Public Enemy (10 page)

Chesa looked forward to his sessions with Berlin, argued with him constantly, and then didn’t want to leave at the end of the hour. I was in the room the first few months, and it taught me a lot—about listening better, rephrasing, or giving Chesa words for his feelings. But mostly it built my sense of empathy for Chesa, for what he was experiencing and how hard he was working to make sense of his life. Berlin was a great guy and a huge help, and I really loved him. Transference? Countertransference? Who can keep it straight?

Bernardine couldn’t help jerking his chain every time we met: when he offered strategies to get through the daily breakfast circus, she said, “Easy for you to say sitting here comfortably with Freud covering your back. Why don’t you make a house call some morning at breakfast, and we’ll see how smart you really are?” When he was alarmed to discover in conversation with us that all three kids sometimes ran terrified down the hall in the middle of the night and clambered into our family bed with us, he wanted to know what Bernardine wore to bed, and advised us that kids must learn to sleep alone to build independence. She responded, “They’re independent all day long. Can’t they have a little nighttime cuddling and connectedness?” Then she stepped way out of bounds: “What do you wear to bed, Doctor? Do you sleep alone to build up
your
independence?” She was trespassing and she knew it, throwing off the kind of question Berlin/Freud would never answer. But in spite of the teasing and questioning, and the alien cultural landscape of psychiatry and psychotherapy, we loved Dr. Berlin and credited him with saving us from sliding into serious despair. We were experiencing the hard truth that parents have had to learn through the ages: you are only as happy as your least happy child.

A few years later, when we moved to Chicago, Chesa met twice a week with Dr. Bennett Leventhal—a lifesaver for sure—at his open, sunny office at the University of Chicago. It was quite a contrast: family photos, games, toys, gardening on the roof and art materials everywhere, the walls decorated with children’s drawings. My favorite was a giant, framed painting of a toddler-drawn tadpole person, thick-lined smiling face without a body, legs and arms dangling precariously from the head with the dictated words along the side: “Dear Dr. Leventhal, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Love, Aaron.” Aaron somehow channeled every kid in crisis with a parent or a teacher or a shrink—he said it all—and it echoed Jean Boudin’s painful proclamation: “I love you and I hate you.” Leventhal was fully engaged and completely there for us. We met often, and he met as well with Jean and Leonard, talked on the phone and corresponded with David and Kathy, and even went to visit Kathy in prison once, well aware that he had inherited a hugely unique blended family. He was also a normal enough guy around the neighborhood—we’d see him at the market or the park, and always at Little League games because one of his sons was in Chesa’s class and on the baseball team that Bernardine coached with our friend Rashid Khalidi.

Things got easier and better, and yet when Chesa was ten and Leventhal told us that his therapy could at long last come to an end and that the kid would be fine without it, we were nonplussed: Don’t abandon us, I thought. Bernardine said, “I didn’t know that therapy ever came to an end; I thought your professional code dictated that once you guys got your hooks into somebody treatment continued forever.” We all laughed, but Leventhal added sagely, “Your family’s been organized around having a troubled kid, and he’s no longer troubled; for years, every relationship has had to bend toward that reality, but reality has shifted, and now every relationship has to shift along with it.”

Soon after that Bernardine came home from work looking as if she’d been run over by a truck. All week she’d been interviewing kids locked in mental institutions as part of a class action lawsuit she’d helped organize on behalf of abused and neglected children, and all the interviews were heart-breaking, but she had spent two hours that day talking “with a kid who could have been Chesa.” Their life stories overlapped eerily: both were ten years old, both had lost their parents at fourteen months, and both sets of parents were now doing life sentences in prison. But one was beginning to thrive and the world was opening up for him, while the other was trapped in a secured facility writing poetry in a tiny notebook, abandoned, fiercely making his own meaning, disappeared from the known world. Of course, the youngster she’d interviewed didn’t have a relatively stable family to fall into as well as psychiatrists, reading tutors, speech specialists, neurologists, and a wealthy grandfather to pay for it all. But it was just too close for her that day, too harrowing and upsetting—a clear reminder, as if she needed one, of the fickleness of fate, and more to the point of her legal efforts, of the harsh and unforgiving face of the law and social policy when it comes to kids born into poverty and racism. It was an illustration as well of a fundamental contradiction that she knew all too well and that she dived into every day: love means nothing at all if it doesn’t mean loving some particular person more than others; loving only a particular person and ignoring all others is a form of narcissism and barbarity. She loved Zayd, Malik, and Chesa specifically, and from that intimate space fought for justice—love enacted as law and policy and justice in the public square—so that all kids might have those choices and openings and privileges and possibilities.

