Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  Dear Jesse. Dear Comrade. Before Pat told me about being a communist, my mother never discussed the revolution. She didn’t have permission. But afterwards, we talked about it all the time. When the revolution comes … When we’re in charge … After the revolution …

  What would it be like after the revolution? Everything—too many things to name. We could decide what it would be like, but only if we got there. Getting there, that was the most important thing. When we got there, my sister would understand what we had been working for all this time. She would forgive my mother and me and understand that the organization was different than the communes and the other causes.

  I’d cried when I found out my mother was a communist, but I didn’t mind the idea of a revolution, a change, not even back then. In the small California ranching town that my mother and I ended up in after the last commune fell apart, there was a dirt-road neighbourhood that some people actually called Niggertown. On a school field trip to the local museum I could hardly tear myself away from the photos of Ishi, the very last man in a tribe of Indians all killed in a single generation. Imagine if there were no one left to understand you in the whole world? Beside it were artifacts left by the Chinese, brought in to build the railroad and then driven out, and just next to that, photos of men hanging from trees, rough justice for cattle thieves. Every piece in the museum was proof that this town would never be home for me. It could all burn in a wildfire or be swept away in the flood of a blown-up dam, I didn’t care.

  Except my mother still lived there, she still stood outside supermarkets, handing out flyers and asking for change. She collected food and worked the soup line. And after the office was closed, she sat in crowded smoky rooms with other cadre and took notes from the Old Man’s lectures. Now I knew that on Sunday nights she went to cell meetings. I knew everything about her life. It was my life that had become the mystery, it was what I knew that couldn’t be shared: the Old Man’s name, the safe-house address. In the organization we frequently signed letters and cards with “Love and Solidarity.” I thought about the two of us, me and my mom, thousands of miles apart as we counted down the days to the revolution.

  Love and solidarity. It felt like there was nothing else to write. And so I didn’t write anything at all.

  FOURTEEN

  I had been at NOC for almost a year when the Old Man called me down to his office and said, “Kid, I’m going to give you a job. We’re going to knock some sense into this organization. We are going to put in some real systems, some fucking procedures so we can all stop running around like chickens with our fucking heads cut off. I am talking the basic tools, the very basic tools a revolutionary needs. I am talking pens, sweetheart. This whole fucking place is out of pens.”

  He said we would make an example of the office supply room, we would show people what true organization looked like. He sent me down to the office supply room in the basement to begin categorizing and inventorying all the office supplies we had.

  In the basements were change rooms with cubbies—one for the men and one for the women—an office, a workshop, a half-dozen refrigerators and freezers, the office supply room with its floor-to-ceiling shelves, as well as the boiler room where Gemini slept.

  I spent the whole day in the office supply room. Gemini came and visited, cautiously followed by some kittens.

  It took me two days to do it all. I created diagrams and charts. I made requisition forms, a colour-coded binder, a master list, all according to the Old Man’s directions. And then I waited for him to call me again, so I could show him my hard work.

  But the next time he called for me, a week later, all he wanted to talk about was French Quebec separatists and hitchhiking across the country. I told the Englishman’s secret about the dead pilot, like I knew I always would. We talked about Karl again and Dana. We talked for hours but the subject of office supplies never came up.

  Later, back down in the office supply room, filling out the requisitions people had given me, I realized that I was as alone as I’d been in months. Was this another gift of the Old Man’s? This time in the basement close to my dog and her new-found family. These hours surrounded by the dusty potential of blank pages and empty notebooks, setting the boxes in tidy lines on the shelf, and listening to music that came drifting in from passing car radios and open windows. All I recognized was mariachi and Madonna. Already I could hear that the pop songs had changed, new singers whose names I didn’t know. It was proof of distance from my former life that I didn’t have to ask myself who was cool or good, worthy of my attention.

  Instead I gathered up pens—black, not blue—and yellow legal pads for the Old Man. White-Out and coloured markers for the Control staff who made the weekly schedule, a board that mapped out our week in hourly segments. Office Supply time was a new colour on the grid, a bright pink wedge in my week, a room of my own for a few hours.

  Songs from a stranger’s radio. The sound of my own voice, humming along. The thump thump of my dog’s tail on the ground when I said her name. Even though to my sister it might look as if I had nothing, I actually had everything. I had a reason to get up in the morning. I had simple tasks that needed doing. And this revolutionary life I had been on the edge of since I was a child now had a place just for me.

  Polly called me to her desk. She had a message for me: my mother had gone AWOL. She’d left the Party in the middle of the day, possessions thrown into the back of a relative’s car. She’d left a note saying she needed to take care of her father, who was dying of cancer. But her new boyfriend, another Party member, was gone too. “I’m sorry,” Polly said. “I’m sure your mother will try and contact you. We can talk about that when it happens.” After she told me I went back down to the office supply room. Gemini came over, her tail in a submissive wag as though my tears were something she’d done wrong.

