Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  My mother groggily replied, “Raul, the Third International was dissolved more than thirty years ago, replaced by the Communist Party—which is hardly worth defending at all costs.”

  This enraged Raul. He accused my mother of not being a “true communist,” that he had the right to inform her about what he was reading, that she had no right to respond if she was not also reading the same book, and that he would have to guide her “political development.” Pointing a fist at my mother, Raul boldly declared, “I will be the theoretician of the Peruvian revolution, for I feel the lifeblood of Peru’s poor in me.”

  “Oh, really?” my mother asked. “And what will my role be?”

  “You will have to immerse yourself with the masses in a distant place and do what you can to not hate me and not be affected by my tyranny.”

  Raul then started stomping around the room, screaming that my mother was driving him crazy and that she hated all men and was trying to get vengeance on men through him. At one point, he yelled out that he wanted to kill her. Both my mother and I were trembling. She motioned for me to join her in her bed, where we sat, side by side, holding each other closely with our backs pressed up hard against the wall. Raul was so agitated that he didn’t seem to even notice that he was frightening us.

  After declaring that he could not wait to get back to Peru to “organize the revolution,” Raul finally started to calm down, motioned for me to go back to my own bed, and then climbed into bed next to my mother. He said to her, “You know, I’m a little bit crazy.” And then he immediately fell sound asleep and started snoring.

  Still wide awake, I whispered softly to my mother in the dark, “Mommy, please leave Raul.”

  She whispered back, “Raul will be better when we’re in Peru again; he’s just homesick and feeling alienated in America.”

  I was miserable the day after. I lay on the bed and sobbed about everything in general, declaring, “This is the worst day of my life.” I’m sure it was partly the sleep deprivation, but the truth was that the situation was wearing on all of us. As my mother wrote in her diary, “These kind of nights are all too frequent and I am really at a loss to know what we should do about it.”

  “Please leave Raul, please,” I again pleaded with my mother when were we alone one afternoon a few days later.

  She didn’t respond, though she had plenty to say about it in her diary: “Raul and I do seem to be constantly on the verge of splitting up, but we just can’t do it. We are so romantic and so easily hurt and so stuck on each other I sometimes laugh aloud to myself when I think about it. Raul would kill me if he knew that.” She also wrote, “Raul and I are so dramatic all the time, who knows, maybe we’ll get bored of it all and finally settle into a more tranquil existence. But if boredom would overtake us, it would be even worse.”

  * * *

  Raul was up early the day after the big fight. When we came down and joined him at the breakfast table, he was casually playing with a set of dice.

  “Come on, play with me.” He smiled at my mother like a child who had found a new toy. It was as if the previous night’s blowout had never happened.

  “No,” my mother said, “you know how I feel about gambling.”

  Raul stiffened and became defensive, telling her, “You don’t gamble because you’ve never had to.”

  My mother countered, “People who are responsible for feeding children should not gamble because they can’t afford to.” She added, “Women are the ones who lose out because men are the ones who gamble.”

  Raul shot back, “Women don’t gamble because they don’t know how.” On and on they went. Eventually, I left the room, glad to be able to escape this time.

  * * *

  That April, my mother announced, “We’re moving to Denver until the trial.” She didn’t explain why we were moving, or why Denver—though I knew she liked to be near mountains, and Colorado was also next to Kansas, where Grandpa Rich lived. My mother’s diaries also give no real rationale for the move. Maybe she just got sick of living in groovy Berkeley again and thought the change might also be good for Raul. I had several months of school left, but I didn’t protest the move. I was used to moving; we never stayed in one place for long. And we had not stayed in Berkeley long enough for me to really make new friends and get too attached.

