Public Enemy (5 page)

He duly reported in the paper the next day that I had compared our situation to “some lost Japanese soldiers from World War II stumbling suddenly from a dense Pacific island jungle into the modern world.”

Incredible, I thought, even as I sympathized: why let unruly facts get in the way of a sweet narrative?

Bernardine made a brief statement in court noting that her views concerning the nature of the system were unchanged, that she was in no way turning away from her revolutionary dreams, and that she intended to continue the struggle by other means. The judge smiled beneficently down from the bench and answered that while he disagreed with her analysis and her goals, he was nonetheless glad to see her back, and that he hoped she would now pursue her objectives through peaceful and legal channels. Like politicians of all stripes, the media from left to right, and the country as a whole at that time, the judge seemed relieved to forget that there ever was a place called Viet Nam with its attendant horrors and humiliations, and move on—the classic American selective amnesia: “Let’s just remember the good things.”

He smiled again, peering over his glasses, as he rejected the state’s attorney’s demand for a million-dollar bail, noting that he knew these Weathermen well. Bernardine was not about to plunge underground immediately after going to all the trouble of surfacing: “When they’re gone, they’re gone, and when they’re back, they’re back.” Bernardine gave a press conference a few minutes later in a packed room. “This is no surrender,” she said. “The fight against racism and war continues, and I will spend my energy organizing to defeat the American empire.” Then she stopped in a neighboring courtroom to express solidarity with a group of prisoners known as the Pontiac Brothers facing death for leading a prison rebellion, before we were whisked down a rear elevator and spirited out of the building,

A few minutes later, we met up with our happy kids and a merry band of family and friends. My brother Juan, like our father before him, was a Chicago booster and chauvinist—he often ridiculed the Left Coast and the Right Coast as he offered marvelous, personalized tours of the City of the Big Shoulders. Juan knew every back alley and hidden side street, and he haunted them all. Michael Kennedy had told Juan that he wanted to treat us all to lunch at “the best restaurant in Chicago,” and Juan led a dozen of us to Nueva Leon on Eighteenth Street, a family restaurant in Pilsen, where we feasted on nachos dias, tostadas, tortillas con queso with three degrees of salsa, the best spicy guacamole any of us had ever tasted, and lots of celebratory toasts with Dos Equis and Mexican hot chocolate. When the check arrived, Michael was bewildered: “This is so small,” he complained. “I’m a New Yorker, and I’m a lot more comfortable when I’m being ripped off.”

My parents joined us at Juan and Judi’s Logan Square apartment that evening, and there were tears of joy and sweet relief all around. When the doorbell rang, Bernardine and I tensed slightly out of habit until Juan returned with a gift for Bernardine from three University of Chicago law students: a maroon T-shirt with her alumni logo and the words “Bastion of Medieval Scholasticism.”

A lot had changed in a decade, of course—Mom and Dad were overjoyed to meet Bernardine, whom they loved on sight, and ecstatic to know their two grandsons—but when Dad said to me over dinner, “Bill, you need a haircut,” I realized that some things remained remarkably intact. I was thirty-five years old, the father of two young children, and had just surfaced from a decade on the run from the law for notorious—“detestable”—actions, and yet my dad mentioned none of it: “You need a haircut.” I found that oddly heartening.

We four drove back to New York, to our tiny fifth-floor walk-up on 123rd Street and the cramped bedroom where we’d seen the face of God a second time when Malik was born ten months earlier, and to our welcoming neighbors and sweet friends. We returned to BJ’s Kids, the dazzling child-care center where I worked and which our kids attended, to the playgrounds of Central Park, to Hunan Balcony and Zabar’s, and to the work that had sustained us for the last few years.

Winnie, our apartment building super, had her all-seeing eye on the block from her window day and night, and when she spotted us pulling up she ran to the street to welcome us home wearing the same gray housedress, floral bathrobe, and bedroom slippers she wore all day, every day. She was short and as perfectly round as a bagel, buzzing with energy and ever loyal to friends and “good tenants”: she had a pear and a colorful pinwheel in one hand for Zayd, a quick tickle and a coochie-coo for Malik. “I read all about you,” she said. “You coulda knocked me over with a feather.” But all of that was behind us now, and anyway, we were good tenants—“I made you a pineapple upside-down cake, and if you can come by the office at six, I’ll get Jimmie and Hector and Ilene and Marta and we can have a little celebration.” She had clipped the story from the
Times
and had our front-page photo proudly posted on the door to her little office.

