Skip to main content

From the Archives: Actor and Singer Harry Belafonte.

Actor and singer Harry Belafonte. This week it was announced that he will be the first recipient of the International Marian Anderson Award, for his contributions as an artist and as a humanitarian. (It will be given to him during a ceremony on Saturday June 27th in Philadelphia) Belafotne was born in Harlem and raised in the hills of Jamaica where he absorbed the song and music of the island life around him. Belafonte's first love was theater, however: he wasn't convinced that popular singing would take him as far emotionally as Shakespeare did. But by embracing the calpyso music of his childhood he introduced it to America. (REBROADCAST from 9/8/93)

18:51

Other segments from the episode on February 27, 1998

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, February 27, 1998: Interview with Irene Vilar; Interview with Martin Duberman; Interview with Harry Belafonte.

Transcript

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: FEBRUARY 27, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 022701np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: The Ladies' Gallery
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:06

MARTY MOSS-COANE, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Marty Moss-Coane in for Terry Gross.

On March 1, 1954, a Puerto Rican nationalist named Lolita Lebron (ph) and three other protesters opened fire in the U.S. House of Representatives. Five members of Congress were wounded. Twenty-three years later, Lebron's daughter Gladys Mendez (ph) committed suicide by throwing herself out of a moving car. Her 8-year-old daughter tried in vain to stop her. That child, Irene Vilar, tried to kill herself 10 years later while she was attending college in New York.

This legacy of Puerto Rican nationalism and self-destructive behavior is the subject of Irene Vilar's memoir, "The Ladies' Gallery," which has just been published in paperback. In the book, Vilar explores the political and personal circumstances that led each of these women -- her grandmother, her mother, and herself -- to consider their own deaths.

In trying to piece together her family's history, she said she ran into many different accounts of what had happened. I asked her for the version she heard about her grandmother and what she had done in the U.S. House.

IRENE VILAR, AUTHOR, "THE LADIES' GALLERY: A MEMOIR OF FAMILY SECRETS": At the beginning when I didn't know much, I would have people tell me she was a terrorist -- even friends who have their own specified ideas of what terrorism was. Others would just say that she was a martyr. Others would say she was a heroine.

So it took me some time to realize she wasn't a terrorist, that terrorism is based on chaos and on fear and on unpredictability, and the uncertainty of its origins. And she actually dressed up for the occasion. You know, she kind of draped herself -- wrapped herself in the Puerto Rican flag and went and faced what seemed to be the dress of power -- the congressmen.

MOSS-COANE: So she went in with her friends. They sat in the gallery. Then what happened?

VILAR: Then I believe they were -- at that moment, they were taking -- about to take a vote; the congressmen were about to take a vote on a bill about letting farm workers from Mexico come in. And I believe they waited for that moment, in which they stood up -- nos and yeas -- and at that moment she stood up and put her -- the flag around her body and just shouted "viva Puerto Rico" and then her companions began to shoot and she also began to shoot.

MOSS-COANE: How many people were wounded?

VILAR: Six. Well many, but basically six were critically wounded.

MOSS-COANE: And then because they stood up and made themselves very obvious, did the police -- the guards descend on them?

VILAR: Yes. Yes, it was so easy. It was like, you know, like going into a big trap. They just stood there and kept shooting and reloading and at that moment, when people came -- you know, the congressmen believed -- heard, you know, "viva Mexico" -- since the context was something else, or maybe "Hollywood."

I don't know, but they -- it was a moment of great confusion from what I've researched and asked, and -- but it took very little time for the guards to come in and just take over.

MOSS-COANE: Now what was her trial like? And she was in the end sentenced to more than 50 years in prison. Can you describe the trial for us?

VILAR: Fifty-seven years -- she -- it seems -- well, there is one moment which kind of summarizes her whole frame of mind and her disposition through that trial, and it was when she was getting -- going out of one of the first trials. She faced two of them, but the first one -- a reporter asked her how did she feel about her children? She had a girl and a boy -- my mother and my uncle, who was still alive. He died a few month after that.

