Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  “I can’t fucking believe you,” she said to my mother. “That was her pet. It had a name.”

  At the end of his letter my father wrote:

  I suppose that it’s confusing at times and sad too. Well it’s the same for everybody. The best thing to do is try to be happy, find some good friends and spread a little sunshine. Sunny is your nickname you know.

  So many choices, my father said. To stay in California, to go back to Montreal. I went to Montreal for a summer visit and I stayed into the fall. I was happy and then, like a wave breaking over my head, I was not happy anymore. So many choices, I could not choose. I could not stop choosing. And although I followed his advice, to find friends, to try to be happy, the only decision I made that lasted for more than a few months was not to be called Sunny anymore.

  I had travelled thousands of miles and lived for months without either of my parents but it was only after meeting Zoe that I began to understand what people meant when they said the word homesick.

  Zoe was tall, blond and lean. I knew right from the first day at my new school that she was the one I wanted for a best friend, despite or maybe because I could see she was just a little bit of a bully. There were only twenty or thirty kids at the alternative school in Redding, where Molly and I started going while we all still lived on the farm. Then Molly moved away and after the farm was sold my mother and I moved to Redding where the school was and where my sister already lived.

  My mother helped pay for my school tuition by volunteering to teach language arts at the school. She had us make our own journals, and we read books about brave American women and folk tales from other countries. It was the closest thing to a normal class we had. At New Morning School they believed in letting the kids do what they wanted. And what I wanted to do, even more than read, was hang out with my new best friend, Zoe.

  I loved the way Zoe’s hands could draw anything, and the way she could cry without making a sound like a movie star. She pushed me off the rocks at the swimming hole, and later towel-dried my hair. Her touch was sometimes gentle, sometimes rough, but always possessive, familiar. She taught me how to eat all the crusts off a sandwich first, so you saved the very best for last.

  I told Zoe what books to read. I introduced her to Pooh Bear and soon he became one of the leaders of a complex society of stuffed animals we rescued from garage sales. On her back porch we created a home for most of them, a boarding house full of bears and rabbits and other animals. No dolls. We never argued about the rules, because we just knew how it was supposed to be. Once you were the voice of a creature, it was yours for always. You were the voice of its spirit. We got angry when people said we were getting too old be playing games like that. We were not old. It was not a game.

  We do other things too. We invent all the letters and sounds of a secret alphabet. We learn too late that it takes more than letters to make a language. We only learn to say our names. Mine is Ya-Kwa-Xee-Bdye-Fel. That’s my magic name, the spirit I can summon just by calling. We have secret symbols for our secret magic selves. Zoe’s is like a sun. Mine is a circle intersecting another circle. I draw it on a rock and try to remember to carry it with me every day.

  I believe in my magic self the way I imagine some people believe in Jesus. That quiet voice that told me things would be okay. I’d heard it before I even knew my true name, in imaginings with my stuffed bear, in the stories I told myself before I went to sleep. This self that was part and not part of the world and, like Jesus, a little powerless but also immortal and all-loving.

  Zoe and I make her little sister cry when we collect her hair to cast spells. We are trying to teach ourselves witchcraft from a paperback. We collect hair, fingernails, rocks and feathers. We believe everything has a power if only you know how to use it.

  Once, just to prove we could, we stayed naked all day at school. The whole school, all twenty or so of us, skinny-dipped on our field trips to the swimming hole, so it wasn’t the nudity itself that was an act of rebellion. It was the way we sat in the common room, defiantly reading. “What?” we said, when one of the staff came in to talk to us. “What’s the matter with our bodies?”

  But then Zoe, who was a year older than me, went into seventh grade and had to go to junior high. Not wanting to be the oldest girl in our tiny school, I decided to leave too.

  I went back to Montreal. I even started school there. Did I go for a visit and stay longer, or did I come back to California for a visit and not leave again? My parents let me choose where I wanted to live but I kept changing my mind, taking turns over which one of them I would disappoint. Wherever I went I was always the new kid in school, starting in the middle of the year, always catching up or falling behind. And whenever things started to look shaky, when the lease ran out or the car broke down, I moved again.

  THREE

  I burst into tears when I learned that my mother had become a communist. Not because the teacher at my new school had told us that the Commie Russians had warheads pointed at this very minute on all major American cities, but because the Russians hunted whales. I had only recently arrived back in Redding from Montreal, where I had attended my first Greenpeace protest and seen a movie about whales that made me cry. Afterwards I signed a petition swearing never to wear lipstick made of whale products. For my last birthday I had received a poster of a blue whale, an ocean mammals colouring book, and even a record of whale music. And now here my mother was sympathizing with their killers.

  It was a senior member of the National Labor Federation, a young woman from New York, who explained to me that my mother and she were something called cadre, committed communists dedicated to building a second American revolution within their lifetime. She said that the work my mother had begun as a volunteer for the organization was just one part of a larger plan; they were not just do-gooders running soup lines, but revolutionaries, committed to changing the world.