All of our friends learned our names now, awkwardly at first. We set aside our
noms de guerre
in favor of Bernardine and Bill, and those names sounded jarring for a time, even to us. Of course, everyone now remembered or discovered that
Time
magazine and the
New York Times
had called us American terrorists in 1970, and that the word had been hurled in our direction from the halls of Congress as well. It was a definite disconnect for many, but for some it was too close for comfort. Two parents at BJ’s Kids called a meeting—we were not invited—to discuss whether our presence created any vulnerability for the child-care center or for the kids. By all accounts it was a raucous meeting, some folks feeling personally betrayed by our deceit, some that we had, intentionally or not, put them at risk, others arguing the opposite: we’d been right to conceal our identities, for it allowed them all to be free from any kind of culpability or conspiracy. Bernardine and I felt bad for everybody, and especially for BJ, but when she called us late that night she was thrilled. “People needed to get it all out on the table,” she said, “but I’m so proud of everyone for working it through, and I learned so much about how people think about politics and personal responsibility. And you two are really loved in this community.” One family elected to leave, which was sad to me, but even that mom took me aside a few days later to tell me it wasn’t personal but she was a frightened person much of the time, and this was just too big for her.

We picked up where we’d left off. I went back to graduate school and to teaching at BJ’s, Bernardine proceeded to study for and pass the New York State bar exam, each of us focused fiercely on raising our precious boys, and we both returned to open—“aboveground”—political work. The notoriety surrounding our return to the open world was short-lived, and the drama faded into the haze of memory as well.

The tempo of our lives echoed the rhythms of our two engaging boyos: early dinners and nightly baths, bedtimes with favorite stories, brown-bag lunches and healthy snacks for school, dance classes at the Harlem Dance Studio or art classes at the Y on Saturdays, trips to the zoo and the beach and the museums. From the outside, our earlier lives as student radicals, full-time activists, and then self-proclaimed revolutionaries and fugitives on the run from the law would seem a sharp contrast to this, but oddly it wasn’t at all. In part this was because our daily lives—everyone’s lives, after all, underground or aboveground, on the run or in the mix—were largely taken up with everyday matters: working, putting food on the table, paying the bills, cooking and cleaning, seeing friends, helping neighbors. Can you imagine a decade on the run without doing the laundry? The ordinariness of it was one of its most remarkable features. And in part it was because the extraordinary excitement of raising kids for anyone paying attention is more packed with purpose than anyone outside of it can possibly imagine—a life in miniature in one sense, but our days as vast and full and dense with drama, discipline, and commitment as they had ever been.

Bernardine and I were paying laser-like attention, and for the first few years the steady surprises—noticing one day that Zayd was studying our faces and looking from one to another as we talked, apparently taking in language long before he could speak; the first time Malik toddled over to a crying child and gently patted his back—occurred under the cloud of our vulnerability. We set up contingencies for their care if we were suddenly arrested, and we had a mantra that we repeated again and again to one another: whatever might happen now, he had a perfect birth . . . or a great day . . . or a wonderful first month . . . or year. We counted methodically backward and forward: whatever else happens, it’s been great till now.

Leaving swim class one day, we were swept up into a raucous women-led march heading from Broadway and Fifty-ninth Street toward Times Square. “No more porn! No more porn! No more porn!” we chanted ecstatically, fists pumping and voices rising as we entered the pornography district. It was a feisty and colorful crowd, our attendance just a happy accident, but with Zayd cheerfully perched on my shoulders we were in high spirits and quite pleased to be in cahoots. Soon we spotted a pizza stand along the route, and Zayd was famished from swimming and ready for a slice, so we settled into a booth. Zayd reflected on the parade we’d just left: “That was fun,” he said. “Why don’t we want more corn?”

