In rapid sequence, a terrorist band called the Symbionese Liberation
Army claimed responsibility for killing Foster; the group kidnapped
Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst; Patty Hearst
announced she was joining the band and appeared with them in a robbery
of a San Francisco bank. Then on May 17, a bungalow in Los Angeles
where the S.L.A. was ambushed by police erupted in flames, killing
all known members except Patty and Bill and Emily Harris.
The acting head of the S.L.A. was a black ex-convict, Donald DeFreeze,
known as General Field Marshal Cinque. The leading soldiers and theoreticians
were young white women. The youngest was Patty, twenty, who took the
name Tania and in a voice with the same refined, airy softness as
that of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, vowed to fight for the "freedom
of all oppressed people."
The unfolding of the S.L-A.-Hearst drama shocked me out of a two-year
stupor, an indifference to the news that even Watergate could not
disturb. The affair seemed to set off in me and everyone I encountered
powerful fantasies and fears. It was a screen which reflected our
private plots, and it was a screen on which the movie was always changing,
the images constantly reversing themselves.
Because I could see myself in Patricia, Mizmoon, Randolph Hearst,
in all the characters, I spent weeks prowling around the settings,
looking in windows and talking to strangers. What I have come up with
are fragments, shards of pathos and humor, and a suspicion that the
symbols in this drama may be more potent and meaningful than the reality.
It is noon at Sproul Plaza, the University of California. No card
tables, no speakers, no leaflets are to be seen. No major demonstration
has occurred in three years. In the sun by the fountain, students
are playing music. A grinning fat man is blowing bubbles from a jar,
and a quartet of girls in gym shorts leap by.
At the edge of campus near Telegraph Avenue, wooden booths are set
up each morning to sell fruit juices, Chinese food, falafel and donuts.
In the Fruity Rudy stand, painted orange with a green awning. Nancy
Ling Perry, who liked to be called Ling, worked for a year and a half.
Everyone in the community must have bought juice from Ling. I know
that I did. She was the most visible and accessible of those who have
been identified as S.L.A. soldiers. With Ling, as with everyone in
this story, there is no detail to be culled from her past that explains
what sent her over the edge. She is described by people who were intimate
with her as a kind, honest person with strong humanist convictions,
"not the type to be violent."
Ling was twenty-six, and like the other S.L.A. women, overqualified
for the work she did. Ling held a degree in English from Berkeley
and took graduate courses in chemistry. But she saw her profession
as a revolutionary, which meant not taking the first steps up a bourgeois
career ladder. It meant working at marginal jobs. (Mizmoon Soltysik
was a janitor; Emily Harris, a clerk-typist.) It meant living in a
dingy rooming house in Oakland, wearing clothes scavenged from free
boxes on the street and hitch-hiking for transportation.
Ling was four feet eleven inches, wiry and fast. She would squeeze
juice for hours and never gossip or flirt with customers. She had
been through a period of experimenting with drugs and once painted
her fingernails green. Noel McCloud, who worked with her at Rudy's,
says she did not like exchanging small talk with people who weren't
"political." She also scorned leftist "old-timers from
the Sixties," whom she viewed as lame and dissipated.
Ling had a strong attraction to blacks. She lived among them, spoke
their language and for six years was married to a jazz musician. It
was a stormy relationship with periodic separations, and after the
last, in early 1973, Ling looked for an outlet for her political passions.
She began visiting inmates at Soledad, San Quentin and Vacaville.
By the summer, she had connected with an odd karass of desperadoes
and dreamers—Cinque, Mizmoon, Camilla Hall, Russell Little, Willie
Wolfe, Joe Remiro, Angela Atwood, Bill and Emily Harris—who with
a few others were training for guerrilla combat. Two of them, Remiro
and Harris, had been taught to kill by the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
The group adopted code names, rented hideouts, stole ammunition,
collected wigs and practiced shooting with BB guns. They formed security
rules such as "Keep your handgun with you" and "Always
know where your shoes are." They wrote reams of propaganda and
drafted a constitution for a grand Symbionese Federation.
In October, Ling rented a ranch house in Concord which the S.L.A.
used as a base until January 10, the night Remiro and Little were
picked up by police and charged with murdering Foster. Ling herself
set fire to the house "to melt away fingerprints."
