Chapter 25: In the Deep End of the Pool

NEAR THE END of the day on Tuesday, it was my turn to speak. Dr. Ranger gave me a nice introduction and I faced this room full of strangers.

“Thank you for that flowery introduction, Dr. Ranger,” I said. “Through most of it, I wasn’t sure you were talking about me.”

The people in the symposium laughed. That was a good sign, I guess. There hadn’t been many laughs in a day and a half of speakers. There had been a lot of accusations. There had been a ton of justifications. There had been demands and explanations and absolutely no solutions. The symposium was winding down and I knew a dozen people had already left.

Dr. Ranger had given me a nice introduction, citing my photography business at Attic Allure, my work study at the college, and my consulting on a Hollywood blockbuster. Which I didn’t think had actually busted any blocks, but he wanted to give me great credentials so there was a chance people would listen to what I had to say. He and Professor Hyatt had taken Ronda and me out to dinner the night before while most of the attendees were still at a cocktail party. They’d quizzed me about what I thought and what I had to say, and even made some good suggestions. Dr. Ranger told me that he wasn’t going to announce anything at the symposium, but that the Board of Trustees had already voted to divest the college of all investments in businesses that had a presence in South Africa. He invited me to make that demand during my talk.

Nice.

Now it was time to deliver words that might mean something. Ronda and I had been up most of the night, Anna a good share of it, and Patricia up early this morning working on my speech. I had it mostly written down because I couldn’t trust myself to just speak extemporaneously. The trick—I had learned it from my mother—was not to look like I was reading it. That’s hard.

“Let me tell you who I really am. I’m nobody. I like to take pictures and hope to become a great photographer. I’m a student, but that is supposed to help me become a great photographer. I consulted on a movie, but that was just to photograph the actors and the action. I did the same thing for a theatre festival in Canada, just taking pictures.

“But I am also a nobody who has marched in protest against the Vietnam war. I am a nobody who walked with the gangs of South Chicago the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, to keep peace and spread his word of non-violence. I am a nobody who exposed a racist cop in a small town and then brought to light the accusation that, as a member of the local draft board, he manipulated the draft calls to make sure that all young men of color in our county were drafted. I am a nobody who is against racism, against the war in Vietnam, and I am a draft resister.

“And I am a nobody who, like men and women of my generation, of all races and religions and economic classes, hopes one day to be somebody.”

I was actually interrupted by some applause that I didn’t expect at all. I had to recollect my thoughts and read ahead from my notes.

“I have listened to impassioned pleas, to corporate policies, to government diplomatic strategies about what corporate America and the United States government can do to rectify the injustice of apartheid in South Africa and racism in America—racism which is as alive today as it was when Dr. King led the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. But in all I have listened to, I have been asking myself, ‘What can I—a nobody—do?’

“It’s easy for me to believe that there is nothing I could do. My words are less important to all of you than the signs of the protesters in front of our campus. The day after nearly half a million protesters, including me, gathered on the National Mall to speak against the Vietnam war, our president told us there was nothing we could do to change the way he was handling the war. Nothing half a million Americans could do! What can I do?

“Yet, in April, I heard him announce that he was reducing the number of American troops in Vietnam by 100,000 by December first of this year. On July fifth the 26th amendment to the constitution was certified, guaranteeing eighteen-year-olds the right to vote. Two weeks ago, Australia and New Zealand announced the withdrawal of all their troops from Vietnam.

“What can I do? Indeed.

“I’d like to go through a few of the high points from this symposium that made me think. It started before you ever walked into this room. It started out there in the library when you had to stand in front of a colored backdrop and have your photo taken in order to get a badge to attend the symposium. I took that photo. I listened to your complaints. How dehumanizing the process was. How 1984 and Big Brother it seemed. Someone asked if they intended to tattoo a number on our foreheads next. Some wanted to know what the different colors of background meant. Some complained directly to me that this process was an outrage. Some of those complaints came with pretty abusive language.

