Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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It was a sweet, almost innocent interlude, especially compared to what came later. Zack and I slept together for the first and last time the same night we organized the SANE chapter at Brandeis. At that age, sex is usually part of one’s family drama, and at college Zack had a hankering for middle-class black and Jewish girls, anyone not like Mom, and I was attracted only to middle-class black and Jewish boys, anyone not like Dad. As a result, sex between me and Zack was too close to incest to give us anything but anxiety. The next morning we somberly agreed not to do it again, and we didn’t, ever. We insisted that it was nothing personal, and the truth is, it wasn’t.
After graduation, Zack went to Ghana with the Peace Corps, and I went to Mississippi and Louisiana for the first time with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That September I returned to Massachusetts to attend Harvard Medical School, where I helped form the SDS chapter, got myself arrested twice by the Cambridge police for disturbing the peace—committing acts of civil disobedience, we called it, blocking entry to the provost’s office and disrupting military recruiters on campus. Making peace by disturbing it. We hadn’t yet brought the war home. But in 1966, as the Civil Rights and antiwar movements blossomed and exfoliated left, right, and center, I dropped out of school six months before finishing and became a full-time political activist. A year later I was living in a commune in Cleveland, organizing and then running a day-care center for working mothers by day and printing pamphlets and broadsides and the occasional phony ID by night. I wasn’t ever a leader; I was a worker, and it was my point of pride. SDS, and before long Weatherman, had become my university, my employer, my church, my family.
THERE’S MUCH ABOUT that period that you don’t need to know, or perhaps much that I don’t care to remember right now. Or can’t remember. I was a different person then. After the Chicago Days of Rage in 1969 and my federal indictment in 1970, I came back to New England and went underground. My name was Dawn Carrington. Carol, who was my lover and roommate, thought of me not as a Marxist and certainly not as a terrorist but as an intellectual, some kind of college-educated, deep-thinking, liberal Democrat was all.
A trusting, utterly honest woman, Carol was small, almost child size, with urchin eyes, wide, round, and dark. Stubborn like a child and willful, she was always exactly who she seemed and claimed to be, my extreme opposite, in a way. To her, I was the distant, gruff, skeptical woman a few years older than she whose presence in her life kept her from falling in love again with the kind of man who would beat her and cheat on her, a man like her daughter Bettina’s father. Though she had been on the streets for years, I was more worldly than she, skeptical and sharp edged. “You make me stronger than I am,” she used to whisper to me, and I would say, “Cut the shit, Carol. You’re as strong as you want to be.” And it was not “Dawn” that she called me, but “Don.” Sometimes she wrote it in little love notes left on the kitchen table for me to find when I left the house early for work, while she slept till Bettina woke her for breakfast. Good morning, Don. I wanted to wake you up when I got in but it was too late and you looked too peaceful asleep. I’m off tonight so let’s go have a cookout at the beach when you get home. XXX
Neither Carol nor I was a bona fide lesbian. We were just sick of men, and lonely. We’d both gotten to the same place, but by rather different and class-specific routes. A mill-town bad girl, Carol was homeless and hooked on speed by fourteen; married, pregnant, and abandoned by sixteen; turning tricks for rent and food money by eighteen. I was a veteran communard by the time we met, someone whose bourgeois sexual conditioning and power structure had been attacked and revamped by months of group critique, group sex, and recreational drugs. Carol and I both, in our own way, just wanted to be alone for a while, and that’s what we provided for each other, a comforting solitude.
For the first year and a half that we were together, I was only marginally a Weatherman, filling coded mail orders for phony IDs and passports, a specialty I’d developed in Cleveland and was able to practice easily in Boston, thanks to my job at the hospital, which provided opportunistic access to the IDs of the dead and dying, and a flirty friendship with the teenaged kid who ran the hospital print shop. I was able to think of myself as a revolutionary, but didn’t have to put myself at high risk.
