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.
In the fall of 1971, when my girlfriend Eileen and I were helping organize a communist movement in Atlanta, we got a lead on a potential recruit, an African-American veteran disillusioned with the Vietnam War. Anthony, we were assured, would be delighted to meet college students fomenting revolution.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this unexpected offer of comradeship. It came from Amos, a fellow student I’d met in junior college that summer. Amos was intrigued by our idea of overthrowing the rich and instituting the rule of workers, but he wanted no part in violent revolution himself, and shook his head in amazement that a pair of white college students from New England would travel all the way down to Georgia to promote such a thing. That Saturday morning, when Eileen and I set off across town to check out the lead, I couldn’t help wondering if this would turn out to be an elaborate practical joke.
It was past 10 am when we pulled our battered Volkswagen beetle into the one free parking spot a block from the address we’d been given. It was already warm on the streets. Residents were beginning to stir, and we were the only white people in sight. When we got to the brick apartment building, I tried to mount the cracked concrete steps with confidence, like I belonged there, but belonging was far from what I was feeling inside.
Inside the entrance, a set of steps with frayed carpeting led to a dimly lit hallway. Halfway down a door was ajar. We knocked, and a young woman in short shorts and a loose blouse came to the door. I explained who had sent us and what we were there for.
“He in there.”
She gestured to the next room. Not exactly an enthusiastic welcome. I braced myself for an awkward encounter, but the tall broad-shouldered man sprawled on the couch at the back of the room shot us a welcoming grin.
“Charlie. Eileen. Amos told me about you.” He hoisted himself up and came over to greet us. “‘Send ’em up to the north side,’ I told him. Don’t nobody want to come up to the north side to visit. They too busy working. They too busy going to the clubs. That ain’t right, is it, Eileen?”
“Nobody,” I guessed, meant nobody from Ocilla, a small town south of Atlanta where Anthony and Amos grew up. Amos and a handful of others had come up to find work in the auto and steel plants—union jobs that paid more than anything they could find back in their hometown.
Behind Anthony, two young children ran in and stared. The woman we’d met at the door caught hold of them and they disappeared into a back room without saying a word. Anthony took no notice. He headed out to the kitchen and returned with three cans of beer. From the way he swayed slightly before sitting down, it looked like this wasn’t his first round of the day.
“So what made y’all want to come all this way to Atlanta? I know you didn’t come for the VA like I did.”
So he was a veteran after all. Amos had told me the truth. I was a little ashamed that I’d doubted him. According to communist doctrine, black and brown soldiers were the vanguard of the class struggle, prime targets for revolutionary incitement. I told Anthony our story—the short version, downplaying the part about armed uprisings but hitting hard on the need for black and white workers to unite and fight the capitalist warmaking machine.
Anthony listened and took a long drink of beer. Black and white together, he said wistfully. He knew what that was about.
“Ain’t no color line in Vietnam, you know what I’m talking about Charlie? Don’t make no difference if you black, you brown, you white, Cong going to blow the s*** out of you no matter what color you are.”
He turned to me and I nodded, not wanting to let on that I hadn’t a clue. A couple of our male comrades had enlisted, hoping to organize support for revolution in the armed forces, and right at that moment I wished I’d been one of them.
Eileen asked what it was like over there. Anthony reminisced about escapades with his buddies: breaking rules, outwitting the officers. A sanitized version, I guessed. No mention of what he and his buddies did to the Cong or what the Cong did to them. All the same you could tell it felt good reliving those memories. You could hear it in the way Anthony’s laughter kept escalating till there were tears in his eyes. Had he tried telling these stories to friends from Ocilla? Based on what I knew about Amos, they probably had things to do and places to be. They might not have time just to sit there and listen.
For the next several hours the stories rolled on. We had a second beer and sank back into the overstuffed couch. It was a relief to be past the awkward part—explaining who we were and what we were here for. Anthony was glad of an audience, even if it was just a couple of clueless white college kids from New England. Maybe Eileen and I being white had something to do with our shared mirth and release of emotion—black and white together, without a thought of the color line.
When it was time to go Anthony made us promise to come back. After the beer and the stories, it would have been unthinkable to say no. We were nearly home before it registered that we’d hardly said anything about the communist movement or our reasons for being there. The war stories, laughter, and beer had pretty much erased any thought of recruiting, at least for the few hours the three of us were together. Now, though, the internalized voices of our communist comrades came flooding back, and with them calculations about the cause and how we were going to convert him. For a first visit, we’d done OK, establishing rapport and finding out what Vietnam had been like. In the future, though, just being a sounding board wasn’t enough. We’d have to do better.
On the next visit we held back on the beer—one apiece. That didn’t stop Anthony from finishing the 6-pack and starting a second. After we talked for a while about the war and a little about Amos and his other friends from Ocilla, we gave him a quick rundown on the movement and protests going on locally. He sat very still while I explained this. It was hard to tell how much he was following.
“I might just come to one of those meetings sometime, Charlie,” he said at last. “Maybe if you and Eileen come and get me and bring me back after. Of course I don’t like to leave Brenda alone with the babies,” he added with a glance at the bedroom door. “Guess she’d be all right, wouldn’t she? It’d just be for a few hours. Maybe you and Eileen and me’d stop somewhere for a beer afterward, know what I mean? These days I don’t get out all that much, what with my leg like it is.”
