Calm as always, the Lecturer asked exactly what part of his analysis Frederick found flawed.
“I didn’t say it was flawed. I said it was wrong.” As the others stared, Frederick went over to the attack. He said that those who once lived here had done the best they could with what they had. He said they should be admired for defying the expectations of a racist society by building a world in which it was possible for their families to thrive. The Lecturer hid his panic behind a supercilious smile. When he was certain that Frederick was done, he proceeded to instruct him. He reminded him of Trotsky on the role of the bourgeoisie in maintaining order with the complicity of the petite bourgeoisie who secretly hated them. He pointed to the promise of reform as the key element in maintaining order among both petite bourgeoisie and proletariat within the capitalist order.
Of course, Frederick knew all this, but the condescension was intentional. The Lecturer expected the older man to explode. Instead, he shrugged. “Well, you’re entitled to your view,” he said smoothly. “You know what they say. Differences of opinion make horse races.”
The Lecturer kept his face placid but inwardly he seethed. The temerity! Differences of opinion! No wonder the pigs were winning the war in the streets. Even the most radical Americans had no discipline. They did not understand that a revolution held no room for disagreement. The Party took a position and it became everyone’s position. There were no exceptions. The toleration of dissent was a sign of weakness. Those who were wrong should be shouted down and disciplined. They should lose their places in the movement, which would proceed to roll right over them.
Violently if necessary.
Nodding in firm agreement with his own exposition, the Lecturer goes back to his writing.
(8)
In the summer of 1962, at the conclusion of the Lecturer’s junior year at Cornell, Professor Hadley invited him to Mexico, just as he had Kimberly the summer before. The young man never hesitated. By this time the serious turn of their conversations had led him to suspect that what his mentor was grooming him for had little to do with his academy. His suspicion turned out to be right. The six weeks of fieldwork in the uplands of Guanajuato, out of contact with the world, turned out to be six weeks of training in Cuba, mostly by East German teachers: ideological instruction in the mornings, and after lunch what was known as technical work—how to shoot, how to fight, how to guard a prisoner, how to send secret messages, how to blow things up. The course was intense and scary. Only four of the twelve who began were able to finish, and he was one of the four. It was at the training camp that he got his name, for he spoke excellent Spanish and passable French, and in the evenings would present long, passionate arguments accompanied by copious spoken citations. The instructors were amused, and called him prepodavatel—a Russian word that can be translated as “teacher” . . . or “lecturer.” Nobody at the camp quite liked him, but nobody liked him at Cornell either. Nobody had liked him even in high school, and it had been some while since he actually cared. He had decided back when he was sneaking into buildings at Yale that being liked was an unimportant part of life. Machiavelli was right. Being respected and feared mattered more.
After the Lecturer returned to Mexico with top marks, Hadley told him that his job now was to continue his education. The young man was surprised. He had expected an assignment. He pointed out that Kimberly had not stayed in school. She had been sent to California. The professor shrugged. Kimberly, he said, possessed a different set of skills. In time you will have a great deal of work to do, but for now you will go back to school. Those are the orders. But by now the Lecturer was beginning to get Hadley’s measure. Maybe there were orders, maybe there weren’t. Either way, nobody was going to trust Tris Hadley with any secrets. The professor loved to play the clandestine revolutionary, but in truth he was more like a travel agent, making sure the people who mattered got to where they were supposed to be. And the Lecturer, a college junior all of twenty-one years old, realized that he was one of the people who mattered—and Tristan Hadley was not.