Soon afterward, she disclosed her identity to the world: "My
name was Nancy Ling Perry, but my true name is Fahizah." Her
tone was exalted, her faith in her own rhetoric absolute. "I
have learned that what one really believes in is what will come to
pass."
When Rudy Henderson, proprietor of Fruity Rudy, first saw Ling's
picture on the front pages, he says, "It didn't surprise me.
She talked a lot about prisoners and the poor people, but she never
mentioned guns."
Ling and Rudy had grown close during the time she worked for him.
Ling told her friends she was in love with Rudy. He is a tall black
man of forty-seven with close-cropped silvery hair, known as an eccentric
who can be snappish and surly. He operates four Fruity Rudy stands,
teaches tennis and lives a block from campus in a hotel with stained
carpets and strange odors.
Rudy used to play drums and would take Ling to jazz clubs. "Ling
liked me and I didn't sort of care for her," Rudy says. "One
time she shouted in the street, 'Don't you know I love you!'"
He shakes his head. "She was trying to rush me into something
and I was a cold fish."
Ling knew Rudy wanted a color TV set, so she tried to find a seam—some
way for him to acquire one cheaply. When two men picked her up hitchhiking
and offered her a stolen set, Ling ran to find Rudy on the tennis
court. He paid the men $150 in cash and triumphantly carried the box
to his hotel room. When he and Ling opened it, they found wood and
bricks inside. "See what you brought me!" Rudy said. Ling
cried.
Noel McCloud recalls, "Ling felt so guilty about it that she
told me, 'Maybe I'll go in the city and turn a few tricks.' She wanted
to make the money to pay Rudy back." Noel, a twenty-one-year-old
who studies communication and public policy, adds, "This shows
me Ling had a conscience."
Ling did repay Rudy with money borrowed from relatives. When people
asked why he accepted the money, Rudy grumbled, "She's like a
sister to me but she has to learn."
Thinking back, Rudy says he feels badly about the way he treated
her. "I liked her more after she made her move," Rudy says.
"You get to know a person better after a thing like this. I know
she was serious about revolution, about helping the poor. She was
not playing games. She was an out-of-sight girl." Rudy folds
his arms across his chest. "I tell you, I love the girl now."
We will never know what happened during the final hours in that yellow
house in Los Angeles, but it is clear that the six inside had passed
through some alchemical psychic process and come out ready to die.
They strapped bandoliers across their chests, stationed machine guns
in the living room and slipped knives into special pockets sewn in
their jeans.
They did not sleep for days before the shoot-out, and lived on soft
drinks and beer, cheap white bread sandwiches and cigarettes. Up to
the end, they were trying to recruit "strong brothers and sisters"
for the revolution. When they found themselves absurdly outnumbered,
they gave no thought to surrender. They took the offensive and fired.
"You are witnessing the biggest gunfight in the history of the
West," one of the news correspondents shouted into his beeper
phone. Could the battle have been staged for the evening news? The
shooting began at 5:50 P.M., Pacific standard time, and the fire erupted
at 6:30 P.M. The camera crews had been given two hours' notice to
prepare for live color coverage.
All the players were speaking lines from B movies. The FBI called
Patricia a "fugitive" who was "armed and extremely
dangerous." James Johnson, eighteen, says Patty told him, "They'll
have to kill me before I go back." Another witness told police
the S.L.A. "lived by night," and Randolph Hearst's own San
Francisco Examiner came out with this headline: "They Died By
Fire."
In California, the S.L.A. shoot-out seemed an event almost as gripping
as a presidential assassination. People stopped strangers on the street
to ask if Patty was all right, and called friends to tell them to
turn on the television. At the Student Union in Berkeley, groups gathered
around monitors, staring at the incongruity of palm trees and flame.
When I stepped outside my door after the news, I expected to see
shotguns and fire, but the sky was clear and my neighbors were pruning
roses. I thought of Tom Matthews, the eighteen-year-old from Lynwood
High School, who was kidnapped by Patty, Bill and Emily Harris before
the shoot-out. After spending the night with these three people that
the entire state law-enforcement apparatus was seeking, he drove home
to play in a championship baseball game. I imagined what he was thinking
all that night, crouched under a blanket, cursing his luck and hoping
he'd get out of this in time to make the game. He did, and they won,
2-0.
When the fire was extinguished and the body count final—six
of the nine known members dead—the FBI said they believed the
S.L.A. had been "decimated." Charles Bates, head of the
San Francisco bureau, said, "Anything can change from day to
day on this, but we feel the death of six people has taken its toll
on the organization."
