Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary Read online

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2015 Sonja Larsen

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2015 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Larsen, Sonja (Sonja A.), author

  Red star tattoo : my life as a girl revolutionary / Sonja Larsen.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81527-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81529-3

  1. Larsen, Sonja (Sonja A.). 2. Women revolutionaries—

  United States—Biography. 3. Women communists—United States—Biography. 4. Radicalism—United States. I. Title.

  HX843.7.L37A3 2016 335′.83092 C2015-905462-1

  Cover photograph courtesy of the author

  Photograph on this page by Ann Marie Martin.

  All other photographs courtesy of the author.

  v3.1

  For Dana & the girls we were

  and to Patricia and the women we became

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter - One

  Chapter - Two

  Chapter - Three

  Chapter - Four

  Chapter - Five

  Chapter - Six

  Chapter - Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter - Eight

  Chapter - Nine

  Chapter - Ten

  Chapter - Eleven

  Chapter - Twelve

  Chapter - Thirteen

  Chapter - Fourteen

  Chapter - Fifteen

  Part Three

  Chapter - Sixteen

  Chapter - Seventeen

  Chapter - Eighteen

  Chapter - Nineteen

  Chapter - Twenty

  Chapter - Twenty-one

  Chapter - Twenty-two

  Part Four

  Chapter - Twenty-three

  Chapter - Twenty-four

  Chapter - Twenty-five

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  History is moving in zig-zags and by roundabout ways.

  VLADIMIR LENIN

  ONE

  A canvas backpack.

  A sleeping bag.

  A drinking cup that collapsed flat into a little case.

  Two matching wooden bowls, one for Dale and one for me.

  A combination fork and spoon. The spork.

  My teddy bear.

  Some clothes.

  A toothbrush.

  A small case, hand embroidered by my mother, to hold my “travelling papers.”

  Pounds and pounds of homemade granola, made the night before and packed in plastic bags. Slightly burned.

  I remember what we packed for the journey.

  But what did my parents say to me when it was time to go—goodbye? See you soon? See you later?

  When the drivers slowed down to look at us, I tried to catch their eye. Sometimes I wiggled my outstretched thumb slightly, optimistically, and sometimes I tried to look sad and hopeful. Anything to imprint this scene in their mind: little girl sitting on a grey canvas backpack, young man with a guitar case, standing by the highway. Anything to slow them down until curiosity or sympathy made them stop.

  Everyone knew that a kid was better than a dog or a woman for hitchhiking. At the Sweetgrass commune, where me and Dale, my parents, and another dozen or so people lived, everyone pitched in, did their share to keep things going. This was something I could do. I was eight years old and already an experienced hitchhiker, a travelling partner for anyone who needed luck and company on the road. I’d also sung in the Sweetgrass band that played folk and gospel songs at old folks’ homes and rock and roll at high school dances. I’d helped sell wildflowers, daisies and golden-rod and fireweed tied up in twine, to tourists in the city. But hitchhiking was the thing I did best. Up and down country roads into town, or the hundred-mile trip from Lennoxville to Montreal and back.

  I was Dale’s plan to get west cheap and in a hurry. Dale was in his early twenties and from Los Angeles. He and another Californian played the lead guitars in the band. They’d helped start Sweetgrass, but Quebec winters and the winding down of the Vietnam War had them longing for home. His friend had already left with another commune member who was caught up in a custody battle for her baby. Dale and I were the second wave. My parents and a few others would be following soon. Behind us was Sweetgrass. Ahead of us was California and a new life. But in between was this long stretch of road.

  By day three I could feel Dale starting to wonder if this highway was more than my small charm could manage. We’d spent hours waiting to catch the next ride. I knew it didn’t help to look too miserable or be crying. No one wanted to deal with that kind of kid. Instead I sat by the side of the road with my teddy bear and sucked my thumb, trying to look younger and cuter than I really was.

  To keep us entertained, Dale played his guitar and sang. He sang the Beatles and Dylan but the old country songs were my favourites.

  Take me home, my heart is heavy and my feet are sore

  Take me home, I don’t wanna roam no more

  I liked that song, I liked the idea that what we were doing was roaming, and that when we got to California our roaming days would be over.

  I watched our stuff while Dale went into the truck stop across the way to get us some soup and crackers. It was getting dark and starting to rain. Through the bright restaurant windows I watched Dale talking to someone at the counter. They both turned around and Dale pointed at me, across the road. I waved. Probably I had the teddy bear out, too, since I used him both as a pillow and a plea. When Dale came out he told me the man at the truck stop lived just down the road. We could spend the night if we wanted, get cleaned up. His wife was expecting us.

  There was just one problem: he was on a motorcycle, so he could only take one of us at a time.

