Public Enemy Read online

  We delighted in a kind of preschool patois constantly being invented and reinvented by the kids but quickly incorporated into the culture of the place, words like africot (half a peach, half a plum, such a fruit!). We also all spoke a fun and sometimes funny feminist argot at BJ’s: firefighter, of course, flight attendant, cow-hand, waitron! Our block area had the biggest collection of multicultural wedgies—the name we invented for these wooden wedge-shaped toys—ever assembled: a Black male nurse and a Chicana doctor, an Asian female cop and an African business person, on and on and on.

  One day we went on a field trip, across the street to our local firehouse. A young recruit named Jimmie showed us around, letting kids try on the big hats, ring the bell, and sit in the front seat of the engine. It was totally awesome, until Caitlin, four years old, asked our new friend, “So, Jimmie, when are you going to get a woman firefighter here?” Jimmie exploded in mocking laughter. “A woman!” he cried. “I hope never! The neighborhood would burn to the ground! This is no place for women.”

  Caitlin was crestfallen and then furious. What did he mean? Why did he say that mean thing? Back at BJ’s she dictated a letter to Mayor Koch about getting a woman firefighter up at Eighty-fourth Street: “It’s not fair,” she declared indignantly. She concluded emphatically, “Women can do anything!”

  BJ wanted to make a wide and deep space for a huge range of children, an early opening for each of them to find pathways to a life lived with courage, hope, and love, a life worth doing, and so BJ’s Kids was always a work in progress. When Zayd asked if everyone who was heroic back then was dead we began to read the story of Rosa Parks each year on December 1, depicted a bus with chairs in two rows and acted out the drama, sang Freedom Songs and silk-screened T-shirts with Rosa’s image behind bars. BJ wrote to Rosa Parks and invited her to the space, and lo and behold, she wrote back and encouraged BJ’s efforts. When Rosa Parks came to New York to speak at an education conference, the organizers knew BJ’s Kids celebrated Rosa Parks Day and asked BJ to pick her up at the airport. When they met, BJ asked Rosa Parks which children’s book about her story she liked the best. Rosa Parks told her, “None of them, because they all say that I was tired from working all day and that’s why I refused to give up my seat. The truth was, I was a political activist long before that day and I had said if I am ever asked to give up my seat, I will refuse because I am tired of being treated like I am not a human being. One day, BJ, I will write an honest children’s book that you can read to your kids.”

  We took the kids to the UN and sang “Give Peace a Chance,” and then we gathered the whole day-care community to march to Central Park with kids in red or yellow wagons for the million-person no-nukes rally; Pete Seeger read one of our kid’s letters from the stage, and we all went a little giddy. BJ wanted the kids to feel that they and their families could stand up in acts of repair and hope, and that something could always be done.

  One morning when Susan was dropping three-year-old Jemmie off at day care, she told us that she’d just learned that she would be laid off from her job as a nurse in a public hospital in Harlem in less than a week. Sydenham Hospital was slated to be shuttered by Mayor Ed Koch for budgetary reasons, and for Susan—as well as for many others in Harlem—it seemed that she and her neighbors were once again being treated, as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, like “the leastwise in the land.” Her spirits were down, but she was planning to attend a community rally later that evening.

  Next day her spark had returned and she was on a freedom high: “The whole community is up in arms,” she told us. “They rely on the hospital, and they care about us.” The rally had been huge, filled with spirit and singing and determination.

  Sydenham was a vital space—seven hundred beds in the middle of what was, without it, an effective health care desert. More than that, Sydenham had a storied history woven into the essence of Harlem: founded in a brownstone in 1892 to serve African Americans, Sydenham was the first US private hospital with both white and Black doctors on staff. Susan was trained in Jamaica and was one of thirty-two Black nurses whose jobs would disappear with a stroke of Mayor Koch’s pen.