Nevertheless, the Lecturer went back to Cornell, where that fall the whole campus, like the whole of America, was terrified over the possibility that the Soviet Union, by smuggling missiles into Cuba, had brought the globe to the precipice of nuclear war. The Lecturer found himself for the most part untroubled. Everything would be fine, he insisted in seminar rooms and coffeehouses. The capitalists were too greedy to blow up the globe; the Communists were too patient. When the crisis was settled, others pointed to the decisive action and wise statecraft of the youthful American president they so admired, but the Lecturer knew that it was only the inevitable turn of the wheel of history. A few months later he finished his philosophy degree with honors. He spent two vacations and half the summer back in Cuba, and one night in July engaged in ferocious argument with a black woman who had delivered a controversial talk that morning on the appropriate uses of nonviolent resistance. Her nom de guerre was Miranda, but she was notorious across America as Commander M, leader of the terror group known only as Agony, which had carried out several actions across the South.
She was accompanied by her second-in-command, a sandy-haired Southerner in overalls who nodded at her every sentence. His name was Paul, and he seemed to be in love with her. The Lecturer could not tell whether she reciprocated. Later that evening, he took Paul aside and reminded him that in a revolutionary movement, bourgeois sentimentality about romantic attachment was a vice. But the fool professed to have no idea what he was talking about. The Lecturer decided not to worry about it. This was his first meeting with elements of Agony, which had always struck him as a rather amateurish lot; he assumed that it would be his last.
Back in the States, the Lecturer entered graduate school in New York City, where he kept arguing political theory in coffeehouses and across chess tables and kept writing his increasingly ferocious articles. More than one of his professors urged him to calm down. But he was always calm; always in control. They simply did not like what he was saying and, in his judgment, were unable to refute it.
Two days before Christmas of 1963, the Lecturer packed his bags to head home for a few days to visit his mother. He was on a wooden bench at Grand Central, waiting for the train to New Haven, when two men in overcoats plopped down beside him, one on each side. The one on his left was a Negro. Even before they flashed their identification wallets, he knew that they were J. Edgar’s boys.
“My name is Special Agent Stilwell,” said the one on the right. “This is Agent Barron. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’d like a brief word with you if it’s not too much trouble.”
“It’s too much trouble,” the Lecturer assured him. “Go away.”
“All we want is a little information,” Stilwell continued in a murmur. The Daily News covered his face. No one else would know that he was saying a word. “A little help, to keep things from getting too violent.”
“Leave me alone.”
“You’ve gotten yourself involved with some very nasty people,” said Barron, the black agent, from his left. “The game is about to get very rough. Very scary. You might want to start with an ace in the hole. A way out.”
“That’s us,” added Stilwell.
“I told you to leave me alone. I know my rights.”
“Keep your voice down. Don’t look at us. Just sort of whisper without moving your lips. Didn’t they teach you that in Cuba?”
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” said the Lecturer, unable to hide the tremor of surprise.
“We don’t care about what you might do overseas,” Stilwell purred. “That’s not our purview. We care about what happens here. Who gets blown up or shot to pieces. That’s what Agony does. They’re dangerous people.”
“Anything you can tell us,” said Barron. “Whatever she may have let slip. We’re just trying to keep people alive here. That’s all.”
The Lecturer stared at Barron. Then he stared at Stilwell. He felt his control return. �
��Even if I knew what you were talking about, I would have nothing to say. You are the satraps of false authority.” The Lecturer got to his feet. So did the FBI agents. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a train to catch.”
“Think about it,” said Stilwell, and slipped a business card into the Lecturer’s pocket. “Track eighteen,” he added.
The Lecturer strode angrily away. Now he was shaking. He headed toward the washroom. For the first time since the beginning of his mad odyssey, he understood that this was all real. That he had made choices and left other possibilities behind. He glared at his face in the mirror. He washed his hands. He had felt so superior to Tristan Hadley, but the professor had trapped him quite neatly. Now two roads loomed before him, and two only. He washed his face. He pulled out the agent’s card, studied it briefly, then shook his head, tore it to pieces, and threw them in the overflowing waste can.
Christmas with his mother was grim. They both knew that her boy had come home to say goodbye, but neither of them could find the words.