Then one night, after I’d put Bettina to bed. Carol was working at the bar, and I was as usual flopped on the mattress on the floor of my room in the apartment, a book-cluttered sanctuary from which I had barred both Bettina and Carol. “This is where I work,” I told Carol. “It’s where I read and write and think, and those are things you do alone, in private. It’s like going to the bathroom, taking a shit. You understand?” She understood. I was reading—who knows what, probably Franz Fanon or Régis Debray—and listening to music on my portable stereo, classical, I’m sure, because Carol hated classical. It made her insecure, she said, and I only played it when she was at work, because I couldn’t stand her insecurity sometimes.
I remember at one point, very late, I dimly heard the door buzzer from down the hall, a steady, unbroken, irritated noise made by someone kept waiting too long. This was more than unusual. We never had uninvited nighttime visitors. The police, I thought, the FBI, U.S. marshals—oh, Jesus, the pigs!
I panicked and looked around my room, suddenly seeing it with a cop’s eye. In a shoe box under the bed: aha! a batch of unfinished phony IDs and half a dozen stolen Massachusetts driver’s licenses. And in the dresser drawer: an ounce and a half of marijuana. And over there on the table: a spiral notebook with the names and addresses of four or five people who’ll find themselves being interviewed by the FBI tomorrow. Stupid! Stupid!
There was someone banging on the door now, and a man hollering my name, my real name, “Hannah! Hey, Hannah, open up!”
So it wasn’t the cops. I tiptoed down the hall to the door and listened. Silence. Then a man’s voice, “Shit,” and an audible sigh.
“Who’s there?”
“Hannah? Hey, it’s me, babe. Zack.”
“Who?”
“Zack Procter, for Christ’s sake.”
“Jesus! Shut up. Are you alone?”
He laughed. “Yeah, I’m alone. Lemme in.”
I jerked the door open, grabbed his sleeve, pulled him inside, and shut and locked the door. “Asshole!”
“You’re hard to find, babe, but not that hard.” He talked as he walked ahead of me down the hall to the kitchen, dragging a large army-surplus duffel and carrying a paper bag that he set onto the table. “Dawn Carrington, eh? Where’d you get that one? Sounds like a character from a TV soap opera. Want a beer?” He pulled a six-pack from the bag, opened a bottle for himself, and sat down at the table. He studied me, a mocking smile on his face, took a long, slurping pull from his beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Oh, man, I needed that!”
I watched him from the door, my arms crossed at my waist. Zack was even thinner than he’d been in college, and his face had turned craggy, wearing a new set of vertical lines on either side of his mouth, as if he’d actually done a little suffering in the intervening years. But it was only a fresh mask, I decided; he still looked like a gleefully defiant boy.
“You shouldn’t have called me Hannah,” I said evenly. “I’m glad my roommate isn’t here and her kid’s asleep.”
He apologized in that easy way of a man who knows he’s quickly forgiven, and asked if I’d like to know how he’d found me, which in fact I did, but hadn’t wanted to ask. He explained that he’d bumped into a couple of old Brandeis SDS contacts who’d stayed more or less out of trouble but were still politically active in the Boston area, and they’d put him in touch with New York Weatherman, people who, he said, took him in and really turned his head around on what’s going down here in the States. From them he heard about my having been busted during the Days of Rage pillage and riot three years earlier and that I’d gone underground, was still more or less Weather, and camped out here in New Bedford. He said word had come down from the
Weather Bureau that he should come here and crank up a functioning cell with me, generate a little more action than manufacturing phony IDs. “So I went to Detroit for a crash course in bomb-making, which was cool, and caught the Greyhound for New Bedford,” he said. “They told me about the Dawn Carrington bit; it’s not that big a secret, babe, which is why I figured if I called you Dawn you’d freak and think it was the pigs or something, but if I called you Hannah you’d definitely open the door for me. Maybe you oughta change your name again, babe,” he said and drained the bottle. “Sure you don’t want a beer?”
“Yeah, okay, give me one,” I said and sat down across from him, believing about half his story.