“Of course, you didn’t know that my red badge identified me as a speaker. You thought I was just a photographer. A nobody.”

There was another round of applause. It seemed people were warming to my topic as I continued to go through a summary of our experience with taking ID photos. I even got permission from a couple of friends to show their IDs with the name blocked out. It showed the difference between a black student photo taken with normal light and one taken with the boost. The student had said it was the first time he’d ever had a photo taken that showed him as he was.

Then I showed a picture that had them all puzzled.

“This is Dora Devine. She was my freshman college roommate in the men’s wing of the dormitory. Yes, she is, according to her birth certificate, a male. What we know as a transvestite or others call a cross-dresser or a drag queen. She never dresses as a male these days and is taking hormones that have helped her breasts grow and stymied the growth of hair on her face and chest. A lovely chest, if I might say so. But she presented a dilemma to us when it was time to photograph her ID. Are we to force her to dress as a man for a picture that she will never look like for her photo ID, her driver’s license, and her passport?

“I bring this up to tell you that the issue of photo ID is not an easy one. Do we force a Muslim to unveil her face? Do we then need to require a Hippie to shave and cut his hair? Are we approaching a society that requires a uniform dress code for all photo IDs? You can say that’s silly, but where do you draw the line?”

I went on to talk about how most students had found the photo ID was helpful. They had less trouble cashing a check, for example, or proving to a bartender that they were twenty-one.

“And then we find that this same technology is used to systematically repress an entire society,” I said. “It’s not Polaroid’s fault that South Africa is ruled by an apartheid government. It’s not Polaroid’s fault black people are discriminated against, considered non-citizens in their own country, restricted in where they can travel, work, or even worship. It’s not their fault. But are they contributing to it?

“If I’m asking myself ‘What can I do?’ shouldn’t every business, school, and government be asking the same question? Why has Columbia College Chicago not divested itself of all investment in South Africa? Isn’t it time we do so?

“Polaroid has initiated what they referred to in this symposium as ‘a great experiment’ to improve the lot of blacks in South Africa. The PRWM holds that is not enough and they should divest themselves completely of all business interest in South Africa until majority rule is established. The representatives of Polaroid and of the US State Department have indicated that such a unilateral action on the part of all US businesses and the government itself would lead to a bloodbath in South Africa.

“So, what can I do? First of all, I’ll be watching Polaroid and the United States government and as a voter and a consumer, I will hold you responsible for the success of your great experiment. Let me remind you right now that when missionaries from the north went south before the Civil War and converted slaves to Christianity and gave them soap to improve their lives, they still left them slaves. Improving working conditions for black laborers in South Africa, still leaves them non-citizens prevented from governing their own country.

“I don’t hold stock in Polaroid to divest. I don’t have investments in South Africa to get rid of. The amount of Polaroid film I use for our ID program at Columbia or in the back of my view camera to test shots before I load color transparencies, is so miniscule that even Levi at Camera Warehouse wouldn’t miss it, let alone the bottom line of Polaroid.

“I am nobody. But this nobody is a photographer and I will use my photography and my voice to speak against racism at home and throughout the world. And let me tell you that I’ve been to California enough times to know blacks are not the only race discriminated against in this country. I know that the Native American population of the United States is treated as poorly as the blacks of South Africa; and that Mexican laborers work for starvation wages at jobs whites won’t do in the fields to put vegetables on our dinner tables.

“I am nobody. But I will record your picture for the annals of history with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what you did to end apartheid. May God grant that the paragraph is one of praise.”

I lifted my Nikon and pointed it at the audience as I started taking pictures.

“I’ve never heard a camera sound so threatening,” Hyatt said as he met me after the presentation. “There were actually people out there ducking down in their seats so not to be seen.”

“It should make some interesting photos,” I said. “Can’t say I spent any time thinking about composition or lighting conditions, though.”

