The commune housed an eclectic mix of characters, employed and unemployed, students and dropouts, almost all young, long-haired hippies, though people’s commitments to political causes varied quite a lot. It was of course a given that everyone opposed the draft and the war. At one point, a Vietcong flag hung out a front window. The biggest political insult was to call someone a pig. Macho men were “sexist pigs,” rich people were “capitalist pigs,” President Nixon was an “imperialist pig,” and cops were simply “pigs.” When I asked my mother why everyone seemed to hate pigs, she laughed. “It’s nothing personal against pigs,” she reassured me, pointing out that most everyone in the house except us was a vegetarian and opposed killing animals.
One thirty-something activist in the house named Paul spent almost all of his time organizing demonstrations and protests on nearby Telegraph Avenue. He spent so little time at home that eventually the housemates called him out for shirking his chores. He insisted that his revolutionary calling did not leave time for such trivial matters and then moved out in a huff.
Soon, three young people—Peter, Toni, and Linda, all dressed in brightly colored shirts, bandanas, bead necklaces, and faded bell-bottom blue jeans—moved into the vacated room. They had a baby with them named Chalali. Peter was the baby’s father, Toni was the mother, and Linda was the father’s ex-girlfriend. They’d come from a commune in Vermont, looking for sunnier weather and a more urban environment. Right after they moved in, Linda got involved with another member of the commune named Steve, whose ponytail reached all the way down his back. Steve’s inclusion didn’t seem to change the dynamic with Peter and Toni at all; it was unconventional, but perfectly harmonious.
For a while the commune also had a resident crazy old lady named Margaret, who got crazier and crazier. One day, she snapped, convinced that Ronald was holding her daughters hostage in the basement. She did have two adult daughters, but they had never been to the house. “They’re down there! They’re down there! He’s holding my girls down there!” she screamed over and over again, her eyes panicked. “Please, please help me free them!” No matter how much everyone tried to calm her down, she insisted that Ronald was imprisoning her daughters, yet she refused to go below to see for herself. Eventually, she was hospitalized in a mental institution in Napa Valley. Some months later, she killed herself.
* * *
My mother didn’t have a regular job but managed to land part-time teaching opportunities at various community colleges in nearby Oakland that were also hubs of political activism. However, these teaching stints didn’t provide health insurance for her or us three kids. So my mother came up with what she thought was a perfectly sensible solution: write to my father and ask him to keep us all on his health insurance. After all, from her perspective, it was entirely my father’s fault that she had to leave Michigan and give up her old tenure-track job with benefits. When he didn’t reply, my mother then wrote directly to his employer, asking for health coverage. This got my father’s attention and provoked a response:
Dear Carol Andreas,
Since you are a well-educated female, in good physical health, experienced, sexy, intelligent, liberated, and youthful, I suggest that you go out and buck the job market like your male counterparts must do. If you associate yourself with a reputable firm, your employer will provide prescription drug, sickness and accident, extended disability, accidental death and dismemberment insurance to mention just a few. . . . The UAW has an excellent employee benefit program. However, due to the recent period of economic adjustment, we are all doing our share to save the union from unnecessary expenses. I therefore discontinued the coverage for all dependents except for Peter. I thought you had obtained custody of Joel and Ronald and were now assuming responsibility for their care. As you know, the UAW is part of the “Establishment.” I am sure you would not want to compromise your position and accept a handout from one of those “evil” institutions.
My mother’s next move was to try to get the California courts to order my father to pay child support for the three of us. In his reply to the Oakland County prosecuting attorney, my father wrote that he would not support our care in a “hippie commune,” that he would be happy to provide a home for us in a “Christian environment” in Michigan, that the Wayne County Circuit Court had dismissed the divorce filed by Dr. Andreas, and that Dr. Andreas then “absconded with my three children and has been living in sin in a commune in Berkeley, California.” He concluded, “Your assistance in recovering my children from Dr. Andreas and returning them to their home will be greatly appreciated.”
My mother then tried to put the Michigan house up for sale that my father was still living in: “FOR SALE: Contemporary house on wooded hillside in faculty subdivision—2970 Heidelberg. Post and beam construction, beautiful natural woods throughout, four bedrooms, three baths, study, large recreation room or studio, screened porch, deck, double garage, several fireplaces, undyed wool carpeting. Price, $50,000. Available—August 15.” My mother should have realized, though, that this move would be easy for my father to block, since he would need to sign off on any sale.
My mother was stuck. Though she finally had all three kids and the divorce she had long wanted, she was still tied to my father through their joint property. And my father would never agree to a property settlement unless my mother returned me to him, which she wouldn’t consider. In early 1972, my mother’s father, Grandpa Rich, tried to play the role of intermediary. He told my father, “If President Nixon and Chou En-lai [Chinese leader] can meet in an amiable way without belligerence, the same thing should certainly be possible with Carol and Carl.” Apparently, though, Nixon and Chou En-lai were more flexible than my parents; Grandpa Rich soon gave up. He wrote my father: “For a blundering old man to attempt to mediate a conflict between a practiced and skilled UAW official and a leader in women’s liberation seems foolhardy.”
