Public Enemy Read online

  And yet . . . even though lawmakers wouldn’t know we’d been there, even though the general population might not notice, and even though the death penalty would go on and on forever, it seemed, being there was somehow essential. I knew who I was then, I knew where I stood. I knew that in a society that legalized murder, I’d refused to go along.

  I drove home feeling sad but honorable.

  And within a few months, a miracle: Larry Marshall won the first wrongful conviction action for a Death Row inmate and the floodgates opened. Activists like Alice Kim united with parents of inmates and began to organize a movement, journalists from the Chicago Tribune and Northwestern’s journalism school took up the serious task of investigating and shining a light into that darkness, and Larry and his colleagues began to win case after case. Soon the die was cast, and our corrupt and mildly right-wing governor became an abolitionist and emptied Death Row. But none of that was on the table as we stood in a circle of candles, singing softly against the storm.

  FOUR

  Fugitive Days/Fugitive Nights

  When I published Fugitive Days, my memoir of the wretched years of the American war in Viet Nam and the sparkling resistance that blossomed in response, it felt like all hell broke loose. I woke up before dawn on September 11, 2001, the official publication date, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the second stop on a scheduled thirty-five-city book tour. I’d begun the journey the night before in East Lansing with an overflow crowd at a spirited independent bookstore. The book had been generously endorsed by Studs Terkel, Edward Said, Rosellen Brown, Scott Turow, and Tom Frank, who told me with a wink, “If the New York Times gives it a positive review, we can’t be friends anymore.” The first reviews were already in—delightfully, amazingly positive. Zayd, now an artist and playwright beginning his career, had warned me to ignore the reviews, and never, ever try to analyze them. “If they’re positive, just figure someone liked your book for whatever reason,” he cautioned. “If they’re negative, someone didn’t like it so much. Those are the only two choices, and everything else is autobiography—don’t get into motives, don’t try to explain or defend, just move on and write your next book.” I remembered a story about the actor Kirk Douglas working in mid-career with the older, renowned Sir John Gielgud and telling the old man that he’d gotten to the point in his career where the criticism no longer devastated him. Gielgud replied, “You’re almost there; now don’t let the praise seduce you.” Good advice, no doubt, but those first reviews felt wonderfully seductive, and so I read each one twice.

  Hunter S. Thompson had offered his endorsement months earlier in a tightly packed, handwritten love letter and screed with long rants and plenty of ellipses as well as unforgettable HST phrases like “More chilling than being held hostage in a Mexican whorehouse” and “an orgy of enthusiasms, and a dangerous invitation to a CIA-hit.” His letter ended on a positive note: “Tell Ayers to stop by if he’s ever in the neighborhood—he can bring the heavy stuff; I’ve got the firearms.” He was kidding, I think, but a few months later I did stop by—without anything volatile—to meet the legend. I’m still recovering from an evening in his fun house.

  But the book was generating a lot of hopeful buzz for my publisher right then: the New York Times would review it for sure and run a feature in its Arts section. The Chicago Tribune would run a front page review and a cover story in its weekend magazine. I’d be a featured writer at the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the South Carolina Humanities Festival, and the Los Angeles Public Library, among others. And I was scheduled to be interviewed by Scott Simon, Terry Gross, Tavis Smiley, and Bob Edwards. The paperback rights had been sold to Penguin a few days earlier, Steppenwolf was talking about film rights, and, based on early sales figures, the book was already scheduled for a second printing. The evening in East Lansing was pulsing with good energy. Up, up, and away.

