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.
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