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fifteen Barbara I was eleven years old when my father got out of jail. It was Christmas Eve, and he called up my mother from Lewisburg and said, “I’m coming home.” So I had to run outside and get him Christmas presents. I think I had to borrow money from my mother. I went down to the bus, and he was home. I remember being very happy, and everybody else was there, too, and everybody was happy and hugging and kissing. We went home and had a big Christmas and then disappeared for a while. Then, for a long time, I had difficulty readjusting to having him in the house, having him out of prison. But he handled it very well. He learned from prison, and he shared his learning. I’ve always appreciated that he came away from prison with stories: stories with morals, with punch lines, good stories, bad stories, and happy stories, and sad stories. That summer, I went back with my friends who had moved on to Camp Thoreau. There I started to learn about my friends. I learned that Judy Winston ’s father had been in jail, and that Mike and Robbie’s parents were the Rosenbergs. I learned about Susie Robeson and her grandfather, Paul. Somebody else’s father was one of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted during the 1950s. This came to me in dribs and drabs. And throughout this time, I was dancing, folk dancing and modern. And that was really the most important thing to me through most of high school. When I left high school I finally made the decision not to dance. And, though I’ve never really felt quite comfortable about not dancing, I never really felt comfortableaboutcontinuing.Itjustseemedaverycomfortable,easy,andfairly dull future. It didn’t seem to me that I would feel satisfied being a dancer. 120 A RED FAMILY I went through high school and started reading more history. In the eleventh grade, I did a paper on the Smith Act, and politics eventually began to make sense to me—politics as something more than the personal experiences of the people I knew. But, I guess, politics never lost the fervor of personal experience: people making politics and people suffering by it. Those few years, the prison years and the years afterward, certainly put an end to my childhood in a very startling way. I just don’t meet too many people I can talk to, for whom it’s somehow natural to have understood and been part of, unwillingly, the process of witch hunts and people going off to jail. My father’s going to jail really wasn’t an act of heroism. He had left the Party long before. There wasn’t anything glorious about it at all, except his refusal to name names to the FBI. For a long time, I wasn’t allowed to tell people about it. People didn’t ask where my father was, and if they did, I said he was away. It was kind of a secret, and it wasn’t easy to digest for a long time. I wasn’t really aware that it had bothered me for quite a while, and then I started to realize that I had many confused feelings about having grown up, about having felt myself a social freak for many years, for most of high school. For a while, feeling different was kind of fun, because it was a crusade, our own personal family crusade. After that, though, I often found that the things I would say and the things I would do were incomprehensible to people. I’m not really sure why, but it was almost as if I was living in a different country. I had a very particular and very different position in the world, a very different reason for being there. I remember a discussion about prisons in high school. People were saying, “Well, they should do lots of nice things in prisons. They should reform the prisons.” And I said, “They shouldn’t have prisons.” The people said, “What? How can you say such a thing?” And I thought, “Well, it does sound crazy, doesn’t it?” But, then, it just kept making sense to me. We shouldn’t have prisons because they’re so horrible. And I decided I was much happier taking that kind of extreme position. It just made inherently so much more sense to me than arguing over this or that reform...

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