A Freewheelin' Time (5 page)

If he said he was going to call me, I would frantically read the newspaper in order to have something to say. Many years later I learned that all during that time his father, the head of the American Communist Party, was in jail. No one ever said anything about his family. If you pretend everything is normal, maybe it will be. The fifties were repressive in more ways than one.

The summer of 1958, the summer after the party that drew me out of my shell, I went to Camp Kinderland as a counselor in training, or CIT. Kinderland was a socialist Jewish camp in upstate New York but was open to everyone, as is the socialist credo. To qualify as a CIT you had to be fifteen years old, as many of my new friends were. I was only fourteen, so all I had to do to be eligible was to lie about my age again.

At Camp Kinderland I made good friends and never, ever was referred to as a goy or as an Italian, with the inevitable snide remarks about the Mafia. I had a few good friends in Bryant High School, but I was always aware of being different. I had to work at being part of the culture in the school and convince myself to be interested in what interested other students, then work at introducing them to what interested me. With my other friends and with the kids at Kinderland, I could be more spontaneous since we knew we came from the same left-wing background; that was our bond.

Camp Kinderland—I’m in the pointy hood next to Sue Zuckerman (far right).

There was no reason to create subdivisions for religions or ethnicity. We’d been brought up to unite, not separate. We had in common an outsider status inflicted on us by the Cold War and our parents’ political beliefs. Other than our seriousness about freedom, justice, equality for all, and banning the bomb, we were still just a bunch of teenagers.

The big event of the Kinderland summer was a play for the entire camp put on by the CIT group. The counselors picked the musical
The Pajama Game,
a recent hit on Broadway, for its theme about a union in a pajama factory seeking a pay raise and better working conditions for the employees, as well as for the central love story between Babe, the head of the union grievance committee, and the plant’s new superintendent, Sid.

I was picked for the role of Babe, and Sid was to be played by my boyfriend. Fun, except that I cannot carry a tune. The counselors cum directors must have had second thoughts about my voice after the first few song rehearsals, but they did not act on them. I must have been god-awful, yet everyone was enthusiastic and we had a great time doing all the work that putting on a stage production entails. I forgot to be afraid of singing in front of people.

The Babe and Sid offstage romance didn’t last the summer, however. I don’t think it was because I couldn’t sing and he could and I massacred all our love duets—but that might have contributed somewhat.

Identity

When the school year
began again, so did the trips to Washington Square on Sundays. My friends and I would meet at Astor Place, then wander off to a coffee shop, a bookshop, or Nedicks, a nondescript hot dog place at Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, where the painters and Beat writers of the forties and fifties had hung out, to carry on intense conversations about the world we were learning about and how we figured in it. And we made plans to see one another at the next folk concert.

Washington Square Park with friends

I traveled back and forth on the subway from Queens to Manhattan and did a lot of reading if I was alone. One book that intrigued me was
The God That Failed
, a selection of essays by internationally known writers of the time, including Stephen Spender, André Gide, Ignazio Silone, and Richard Wright, explaining why they quit the Communist Party. The appeal of Communism was the search for a better, more equitable society, but the disillusionment each of these writers experienced was a long, agonizing journey. As an examination of the Cold War and Stalinism by these important thinkers, without the usual rhetoric, the book made an impact.

The fact that these respected intellectuals publicly repudiated their previous beliefs was a blow to the left. Because
The God That Failed
had been so touted and praised by anti-Communists, I felt I was betraying the elders by reading it. Hence I read in secret. In those terrible times of anti-Communist fervor, you were either on one side or the other; there could be no middle ground, at least publicly. Behind the scenes the book was read and discussed by the left, as well.

I was wary of dogma, of black-and-white opinions. In this climate, it wasn’t easy for red-diaper babies to raise questions about the Soviet Union and Stalin, since we knew our parents were living within a siege mentality. When the writer Howard Fast left the Communist Party he was denounced by it as a traitor and an opportunist. His book
Spartacus,
about a Roman slave revolt, was made into a Hollywood movie starring Kirk Douglas. My pal George Auerbach, also a red-diaper baby, said that the condemnation of Fast, who had also written
Tony and the Wonderful Door,
a children’s book I loved, was bogus. The implication that he was no longer a good writer because he no longer believed in Stalin seemed absurd. As in a comic book, a Big Question Mark suddenly appeared over my head. I began to doubt.

The forbidden had always had an allure for me. Growing up, I remember overhearing my parents whisper the name Carlo Tresca, together with the words
anarchist
and
anti-Communist.
I had no idea who Tresca was, but the fact that he was talked about sotto voce made me never forget his name. He was something illicit, an outlaw; and I was immediately curious. The secrecy surrounding Tresca made him infinitely attractive to me.

It was the same with comic books, which we weren’t allowed to read. The babysitter was told never to bring any with her when she came to sit for us—so naturally I had to find out what they were about. Fortunately the other kids in the neighborhood had stacks of comic books in their rooms. Devouring them, I forgot all about Tresca.

