I Was a Revolutionary (26 page)

“Doesn't mean you have to pretend you're someone you're not,” she says.

I try to explain about being a spousal hire and the uneasy state of my employment after the attention from the book. “It's why they gave me only one class this semester.” To everything she asks why, and I try to rationalize and explain until all I can see in her expression is disappointment, the slight accusation of cowardice.

Next class, I arrive to find a flyer for the protest taped to the
dry erase board of my room. Lauren doesn't show. I leave the handbill where it is, writing dates and names from the Kansas past around it. Finally, someone asks what it is. I take it down and read it aloud. They are silent. I set it on my desk and continue lecturing until our time is finished.

Afterward I walk to the union, where the rally is under way. There's a young black man standing on a stone bench. He's wearing a heavy peacoat and a black knit hat that keeps inching higher off his forehead because he's shaking from cold or anger. Suddenly he shouts: “We are at war, and we are the citizens of an empire. The crimes of our government are being committed in our names and we ain't gonna stand for it any longer!” He goes on another minute, and the crowd echoes back, chanting, “Not in our names.” Then I see Lauren. Booming forth from the crowd, she joins the guy on the bench. She looks around, taking in the sizable gathering. She opens her mouth but hesitates. I think maybe the moment has gotten to her, but she steadies herself and begins reading the casualty figures—military and civilian, American and Iraqi—the Pentagon tries to keep secret. The crowd shouts its frozen approval, fists raised here and there. She is electric in her nervousness, gaining confidence with each response from the crowd. She tells us that on the count of three we will fall to the ground and lie silent for five minutes in recognition of the war dead.

I'm standing on the periphery with the other interlopers taking in the spectacle, but when she begins to count I move closer and lower myself to the snow-covered brick. Lying silently with the others, I look at the gray, sunless sky, and wonder what Linda's doing. We never went in for something as static as a die-in. We were always marching somewhere, or trying to occupy some building. Looking for confrontation. I think of the March on the Pentagon and trying to break the line of police and National Guardsmen. I see Linda spitting in
a marshal's face and feel the old wounds from the clubs in my back when they countered. We were begging to be arrested, and when we finally were, cuffed and put on buses that took us to separate detention facilities, I thought of her then, too, as I stretched out on the holding-cell floor. I wanted only to pay my fine so that I could return to her. I feel no such desire now, just the curiosity of what it would take for her to dirty her winter coat here in the snow.

When the five minutes are over, we all rise and dust off our jackets. I hang around, watching Lauren talk to a group of people who have surrounded her. I look away when she glances in my direction, but turn back to find her smiling.

“You came,” she says as she approaches.

“Of course.”

The other speaker walks over and joins us. He's thinner than, and not as tall as, he looked standing on top of the bench. She introduces him, Kwame, and we shake hands.

“Lauren's told me about you,” he says.

“Don't believe everything you hear.”

The shortest month of the year, February won't end just to spite us. We're all runny noses and shivering, Lauren's fair skin almost translucent in the cold.

“What'd you think?” Kwame says, blowing into his hand. I tell them they're doing the right thing, that the pressure will build. He nods as he looks around. “What should we do now?” he asks. I start talking about how it's not just one rally, the commitment has to be sustained, that power concedes nothing without demand, and suddenly I'm twenty years old and standing on a Chicago street corner haranguing some poor guy on his way to work to stop slaving for the Man and come to a fucking meeting. “Nah, I know all that, man,” says Kwame. “I just meant what should we do
now
? You wanna grab a drink or something?”

And so I follow them downtown to the Taproom. It's off campus, and we're the only people there, which I like. The bartender wears thick black glasses and a pearl-snap cowboy shirt over a white thermal. He's just opened. As we lean on the bar considering the various taps on draft, he turns and kneels, slowly flipping through a crate of LPs on the floor behind the extra liquor bottles. He picks one and sets the needle before finally turning to serve us. There's the old familiar crackle of stylus threading groove and then Dylan's strange country croon fills the bar as
Nashville Skyline
begins. We take our pints to a corner booth by the window and discuss school. They are studying poli-sci and thinking about grad programs. They don't say so, but I can tell Lauren and Kwame are together. The occasional touch on the other's arm as they work to articulate a point, the hopeful expectancy that undercuts the seriousness with which they look at one another.

