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CHAPTER 6 Two Different Worlds I was noticing that the people on the Avatar staff who were based in Boston and Cambridge, rather than Fort Hill, were feeling rather threatened by the sense of impending change, in ways I didn’t quite understand. I liked those people, and as I heard their versions of the story, I found myself sympathizing with them and becoming confused about where my allegiance was. There was, for instance, Ed Jordan, also known as Ed Beardsley, who had been involved in the artwork and production end of Avatar from its beginnings, and who was the central figure in a collective household around the corner from the office, very reminiscent of my collective household in East Lansing. Ed would wonder aloud, “If Mel is God, then what about me and all of us, aren’t we God, too?” This attitude didn’t make him popular with the Fort Hill folks, but the question seemed like a good one to me. Besides, I enjoyed working on layout with him, with his irreverence and his zany sense of humor. And there was Charlie Giuliano, who had known Mel for years, since the early days of psychedelic experiments at Harvard and later in Waltham, around Brandeis University. Charlie seemed sincerely interested in building Avatar into an alternative news source, and seemed hurt by Mel’s putting him on the spot to declare his allegiance this way or that. I felt for him in his ambivalence. Candy, however, had no such problem; she was clearly prepared to align herself with Fort Hill and its needs, whatever they would turn out to be. Also, much more than Candy, I was enthusiastically absorbing whatever details I could about the lifestyle of the people we were getting to know. This activity filled a fair amount of my available time. I had never before thought much about the concept of “voluntary poverty,” although the idea had had a certain vogue for a while among New Leftists. But here at Fort Hill, even though the phrase was seldom used and would not have been universally accepted as a description of what was happening, clearly most of these people, one way or another, had had access to lots of resources and privileges and had chosen to forego the easy life in favor of a life of principle that happened to be taking place in a poor neighborhood, in 52 | Chapter 6 rundown houses, following a set of priorities that did not include money and what it could acquire as the primary goals. Looked like voluntary poverty to me. Having lived for several years on relatively small amounts of money (mostly gleaned from my share of my father’s rather small estate, and from Social Security income that was available to me from the time he died until I turned twenty-one), but not having had to struggle to support myself, and having been able to remain in school as long as I wanted without worrying about where the tuition would come from, I now felt somewhat flush and embarrassed by comparison to the Fort Hill folks, with their flocks of children and their patched clothing. At the same time, many of them had given up lucrative careers to live on the Hill, and they did own their houses and have some pretty nice material possessions around them. The houses had a tattered, almost magical elegance about them that fascinated me, that seemed to transcend and transform the mundane modesty of the furnishings. And there was a certain self-righteousness to the self-imposed frugality of Fort Hill. An article in February 1968, in the local newspaper of Roxbury’s black community, the Bay State Banner, described the attitude of this band of new white immigrants into the mostly black neighborhood: “[L]iving without financial security is an important part of the philosophy of the Hill People. They believe that what they need they will find, and that their security comes in living for the moment at hand. ‘This is a way of life where you do away with everything except the moment,’ says Faith Gude. ‘The secret is to lose everything. I have to become everything that’s going to happen. And then, the thing that happens is you. That’s not something you can lose.’” On the other hand, when I had mentioned my misgivings about my own financial status to Wayne Hansen, he had let me know there was another, seemingly less voluntary...

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