Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  “Yeh.”

  “Jack!” said Twohig. “That’s enough!”

  “All right,” said Farrell. “Mr. Twymon, I’m placing you under arrest.” Then he took out his Miranda Card and read the suspect his rights.

  When Freddie Twymon was nine years old, he was named Roxbury’s “Tom Sawyer of 1967.” The annual contest, sponsored by the Roxbury Boys’ Club, sought out the local youth who most closely resembled Mark Twain’s hero. Thirty boys, decked out in straw hats and patched dungarees, competed in wood-chopping, apple-dunking, and fence-painting contests, and when Freddie emerged victorious, his beaming face appeared on page three of the Boston Record-American, making him something of a neighborhood celebrity.

  When he was a child, Freddie’s ebullience and spunk were irresistible. He’d try anything once. Daisy Voight snapped a picture of him standing on his head in a massive snowbank, his mischievous smile beguiling even upside down. Many inner-city blacks were terrified of water, but Freddie took to it readily, becoming a star of the Boys’ Club swimming team. When others in the club science program shrank from a twenty-three-foot python, Freddie posed with the giant creature draped around his neck.

  But somehow adolescence seemed to drain that formidable energy. When he was fifteen or so, Freddie stopped going to the Boys’ Club, preferring to spend his afternoons on the Boston Common with a gang of vagabonds. Those who saw him there in the summer of 1973 were astonished by the change in his appearance. Once a spiffy dresser, he now looked more like a hippie, disheveled in ragged T-shirts and droopy jeans. His eyes bloodshot, his face impassive, he was drinking a lot of wine, smoking a lot of reefers. Coming home drunk night after night, he struck his brother George as “the spitting image of his father.”

  About that time Freddie started stealing from the family. At night, while his mother slept, he’d sneak into her room and snitch a couple of dollars from her purse. Later he grew still bolder, taking money and clothing from his brothers; when caught, he invariably insisted he was “borrowing” the stuff for a few days. Richard and George warned him to stay away from their things, and finally, when he lifted an expensive tape deck from their room, they took him down to the boiler room and beat the hell out of him.

  Nothing could turn Freddie around as he drifted deeper into trouble. For a time in 1973–74, he hung with the gang outside the Soul Center and Braddock Drugs, preying on the gentry across Columbus Avenue. But soon he found more professional company, spending his nights at the Rainbow Lounge on Tremont Street, a notorious hangout for South End stickup men, drug dealers, numbers runners, and prostitutes.

  In the fall of 1974, Freddie was going with a girl from Chelsea. One night he stayed late at her house, then came home by subway. At the City Square Station in Charlestown, never a comfortable place for black passengers, he was arrested by two transit policemen for attempting to break into a safe in the change booth. Although he loudly protested his innocence, he was arraigned the next morning in Charlestown District Court, charged with breaking and entry (and later received a suspended sentence).

  Not surprisingly, his nightly dissipation took a heavy toll of Freddie’s schoolwork. In elementary school he had shown considerable promise, often winning gold stars for achievement and deportment, but now he lagged badly in both English and math, failing to complete ninth grade at East Boston’s Barnes School. In the fall of 1974, as busing got underway in South Boston and Roxbury, his mother arranged for him to repeat that grade at the relatively tranquil Jamaica Plain High.

  On September 12—two days after his arrest in Charlestown and with the case still pending—Freddie started at Jamaica Plain. A few days later he got into a fistfight with a white boy, was suspended for three days and told he couldn’t return unless escorted by his mother. On the appointed day, Rachel and Freddie were walking toward the subway when she noticed a knife sticking out of his pocket.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “If one of those white bastards messes with me today,” he said, “I’m going to kill him.”

  “Freddie,” she said, “I’m not taking you anywhere with that knife.”

  “Well, I ain’t going to school without it.”