That wasn’t the response we were hoping for, but it wasn’t a total surprise. At some level we were already aware that solidarity with the international working class wasn’t at the top of Anthony’s priority list. If we had any doubts about this, the comment about stopping at a bar would have confirmed it, especially since he claimed to be worried about leaving Brenda alone with the children.
The pattern was reinforced on return visits. Whenever the subject of politics came up, he’d find a way to shift the conversation to Vietnam, where there wasn’t a color line, and blacks and whites were united in not getting the s*** blown out of them by the Cong.
At some point we must have realized we would never recruit Anthony, but by then our own priorities were beginning to shift. Anthony welcomed our visits, and that mattered for reasons that had nothing to do with communism. He needed us. He needed an audience. In some obscure way the hours we spent together reenacted the fellowship of the war, a time when, however briefly, the color line was overridden by something more urgent. For us, listening to the crazy repetitive stories felt natural. We looked forward to the welcoming grin and the intense, wistful voice. For some months we didn’t look critically at the chaos in the apartment, the litter of plates and beer cans and food wrappers. In the midst of all that, we felt at ease and knew we were needed.
Eventually, though, we began to have reservations. Anthony’s drinking intensified. When he drank more the stories got raunchy, and his voice took on a harder edge. We tried pushing our visits earlier in the day in hope of finding him sober, but the time of day didn’t seem to make any difference. After we’d talked a while, his eyes would glaze over and eventually he’d start slurring his words. As the weeks passed, our visits to that fetid living room felt less like keeping company with a friend and more like watching a stranger destroying his life in slow motion.
Eileen thought things might go better if Brenda joined us. She asked once why Brenda didn’t have a beer too or at least sit down and talk with us. Anthony waved off the suggestion. Brenda didn’t drink beer, he said. She was kind of quiet anyway and didn’t talk much. Besides, she had to stay with the babies. We couldn’t have a real talk with the babies running and carrying on.
He grinned when he said this, but you could tell he didn’t like being questioned about Brenda. Eileen said afterward she didn’t believe what he said about what she wanted and didn’t want. The truth was probably that Anthony didn’t want to help take care of the children, and he didn’t want Brenda to talk because he didn’t want to hear what she’d say.
We began to wonder if we should stop going there. Anthony still looked forward to our visits, but what good did they really do? As Eileen pointed out, he was drinking when we arrived and he was still drinking when we left, and his mood didn’t really seem all that much better. And what about Brenda? What good did our visits do for her? How did it help her to be shut up with the kids in a bedroom for an hour or two each week?
She was right. We’d reached a dead end. This wasn’t helping. But I didn’t want to just stop. That would seem like a betrayal, worse than if we’d never gone there in the first place. So we worked out a compromise. We would try one more visit. This time Eileen would follow Brenda back into the bedroom and try to talk with her, maybe offer our help with the babies if she wanted to sit with us and have a beer and join in the conversation.
I don’t recall how we were going to explain this to Anthony. We knew he wouldn’t take it well. Would he lose his temper? Would he blame us for interfering? When we reached the apartment, though, these worries fled from my mind. As soon as Brenda answered the door, we could see something was wrong.
“He had a seizure. He in there waiting on the ambulance.”
Anthony must have heard Brenda’s greeting, because he called out that he wanted to see us. We went back to the bedroom. He lay stretched out on an unmade king-sized bed, long pajama-clad legs splayed over the covers and face taut with pain. “Hey Eileen. Hey Charlie. Stay and visit a minute till we see do they come for me.”
When he lifted his head I could see that he was making a monumental effort to focus on us and not give in to the pain. When the ambulance came, he insisted we stay by his side. We accompanied him out to the ambulance. He was still talking to us as they slid the stretcher into the back of it.
While Anthony was in the hospital, Eileen suggested we do something for Brenda. The weather was warmer now. We decided to take her and the two toddlers to the zoo. It was a sunny day. The children enjoyed the zoo and the picnic we’d packed. After lunch we spent a delightful hour chasing them around a field. Brenda, however, appeared tense and withdrawn. Seeing her up close for the first time, we noticed a bruise on her check. When she spoke, it was in the flat monotone we’d heard back at the apartment. Something more serious was wrong in that family than Anthony not helping with the children.
I went to see Anthony once in the hospital. It was awkward sitting there at his bedside. He never did get into his war stories. Eventually he was discharged, but Eileen and I never went back to the apartment to visit. After the afternoon with Brenda, I think we both realized we were in over our heads.
When I look back now, the end of the relationship has faded in memory, but the start of it is still vivid. Half a century later, those war stories still resonate, as do the warmth and satisfaction we felt in hearing them. Sanitized versions or not, he needed to tell them, and that was what mattered. Thus began my long journey away from a murderous political ideology. The rigid dogmas of communism can’t tolerate human connection.
I didn’t realize that then. I had no idea where I was headed, still less who was leading me. Even so, lead He did, by inclining my heart first to sink back into that overstuffed couch, and then to realize I couldn’t stay there forever.