  The latest plan my mother and Raul had come up with was to buy a big van, drive it to Colorado, and then, after the Michigan trial, live in the van while driving it down through Latin America. At a used-car dealer, we found an old Chevy laundry van that looked exactly like a brown UPS truck. We spent days gluing beige shag carpeting to the inside walls of the van, trying to insulate it and convert it into a livable space. My mother and Raul proudly named the van “The Messenger of the People.” She happily wrote to her father in Kansas about it in early May of 1975: “We’ve started working on converting the van into a home and it feels good to be really doing something together—Raul, Peter, and me.”

  But the van kept breaking down, at one point leaving us stranded by the side of the highway as we tried to cross the Rockies. Raul didn’t know how to drive, didn’t want to learn, and had no interest in car mechanics.

  The van did get us to Denver, where my mother would eventually get rid of it at a substantial loss. Raul started taking English classes at the Colorado Migrant Council, though his real intent was to form a Marxist study group there. My mother was looking for a good cause, one that she could believe in, so she took a volunteer job, every day except Sunday, from 8:30 to 6:00 p.m., as a staff person for the UFW—the United Farm Workers union—which was in the midst of a boycott against grapes and Gallo wine. We lived in a small run-down apartment on West Fourth Avenue in a mostly Mexican neighborhood on the west side of Denver. To pay the rent, on Saturdays and three nights a week my mother put on a red skirt and a black ruffly blouse to wait tables at a local Mexican restaurant, La Posada, a mansion converted into a folkloric family-style restaurant. Raul worked part-time as a busboy at another nearby restaurant. We were close to broke.

  Instead of enrolling me in school to finish the term, my mother took me everywhere on her UFW work that spring and early summer. Each of us proudly wore our little UFW pins, on which a black eagle spread its wings against a red background. My mother worked as a Spanish-English translator at UFW business meetings; organized showings of Fighting for Our Lives, a documentary film about the UFW campaign; helped put together press conferences to denounce police harassment; set up protests at jails where UFW staff were detained; and shuttled people around to keep picket lines going.

  I spent many days with my mother picketing local liquor stores that sold Gallo wine, with typically twenty-five to fifty people at each picket. We called them “dirty” liquor stores that needed to be “cleaned up.” I could belt out “¡El pueblo unido jamas será vencido!” (The people united shall never be defeated)—a line I remembered from our time in Chile—as loudly and with as much gusto as any adult. I was the only ten-year-old who was a regular at Bootlegger Liquor on West Alameda Avenue. For the Fourth of July, the UFW threw a big potluck party at Sloan Lake, dumping Gallo wine into the water as a sort of Boston Tea Party protest, and used the event to get new recruits to join the picket lines. When we picketed liquor stores, the police often showed up and made arrests for “blocking entrance.”

  * * *

  My mother and Raul also sometimes collaborated in political activism. One time, the manager at Denver’s Aztlan Theatre agreed to let Raul do a performance, in Spanish, in the break between the Spanish-language movies. Raul asked my mother to sing Violeta Parra’s “Jose se fue para el Norte” (Jose has gone to the North) in the wings of the theater while Raul pantomimed the life of an immigrant worker in the United States. Then he talked to the audience about Chile and the need for worldwide revolution. At the end of his performance, my mother came out onstage and sang the anthem of the Chilean resistance movement with him. The song begins “De pie canta que vamos a triunfar” and ends with �
��El pueblo unido jamas será vencido” (Stand up to sing of victory to come . . . the people united will never be defeated). The whole performance was a sort of guerrilla theater because the manager of the place did not know Raul’s act would be anything other than “entertainment.” The audience clapped, and since the manager did not know Spanish, he clapped, too.

  That summer, my mother and Raul also started a small Spanish-language newspaper. It was called Chispa (Spark), after the title of the newspaper Lenin published while in exile. They pitched it as “a newspaper for the Latinos of the West Side” and sold it for ten cents a copy outside the Spanish-language theaters in Denver.

