Days of Rage (62 page)

The story of Ray Levasseur’s journey underground provides a rare window on the emotional and political development of the 1970s revolutionaries. It begins in the village of Springvale, just outside the southern Maine mill town of Sanford, where a series of textile and shoe factories lined the Mousam River. Levasseur was born there in 1946, the older of two sons in a second-generation French Canadian family. His struggles with authority began with a distant and dictatorial father, who spent long periods away working as an air force mechanic, leaving the boys to be raised by their mother, Jeanette, in a series of ratty apartments. Exacerbating these struggles were prejudices in 1950s-era Maine against French Canadians, who were seen, in Levasseur’s words, as “docile and dumb.” Fifty years later he can still recall the stinging jokes: “What’s a French Canadian? A nigger turned inside out.” The
Protestant kids smirked at poor children like him, calling them “frogs.” From an early age he yearned for their acceptance.

Two things made Ray Levasseur different from other mill town boys: a vague sense that he was meant for something better than life in the mills and, especially as he grew into adulthood, a deep-seated belief that the world should be fair and just, that poor people—“the oppressed,” he would come to call them—were being held back by a rich and powerful white elite. His first act of revolt came against the nuns who taught his sixth-grade classes; when one smacked him in the forehead with an eraser, Ray implored his mother to let him attend public school, and she did. In high school he grew to be a strapping six-footer, big enough to start on the football team and handsome enough to snag a Protestant cheerleader as his girlfriend.

He thrived for a time, until football season ended during his senior year and he began to confront his future. His father, who himself disdained all things French Canadian, told him that whatever he did, he should never take a job in the mills. Ray began skipping school, hanging out at a pool hall, smoking, drinking, and getting into fights. Mostly he fought kids from neighboring Biddeford, but there was a small college nearby, and he and his pals mugged the college kids and stole their beer; he beat one so badly he ended up in the hospital.

After graduating at the bottom of his class in 1964, Ray reluctantly took a summer job in one of the mills, cranking out shoe heels and sabotaging the big machine when he needed a break. Frustrated and aimless, he usually began drinking when his shift ended at dawn; weekends he spent at the Maine beaches, drinking and fighting, earning his first night in jail for beating up a sailor at Old Orchard Beach. This wasn’t what he wanted in life, he realized, so that fall he took his last $50 and hitchhiked down Interstate 95 to Boston, where he bunked with a girl he’d met at the beach. He got a job loading fish at the docks, where the older men nicknamed him “Animal” for his continuing penchant for fistfights. In one episode, at the Newport Folk Festival during the summer of 1965—he saw Dylan go electric—he got into a fight with another drunk for urinating too close to his car. He had the fellow on the ground and was pounding him senseless when the man’s friend came up behind Ray and swung a hammer full force into the right side of his head, nearly popping out his right eye.

Ray never understood why he fought. Maybe to impress girls. Maybe out of frustration. He was certain this wasn’t how his life was meant to go. But he had no idea how to escape the cycle of boozing and brawling. In Boston he was arrested twice for assault, then sued by both victims, after which his court-appointed attorney told him the judge would dismiss the suits if he entered the army. So he did.

It was December 1965; Ray was nineteen. The war in Vietnam was fast escalating, but he was still busy with his own fights. He got into one the night before he left for Fort Dix, New Jersey, then got arrested for going AWOL when he sneaked off one weekend to see a girlfriend in Boston, then arrested again the day before leaving for Vietnam; a military policeman accosted him for drunkenness, and Ray spit on him. The irony, lost on Ray at the time, was that when they sent him to an actual war, he did no fighting at all. He spent his year in Southeast Asia supervising Vietnamese laborers, building quonset huts, guarding payroll shipments, and smoking copious amounts of marijuana.

He returned from Vietnam in December 1967, a burly twenty-one-year-old. After a thirty-day leave visiting his girlfriend in Boston, he was assigned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he was given little to do. He remained angry and deeply confused by his experiences overseas, having little grasp of Vietnamese history or geopolitics. For the first time in his life he suddenly wanted to understand the world. What was the war even about? Why had several of his friends died? Having made it through high school without reading an entire book, he purchased his first,
The Diary of Che Guevara
, and downed it like a starving dog. He found Che’s odyssey enthralling, especially the notion that a small group, with the right leaders, could topple an entire government and change the course of history. His curiosity grew when, walking the streets outside Fort Campbell, he saw the aging signs of the Jim Crow South:
COLORED ONLY. FOR WHITES ONLY
. The prejudices burdening Southern blacks, it dawned on him, were not unlike those directed against French Canadians in Maine. To whites, he saw, they were all “niggers.” Thus began his lifelong identification with blacks.