  Since we’d left the commune and moved into town my mother had become more interested in feminism, volunteering for the rape relief society and other women’s organizations in Redding. At a welfare rights protest in Sacramento she met organizers from the California Homemakers Association, a local chapter of the National Labor Federation.

  CHA was organizing women like my mother who, under California’s work-for-welfare program, provided home support for the disabled in exchange for their welfare cheques. Even when she worked only the hours she was assigned, she earned less than minimum wage, but often the women she took care of needed extra help. For her and other workfare participants, there were no rules governing safety on the job. Stories of women hurting themselves while lifting their clients out of beds or bathtubs were common.

  She liked that CHA brought everyone to the protest, the workers on the picket line pushing their clients in wheelchairs, demanding better benefits for everyone. She was excited by the way they mixed the practical and the political: the soup lines and the labour history classes. In offices in Sacramento, Oakland and LA, they operated food banks, legal and health clinics, free clothing and free welfare advocacy.

  Soon the CHA was the only group she wanted to be involved with. She had never heard of a mutual benefits association before, but liked the fact that it was not a charity, or a purely political group, but instead a kind of union for the non-unionized.

  And if, later, she was a little surprised to find out that the organization was a recruitment tool for a clandestine party, I guess it didn’t put her off. She understood there were tainted words, words no American would have a chance of comprehending if they did not first understand the need for change. The first thing the organization taught in political education classes was about capitalism. How it had to have some people without jobs, how it was designed to always have poor people, to keep some down for the profit of others.

  There was something I saw in my mother’s face that I would see later in other new recruits. A eureka moment when they understood that being poor wasn’t only about bad choices and bad luck. What happened
to people, the way they ended up poor and powerless, was not an accident but an essential product of the system itself. But the real discovery was that someday it was going to be different. Since she’d joined, my mother could not stop telling me this. But until I heard the word “communist,” I hadn’t understood exactly what she meant.

  The young woman who used that word about my mother looked startled when I began to cry. She’d been sent to help my mother start an office in Redding. Her name was Pat. Not Patricia or Patti but Pat. In some ways, with her boyish clothes she was very different than my mother, my sister, the Patti from the commune. But in her urgent, serious tone there was something familiar too.

  “Slow down, kiddo,” Pat said when I started crying. She held my hands. “Nobody’s killing whales here.”

  She told me, “After the revolution, maybe we could ask the Russians to stop, if that’s what the organization decides. You could be a part of that.”

  After the revolution everything was going to be different. The whales, my mother, our daily life. It was all going to be something else. Sometimes I had to remind myself of that in the crowded, smoky office of the newly opened Redding branch of the National Labor Federation, or NATLFED, as we called it. That this rundown storefront was actually the beginning of something amazing, even if most people who walked through the door didn’t know it.

  Our branch of the organization was called Western Services Workers Association. The Sacramento and Oakland branches were California Homemakers Association and the Oregon branch was the Northwest Service Workers Association. We were all part of the National Labor Federation and affiliated with a variety of other organizations like the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, and the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals. The grassroots activities of each of these organizations—offering medical and dental care, soup lines, food banks, free firewood for families in the winter—were also a way to recruit people to the revolution. After all, who could work on a soup line day after day and believe the system was not broken?

  We ran a food and clothing bank in the office and a soup line in the park. Sometimes people came into the office with their faces full of shame and sometimes they settled in like family. And for some people listening to my mom talk about trying to get poor people to come together to fight for their rights was like listening politely to any preacher’s sermon at a church soup kitchen. But for other people you could tell it made them see the world in a whole new way.

  The office moved several times. For a while we were located downtown near a club everyone said was a gay bar—one night a man walked back and forth along the sidewalk, shouting for the commies and the queers to come out. But the office I remember best was the one located on the edge of downtown. Around the corner was a motel that rented by the month and across the street there was a liquor store.

  The only kids around the neighbourhood were the ones in the office and that suited me fine. Even though I wanted this new world my mother and Pat talked about, the daily reality of her work sometimes filled me with embarrassment and dread. Like my sister who had also moved to Redding but lived in her own apartment and took courses at community college, I was anxious people from my school would associate me with the woman knocking on doors or standing outside a grocery store handing out leaflets and raising money.

  Even Zoe did not understand, Zoe whose parents smoked dope and whose mother had been in several feminist groups with my mother. I saw Zoe every school day now that we both went to the same junior high. I knew it was going to be different between us. Over the past year, on the rare occasions we’d seen each other, she did not want to build forts or talk in our secret language. Instead she spoke her own language of basketball games and math tests. But I must have believed that when she saw me every day the spell would be broken, that we could go back to our world again, because I was disappointed every day it didn’t happen.