  He never returned to school and some weeks later he left home, moving in with a pal on Tremont Street. Over the next year, Freddie engaged in a series of petty crimes: car theft, burglaries, and robberies. Occasionally he was arrested—for attempted auto theft in March 1975, for receiving stolen property in July—but he never got more than a suspended sentence, often committing his next crime while out on probation from the last one. His family grew increasingly impatient with him. Once, after he failed to appear in court for a hearing, his mother made him turn himself in to police. As the charges piled up, Freddie talked about leaving town altogether, running off to see his father in Alabama, but when he called to ask permission, Haywood Twymon said he had no place for his son to stay.

  On August 18, 1975, Freddie crossed a critical boundary. Having spent the day hanging out with friends on the Boston Common, he was standing on Arlington Street just across from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel when he noticed an attractive young white woman parking her red Vega, then searching for change to put in the meter. When he offered her two dimes, the woman—a twenty-three-year-old vocational counselor named Gail Rockmore—thanked him profusely. They fell into conversation. Gail liked Freddie’s open face and ready smile; he seemed like “a nice, harmless kid.” When she went to get a hamburger at McDonald’s he tagged along, and they talked for another quarter hour at a table overlooking the Public Gardens. Then Gail left for her evening lesson at the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute a few doors away.

  When she emerged at 9:30, Freddie was still standing on the corner, talking with a white youth. They asked for a ride up Beacon Hill. When the white boy got out on Charles Street, Freddie said he lived a few blocks away. Gail drove four blocks and stopped.

  “No,” Freddie said. “It’s a little further.”

  She drove another block. When her passenger made no move, she said, “I’m sorry. This is it. Please get out.”

  “Just turn in there,” Freddie said, indicating an adjacent alley.

  Starting to panic, Gail said, “No! I’d like you to get out now!”

  Freddie leaned across the gap between the bucket seats and grabbed her by the neck.

  “Stop!” Gail shouted. “I’ll do anything you want.” But as soon as he relaxed his grip, she pushed open her door and jumped out.

  “If you leave,” he said, “I’ll take your car.”

  “You can have it!” she shrieked.

  Running back down Charles Street, she flagged a car and told the driver, “Some guy just tried to kill me.”

  Seeing her enter the other vehicle, Freddie gunned the red Vega up Cambridge Street. Gail and her companion gave chase, alerting two policemen in a cruiser, who chased the Vega onto Tremont Street, where it jumped a red light, swerved right, and hit a utility pole. Freddie leapt out and ran down Winter Street, ducking into Locke-Ober, Boston’s most elegant restaurant. Taking refuge in its basement men’s room, he was arrested there a few minutes later by Patrolman John O’Brien. Convicted of larceny of a motor vehicle, assault and battery, operating a car without a license, and leaving the scene of an accident, Freddie was sentenced on September 8, 1975, to up to two and a half years in Concord Prison.

  The Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, as it was officially known, was a grim bastion of penal servitude not far from the Old North Bridge and hard by the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The Commonwealth’s younger, more malleable offenders usually ended up at Concord, while more seasoned criminals went to the maximum-security prison at Walpole. But there was nothing easygoing about Concord. Those who had served there called it “tough time,” a severe, unrelenting regime.

  Freddie—henceforth Prisoner No. 49471—shared a two-man cell with a succession of short-timers. Put to work varnishing park benches in the wo
odworking shop, he was later transferred to the kitchen, where he washed pots and milk trays.

  From the moment he walked through the gates, Freddie drew ardent attention from the prison “queens,” always on the lookout for good-looking young “punks.” One husky pederast—known to guards and prisoners alike as “Diane”—showed a special interest in Freddie. “Here’s a pack of cigarettes,” he’d say. “Come up to my room.” Terrified by these advances, Freddie did his best to rebuff them, but Diane didn’t give up. Gradually his importunings became more urgent, laced with not so subtle threats of violence. Finally one day, when Freddie rejected him again, Diane forced him to his knees and was about to sodomize him when a sympathetic guard intervened. Frantic to escape Diane’s energetic courtship, Freddie sought some means of hurrying his parole. Strictly speaking, the Parole Board wouldn’t release a prisoner until he had guarantees of a home and a job; but such assurances were so difficult to obtain inside prison that a private organization, called the Self-Development Group, had received the board’s approval for an experimental “release and support program” in which the group began working with prisoners before their release and continued to provide assistance once they were out.