Gradually, Zack brought me up to date on his life. “Changes, man, big changes.” After his tour as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, he’d taken our generation’s version of the Grand Tour. Though he didn’t say it, I knew he’d been financed by his trust fund as he drifted through most of the Third World, with extended stops in Tangier, Calcutta, Nepal, and Thailand for drugs and enlightenment, shorter visits to Saigon, Mexico City, and Havana for politics, and had ended back in the States, convinced that a worldwide revolution was inevitable and imminent. For Zack, the introductory music for the Revolution had already been struck up, and the theme song was “Street Fighting Man.”
“The past is prelude, man, and the prelude has passed. We’re in it now!”
Around two in the morning, Carol came home, and I introduced Zack as my cousin. From his extreme height, he splashed kindly attention onto her, and she responded with surprised pleasure and quick affection, and when he asked if he could crash at our apartment until he found a job and a place of his own, she readily agreed, without so much as a sideways glance in my direction.
“Where’s he gonna stay, Carol?” I asked.
“Your workroom,” she said. “It’s only temporary. Right, Zack?”
And to his credit, it was. A few days later, he rented a room in a downtown flophouse and took a part-time job driving a local cab.
It was hard not to like Zack, and especially hard for me not to take some of his voltage and use it to charge my own depleted batteries. Until he showed up, I had been moving slower and slower with every passing week. For the first time in my life, I depended more on habit and routine than on political commitment to get me though my days and nights, and no matter how much comfort I took in Carol’s and Bettina’s familial presence, I was lonely and sad and aimless most of the time. For years, since adolescence, I’d lived with the sense that soon, very soon, something life changing, maybe world changing was going to happen, that a political Second Coming was locked into the calendar, into my personal calendar. That belief had made my life seem exciting to me and purposeful. But in the past year, especially in the last few months, as the Vietnam War chewed up Southeast Asia and ate away at the American economy, and the body count kept rising, and Lyndon Johnson’s America got replaced by Nixon’s and Kissinger’s, and as I found myself growing older, in my thirties now, gray hairs showing up in the tub drain, it had started to seem that all I had to help me explain the content of my present life was the form of my past life.
There is a crucial transition from radical activist to revolutionary, and when you’ve made that crossing, you no longer question why you have no profession, no husband, no children, why you have no contact with your parents, and why you have no true friends—only comrades and people who think they’re your true friend but don’t know your real name. Until Zack showed up, even though I was paying the price of being a revolutionary, I hadn’t really made that crossing yet, and consequently my life had come to feel shriveled and gray, boring and pointless. I had the effects, but no cause.
Zack changed that. Almost immediately, as if we were a couple of pimple-faced kids starting a fan club for a rock star, he and I formed an independent Weather cell together—which was how it was generally done in those days, as there was no central authority or headquarters that kept track of us or passed out membership cards and a handbook. We were expected to work independently and generate and carry out actions against the War Machine ourselves. Within weeks, in the dingy, damp basement of the three-storey wooden tenement building on Phillips Street, while in the apartment upstairs, Carol and I and her daughter, Bettina, still pretended that we were a family, Zack and I were in the basement, two or three nights a week and on weekends, trying to make pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. Cousin Zack, as the little family half-jokingly called him, and I hinted to Carol that what we were making was cool and secret, which she assumed was a present for Bettina’s upcoming birthday, a dollhouse, maybe.
The rest of the time I sleepwalked through what passed in those days, the early and mid-1970s, for a normal, if quasi-bohemian, life. Except for the fact, of course, that my parents and no one from my childhood or adolescence or even from most of my adult life so far knew what my name was now or where I was living and working or the name of the young woman I lived with and what we did together on those few occasions when we were alone and in bed. And even the young woman herself did not know the truth, and probably never would, for as soon as Zack and I built and successfully set off our bombs, I intended to disappear from her life. I had in fact already cleaned up my room, packed my clothes and books and a few records, and destroyed everything that might connect me to Carol and incriminate her in any way. She had to be able to say, “I didn’t know anything about it,” and be telling the truth. In thirty seconds, all signs of my ever having lived in that apartment could be erased, and would be.