“So, Lauren says you were in it deep back in the day,” says Kwame.

“Sort of.”

“Come on, man,” he says, scanning over the empty bar. “What was it like?”

“What, the movement?”

“Being underground.”

I think a long moment before responding and when I do I meet their eyes and say, “How do you
think
?”

When I say nothing else, it seems he might let it lie, but Kwame probes further: “What made you do it? How did you know you needed to go under?”

I tell him I knew the exact moment.

“I was in Chicago, walking past Fred Hampton's casket after the police assassinated him and Mark Clark.”

“You knew them?” Kwame says.

“The Panthers' offices were close to ours. They used to
come over, sometimes to plan joint actions, and other times, just to fuck with us, they'd take stuff to test how truly anti-racist we were.”

“Am I supposed to be impressed you hung out with Panthers or offended you calling brothers thieves?”

“I'm just answering your question, Kwame.”

The look in his eyes betrays the edge in his voice. “Go on, then,” he says. So I share some of the old stories, confiding how one of the last times I heard Fred speak he seemed to auger his own death:
I might be gone tomorrow. I might be in jail. But when I leave
,
remember the last words on my lips
:
I am a revolutionary
. “They killed him in December '68,” I say. “By January we were moving underground.”

The ease with which I relate this story is familiar. The Hampton-Clark murders had a big impact on Linda and me. Over the years they became part of our personal mythology, a way in which to understand our past and to account for what had become of us since. However, usually when I tell it—now and again it will come up at a cocktail party or university function—it's a cautionary tale meant to explain not why we went underground but why we left the movement altogether.

“Who's ‘we'?” Lauren asks.

“My wife. We were there together.” There's a pause as they nod, and then I ask: “How'd you two meet?” The look they exchange tells me my hunch was correct. I learn they had a public policy class last fall.

She says: “Even today people sometimes look confused when they see us walking together.”

“It's all good, though,” Kwame says, a cold smile on his face. “A black man's in the White House. It's like they say: We're ‘post-racial' now, right?”

One night in early March, I receive an e-mail from Linda ask
ing if I'll leave the house so she can gather more of her things. With the first hints of spring in the air, I decide to walk downtown. As I pass an Italian restaurant we used to go to on special occasions, however, I catch sight of her out of the corner of my eye, having dinner with a man. I haven't seen her since she left the house after New Year's and can only stare. She's straightened the curl of her long black hair, and she's wearing an outfit I can't recall. I don't recognize the guy. They're eating and smiling, and then she turns away from him and looks out the window near where I'm standing. Instinctively, I raise my hand, meaning,
Why aren't you at the house like you said you'd be?
and
Who's this asshole you're having dinner with?
But she doesn't acknowledge me. She turns her attention back to the man and raises her fork to her mouth. I leave, heading home, thinking maybe she didn't see me after all. Must have been one of those tricks of the light where, inside the illuminated restaurant, she couldn't see anything outside in the dark.

We talk about the pressure to move from agriculture to industry. We talk about the development of the urban centers of the state. We discuss John Brinkley, the Goat Gland Doctor, who injected goat glands into men to improve virility. We marvel at how he manipulated early radio to nearly steal the 1930 gubernatorial race. We talk Depression and Dust Bowl. We read excerpts from the
WPA Guide to 1930s Kansas
and look at murals. We cover the war years, how Wichita doubled in population overnight after receiving bomber contracts from the government, how German POWs were relocated to Kansas to relieve the shortage of agricultural workers. We talk NAACP and
Brown vs. Board of Education
. Do they know that the sit-ins at Dockum's Drugstore in Wichita preceded the famous Greensboro sit-ins by two years? They do not. The sixties get their own unit, culminating here in Lawrence with the 1970
riots after police shot two students, one black and one white.