  As I stacked paper I found myself remembering a day back at Live Oak commune, after I’d moved to California. Sitting at the kitchen table, carefully cutting out paper flower petals. We were making construction paper posters that said “Dust Is Our Enemy.” If China could wipe out the housefly, my mother said, then our commune could live in a dust-free house. Next she showed me how to sweep. She said, “Pretend you are painting a canvas.” These were my first memories of her since we’d first joined the communes, since I’d left Lennoxville with Dale. How she re-entered my field of vision, although I had no way of telling how far away she’d been, only that she was back, not just one adult among many, but my mother, holding the broom steady in my hand.

  And now she had disappeared again.

  Polly was right—a week or two after my mother left, I received a letter from her. She wrote that her dying father asked her to come and stay with him, and she’d promised him she would. In her next letter she wrote that even Lenin knew that not everyone was cut out to be cadre.

  I turned over all of my mother’s letters—pleading, explanatory, tidy—to Polly. As the head of Politburo she was charged with our political education and morale. My first few responses to my mother were rejected—too angry, too emotional—and over the next few months I wrote so many letters, I could not remember which were the few I’d actually tried to send, and which I simply kept to myself. On watch duty, or just before I fell asleep, but especially alone in the storeroom, I composed and re-composed the things I wanted to say to her.

  I remembered walking picket lines with her, falling asleep against her during political education classes. The tone of her voice when she described what life would be like after the revolution. My comrade-in-arms. After she left Karl, she told me they were only comrades. My mother who had always understood the pleasure of a new pen, or the importance of lines on a page spaced just right. Dear Mommy. Dear Jesse. Dear Comrade. I ran my fingers along the edges of the smooth white paper, and wondered how I was ever going to forgive her.

  FIFTEEN

  “Congratulations,” Mary T said with a broad smile. Mary T was petite and her face was a complicated mixture
of expressions and features. Amused and annoyed; white and Chinese. She had high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes and pale skin. Her long brown hair hung down to her hips. Unlike most of us she often wore nail polish and sometimes even makeup, but she chipped off the polish in a nervous tic, and she often chewed her lips, biting off her lipstick. I sometimes wondered what she’d been like as a teenager. I still would have been a little afraid of her.

  Even when she was smiling at me I had the sense that I had done something wrong. I understood that this was her job: to guide me, to keep me in line. Mary T was my sponsor, and we’d been having monthly meetings ever since I joined. Sponsors were your guides the first year in the Party. They helped new Party members understand and adjust to their new life. I’d wanted Pat for a sponsor but I wasn’t surprised when I got someone else. Personal relationships complicated revolutionary business. Even as a kid in the field office I’d been able to see that.

  Until I joined, Mary T had been the youngest person to join the Party at seventeen. I suspected that the small nudge of satisfaction I felt was matched by an equal feeling of irritation on her part although I knew that my evidence—a way of laughing at my questions, a small smirk she gave me when she was angry—was not very convincing since she was like that with everyone except the Old Man.

  My other sponsor was Kiersti, a quiet woman probably a little older than Mary T but less senior. She had short brown hair and was one of the few people in the entire office who didn’t smoke. She seldom said anything, but nodded in agreement whenever Mary T said I was prone to daydreaming, to occasional childish behaviour. That if I wanted to be taken seriously then I had to act serious too.

  But now that my probationary year was over this would be my last sponsor meeting. Despite their doubts, even despite my mother’s defection, at seventeen, I had been accepted as the youngest full member of the Communist Party USA, Provisional Wing.

  I had seen the diagrams and read the constitution, but the actual structure and shape of the Party was still somewhat vague to me. As a full Party member I could hold office in the local cell and put forward motions for discussion without the sponsorship of another member. But at NOC the lines between the Party and the National Labor Federation remained blurred. One result was that we did not have weekly cell meetings, as they did in the field—the reasoning being that our cell would be disproportionately influential. Instead only the leaders of the Party, the Central Committee, met, and even then not regularly.

  I was surprised when I learned that the woman we all called Struggler was actually the Chair of the Party since it seemed obvious that the Old Man was the leader. But it was explained to me that the Old Man’s role as Field Commander was not so much to lead the Party but to lead the revolution that would bring the Party to power. He was like a general in charge of a war.

  Struggler was a tall, thin woman with pale blue eyes and short curly blond hair who oversaw most of the day-to-day operations in addition to being head of the Central Committee. In both roles she seemed like an odd choice, with a quiet, delicate demeanour and an almost childlike voice, but over time I saw the resiliency and toughness that lay underneath.

  Polly was on the Central Committee too, and there were others I assumed must have been, in particular anyone else who had been around in the early years. But it was never discussed and the structure and rules of the Party did not have much of an effect on our daily lives at NOC. In fact, other than the end of sponsor meetings, the only thing that would change for me was that before I could have left the Party at any time, but full members had to ask for permission to leave. It was both a right and a duty of full members to explain to the Central Committee why their grievances were irreconcilable.