  I bought the Times around 6:00 a.m. and headed over to a campus coffee shop. I opened the paper, and there on the front page of the Arts section was a big picture of Bernardine and me sitting on our front steps in Hyde Park—she looked elegant as always, and I, well, I looked as usual like her porter or her driver, and damned lucky to be there at that. The article was by Dinitia Smith, who had interviewed each of us extensively, and had even come to our home and met our roommates, Dorothy Dohrn, Bernardine’s mom, and Florence Garcia, her steady caregiver. I liked Smith even though she repeatedly referred to Florence as our “housekeeper” and showed decidedly less interest in the people in the house than in the house itself: “The ceilings are so high,” she remarked several times. “Yes, they are; it’s not Manhattan, you know.” “You certainly don’t live like Weathermen,” she said. I wondered what Weathermen lived like. The reporter who interviewed me from Chicago magazine had told me that I didn’t “look anything like a real Weatherman.” I asked her what a real Weatherman looked like, and we laughed together. She reported that, for Weathermen, Bernardine and I had raised three remarkable young men, though I was unsure what parenting skills and dispositions distinguished the Weatherparents from anyone else. The title of the Times piece was pretty dopey: “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.” “No Regrets” had been the headline of the Chicago article about the book the week before, and Smith had stayed in the home of the Chicago writer and editor on her overnight to interview us—they had high ceilings too, she told me.

  The article seemed OK to me, but when I called Bernardine an hour later, she didn’t think it was OK at all. “The headline is not dopey; it’s disturbing,” she said. She read aloud a single sentence: “Even today, he finds ‘a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,’ he writes.” This supports the “love affair with bombs” thesis, Bernardine pointed out, but “it’s completely dishonest—you don’t write that you find any eloquence in bombs.” True: I’d written that the American war-makers—the cozy corps of Dr. Strangeloves and Brigadier General Jack D. Rippers—seemed to hear a joyful noise while bombing villages from forty thousand feet, and that that was perverse and disgusting. But no matter—let people read the book and see for themselves, I said.

  It was all a little silly and forgettable, mildly irritating, and sure to quickly fade away. I was wrong, of course, for the known world was about to blow up, and love of explosives and no regrets would be infused with fresh meaning and new urgency.

  I returned to my reading and my coffee, but the background buzz in the coffee shop escalated suddenly, and the place got noisy. I looked up as everyone crowded around a man at a table in the center who was pointing at his computer screen and shouting, “It’s not a film . . . this is real, and it’s happening right now!”

  Everything suddenly cracked open, brittle or broken, and frighteningly out of balance. We were already living in a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post–Viet Nam world, and we’d taken the measure of mass terror perpetrated on innocents more than once before. But what was this? In those early hours and first days, no one knew for sure. The images played over and over—an airliner slicing into the tall building, smoke, disbelief, the second airliner going at full speed into the smoking tower, bodies tumbling to the ground, the two massive towers collapsing in slow motion as thousands of people fled. It was incomprehensible, horrifying, and sickening, and eventually numbing. Bits of information emerged every hour; the air vibrated with rumors and speculation and theory. But no one knew what had happened, or what was to come.

  At the reading in East Lansing the night before I’d joked about American politicians and their media allies sweating and fretting in public about how threatened we were (“Security precautions for the Super Bowl are elaborate and more costly than ever!”), while the US military scorched the earth and US power menaced the world. It was generally true, but suddenly, weirdly miscalibrated in the dawn’s early light.

  “Come home,” Bernardine said when I reached her an hour later. She had talked to Zayd, who was studying in Boston, and to Chesa, who was in school in Santiago,
Chile, and demonstrating on the anniversary of the US-sponsored coup and assassination of Salvador Allende. She was with Malik, whose flight back to California and college that morning had taxied out and then returned to the gate, grounded.

  “I can’t come home yet,” I said. “I’ve got this event tonight.”

  “Cancel it,” she said.

  I walked over to Shaman Drum, where I was set to read that night, and sat with the bookstore staff in a troubled knot watching the coverage on a laptop for several hours. Should we cancel the reading? I called my publisher and editor, and she agreed with me and most of the folks gathered at the store: people need a place to gather, a place to talk no matter what. “Go on with it,” she advised.

  Bernardine weighed in on the other side: “Come home! Come home!” she repeated.

