Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

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  Contents

  Author’s Note

  I. LEAVING

  Carol and Carl

  Separation

  Berkeley

  II. CHILE

  From Guayaquil to Santiago

  Renaico

  Just Passing Through

  Back to the Farm

  El Golpe

  To Buenos Aires

  III. PERU

  Jauja

  Ocopilla

  Passing the Hat

  Piojos

  Was Jesus a Revolutionary?

  Ataura

  IV. VISITING AMERICA

  Christmas ’74

  The Wait

  The Trial

  V. RETURN TO PERU

  Kidnapped

  Comas

  Animal House

  A Dangerous Place

  Huertas

  VI. MILE-HIGH HIDEOUT

  South Bannock Street

  Lesbians Will Lead the Revolution

  Don’t Vote!

  Playing Hooky

  Gun Crazy

  VII. TEEN YEARS

  Stealing from the Rich

  The Bout

  Surfacing

  The Science Report

  Tourists

  Baker’s Dozen

  Denounced

  Saving Raul

  Fitting In

  “Let’s Put a Pencil to It”

  EPILOGUE

  Defection

  “Where Are the Students Studying Mao and Lenin?”

  Chasing Rainbows

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Stella and Annika

  With my mother in Lima, Peru, December 1973

  Author’s Note

  After my mother’s sudden death, I found scattered through her tiny redbrick house more than a hundred diary notebooks. They covered three decades, beginning in the years when she and I had traveled South America together. She had used whatever was available, from spiral to legal pads and even my school notebooks from our time in Peru, when she’d switched back and forth between writing in English and Spanish. I always knew my mother kept a diary—I’d often watched her write in it when I was a little boy—but I had no idea she had kept them all. As we were clearing out her house together, my two older brothers had no interest in the notebooks, so I packed them up, along with my mother’s half century of personal correspondence and other documents, and carried them home to Providence in duffel bags. I spent weeks reading through those dusty old diaries, a way of talking to my mother one last time, reliving my roller-coaster childhood by her side as we fled, time and again, across borders in search of her elusive revolution.

  Now, more than a decade later, these diaries have helped me finally tell the story of those wild years with my Mennonite-turned-Marxist mother, a passionate, headstrong woman whose radicalism extended from the geopolitical down to her own domestic sphere. It’s a story I’ve long struggled to decipher and come to terms with, now even more so with my late entry into the world of parenthood. In addition to relying on my own memories and interviews with friends and family members, I’ve re-created and extended dialogue and scenes described in my mother’s diaries, notes, books, and personal correspondence. I do wonder, of course, what my mother would think of this book if she were still alive—though I could never have written it while she was alive. She would surely have enjoyed arguing with me about it, but I have no doubt she would be glad I wrote it. It is our story.

  I.

  LEAVING

  Today,

  I dance for hours alone in a beautiful world.

  I dance with Peter, my little boy, who cannot live with me.

  I dance because I never felt free to dance before.

  And there is no one else in the world who is free enough to dance with me.

  —Opening lines of Carol Andreas, Sex and Caste in America

  Carol and Carl

  MY MOTHER HAD always been the one to pick me up from nursery school, but one late June afternoon in 1969, a couple of weeks before my fourth birthday, my father arrived first and pushed me into the backseat of his gray Chevy Malibu. I could tell that something was not right by how tightly he gripped my hand and hurried me out of the school building to his car. Standing on my toes on the seat to look out the back window, I saw my mother’s beige VW station wagon arrive behind us just as we started to pull away from the curb.

  I waved at her. “Daddy, Daddy, Mommy’s coming!”

  “No, Mommy’s leaving,” my father grumbled, turning his head back briefly. “Now please, sit down.” My father slammed the accelerator and the car jerked forward, tipping me off balance.

  My mother, seeing that my father had already taken me, tailed us for as long as she could. She projected an air of calm, waving cheerfully at me from over the steering wheel, but she must have been anything but. Eventually, my father accelerated so fast that she became smaller and smaller, then disappeared into the distance. “Mommy’s gone,” I cried out, tears welling in my eyes.

  “Yes, that’s right, Peter, Mommy is gone. But don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

  That afternoon was my first memory. It marked the beginning of my parents’ war over me. Earlier that day, while no one was home, my mother had quickly packed as much as she could into her car, mostly clothes and books but also a few of her favorite Pakistani pictures hanging in the living room, and moved out of the house for good. When my father got home from work and saw the empty closet, the first thing he’d done was rush to my preschool. Over the next six years, I would be kidnapped from school two more times—both times by my mother, who would carry me first across the country and then across continents. My father won that opening battle, but he would lose the war.

