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

[joe harcz Comcast]

Wow Fred! How powerful!

You have raised up another notch in my resopecto-meter for fowarding this 
powerful story!
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred wurtzel" <f.wurtzel at comcast.net>
To: "'NFB of Michigan Internet Mailing List'" <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 11:37 PM
Subject: [nfbmi-talk] FW: [stylist] creative nonfiction essay "Clan of 
theOne-breasted Women" by Terry Tempest Williams one of my favorites


> 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/>
>
> stylist mailing list
> stylist at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/stylist_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> stylist:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/stylist_nfbnet.org/f.wurtzel%40comcast.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nfbmi-talk mailing list
> nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfbmi-talk_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nfbmi-talk:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nfbmi-talk_nfbnet.org/joeharcz%40comcast.net