Others, however, worried that it was not the end, that new terrorist
groups would surface in the future. Joe Remiro had said in prison
on Easter Sunday: "The S.L.A. ain't nothing, man. The revolution
is on with or without the S.L.A. ... if the entire S.L.A. and everybody
who relates to the S.L.A. would be killed tomorrow, the next day they'd
have to kill a lot more."
As I drive down Telegraph Avenue, I stop for a little girl in a sailor
dress standing in the street with her thumb out. She is six years
old. "You're the youngest hitchhiker I've ever seen," I
tell her.
"That's the way it goes," she says. "I've been hitching
since I was three. My mom taught me."
I am on my way to see Michael Kossman. Me is thirty-tour and something
of a Berkeley fixture: leader of the Free Speech Movement, crusader
for educational reform, and, at the moment, he says, "I'm working
with kids, writing and doing sex therapy." Michael greets me
with a bear hug, notes that my shoulders are tight and shows me an
exercise to unlock tension.
Michael says he never knew anyone connected with the S.L.A. "In
one sense, it's ten or twenty isolated people, but in another sense
it's ten or twenty million people, because that's us there! We contributed
the energy the S.L.A. is running on. It's clear where those ideas
come from: women's liberation, lesbianism, the black struggle, the
Vietnam veterans, prison reform, the Black Panther food program."
I ask how the S.L.A. makes him feel. "Crazy and confused,"
he says. "The S.L.A. says to me: where are you with your passions
of the Sixties? Remember bygone days when you marched for the downtrodden,
the poor, the blacks? Well, look around, buddy, the war isn't over.
All the problems in America are still there and you, buddy, what are
you doing?"
He mimics the answer: "Oh, I'm sitting on my cushion meditating,
studying acupuncture and teaching kids to stay open. I've grown mature.
I know how long things take. I've learned revolution is complicated,
that it's not a simple matter of good guys and bad guys."
Michael slams his hand on a chair.
"There's still a part of me that feels the need to do something
right now."
Russell Little, who is twenty-four, has written his autobiography
for the underground San Francisco Phoenix. Every other sentence ends
with an exclamation point. ("My father grew up in Alabama!")
In hit-and-run prose, Russell describes his working class, Southern
cracker background, his political awakening at the University of Florida
and his transformation to a "long-haired, pissed-off radical!"
By accident ot birth, Kusseil missed out on the Sixties and came
of age just when the New Left hit a slump. Russell describes what
happened when he drove across country to Berkeley in 1971. "I
expected things to blow up all over California but they didn't . .
. The era of riots and demonstrations had passed . . . People started
talking about educating the people again. Bullshit to that. What about
all the people who had been educated in the Sixties?"
Russell decided the only revolutionaries "who didn't die or
go underground by the Seventies" were in prison. He joined the
Black Cultural Association (B.C.A.) at Vacaville, a group set up to
give convicts pride and prepare them to re-enter society. There he
met Cinque and a number of young white visitors who reinforced each
other's urges and frustration. Russell says, "We grew tired of
waiting ... we decided to seize the moment." They would form
a guerrilla army and fire the first shots, because "revolutionary
violence is necessary, is practical—it works!"
The American left, in its entire spectrum, disputes Russell Little
on this point. Angela Davis, Cesar Chavez, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden,
Huey Newton, the Black Panthers, the Communist Party and the Maoist
Venceremos organization have denounced the tactics of the S.L.A.
Dan Siegel, a radical lawyer, tells me he sees the S.L.A. as a "threat
and a setback. The S.L.A. gives a picture of the left as wanton, crazy
killers, and we're at a time now—because of the economic crisis,
the energy crisis and Watergate—that radical-left ideas could
flourish. The S.L.A. was trying to be a guerrilla army without having
any mass base. They took actions that people couldn't support or even
understand, and the result was they were murdered."
The killing of Foster caused almost universal anguish. Members of
the S.L.A. claim they assassinated Foster because he supported a plan
to introduce identification cards and guards in the schools. What
they do not mention is that Foster, with the backing of community
groups, withdrew the plan from the School Board agenda on October
9, almost a month before he was shot.