  * * *

  During her devoutly conservative childhood, my mother would have seemed like the last person to kidnap her own child. She was born in 1933 in North Newton, a tightly knit Mennonite community of a few thousand inhabitants in central Kansas, where Mennonite wheat farmers from Ukraine had originally settled in the 1870s. When my mother was a child, most people didn’t venture out of North Newton much; if they did, they were usually visiting other Mennonite communities in rural Middle America. As a pacifist Christian sect closely related to the Amish—though unlike the Amish they don’t reject the technologies of modern life—Mennonites mostly intermarried, spent Sundays at church, and kept to themselves.

  My mother’s parents, Willis Rich and Hulda Penner, had met while waiting in line their freshman year to enroll in classes at Bethel, the local college where most college-bound Mennonites in the area went to school and where Willis would eventually become director of public relations. Although they were devoutly religious—going to church, praying before meals, singing church hymns, dressing conservatively—they were also less strict than other Mennonite families in North Newton. As the PR man for the college, Willis made sure to bring interesting speakers from all over the world to campus, and Hulda would entertain them at their house a few blocks away. My mother and her three siblings served the guests at the table, which gave her an opportunity to pepper them with questions.

  Perhaps it was partly due to such outside influences that, by the time my mother was a teenager, she had become enough of a skeptic to decl
are herself an agnostic, which I imagine must have rattled the rest of the community. Her parents, though, took it in stride. Mennonites did not dance (“that led to sex”) and did not play cards (“that led to gambling”), but Willis and Hulda let their children do both—as long as it was out of sight, behind closed doors. So when the doorbell rang while the kids were playing cards, they quickly hid them under the table; and they could playfully dance around the house, but any kind of dancing in public, including at the high school dances organized for the non-Mennonites from the other side of town, was not allowed.

  The Rich family differed from the rest of the community in other ways, too. They were Democrats in a Republican town. Willis’s sister, Selma, whom my mother looked up to as a role model, was an early civil rights advocate and campaigned to integrate the local swimming pool and movie theater. Also unusual was that Willis had gone to Columbia University for a graduate degree in education, and his first job was as a teacher in the non-Mennonite town of Bentley, Kansas. Although there were plenty of Bibles scattered about the house, Willis spent more time reading Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking—and enthusiastically quoting from it out loud to his kids—than he did Scripture. Willis was always upbeat and optimistic, which remained true even after he became afflicted with multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair.

  * * *

  During Christmas vacation, 1947, just a little more than a month after my mother turned fourteen, she and a friend had gone out sledding—or tried to, anyway, in the flat Kansas fields. She’d been allowed to exchange her plain skirt for a pair of pants for the sledding, and the curls of her fine, shoulder-length hair poked out of her wool winter cap. It was her smile and her beautiful green eyes that captivated my father, the handsome twenty-year-old Bethel College student who stopped by the side of the road that afternoon and offered to pull her sled behind his shiny black 1931 Ford Model A coupe. My mother asked my father if he played a sport and he replied, with a grin, “I play the radio.” He was not the athletic type, but he did have a car, and it did have a radio.

  My father, Carl Roland Andreas, started taking my mother, Carol Ruth Rich, out once a week, holding her hand at the drive-in or at the high school and college basketball games. Except for the nearly seven-year age gap, my father seemed like a perfect suitor—polite, responsible, hardworking, and from a good Mennonite family. His grandfather had even been a Mennonite minister married to the church organist.

  Beyond her pretty face, my father was drawn to my mother’s complex combination of innocence and maturity. My mother, in turn, was flattered by the attention of an older man, especially one who had resisted his mother’s pressure to become a minister. And he seemed downright worldly compared to the other Newton boys; he had traveled to Cuba with his college roommate during a winter break, worked on the railroad in Colorado for a year after high school, and spent the last year of World War II as a conscientious objector in a Civilian Public Service camp in Mississippi, building latrines in poor rural communities. My mother admired those who defied the draft and had tasted life outside of Kansas. Her hero growing up was her cousin Dwight (Aunt Selma’s son), who spent six months in county jail for refusing to register for the draft and then lived in India for four years before returning to teach at Bethel.

  Two years after they met, my mother and father got engaged and kissed for the first time. A year after that they were married. My mother was seventeen; my father, twenty-four. Mennonite girls in North Newton often married young, but usually not that young, and usually not to someone that much older.

  Yet, even as my father’s college buddies teased him for robbing the cradle, most everyone seemed pleased with the match—except for the bride. My mother was already starting to have ideological doubts about traditional marriage as a concept itself. As my mother would later tell it, as she and my father arrived at their late-afternoon marriage ceremony on Bethel’s Goerz House lawn, she turned suddenly and blurted: “You know what? It just occurred to me that I really don’t know if I believe in monogamy.” A bold thing to say in 1950s America, this was downright scandalous in a conservative religious community in central Kansas.

  “Tootsie, what difference does it make?” my startled father replied, trying to stay calm. “Look over there. There must be five hundred people waiting for us. They all believe in monogamy. They can’t all be wrong. And besides, you want to live with me, don’t you? How else can we swing that?”