At a party he met and befriended a woman named Jan Phillips, an organizer for a civil rights group called the Southern Conference Education
Fund. Sensing an eager student, Phillips plied him with works by Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, and Fidel Castro and invited him to his first demonstrations. He read every book, some twice. It was 1968, the year Dr. King was killed, and by that summer Ray felt like a new man, with a new vision and a new course in life, devoted to fighting the war and white prejudice in all its twisted forms. His girlfriend, Kathie Flynn, came to Kentucky, they got married, and he began taking night courses at Austin Peay State University, across the state line in Clarksville, Tennessee. When he learned he could qualify for a discharge if he went to college, he applied and was accepted as a full-time student.

Almost overnight Ray transformed himself from a confused, aimless army private to a campus radical. Growing his brown hair long, pinning peace symbols to his army jacket, he became a fixture at the few antiwar rallies around Clarksville and helped start a radical campus newspaper. He traveled to antiwar conferences in Atlanta and Louisville and marched side by side with young black men and women, raising his fist with theirs and shouting angry slogans. For the first time in his life he had found a purpose, a calling, and he loved it.

Like many of his friends, he also loved marijuana. Excellent Vietnamese weed was streaming into Fort Campbell in hundreds of packages mailed by U.S. servicemen, and Levasseur had started selling some of it, first at a black club in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, later to his college pals in Clarksville. One morning in February 1969 he was awakened at his apartment by the crashing of fists on his front door, and though he managed to flush his stash down the toilet, it was too late. One of his customers turned out to be an undercover cop.

He and Kathie were both arrested; their photo appeared on the front page of the Clarksville newspaper. They made bail, then got evicted from their apartment, at which point prosecutors allowed them to return to Boston until their trial that fall. Just like that, it was over: the new life in college, the civil rights marches, the work against the war. Deeply depressed, Levasseur washed up on a couch at Kathie’s family home, watching Neil Armstrong take man’s first steps on the moon and thinking, “This means nothing. The ghettos are in flames, and the world is turning to shit.” He took his old job on the docks.

Levasseur now faced twenty years in prison. He had no money to hire a lawyer. After a final blowout weekend at Woodstock, he and Kathie reluctantly hitchhiked back to Clarksville for their trial. In the courtroom the prosecutor lambasted them as a “scourge to society.” It was over in two days. Kathie got two years. Levasseur got two-to-five. Her family bailed her out, pending an appeal, but refused to help him.
*
He ended up in the Montgomery County Jail while his case too was appealed.

To say Ray Levasseur was an angry young man is like saying Mozart could play the piano. His anger was volcanic, all-encompassing, an emotional virus that was sinking into his bones, reshaping him, twisting him. Nothing about any of this seemed remotely fair. The government had sent him to Vietnam. The government, he felt, was now punishing him for antiwar work. His family—and Kathie’s—had abandoned him. He was utterly alone, in a grimy Southern jail, and when he finally couldn’t take it anymore, he exploded: at the bologna.

The bologna they served in the Montgomery County Jail, Levasseur decided, was moldy. At night, in his cell, he hollered at the black prisoners that they should mount a hunger strike, that moldy bologna was a violation of their rights as men. The black prisoners agreed and elected him their spokesman. He presented the sheriff and a crowd of beefy deputies with a list of demands. The very next morning they hauled him out in handcuffs and dragged him back to the courthouse, where the prosecutor called him a troublemaker and said, “We believe Mr. Levasseur would be more comfortable at the state penitentiary.”

He was bused to the maximum-security state prison at Nashville and tossed into a holding area with hardened murderers and rapists. On the first day he struck up a conversation with a trio of young black men who had been convicted of killing a Nashville patrolman. They were in the cafeteria line, discussing Coltrane and Marx, when he noticed that the line was splitting in two at the entrance, blacks to the left, whites to the right. Unsure what to do, and unwilling to offend his new black friends, he joined the black line. Inside,
the cafeteria—blacks sitting only with blacks, whites with whites—was loud with the sound of a hundred inmate conversations. When he took his food-laden tray and walked toward a table full of black men, the din began to subside. By the time he sat down, the cafeteria had gone silent. One of the blacks leaned over and said, “Now you know what it’s like.”

