released.

The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the
desert with no way to get home. What they didn't realize was that we
were home, soul-centered and strong, women who recognized the sweet
smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.

 

Terry Tempest Williams

Much qfTeny Tempest Williams' writing explores how the natural landscape
affects us. both politically arid personally. She is best known for her
book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her other books
include a collection of essays. An Unspoken Hunger, Desert Quartet: An
Erotic Landscape. Leap, and Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert. She
has also written two children's books. The Secret Language of Snow" and
Between Cattails. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications,
including the New Yorker, the Nation, Outside, Orion, the Iowa Review,
and Audubon, and she edited the book Testimony: Writers Speak on Behalf
of Utah Wilderness. She has served on the Governing Council of the
Wilderness Society and as natural ist-in-resideuce al the Utah Museum of
Natural History, and today she serves on the advisory board of the
National Parks and Conservation Association, The Nature Conservatory,
and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Williams has received many
awards, among them induction to the Rachel Carson Honor Roll and the
National Wildlife Federation's Conservation Award for Special
Achievement. Born in Corona. California in 1955. she lives in Castle
Valley. Utah.

 

 
Sincerely,
Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter
Read my blog at:
 <http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/>
http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
 
"History is not what happened; history is what was written down."
The Expected One- Kathleen McGowan
 
_______________________________________________
Writers Division web site:
http://www.nfb-writers-division.net <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>

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