In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (38 page)

Jane Alpert, a fugitive since her appearance in a New York court in 1970, when she pled guilty to an antiwar bombing conspiracy with her lover Sam Melville, had undergone a change in her political thinking one year into her life underground. No longer a believer in revolutionary violence, the former Swarthmore honors student who had been willing to die for her cause moved from city to city under a series of assumed names, supporting herself by secretarial work and occasional aid from her loyal, distraught parents. Posing in San Diego as Ellen Davis, nicknamed Foxy, she walked into the Women’s Center one evening when the need for companionship triumphed over her fear of exposure. A consciousness-raising group was in formation, and she decided
to join it. It was there that she experienced her belated feminist conversion.

Sam Melville died at Attica in September 1971, when New York state troopers mounted a helicopter assault to quell the prison rebellion, killing three dozen inmates and three guards. Jane, spirited by the underground network into New York City to view his body, wrote a remembrance of their life together for a collection of his letters. Her mildly critical essay, written in haste, foreshadowed her changing perceptions. Robin Morgan, in secret visits, had become Alpert’s mentor in feminism, having severed her own ties to the radical left. Migrating to Santa Fe, then Albuquerque, then to suburban Connecticut, Jane studied some classic feminist texts and tried to make sense of her derailed existence. An unsatisfactory rendezvous with the Weather Underground, not her first, confirmed her political alienation from the clandestine band. She moved on to Denver, found employment as Carla Weinstein in an Orthodox Jewish school, and started composing a statement of her new beliefs.

Alpert’s vaguely spiritual, matriarchy-and-goddess-oriented essay bore the name “Mother Right,” and held that reproductive biology was the revolutionary source of female power. As a piece of theoretical writing it suffered from the fugitive’s intellectual isolation, but it nonetheless ignited a long fuse. The first part of the document, addressed to “Dear Sisters in the Weather Underground,” delivered a scathing reappraisal of Melville and a harsh critique of sexism in the radical left, a movement she referred to with brutal honesty as “forgotten” and “dying.” Angrily challenging the banner of Attica, she wrote, “I will mourn the loss of 42 male supremacists no longer.” She would come to regret the rhetorical excess of that line.

A mailing of “Mother Right” to a handful of weekly alternative newspapers in the spring of 1973 brought no response. A second mailing, to reporters who had covered her 1970 case, drew a story in the
Times
, “Female Fugitive Bids Women Shun Leftist Units,” and the publication of “Mother Right” in
off our backs
. Robin Morgan happily paved the way for
Ms
. to publish the full text in August with a compassionate introduction by Gloria Steinem.

Another year passed while Jane began the delicate process of turning
herself in. She surfaced in November 1974, represented by an experienced Washington lawyer Gloria had suggested to Robin. Unwilling to reveal anyone’s whereabouts in the underground network, Alpert walked a highwire in her meetings with the Justice Department and the FBI, minimizing her contacts with Weatherman and changing the cities of their rendezvous. As a government court document shows, she told the authorities she knew nothing of Pat Swinton, a second fugitive in the Melville case with whom she had traveled during her first year underground, until the stress of life on the run had splintered their friendship. Nonetheless, Jane had been sufficiently worried about Swinton’s safety to visit her estranged friend in the Vermont town of Brattleboro before she surfaced, to suggest that Pat take cover or move since the faintest of inadvertent clues, an old address of Jane’s or an alias, could conceivably lead to Pat’s door. Swinton, renamed Shoshana, had found a tranquil refuge at Total Loss Farm, a renowned left-pacifist commune, and was working in pleasant surroundings at a health food co-op. She chose to stay put.

Alpert was sentenced to twenty-seven months for the bombing conspiracy and bail jumping, and was shipped off to prison in Muncy, Pennsylvania. Three months later, in March 1975, Swinton was arrested at the food co-op in Brattleboro. Grandstanding for the press in a classic move to gain sympathy for his client, Swinton’s radical attorney placed the blame on Alpert. He disclosed that the two fugitives had traveled together, leaving Jane open to a perjury charge, and added that Pat had expected to be picked up after Jane’s surrender. Elevated overnight to the iconic status of Shoshana, radical heroine in jeopardy, Swinton embarked on a series of speeches, arranged by her defense committee, in which she concurred that Jane’s talks with the FBI must have led to her capture. Already predisposed to think the worst of Jane for her recantations in “Mother Right,” the leftists around Swinton mounted a smear and innuendo campaign accusing Alpert of being an informer. I did not believe them, and watched in horror as the virus spread into feminist circles.

Ti-Grace Atkinson and Flo Kennedy led the relentless attack on Jane inside the women’s movement, taking “
We Are Attica” as their slogan. Flo, it is true, had always placed prisoners and prison issues
near the top of her long list of causes, but a frontal assault on Jane was an irresponsible forum for these vital concerns. The kick-ass lawyer in the cowboy hat often wisecracked, “The women’s movement is my hustle,” to explain her theatrics on the lecture circuit. To her many fans the quip was a charming, outrageous Flo-ism; I was less forgiving.

Ti-Grace was bad news through and through. She had made a ridiculous spectacle of herself in 1971 at a “
Women and Violence” panel in New York shortly after the shooting of the mobster Joe Colombo, with whom she was acquainted. Walking up the aisle barefoot in flowing white garments on that occcasion, she unveiled the Mafia leader’s picture and intoned, “This is Sister Joe Colombo.” Then she had vilified everyone present, and some of those not present (including me), concluding with the incantation, “I, Ti-Grace Atkinson, divorce you.” Next she
popped up in a bitter dispute between Philadelphia and Chicago feminists over an abortion clinic and its methods, to propose that she preside over a movement tribunal. The high court of movement justice à la
Alice in Wonderland
and “Off with her head” seemed to be the direction in which she was going.

