Breaking with Communism

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.

Breaking with communism was slow and painful, but it wasn’t difficult to accomplish. In the end I simply rented an apartment on the other side of town and didn’t tell anyone where I was going or why.

It was slow because it took two years to make up my mind. The painful part was alienation from my closest friends, my comrades in arms, my support network. Little by little I lost respect for them. For as long as I could, I kept this secret. It wasn’t something I wanted to share, especially with Irma Jean, local leader of the Party. She lived in the same apartment complex as Kirk and me, who were both Party members. For several months the three of us saw quite a lot of each other. Kirk and Irma Jean became the fulcrum of my doubt and disillusionment.

Irma Jean was a stout, brash, redhead in her early thirties, 7 years older than me. More often than not, her thick red hair was unkept and she wore frayed clothing in loud colors, sometimes blotched with stains. She’d grown up in a small town in South Carolina, gone to college to be a math teacher, and ended up in Union Theological Seminary in New York before being recruited to communism. I wasn’t attracted to her, but I admired her confidence and air of authority. She alone, of all the activists I ever met, seemed truly to have transcended her middle-class background and become a new person. Now that we lived nearby, I hoped she would be an example for the next phase of my life. Observing her at close quarters, though, I began to have doubts.

Over the past year Irma Jean had worked hard to recruit Donald, an African-American steelworker. Eventually he embraced the cause, and soon afterward they became a couple. Donald was charming and ebullient, but married. He divided evenings and weekends between Irma Jean and his wife and children who lived across town.

Naturally he and Irma Jean kept a low profile. He didn’t sell newspapers with us at factory gates. He didn’t show up at protests or marches or even come to our meetings. That set me to wondering. Was his embrace of the radical movement real, or just a ploy to sustain stolen weekends with Irma Jean? Irma Jean insisted that he promoted the cause to his workmates, but if he did, the rest of us never met them.

I was curious about what Irma Jean told national Party officials about Donald. As local leader, she would have to disclose the relationship. I couldn’t believe they would approve of an affair with a married man who divided his time between her and his wife and children. At the very least they would have asked hard questions about his support for the cause. Had Irma Jean shaded the truth with them? More important, was she honest with herself about Donald? Did she really think he was committed to communism? Did she think he loved her more than his wife and children? Where would she be if he decided those stolen weekends were no longer convenient?

I must have voiced these doubts to Kirk, because I recall that he shook his head irritably. He had no idea what kind of understanding Irma Jean had with Donald. All he knew was that she was serious about the relationship. Her reasons were none of his business.

He was telling me, of course, that they were none of mine either. That was revealing. If Kirk couldn’t answer my doubts, then in some dim corner of consciousness he must share them. Apparently loyalty forbade him to say so out loud. Revolutionary zeal could not tolerate inconvenient truth, even a truth as obvious as an illicit affair.

I kept my mouth shut after that, but I could not turn my brain off. Suspecting that Irma Jean’s happiness with Donald might be a facade, I couldn’t help looking for other weaknesses in the stalwart stance with which she confronted the world. I kept trying to picture her growing up in a small town in South Carolina, daughter of loving parents and a promising student in school. Like me, Kirk, and countless others in the communist movement, she’d traveled far from the world of her upbringing. Could she ever go back again?

My own recent trips home had been fairly harmonious. My parents still weren’t enthusiastic about the idea of me becoming a teacher, but they had come to accept it. What about Irma Jean’s parents? Did she visit? If so did they accept her as she was now? Did they cringe at the sight of her careless hair and frayed shifts? Did they shrink from her loud, sarcastic speech, blunt to the point of obscenity? How would they react if they found out about Donald?

I knew better than to give voice to questions like this. Radical activists were sensitive about personal background. Reminders of a privileged or even comfortable upbringing could be painful, not to mention undercutting who we were trying to be now. Once in a great while, though, the veneer would slip, allowing a glimpse of what lay beneath it.

Kirk and I saw such a slip. It was on a Saturday afternoon. Irma Jean had just done her laundry. We knocked on her door. She opened it. Her face was streaked with sweat—or was it tears? She held up a white blouse from the pile she had been folding.

