A Future Together
Love and jealousy in a summer of radical activism
A new installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. New to the series? This introduction provides context for the events described here. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is also available.
When I look back on the summer I spent in Atlanta in 1971, I have a vivid impression that I was being shown something I didn’t fully recognize at the time, something that opened my eyes to undercurrents of regret, need, and human frailty to which I’d been oblivious up to that point in my life. Ironically, it was my girlfriend Eileen, who had agreed to this venture somewhat reluctantly, who was the unwitting source of these insights.
That summer Eileen and I lived with four other people in a tumbledown 3-room apartment, all of us working full-time to spread communism. The constant company of our comrades left us little time alone together. I looked forward to Saturday mornings, when the volunteers spread out through poor neighborhoods and sold newspapers door to door, and Eileen and I could arrange to be paired together.
Canvassing neighborhoods on the weekend was less stressful than selling at factory gates, which occupied most weekday mornings. Unlike the workers, people who answered the door were friendly and had time to listen and talk to us. I have especially sweet memories of Summerhill, one of the poorest areas in all of Atlanta, a cross-hatch of hilly, treeless streets lined with dilapidated shotgun-style houses rented to blacks. The gracious welcome they gave us was unlike anything else I experienced during that grueling summer.
Summerhill had a reputation for crime, but when we arrived at 10 am, the streets were empty, shadeless, and silent. Early as it was, the pavement was already hot. The bare ground, showing in patches through parched lawns, was dusty and cracked. Trudging from one house to another, I felt a powerful sense of desolation in old tires, broken toys, and sagging porches. Yet at nearly every front door, someone answered our knock. First we would hear a faint thumping or creaking. Then a figure gradually materialized out of the darkness and a face peered at us through the screen.
You would have thought they’d be annoyed to be disturbed on a Saturday morning by a pair of white strangers, but we invariably got a courteous greeting. After listening to a sentence or two of our pitch, the residents often agreed that the bosses and landlords were bad and that working people were held down and victimized by the system.
When we asked about their experience, it was astonishing how willing they were to share intimate details of their lives. One spoke of a son that died, another of a mill that closed, others of the birth of a great-grandchild or a loved one’s long illness or a friend’s tempestuous marriage. Simple, quiet, homespun stories that were nonetheless strangely resonant, as if coming to us from a cavern of silence. And a tone of resignation, an undercurrent of sadness, punctuated with gentle humor and every now and then a whisper of irony. It was easy to forget our recruiting mission and just stand there and listen. It was then, listening, that I first sensed that I was out of sync with Eileen.
We heard the same stories. Why, though, were our reactions so different?
Eileen came away angry. How could the world hold so much pain and injustice? How could people do awful things like that to each other? Why had the world ignored all of this? What could we do to help these people fight back?
I, however, felt no call to arms. No anger. No sense of righteous resolve. Those lovely, sad, resonant stories left me only with feelings of tenderness. The humble souls who spoke from their doorways chose us to share the burden of their regret for reasons that had nothing to do with the movement we were trying to recruit them to. It seemed to me our mere presence outside those tattered screen doors was more important than anything we could do as radical activists. Every so slowly, I was moving away from the communist movement, though I would no more have admitted that to myself then than I would have acknowledged the feeling that Eileen and I were not on the same page.
We canvased other neighborhoods besides Summerhill. Grant Park, a racially mixed working-class neighborhood with well-tended front yards and neat bungalows mostly occupied by their owners, sticks in my mind because of a surprising encounter that accentuated the distance I sensed between Eileen and me. At one of the houses a slender, slightly stooped white man who appeared to be in his late 60’s blinked out at Eileen. “O’Shaughnessy!” he exclaimed, before she could start her pitch. “Don’t you remember me?”
She stared. Then she remembered—a neighbor from home, someone she hadn’t seen since she was a child. Here he was, a thousand miles away from the old neighborhood, and he still recognized her. He invited us inside. We chatted companionably for a half hour—about Providence, about the old neighborhood, about Eileen’s family and his own. I remember wondering if he was still in touch with anyone back in Rhode Island, and if so whether word would get back to Ma that we’d shown up at his door.