The S.L.A. has not justified the Foster killing to anyone outside
its ranks. Carolyn Craven, a black reporter who grew up in the Movement,
says, "Black folks have never been given enough power in this
country to be No. i on anybody's hit list. Why Foster? Why not the
head of Standard Oil of California, or Union Oil or Bank of America?
By what standards do you kill one of the few black superintendents
of schools in the country? You go down on East Fourteenth Street in
Oakland and explain it to the people, because the S.L.A. hasn't bothered!"
Carolyn's feeling is echoed by Popeye Jackson, who has spent twenty
of his forty-four years in prison and heads the United Prisoners Union,
a group working to change the penal system.
Popeye wears a black leather jacket and black straw hat and speaks
in a muffled volley. "If I were in the S.L.A., there's no way
in hell I would have shot Foster or kidnapped Hearst," he says.
"If they'd kidnapped the head of the California Adult Authority,
that would have been different. They could have gotten all the prisoners
out of jail."
Popeye knows most of the identified S.L.A. members. He worked on
an educational film strip with Mizmoon and Camilla Hall and saw them
as "two regular sisters," no different from hundreds who
volunteer to tutor prisoners. There are five women to every man in
the prison movement, he says, "and they're not interested in
the problems of women prisoners. They're only interested in the men.
Most of them get involved in a romantic trip. When they talk about
violent revolution, they're living in a dream world! We don't have
no nuclear weapons, we don't have no jets. We can't buy one tank.
How we gonna have a revolution? We have to educate the people first."
After he watched the "incineration" in Los Angeles, Popeye
said he was furious. "The pigs burned them alive and that was
not called for. They murdered the S.L.A. because they didn't want
the S.L.A. to come forward and talk about why."
What happened to Patricia Hearst, and why? If she had been able to
return home to Hillsborough, what would she have gone back to?
To a white, twenty-two-room house with Greek columns and pots of
orchids always in bloom. To Etruscan vases, Persian carpets, candelabra
and burnished mahogany. To quiet, opulent Santa Ynez Avenue, where
nothing happens outside all day except that in the afternoon, ladies
with pearl necklaces may drive by in their Country Squire wagons.
Perhaps the Hearsts would have taken her to rest at San Simeon. The
Hearst castle there is a state museum, but hidden behind it in a vale
swarming with butterflies is a Gothic house the family still uses.
Or they might have sent her north to Wintoon, the baroque alpine estate
overlooking the McCloud River which Phoebe Apperson Hearst had built
by craftsmen brought here from Bavaria.
What would Patricia say to her parents and they to her? A young man
who is a close friend of the family describes dinners he would have
with them before the kidnapping. "It was relaxed and cordial,
but there were subjects everyone tacitly agreed not to bring up. Sooner
or later, Mrs. Hearst would voice some absurd opinion like, 'We've
got to stop nudity.' She had seen a nude ballet and was terribly upset.
Among the young people, it got to be a game: Who in the room would
flinch, or be the first to change the subject?"
Patricia, he says, had a rebellious edge and caused a minor family
scandal when she moved into an apartment with her boyfriend, Steven
Weed. It was from this apartment on February 4 that she was kidnapped—an
act which so violated the genteel, insouciant pattern of her life
that such order might never be restored.
There are numerous clues about the process of Patty's conversion
to the S.L.A. The tapes she made suggest that Patty came to believe
her parents betrayed her, let her down, sacrificed her for the sake
of money. This impression may have been planted by the S.L.A., but
toward the end, Patty believed it.
In the first tape, February 12, Patty said: "I just want to
get out of here and see everyone again and be back with Steve ...
I just hope that you'll do what they say, Dad, and just do it quickly."
The S.L.A. was asking Hearst to give seventy dollars' worth of food
to every poor person in the state. Hearst protested this would cost
hundreds of millions. In her second tape, February 16, Patty told
her father the S.L.A. was not trying to make unreasonable demands.
"They have every intention that you should be able to meet their
demands ... so whatever you come up with basically is O.K. Just do
it as fast as you can . . . Take care of Steve and hurry."
Hearst offered to put up two million dollars for the poor. The S.L.A.
demanded four million more. Hearst threw up his hands. This was beyond
his financial capability, he could negotiate no further. Later, however,
the Hearst Corporation was able to produce the additional four million,
to be held in escrow until Patty's return.
Hearst's withdrawal from negotiation must have been a bitter blow
to Patty. Surely she felt that her father, with his influence and
connections, could have raised any sum he wanted.