Our children were the hub and heart of everything, and the little day-care center became the nucleus of the everyday. Finding that magical place—three years before turning ourselves into the authorities—was one of those miraculous moments when choice and chance suddenly rhyme. Malik had not been born and Zayd was a year old when we first toddled into that enchanted spot. We were using a not-so-clever or imaginative underground moniker for him, simply the letter Z. I was called Tony Lee because Lee seemed to be the most common surname in the Manhattan phone directory, and Bernardine was Lou. Tony Lee, Lou Lee, and Z Lee—it had the rhythmic sound of three high school friends gathered in a garage with wildly inflated dreams of rock-and-roll glory.

We’d been in New York for just a few months then, living in a single shabby room in a Skid Row hotel near Times Square. The roaches were an unending scuffle with a temporary victory declared by us whenever the battlefield moved from our bed to the tiny sink under a bare light bulb in the far corner. The shared bathroom down the hall was a challenge, too, especially with a toddler to keep sparkling and clean, but the folks on our floor—old men with hard times etched into every crease of their leathery faces—were kind and accommodating, being sure to clear a shining path to the old tin tub or the toilet whenever necessary. “Love the kid,” they’d say warmly, wrinkling into a smile or peek-a-booing to get a guaranteed happy response from Z.

Lou/Bernardine had worked a temp service job into a regular secretarial position at an office nearby, which allowed us to meet up at a diner for lunch—and a chance to nurse—every day. We settled into a suitable routine, heading out of the hotel and onto the street by 7:30 each morning, a quick coffee and bagels at the corner dive, and then Lou off to work, Z and I to the train and one of the several spots we’d found to be perfect winter playgrounds for him: the Metropolitan Museum of Art with its knights and armor room, Macy’s toy section with the plush carpets and giant stuffed animals, the Guggenheim with its massive circular ramp rising into the sky, Shakespeare and Company with children’s books galore. By ten we were back at the diner in Times Square, ready for replenishment and renewal.

I always rode the subway in those days accompanied by a shadowy memory from a nightmare that had startled me awake when we first arrived in the city. In that dreadful dream I entered the train with Z in my arms, swung him easily into a seat by the door, and suddenly realized that my backpack was on the platform, just out of reach. As I jumped off for less than a second to retrieve it, the doors slammed shut, and the train sped away. I woke up screaming.

When I began to look for work in earnest, we auditioned a couple of different babysitters we’d found through word of mouth, but neither was quite right, and nothing worked out beyond a morning or two. Perhaps we were overly critical or hypersensitive, perhaps handing over our precious one to someone else for the first time was too alarming, and being without him for more than an hour at a time a bit unbearable, or perhaps these two caregivers really were inadequate in some way. Perhaps we would let him out of our sight when he was twenty-one years old, we joked. Who knew? But because we were unsettled and unsure, and because we trusted our own instincts, we decided to keep on looking, unhurried and deliberate.

One Monday morning after a quick trip to the Natural History Museum and a visit with the giant whale suspended from the ceiling on the lower level, Z and I made our way up to Eighty-fourth Street near Riverside Drive—only a few blocks away but an authentic expedition for a toddler practicing the fine art and exciting skill of walking with his willing papa wobbling along behind, and with the New York City sidewalks filled with giant bags of garbage and fascinating objects fit for close examination and deep exploration at every step. We were off to visit with a woman who was just beginning a child-care center in the basement of a brownstone.

A mom we’d met in a playground had referred us to “BJ’s Kids.” “BJ is amazing,” she’d told us, “and it’s affordable, committed care.” Nice: affordable
and
committed. While we couldn’t be sure what those two words meant exactly, we figured they had to signify something specific; she could have chosen other pairs—“cheap, faithful” or “sparkling clean” or “tough love.” To us, “affordable” struck an immediate and essential chord, and “committed” meant so much more—it was a stretch, for sure, but we imagined that somehow she might be part of our extended and far-flung tribe, our very own beloved community. And we weren’t wrong.

When I’d talked to her on the phone she was super-friendly and wide open, and she urged us to drop by anytime. I liked that—she didn’t need to clean up her act or prep for a performance. “Just come down the front stairs,” she’d said. “We’re in the garden apartment.” Whatever we were about to see was just what we’d get.