But anyway, she -- she answered: "it is painful now for them because they're children, but when they grow up it will be more important for them to be free than to have a mother, and this is why I'm doing this now."

MOSS-COANE: Who took care of your mother?

VILAR: Her grandmother. My grandmother's mother.

MOSS-COANE: So, your great-grandmother then raised your mother. Well let's talk a little bit about your mother. Now when she was born, your grandmother left her in Puerto Rico so that she could go to the United States. Why do you think she felt she couldn't take her own daughter with her?

VILAR: I think she had a very ambivalent relationship to this baby, because it was born out of not a love relationship, but more out of a bartering relationship with a rich man that had kind of given them a home after her father had died. So it was a kind of, you know, kind of -- kind of selling of -- and this baby was very, very ambivalent for her.

And I think she left it and she was young. She was only 20. And after she got to New York, then she became involved with the party. She wasn't involved before. She was just a writer -- she was a poet. She had had a very difficult life, very poor life in the countryside.

And when she got to New York, she met people. She got involved with the seamstress in New York City -- trying to organize them. She met very interesting people that directed her; that were struggling then in New York City. And little by little, I think that abandonment became justified in other ways. But I think the origins of that leaving my mother was much more complex and much more, perhaps for her, shameful to admit. But I think it's very rich -- yeah.

MOSS-COANE: Do you feel, then, that your grandmother abandoned your mother?

VILAR: I don't necessarily feel that, but I know that's what -- the way my mother felt. I know that from -- from the things I witnessed through her -- through the melancholy she had and through her efforts to justify that through her own involvement in the party, through trying to free her and work with people back in Puerto Rico to build support to free her mother.

But basically deep inside, there was a sense of abandonment.

MOSS-COANE: Well you're the youngest of four children -- the only daughter. What kind of mother was she to you?

VILAR: She was a very -- she was marvelous. She was very sweet. We were together constantly always. I was -- again, I was more than a daughter. I was a witness because I went everywhere with her. And I was also her -- like her shield, you know, when she had her own affairs, I was her shield. So I was many things for her, but towards me -- I got a lot of love and a lot of ambiguities too.

MOSS-COANE: Well, I want to have you read a section from your memoir, and this is actually written about leaving your brother's wedding and at the wedding, your father had been dancing with a younger woman, and the year is 1977. Can you read that section for us?

VILAR: Mm-hmm. Here goes.

My brother Chaita's (ph) wedding was anything but heaven for mama. "So long," papa said getting in behind the wheel, and Camarel (ph) didn't take his eyes off mama. "Drive carefully," he said. "Take it easy," he stressed. Papa, with his usual optimism, declared that everything was going to be all right.

He started the engine and we took off in the Mazda. We were returning home on the 27th of February, 1977. I don't know if they said anything to each other. Mama stayed in the same position, maintaining the same silence with which she'd gotten in. And I, who had seen Uncle Miguel's worried face, was keeping watch in the back seat, sort of preparing myself for what was to come.

In the shadows of the car, all I could see of her was the gold purse. She was clutching it with both hands. Papa was looking straight ahead. He was still looking ahead when we went to the main gate, and that's how he was during the whole trip -- straight ahead. I said there was still time to stop everything. I looked back. I looked for the church where my brother had just gotten married, and I saw Uncle Miguel still standing there with the undecided expression of someone who knows that something is going to happen. Was he imagining it?

I've got to look after her, I said to myself. And I took her arm firmly, as if to tell her I wouldn't abandon her. She turned around. She had the look of someone who was very tired. I let go, but from my back seat I kept on watching her. Her eyes were enlarged, empty. "Go to sleep," she ordered. It was the last thing she ever said to me.

MOSS-COANE: Both you and your uncle had this idea of something was going to happen next, and what happened was that she threw herself out of the car, and both you and your father then took her to the hospital. Her head was on your lap -- and she died.

You write: "she'd done what she wanted to do. She left me."

VILAR: Mm-hmm.