Weeks went by. In her third tape in mid-March, Patty said: "I
don't think you're doing everything you can, everything in your power.
I don't believe that you're doing anything at all. You said it was
out of your hands; what you should have said was that you wash your
hands of it. ... If it had been you. Mom, or you, Dad, who had been
kidnapped instead of me, I know that I and the rest of the family
would have done anything to get you back. . . . I'm starting to think
no one is concerned about me anymore."
In her fourth tape, on April 3, announcing her decision to "stay
and fight," Patty turned on her parents with stinging words.
She accused them of playing games all along, "stalling for time—time
which the FBI was using in their attempts to assassinate me. . . .
Your actions have taught me a great lesson, and in a strange kind
of way I'm grateful to you."
I have no doubt that the Hearst family believes they did everything
they could to get Patty back. But it is also easy to see how Patty
could have been vulnerable to believing they did not.
From the date of the kidnapping, there have been sexual innuendos
surrounding the case. People speculated that Cinque was a figure like
Charles Manson who kept the women around him in a sexual trance. During
call-in shows to a black radio station, people predicted Patty would
become involved with Cinque. One woman said, "Some black dude
has kidnapped a rich white girl. What else is gonna be going on! And
Cinque is a handsome black dude."
In Berkeley, it was known that Cinque was sleeping with Mizmoon,
Ling and Emily Harris. Emily wrote to her father in Illinois on January
30, describing her affair with Cinque: "A beautiful black man
has conveyed to me the torture of being black in this country and
being poor." Emily said she and Bill had opened their marriage,
"so that it no longer confines us, and I am enjoying relationships
with other men. I am in love with the black man . . . and that love
is very beautiful and fulfilling."
The bank robbery, however, reversed the illusion. Four women marched
ahead of Cinque into the bank while men waited in the getaway car.
People who had known Cinque at Vacaville, such as David Inua, one
of the founders of the Black Cultural Association, said, "Cinque
is not a bright man. He has no ability as a teacher or a leader. Those
were not his phrases on the S.L.A. tapes —that's not the way
he talks." Now it seemed the S.L.A. might be a regiment of women—two
of whom were known to be lovers— using Cinque as a figurehead
to carry out their plans.
When I first learned of the kidnapping, I remembered that as a young
girl I often had dreams of being kidnapped and falling in love with
one of my captors. I also remembered Temple Drake, the heroine of
William Faulkner's Sanctuary, who chose to live with her abductor,
a hood named Popeye, in a Memphis whore-house before being "saved"
and returned to a decaying social order.
The possibilities for speculation are endless, but it is realistic
to assume that some relationship developed between Patty and the S.L.A.
Patty celebrated her twentieth birthday among the S.L.A. They gave
her books to read, like George Jackson's writings from prison. They
exposed her to conditions of blacks, Chicanos and the poor, and initiated
her into knowledge of the evils of American foreign policy. They nursed
her when she came down with a cold, showed her karate and taught her
to shoot a gun. They offered her a heroic name, a rebirth.
I have known many women who came to Berkeley from conservative, moneyed
families and almost overnight took new identities. Anne Weills, thirty-two,
was a child of wealthy parents in Marin County. She met and married
a New Left leader, Robert Scheer, became a radical feminist, separated
from Scheer and is at present working to build a revolutionary organization
in the working classes.
Anne says she understands the leap Patty seems to have made. "Once
you see the way poor people and racial minorities live, you feel terribly
privileged, and if you have any social conscience, you feel guilty,"
Anne says. "What can you do to make up? If you're surrounded
by blacks who are furious and want retribution, and by strong, committed
women, you can get a lot of energy. You become alienated from your
family because you see yourself as so special, so different and morally
right."
When you're young, she adds, you also feel invulnerable.
In Patty's case, when the time was right, the S.L.A. gave her a choice:
Go back to your own kind (who've already abandoned you) or join us.
In her good-by tape, Patty said she had discovered a new kind of
love. She told Steven Weed: "I've changed, grown. I've become
conscious and can never go back to the life we led." (In how
many homes across the country recently has a woman delivered that
message?)
After the FBI had labeled her a criminal, people continued to pray
for Patty. She has proven to be a transcendently sympathetic figure,
like certain actresses whom the audience always roots for even when
they are cast in unattractive roles. In her tape, Patty said: "Love
doesn't mean the same thing to me anymore. My love has expanded as
a result of my experiences to embrace all people."