On the last day before spring break, Lauren stops by my office. She's been doing this more and more, sometimes to talk about class, but usually just to talk. She says she's going to D.C. for a rally on the Mall to bring the troops home. “Me and Kwame chartered a bus and we've been organizing people to come. It's almost full,” she says. “You have any plans?”

“In this economy?” I say. “Thought I might stay home and listen to some fireside chats on the gramophone.”

It feels nice to have developed a rapport with her, one of the small pleasures of teaching.

“You should come with us,” she says, setting a hand on my arm, which is what I'm looking at when I hear Brad's loud voice from the hallway, asking if I have a second. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says. “Didn't realize you were holding office hours.”

“It's okay.” I wave him in. “Lauren was just leaving.”

She shoulders her bag and heads for the door. I wish her good luck in Washington.

“What's in Washington?” asks Brad affably. “Family?”

“A protest against the wars,” she answers.

“Ah,” he says, looking from Lauren to me and back again. After Lauren leaves, Brad closes the door and pulls a chair close like he's going to give me a real talking-to. He leans forward.

“I heard about you and Linda.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “What'd you hear?”

“I bumped into her earlier today. She said you two were separated.”

“Yeah.”

We let that silence just hang there awkwardly for a few seconds.

“I'm sorry,” he says, putting a big paw on my shoulder. “I wasn't aware. Are you doing okay?”

I tell him I'm fine, that we'd been growing apart for years. “Really,” I say, “it's the best thing for both of us.” He takes this in with a series of hurried nods. He seems to want to say more, but I tell him I need to go.

“I've been through it myself,” he says. “I'm here for you if you want to talk.”

When Linda left, it felt strange to have time to myself again. Between teaching and our life together, my attention was always directed by the concerns of one or the other. Since January it seems all I've had is time, and without marriage, teaching has rushed in to fill the void. And so over spring break I'm not on vacation or visiting family. I stay home and tinker with my syllabus and course schedule, reading a new book I want to incorporate into class next fall. The Friday before returning to school I get an e-mail from Lauren. For a brief second I misread the name, mistaking it for another please-leave-the-house note from Linda, and feel relieved when I realize the error. Lauren's message is brief. She says the D.C. trip fell through and asks if we can meet. I type:
Come by my office Monday
. My cursor hovers over
SEND
, then I delete and type:
Walk tomorrow?
giving her my home address and the time.

The following afternoon I'm grading papers when Lauren knocks, forty-five minutes late. She's wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt too big for her. Kwame's, I imagine. “Sorry, I lost track of time.” I pull on my jacket and step onto the porch. A cold front has come through and a heavy gust of wind kicks up over the railing. She lowers the hood of the sweatshirt and says she needs to make a phone call before we head out. “Forgot my cell,” she says. “Would you mind if I used your landline? It won't take a second.”

“Of course,” I say, pointing toward the kitchen. She takes the handset from the cradle on the wall, looking at me over
her shoulder before dialing. I walk upstairs to my study to give her some privacy. A minute later she calls out my name and I tell her to come here. I've taken off my jacket and slung it over the back of my chair. Linda and I used to work here together, our desks at opposite walls, surrounded by bookshelves. But for a few stray paper clips, hers is cleared out and the bookshelves stand half full. The wooden stairs creak from Lauren's languid ascension. When she appears in the doorway, she's looking all around her like a thief casing the joint. “Last throes of winter out there,” I say. “I thought we could talk here.” She agrees. “So tell me what happened with Washington.”

She explains that the donors who fronted most of the money pulled out two days before, an unforeseen result of the ongoing financial collapse. She's looking across the hallway where I've left the bedroom door open. I imagine what she's seeing. The built-in bookshelves we put in ten years ago that span an entire wall. The green leather ergonomic reading chair by the window imported from Sweden. The attached bath we added with a whirlpool and a dual-head standing shower. “Look at this place,” she says, unzipping her sweatshirt. “This could be my parents' home.”