I’ll stop right there and bypass some of the most chilling ups and downs; I’ve said enough, perhaps too much. We would never have wished for the pain and suffering that brought Chesa to us in the first place, nor the difficult struggle we all experienced for several years, but Bernardine and I—and I think Zayd and Malik as well—were deeply and surprisingly grateful for the experience nonetheless. Knowing what I know and having witnessed all I’ve witnessed, accounting for the burdens he carried and the mountains he scaled, his trajectory seems all the more valuable to me. Chesa was fiercely protected by Malik and Zayd, but he didn’t learn to read until the third grade, stopped seeing Leventhal in the fifth, regularly visited each of his imprisoned parents, and zoomed through high school in three years. Then he went off to Yale, where he won a Rhodes scholarship and attended Oxford University, lived throughout Latin America for years and traveled the world, published three books, and returned to Yale Law School. He was instrumental in the herculean effort that won Kathy’s freedom from prison after twenty-two years inside, and he continues to fight tirelessly for David’s release. I apologize for bragging about our own son, but he has become a person whose hard-won love of life has made him naturally open-handed and passionate, sensible and sympathetic, disciplined and driven, and hungry for every kind of freedom—a mensch among men.

Soon after Brinks and a few months after Chesa came to stay, all five of us came dashing down the stairs at 7:00 a.m. on a crisp New York May morning, Bernardine in high heels and a business suit as always, on our merry ways to work and school, backpacks filled with snacks and lunches, books and art projects and notes. We careened onto the sidewalk at full speed into the spring air, admired the blooming magnolias, and were caught short by two men in matching brown suits and brown fedoras, white shirts and those signature scuffed-up brown shoes. “Ms. Dohrn,” the taller one with the square jaw said, blocking her way and sticking an envelope into her hand. “This is a summons to appear in Federal Court next Monday at 9 a.m.” There was no way to avoid him, to cut and run, and she simply looked at him coolly and said, “Oh, shit.” “You’ve been served,” replied the softer, plump-faced one, affecting a tough-guy swagger, and they were gone, leaving the intimation of peril and two gloomy silhouettes that suggested characters from a 1950s detective comic book.

Malik and Chesa missed it entirely, and Zayd simply asked, “Who were those men?”

“Just guys with a letter for Mom,” I replied. And off we went.

Bernardine called Michael and Eleanora Kennedy, and met with them for lunch. She saw Leonard right away too, and then gathered half a dozen friends at our apartment later that night to talk strategy. She was in high gear. We half expected it. A federal grand jury had been impaneled to investigate the Brinks robbery, subpoenas were in the air, and given Bernardine’s history and the fact that the US attorney was casting a wide, wide net in hopes of turning up anything at all, she had apparently made the list—but even so, when the blow was delivered it spun us around. “Let’s go underground,” I suggested. “Not funny,” she said, but smiled nonetheless.

Grand juries are oddities descended from English common law, established originally to provide a buffer for the ordinary people against the unchecked power of the king, but in modern times turned into their opposite: star chambers where prosecutors alone wield powerful weapons and act on their own authority, virtually unchecked. Bernardine would be required to enter the chamber alone, without counsel, without representatives of the free press, without a public gallery. She would be asked to answer questions without benefit of context, without being told what evidence was already before the panel, without knowing if she herself was the target of an investigation, and without being able to face or contradict or cross-examine any possible witnesses or accusers. I reminded her that when John Brown was indicted by a slave-loving grand jury in Kansas, members of the panel ended up dead. “Please shut up, honey,” she said. “Please and thank you.” “Just a joke,” I said, but again not funny, and I did shut up, of course, very politely and quite contritely.

