My mother, the debutante Communist

The story I want to tell you begins with a woman in a car in the middle of the night, in the middle of the last century. To be specific, it is late in 1951 or early in 1952, in the parking lot of an apartment complex in southeast Washington, D.C., across the Anacostia River from Capitol Hill. The woman is young and pretty, or at least she looks that way from here. In fact she is about 30, which nobody thought was especially young at the time. If she were reading this right now, she would curl her lip slightly and say, “Well, dear — Striking or handsome, perhaps. I was never pretty.”

We’ll stick to the facts: She has fair skin and strawberry blonde hair. She is an old-line WASP whose ancestry stretches back past the American Revolution, all the way to the Salem witch trials and the Mayflower. She grew up in an Arts & Crafts house on a leafy suburban street in Northern California, and attended a private school meant to produce marriageable young women who could play the piano and speak a little French. She was a sorority girl at Berkeley for about a year and a half — and even then, decades before that campus became famous for student activism, there were “radicals” handing out leaflets in Sproul Plaza. 

She dropped out of college and moved across the country to join the labor movement, an experience that will inspire her, many years after the story I’m telling you now, to write a novel that was nominated for a Pulitzer and optioned by Hollywood. (No movie was ever made, as is so often the case.) She has upright posture and what would then have been described as “good breeding” and a “nice figure.” In other words, she bears many of the markers of wealth and privilege, although when we find her on this rainy night in the early '50s, she has no money to speak of.