“Ruint.” She pointed to a streak of grease on the sleeve. “Ruint! The f***ing capitalists don’t even clean their own f***ing machines!” Her lips puckered. Now she was definitely fighting back tears.

I was puzzled. A streak of grease on a blouse? Capitalists did far worse to everyone every day. Finally, after a few more epithets, the truth slipped out. The blouse had been made for her by her mother.

I looked at the stained blouse. In the blink of an eye, the cheap piece of faded white cloth had been transformed into the token of a love Irma Jean never talked about. A thousand questions crowded my brain. Did she still talk to her mother? Did she go home to visit? How much did she tell her mother about her life in Atlanta? What did her mother think of it all? As a Party member, I realized, I couldn’t ask any of this. Loyalty to the cause should have forbidden me even to wonder.

My first teaching job intensified my discomfort with communism. In the beginning I still sold Party newspapers at early morning factory shift change. Angry confrontations with workers were a jarring prelude to a day in an elementary school classroom. Heading to work after one of these sessions, the accumulated tension and fear overcame me. I felt my stomach heave and bile rise in my throat. I swerved over to the side of the road, climbed out of the car, and vomited copiously onto the pavement. Carefully washing my face in the school bathroom, I wondered what the principal would say if she ever found out about the secret life I was leading.

My comrades’ insistence on attributing every misfortune to systemic oppression grated on me. One of my recruits, Tanya, was depressed about sending her children back to school without the new shoes she’d planned on buying. Thinking she’d probably had her pay docked unfairly or in some other way been cheated by rich people, I asked what had happened. She confessed tearfully her husband had taken the money out of her purse and spent it all in a bar. How could I have been so utterly wrong about the cause of her problem, and what else were my comrades and I wrong about?

When I mentioned the episode to Kirk and Irma Jean, they were more indignant at me than at Tanya’s husband. Kirk, who’d never even met Tanya, opined that the husband had probably endured daily exploitation for years on his job. By blaming the victim, I was aligning myself with the bosses, who covered up their own greed by spreading vile lies about those they oppressed.

Kirk’s caustic criticism and Irma Jean’s relentless bravado were taking their toll. When I came home from work after a day’s teaching, I needed a quiet place to unwind. Soon after the Tanya episode, I moved out of the apartment Kirk and I shared and into a small two-bedroom townhouse on the other side of town, nearer the school where I taught. The solitude and tranquility there were a welcome relief from the Party’s preoccupation with class struggle.

With more free time, I began to think about my future. In hope of advancing my career, I decided to take night classes. This new commitment made it difficult to come to Party meetings in the evening, let alone get up at 5 am to sell newspapers. I resigned from Party membership but still thought of myself as a fellow-traveler, sympathetic to communism, a friend to all the other friends who remained active in struggle.

Although I saw Irma Jean less frequently, I especially valued her friendship. She, too, was a teacher, and she became my confidante about the challenges of my new classroom. Every so often we met for coffee and traded stories about teaching. I was particularly curious about how radical activism fit in with professional responsibilities. Irma Jean didn’t seem to have made much progress organizing. In the school where she taught now, she’d met only one other teacher who seemed in the least interested in radical politics. They met outside pretty regularly, but without much result. This friend of hers was stuck in a bad marriage. Mostly they talked about the problems she had with her husband.

Our conversations continued all spring after I left the Party and resumed in the fall. Throughout those months, she remained the patient, confident, optimistic leader that I had admired since I came down to Atlanta to help build the movement. One early fall afternoon, however, my view of her changed abruptly.

We were sitting in a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on the West End of Atlanta. Sunlight bathed the counter where we sat side by side waiting for our coffee and pastries. Irma Jean seemed unusually pensive and barely spoke until our order had come. Then she said she had a favor to ask me. She had to go to New York Thursday night. Could I give her a ride to the airport?

Ordinarily I would have simply said “sure,” but something stopped me. I had no car. She had the van the Party had bought for her. Couldn’t she drive herself and park at the airport? Seeing my hesitancy, she wrinkled her nose, half annoyed and half humorous.

“I’m pregnant.”