“You had a good photo in this morning’s paper. How did you manage that?” he asked.

“I spent lunch yesterday in the photo lab processing and printing, then sent a friend down to the paper with them so I could go back to the meeting. Are we done yet?” I asked.

“Some of the guests from out of town have left,” Hyatt said. “Most are sticking around for dinner and tomorrow’s breakout sessions. We agreed to host the DMV reps from the states as they discuss the process of converting to pictures on drivers’ licenses. And Polaroid is going to demonstrate their newest ID system. You’ll definitely want to be there for that. And in general, as a resource. You made an impression today. I would guess that other roundtables will be requesting your presence. You might even get some job offers.”

“Job offers? I’m not even out of college yet!”

“Well, don’t accept any on the spot. Right at the moment, you’ve become the spokesperson for an entire generation regarding photo ID and its benefits and problems. You did a good job, Nate.”

“I’d like to go home and go to bed with my girlfriends now,” I sighed.

“Not until after tonight’s dinner. Don’t you have a girlfriend at the conference here? Sit with her at dinner.”

“Right.”

Dinner was entertaining. Dr. Leon Hernandez, Ronda’s professor at the University of Chicago, used the meal as an opportunity to give me a crash course in International Relations. One of the key elements he mentioned was the principle of retaliation. If Country A attempts to punish Country B for its treatment of Group 1, it is just as common for Country B to retaliate against Group 1 for the inconvenience it is causing as it is to improve the treatment.

“That sounds familiar,” I said. He asked me to continue. “When I was in high school, I took photographs and my father used them with an impassioned plea to our village council to get a racist cop fired. He’d been beating a friend of mine and I happened upon them with a camera. The cop was fired. A few months later, he had managed to get a position on the draft board and used it to get my friend and other blacks drafted. It got my friend killed in Vietnam.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, but you are right. It is an excellent example of a punishment of one person being referred to another, usually innocent person. You can well imagine what that would mean on a global scale. There are never easy solutions. South Africa blames blacks for the world’s criticism of apartheid. The greatest need we have in the world today is for people who can negotiate the intricacies of national powers so that countries can come to peace without conflict. I don’t know that anyone exists in this world who can do that right now,” Hernandez said. “It’s the hope I have for each of my students,” he concluded, looking directly at Ronda.

I floated to four different roundtable discussions on Wednesday. A page summoned me from one to another. Mostly, there wasn’t any real reason for me to be at any of them. They congratulated me on a perceptive speech the day before and asked a few inane questions about the system or about student response. I did appreciate being the operator guinea pig for the Polaroid demonstration of their new ID3 system.

Unlike the ID2 system we were using and that was the subject of such controversy in South Africa, this system was not portable. The box was about two feet tall and almost as wide with the photo and lamination processes in separate parts of the box. It was just as fast as the ID2, but it was made to be kept in one place with people going to it. It also was more subtle about boosting the flash or setting a different lens opening based on an automated light meter.

I got trained on how to use it in front of representatives of the local colleges and the license branches. Then I was told that freshman identification day was Thursday and I’d have this new camera to work with as a steady line of freshmen came through to get their new student IDs.

Hmm. I’d already told Hyatt I couldn’t do the work study this year. I wondered if I was going to get paid by the college to take freshman IDs or if that was supposed to be part of my participation in the symposium.

“Mr. Hart, could I speak to you for a few minutes?” a man asked after the demonstration. I recognized him as one of the speakers—a deputy assistant something or other in the State Department.

“Sure.”

“I’m Donald Martin, and I represent the Bureau of Consular Affairs in the US State Department at this symposium. I find the information gathered has been useful, but we are attempting to improve the facility for creating passports at various embassies around the world. You have a passport?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you think of the quality of your photo?” he asked.

“It’s a good photo. It meets the technical specifications of the passport regulations and was taken by a photographer who knew what he was doing. It was at Camera Warehouse, just up the street, where my studio is.”