* * *
Just as my mother had promised, my “time-out” from school eventually ended and she enrolled me in Berkeley’s Whittier Elementary School. Joel and Ronald also returned to school, but going to class was the last thing on their minds. Joel’s real passion was a polemical comic book about the Rockefeller family and its exploitative billions that he had begun drawing the summer after ninth grade. For my brother, the Rockefellers personified all the evils of capitalism and American imperialism that he and my mother were fighting so fiercely against. Draft pages were scattered all across his room, where he sat cross-legged on the floor, hunched over, drawing for hours every day with Rapidograph pens. Sunny kept him company, sprawled out on top of the pages, but Joel didn’t seem to mind. What he did mind was my interrupting, so I would only go into his room to try to coax Sunny out to play. Ronald was less respectful of the project; once, during one of their huge fights, Ronald grabbed the book and threatened to destroy it.
Luckily, the comic book survived and went on to become a hit—in reality, a spectacular hit, given that my brother wrote it when he was only fifteen, with no help other than encouragement from our mother. The Incredible Rocky vs. The Power of the People! Featuring America’s Richest Family was published in 1973 by the left-wing group NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) and sold more than one hundred thousand copies in multiple editions. The title was a parody of superhero comics, with the cover drawing depicting Nelson Rockefeller in a Superman outfit, cape and all, holding a huge gun with oil gushing out of it. The radical group Weather Underground even sent Joel a fan letter praising the comic book, along with a copy of their own book, Prairie Fire, which Joel said was “very revolutionary inspiring,” and proclaimed that he had “never felt more completely oriented toward the revolution than at that moment.”
Cover of The Incredible Rocky
Joel and some of his friends spent much of their time organizing what they called Berkeley Young People’s Liberation, headquartered in the small, overstuffed mildew-smelling garage next to the house. By their logic, if women could have a liberation movement, why couldn’t k
ids? They insisted that ageism—in this case, prejudice against empowering and trusting young people to make their own decisions—was a leading source of oppression in society. They spent hours deliberating over their positions and platforms on kids’ rights, held weekly strategizing meetings to plot how to take over the Berkeley schools, and passed out flyers encouraging young people to stand up for and liberate themselves: “We are here especially for young people who are leaving their parents’ homes, either legally or illegally.”
One thing Joel and Ronald still had in common was that they hardly ever mentioned our father. It was almost as if he no longer existed and that life started when we moved to Berkeley. Joel and Ronald also did their best to pretend I didn’t exist. Neither of them wanted to play the protective older brother role or spend time with me. It had begun in Detroit, when my parents’ marriage broke apart, and both Joel and Ronald seemed to have considered that a kind of severing of our basic family ties. They immediately started calling our parents by their first names, and spending time away from home, on their own projects, from young ages. Neither of them wanted a baby brother tagging along.
Of course I craved more brotherly attention, but I focused on Joel, who at least didn’t dislike me. Ronald always seemed to resent my existence and wish our mother had left me behind in Michigan. Then again, Ronald didn’t seem to really like anybody all that much. He became my anti–role model: I was determined to become everything I thought he was not—sociable, likable, agreeable.
My own life in the commune and at school was far less complicated than my brothers’. I had many of the basic trappings of an all-American childhood—a steady supply of Cap’n Crunch and Hostess Ding Dongs and Saturday-morning cartoons. I was hooked on Speed Racer. My mother didn’t seem to care; maybe it was her way of recognizing that I needed a few conventional things in my life. I spent most afternoons out on the streets with the other neighborhood kids, including my best friends, Fritz and Garrett. We played tag and hide-and-seek, climbed trees and walls, played kickball and dodgeball. I excelled at the last two, which I was sure marked me as a star athlete.
Even though my mother was busy with teaching, running the house, antiwar protests, teach-ins, and other political activist stuff, she found time for me. On weekends, she would take me on outings to Tilden Park, a short drive from Berkeley, where we ambled along the narrow dirt paths among the towering redwood trees. A few nights a week, even though I had no specified bedtime, we still had a soothing little ritual. My mother would tuck me in as she softly sang, “There was a boy, a very, very special boy . . .” while gently tracing her finger across my forehead, around my eyes, and down my cheeks, over and over again. Even today, when I try to remember the sound of my mother’s voice, the first thing I hear in my head is her singing that dreamy childhood song. And I can still even feel her finger lightly caressing my face.
When I turned seven, in July of 1972, my mother mobilized the entire commune to throw me the best birthday party a little boy could ever imagine: everyone in the house played a role in an elaborate treasure hunt, including one exceptionally tall housemate with long dark hair and an almost equally long beard who dressed up as Blackbeard and guarded a treasure of chocolate coins hidden in the garage. For Easter, we colored Easter eggs and invited all the neighborhood kids to an egg hunt in our backyard. With someone always in the house, I was never home alone.
The only thing missing in my life was my father, with whom I had virtually no contact. I still missed him and thought about him often, along with some of my school friends back in Michigan, and wondered if I’d ever return. But otherwise, I was doing fine at school, and my teachers liked me, and I liked them—just like in Michigan. Life was, overall, relatively normal, even as I grew up in a commune. But that was about to change.