  I wobbled, unsure, and asked if Major League Baseball had canceled games. By midafternoon, baseball shut down, and so did Shaman Drum. “We’ll sort things out from here,” Bernardine assured me. No planes were flying, the whole book tour was put on hold, and I reluctantly drove back to Chicago, the sound track of all-news radio accompanying me on my solitary slog, hyperventilating and speculating, deeply disoriented and confused, uninformed and struggling to catch balance. In those early hours, we were all feeling a huge hole blown through our collective consciousness, but the rupture presented such an unruly range of dimensions that no one peering uneasily into that smoldering crack saw exactly the same things. It was a tumultuous but desolate drive.

  I dissolved when I saw Bernardine—exhausted and relieved—and I held onto her for a long time, weeping—so much unrecoverable loss and so much unnecessary pain. But I was home at last.

  Mona Khalidi called right away, insisting that we come for dinner, and of course we would, we must. On this night of all nights, I thought, people would be reaching out to friends and family to touch and talk, to try to make sense, yes, but mostly to find some solace and salvation in our simple connectedness—the preciousness of one another, the sanctity of modest gestures, and the vastness of small affections. The world was in flames, the West was burning and the oceans rising, but we would not so easily collapse into the conflagration, and so we gathered ourselves.

  We’d met Mona and Rashid Khalidi by chance years earlier, just before we moved from New York. They had three kids the same ages as our three, and their babysitter happened to be one of my students. When the babysitter introduced us, she was certain that Bernardine and I would hit it off with the Khalidis. “Same relaxed approach to raising your kids,” she’d told me, “same crazy politics, same everything.” When a few weeks later and within days of each other, our two families rambled to Chicago from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she was sure it was destiny, a match made in heaven. “Karma!” she said happily as she waved good-bye. “You guys will love each other.”

  She was right. We lived only a few blocks apart in Hyde Park, and now we began regularly looking after one another’s kids after school and going to the beach or the movies together on weekends. Bernardine proposed having dinner once a week at each other’s houses, but soon we were having dinners on alternate nights at one or the other of our homes, and it grew into a new big blended family tradition—dinner four or five times a week at seven o’clock for at least ten people, and often fourteen or sixteen or more, as one or another kid brought along a classmate or we invited friends and colleagues and elderly parents or folks visiting from out of town or one of the many Khalidi “cousins,” an indistinct but vast and expansive collection of relatives just passing through. “The diaspora is far-flung,” Rashid would note with a wink whenever a “cousin” was en route, “and Samer is the second cousin of my great-aunt’s brother-in-law.” “It’s well known,” he would continue, “that we Semites—and not exclusively the wandering Jews—are tribal and nomadic peoples, drifting here and there in search of our land.” He would then pull out a series of maps in order to trace Samer, for example, from UCLA back through Detroit to Lebanon and Jerusalem, and the high desert beyond.

  Mona, wooden spoon in hand, pot bubbling on the stove in the background, stood at the center of the shimmering multitude—organizer and scheduler, comrade and companion, advisor, critic, agitator, busybody, provocateur, reporter, newsmonger, nudge, nag, fixer, Arabic coach, cheerleader, librarian, yenta, lover, healer, nurse, community psychologist, schemer, social worker, earth mother, and cook. She was elfin, but there was nothing diminutive about her presence—she had a huge heart, a colossal spirit, a big brain, and a supersized opinion about everything. Something was always cooking at Mona’s because food was not only nourishment, it was also love and therapy, rehab and remedy, the perfect medium for problem solving or political discourse, homework help or healing. Feeding people was Mona’s default position, no matter what, and so whether things were fast-paced or slow, happy or sad, urgent or relaxed, she insisted that whatever else was on your agenda, you had to eat, so stop by “just for a bite.” Once ensnared, you didn’t dare refuse a second helping for fear of unleashing the ferocious Semitic inner mother lurking in the centuries-old well of accumulated cultural memory: “What, it’s not good enough? You don’t like my food, or you don’t like me? Which?” Still, hers was the lap every wounded child desired, the ear every troubled teen sought out, the essential table for serious conversation.