From that day on Ray hung with the black inmates, eating, boxing, and playing basketball with them. Their stories of white hatred and bigotry only fueled his burgeoning radical worldview. From his cell he sent for every radical newspaper the guards would let him receive. He read of the Panthers and George Jackson and the Weathermen and all the young people who were calling themselves revolutionaries, who were actually fighting for the oppressed. He yearned to join them. Then, as he read more of Che and Mao and Ho Chi Minh and Lenin, he began to daydream about leading his own underground army; Ho had started with barely ten followers. It only took one man, Levasseur saw, one visionary leader to start it all. He dreamed of becoming the American Che.

A born proselytizer, he eagerly spread this new radical message to his black friends, which didn’t sit well with prison officials. He was labeled a “racial agitator” and in the summer of 1970 was transferred to the state’s toughest prison, Brushy Mountain, where Martin Luther King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, was doing time. There, in his new cell, Ray found a welcoming note that read, “You’re dead, nigger lover.” Spending much of his time in solitary, he wasted no time agitating for parole, and in the spring of 1971 he earned it, on the condition that he leave the state. That May, six months after arriving, he was finally released. He stepped outside Brushy Mountain’s high walls, raised a clenched fist to his friends in the cell block, thrust a defiant middle finger to the administration building, then boarded a bus for the long trip back to Maine.

 • • • 

Back in Sanford on parole, he took a job at a friend’s Sunoco station, then quit it for a job making concrete blocks, then quit that to work construction in the resort town of Kennebunkport. He hung a portrait of Che on the refrigerator in his apartment. He began taking drugs, a little at first, then more, marijuana and amphetamines mostly, washed down with cheap scotch. He lived in a state of simmering rage, at a government that had sent him to Vietnam, that had thrown him into a maximum-security prison for a two-bit marijuana bust, that beat down the blacks and the poor and anyone who wasn’t white and rich. All that summer he rode his bicycle past Kennebunkport’s seaside mansions and dreamed of burning them down. Then, that August, George Jackson was killed. “George murdered, I’m insane with hate,” Ray wrote in the diary he had started in prison. Three weeks later came Attica: “Attica Attica Attica, the massacre burns in my mind for weeks.”

He knew he couldn’t go on like this, a druggy life in a dead-end job. Then he read an interview with the president of the University of Maine at Augusta, who was recruiting underprivileged students, including blacks and ex-cons. Levasseur wrote him a letter, challenging him to let him enroll. To his amazement, the college telephoned.

“Could you be ready to enroll in January?” the woman asked.

“Shit, yeah,” he breathed.

At the university, where the GI Bill paid his tuition and janitorial work his rent, he returned to the role of campus radical, starting a chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. As if making up for lost time, he threw himself into antiwar work with a vengeance, staging a series of marches and demonstrations where he clutched a microphone and exhorted the audiences—including one of a thousand or more, labeled the largest in state history—to take to the streets. Overnight he became a public figure in Maine, a highly visible antiwar activist and a regular presence on television news; his mother took to calling to tell him to change his shirt. For Levasseur the high point came when he led a crowd of protesters that rocked Vice President Spiro Agnew’s limousine after he delivered a speech in Augusta; his proudest moment, he often said, came when he spit into Agnew’s open window and barely missed hitting him in the face.

And then, after nine frenzied months, it ended. American troops were streaming back from Vietnam, and what remained of the antiwar movement began fading away. That September of 1972, seeking a new cause, Levasseur printed up a thousand fliers calling for a demonstration to mark the one-year
anniversary of the Attica rebellion. Stapled on bulletin boards across Augusta, it compared the Attica killings to harsh punishments of prisoners in Maine, demanding that “the economic, racist, sexist exploitation and oppression of human beings must end!!!” A handful of ex-cons, eager to improve conditions at the Maine State Prison, responded, and with their support Levasseur formed a new group, the Greater Maine Committee to Secure Justice for Prisoners. He plunged into a months-long study of Maine prisons, compiling lists of inmate beatings and suspicious deaths. In early 1973, working with inmate leaders at the state prison, he issued a press release citing prisoner grievances and making fourteen demands, from better medical care to elimination of segregation cells and mailroom censorship. “We are the convicted class,” it concluded. “We have been pushed over the line from which there can be no retreat. . . . We will never give up.”