Breakaway

A new installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. New to the series? This introduction provides context for the events described here.

After a month in a dilapidated rooming house on the south side of Providence, Rhode Island, I was beginning to learn the social conventions of living among transients. Nod when you pass someone. Return their greeting. Stop and talk if they want to talk, but don’t tell them too much about yourself. Getting the hang of this, I began to feel less conspicuous, more at ease in my surroundings.

One morning, testing my new skills, I stopped to talk to an African-American woman and her teenaged daughter who were just moving in. That brief conversation did more than anything else that year to convince me that my life was on track and I was destined for great things in the revolution to come.

The mother had questions about trash disposal and rent payments. Sensing she wanted to talk, I asked where they were moving from. She told me she had just been through a divorce, and they had been evicted from their apartment. To top it all off, her daughter had had a run-in with police. A group of black teenagers were at a movie downtown when a fight broke out. The police moved in with their nightsticks and arrested a dozen of them, including the daughter, who had received a court summons.

Instantly I was on full alert. I belonged to PL, a communist group eager to foment mass uprisings against capitalism. Confronting police…