Free Public Enemy by Bill Ayers Page B

we always stood up somehow for “fairness.” “That’s not fair” had the same indignant tone, whether referring to the smallest injustice on the playground or some monstrous outrage like a police murder of a young Black man on the streets of Brooklyn.
    Before the dizzying and defining moment of our children’s’ births Malcolm X had famously noted that Black people seemed forever to have an abundance of Washingtons and Jeffersons and Lincolns in their family trees, but white people didn’t even have a twig or a leaf for Nat Turner or Cinque or Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman. Why, he asked rhetorically and pointedly, why the color line—even when it comes to naming the babies?
    We chose to take Malcolm’s observation as a practical matter, and so we named our first-born Zayd Osceola, to remember a Panther brother killed by the police and at the same time to raise up a Seminole leader who never surrendered to the US policy of relocation and extermination; our second Malik Cochise, this time in honor of Malcolm himself as well as a renowned First Nation legend, the great Apache guerrilla fighter.
    Our children grew up on stories of freedom fighters: Zayd’s changing table was adorned with postcards of Ho Chi Minh and a framed photo of Zayd Shakur, and above Malik’s bed was a portrait of Malcolm X as well as pictures of Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, South African revolutionaries imprisoned on Robben Island. Each of our kids started life with a home birth and an invented identity—is there any other kind?—outfitted with a false birth certificate and an assumed name as well as the more standard-issue Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls and tie-dyed T-shirts. Born on the run, they had their own youthful list of s/heroes: Robin Hood, Amilcar Cabral, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Stuart Little, Jackie Robinson, Han Solo, Lolita Lebron, Che Guevara, Peter Rabbit. They liked outlaws. Kathy and David’s beautiful baby—Chesa Jackson Gilbert Boudin—bounded into our family and crash-landed in our lives when he was fourteen months old with his name already attached, and it fit right in: Chesa, a Swahili word for dancing feet, and Jackson, taken from Soledad Brother George Jackson, murdered by prison guards at San Quentin. His prized T-shirt was a silk-screen portrait of Rosa Parks in dignified refusal.
    Leonard Boudin, a prominent civil rights attorney, had rushed to his daughter the minute he’d heard the shocking news of the Brinks robbery, the killings, and her arrest. It was a troubling jailhouse reunion, he told us later—sorrow and remorse mixed with anger and accusation—but he left with one concrete assignment that gave him a sense of practical purpose. He hurried to the babysitter where Kathy had dropped Chesa a day earlier as she left for what she never imagined would be her last day of freedom, and he retrieved his grandson and brought him home.
    We’d known Leonard and Jean Boudin for decades. Bernardine met Leonard first as a law graduate and organizer for the National Lawyers Guild; I met them when Kathy and I were community organizers together in the Cleveland ghettoes. Later we saw them often because their Greenwich Village home was a kind of center of left-wing social and literary life. Bernardine talked law with Leonard, poetry with Jean, and politics with all of us together. When we showed up on their doorstep after Brinks with our two little guys in tow and a shopping bag of baby clothes, they were still reeling from the tragedy of Kathy imprisoned and the consequences abruptly crashing down upon them, scrambling to pick up whatever pieces they could.
    “Oh, my dears,” Jean said as she answered the door, embracing us one by one, her dazzling smile in place, but her petite frame seeming even more fragile, her lively blue eyes brimming with tears now. “Thank you so much for coming.” Leonard, too, big and handsome and exuding robust power most days, was strained and shrunken as we fell into an