We Mourn and We Warn

It is essential for me to state, and the reader to understand, that Women in Black is a collection of completely autonomous groups for whom no one woman may speak. I am a Woman in Black, and I speak only for myself in this attempt to tell you what we do.

War is as old as picking up a thigh bone and whacking a rival. What the Women in Black do in their silent vigils against war all over the world is even older. To use one of the Bible stories that are, at present, the favorite bedtime reading on the pillows of power, Mother Eve had to give birth to her boys before one of them could kill the other.

Before death and war comes the giving of life, and after death and war comes the last of a thousand, thousand cleanings up, which have been the duty of the crone, the ancient and original Woman in Black whose power is invoked by today's lines of silent, somber women. It sounds mystical and partly is. There is a very large spiritual component in any dedicated vigil, and the women who stand on street corners and at checkpoints make good use of their stillness.

We are not precisely antiwar. We are most profoundly for—for peace, for life, for understanding, for hope. Although our attention wanders during our vigils, dwelling on the immediate action of the stage before our eyes, on our families or finances or chores to be done, on jokes or politics (insofar as there is a difference), we do spend much of this quiet time considering ways to free ourselves of angers and oppositions and learn what we need personally and so terribly to know of peace.

The crone power we sometimes joke about wielding is real and astonishingly effective. Our silence, our stillness, our black mourning garments move passersby in depths and ways that neither we nor they ever quite anticipate.

Women In Black is not an organization but a network of independent groups of women of all ages, faiths, countries, and political convictions who express their shared passion for ending violence by supremely nonviolent vigils. Its original inspiration was the Argentine Grandmothers of Plaza De Mayo, who have been standing and marching in black since the early 1980s, sometimes silently and sometimes loudly seeking the return of their "disappeared" children and grandchildren. In 1988, in Jerusalem, a group of Israeli and Palestinian women, sickened by the murder-suicide pact of their bloodstained peoples, braved bombs, bullets, and other obscene attacks to stand together in black and demand an end to the insanity. They were not silent at first, but they quickly discovered that angry confrontation was no more effective than it had ever been, while silence startled witnesses into thought, however confused.

That disturbance of people's mental status quo remains our basic tactic in pursuit of our ultimate, and ultimately maternal, goal of making people want to seek and find honorable, nonviolent solutions to the troubles of our world. We want to reach into that place of unease that lurks within us all and makes us wonder if we have been good or bad, and if She knows.

What people think after we have poked our crones' spoons into the cauldrons of their consciences is up to them. We hold up signs, usually in a very limited way, to indicate our strong preference for peace, human rights, justice, and nonviolence, but once we have people's attention, we leave them alone. We know we will haunt them.

In our group on Bainbridge Island, we have developed a twist on the maternal tactic. On Friday evenings, most of the women stand in a line on one of the corners where they are most visible to drivers on their way from the ferry, a somewhat alarming sight—though a familiar part of the landscape after two and a half years. On another corner, frequented by most foot passengers, the plump, pleasant Universal Grandmother sits in her quite legitimate wheelchair and hands out leaflets, talking with anyone who has questions or comments. She does not talk much, unless it is important to someone, but she smiles a lot, especially at those who scowl or are offended by her proffered flyers. She was chosen for the job partly because her eyebrows are nearly invisible, which, combined with her being seated and therefore shorter than most people, makes her look harmless, cozy, and unthreatening. Thus do we enact H.L. Mencken's injunction to simultaneously "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

The device came out of a period of open aggression from a group that brought large flags and a lot of noise to yet another of the four corners of the intersection. They identified themselves as Republican Women ("Women in Red, White, and Blue") and American Legionnaires, some of them local and quite a few coming on the ferry, and they were shouting support for the troops on their way to begin the war in Iraq. They were offended by us and also shouted, often angrily and sometimes offensively, at us.