  Each day Susan brought news from the hospital, and her accounts became a wildly anticipated and vivid “chapter book” shared at morning circle. She animated her stories with a colorful cast of characters, nurses and friends, community activists and ordinary folks, in a Dickensian slog through the empire city, life in excruciating detail, world without end. But the core of each installment was a clash of two titans: on one side, the Reverend Timothy P. Mitchell, leading critic and charismatic leader, beautiful, brilliant, and brave, rallying the community in heated demonstrations; on the other side, rankling all the good people, the scary and gnarly Mayor Koch, a lonely, barren soul whose foul deed had set the drama in motion. The Mayor Koch of Susan’s story hated ordinary people—and Black people in particular—and was the embodiment of evil: the Wicked Witch of the West to the kids, Mistah Kurtz or Iago to the rest of us. Susan was in the thick of it, eyewitness reporter, participant observer, hero, sage, mom, and friend. She never mentioned the hardship of a no-pay payday—it was a children’s story, a magnificent fairy tale.

  When the ministers and their allies occupied Sydenham to keep it open, the kids were excited because, like Rosa Parks, they would not be moved. And when they escalated by announcing a hunger strike, the kids were electrified: “When will they eat?” “Are they sad?” “I’m hungry!”

  “Let’s bring them something to eat,” Z said at snack time that day. Good idea! We baked for the ministers two big carrot cakes, decorating each with hearts and stars. And next morning, right after circle, Susan led the staff, kids, and a couple of other mothers on a field trip to bring carrot cake to the hunger-strikers at Sydenham Hospital—missing the concept a bit, perhaps, but wholly aligned with the spirit of the struggle. We wanted the ministers to be strong and successful in their righteous effort, we wanted Susan to keep her job, and we wanted to stand up for justice and against health care denied.

  The bus dropped us a block from the hospital and we immediately heard the chanting and singing from down the street. We moved excitedly on, and when we got close Susan began greeting folks. She seemed to know everyone. The picketers cleared a path for us, smiled at the kids, and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” as we passed by. We were in the middle of the crowd when we spotted the famous Reverend Mitchell beaming at us. “Here you are!” he exclaimed, delighted. “Susan, come on up here.”

  And up we all went. Reverend Mitchell hugged every one of us enthusiastically, and spoke gently to each of the children, beaming. Z handed him one of the carrot cakes, and then allowed the reverend to pick him up. Holding the cake and the toddler aloft, Reverend Mitchell offered a prayer that stretched and searched beyond the available light, while TV cameras brushed the scene.

  THREE

  Learning to Walk

  Zayd, Malik, and I walked and toddled and wobbled our way to Broadway and Eighty-sixth Street after school to meet up with Bernardine, shop for groceries, and head home for dinner, baths, stories, and bed—our regular rhythm and routine by now and the best two hours of every day. I was stopped short at the corner news stand by the front page of the New York Post, which featured a huge headline—“COP KILLER!”—and an oversized photo of a disheveled man bound in a straitjacket, his eyes swollen and his face bloody and bruised, being led by several cops into a police station. I’d heard fuzzy references on the news of a Brinks truck robbery near Nyack just north of the city, a car chase, and a shoot-out—typical train-wreck news as far as I was concerned, isolated and irrelevant, disconnected and distracting. But it was the photo that seized me, and staring at that picture, first in disbelief and slowly with a gathering certainty, things began to shift and the world flipped quickly upside down. I did a double-take and then another and another: David Gilbert, our sweet and smart and funny friend, was the person beneath that disfigured mask of pain in the photo.

  Poor, dea
r David, he looked so badly beaten down and diminished in shackles—nothing like the beautiful man I knew—that I choked back a sudden sob. I wanted to cry out loudly and openly, but not now, not with the kids there. When Bernardine arrived moments later, it was clear she’d seen the same thing, and as we hugged she whispered in a tight voice, “Later.” We sat on a bench and Malik nursed while Bernardine read a story to Zayd, and then we gathered ourselves and went home.

  As soon as we could sit up and pay attention later that night, the terrible details zoomed into razor-edged focus: a group of armed men had stormed a Brinks truck at the Nanuet Mall and made off with over a million and a half dollars, killing a guard named Peter Paige (who we later learned was himself an activist, involved in Northern Ireland’s liberation struggle against Great Britain), and severely injuring another, Joe Trombino, who managed to fire a single shot from his handgun before having his arm practically severed from his shoulder by the force of the gunfire he endured. As police converged on the mall and mobilized to cut off escape routes, the armed men drove to a nearby parking lot, where they quickly swapped vehicles and sped away. But someone across from the parking lot had called the police, saying she’d just seen “several armed Black men” piling into the back of a U-Haul truck, and moments later officers stopped the U-Haul at a road block on an entrance ramp to the New York State Thruway and all hell broke loose: as they leapt from the back of the truck the men blasted away with M-16 rifles, 12-gauge shotguns, and 9-mm handguns, killing two Nyack police officers, Edward O’Grady and Wesley Brown, and fleeing the scene. The driver of the truck and the front seat passenger were apprehended immediately: David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were in custody, accused of murder. They were our friends and our comrades from SDS and the Weather Underground.