Suddenly it was very still in the doughnut shop. It was one of those moments when your life suddenly turns in an unexpected direction. Looking back, I can see that I was about to be taught something, but all I felt at the time was confusion.

I could scarcely believe what I’d just heard. It seemed so incongruous. Irma Jean, Party loyalist, fighter for justice, stalwart leader—pregnant? And her tone—amused but irritated at the same time—didn’t match what she’d just told me, let alone what she must be feeling inside.

“I’ll pick you up at your apartment at 7. You can drive me direct to the airport. Keep the van over the weekend. If everything goes like it should I come back Sunday night at 11.”

I nodded, but she must have sensed I still had questions.

“There’s something Donald has to do that night.”

She gazed steadily into my eyes, warning me not to press further. Nothing was wrong, her eyes seemed to say. An unplanned pregnancy was just one of those things. It could happen to anyone. No one had better say or suggest or even hint that she was throwing her life away for a lost cause and a lover who would always go back to his family. What irony! Several years earlier, when my girlfriend was pregnant, Irma Jean had warned me against taking her to New York for an abortion. “If you’re not ready for a child,” she asked bluntly, “why are you even together?” But I’d done it, and now she was doing it too. For me, the consequences had been disastrous. What would they be for her, and how could she not have remembered her own counsel?

A pall of sadness hung over me that night. I couldn’t make sense of it. Irma Jean and I weren’t that close. Despite chit-chat about school, she never shared what was really going on in her life. That afternoon, when she slipped back into banter about kids in her class, it was like having a shade pulled down over a window.

It was already dark Thursday night when she pulled into a parking space in front of my apartment. She slid over to the passenger side and I climbed in. We talked about the lesson plans she had left for the substitute teacher.

“I don’t know why I bother,” she commented wryly. “Most of them know less math than the kids.”

The sensation of the shade being drawn was stronger now. I was filled with a prurient longing. Why couldn’t she open herself to me? Why couldn’t she acknowledge loss, regret, and loneliness? Couldn’t she step away from the role of Party stalwart even for a millisecond?

By the time we reached the airport I was no closer to an answer. There were no answers late Sunday night, either, when I picked her up. She was tired and pale, but otherwise I couldn’t detect any change. We reversed our journey, riding in silence. She said nothing about New York and nothing about Donald. At my apartment, she thanked me and slid over into the driver’s seat without hesitation.

Getting ready for bed, I wondered if I had misread her. Maybe the shade I thought she’d pulled down was the only reality and there was nothing behind it. Maybe she really was as calm and matter-of-fact as she made out. Maybe it was I who was guilty of weakness and sentimentality and not having the courage to face up to reality.

During that fall and winter, I had other things on my mind besides Irma Jean. I had decided to look for a job in a public school. I wanted to confront injustice directly. I began putting together materials I would need for interviews in the spring. On a rainy day in late December, just a few days before New Year’s Eve, I was engaged in this happy task when the phone rang.

It was Irma Jean. She’d been trying to reach me for several days now. Where had I been, and did I have plans for New Year’s Eve?

I’d just returned from a Christmas visit to my parents, and no, I didn’t have plans for New Year’s Eve. I wondered if she was arranging a get-together for Party members and friends. If so, would Donald be there, and would I be able to detect any change between him and Irma Jean?

“If you’re not doing anything, let’s go to a club.”

“To a club?”

A year or so before, a group of us had done that. It was loud. It was frenetic. I had no desire to repeat the experiment.

“Where else would we go to celebrate New Year’s?”

We? As in she and I?

My heart sank. Was she asking me on a date? Had she felt my sorrow and longing and mistaken them for something they weren’t? Having coffee with her in the afternoon was one thing. But a date implied an intimacy I didn’t want. I wasn’t attracted to her, and I didn’t want to get sucked into the lie she was living.

I muttered something about being busy preparing for interviews.

“So busy you’re going to be working on New Year’s Eve?”

I could think of nothing to say to this. To be honest I had no idea how I was going to spend New Year’s Eve, but I couldn’t let her see how I dreaded the thought of spending it with her. Dolefully I repeated that I was very busy indeed.

