Burroughs, Cuney, and DuBois - Three Families Intertwined – Part 1

Black, White and Red

                                                When I was a preteen and early teenager, it was a standing joke among our family and fellow leftist friends that our phone was tapped by the CIA.  My best friend Judy was actually the daughter of a prominent American Communist who was in prison.  It was a joke to us because all that the faceless eavesdroppers would have overheard would have been teenage prattling or deliberately provocative nonsense.  This was the period before the Vietnam War protests when the Cold War was still in full swing and hatred and fear of “Reds” was all around us. We knew, implicitly, that this knee-jerk horror of Communism was unfounded, because after all, these were our families.

            When I finally set out to discover more about the earlier lives of my parents and their forebears, I really had no idea what I was getting into.  The idea came to me after I attended the reunion of my 1967 graduating class at the High School of Music & Art (now LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts.)  Mingling and reconnecting with long-lost friends, with whom I’d shared a heady year of anti-Vietnam War activism, reminded me that many of them were, like myself, “red-diaper babies,” offspring of leftist organizers and sympathizers who were veterans of earlier progressive struggles in the 30s, 40s and 50s.              But for my brother Norris and myself, there were two major differences.  The first was that our parents were an interracial couple.  The second was that my classmates, mostly children of Jewish intellectuals, were well aware as teenagers about their political heritage, of which their own activism was a natural extension. Our parents, though they certainly expressed leftist sympathies and supported my own activism, had never, so far as I knew, been overtly involved in any political activities.  Yet I knew that my father’s mother had not only been a member of the Communist Party, but had lived for many years in the Soviet Union, as had my father’s two younger brothers, Uncle Charles and Uncle Neal.

            But in fact, neither of our parents was very political, at least not in the outwardly activist sense; there simply wasn’t time.   Our father had chosen the life of the theater, in part, I now believe, as an escape from the strident politics of his Communist family.  I never knew either of his parents, who had both died before I was born.  Of his father Charles, my father had really not told us very much: he had worked for the Post Office, and he had given dramatic readings of Shakespeare and the like, sometimes using the stage name of “Brastus Cuneil.”  So in becoming an actor, my father was following in his own father’s footsteps, but he took the leap of trying to actually make a living at it.  It was a struggle. In the early years, he alternated between going to auditions or rehearsals and taking care of us while mother worked - he was an early ‘house-husband.’  After I was ten or so, his drinking put an end to the acting, but he never failed to have dinner on the table for us, and for mother when she got home from work.  

            My mother was progressive, and a bit of a rebel, by nature - she had to have been, to have been working for the NAACP in 1930s Hartford, CT - but her activism, at least once we were born, seems to have been internal.  As the Women’s Movement declared in the 1970s, the personal is political; by marrying my father, my mother’s very life became a political statement, but it was a quiet one.  Especially once my father’s acting career crumpled and died, my mother worked nine to five as a secretary to support us.  The remaining members of my father’s family were not overtly politically active either – they too were just struggling to make a living as best they could.  But my grandparents’ Communist past had left an impact on each of their children in unique ways.

            From early childhood, it was clear to me that my father’s youngest brother, Uncle Neal, was Russian.  His high cheekbones and slightly tilted eyes had a decidedly Slavic cast.  He looked like the famous Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in postcards he’d given me, and he was tall and stalwart and brave, like the Prince in the Russian fairy tale books he brought me, brightly illustrated paper-bound editions of the story of Baba Yaga and others. And when Uncle Charles came to visit from Chicago, I discovered that he was Russian too:  he and Fadder (as we called our father) sat around the table for hours, drinking vodka and talking and shouting in Russian. To me at that age, there was absolutely nothing strange about my father being mainly American while his brothers were mainly Russian, or the fact that they were all also black.  (Fadder could speak some Russian, but that wasn’t quite the same; he was more fluent in German, anyhow.)

            Uncle Neal died when I was only twelve.  His death made no sense at all. He entered the hospital complaining of stomach pain, with mysterious but apparently minor intestinal bleeding, and we children were told what our parents believed, that it wasn’t serious, he would be home soon.  A few days later, at less than 40 years old, he was dead. Many years later, when I was attending college in Chicago and had become close to Charles, he told me that he thought Neal had died of despair, longing and homesickness, feelings that he himself often felt, for the country to which they could never really return:  the Soviet Union.      

           Their sojourn began when Neal and Charles were only five and nine years old.  My father Eric, born in 1911, and their sister Alison, the eldest and the only girl, were already grown. (Another little sister, Carola, for whom I was named, died in the diphtheria epidemic around 1918.)  But to put their tale into perspective, it first makes sense to tell the story of their parents, Charles and Williana Burroughs.