Free The Darling by Russell Banks

them “films,” and cultivated what we regarded as morally meaningful alienation from bourgeois society and values. Our forms of rebellion had been handed down to us from the fifties, after all, by the Beat Generation and famous European-café existentialists.
    It was a sweet, almost innocent interlude, especially compared to what came later. Zack and I slept together for the first and last time the same night we organized the SANE chapter at Brandeis. At that age, sex is usually part of one’s family drama, and at college Zack had a hankering for middle-class black and Jewish girls, anyone not like Mom, and I was attracted only to middle-class black and Jewish boys, anyone not like Dad. As a result, sex between me and Zack was too close to incest to give us anything but anxiety. The next morning we somberly agreed not to do it again, and we didn’t, ever. We insisted that it was nothing personal, and the truth is, it wasn’t.
    After graduation, Zack went to Ghana with the Peace Corps, and I went to Mississippi and Louisiana for the first time with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That September I returned to Massachusetts to attend Harvard Medical School, where I helped form the SDS chapter, got myself arrested twice by the Cambridge police for disturbing the peace—committing acts of civil disobedience, we called it, blocking entry to the provost’s office and disrupting military recruiters on campus. Making peace by disturbing it. We hadn’t yet brought the war home. But in 1966, as the Civil Rights and antiwar movements blossomed and exfoliated left, right, and center, I dropped out of school six months before finishing and became a full-time political activist. A year later I was living in a commune in Cleveland, organizing and then running a day-care center for working mothers by day and printing pamphlets and broadsides and the occasional phony ID by night. I wasn’t ever a leader; I was a worker, and it was my point of pride. SDS, and before long Weatherman, had become my university, my employer, my church, my family.
    THERE’S MUCH ABOUT that period that you don’t need to know, or perhaps much that I don’t care to remember right now. Or can’t remember. I was a different person then. After the Chicago Days of Rage in 1969 and my federal indictment in 1970, I came back to New England and went underground. My name was Dawn Carrington. Carol, who was my lover and roommate, thought of me not as a Marxist and certainly not as a terrorist but as an intellectual, some kind of college-educated, deep-thinking, liberal Democrat was all.
    A trusting, utterly honest woman, Carol was small, almost child size, with urchin eyes, wide, round, and dark. Stubborn like a child and willful, she was always exactly who she seemed and claimed to be, my extreme opposite, in a way. To her, I was the distant, gruff, skeptical woman a few years older than she whose presence in her life kept her from falling in love again with the kind of man who would beat her and cheat on her, a man like her daughter Bettina’s father. Though she had been on the streets for years, I was more worldly than she, skeptical and sharp edged. “You make me stronger than I am,” she used to whisper to me, and I would say, “Cut the shit, Carol. You’re as strong as you want to be.” And it was not “Dawn” that she called me, but “Don.” Sometimes she wrote it in little love notes left on the kitchen table for me to find when I left the house early for work, while she slept till Bettina woke her for breakfast. Good morning, Don. I wanted to wake you up when I got in but it was too late and you looked too peaceful asleep. I’m off tonight so let’s go have a cookout at the beach when you get home. XXX
    Neither Carol nor I was a bona fide lesbian. We were just sick of men, and lonely. We’d both gotten to the same place, but by rather different and class-specific routes. A mill-town bad girl, Carol was homeless and hooked on