(9)
The Lecturer puts down the Flair and closes his eyes. Thinking back, he realizes that he had been scared only of what he had gotten himself into. Never of the agents. They were not supermen. They were flesh and blood like everybody else. In a camp he had worked at in Algeria, the targets were gussied up to look like soldiers—French soldiers, American soldiers—and the students shot them full of holes without so much as flinching. That scared him sometimes. That scared him a lot. The fact that they didn’t flinch. The Lecturer had been in the car with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1967 on the fateful night when a cop pulled them over and Huey sparked a movement when he climbed out of the car carrying his gun, told the cop he was exercising his constitutional rights, and warned him that if he tried to take the gun away he would get shot. That night and the nights of armed black patrols that followed put the Black Panthers on the map. The Lecturer had been sent to California to bring back a report on their ideology, but the truth was he did not entirely believe that they had one. They had discipline, though, and they had commitment, and he admired both. Despite their public image, the Panthers were not true revolutionaries. Their manifesto, when stripped of the rhetoric, was largely reformist. Well, except for that nice business about holding a plebiscite in which Negroes would get to vote on whether or not to remain part of the nation. The Communist Party had supported self-determination for America’s black population since the 1920s, and the Lecturer supposes that as a formal matter, it supports it still.
He opens his eyes and, without rising, looks up through the stained glass at the house across the street. Once more he imagines old Harlem. Frederick’s Harlem. Kimberly’s Harlem. The black bourgeoisie. They would never vote to leave. He thinks about the tens and hundreds of thousands who volunteered to fight in the nation’s wars—his own father among them. They fought and often died. They, too, would never vote to leave. That they risked their lives for a country that hated them implied that they loved that country even more than the Caucasians did.
The Lecturer shudders. The weight of that realization is, for a mad instant, all but unbearable. How will the revolution ever reach those who take such pride in their patriotic fervor? Maybe Lenin was wrong.
He shakes off the mood and once more lifts his pen.
Time to admit the truth.
He is not writing to his mother, or to his father. He is not writing for posterity, or for those he sent out to kill. The truth is that he is writing to Junie, writing in the shameful desperate hope that whether by the will of God or through some random act of governmental incompetence, his letter will find its way into her hands. He wants her to understand that he is sorry for what he did to her, and why, if he could go back and do it again, he would have done things exactly the same.
(10)
He had his second encounter with the notorious Commander M in the summer of 1966, when he was sent home to solve the murder of a Klansman. By this time he had left graduate school, and indeed left America. During spring break of 1964, he had traveled to Algeria for a conference on revolutionary theory and never returned. By this time he had several hardline essays in fringe publications to his credit. One of the pieces, written shortly before independence, had extolled Ahmed Ben Bella, leader of the Front de Libération Nationale, which most of the West considered terrorist thugs. Ben Bella was now president of Algeria, and the essay had come to his attention through the efforts of Tris Hadley, who continued to take an interest in his protégé and had connections everywhere. After the conference, the Lecturer was asked to remain in Algiers for a few days. A week later he was asked if he was willing to undertake a special action—
(Sitting at his attic desk, he hesitates, then decides not to describe either the action or who asked him to do it.)
—and when he had performed the task, he was asked whether he would be willing to do ideological training more frequently. There would be risks, he was assured, but the work was important to the revolution, and there were few who were good at it. The way they were buttering him up, the Lecturer was sure that the risks were even greater than the recruiters were describing, and he turned out to be right. Nevertheless, he persevered in his calm, orderly way. He trained cadres in walled compounds in North Africa where guards and dogs protected the perimeter and in dank shuttered basements in Latin America where every shuffle in the street outside might be a prelude to a raid by the security services and an introduction to the delights of interrogation. Conferring with a revolutionary cell in the back room of a beer hall in Munich, he marveled that nobody sees the unhappy symmetry. Meeting American students who had traveled to Hanoi to protest the war, he is struck by both their appealing naiveté and the dangerous simplicity of their view of the world. In between he found time to give papers at conferences, including the second Afro-Asian Conference, held in Algeria in February of 1965, where he was part of the audience that wildly applauded Che Guevara’s speech on why the socialist countries had an obligation to afford financial and other support for all anticolonialist and anti-imperialist movements, whether they were socialist or not.
