Ayers - Fugitive Days

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To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher

Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist

Bill Ayers

Beacon Press

Boston

This story is only one version of eventsit is a memory book rather than a transcript, an accounting of sorts without any pretense toward an authorized history. There is, too, a necessary incompleteness here, a covering over of facts and a blurring of details, which is in part an artifact of those fugitive days and those exquisite and terrible times. Most names and places have been changed, many identities altered, and the fingerprints wiped away. Is this, then, the truth? Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.

Beacon Press

25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books

are published under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

2001 by William Ayers

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Afterword 2009 Bill Ayers

In Those Years from Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 19911995 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright 1995 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Ive written these stories as I recall them, making only minor changes, including some names and details to protect privacy.

12 11 10 09 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Text design by Sara Eisenman

Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ayers, Bill.

Fugitive days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist / Bill Ayers.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8070-3277-0 (hard : alk. paper)

E-ISBN 978-0-8070-7122-9

1. Ayers, Bill. 2. Left-wing extremistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Left-wing extremistsMichiganAnn ArborBiography. 4. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975Protest movementsUnited States. 5. RadicalismUnited StatesHistory20th century. 6. RadicalismMichiganAnn ArborHistory20th century. 7. United StatesSocial conditions19601980. I. Title.

HN90.R3 A96 2001

973.92092dc21 2001000362

19651970

19701975

Wait a minute. This cant be happening now. Wait.

The fuse is already lit, little sparks flickering forward in a desperate, deadly dance. The steel hands on the big clock tick-tick-tick relentlessly onward as the world spins further and further out of control. My whole life is about to blow up.

In a minute Ill be staggering down a dusty stretch of road alone, wobbling into the night, everything torn to pieces, but I dont know it yet, not yet. The hints and the clues, the doubts, the fears, have been trampled down and banished to the far edges of my mind, and so I simply sit here looking dumbly toward this deserted little telephone booth, wondering for the third night in a row in the gathering dusk if the damn thing is ever going to ring. Everything will collapse in a minute. But not yet. Sixty seconds to chaos.

The faded blue sign invites neither scrutiny nor confidence: PUBLIC it announces uneasily. TELEPHONE. The phone worksIve checked and then rechecked a hundred timesbut the red paint along its borders has bleached to pink, the dull fluorescent light flutters frantically, and the black wire slouches uncertainly toward the main line. Any sensible traveler, even the most desperate, will, I hope, push on to a more promising spot; here theres no food, no gas, no toilet, nothing but a solitary smudgy telephone booth and a broken-down picnic table. Its my own private line by now, just as I want it.

Id nicknamed this place the Spiders Palace, from a childrens book I knew long ago, and its true, the black spiders are living large, collecting luminous flies in frail-looking but intractable cobwebs. Diana and the others all have my numberIll be at the Spiders Palace at eight, Id said as we synchronized our watches and split up days agoand here Ive been since eight oclock exactly, waiting.

The phone booth reeks of ancient piss, baked daily I imagine in this accidental solar oven. Who would pee here? I wonder aloud, looking away toward the horizon, wide as a church door. Maybe the sight of an abandoned phone booth is like the bells of Pavlovs dogs. My mind is wandering now. Where is everybody? I groan into the night, into myself. Five minutes after eight. Ill wait till quarter past, I think, no longer.

I slide off the table and walk a few steps away, scooping up a handful of stones, pitching them one by one at a godforsaken wooden gate across the road.

Two nights, no call. What if theres nothing again tonight? Ill be back at the Spiders Palace at eight tomorrow night, I think, eight the next night, and the next, and the next, forever, I guess. Ive felt my courage flicker in recent months, and my confidence choke, but I hold tight to this one small hard thing: discipline. I was supposed to be right here starting Saturday, and here I am. Its like a death grip, this phone and me; I cant let go. The chilly air is turning bitter, and I shiver slightly. Come on, I say, breaking the silence again, feeling cold and forlorn. Call me. Please call me.

A dark sedan appears as a dot in the distance making tracks down the road, accelerating thunderously past me toward the far horizon, and is, like a mirage, quickly gone, and my phone roars suddenly to life, erupts like a shotgun. Two loud rings, both barrels. I leap to snatch it as at a life jacket before going over the side of a sinking ship. Hey, babea friends voice, but not Dianas. Somethings wrongthe closeness, her urgency, the intimate embrace, I think, of the desperate. Are you OK? she asks. Are you alone?

Whats up? I say, my frustration pushed roughly aside by simple fear, larger and more imposing. What is it? I could picture her then, standing at her own isolated phone booth, tough and sure, not like me at all. But she hesitates; theres an unexpected catch in her breath, the sound of suppressed sobs, perhaps, and a surprising sadness tempering her steely will. Alarms are going off up in my head.

Youve got to leave now, she says firmly. Tomorrow at the latest. Well meet up in a week at the shore. Theres been a terrible accident.

What the hell? An accident? What the hell is she talking about?

Dadadada... She sounds weirdly incoherent now, chattering like a monkey, and I cant make any of it out.

Wait a minute, I say. This cant be happening now. Wait.

Diana is dead, she says again, the sound of breaking glass rising up in her throat. And some of the others... dead as well.

My mind stutters.

Diana is dead, she repeats slowly, and then Im running wildly, the abandoned phone swinging side to side. Diana is deadthose three shrill words rebounding off the wall of my skull in a continuous loopDiana is dead. Stumbling, I drop down, bob back up, scratched and covered with gravel, running again. Where do I think Im going?

A voice, not one I recognize, comes ripping from afar, rising and gathering into a long scream propelled from some unknown place inside meNO! And then, a deathly quiet, just the rushing of air and the pumping of blood, the echo of escape. I can hear the drum beating in my ears, my heart hammering through my chest, and I feel my muscles flexing from a distance, working automatically now. I am running for my life, but I dont know where Im going.