Eileen was very quiet after we left. We started walking toward the car. Sensing her mood, I didn’t speak. And then, out of the blue, she said she really didn’t feel all that homesick, but it was just so strange to see a neighbor from Providence right here in Atlanta.
I agreed, hoping to encourage her to talk more, but she didn’t. I was left wondering what was going on in her mind. Coming here had been a thousand-mile journey, a long way to travel when you’ve never left home before. Maybe, underneath all the excitement of that tumultuous summer, she did miss Ma and Josie, her younger sister. Was she counting the days till it ended? I wondered what it would be like going back. Eileen living at home again under Ma’s rules. I’d assumed Eileen dreaded that. Now, though, I wasn’t so sure.
Whatever internal conflict Eileen might have felt, her energy and enthusiasm for the cause impressed our comrades. She was the only one of us to make a contact at Grady Memorial, Atlanta’s major public hospital and one of its largest employers. Yvonne, an African-American girl in her late teens, worked there as an orderly. She lived with seven other family members in a small rented house near the Summerhill area. Her father had died in a mill accident. She was the only one in the family working full-time, and they depended on her paycheck to pay rent and buy food for all eight of them.
Peter, leader of the volunteer group, listened in on one of their phone calls. He was impressed by the way Eileen drew Yvonne out and urged her to cultivate the relationship. Yvonne and Eileen’s anxiety about her began to play a larger role in our lives. If she couldn’t reach her by phone, she worried something awful had happened. If she did reach her, she brooded about all the things that had gone wrong in Yvonne’s life: headaches from the smells in the hospital, unfair reprimands when she reported to work late, the landlord’s neglect of repairs.
I tried to be sympathetic, but it was hard. Eileen’s angst seemed all out of proportion. Yvonne’s complaints struck me as melodramatic. Was she even that close to Eileen? It was always Eileen that called Yvonne, never Yvonne who called her. Was Yvonne interested at all in Eileen, or did she just come to the phone when she felt like venting?
I knew better than to say this out loud. She would have resented my skepticism, and it would have attracted the wrong kind of attention. We were supposed to be encouraging one another. Besides, Eileen’s stock in our group was rising. The last thing I wanted to do was jeopardize that. I had already begun to feel a distance between us. I didn’t want other people prying into our relationship. If our comrades saw both of us as productive, they were less likely to try.
The new respect for Eileen, however, did have a downside. Stan, a PL stalwart and the only unattached male in the group, noticed her success and asked to meet with her privately to discuss her progress and future plans. Hearing that, I felt a stab of jealousy. Stan had been through a terrible ordeal—military prison, where he was sent for trying to promote communism in the Army. Would Eileen’s sweet, sympathetic nature be triggered? Would she draw him out about his stockade experience the way she drew out Yvonne? Would that lead to intimacy?
I couldn’t object to the meeting with Stan. Any hint of jealousy would make people think I was insecure about my relationship with Eileen. In the end not much came of it. Eileen didn’t say much afterward, but I couldn’t detect any change in her. My anxiety about Stan soon receded, as a more pressing concern came to the fore. Our cramped quarters were becoming unbearable. Peter was in a bad mood and the rest of us bore the brunt of it. Why weren’t more contacts being made? Why weren’t we reaching out to bring people to meetings? He was particularly surly when he came back from meetings with the local SDS group. I suspected the Atlanta comrades were dissatisfied, and Peter had been called on the carpet.
Tension increased one night when Rachel, Peter’s girlfriend, brought a sleeping bag into the living room and unrolled it on the floor where the rest of us slept. I didn’t fully realize what had happened till the next morning, when I got up to go to the bathroom and saw Alyssa spreadeagled under the sheet next to Peter. Just like that, he had switched bed partners without any of us being aware. It was weird and off-putting. Officially PL emphasized the importance of stable relationships. Was all that just window dressing? Could Peter blithely discard one partner and take up with another without consequences?
In early August, as the summer wound down and we began to think about our return to New England, tension ratcheted up yet again. Peter announced that the women in the group needed more privacy. A separate apartment had been rented for them. They would move in immediately. Eileen had said nothing to me about this. Had she been told in advance? If so, why had she kept it from me? Who was behind this abrupt move? Was this new talk of privacy a subterfuge to separate me from Eileen?