  “Don’t be scared,” the man said to me. I don’t know if it was the rumble of the motorcycle, the wheels beginning to roll, or the word, scared, that made the bottom of my feet tingle, that gave me that just-about-to-fall feeling, as we sped away from Dale and the parking lot, and onto the dark road.

  Before the commune my parents used to read to me almost every night. We read Winnie-the-Pooh, Grimms’ fairy tales, all of the Narnia Chronicles. There was a time when I believed my parents’ ability to pull meaning from tiny black lines on a page was its own kind of magic. For the first time I could see that I might be in a story too, the girl who went down the rabbit hole or disappeared through a secret door. As the motorcycle curved in the drizzling dark, I sat on the seat in front of the man, enclosed by his arms, breathing in the smells of his leather jacket, and the wet trees, and the old-penny smell of rain hitting the pavement.

  When we got to the man’s house, his wife was waiting out front, her body a dark silhouette in the doorway. While the man rode back to pick up Dale, his wife helped me get ready for bed. She asked if I had a prayer I said before bedtime and when I said no, she taught me one she said every child should know.

  Now I lay me down to sleep,
<
br />   I pray the Lord my soul to keep;

  If I die before I wake,

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  I knew there was no God. When I was six or seven our family dog died. My parents and sister and I had just moved to Montreal and a girl on our street told me that if I prayed to God for ten days, my dog would come back. We had never discussed God in our home, but I thought maybe he was something new, the way Canada was new, and French was new. When the dog didn’t come back I asked my parents about God. He’s not real, they said. He’s just a story people tell to make themselves feel better. And what about Santa Claus? Same thing.

  We didn’t have a lot of stories to make us feel better except maybe that we were the kind of people that didn’t need them. Later I would learn that Bud, my mother’s father, and his father before him, had been Texas-born preachers for the Church of the Nazarene. The women weren’t supposed to wear makeup and no one was supposed to dance. My mother was born on an Indian reservation where Bud was stationed at a mission and as a child she’d moved a lot. Minnesota, Maryland, Washington. Over ten states by the time she was sixteen. But by the time I came along not even Bud was a believer anymore. He gave up his calling but not before telling my aunt she was a slut when she was raped, not before making my pregnant sixteen-year-old mother get married outside of town so it wouldn’t be listed in their local paper. Not before the damage was done.

  That first marriage barely lasted two years and was over when her husband started to hit her. There was no one serious after that until she met my father at a dance hall. He was smart and funny and a good dancer. He loved books like she did. He played guitar. He had a college degree. But even so, my mother didn’t want to get married because she didn’t want her daughter, Patti, to have a different last name than she did. When my dad said he’d adopt Patti, my mother said yes. In the photos they stand together, all of them smiling. And nine months later I was born.

  My mother was sick with kidney problems during the pregnancy and when I was slow to sit up as a baby they worried something was wrong with me. “But you were just lazy,” my sister said. “You just liked being held.” “You were a very loved baby,” my mother said. She thought love was like the fluoride in the water of my baby formula, that it protected me to the bones.

  Milwaukee was the town where the fluoride was in the water, the place where my father grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in a house his parents bought before he was born. It’s where I was born, and a place my mother loved and admired until the race riots of 1967, when a black friend of my mother’s stayed with us for two days because it was not safe for her to be on the streets. We left Milwaukee the same year.

  Hawaii was where we went next, first on one island and then another for my father’s teaching job. It was where we stole pineapples from a field and ate them until our mouths were raw waiting for his first pay-cheque to come in. My dad claimed that when I was two or three, I could predict the suit of cards before he turned them over. So that would have been in Hawaii too. I had mixed feelings about that story. Sometimes it made me feel special, and other times it made me feel like I would never be special again. Hawaii was where we’d bought the family dog by the side of the road from a man we suspected was selling him for meat. We named him Aso, Tagalog for dog. It’s where I loved the ocean until one day a wave knocked me over and I didn’t love it anymore. Hawaii is where we left one summer for a visit to the mainland and never went back.

  We moved to Montreal after that, a whole new country, away from the Vietnam War. It was a place for a fresh start, a haven not just for draft dodgers but other disillusioned Americans as well. My father wanted to write a novel. My mother wanted to go back to school. They had big plans, plans to be happy. In Montreal I learned about God and the different words there were for each thing, how you could think you knew something—how to ask the time or how to say hello—and then go someplace where it turned out maybe you didn’t know anything at all.

  Montreal was where the dog died and we got a new dog and moved to the east end of the city where we lived above a used car dealer. My father took me out in a purple snowsuit and taught me one of the few French words he knew: neige. Another word was bonjour, which we used on the neighbour kids as we made snowmen and snow angels in the vacant lot beside our apartment. My sister and I were the only English kids on our block and also the only ones to have pets, allowances or rooms of our own. At the corner store I bought the other kids candy and they taught me the names of each one: gomme balloune, sucette, réglisse.