  There was more that night, and much more to come—carjackings and car crashes, conflicting accounts of what had happened and how, escapes and more shootings, raids and round-ups, indictments, grand juries, and trials—but our interest was arrested right there: Kathy and David detained and living under the menacing cloud of being charged with murder. It seemed at once awful and improbable, so ghastly and so out of character. And it seemed altogether too big, a bloated and distorted caricature.

  More than a dozen of our former comrades were still underground then—we’d returned to the open world less than a year before ourselves—but Bernardine had met their new-born son on the day of his birth just before we’d surfaced; we were certain then that they were about to take the same path, casting their baby’s life-reel toward a hopeful and more realistic future. That’s what Kathy had said, and they’d agreed that day to meet up soon on the other side.

  Where’s the kid? we asked in unison. Others would have to worry about the legal difficulties, the deeper meanings, the tragedy and its inevitable fallout. We set off to find Chesa.

  The culture of our young family was shot through from the start with politics and activism—Malik and Zayd were born into picket lines and demonstrations, our lively little apartment abuzz with friends and comrades, meetings and political discussions, organizing projects and action plans, along with the ordinary dialogue of everyday family life. Because we refused to have a TV, conversation was the charge and current in the room—our kids’ earliest words and phrases included “mama” and “dog” and “ball,” of course, but also “Peace Now” and “No Corn.” Even without a literal understanding of every detail or every cause, we tried to create a kind of loving, child-friendly, and joyful resistance in our daily lives, a sense that we always stood up somehow for “fairness.” “That’s not fair” had the same indignant tone, whether referring to the smallest injustice on the playground or some monstrous outrage like a police murder of a young Black man on the streets of Brooklyn.

  Before the dizzying and defining moment of our children’s’ births Malcolm X had famously noted that Black people seemed forever to have an abundance of Washingtons and Jeffersons and Lincolns in their family trees, but white people didn’t even have a twig or a leaf for Nat Turner or Cinque or Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman. Why, he asked rhetorically and pointedly, why the color line—even when it comes to naming the babies?

  We chose to take Malcolm’s observation as a practical matter, and so we named our first-born Zayd Osceola, to remember a Panther brother killed by the police and at the same time to raise up a Seminole leader who never surrendered to the US policy of relocation and extermination; our second Malik Cochise, this time in honor of Malcolm himself as well as a renowned First Nation legend, the great Apache guerrilla fighter.

  Our children grew up on stories of freedom fighters: Zayd’s changing table was adorned with postcards of Ho Chi Minh and a framed photo of Zayd Shakur, and above Malik’s bed was a portrait of Malcolm X as well as pictures of Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, South African revolutionaries imprisoned on Robben Island. Each of our kids started life with a home birth and an invented identity—is there any other kind?—outfitted with a false birth certificate and an assumed name as well as the more standard-issue Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls and tie-dyed T-shirts. Born on the run, they had their own youthful list of s/heroes: Robin Hood, Amilcar Cabral, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Stuart Little, Jackie Robinson, Han Solo, Lolita Lebron, Che Guevara, Peter Rabbit. They liked outlaws. Kathy and David’s beautiful baby—Chesa Jackson Gilbert Boudin—bounded into our family and crash-landed in our lives when he was fourteen months old with his name already attached, and it fit right in: Chesa, a Swahili word for dancing feet, and Jackson, taken from Soledad Brother George Jackson, murdered by prison guards at San Quentin. His prized T-shirt was a silk-screen portrait of Rosa Parks in dignified refusal.