I loved looking at
Archie, Superman,
and those mysterious “love comics” that were easy to find in the hidden stash belonging to an older sister of a friend. I would come home from reading comics at other people’s apartments and spend hours making up characters and stories and drawing intricate maps of the towns they lived in. I came up with a complicated language, similar to hieroglyphics, for them to “speak.” When I showed these to a like-minded playmate, we worked hard to develop the hieroglyphics into a sign language that we used with each other, to the delight of the adults, because we were oh so clever and absolutely quiet for hours.

I also made storybooks in which the main character was always sweet and sensitive yet tended to have some terrible fate befall him or her. My parents found these amusing and seemed to enjoy my developing sense of humor. When
Mad
magazine came out in the early 1950s, I was ready for it. Around that time, my parents’ disillusionment with the Soviet Union’s version of Communism was cresting. They had also forgotten about the comic book ban.

As for Carlo Tresca, this is what I found out:

Tresca was an Italian who became a well-known labor organizer in America and was an important man fighting for the soul of the Italian American community during the early years of the twentieth century. He published articles and newspapers in an attempt to educate Italian immigrants and all workers to fight for their right to better working conditions. Because he was an anarchist, an anti-Communist, and a foe of big business and the mob, he made many enemies. As a result, he also had few allies. He was murdered in broad daylight at Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street in 1943.

The crime was never solved. My parents probably felt they had to speak of him sotto voce because he was anathema to Communists. I like to think that they secretly admired Carlo Tresca and disagreed with the Communist Party line.

I
n the summer of 1958, the friends I’d met at Kinderland and I heard about plans for a march on Washington, D.C., that fall called Youth March for Integrated Schools. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision,
Brown v. Board of Education
, declaring segregation of schools unconstitutional, the question of integration in the South was coming to a head. Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas and other Southern politicians were denouncing organizations, such as the NAACP, that were fighting against segregation, insisting they were really Communist groups. The majority of Americans were in favor of integration of the public schools, however, and the defamation didn’t stick. Leaders of various equal rights organizations banded together to announce there would be a demonstration by students in Washington on October 25, 1958. Young people nationwide would travel to the capital to demonstrate their support for the end of segregation in the schools. On Saturdays and sometimes after school during the week some friends and I started working as volunteers for the march.

Bayard Rustin, from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was a coordinator of the march and ran the Harlem headquarters of the organization at 312 West 125th Street. To us, a young group of mainly white student volunteers from left-wing backgrounds, Rustin was an imposing and elegant figure, a taskmaster and an educator. Our jobs were to get signatures on a petition demanding an end to segregation and to help raise money for and spread the word about the upcoming march. At the Harlem headquarters I’d meet up with George Auerbach and the other kids, and we’d break up into groups and choose neighborhoods in which to go knocking on doors.

George and I and a few others decided to go to the theater district and wait at the stage door for Sidney Poitier, who was starring in Lorraine Hansberry’s play
A Raisin in the Sun.
When he came out, we ran up to him rattling our cans and explaining our mission. He was gracious, but as he dropped coins in each of our cans, he told us: Oh, man, I have given so much already.

Students from all over the country came to this first youth march on Washington. It was thrilling to be one of ten thousand young people, black and white, who marched from the White House to the Lincoln Memorial. A small delegation led by Harry Belafonte attempted to deliver a petition to President Eisenhower, but they were not successful. The march itself was a success, if only because it inspired all of us who were part of it to continue to work for civil rights. We just knew that the next march would be even bigger and more successful. And the next one, in April 1959, was bigger, and soon there were the Freedom Rides and the sit-ins in the South. By the time the third and most recognized march on Washington was held in August of 1963, there were more than a hundred thousand people. This march, along with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, pushed the agenda of civil rights forever into the national consciousness.

As the civil rights movement gained momentum, my friends and I picketed the nationwide chain store Woolworth’s, which had segregated lunch counters in the South. While we marched in front of stores around the city, we handed out information to passersby, informing them of the chain’s policy down South and of the sit-ins that were taking place at the lunch counters. We would try to deter potential customers from going in to shop or to eat at any Woolworth’s. One Saturday my aunt walked out of a store, mortified that she had crossed a picket line, albeit unwittingly since she had gone in before we showed up. She joined the line for a little while and I felt very proud.

A
t Bryant High School I eventually discovered a core group of kids who were politically involved with the world around them, and what I perceived as two different worlds suddenly had more in common with each other than I ever expected.

A boy I had known since elementary school was an outsider like me. He was well liked but known as a “fairy nice boy.” He played the piano and sang wonderfully. He was smarter than anyone else and was a lot of fun to be with. We were soul mates and ended up going to the senior class prom together. Even though he was nearly a head shorter than me, and queer, we were a great couple.