  It was harder for my teenage sister. Once again she was the new kid. In Hawaii she’d been the only white kid in her school, now she was the only English kid on the block, caught between worlds. Once she did make some friends she got picked up by the cops and harassed for being out past the government-imposed curfew. We’d only been in Quebec a year before the FLQ crisis had broken out. There had been kidnappings of politicians, a murder. All around the city separatists were spraying graffiti on the walls and blowing up mailboxes in the rich English-speaking neighbourhoods.

  Patti was tired of moving and probably tired of taking care of me too. Every day after school before my parents came home from work she babysat me and we watched Dark Shadows together although my mother said TV rotted your brain. My sister was furious when I told my mother what we’d been doing, but I thought my mother would want to know the truth, that TV wasn’t so bad and our brains were just fine. Instead she took the power cord away.

  When my parents fought Patti would bring me into her room and turn up her radio. It was always my sister and me together, even if she was mad at me. But when she fought with my parents, I didn’t know what to do or where to go.

  My parents had come so far but so much was still the same. Canada wasn’t what they had imagined. Here, as in the States, there was injustice, deep divides between people and, it turned out, between each other. My parents weren’t happy. My sister wasn’t happy. Maybe I wasn’t happy either, but I just didn’t know it.

  When my parents weren’t fighting they were trying to make up. They took long walks, explored the city. They were shocked to find taverns where women weren’t allowed, and pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to find marijuana and hash. One night the bamboo blinds in the living room caught fire when they went out and left a candle burning. My sister called the fire department and kept me calm until they arrived. Another day she took me to the hospital for stitches when I fell down in the gravel parking lot beside our apartment while my parents were still at work.

  We found a nicer neighbourhood and a better apartment. Our parents made new friends. At dinner parties they debated about Marxism and feminism but at home that only added fuel to their arguments, their dissatisfaction with each other and with themselves. When I was older my mother told me she’d spent hours at her job thinking up ways to kill herself so that it would look like an accident. A car crash, a fall, a death by drowning. It was her first job with life insurance.

  I went to an English school down the street. In my old neighbourhood I’d been la petite Américaine, a novelty because of my language and my weekly allowance. Here I was no longer the only kid with my own room or pocket money and there were all kinds of English I had not even known about—Jewish, Greek, Italian—but I was none of them. They didn’t know what to make of me. I had to be something—a nationality, a religion—but I was nothing, an American mutt. The girls at my school chanted, Sonja, Sonja, don’t be blue, Frankenstein was ugly too! and this seemed almost harder to understand than a new language. Not words substituted for other words, but words that seemed to mean one thing but really meant another.

  My parents kept fighting. One night my mother came into my room and woke me up to ask me if I thought she should divorce my father. Patti ran in, shouting at her to leave us alone. Patti was fifteen then, the same age my mother was when she’d gotten pregnant. They even had the same name—my mom was Big Patti and my sister was Little Patti. But looking up at them now as th
ey stood face to face screaming I could see that they were the same size.

  Around that time my mother and I went to visit a friend they’d met at the dinner parties. Debby had just moved with her baby to a commune called Sweetgrass, a hundred miles outside of Montreal. That weekend, nobody shouted or cried. Instead they sang and played music.

  I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to play tambourine and learn how to sing harmony. Maybe it was only supposed to have been for a few weeks, or a month. Maybe if I had known that would be the end of my family, I would not have asked to stay. Maybe. All I knew was that I wanted out. Out of my new school. Out of the yelling and fighting at home, away from slammed doors and tears. I don’t remember asking to leave my family, I just remember asking to stay at Sweetgrass. When I told Debby I wanted to live there, she said I had to ask the group, which I did at dinner one night. Nobody said no.

  I spent my days exploring the barn, hanging out with Debby and her baby. A few weeks later my mother decided to move to Sweetgrass too. My father and sister stayed in the city. My mother started to learn the banjo and the first song she learned was about Jesse James. She decided to change her name to Jesse, since there was already a Patti at Sweetgrass too. From then on that’s who she was to me. Not Mommy or Pat or Patti, but Jesse.

  The peaceful atmosphere didn’t last; not long after we arrived the commune started fighting too. I felt like our unhappiness was contagious, or maybe that it just took time to see what tensions were already there, like eyes adjusting to a change in light. I could not help but notice the love affairs and power struggles, and in both some people were content with the way things were and others wanted more. Maybe the Americans had been waiting out the draft or maybe they just wanted to go home, but it wasn’t hard to sell some people on joining them in the dream of a proper farm in a place where it was always warm and we could really live off the land. Debby had a custody battle she was running from. Half a dozen decided to go to Northern California, and half a dozen stayed behind. I must have wanted to go, because once again I was among the first to leave. My mother, and even my father, would follow later.