  On November 8, 1975, Freddie scrawled a note to the Self-Development Group: “I would like to talk to you about your program. I think I’ll be interested in getting into it. I see the Parole Board in January.” Some days later, in a formal application, he listed his skills as “electrical, repair radio, TV,” his job interests as “help kids stay away from where I’ve been (jail),” his occupational goals, “teaching, swimming.”

  Once he was accepted, he began working with Eddie Collins, the group’s Concord representative, a hip young black man who knew his way around Boston’s streets. Through that winter, Freddie attended Ed’s counseling sessions, learning to set “short- and long-term goals,” “establish a realistic budget,” and make a good impression at job interviews. When Freddie decided he wanted to be an electrician, Ed enrolled him in the Recruitment Training Program that provided released prisoners with thirty hours of instruction in a construction trade, then guaranteed them a job. It was a sweet deal and Freddie wanted it badly. But all depended on his being paroled by February, when the training got underway.

  On January 13, the day of his scheduled appearance before the Parole Board, Freddie had a particularly unpleasant run-in with Diane, in which the older man warned him: “Punk, you better come across pretty soon if you know what’s good for you.” The confrontation left him shaken, in no shape for a crucial showdown with the board. And when he walked into the hearing room later that morning, he was further unnerved to find that he recognized one of the two board members serving on the panel that day. The Reverend Michael Haynes, minister of the Twelfth Baptist Church and Martin Luther King’s longtime ally in Boston, had grown up around the corner from the Walkers and had known them all their lives. He didn’t know Freddie well, but recognizing the name on the file before him, he began by asking, “Mr. Twymon, do you know me?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Freddie, “I do.”

  Then Haynes launched his formal interrogation: why had Freddie dropped out of school, whom had he been hanging out with, was he on dope or alcohol, how had he gotten into trouble in the first place?

  As the questions poured out, Freddie grew angry. Here was this big-shot minister, a friend of his mother’s, interrogating him as though he were a member of the family. What right did he have to ask questions like that?

  Then Haynes got to more personal matters. “Frederick,” he said, “I know your mother very well. As you know, she’s a very sick woman. She’s suffered a great deal. I know that having you in here has caused her more pain …”

  Before he could finish, Freddie leapt to his feet and slammed both hands down on the kidney-shaped table separating him from the panel. Tears welling in his eyes, rage rising in his throat, he felt like grabbing the table and flipping it over on Haynes, but somehow he restrained the impulse, spun around, and rushed from the room. For a minute or so, he stood in the corridor, tears streaming down his face. When Haynes sent for him, Freddie said, “You were playing with my mind.”

  “I wasn’t playing with you, Frederick,” said the minister. “I was trying to get the information we need to make a determination. I’m sorry you walked out and under the circumstances I think we’d better put your case over to next month.”

  Three days later, the board’s administrative assistant wrote to Freddie: “It appeared that you were emotionally unable to deal with a hearing this month. Hopefully by February you will have enough impulse control to present yourself in a more positive light.” Realizing he’d blown his chance at the electrical training program, Freddie sank into a depression. In February and March the board took no action on his parole. He thought he’d never get out.

  Then, abruptly, things turned for the better. In late March, he was transferred to the farm dormitory just beyond the walls. In April, he passed his high school equivalency test, an essential step toward a decent job outside. Finally, on April 27, the board approved his parole. On May 7, 1976, after eight months behind bars, he left Concord.

  Family and friends offered encouragement. “You can change your life,” his brother George said on the phone from Nashville. “You’ve got what it takes,” said Eddie Collins. “Now use it!”

