Speaking Up
Johnson, Lucy
Speaking Up Division Street: America, by Studs Terkel. Pantheon Books. 381 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson T^rom about 700 hours of tape-re-* corded talk, Studs Terkel, a radio and...
...These unselfconscious outpourings from people who were for the most part not used to expressing themselves in words prove that...
...It hurts me to think...
...They don't have to be colored, black, just different...
...There are Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and non-believers...
...They come from all ages and classes...
...How much credit, then, can be given Terkel as author...
...a question that calls out on one level or another to most of us...
...What's gonna happen to our kids, our grandchildren...
...The war in Vietnam is obviously on their minds ("Myself, I get confused...
...And television, the guys being interviewed, talking about peace, and the picture shown where the women and children are being bombed and slaughtered and murdered...
...You pick up a paper, they're bombing children...
...Some of the interviews (and in the best ones Terkel fades into the background) are short stories in themselves...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson T^rom about 700 hours of tape-re-* corded talk, Studs Terkel, a radio and television interviewer, selects conversations with seventy-one Chicagoans...
...Lucy Jefferson, a fifty-two-year-old Negro woman, knows who she is and therefore can reach out to others: "Let's face it...
...And if you don't have this, baby, you've had it...
...The politically right, left, middle, and apathetic speak out...
...Followers of the drug-religions are not included...
...But the thing is what can I do about it...
...The Bomb doesn't bother me...
...Is this a reflection of a general state of things, or merely of Terkel's own interests, or of a genteel reticence on the part of both interviewer and interviewee...
...A Mexican-American steel worker: "It's a world I have to live in, how can I not care...
...Terkel's own broad understanding and sympathy prompted vivid pictures from all kinds of people...
...I certainly hope that the white man don't get up there with his prejudices and spoil the moon . . . spoil the heavens...
...I'm just going along day to day and day to day, like that...
...In addition, his selection of the interviews, his editing, and his arrangement of them in the book are all artfully done—although occasionally the art is not completely concealed...
...The struggle sometimes takes hideous forms —mercenariness, prejudice, brutality— and sometimes quite beautiful ones— pride and pleasure in a craft, service, sacrifice...
...There is sometimes a too perfect balance or a too pat irony...
...There is plenty of talk about connections between generations within a family, and with those outside the circle of family and friends, but relatively little of relationships between husbands and wives...
...And feeling...
...The ages range from fifteen to ninety...
...The other major theme which Terkel mentions in his brief generalizations is the "cop-out," the man who says "What can I do...
...These are the dead ones...
...Urban renewal, automation, and other causes of depersonalization are real and close to most of these people...
...Terkel, in his preface, says they are looking for "face," but it seems to me to be much more than that...
...Division Street: America is a moving and exciting experience...
...Not only that, there are many mixed voices, people working their way through complex ideas or facing complicated feelings right before your eyes...
...For the last three years I just about given up thinking...
...What counts is knowledge...
...What is so exciting and, indeed, uplifting about this book is that the voices of those who are alive and giving come through loud and clear...
...You see, there's such a thing as a feeling tone...
...The President tells ya that he don't want no war, it's peace...
...the whole drug culture is skirted...
...These two are among the sadder cop-outs...
...Nothing," and so does nothing and may finally end up not caring about anything, or actively doing evil...
...But suburban dwellers are here, and high-rise apartment secretaries, and Appalachians in crowded tenements...
...As they talk, doors open on horror, desolation, pathos, hope, love, courage—a whole range of emotions, situations, ideas, and opinions...
...One is friendly and one is hostile...
...It has a drama and a human immediacy that couldn't have been achieved any other way...
...Certainly he is a highly skilled interviewer...
...They struggle to keep their sense of themselves, their pride if they have any to begin with, or some feeling of usefulness or of going somewhere...
...He communicates to us that state described by a Negro woman who worked for a white family for twelve years: "I was just like a person to them, and they were just people to me...
...Studs Terkel was right to present his material in verbatim style, instead of using it to back up his own conclusions about modern urban life...
...It's a shame Negroes don't like me and children don't like me and dogs don't run up to me...
...The fear of humiliation, which he sees as a central motivating force, appears from many of his examples to be non-operative in cases where there is a cen-teredness (not self-centeredness...
...Others are rich character studies...
...In letting people speak for themselves, Terkel has recorded the black humor of their situations...
...Out of confusion come some statements of terrible problems and some answers to Milton Mayer's question, "What Can a Man Do...
...Civil rights and prejudice are bothering them, too (A Negro womai: "I'm praying and hoping only for just one thing, that the white man does not get to the moon, if there's anyone up there...
...A final question occurs to me...
...You're dead...
...A girl on the staff of a magazine: "I wonder why I don't care about these things...
...There isn't much I can do about it, so I'm not worried...
...There are Negroes and an American Indian as well as whites from many other parts of the United States and from Europe and Latin America (but no Orientals...
Vol. 31 • May 1967 • No. 5