II.
CHILE
I think your concerns about my fate in Latin America are exaggerated. I have good contacts there. I am not an aggressive man-hating type and although men are often afraid of personal involvement with me they are usually willing to listen to what I have to say. . . . I do feel that motherhood contains my energies too much, and this will be especially true with such an ambitious undertaking—but I am adventurous for Peter, too. I think he will gain confidence from traveling and learning Spanish.
—Carol Andreas, letter to her father, summer 1972
From Guayaquil to Santiago
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1972, less than two years into our stay in California, my mother announced that we were moving to South America.
“Is this another time-out from school?” I had just settled into second grade at Whittier Elementary.
“No, it’s much bigger than that,” she replied, her eyes shining. “We’re going to be part of a revolution. It will be the biggest adventure of your life.”
The next several years would prove her right.
No longer a polite and proper Mennonite teenager, by her late thirties my mother had learned to thrive on conflict and action. Berkeley was too hip and hippie-saturated, a cozy little city with permanently pleasant weather that in no way resembled the front lines of the revolution. We had moved west to get away from my father and find a sympathetic judge, but my mother was growing politically restless. Compared to gritty Detroit, where she’d thrived as a leader of the antiwar and feminist movements, my mother felt lost in the groovy Berkeley crowd. What was the point of being into antiwar activism if everyone in town already opposed the war? More generally, my mother had less and less patience or tolerance for “feel-good American bourgeois liberalism.” She was especially fed up with the liberal brand of feminism that had come to dominate the women’s movement, which she considered too reformist: the goal was to create more equality and opportunity for women within the system rather than to overthrow it.
One night, my mother attended a local bookstore reading about social change in Chile, where two years earlier, in 1970, a socialist had been democratically elected president. President Salvador Allende’s victory had been celebrated by leftists worldwide, and he was implementing a radical agenda. The speaker at the bookstore was a twenty-five-year-old Stanford grad student named Richard Feinberg. His stories of life in Chile as a peace corps volunteer seduced my mother, as did his accounts of the transformations underway in Chile. She was quickly hooked—not only on Feinberg, who became her lover, but on Chile itself. She jumped on the Allende bandwagon, eager to write a book about the role of women in the new, revolutionary Chile. “We’re joining the revolution,” I told all my friends at school. “My mother says it’ll be fun.”
Her hope was to take all three of us boys. But Joel was engrossed in his Berkeley activism and finishing his Rockefeller comic book. He wanted to remain in the commune on his own, and my mother agreed, even though he was just turning sixteen. While we were gone, he would survive on food stamps and a stack of $100 checks that my mother left him—one for each month of the year. On the other hand, fourteen-year-old Ronald liked the idea of going to South America, but as always, he wanted to do his own thing and had no intention of tagging along with my mother and me. Of course, my brothers were too young to be on their own, but at that point my mother had given up playing a traditional parental role with them. She had long ago lost any real control over their lives and simply accepted their declarations of independence. But she still wanted to take her little seven-year-old with her. She didn’t see another option, anyway: sending me back to my father was out of the question, and she certainly wasn’t going to leave me behind in the commune with Joel.
Some of my mother’s relatives urged her to let my father have me. “Peter will have a more stable home with his father,” Grandpa Rich advised in his letters and phone calls from Kansas. “It will be better for him and easier for you.” Grandpa Rich, who had recently lost his wife to cancer, worried about our safety in South America. But knowing he could not talk his daughter out of going to Chile, he still tried to convince her it would be best to leave me behind.
“Nonse
nse,” my mother shot back. “The best thing for Peter is to be part of history, not against it, to be with the people, not against them.” She was convinced that American parenting’s emphasis on security, comfort, and stability was merely part of the mythology about the superiority of the traditional nuclear family. A child needed to be exposed to the world, and she wanted me to share in the thrill of real revolutionary change. In her mind, her embrace of revolution and rejection of the conventional definition of “good” mothering was in itself proof that she was a good mother.
* * *
My mother, Ronald, and I flew off to South America, connecting through Miami, in September of 1972. She and I each had a knapsack and a duffel bag swung over our shoulders, while Ronald brought his backpack. Sensing how nervous I was to be leaving behind my world of Cap’n Crunch cereal and Saturday-morning cartoons, my mother tried to comfort me, in her own way.
“Just remember how lucky you are,” she murmured as she adjusted the airplane seat belt for me. She reminded me that we were going to be participants in a “real revolution,” that all those spoiled, sheltered American kids will never get to experience anything like that, and that’s why it was good I was with her rather than with my father.
I nodded.
“Look, I know it’s hard to leave, but I promise you’ll understand someday and be glad. We can’t just sit around and expect the revolution to come to us.” She squeezed my hand and I finally smiled. Her confidence made me feel special. It was a privilege that my mother was taking me to join her on her quest.
Content that she’d laid my concerns to rest, my mother gave me a pat on the head and then turned to the book she had brought to read on the flight, a collection of speeches by anarchist activist Emma Goldman. If she had any worries of her own about what was in store for us, or reservations about leaving, she hid them well.
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