Why anyone was still listening to Ti-Grace was a mystery to me, but inflammatory rhetoric never fails to capture some of the people some of the time. Atkinson was a master at it. Employing the epithet coined by the Panthers, she called Jane “a high-level pig.”

I had no trouble figuring out which side I was on, and neither did most of my friends when Robin Morgan summoned us to an emergency meeting. I named our committee the Circle of Support for Jane Alpert. Florence Rush, at work on her history of the sexual abuse of children, and Barbara Mehrhof, of the old
FEMINISTS
, were the mainstays in New York. On the West Coast Susan Rennie and Kirsten Grimstad, editors of the
New Woman’s Survival Catalog
, and Susan Griffin, the poet and writer, pulled their connections to present Jane’s side of the story in the feminist press.

Statements were drawn up and circulated on both sides of the division. Some people straddled the fence, hoping Pat Swinton could avoid going to jail for whatever it was she had done, while remaining unconvinced that Jane’s actions had led to her capture. Grace Paley and Barbara
Deming, the leading peace-movement feminists, signed both sets of statements. Women’s newspapers around the country lavishly reported the controversy.
Big Mama Rag
in Denver,
her-self
in Ann Arbor, and
Plexus
in San Francisco were sympathetic to Jane.
Off our backs
wavered.
Lavender Woman
, Chicago’s lesbian-feminist newspaper, wound up in Jane’s corner while extending compassion to everyone. The Weatherwomen issued a statement from the underground maintaining that Alpert had jeopardized their safety. In an ugly bit of business,
Midnight Special
, a leftist newsletter distributed in Muncy and other prisons, called Jane a traitor and warned people to watch out for her. With good reason, she feared for her life.

As it turned out, Pat Swinton was aquitted of all charges in connection with the Melville bombings, and Jane Alpert got an extra four months tacked on to her sentence for refusing to testify in court against her. In all, Jane served two full years before getting time off for good behavior. By then it should have been clear to her attackers, as it was to the Department of Justice, that she hadn’t informed on Swinton or the Weather people, yet only one person involved in the smears was decent enough to send her an apology, the fellow who called her a traitor in
Midnight Special
. Jane and I became close friends after her release from jail and she even joined the antipornography campaign for a while, but her heart wasn’t in movement politics any longer. She’d had more than enough for one lifetime.

Susan Saxe and Katherine Ann Power, two former students at Brandeis, were on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for a 1970 bank robbery in Boston meant to finance their revolutionary operations. During their getaway, a much decorated member of the Boston police force who happened to be the father of nine children was murdered. The FBI easily captured three men involved in the bank heist, including the shooter (they were white ex-convicts enrolled in a special program at Brandeis), but the women eluded their net.

Saxe came out as a lesbian during her fugitive travels, finding shelter along with Power, as Lena Paley and May Kelly, in a scattering of college towns from Connecticut to Kentucky. At some point the two
fugitives went their separate ways. Saxe was arrested in Philadelphia in March 1975, a week after Pat Swinton’s capture. Refusing to talk about Power, she pleaded guilty to the Boston bank robbery, received a sentence of twelve years, and issued a statement scoffing at bourgeois feminism and Jane Alpert. She vowed, “I intend to fight on in every way as a lesbian, a feminist, an Amazon.”

It has never been clear how many of the women who harbored Saxe as “Lena Paley” were aware of her real identity before the FBI, on a tip from Lexington, Kentucky, zeroed in on the lesbian network. Neither is it clear what clues to her whereabouts and to Power’s those who had given her refuge may have possessed. Antigovernment sentiments in that era were such, however, that in the period prior to and after her capture, two young lesbians in New Haven, Ellen Grusse and Terri Turgeon, who called themselves revolutionary Marxists, spent seven months in prison for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigation. A lone holdout in Lexington, Jill Raymond, was jailed for more than a year for
her
refusal to cooperate with a grand jury.

The Saxe case with its long tentacles and excruciating side issues did not vitally engage some of us who were urgently enveloped in the Alpert-Swinton controversy. Alpert had disavowed violence and attempted to create new feminist theory, while Saxe was professing a continuing commitment to violence, and her lesbian identity seemed irrelevant to her plight. As Jill Johnston wrote in
The Village Voice
, it was highly improbable that Saxe’s sexual identity figured in the 1970 Boston bank robbery, so why should it matter in 1975? Johnston called Saxe “an interesting liability” and deplored the case’s romantic attraction for those lesbians who were rushing to glorify Saxe and the still-at-large Power as “Bonnies without Clydes.”

Romance aside, the Saxe case resonated profoundly among many lesbians who believed “the Man” was hounding their community because of its sexual orientation. For more than a year, until interest in Saxe subsided, they debated such questions as cooperation with the state, the harboring of radical fugitives, and the implications of standing by a lesbian sister defiantly committed to armed struggle.

The Redstockings attack on
Gloria Steinem for her former CIA connections broke out in the middle of the fugitives’ storm, adding to the rampant paranoia over agents and informers. This painful internal schism burrowed deeply into the movement’s psyche, pitting some of its most important founders against the popular leader whose ascendance had eclipsed them in the public’s eye.