“Ah, yes. We were told you had a studio nearby. I’d like to see it if you have the time.”

“I’m always happy to show off the studio,” I said. “I’m finished for today until I start taking freshman ID photos tomorrow morning. We can walk if you’d like to.”

“I could use a little fresh air.”

“Not sure if you’ll get that in Chicago. If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’d like to call over to make sure my assistants aren’t running around naked up there.”

He looked puzzled, but I stopped in the classroom and called over to Levi. He said he’d make sure it was cleared.

“I’ve heard about this studio as well,” Dr. Hernandez said from nearby. “Do you mind if I accompany you?”

“It’s kind of your tour, Mr. Martin,” I said. “Do you mind if we have a couple more guests?”

“Oh, not at all,” Martin said. “As long as we can have some time to discuss a matter. Perhaps dinner tonight.”

“Ronda?” I asked. She was standing next to Hernandez.

“No problem,” she said.

“Are you a couple?” Martin asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then please join us. Leon, you might as well be privy to this conversation as well if you’ve got time.”

“Dinner on the State Department?” Dr. Hernandez asked. “How rare is that?”

It turned out that the representative from Polaroid wanted to join us, too. Martin approved of it.

Anna, Cassie, and Rita were in the studio, busily cleaning and setting props. I hadn’t been there yet since I got back from Stratford. They were dressed. I introduced them and Cassie and Rita left us as I gave the men a tour. They stopped for a long time in front of the gallery. I noticed Anna had brought some of our most recent work from Canada to the studio for display.

“I hope you don’t mind,” I said to Martin. “Anna is also my girlfriend.”

“You have two girlfriends? And they seem to get on well with each other,” Martin laughed.

“Our third is at home with the little one,” I said offhandedly. All three men stopped and just stared at me for a minute.

“This is some impressive work,” Mr. Taylor, the guy from Polaroid said. “No Polaroids among these, though.”

“The Polaroids I take are really too small to exhibit,” I said. “I have them in my safe, though. I use a Polaroid back on my Linhof to test composition and balance in my shots that are then photographed on 4x5, either in black and white or Ektachrome. Those are what I print enlargements of.”

“You do show quite an artistic talent in your photos. How do you feel about your work on the student IDs? Surely, that is a step down from what you do in the studio,” Martin said.

“I’m not taking art photos at the college if that is what you mean,” I said. “At the same time, I try to take the same care with photos done for simple things as I do for art photos. Just as people being told they had to have a photo ID before they could enter the symposium, students are nervous about it. They want to look good. They don’t want to carry an ID they have to show that doesn’t look like them. Or like what they think they look like. I’ve been out to California several times to work on the movie and even my mistress complains that her driver’s license photo looks like a prison mug shot.”

“Your mistress,” Martin said flatly. He glanced over at Anna and Ronda who simply smiled at him. “You’re a complicated person, Nate. Let us take these lovely young ladies to dinner and discuss some business.”

“Oh, please,” Anna said. “I won’t be joining you. I was just about to go home so Patricia isn’t left alone with Little Toni. And Ronda can take notes on any business items I need to tend to.”

“You all live together?” Hernandez asked. “No wonder you do so well in international relations,” he said to Ronda.

We suggested the Trat as having good food reasonably priced. And they could almost always be counted on to have seating—especially on a week night.

“Excellent food choice, Nate,” Martin said. “Leon, feel free to jump in with explanations about the politics involved in this so I don’t need to violate government policy. Of course, George, you’ll have some things to say. Here’s the situation. In the United States, getting a passport is a relatively straightforward process. You go to a photographer who has the specs for a passport photo, fill out the form and take it to the Federal Courthouse. In many areas, you can now just drop it off at the main Post Office branch. That’s the way you got your passport. Easy. But it’s considerably different when we are dealing with foreign nationals who want a long-term visa to come to the United States.”