At the time of the summons to return to America, the Lecturer was at a camp in Syria, brushing up what his kind called technical skills and lecturing on the ideology of revolution to volunteers who only gradually, now that it was too late to back out, had started to understand just what they had joined. Months earlier he had been in graduate school, but in this business every month was an eternity. One day after the usual lunch of lamb stew with rice, the camp commandant called him in and told him that he had an assignment back in the States. The air was stifling. The electricity was out, so the fan on the desk was useless junk. The Lecturer pointed out that he was now a wanted man at home. That would not be a problem, the commandant assured him. Documents had been prepared. The Lecturer asked what the task was. When he had heard the commandant out, he erupted in fury—which is to say that he raised an eyebrow and frowned. Why do we care about the death of a Klansman? he asked. Surely his execution serves to advance the cause.
I have your orders here, the commandant replied.
And so of course the Lecturer packed his bag. He had no idea at what level the decision had been made, or why the duty devolved on him rather than on someone else. But he was a soldier, and he would go where he was sent.
On a sultry, lazy afternoon two days later he rang the rear bell of a lovely Victorian house in what must have been the whitest neighborhood of America’s most segregated city, Charleston, South Carolina. To avoid worrying whoever might be peering from the windows next door, he arrived in a plumber’s van and wore dirty overalls. Through the screen, a uniformed Negro maid asked whether she could help him.
“Somebody called for a plumber,” he said. “I’m Jeremy.”
The maid opened the screen door. “You’d better come in,” she said.
They stood together in the kitchen. The maid looked him over. He returned her scrutiny. She was small and dark and appropri
ately somber, but something in the wide brown eyes announced that she was playacting every bit as much as he was. And no wonder, given that the woman standing before him was Commander M.
“I thought you’d be older,” she finally said. “I can’t believe they sent me an expert ten years younger than I am.” She offered her hand. “I’m Junie,” she said.
“We met in Cuba,” he reminded her. “And my instructions are that I am to call you—”
“Call me Junie.”
He finally shook. Her hand was warm and firm. “A pleasure to meet you, Comrade Junie.”
“Just Junie, please.”
She smiled then, a quick mischievous flicker, before undoing her apron and tugging a small handgun from her waistband. She laid it on the table. She whistled twice, and a thickset black man in a threadbare blue suit stepped from the hallway. A shotgun rested in the crook of his heavy arm. “This man-mountain is Hammie,” she said. “And you are?”
“I told you. Jeremy.”
“We use real names here. We don’t keep secrets.”
“I do.” He realized that the time had come to assert himself. “Who else is in the house?”
“One upstairs, watching the street, and two out running errands.” Again she gave him that searching look. Then she moved toward the counter. “I just brewed some coffee.”
He allowed her to pour him a cup. They sat at the table. Hammie had vanished, leaving them alone to talk.
“Would you like to see the basement?” she asked. “The scene of the crime, so to speak?”
“Yes, please, in a moment. First I would like to understand your living arrangements.”
Junie explained. The fiction was simple and clever: Sharon and Paul, the two Caucasians in the group, played the part of a happily married white couple (more coloration). Paul was from Tennessee, and put it about that he had inherited a small sum and had settled in South Carolina to write the great Southern novel everyone had been waiting for since Faulkner. His “wife” got to know every merchant in town. The couple had a lot of money to spend, and because it was inherited money it was respectable. Also living in the house were three Negroes: a maid, a cook, and Hammie, who doubled as chauffeur and yard man. Junie was the cook. Kimberly was the maid—
It Occurs to Me That I Am America Page 7