MOSS-COANE: Is that how you felt? That she had -- this was a personal thing that she had left you?

VILAR: I think that -- see again, that -- in that section, the point of view is more the point of view of the child, which is -- which the whole world centers around that mother and who -- for whom she's sacred. She's God. I mean, she had -- that child has no idea of religion or of God beyond that mother.

MOSS-COANE: When the police investigated the accident, you said that she'd fallen asleep against the door, which opened. Did you feel you wanted to protect your mother?

VILAR: Yes, you know, many times I've asked myself: why do -- why I so spontaneously came up with that lie, and probably I think that as a child, even within my ignorance, I knew that what happened was wrong. And I tried to make it look fine. I tried to make it, again, all right.

And it was not only my mother, but my father. I sensed somehow too that my father was part of it and that it was directed towards my father. So -- and I loved dearly my father. So I also wanted to protect him.

MOSS-COANE: Our guest is Irene Vilar. Her memoir The Ladies' Gallery is out in paperback. More after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

Let's get back to Irene Vilar. We're talking about her memoir The Ladies' Gallery.

When do you think you became unglued, if I can choose that -- use that word, and I want to have you actually read a section from the book after we hear the answer to that. But when you look back over your life, then, do you have a clue about when things started to go wrong for you?

VILAR: Yes, I think they had started to go wrong for a long time. I think that as a child, and as a child I -- when my mother died and kind of de-sacrelized my life, I had enough good things inside thanks to some luck I had by having all these uncles and aunts and my father. I was a lucky child, I think, in many ways -- that somehow were able to make me just keep going.

But I did it by just kind of forgetting. I mean, I didn't want -- I don't know how you say "mourn" or mourn?

MOSS-COANE: Mourn, yeah. Mm-hmm.

VILAR: Mourn -- I didn't mourn. It was just like she died. OK, I'll just fix the house and start from scratch. And that -- I think that helped me for a long time, because the horror of that experience and that's part of the trauma just -- you know, it was too horrifying.

And it helped me to keep going. But then at age 18, that technique, you know, doesn't help you anymore because the problems are different. And I think that when I became a senior and many things started to coincide as I was coming of age.

And I was starting to be a woman. I was making love. I was knowing about our bodies in many other ways. So a lot of things started to coincide and my mother became a recourse.

MOSS-COANE: Well, I want to have you read another section from the book, and this is something that you write about a time -- you were 18 years old and it's in the middle of winter.

VILAR: I had just moved into a house in Buckingham Street, and that day I'd begun to fix the place up. I'd stop going to my literature classes. On Sunday, January 31, I opened the boxes and found mama's picture. It was the last photograph taken of her. I've carried that picture with me ever since I was a little girl. Everything -- sadness, death, and even the cheapness of the metal frame informed that photograph in absurd proportions.

I wanted to hang it on one of the walls. After all, that woman of clear beauty was my mother. I could hear the rain beating on the roof of the balcony and I could also hear my mother's voice in the sound of the rain, and something in my blood made the connection. And while I was standing on a chair, struggling to straighten up the picture, my mother's voice persisted.

I shouldn't have been hearing that voice. Things hadn't been going well for me lately, and the refuge I needed was somewhere else, perhaps in my index cards. I had been shuttling between the library and my room armed with index cards that were becoming increasingly oppressive.

But mama's overpowering voice went on. Hundreds of voices sprang from hers, tucked around themselves, spoke to me about me on my behalf -- voices from my index cards, the illusion of a busy life; notes for a diary I would one day turn into a critical book about three sirens or cycles: the child, the nymph, the old lady; three generations of women in my family.

But what I imagined was a clever project was fast becoming a chaos of three-by-five cards I couldn't bother to read, because they brimmed with pride, wanton self-assertiveness, self-conscious family epigrams -- too glorious to be taken seriously now -- now that I could barely stand on my own feet.

As I stepped down from the chair, the other voices faded away, but mama's went on. It started to invade me -- to get inside me. It said: "hurry up, Irene, you can only be one of us."

