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Seven: Junius
- University of Illinois Press
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seven Junius Gladys and I were married in February 1950 and lived in Carrboro. My neighbors across the street and about two city blocks away had FBI agents living in their houses. There they’d be with binoculars watching everybody that came to the house. I used cabs a lot because I didn’t want to get too many people’s cars involved. We’d drive off, and before the cab could get two blocks, there’d be three or four carloads of FBI agents behind it. We’d drive around like a funeral procession. Often the cab drivers were in on it with the FBI. But friends would come in spite of the harassment. It made them mad, but we were friends, and they didn’t want to be intimidated. Gladys was a New Yorker and a Brooklyn émigré, and I warned her before the marriage, “I’m probably going to go to jail.” In 1950 it didn’t take any vast imagination to see that the way things were going I’d be in trouble. I was the only open Communist in the South at that point, and they sort of concentrated their fire on me. Up till then, the FBI had been inhibiting me considerably, but I figured the most they could do was arrest me. The Ku Klux Klan threatened me. One Sunday afternoon, this long, low truck with a bunch of guys with shotguns kept driving around and around the house at three or four miles an hour for about forty-five minutes. I guess I was scared because I took my shotgun and cleaning equipment and went out and sat on my front porch. I sat there and cleaned my shotgun, and they left. Later they burned a cross on my lawn. In April of ’51, our child Barbara was born. Then, in July, I got orders from the Party up in New York and the southern director of the Party, who particularly tended to panic, that we should all go underground. And so we made ourselves very hard to find. A RED FAMILY 69 I had to leave home before my daughter was even six months old and, as the surveillance gradually intensified, had to stay away for longer and longer periods. FBI agents swarmed around me so that I couldn’t go to see anybody without putting the finger on them. Somewhere in the fall of ’51 I started living with friends, mostly not Party people, in different cities. I’d come home sometimes and spend a few days, but gradually that got to be too difficult. It was just as difficult to leave again. So Gladys would take Barbara in a wicker basket and leave with the help of friends, switching from car to car, and I’d meet them on weekends. Sometimes we’d stay at a friend’s place. One of our favorite stunts, to make sure we weren’t being followed, was to go lickety-splitting down a highway and stop at a motel. We’d sign in for the weekend while a friend drove the car on down the road. Somebody would come pick us up Monday. The FBI had their hands full because we thought up more and more stunts. And you know, they’re not very smart. They’re just too rigid. The only way they were able to keep tabs on us was with stool pigeons. When they tried to do it themselves, you could outwit them every time. I remember once I hopped into a friend’s car, and we knew perfectly well the FBI were following, so we drove like a bat out of hell. My friend got about a good block or so ahead of them and was turning around a corner. Just as they rounded the corner, they saw him slamming the car door on my side. I was on the floor of the car, but they just assumed that I had gotten out. And as we drove off, he could see them in the mirror hopping out of their car and swarming all over somebody’s house, convinced I was there. I bet they were camped out half the night there, trying to figure out where the hell I was. Meanwhile, we were having a nice conversation while I was sitting on the floor of his car. He drove around for a while and then went home. The agents were sitting there at his place. He went in and...