Breakaway
The one day I thought for sure my life was on track
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.
After a month in a dilapidated rooming house on the south side of Providence, Rhode Island, I was beginning to learn the social conventions of living among transients. Nod when you pass someone. Return their greeting. Stop and talk if they want to talk, but don’t tell them too much about yourself. Getting the hang of this, I began to feel less conspicuous, more at ease in my surroundings.
One morning, testing my new skills, I stopped to talk to an African-American woman and her teenaged daughter who were just moving in. That brief conversation did more than anything else that year to convince me that my life was on track and I was destined for great things in the revolution to come.
The mother had questions about trash disposal and rent payments. Sensing she wanted to talk, I asked where they were moving from. She told me she had just been through a divorce, and they had been evicted from their apartment. To top it all off, her daughter had had a run-in with police. A group of black teenagers were at a movie downtown when a fight broke out. The police moved in with their nightsticks and arrested a dozen of them, including the daughter, who had received a court summons.
Instantly I was on full alert. I belonged to PL, a communist group eager to foment mass uprisings against capitalism. Confronting police brutality was one of our top priorities. The timing was perfect. For weeks now we’d been looking for an issue like this. A big demonstration was to be held tomorrow at the Rhode Island State House, led by a city-wide coalition we were part of. To promote ourselves as the most radical group in town, we hoped to instigate a breakaway march on the police station downtown. We had prepared signs denouncing the war, capitalism, and police repression, but we had no local event to tie them to. Thanks to my brief encounter in the rooming house hallway, now we did.
Eagerly I asked mother and daughter if I could write up their story for a leaflet. After they unpacked and got settled, I brought over paper and pen and wrote out the girl’s account of what had happened. Naturally this narrative put the police in the worst possible light. The girl and all of her friends were entirely innocent. The police “attack” was unprovoked. By the time we got through massaging the story, the fight the mother had referred to never happened.
That evening I spent several hours with Bruce, the local leader of our group, transforming the story into a Party leaflet that we could print off and distribute to advertise the breakaway. By 9 pm it was ready for printing. Because of the huge crowd expected, I had to drive to Boston, where PL had a high-volume mimeo machine. Printing off 10 reams of paper was an enormous task. I didn’t make it back to Providence until daybreak.
People were already converging on the State House grounds in the late afternoon when I backed my battered Volkswagen to a curb at one end. Rented loudspeakers were attached to the roof. Bruce’s girlfriend Emily was scheduled to speak at the rally. She would alert the crowd to the breakaway march, and as soon as I saw the crowd gathering near me, I would pull out into the street and lead the procession downtown.
As I eased into the parking spot, Bruce and a couple of our comrades came over, along with a tall, broad-shouldered black man I hadn’t seen before. This was Gene, an Army NCO Bruce had met selling the Party newspaper. Bruce had been talking about him for a while now, but this was the first time I’d seen him.
They carried off posters and the box of leaflets I’d brought. I stayed by the car, awaiting my cue. Nearly two hours had passed by the time Emily got up to the podium. Dusk had deepened. I could barely make out her voice. How would I know when my cue came? If I had to guess I was bound to guess wrong. Would it be better to start early or late? The seconds were slipping away, and I couldn’t decide. I got in the car, started the engine, turned on the sound system, and heard my voice boom from somewhere above me.
People nearby looked up in puzzlement. I was too early. But least they could hear me. I’d wait here a few minutes for the crowd to head toward me.
Suddenly the mike went dead. I got out to check the wiring on top of the car. Someone grabbed me. When I tried to break free, heavy hands pinned my arms behind me. I caught a quick glimpse of handcuffs and felt steel on my wrists. I was half-pulled, half-shoved toward a late model sedan. Somebody opened a rear door. They shoved me inside. A guy in a suit squeezed in after me. Who were these guys, local cops? The Feds? Organized crime?
No one spoke. My brain struggled to catch up with what had just happened. What would become of the breakaway march without me and the loudspeaker to lead it?
The car slid forward, headed downtown. It was almost dark now. After a couple of turns, I had no idea where we were. The car stopped in an alley. Two suits hustled me into a large nondescript building, up a long flight of stairs, and into a large brightly lit office, where I was shoved onto a metal chair.
A balding man with an enormous forehead and belly settled himself opposite me on a stool. Local cop, I decided. They must have been waiting for us at the State House. But how did they know? We’d kept the plan secret. The speakers came from an out-of-town rental company.
It was very hot in the office, even though a window stood open on a far wall. The balding man settled his behind on the stool. I braced myself mentally for whatever was coming.
“Who the h*** are you and what’s going on out there?”
Didn’t he already know? What was he after? The names of comrades? What was in store for me if I didn’t talk? Jail? Torture? A beating? Would they break me?
I told him what he could have found out from my wallet. There was a lot more I could say that he already knew, but I’d have to dole it out slowly. Make him work for it, so that at the end he’d think he got everything.