MOSS-COANE: You took a mixture of pills and vodka, and you describe that -- that early sensation of suicide, really, as a kind of vertigo. Do you remember the sensations, the feelings of what it was like when the pills and the vodka took effect?

VILAR: Yes, there is so much that I get mixed with those images because there's also images that are yours, but there are also images that come from so many places -- from movies, from TV, from books. And they all get mixed up, giving you even more of the feeling that you're nothing -- that you're a fake; that even your own death is not yours, you know.

So I do recall that feeling -- feeling nothing all the way to the end; feeling that not even that act was mine; that even that act was a reenactment. And basically, it was a reenactment. It was a repetition of my mother's act.

MOSS-COANE: You talked about the fact that these index cards that you were keeping as a way of, I guess, writing down the facts of your life; that in part, these were the words and memories that were driving you crazy. And yet here you've written a book drawn, I assume, to some degree on those index cards that you kept. Was there something about being able to finally write the story down which helped you bring some kind of order and sanity to your life?

VILAR: Yes, very much -- the book -- see, I -- I always wrote, but again, in bits and pieces. I -- until that moment, that critical moment in my life, writing was more undirected. I kind of lacked an organizing principle. I lacked organization and purpose. So this crisis and all that happened in it and after it gave me a wound where to write from, basically. I knew where the wound was and I knew that it could give me a lot of material to organize those parts.

And that not only was my story, but it was the story of these other two characters and that through them, many other stories could also be told. So it's a memoir, but it's more than a -- more than a memoir, it's a testimony because it's a point of view of the witness.

MOSS-COANE: You say that your mother's death may be your redemption. Are you any more certain today after you wrote those words?

VILAR: Yes, I mean to the extent. I mean, the phrase itself has the price of poeticity, but -- but you know, there is a part of it that is very true, which is that she offer me an image of fragility and of -- and of lust, that I feel privileged to have, you know.

Many people go through their lives with nothing more lacking than not having seen the basketball game the day before. I don't know to what extent that redeems you or not. So I think that -- I mean, it's just out there for questioning.

MOSS-COANE: Well, Irene Vilar, I thank you very much for joining us today on FRESH AIR. Thanks a lot.

VILAR: Thanks.

MOSS-COANE: Irene Vilar's memoir The Ladies' Gallery is out in paperback. She's working on her next book, a novel.

Dateline: Marty Moss-Coane, Philadelphia
Guest: Irene Vilar
High: First-time author, Irene Vilar. Her book "The Ladies' Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets" is now in paperback. This memoir chronicles three generations of self-destructive behavior: in 1954, her grandmother was imprisoned for opening fire at the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1977, her mother leapt to her death from a speeding car; and in 1988, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide. Alternating between her notes from the psychiatric ward and the chronicling of the history of her family, Vilar tells of her own attempts to come to terms with her family history.
Spec: Health and Medicine; Mental Illness; Crime; Books; Authors; The Ladies' Galley; Politics; Government; Death
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: The Ladies' Gallery
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.

You May Also like

Did you know you can create a shareable playlist?

Advertisement

Recently on Fresh Air Available to Play on NPR

52:30

Daughter of Warhol star looks back on a bohemian childhood in the Chelsea Hotel

Alexandra Auder's mother, Viva, was one of Andy Warhol's muses. Growing up in Warhol's orbit meant Auder's childhood was an unusual one. For several years, Viva, Auder and Auder's younger half-sister, Gaby Hoffmann, lived in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. It was was famous for having been home to Leonard Cohen, Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thomson, and Bob Dylan, among others.

43:04

This fake 'Jury Duty' really put James Marsden's improv chops on trial

In the series Jury Duty, a solar contractor named Ronald Gladden has agreed to participate in what he believes is a documentary about the experience of being a juror--but what Ronald doesn't know is that the whole thing is fake.

There are more than 22,000 Fresh Air segments.

Let us help you find exactly what you want to hear.
Just play me something
Your Queue

Would you like to make a playlist based on your queue?

Generate & Share View/Edit Your Queue