Driving from one place to another is the best time to get the old Commies talking. Today I drove Jack from Fort Point to our regular lunch at the restaurant near Lands End. He started telling me about visual images still in his head from his childhood, memories of walking across the plains in Texas hunting as a kid. I think he said prairie.
“What did you hunt?”
“Rabbits, squirrels, really anything that moved.”
“What kind of gun did you have?”
“I started out with a .22, and then later got a shotgun when I was about 14.”
“Did you skin them and eat them?”
“Yes, I ate everything I killed. I loved that shotgun and kept it till just a few years ago. I didn’t want a gun in the house. My grandson was growing up.”
I told him I have a gun, a .22 handgun, how my mother was horrified when I told her I’d bought it. It was just before John Lennon’s murder. My gun is a Taurus revolver, the exact model that killed John. I put my gun far away in the storage room, partly because I didn’t want any visiting kids to find it, but also because I went through a period of deep depression and was afraid I might kill myself.
Then he said he had owned another gun, a .45. Jack had been in the Army in World War II. An Army friend who took it from the Oakland Army base after the war gave the gun to him. The guy asked him, kept asking him, if he wanted a gun. Now he thinks the FBI planted it on him.
“Most of the black Army officers were recruited to the FBI,” he said, and this friend was one. The FBI kept close track of Jack, and maybe they still do, he said. He was in the Communist Party USA till the mid-50s and the FBI would call him up periodically just to check on him.
The CP, and particularly one friend, bugged him to get rid of the .45. The CP frowned on their members having guns. It was dangerous, and especially dangerous for black men. Finally he took the .45 apart, every screw, he said, put all the parts in a paper bag, then walked along the waterfront throwing the parts in the water one by one. No one will ever find that gun, or pin it on him!
Later, when a president was about to visit San Francisco (he thinks it was Truman) the FBI came to his house. When they knocked on his door and asked him if he had any guns, he was able to honestly say no.
The FBI would always have someone at CP meetings recording who was there and making lists. But even after Jack stopped going to meetings, they were surveiling him. He thinks an FBI agent even came to a Catholic prayer meeting he was leading a few years ago. “The guy picked up all the religious books and looked at them. He came a couple of times. I knew he was FBI,” Jack said.
“Didn’t it make you paranoid, knowing they were watching you?”
At first he said no, but then he admitted yes. That’s why he got rid of the gun.
Jack said he left the CP in ‘55 or ‘56, when the Krushchev report came out about Stalin. “We thought the Western press was making up all those stories, but there was no need. The truth was awful enough.”
tradeswomn musings 