He let me joust with him a few minutes. Then the questions slowed down. His voice got quiet. Then, ominously, it stopped. He took some sort of tool out of a leather pouch attached to his belt. To my terrified eyes it looked like a small hammer. He began slapping it rhythmically into the palm of his hand. I willed myself not to move.
The slapping sound stopped. I stiffened in alarm. The bulging behind twisted on the frail-looking stool as the man looked looked over his shoulder. Through the open window, I heard a faint murmur, but couldn’t make out what it was. Could the sound of the demonstration carry all the way downtown from the State House?
The bald man shrugged and turned back to me, but the murmur got louder. The crowd must be on the move, heading our way. How did they know where to go, with no car and no loudspeaker to lead them?
The sound grew louder and nearer. I could hear the rhythm of chanting. Still the noise swelled, till it sounded like the crowd right under our window. I heard “Free.” Then something muddled. “Free” again, and all of a sudden “Free Charlie.” All that for me!
The bald man got up and closed the window.
“They know I’m here.”
Very slowly, he put his tool back in its pouch, crossed the room to an open doorway, and said something to someone I couldn’t see. Two uniformed officers came into the room and took off the handcuffs. Suddenly I was in motion again. The scene jerked forward like an old black-and-white movie. A dark stairway. A metal rail. A door that opened outside. The cement sidewalk. The crowd yelling. Bruce shouting at me and shoving a bullhorn into my hands. The sound of my own voice getting hoarse, straining to be heard over the wild noise of the crowd. After that, darkness. Somehow I got back home and to bed, but I have no recollection of how.
The next thing I remember is sitting next to my girlfriend Eileen in the college cafeteria, bathed in wan morning light. Eileen had been at the State House, and filled me in on what happened. The six people who showed up for PL were wondering how they were going to pass out 5000 leaflets when a couple of black teenagers showed up. They’d been in the movie theater ruckus and wanted to help. Their friends joined in. Pretty soon the leaflets were gone and it seemed like everyone on the State House grounds seemed to be reading them. When Emily got up there to talk, a wave of anger swept over the crowd. They surged down the hill. Bruce fought his way to the front and started the chant I’d heard inside the police building. When they spotted me coming out of the side door, it felt like they’d won a great victory.
Bruce joined us, reporting that the morning paper said that just a couple of hundred people had joined the breakaway march. Everyone knew that was a lie. The true number had to be in the thousands. The paper also reported that some of the marchers broke away at the end and ran through downtown streets breaking windows and looting.
“Saboteurs,” somebody muttered. Several others agreed. That was a standard line for PL: when demonstrations turned violent it was the fault of police instigators.
All that day and the next I struggled to wrap my head around what had happened. The chance meeting with mother and daughter, writing up their account of the movie theater attack, the late-night trip to Boston, grinding out thousands of leaflets, the car, the speakers, the cops, and the roar of the crowd—they were all jumbled together in memory. As I sorted through them I felt a kind of awe at the role I had played. The convergence of all these different events was astounding. It felt like I’d been an actor, cast in a role in a script someone else wrote.
Something else nagged at me about what happened that day—the black teenagers that helped pass out all those leaflets. Who were they? What were we doing to follow up with them?
I asked Bruce about this. He didn’t look pleased.
“There’s a problem.”
The problem was Gene. Gene, the black NCO he’d recruited. When the high school kids saw him they scattered. One of them explained to Bruce that Gene had been at their school asking all kinds of questions. Gene was a cop. Gene was undercover. That was why the kids never gave us their names. We had no way to find them.
At first I couldn’t believe this. After I’d had more time to think about it, though, it made sense. They’d targeted us. We were dangerous. The breakaway march proved it. A lot of that was my doing. Pretty much all of it, I later convinced myself. Unlike some of the other middle-class radicals, I’d transformed myself. I’d gone to live in a place where no one knew me, where I was nothing and no one. It was because of that transformation that the mother and daughter had told me their story.
What more validation than that did I need? My life was on the right track. A glorious future of violent revolutionary leadership stretched out before me.
Or so I told myself. In those days before I knew God I could be very persuasive, especially inside my own head.
God, of course, had a different plan, of which I was blissfully ignorant.
His plan did not preclude me pursuing my own. But it did dictate that my path would not lead where I hoped. Through these vain pursuits, He was teaching me something important about human weakness and about the fruitlessness of my own will and that of my comrades. When we edged too close to success, He pushed us away. Gene was his emissary. Because of him, we never saw the black teenagers again, not even one.
Over the next days and weeks, the intoxicating fury of that night all drained away, leaving the ghost of a memory. I no longer think of that night as the night I led a mass uprising or the night a police agent thwarted our movement. Now that I know God, I thank him for sending a police agent into our midst. Bruce’s “recruit” Gene, whom we all vilified for months afterward, was God’s agent, His way of protecting me and the rest of our little cabal from the results of our folly.