“You’ve got a problem,” she said. “A serious social problem. I have no idea what’s the matter with you. You need to get out more.”

She hung up the phone, and I retreated to the comfortable shelter of my interview preparations. Maybe I did have a problem. This new life I was starting felt lonely at times. But if I had been honest with her about that, I would have had to be honest about other things she would not want to talk about, things that would be more painful to her than to me. I was just thankful she seemed to have gotten the message. It was the last time either of us called to suggest getting together.

Even then I didn’t entirely break ties with radical activism. The denouement came some months later. By now Kirk was living with me again. He was cash-strapped, so I let him move into my spare bedroom. One night we went to a bar together and met a friend of his, someone he’d known before he got involved with radical politics. The friend was curious about the Party. Kirk recited the standard recruiting line. After the second or third round of questions and answers, I got impatient and asked if anyone in the Party really believed deep down that they had the slightest chance of leading a working-class revolution.

Kirk bristled. Of course he believed it. Didn’t I?

That was a good question. What did I believe? Since leaving the Party I hadn’t given much thought to communist doctrine. It didn’t have much to do with my life as a teacher. I suppose in a vague way I still hated capitalism. I believed passionately in social transformation. But it was hard to imagine Irma Jean and Kirk and the rest of the Party as real agents of change.

I didn’t want to get into any of that in front of Kirk’s friend, especially with two beers inside me. On the other hand, though, I couldn’t just back down from the challenge. Instead of answering Kirk’s question directly, I asked if he could name one person either he or Irma Jean had recruited in the past year.

Kirk’s eyes widened. Whatever he’d expected to come out of my mouth, it wasn’t this. I could see him wavering. I guessed he wanted to deliver a crushing rejoinder, but wondered how that would look in front of his friend. Finally, after a long pause, he mustered a knowing grin and asked if I had heard about the fellow teacher Irma Jean was trying to recruit. Irma Jean had met with this teacher several times. This teacher was interested, black, and incredibly promising.

Of course I did know. Maybe I even knew more than Kirk did. I told him and his friend I’d heard all about this teacher for nearly a year. The woman was lonely. Irma Jean was a shoulder to cry on. If she claimed this as a recruiting success, she was deceiving herself. Maybe that was how the Party had survived as long as it had—we had all been deceiving ourselves.

Kirk looked at me quizzically. I wondered what he was thinking. I was expecting some kind of comeback, but he let the conversation drift off in another direction. Later that night, back at the townhouse, I found out why. Partway through a call to Irma Jean, he mentioned us going out for drinks with the friend, and then he did something he’d never done—switched to the upstairs phone and asked me to hang up the downstairs receiver. He had something he didn’t want me to hear, but he made an incredibly foolish mistake. He left his bedroom door open. After hanging up the phone I could still hear every word.

“Charlie asked . . . ” “Charlie said . . . ” “Charlie thinks . . . ”

I listened in horror as he repeated what I’d said at the bar. Had my actual words sounded so harsh? So scornful? “Deceiving ourselves”—it felt like I’d been hit in the pit of the stomach. Had he planned all along to use this against me?

I was mortified. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt Irma Jean. For two years now, ever since my first qualms about Donald, I’d done my best not to. Kirk, however, had been lying in wait, hoping I would say something he could use to discredit me.

Hot, throbbing anger swamped the regret and embarrassment I initially felt. What Kirk did was a calculated and deliberate betrayal. Now the pair of them would be conniving against me to protect their delusions. I was through with communism. That very night I began planning how to extricate myself.

A few days later, while Kirk was at work, I backed a rental truck up to the rear door of the townhouse. A neighbor helped me load my share of the furniture. Later that week I met Kirk after work and arranged to remove my name from the lease and transfer utilities into his name. Watching him write out a check for the deposit on the utilities, I felt an enormous sense of relief. Check in hand, I turned away and left without saying goodbye.

It was a curt valediction, but it worked splendidly. I never heard from any of my Atlanta comrades again. No badgering. No recriminations. No more accusations that I served ruling-class interests.

Just blessed silence, and a huge hole in my life, where the hope of a glorious proletarian uprising had once fueled my hatred and scorn for an imperfect world.

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