The Year of Five Liberations (3 of 5)
by John Shannon
art by Paul Takizawa
7
Free Tray Franklin! was the title of the draft of a pamphlet I was photocopying for approval. It was press-on type, Helvetica 24 point. Not very inspiring as a title or a design, but I couldn’t think of anything better and we’d been chanting those three words outside the police station and courthouse for years now so it’d become a mantra of my political life. This was before the age of computers, of course, so I had typed out the text of this eight-pager column-wide on special slick paper with an IBM Selectric and then X-Acto-knifed them out and stuck them onto the masters with a hand-held hot wax machine. How the world has evolved.
“Could you change alleged to accused? I don’t think a lot of people in the community know alleged.”
Tray’s mother, the redoubtable Kathleen Franklin, wanted a few other changes, too, even at this very late stage in laying out the pamphlet, but that was absolutely fine by me, because she was a strong, clear-eyed, immensely decent and very overweight black woman whose judgment I almost worshipped. I would never ever cross her and we suspected she had been around the Left somewhere before, the way she seemed to understand and tolerate and humor us, Dan and Rocky and me, and she deserved absolutely all the credit for holding the deliriously unstable Tray Franklin Defense Committee together for five years now, through three lost appeals, three lawyers, an endless turnover of community loudmouths with big Afros who promised to burn down the universe to get Tray out of prison but were always missing in action after a week or two, several well-meaning white liberals from the universities and high schools who passed through, unconsciously using the committee as the circumstance of their own political and ethnic education—and us. Us, who’d been here the whole way, Dan and Rocky and me. Because supporting Tray was not a hairshirt for us, nor a proof of our macho nor a repudiation of our middle class parents. It was a simple political act. Or maybe not so simple.
8
I’m having a bit of struggle with attitude here. It’s so easy to patronize your own excitably earnest youth. Earnestness is always funny, it’s a fact of nature, but this heartfelt period of my life was to have such consequences that no matter how I couch my attitude now it leaves a peculiar taste in my mouth. We thought we had a pretty well refined critical palate for bullshit and self-deception, but it turned out almost no one did, not in those heady days—I remember reading of a Gallup poll from 1970 that said over a million American students thought of themselves as revolutionaries. Imagine the mass psychosis! With a real bullshit detector operating, we’d have known that by 1975 the New Left was plummeting earthward in a full power tailspin. There, it’s managed to weasel itself into the narrative at last—a sneaky approach to the question. How do you dive headlong into something that demands an upbeat and constructive outlook and keep a weather eye out for the self-hypnosis that you come to use on yourself to deny the obvious? Deny the fatal pressure cracks spreading through the perfect gem.
9
We knew the correct word for working alongside Mrs. Franklin and occasionally her daughter, Tray’s sister. It was solidarity, venerable old word. At the time the committee started, Rocky was still in his first year as an apprentice carpenter, I was scorching my forearms every night in the rubber factory and losing sleep trying to adjust to graveyard shift, and Dan—Dan had become a retired proletarian. If you can call it retired when his last steel plant, U.S. Bridge, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, pulled up stakes and left its entire workforce beached in the central city like so many other corporations. We didn’t appreciate this fact, either, but by 1975 we were deep into the great de-industrialization of North America. We still thought we lived on the edge of an industrial city, with a big black proletariat.
The wartime labor shortage had attracted hundreds of thousands of blacks from the South, and by the end of the war, the city was ringed by major plants from aircraft, auto, steel, chemical products, and the tire makers (I worked at a subsidiary). The city was an industrial powerhouse. But, just twenty years after the war, the factories started pulling up stakes and leaving for cheaper labor in Georgia and Mexico and then China, abandoning all the blacks and browns in the ghettoes and barrios to stew in their own frustration. It’s not really a moral question, of course. Dividends must be maximized. It’s the one imperative that is never ignored.
“How’s the appeal going?” Rocky asked Mrs. Franklin before the meeting. Our mentor Dan had a stony face. He never talked about law. The law was an issue of supreme indifference to him; he was focused wholly on informing and organizing and mobilizing the community, which was all fine as a matter of principle, but which usually meant dragooning Tray’s mom, his sister and one old colleague or another from Tray’s now-defunct youth group, Community Rising Up, into leafleting with us outside the Safeway that was nearest the tiny black ghetto out in our rim city.
“Bartlett didn’t call me. He still wants an investigator, but we don’t have the money,” Mrs. Franklin said. Bartlett was our latest lawyer, a young hotshot with on eye for a high-profile case, and he had a theory we could discredit the victim’s story by putting a “girlfriend” with a tape recorder onto him. Maybe he’d seen it on TV.
“We’ll have to raise it then,” Dan said. “Marsetta, didn’t you suggest a fashion show?”
Marsetta was Tray’s sister, who came to the Defense Committee meetings, really pretty dreary weekly affairs at the community center, one week in three. Once, long ago, she’d had a brainstorm that the young women who’d been around the youth group could put on a fashion show to raise money for Tray, probably a hairbrained idea, which was quietly ignored at the time by her mother, but Dan was always in favor of events that involved the maximum number of people, and his mind must have fastened on it at the time like a steel trap.
“Nadine isn’t around no more. C-Dog went and took her to Atlanta and turned her out.”
I could see Dan puzzling over this statement, in that mime-show way he had, his brow deeply furrowing as if he had to broadcast his worries many miles against great resistance by pure willpower, and I knew he was going to ask me about this later as we drove home and tried our best to debrief. I did know roughly what it meant but really none of us had a clue about what went on deep in the black community. We came every week and tried our best, but it was like two groups of people inhabiting the same physical planet but wholly different dimensions. To be brutally honest, we didn’t even know, ultimately, if Tray was innocent. “I’ll be damned if I’ll look like a do-good liberal,” Dan occasionally tantrumed, an emanation of his deep, frustrated need to feel he was politically useful in some way that Lenin would have approved.
We worked haphazardly through the things we needed to discuss and then the focus came back around to money, and a kid who said his name was Cool Ice turned scornfully on Dan and said, “Whynchou get off your fat white butt and get Tray some money. You paddies never do nothing but talk.”
This was pretty thick since Cool Ice, whatever his name was, had only attended one previous Defense Committee meeting, several months back, had never come to a picket or a leafleting for Tray, and had dropped the ball on the one thing he ever promised to do—come along to visit Tray at the prison where they held him 80 miles away.
Dan appeared to consider Cool Ice’s suggestion impassively for a while, as Kathleen Franklin spoke earnestly about ways the committee had raised money in the past, as if she were only cataloguing possibilities, but in fact she was very delicately illustrating for Cool Ice how useful Dan had already been. Dan had a bit of ego, though less than most, and, like me she had seen how offended he had been inside by the boy. To his credit, Dan hadn’t said a word. And after the meeting, I was astonished to see Dan talking to the boy outside, and they were both being polite, if guarded. I managed to hear Dan cheerfully invite the boy to come along to the prison that weekend when Dan was planning to drive his mother up, and there was not a hint about the previous no-show.
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