My anxiety spiked when Irma Jean, the local Party leader, and Peter, leader of the volunteer group, asked to meet with Eileen and me privately to discuss the women’s apartment. I braced myself for awkward questions about our relationship. To my astonishment, the subject never even came up. Peter, who I had expected to take the lead, sat silent as Irma Jean explained matter-of-factly that there had been concerns about summer volunteers’ living conditions. It was decided the women in the group needed privacy. Irma Jean had notified National Office. Funds for a short-term lease on a second apartment had been authorized.
I glanced at Eileen. She seemed as puzzled as I was. Maybe this move wasn’t about us after all. What could have triggered it, then? I looked over at Peter. He avoided my eye. It dawned on me what must have happened. Irma Jean had found out about Alyssa and Rachel. My suspicion faded, replaced by relief. It was good to know I wasn’t the only one who found that situation uncomfortable.
It wasn’t easy maintaining a connection with Eileen, with her living in the women’s apartment and me separately with the men. Somehow we managed. On the rare occasions we were alone together, I saw no change in her, no reserve, no sign of concealment that would have hinted that something happened between her and Stan. If anything we talked more freely than we had in the weeks prior. Yvonne’s ordeals remained center stage, but Eileen had also begun to think about going back to Rhode Island at the end of the month. She had mixed feelings. It would be a relief to be done with the Summer Project. It would be good seeing our friends again. Josie and Ma too. But she was not looking forward to going back to Ma’s apartment and Ma’s rules.
Talking like this, I felt the intimacy we had enjoyed in Rhode Island before the Summer Project began. We were on the same page again. We agreed that the return to Rhode Island would be a step backward for us, but was there any realistic alternative? For a week or so we mulled over this problem, till a solution came to us from none other than Irma Jean, the last person I would have expected to be interested in our future plans. I was totally caught off guard when, for the second time, she asked to meet with us privately.
“Some of us have been talking.” She gazed fixedly at us, as if searching for a clue to our response to what she planned to say next. “We decided I should ask you if you would consider relocating to Atlanta.”
Relocating? No one, since this trip was first mentioned back in the spring, had given any hint that any of us would be asked to stay on past the summer. After all Peter’s badgering, I’d thought Party leaders couldn’t wait to be done with the lot of us. And yet, here was Irma Jean, who outranked Peter, actually inviting us to join the group in Atlanta. We’d done good work, she was saying. We’d made local contacts. Important ones. We were needed.
Needed! At that point in my life, I don’t think anyone had ever said that to me before. It was the last thing I expected to hear from Irma Jean or anyone else here. It got very quiet. Irma Jean looked from one of us to the other.
I risked an inquiring glance at Eileen. Thrilled as I was at Irma Jean’s invitation, I hardly dared hope Eileen would agree. Back in Providence, Ma was waiting. When we went away for the summer, Ma had complained she’d be all alone. What would she say if we moved down here for good?
Our future hung in the balance. It was one of those moments in which one had the illusion of being able to turn in either direction. If we were alone in the world, that would be true. In reality, though, God influences us in countless subtle ways that unbelievers may never recognize. He had a plan for our lives. The plan did not involve us moving back to Rhode Island. I know that now, but back then I did not see it coming.
Eileen met my gaze and flashed a quick, tentative smile.
“Could we transfer to college here? Would they accept the credits we earned back in Rhode Island?”
Irma Jean turned to her, and I could see she sensed Eileen’s hesitation. In her quiet way she stepped in to take charge.
“Why don’t the two of you go in to Georgia State and see if you can meet with an advisor.”
The very next morning we did. The answers we got from advisors were all very encouraging. Whatever doubts Eileen entertained vanished. All the rest of that day and the next and the next after that, we talked excitedly about how we would go about putting down roots in Atlanta and what it would be like making our home there.
We traveled north to tell our parents the news, weathering sorrow, anger, and disappointment. At that point in our lives, nothing and no one could have deterred us from what we decided. After the grueling ordeal of that summer, it was an incredible relief to be able at last to look forward to a future together.