  While Raul and my mother kept busy with political activism around town by day, at home late at night they kept busy arguing with each other, as always, over politics. Lenin was one of the most persistent problems in their relationship. One summer day, Raul bought a large cloth portrait of Lenin and put it above the bed he shared with my mother. Just as I was falling asleep that night, I heard them yelling. The dispute was over the portrait’s location. Raul had made the mistake of not asking my mother’s permission before hanging it. She exclaimed, “What, you’re now making Lenin the patron saint of our bedroom? No way. You’ll have to put it somewhere else.”

  Raul’s cloth portrait of Lenin, with a United Farm Workers badge pinned to the lapel

  “But, Carola, it’s Lenin. Lenin! Above the bed is where he should be, looking down on us, watching over us, we should give him the proper respect he deserves.”

  After hours of arguing about it, neither one of them would give in. It was as if the fate of the revolution were at stake.

  The next day, Raul moved out with Lenin and rented a room in a dilapidated house three blocks away, which he could barely afford on his busboy wages. The only thing he put on the wall in his new place was that Lenin portrait. Raul told us that he had convinced the landlord that it was actually a portrait of his father, whom Raul said was a “Quaker minister.” Raul’s real father had spent most of his life hauling junk to and from Lima’s La Victoria flea market. I doubt the landlord would have cared if he’d known it was Lenin, but Raul enjoyed those sorts of jokes.

  As a sign that he still loved and respected my mother, Raul pinned to Lenin’s lapel a farmworkers’ badge to recognize that my mother was working for the United Farm Workers union. Raul had long accused my mother of romanticizing the peasantry and not recognizing the role of the urban proletariat in leading the revolution—so this may have been a gesture of reconciliation he hoped my mother would notice and appreciate. Within a month or two, Raul was living with us again. The arguments continued. It had never been a real breakup, just a pause during which they visited each other constantly, but I had enjoyed the quiet break from full-time Raul.

  While Raul was renting his own room, he’d read Nadezhda Krupskaya’s biography of Lenin. Krupskaya, also a leading Bolshevik revolutionary, was Lenin’s much-older wife. Raul was especially eager to reconcile with my mother once he decided that she was his Krupskaya. When he informed my mother of this revelation, another huge argument erupted. When the hostilities eventually subsided, as they always did, Raul told my mother, “Actually, Carola, you’re Lenin. And me, well, I’m a mere Trotsky, vacillating and weak.”

  The Trial

  THE TRIAL DATE was fast approaching. My mother and I traveled to Michigan by bus the first week of August while Raul stayed behind in Denver. Old friends of my mother’s let us stay at their place in Detroit and let us borrow their car to drive back and forth to the courthouse. I had not been to Michigan for five years—half my life ago at that point. I was looking forward to seeing my father and Rosalind again, even while dreading the impending trial.

  My father finally had my mother back in Michigan, on his home turf. This was his one chance to get me back. In the many documents he put together for the trial, he charged that my mother was a radical hippie, a church-hating atheist, an anti-American communist, and an anti-male and anti-marriage feminist who promoted polygamy and was determined to destroy the traditional family. He used a copy of my brother’s polemical comic book about the Rockefellers as evidence of my mother’s poisonous radical influence.

  But winning custody was an uphill battle for any father; my mother was counting on the reluctance that courts usually showed when it came to taking a child away from the mother. My father was going to try to even the odds by depicting my mother as totally unfit, psychologically unstable, and downright dangerous, not only to her children but to American society and to Western civilization.

  During the trial days I waited, tense yet bored, sitting on a long bench outside the courtroom, hoping for it to end. During court recesses, both my father and mother would emerge with forced smiles, trying to act as if they had not just spent hours engaged in the courtroom equivalent of trench warfare.