Though famously also refusing to talk to the media since we had come aboveground, Bernardine gave an interview to CBS reporter Chris Weicher in Central Park, noting the unjust and unconstitutional uses of the grand jury throughout US history and explaining her pending refusal to cooperate, despite her disagreements with the Brinks robbery. She highlighted other grand jury resistance, including the scores of people who had refused to cooperate with grand juries seeking information about the Weather Underground. When she spoke about defying the subpoena as the most difficult decision of her life, given her young children, she teared up and ended the interview.

We’d stayed close together that whole weekend, lots of quiet time and calm and familiar pleasures: baking cookies with the kids, walking to Broadway for pizza and ice cream, playing in the Eighty-fourth Street playground and picnicking under flowering cherry and apple trees in Central Park. Bernardine knew from the start that she would never talk to the grand jury, and she knew, too, that she would likely be jailed for that refusal. She explained to the boys that she would be going away on Monday, but that “Poppy will be here to take care of you,” and that BJ and all their friends would be here too. It was all a bit abstract. They all knew that their momma would be in jail for a while, but jail was already familiar to all three because of visits with and phone calls from Kathy and David. Chesa had enough prison visits in his life, so we planned for him to see Bernardine infrequently; Malik and Zayd could visit her every week and talk to her on the phone and write letters to her every day. Malik and Bernardine clung hard to each other, but none of it made Monday morning any easier.

We stuck to our routine, and after breakfast dropped Malik and Chesa at BJ’s Kids—the good-bye hugs lasted longer, Bernardine’s backward glances were heavier, and her tears were just barely in check. How could she leave them? How long until she saw them again? We were scared and we were miserable, but we wanted to be strong, to assure the kids that their lives would be OK, that we would be OK. BJ as always rose to the occasion, kissed us all and wished us good luck, and then quickly swept the kids up and away into a project making papier-mâché masks and cloth capes for a dramatic play.

Zayd wanted to see what would happen, and Bernardine always talked to him about everything anyway, so he came along with us to the anticipated nine o’clock collision. We would stay together as long as possible, but my first responsibility was to him, to be sure nothing scary happened for Zayd. As the three of us held hands and mounted the imposing staircase to the federal courthouse, a media mob descended, cameras flashing, reporters shouting questions, and Zayd looked up and said, “They’re excited.” Not much got past Zayd, even then.

Bernardine was swept up to the grand jury chamber while Zayd and I joined Michael and Eleanora Kennedy for toasted raisin bagels and cream cheese. We rejoined her shortly, this time in the courtroom of federal judge Gerhardt Goettel. Michael asked the judge to release her from the subpoena, and certainly to reject putting her in custody, explaining that she was the mother of three young children and that the judge was not permitted to punish her for her silence. Goettel rejected Kennedy’s plea, saying he wasn’t punishing her, but simply compelling her testimony. “You have defied the law before,” he noted. “And this time the law compels you.”

When invited to address the court, Bernardine said, “Judge”—none of the usual “Your Honor” bullshit for Bernardine in this situation—“I will remain silent not as a Fifth Amendment matter but as a First Amendment principle.” She argued that freedom of speech had no practical meaning if the state could force someone to speak against her will, that she had nothing to say, and that her silence was protected. “Nonsense,” Goettel replied. He ordered her locked in the Metropolitan Correctional Center “until such time as you are willing to respond to a lawfully constituted grand jury.” He added an inelegant phrase that he would return to each time Bernardine appeared before him: “The keys to your cell are in your mouth.” As she was taken from the courtroom in handcuffs she turned to smile at Zayd and me. Zayd blew her a kiss and waved bye-bye.

The days and weeks and months dragged on, and because her imprisonment was indeterminate—“The keys are in your mouth”—we couldn’t plan or even pace ourselves. She could talk and get out, or she could stay silent and spend what felt, day by day, like life in prison. And although she had nothing to do with the Brinks robbery and faced no criminal charges, she would refuse on principle to cooperate with a fishing expedition of the state: “It’s an abuse of state power, and it gathers greater and greater strength every time people cooperate,” she said. Eventually, a total of one man and sixteen other women—also refusing to speak on principle—were locked up in the federal detention center in downtown Manhattan for resisting the Brinks grand jury. Bernardine felt unsure about a lot of things, but completely resolute on just this: Don’t talk! Ever! She’d likely be locked up for quite a while.