Otherwise, my life passed for ordinary. If I got caught trying to set off a bomb in the Federal Building in Boston, which was our primary target, or the Shawmut Bank or the eighteenth Precinct Boston Police Station, two of our secondary targets, or if one night, God forbid, down in the basement Zack or I, a little stoned on grass maybe, touched the wrong wires together and blew ourselves and the building to bits—like Diana, Ted, and Terry, when they blew up the townhouse on West Eleventh Street back in ’70—and if as a result of the accident we killed Carol and Bettina and who knows how many others in their sleep, then the neighbors and my co-workers at the hospital and the guys who ran the deli on the corner of Phillips and Bay Streets and the mailman and the guy who read the electric meter and the Greek who collected our rent once a month (in cash, always in cash), they’d all say, I dunno, she seemed like a nice enough girl, quiet, though, kept pretty much to herself, always paid the rent on time, didn’t smile much, didn’t socialize with anybody, except her friend, the other girl, the one with the kid. Never came to any of the office parties, didn’t hang out in the bars, not even the bar where her friend worked. Really kind of an ordinary girl, I guess. The kind of person you don’t actually notice. You could call her a loner. More a loner than a loser. Like whatzizname, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Basically, it was a childish fantasy, wanting to survive your own death so you could overhear the postmortem, read your own obituary, attend your own funeral, and I indulged it often. But at the same time I was aware of something rumbling beneath it, a hidden desire to get caught, to fail in a spectacular, even suicidal way, and it made me very nervous. It was the feeling I sometimes got driving over a high bridge: one quick tug of the steering wheel to the right, and it’s over the edge and straight down. I had to force myself consciously to resist that impulse, or else pretend that I wasn’t on a bridge—no, I was driving across the Plains, somewhere west of Iowa, nothing but flat, solid, grassy ground beneath me stretching from horizon to horizon.
WHEN HE WASN’T WORKING with me in the basement or driving his cab, Zack had taken to traveling to New York City for days at a time. “I’m making some very cool contact down there with our black comrades-in-arms,” he told me. “These brothers, man, they’re the forward force of the revolution, the elite corps. A lot of them have been in the joint, some of the brothers are vets back from ’Nam, man. And they’re pissed. They make Weather look like candy stripers, man.”
I asked him i
f they were Black Panthers, but he said, “No way, these guys are in deep cover, man. And the kind of action they’re into is almost beyond politics. These brothers are much heavier than the Panthers.” Again, I believed about half of what he told me. But the half I believed lifted my spirits. For years, ever since the Civil Rights movement got taken over by blacks, and the white college kids like me and the white lawyers and clergymen were sent home from the South, leaving us with only the splinters that were left of the antiwar movement—SDS, Weatherman, the Yippies, Diggers, and so on, all of whom were white and middle class—I’d felt somehow cheated out of my true mission, as if in my chosen line of work I’d been deprived of an essential tool, and that tool was black people. Practically from childhood, and especially in high school and college—thanks to my father’s old-time New England hierarchy of values, I’m sure, and his heavy emphasis on noblesse oblige—my heroes had been the nineteenth-century white abolitionists, most of whom were educated, upper-class women from New England. Like me. And my father had nothing for those women but unqualified praise and admiration. “Among all our distinguished ancestors, Hannah, those female abolitionists are the ones I hold in highest regard. The others, the men, all they ever did was make money. Until I came along,” he’d add, laughing, as if he, a world-famous pediatrician who wrote best-selling books on child care, had somehow managed to avoid making money.
I wanted to know more about these mysterious black proletarian warriors in New York City with whom Zack claimed to have initiated an alliance. But beyond offering hints, winks, and vague allusions to plans for bank robberies and high-jacked armored trucks and heavy weaponry, he wouldn’t tell me anything specific or concrete, which disappointed me, and after a while I figured they were largely a blend of rumor and fantasy cooked up by Zack and some of his male friends, the New York–based members of Weather. Radical white-boy wet dreams.