  That’s what the constitution said, but I had never actually heard of anyone doing that. The truth was people just disappeared the way my mother had done. After seven years in the organization, she’d packed up her things and left with her boyfriend while everyone else was at an all-day event. She’d said she was going to take care of her dying father, which no one quite believed. Why take her stuff, her man even, if she was coming back? “Are you in?” she’d asked me, only a year earlier. But just before I was all the way in, she’d gotten out.

  After my very last sponsor meeting was done, I met up with another cadre to cook dinner. Maggie was fun to work with. Tall and blond and apparently related to a prominent family, she had a loud laugh and a relaxed but energetic attitude. We started with the Jell-O, since it took time to set. The food we ate at NOC was straight from a school cafeteria. Maggie and I were making meat loaf with green salad, Thousand Island dressing (ketchup, mayonnaise and relish) and bananas and red Jell-O for dessert. Coffee in a forty-cup urn, and an orange drink we called “bug juice” that came from a restaurant drink dispenser.

  We needed more ketchup so we got to walk up to the corner store together. We bought the last five bottles in the store, and Maggie bought me a Coke with her own money. “Congratulations,” she said on the walk back. She had been in for five years.

  Two other people served dinner, so between the time that dinner was served and the time the dishwashing crew came in, there was a lull where Maggie and I sat alone in the kitchen, having our after-dinner coffee and cigarettes. Maggie’s cowboy boots were propped up on the chair, and there was almost a conspiracy of laziness hanging in the air. We knew we could have been scraping pots and stacking pans. Instead we were sitting there, waiting for the kitchen door to swing open and spur us back into action.

  At the end of my last sponsorship meeting that morning, Mary T asked if I knew what another right of a full member was.

  No.

  The right to join the military fraction.

  Even as a young girl I’d heard this part of the organization hinted at. Cadre who would be willing to do “anything necessary” for the revolution. But who were those people around me? My mother? That wasn’t important. Karl? Pat? I didn’t need to know. Things in the organization were on a need-to-know basis.

  But now at least it had a name. The military fraction. “Fractions” were all the parts you needed for the revolution, the distinct parts of the whole. The mutual benefits societies, like the one my mother had worked in, were part of the labour fraction. The organization that recruited doctors, put on health clinics for moms and their kids and arranged TB testing was the professional fraction. They were out there—pissed-off doctors realizing that this wasn’t enough, that the system had to change. The lawyers visiting clients who had been in jail a year without a trial—the same thing. Like the Old Man said, there was no justice. Just us. This had all been explained to me a year ago in the fraction briefing.

  But we all understood the capitalists wouldn’t just hand over power. It wasn’t logical to think that. So there was the military fraction.

  “Would you be interested in finding out more?” Mary T asked.

  ——

  Even in the intimacy of the kitchen, I didn’t ask Maggie what she knew about the military. I had been told not to discuss it, but even so it didn’t seem like the kind of question I knew how to ask another person. How far would you be willing to go? Maybe it was not even the kind of question you knew the answer to until the time came. As my mother’s defection had shown, sometimes people changed their mind.

  At the end of the night, on the drive to outside housing, me and Maggie and six others were all crammed into a green station wagon like college students pulling a prank, but we didn’t giggle. We didn’t even listen to the radio, since choosing a channel among so many of us was considered to be a potential and unnecessary source of contention.

  Instead of the radio, we told stories. There were two kinds of stories. One story was before.

  Before I found.

  Before I knew.

  Before I joined.

  Before she joined, Helen was in medical school, but knowing she could never be a part of that system.

  Before she joined, Maureen was getting ready to be married.

 
Before she joined, Maggie was using too many drugs and living an empty life.

  I balanced myself on the knees of bony young women. I could hardly remember this moment, this moment before. I felt like I had always known. Even my father—who did not believe in the revolution, who did not even know about the revolution—did not really believe in the future. If we didn’t talk about how a knock on the door from the police could change his life forever, we also didn’t talk about careers or college. I had an answer for what to say when teachers or strangers asked what I wanted to be when I grew up—marine biologist, writer, actress—but it wasn’t a question either of my parents often asked me.

  So I was fascinated by everyone’s stories. I wanted to know, was it a sacrifice or a letting go? And what was it like, that wide-open world they gave up? I listened to their voices for clues, since that was something else I could not ask. How could I even word that question? What did it feel like not knowing that most of what they taught in school was lies, that the world was a terrible place, that it was your duty to change it?

  The other story we told was after.

  After, Helen wanted to help run the national health care system.

  After the revolution, Maggie wanted to be the commissar of Florida because she didn’t think she could stand another fucking New York winter.

  After the revolution, we would all be heroes. We would look back on our lives with amazement at the history we had created. When people said things like this I was not sure if they were joking or not. Maybe it didn’t matter. These fantasies were probably as close as we came to imagining not just cadre life, but a life after this.

  If I took that next step and joined the military fraction, would I still have that hope that I was going to live through it? That someday my life was going to be different than it was right now? But if I said no, then why was I there? Didn’t I give my life to the Party the day I walked in the door? That falling apart, falling-down life of a girl who wanted everything Dana didn’t have, including the chance to kill herself all over again. But for something meaningful this time. For something real.