  Rachel gave him his old room at Methunion Manor, but as yet he had no job. On May 14, the Self-Development Group set up an interview with Inner City, Inc., a subsidiary of the Polaroid Corporation. The job provided electronics training, good pay, opportunities for advancement. Freddie got through the interview and the physical, then missed several appointments and was dropped from consideration. Instead, through a family friend, he got a municipal job, manning the Alewife Brook Sewerage Pumping Station. When that lasted barely a month, he took another dead-end position, raking leaves and sweeping walkways in Blackstone Park. For a time in midsummer he worked as a busboy in the Pavilion Room of the Sheraton-Boston Hotel, but lost that after three weeks when he violated a rule against hanging around the hotel on his day off. The Self-Development Group referred him to jobs as a radio-TV repairman and a pantry steward at the Harvard Medical School, but neither panned out. Through late summer and early fall Freddie was unemployed.

  He didn’t care for his parole officer, a Latino named Juan Snowden, whom he called “the wrong kind of dude.” At first, Freddie reported regularly, but as the months went by he often remained out of touch for weeks on end. After he missed several appointments, Snowden tried in vain to reach him at home. Things came to a head on November 23, when he failed to appear once again. The next morning Freddie called in an agitated state. Snowden confronted him with his missed appointment, saying he was “tired of excuses.” Freddie explained that he was deeply upset about his sisters’ disappearance and asked Snowden to give him a lift to a place he’d heard one sister was hiding out. Sensing that his client was losing control, the parole officer told him to wait right there, he’d be over in a minute. But when Snowden got to Methunion Manor, Freddie was gone.

  Distraught over Little Rachel’s alliance with Horace, Freddie had decided to take matters into his own hands. From behind the housing project he dug up a 22 caliber pistol he’d buried three months before and told a friend he was going up to Massachusetts Avenue to “get my sister back from the dude.” At the last moment, he thought better of this plan.

  The next day—Thanksgiving—Freddie spent the afternoon at Alva’s house enjoying the goose and sweet potato pie. Then he joined the other guests at Susan Page’s party. Downstairs in the recreation room he met a young white woman named Marianne.

  Marianne was a thirty-one-year-old graduate student and college teacher with impressive credentials. A 1969 graduate of the University of Maryland, she had a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, had completed all her requirements, except the dissertation, for a Ph.D. in economics from Yale, and had spent a year as a visiting scholar
at the Bangladesh Institute of Economic Research. After returning to the United States in 1975, she began teaching economic principles and international economics at Boston State College, while continuing her research at Harvard.

  But Marianne had another life—as a dedicated Marxist. Her experience in Bangladesh had left her with the conviction that former colonial powers were systematically exploiting Third World peoples; back home she saw countless parallels in the treatment white America accorded its black, Hispanic, and other minorities. With little prior experience in political organization, she determined to enlist in the “socialist struggle,” and began scanning Boston’s radical spectrum for a group to which she could devote her formidable energies.

  Her search ended in February 1976 when she attended a lecture by E. P. Thompson, the celebrated British Marxist. His address was followed by commentaries from several Boston Marxists, among them Michael Hirsch, organizer of the Boston branch of a tiny Trotskyist sect called International Socialists. IS, as it was known, concentrated its activity in the industrial realm, working to establish “opposition caucuses” within labor unions. At the time of the Thompson lecture, the branch had only eleven members, most of them young and working-class, all of them white. In early March, Marianne joined up.

  Marianne’s passion was the race issue. That was fine with her new comrades, who had long sought some way for the organization to grapple with America’s racial crisis. Seeking principally to recruit white workers, it found issues like busing and affirmative action potentially divisive. Not surprisingly, it had concentrated on “Third World” causes as remote as possible from Boston: leading a campaign to expose the South African investments of the First National Bank of Boston, collecting clothing to send to guerrillas in Zimbabwe, and working to free Gary Tyler, a black teenager serving a life sentence for the 1974 killing of a white youth in Louisiana.

  In the spring of 1976, Marianne was named the branch’s “black coordinator,” a position she took very seriously. Teaching only part-time at Boston State, she could devote plenty of time to IS business, seeking to rally Boston blacks to her agenda. One IS member recalls, “She put in a lot of time, but it just wasn’t working. Boston blacks didn’t give a damn about some kid in Louisiana or guerrillas in Zimbabwe. Moreover, Marianne, like the rest of us, was white. We were viewed with suspicion, and rightfully so.”