  I was lucky I loved reading since that’s what I did at recess. I didn’t even try to make other friends. I was sharing a room with my mom and the rest of the house with half a dozen or more full-time volunteers, a household more regimented but just as crowded and at least as difficult to explain as our days on the commune. At the office there were boxes of donated books. I read a box of Ian Fleming novels. James Bond, Harlequin, Erica Jong, John le Carré, science fiction. Good books, bad books, I didn’t care so long as it kept me turning the pages while I waited. Waited for the revolution or for Zoe to come back to me. Whichever came first.

  All the friends from my mother’s old life—the commune and the women’s centre and the rape crisis centre—began to be replaced by people from the organization. She was done with hippies and liberals. You say you want a revolution. My mother didn’t like that song and she didn’t like it when people quoted it as their excuse for not being more political. We all want to change the world. That was an excuse and a lie. Lots of people didn’t want to change the world, they just pretended they did. My mother had no time for pretenders. “Stop trying to recruit me,” Zoe’s mother had told mine last time they’d seen each other. We had become too much, my mother and I, my mother with her politics and me with my longing for how it used to be back at New Morning School.

  When the revolution came, everything would be different. I imagined my mother speaking before a crowd of people. I imagined my social studies teacher, an enemy of the people, up against the wall in a firing line. The triumphant agreement between Russia and the United States to end whaling. And Zoe greeting me as a hero or begging me to save her, realizing just how wrong she’d been.

  FOUR

  My mother and I were on a Greyhound bus heading south to San Francisco. I was going on my first trip to the West Coast leadership apartment. They called it a safe house but when we got there it was just an ordinary apartment. Pat greeted us and I understood this was where she lived when she wasn’t with us. We were briefed about walking near the windows or going out in large groups and never mentioning the location of the safe house to anyone.

  Over the weekend I mostly sat in the kitchen reading and drawing while my mother went to meetings and classes. One night I helped Pat make spaghetti for everyone. As we cooked, Pat explained dialectics to me. Pat said that understanding dialectics was central to understanding Marxist theory. I liked the way she spoke with her hands, gesturing in the air. She explained how everything was made of opposites. Night and day, hot and cold, you needed both for either to exist. Things were always changing, moving back and forth.

  “Think about the connection between water and steam,” she said, gesturing towards the pot of water boiling for pasta. “They are always changing, one to the other. Water to steam and back again. The philosopher Hegel called this ‘the unity of opposites.’ The necessary struggle at the heart of all change.” I thought about the way things could change, how more often than not they didn’t change back again. How Zoe could pretend I didn’t exist, or how my parents couldn’t even talk on the phone without arguing. But I knew that wasn’t what Pat meant. She meant things that couldn’t exist without each other.

  Dialectics said that there was a connection between the quantity and quality of things too. A single grain of rice is still rice, but we need lots of rice for it to truly fulfill its purpose. Enough little things make a bigger thing. Quantitative change leads to qualitative change.

  Pat asked me to try and think of other examples that might be like this, that quantity might change the essential nature of a thing.

  “Sand?” I said “Snow? Rain? The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”

  “Excellent,” Pat said. “You are a very good student.”

  As a special treat my mother and I went to the leftist bookstore in San Francisco. You couldn’t get books about dogs or magic in a bookstore like that, but I still liked it, and my mother loved it: the smell of the new books and all the titles by and about women and poor people, all the people left out of history. My mother started to read on the bus ride home but reading in cars or buses made
me sick so I looked out the window, sometimes at the world and sometimes at my own reflection in the glass.

  Sonja, Sonja, don’t be blue, Frankenstein was ugly too. In my reflection I could see that I had my father’s broad nose and mother’s big eyes, that this don’t-be-blue face was a collage of my parents’ features, further proof of their incompatibility. And some days everything else seemed patched together too. Some days I was a girl in a safe house learning philosophy. The revolutionary me that only thought about the future. And then there was the school me who just worked on making it through the day. I had three pairs of Dittos, the saddle-backed coloured jeans all the popular girls wore. I’d pulled mine from the donated clothing closet at the office and I lived in fear that someone might recognize them as ones they’d given away. The pants were yellow and blue and brown and so every day I wore some variation of these colours. I particularly disliked the blue and yellow. But when all three pairs were in the laundry I felt like an actor walking on stage without her costume on. As soon as I got home I changed. I didn’t like other cadre, not even my mother, to see me in those clothes, just like I didn’t want the kids from school to see me in my cut-off shorts and purple canvas tennis shoes standing on a street corner, handing out flyers. Those were two different people, even to me. When we handed out flyers in parking lots, I was careful to look away when kids my age walked by. Sometimes I wanted to be them: popular, normal, stupid. And sometimes I hated them for not seeing what was so obvious: that we lived in a world where some people succeeded only because others suffered. That could change. It had to.