Colston Westbrook has been marked by the S.L.A. as an enemy to be
"shot on sight." He was outside co-ordinator of the Black
Cultural Association and teaches linguistics at Berkeley. The S.L.A.
claims he is an FBI informer and worked as a "torturer"
for the CIA in Vietnam.
It is 10 P.M., and I am meeting Westbrook outside a Japanese restaurant
on San Pablo Avenue. He pulls up in a blue Volkswagen with the license
plate NGOMBE, parks and watches me from the rear-view mirror.
When he gets out, he says we're not going to the restaurant but an
office next door. It is a small storefront with peeling plaster and
fluorescent lights. We sit on folding chairs in the debris. He makes
two phone calls to two "sets of police," then takes an electronic
device from his pocket and speaks into it: "Machine, I'm at M.C.'s."
Breathing hard, Westbrook takes a beer from a brown paper bag. He
is a burly man wearing a black and white knit cap with a tassel. He
seems to thrive on publicity, on playing verbal chess with reporters
and drawing a cloak of suspicion about him. He speaks six languages
and will receive a master's this June in black English dialectology.
"It's a brand new field, my own field, I made it up," he
says.
I ask why he went to Vietnam. "Money, why else. I was told by
the American Embassy in Tokyo I could make ten thousand dollars working
in Vietnam. They said it pays to be black in Nam." He smiles.
"I've never been a torturer. But I know how to do it. I know
how to cut a cat's throat."
Westbrook was teaching at Berkeley in 1971 when he was asked to work
with the B.C.A. They ran classes for inmates in everything from Swahili
and nation-building to astrology. On Friday nights there were cultural
meetings, which several hundred outsiders attended. They opened with
a flag ceremony: the tri-color of the Republic of New Africa was paraded
on stage accompanied by music and black-power salutes. There were
speeches, poetry readings, plays and debates. It was at these meetings
that Cinque met most of those who were to form the S.L.A.
Westbrook worked with Cinque and says he never had trouble with him.
"It's the white women in the S.L.A. who were against me. They
accused me of taking lewd pictures and sexy-looking black women wearing
high miniskirts into the prison. Sure I took some foxes, some of my
prime stock in there. And I took Jet calendar pictures. Because if
you want to dangle a carrot in front of the inmates to get 'em to
learn and come to meetings, you don't dangle communism. You dangle
fine-looking chicks they'll think maybe they can get next to.
"The S.L.A. women say I tortured the inmates by taking in chicks
they couldn't do anything to. That's why those lesbians were mad at
me."
I ask if he feels out of danger now.
"No! Nothing's changed until they find out who's controlling
this. There are people who haven't come out of the woodwork yet. I
know—that's why they want me dead."
Who does he think is controlling the S.L.A.?
He gives me a hard stare. "You really want to get me in trouble,
huh?"
Is it a man, I ask.
"As far as I know."
Someone known to the public?
"Yes." He finishes his beer. "At the right time, you
expose your hand." He waits a beat. "There's a theory that
I'm No. i, because I haven't been killed."
I tell him I'm no good at these games.
"Are you really a reporter?" he asks. I'm wondering myself.
"How would you like to join the CIA? You'd be a natural."
As I'm leaving, he suggests I visit a psychic he knows. "You
might break the story. Find the head of the S.L.A."
If I did, I'm not sure what I would do.
"Tell me!"
No, I wouldn't tell you.
He leans forward, eyes wide, and whispers, "How do you know
I don't already know?"
The names, word play and coincidences in this drama have sent writers
and conspiracy buffs into reverie. DeFreeze takes the name Cinque,
but calls himself Comrade Cin, undoubtedly aware this will sound the
same as Sin. "Devoto" runs through the S.L.A. web. Members
often use it as an alias.
Tania, in whose name Patty steps forward, was a German woman in love
with Che Guevara. She fought and died with his guerrilla band but
was suspected of being a spy for the Soviet establishment. Joe Remiro
claims he is related to Joseph Alioto, Mayor of San Francisco, "in
the grandparents somewhere." Alioto claims the S.L.A. attempted
to kidnap four of his grandchildren.
The seven stated aims of the S.L.A. are identical to the seven principles
of conduct set forth years ago by Ron Karenga, founder of US—United
Slaves. Karenga sits in jail in San Luis Obispo for the shooting of
two Black Panthers at U.C.L.A., but two of Karenga's men, George and
Larry Stiner, happened to escape from San Quentin this past March.