  The trial was unexpectedly interrupted when Ronald was arrested back in Berkeley after a huge fight with his girlfriend, Beverly, a pretty redhead some ten years older than him. When the fight happened, she called the police. After the cops came and took him away, Ronald sat in the juvenile detention center for days until my father flew out to get him. During his days behind bars, the jail staff only fed Ronald hot dogs, and as a strict vegetarian, he only ate the buns. Ronald always projected such an air of dignified control that I imagine it must have really shaken him to be treated like a criminal, shoved into a police car, and made to wait in a cell without a decent meal, day after day, until my father finally arrived. No doubt the Michigan judge took notice that it was my father, not my mother, who made the trip to rescue Ronald. The trial resumed as soon as my father got back.

  Right before the trial ended, the judge called me into his chambers, all by myself. He was a heavyset man with puffy cheeks, and his black robe made him look even bigger. The shelves were filled with thick, dark hardbound books, and the walls were decorated with framed diplomas. The room was hot and stuffy, and I was desperate to escape. I sat in an uncomfortable oak chair in front of the judge’s enormous desk, dangling my feet nervously, staring at the floor. The judge leaned back in his brown leather chair, arms folded behind his head, and looked across the desk at me. All he asked me was one question: “Peter, who do you want to live with, your mother or your father?”

  I wilted into the chair. Instead of replying, after a long pause I tried to deflect the question by asking a question back: “Can I live with both of them, equally, half of the year with each? That’s what I’d like to do.”

  He shook his head. “No, young man, I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, you should really be in only one school during the school year, not going back and forth all the time between different schools in different places, and certainly not between Michigan and Peru. That’s just not good for you, or for any kid.”

  After a long silence, I said, “Well, then, I guess I should just stay with my mother.” My reasoning was simple: my mother needed me more than my father did. I had a hard time imagining my mother without me, or me without her for that matter. And I knew my father would be okay without me, and me without him, because we were already doing okay. And he had Rosalind.

  The judge stood up, extended his fat, sweaty hand, and said, “Thank you, Peter, we’re done.”

  And then I went back to my bench in the hall and waited, watching the courtroom door.

  An hour or so later, Rosalind came through the door with a huge smile on her face. She rushed over to me, crouched down, and put her hands on my shoulders. “Peter, you’re coming home with us, to live with us!” She gave me a hug. I hugged her back but felt numb inside. What had just happened?

  My father then appeared, beaming. “Peter! It’s finally over.” He hugged me stiffly.

  I was relieved the trial had ended, but startled by the outcome. We were supposed to be heading back to Peru now; we had only come to the U.S. for an extended visit and for the property settlement agreement. But that w
hole plan was now derailed.

  Minutes later, my mother, wide-eyed, stumbled from the courtroom. She made a beeline for me, pulling me off to the side.

  “What did you tell the judge?” she asked. Her voice shook with accusation. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “I told him I should live with you. Really, I did.”

  Maybe the judge would have chosen my father regardless of what I’d said or how I’d said it, but, either way, the decision had been made, the trial was over. And my mother’s worst nightmare had come true. She had the property settlement she had come back to Michigan for, but she’d lost me in the process.

  Looking back, it’s not surprising that the judge trusted my father to provide a more stable home for me. The real surprise is how confident my mother had been that she would win. Even her diary entries leading up to the trial reveal no worries at all. A few days into the trial she wrote a letter to her father saying she remained confident in the outcome even though “Carl is taking every opportunity to make me seem like a wandering, irresponsible degenerate.”

  My mother took the loss as a devastating failure—not just a personal one, but a political one, too. At the stroke of a judge’s pen, her dream of raising a revolutionary boy, free of the vices of mainstream America, was dashed. The Establishment had prevailed. And, worse, she had been an accomplice; by fighting for the settlement, she’d succumbed to the temptation of, of all things, money.

  We all walked outside to the parking lot. It was a hot August afternoon and my mother, shoulders hunched, took my hand. We were both shocked that I was about to go home with my father and Rosalind forever. I looked up at my mother’s face. Her skin was pale and her lips were trembling. I’d never seen her look so defeated. She met my eyes and tried to smile. “Don’t worry,” she said, bumping her arm into mine. “I’ll figure something out.”