  They went through with the ceremony and then moved into an upstairs apartment near campus on South College Avenue. While my father waited for my mother to get through school, he took a job as a bill collector and bookkeeper for the local Mennonite Deaconess Hospital. Whatever my mother’s hesitations, the truth was my father was her ride out of North Newton. Originally from Beatrice, Nebraska, a few hours’ drive away, he had no plans to stay in town after college. He and my mother both wanted to go to graduate school, which meant not only leaving North Newton but probably Kansas as well. Many others from my mother’s generation, including her siblings, would also end up moving away, but she was more eager to grow up and get out to see the world than most. Always disciplined and studious, she skipped a grade at Newton High and rushed through Bethel as fast as she could. “I was only nineteen when I finished college,” my mother always reminded me. “I did it so I could be with your father.”

  Carol and Carl Andreas, May 1951

  As soon as she had her diploma, she and my father moved to Minneapolis–Saint Paul to attend the University of Minnesota together, where my father earned an MA in hospital administration and my mother an MA in psychology. My mother got him through his course work by helping him write and type up his papers.

  My father and mother as a traditional 1950s married couple

  Soon they had two little boys, Joel and Ronald, a year and a half apart. My mother loved her children but grew restless under the expectations of a 1950s housewife, a role she’d never intended to play. With my mother’s encouragement, my father signed up for a four-year stint as coordinator of a U.S. government–funded medical school program in Karachi, Pakistan. My father saw it as a good career move, but my mother, now in her mid-twenties, was mainly eager to experience life outside of America—and Pakistan happened to be the post that was open. She miscalculated. Instead of worldly adventure, she found herself in an even more insulated life, cooped up in charge of two rambunctious boys in a stifled and claustrophobic U.S. diplomatic community. My mother did her best to keep busy—she studied Urdu, scoured for antiques in Karachi’s old bazaar, volunteered to teach English to Pakistani women—but was still restless and frustrated.

  It didn’t help matters that my father was a workaholic who, according to my mother, was reluctant to take a single day off work, not even a Saturday or Sunday. This was true even before the move to Pakistan; there were no family vacations except for the once- or twice-a-year cross-country drives to visit relatives back in Kansas. In Karachi, my father had little family time beyond an obligatory short daily walk with the kids at dusk—usually taking them to review progress on the city’s brand-new sewage plant—while my mother, dripping sweat, struggled to have dinner on the table when they got home.

  My father even resisted the weekend outings she tried to plan: when she insisted on going to the beach, he would reluctantly drive them there but would spend the day sitting in the car. My father could be maddeningly practical: from his perspective, what was the point of sitting on the ground or in a rickety beach chair if the car seat was more shaded and comfortable? He did not share my mother’s interest in foreign cultures or in mingling with the locals; he was just there for the job opportunity, a career stepping-stone, and looked forward to returning to the States. He did everything he could to avoid the spicy cuisine, even if it meant embarrassing my mother by refusing to eat at neighbors’ dinner parties (my father was not a picky eater, but he preferred his food as bland as possible). Even back home he had never liked to eat out, choosing cheap, o
ver-processed chain restaurants whenever possible. As my mother started to experience the world outside of the American Midwest, she came to see my father as frustratingly square and provincial. The only dream that dominated my father’s life was to save a million dollars by the time he retired. She had no dream—not yet—but she had become ashamed of the privileged lives of the diplomatic community and local elites floating in a vast sea of poverty.

  My mother also felt restless when she and the kids were cooped up together in the air-conditioned bedrooms during the years before my brothers started school. More than anything, though, she felt isolated. One of her favorite Karachi memories was of a homely camel poking its head affectionately into her car window as she was stopped at an intersection. She would later write, “I had an urge to hug it and kiss it, as if we were two misfits in the world who had finally found each other—a fleeting recognition of my solitude during a time when I didn’t even know enough to keep a diary.”

  * * *

  When the Karachi assignment came to an end in the early sixties, my parents and brothers went right back to the Midwest, this time settling down in Detroit, Michigan. My parents bought a downtown townhouse in Lafayette Park, a middle-class “urban renewal” community. My father had accepted a job offer as business manager for the Wayne State University School of Medicine, and a few years later, he moved on to become a staff member of the United Automobile Workers union, where he would spend the rest of his career, negotiating Social Security and pension benefits.

  Intellectually restless and physically exhausted from raising two energetic boys, my mother decided to work on a PhD in sociology at Wayne State, where she read works by Marx, Engels, and other radical theorists for the first time. My father was supportive of my mother getting a PhD as a sensible career move—he liked the idea of two incomes—even though he didn’t really understand why anyone would be interested in sociological theory, and certainly wasn’t prepared for the ways in which her personal beliefs might be affected. In the midst of writing her doctoral dissertation, a critique of U.S. aid to Pakistan as a tool of political and economic domination, she unexpectedly became pregnant—yet another boy. “You were a mistake,” my mother used to say, “but a happy one.” I arrived on July 8, 1965.