All the Wild Children by Josh Stallings Read Free Book Online Page A

as I understand them. One night while my five-year-old son was suffering from an acute attack of asthma it struck me that if there was a father anywhere in the world who could do anything that might help or protect my child no matter the cost to that man, I would expect it of him. I would not feel that he had done anything special. The fraternity of fathers brings its own unique responsibilities. Now it is my turn. I see danger impending. The fathers who cannot protect themselves or their children are waiting for my response.
    HAL STALLINGS
     
    My father is made captain.  They don’t make it to the Christmas Island.  They are arrested twelve miles out.  Later my father tells me they never would have made it.  The Everyman was taking on water, the crew was grossly under skilled.  If they hadn’t been arrested they certainly would have drowned.
     
    U.S. v. Stallings, Lazar, Yoes. (ND Calif., S. Div.) 3 Defs. sailed trimaran Everyman I out of San Francisco harbor toward U.S. atomic testing area (Christmas Island) in Pacific Ocean; boarded by U.S. Atty., crew arrested for violating temporary restraining order issued without notice or hearing.  Defs'. arrest 12 mi. at sea unlawful. June 7, 1962: DC after hearing found Defs. guilty of contempt; 30 days due to Defs. unwillingness to purge themselves of contempt by agreeing to obey future ct. orders. No appeals.
     
    At sentencing my father made the following statement. 
     
    I feel that I have let some misconception about myself grow in this courtroom. While this may seem overly personal and irrelevant in a courtroom, it is the only thing I know.  Yesterday Al Wirin and Marshall Heslep called me Captain Stallings. And up came the image of the self-sufficient seafarer striding the deck, facing the storm. It did not even hint at the cowering, afraid, sea-sick guy unable to even think for his own fear, willing to have his friends endanger themselves on that boat before himself.
    (Marshal) Cecil Poole's question yesterday always hits me with fresh new import. "Hal Stallings—are you flagrantly doing what you 'durn well please'? Where did you get the right to think you alone might be right?"
    I don't know that I'm right in any sense, I have neither divine nor human, neither internal nor external assurance that I'm right in any grand sense.  I yearn sometimes for a world where I can feel truly confident that my three-year-old who tells me in wonder and expectation that he wants to be a "builder" and build a home for his mother and me has a real chance to grow to be that builder; that at the very least I have done everything I can to protect that future.
    I yearn not to remember when I put my kids to bed that there is a mother in Hiroshima putting her children to bed—their father dead—killed by radiation—killed in my and my children's "defense."
     
    It is 1962 and my father goes to jail for thirty days.  He is a hero of the movement.  My mother is left at home with four kids and wondering how to feed them.  The woman's movement hasn’t reached the Quakers yet.  I hate having my father gone.
     
    In 1963 My father is arrested blocking the entrance to the Livermore Nuclear Testing Facility.
     
    1963 Mom and another Quaker woman pack up a VW van full of kids and head for the south.  There is a firebrand young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. leading marches.  My mother is not late coming to the freedom movement.  As a young student she protested not being able to sit with her Black friends in a movie house.  She left Indiana and worked in an inner-city school.  She had been fighting for equality long before the TV cameras started rolling.
    My siblings and me see lynching on the nightly news.  We see dogs and hoses set on crowds.  The drive south scares the hell out of us.  We are going into enemy territory, unarmed with our arms held wide open.
    In Salt Lake City Utah I slam my thumb in the door of the van, smashing and cutting it pretty bad.  Thanks to the