  Our communal kitchen quickly took on the tone and spirit of a lively and eclectic salon—we designated the Khalidi kitchen Club-K, and our house B and B’s American Café. Over time, it felt that we were feeding the wide, wide world, one memorable dinner at a time, our very own movable feast. One night a few regulars joined a coincidence of visitors, and the extraordinary scene led Mona to suspend a standard rule. Edward Said, the literary scholar and Palestinian rights activist, had been staying with the Khalidis, and Jaqui and Homi Bhabha, colleagues at the University of Chicago, had come for dinner with their kids; Edward called his friend Daniel Barenboim, maestro of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who then called Zubin Mehta of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who was in town for the day, and each brought partners and special friends. Brandy flowed, Turkish pastries and tangerines were consumed, and when Daniel said, “Mona, would it be all right if I had a cigar?” she didn’t hesitate: “Of course, Daniel, please.” All the regulars were shocked—Mona in the thrall of the maestro had become a pushover. Everyone lit a cigar, and we sat around the table blowing smoke toward the ceiling.

  On September 11, Mona served her signature tabouli with its surprising amounts of mint, finely chopped green onions, and gallons of olive oil and lemon juice, chicken with yoghurt (and about four heads of smushed garlic and a dusting of sumac) over white rice, and Khubz Arabi (what Americans call pita), but the table was unusually somber and subdued. Sim Sim, the last of our collective six kids, had left to begin college three weeks earlier, and it was just the four of us together, with Malik quickly off to see his local friends, and of course everything was in a muddle. No one had much of an appetite for dinner that night.

  Everything but Mona’s food felt bizarre, beyond reason or logic, murky and clouded with wild reports of armed men on the Washington Mall and warships in New York harbor. The constantly ringing phone—kids checking and rechecking in, friends and colleagues calling from New York, London, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Los Angeles to share information or to speculate about what the hell had just happened—added to the turbulence. All we knew for sure that night was that four passenger planes had been hijacked: two had flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York—the sickening images captured on film and playing over and over—one had hit the Pentagon, and one went down in a field in Pennsylvania. We were groping in the dark, all of us, across the country and the world, but we couldn’t help wondering: what would come next? Retaliation and revenge were in the air, but what shape would they take? What forms of violence loomed ahead? Was a huge war inevitable? Who might the United States strike now? And who later on?

  Our conversation ricocheted rapidly around the
room, moving from the well-being of our kids to politics and global power, our work, the fragile condition of our parents, the craziness of a story about Bernardine and me being featured in the Times on this day of all possible days, my shattered Fugitive Days book launch, and back to our kids. “I worry most about Sim Sim,” Mona said. “He’s been away only a couple of weeks, and he can’t have many friends yet. This must be hard for him no matter what he says.” Bernardine was relieved that Malik’s plane hadn’t got off the ground that morning. We agreed that in a day or two, depending on what unforeseen events popped into view, the four of us would drive to Macalester College in Minneapolis to spend a day with Sim Sim. I was so happy right then to have one another and to be here together, and to have a plan to do something, anything concrete. We would eat, and we would drive. Good enough.

  Shortly after 8:00 p.m., the doorbell rang. It was Adele Simmons, the president of the MacArthur Foundation and an occasional member of the communal kitchen, who’d driven from Lincoln Park to check in with Mona and Rashid. “I’ve been worrying about you all day,” she said. “Who knows what’s coming next, but there’s already a whiff of anti-Arab sentiment in the air. I want to help.” Just as most liberals were poised to duck, cover, and disappear, coming to Mona and Rashid’s side was the sweetest and savviest thing she could have done, and so very typical of her.

  I got an anonymous phone call at home after midnight: “Do you support the bombing of the World Trade Center?” a man’s voice asked angrily. I was astonished. “It was a monstrous crime,” I said, and added that I wished he would, whoever he was, call me at my office during the daytime. He replied in a suddenly subdued tone, “OK, thanks.”