The Panthers have a feud with both US and the S.L.A. They assert that
DeFreeze was a Government agent paid to foment trouble and create
an atmosphere of terror.
Patty Hearst's use of the word "ageist" brought a moment
of comic relief. After Patty called her fiance, Steven Weed, a "sexist,
ageist pig," the San Francisco Chronicle ran a box headlined:
"The Latest Word. Webster's Third New International Dictionary
defines 'agist' as a verb meaning 'to take in (livestock) for feeding
or grazing and to collect the amount due therefore.'"
The metaphor seemed strained. Was Patty the livestock? Was Steven
grazing her for money? The next day, the Chronicle corrected itself.
"Ageist," they had learned, is the latest Bay Area political
insult, applied to someone who discriminates against any age group,
particularly the old.
"Gay Power"
"Kid Power"
"Love Yourself"
"Eat the Rich"
The words are painted on Charming Way, just below Shattuck. This
block has a mystique in radical circles, and until recently was the
home of a ten-foot-high, red, papier-mache fist. People who live here
in decrepit Victorian houses crawling with wisteria and rhododendrons
feel it is a special place. They've built a bulletin board and installed
chairs on the sidewalk. There's a coffeehouse in someone's spare room
and a free box on the street with clothes and cast-off items.
Until the S.L.A. brought police to the block, life was easy on Channing
Way. Few people worked, because they could get by on almost nothing.
In the summer, they would plant vegetables and sunbathe nude in overgrown
backyards. On warm nights there might be a block party where everyone
would take Quaaludes and dream about the coming of the revolution.
Camilla Hall and Mizmoon Soltysik both lived on Channing Way. I am
talking about them with Kate Coleman, an outspoken woman who has been
in Berkeley on and off since 1960.
"I think I understand their motivation," Kate says. "It's
frustration, it's failure, we all feel failure whether we've failed
or not. Do you realize how many people who went to college with us
are out in the woods, croaking on their communes because the revolution
didn't happen and they can't get back in the economy because they've
been out so long?"
Kate says many women she knows who are political have "nothing
happening in their lives. The left is fragmented, dying, and the S.L.A.
women probably felt they had to do something to set people on fire.
It's the nihilist blaze of glory: you start the revolution with six
people and don't worry about organizing the masses. You must live
the revolution even if you're before your time. The appeal is very
powerful."
Kate says she could never join an underground group because "my
nature is so up-front and flamboyant. But the S.L.A. loved the secrecy
and the plotting. They knew they weren't infiltrated because they
didn't have a broad-based organization. But that was also their downfall.
Because if they survived, how could they grow? They could only build
up myth."
All over Berkeley, political families are closing up apartments and
loading their cars. Some will drift to the country until the heat
is off. Some will continue working on small contained projects like
a home-birth center or a school election. Some will do what Dan Siegel
has done—move into neighborhoods like East Oakland to connect
with working people.
Siege is twenty-eight, an attractive, modest-looking young man in
a sports shirt and slacks. In 1969, when he was student-body president
at Berkeley, he gave a speech that sent thousands surging down Telegraph
Avenue to reclaim People's Park. Bob Dylan was singing from speaker
vans: "You can have your cake and eat it too." Marvin Carson
was writing: "That high feeling—when you're relating to
each other as brothers and sisters—that's the revolution! That's
what's worth living for and dying for."
Siegel is sitting this morning in the smoggy sun near the Oakland
Superior Courthouse. "I don't think you'll ever see thousands
marching in support of the S.L.A.," he says. "I imagine
the S.L.A. believed it was doing real revolutionary acts that threatened
the existence of the state. But the people in it were inexperienced,
naive and idealistic."
He muses: "I remember how arrogant we used to be. I remember
thinking how great it was that we didn't need ideology, strategy or
the working class. Young people would be the revolutionary force in
America. Then the New Left fell apart, and it was probably good for
us."
Siegel says he no longer has "the illusion that revolution will
be easy or that a few gallant people can do it. Winning the hearts
and minds of tens of thousands of people—that's what making revolution
is about."
He walks toward the courthouse, where he is preparing a test case
in which the community is suing the district attorney, and he says
that it's funny but in some ways, he feels old.
1974