  Leonard Boudin, a prominent civil rights attorney, had rushed to his daughter the minute he’d heard the shocking news of the Brinks robbery, the killings, and her arrest. It was a troubling jailhouse reunion, he told us later—sorrow and remorse mixed with anger and accusation—but he left with one concrete assignment that gave him a sense of practical purpose. He hurried to the babysitter where Kathy had dropped Chesa a day earlier as she left for what she never imagined would be her last day of freedom, and he retrieved his grandson and brought him home.

  We’d known Leonard and Jean Boudin for decades. Bernardine met Leonard first as a law graduate and organizer for the National Lawyers Guild; I met them when Kathy and I were community organizers together in the Cleveland ghettoes. Later we saw them often because their Greenwich Village home was a kind of center of left-wing social and literary life. Bernardine talked law with Leonard, poetry with Jean, and politics with all of us together. When we showed up on their doorstep after Brinks with our two little guys in tow and a shopping bag of baby clothes, they were still reeling from the tragedy of Kathy imprisoned and the consequences abruptly crashing down upon them, scrambling to pick up whatever pieces they could.

  “Oh, my dears,” Jean said as she answered the door, embracing us one by one, her dazzling smile in place, but her petite frame seeming even more fragile, her lively blue eyes brimming with tears now. “Thank you so much for coming.” Leonard, too, big and handsome and exuding robust power most days, was strained and shrunken as we fell into an awkward embrace. For such a powerful man, such an influential man, to be unable to control an outcome when it mattered most was simply devastating.

  They were in their seventies now, and Chesa was a handful—too heavy to carry up the stairs and too small to negotiate them alone, too full-tilt and too nonstop, too vulnerable and too needy. Everything was a challenge, from diapers to baths to bottles, and the energy it took just to keep up was backbreaking and mind-numbing for them. They’d had Chesa for less than twenty-four hours, but their elegant space was already messy, the two of them on the floor with a naked Chesa, completely spent.

  We ate Chinese takeout from boxes, and then set the kids up to play on the rug with the few toys they’d quickly gathered from neighbors. As we talked quietly in the kitchen the two of them ricocheted wildly from tears to dete
rmination, anger to sorrow, grief for their daughter to astonished joy with their grandson. We were right there with them, bouncing uncontrollably from wall to wall. How can we help? we asked.

  We came to visit every day, bringing clothes and books, stuffed animals and art supplies, and lots of homemade presents from Zayd and Malik for their new friend, Chesa—paintings, cards, collages, beaded necklaces. Within a week, Chesa was commuting each day from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side with Lorraine from BJ’s Kids, and soon after that, with agreement all around, he moved in with us—simple as that.

  But, of course, it wasn’t as simple as that; it wasn’t simple at all.

  Bernardine and I had had one long, long late-night talk right away walking down Broadway while BJ watched our sleeping kids, our thinking entirely in sync. We’d known and loved Kathy and David forever, and they were family—our brother and our sister—and, whatever else, family takes care of its own, especially in times of crisis. The pulse and measure of our lives was fully tuned to the complex rhythms of raising young kids, and here we were now, happily child-centered, fully immersed in the joyful noise of a chock-a-block toddler orchestra. Yes, there was room for one more. And if, God forbid, anything catastrophic ever overwhelmed us, our primal scream would be for our two precious boys, and who, of all the people in the world we could imagine, would we want to step up for them? We would want us.

  We raised the possibility, gently, tentatively, with Leonard and Jean. They were torn into pieces, struggling to keep from drowning in tears and going mad with grief, frantic for some way out for Kathy, desperate to keep and raise Chesa, and eager for help—their heads said yes, but their hearts screamed no. Years later—long after Kathy had gone to trial and been sentenced to a term of twenty years to life in state prison, after we’d settled into our new family reality with us as Chesa’s other parents (or “caretakers,” as Jean called us for a while) and Jean and Leonard loving and engaged grandparents, and long after we’d moved to Chicago—I was back in New York for work and came to their home for dinner. “Oh, Bill, dear,” Jean said, answering the door, reaching up to hug me warmly, smiling her warm and stunning smile. “I love you . . . and I hate you,” just like that, completely matter-of-fact. She might have been channeling the common sentiment captured so simply by the conflicted and tormented Roman poet Catullus: “I hate you and I love you!” We both laughed, and I said, “Perfect!” and so she said it again with cheerful conviction: “I love you and I hate you.”