Ayers Dohrn openly admires his mother’s passionate devotion to causes (Black liberation, anticapitalism and antiwar activism) that she could have easily ignored. “I loved her,” he writes. “I admired her. I wanted to be like her.” Yet he also, with the tentativeness of a loving child, explores how her aptitude for self-sacrifice might have compromised her parenting. When Ayers Dohrn is around 5, Bernardine and Bill assume responsibility for Chesa, the toddler son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Weather Underground members who were caught assisting the same Brink’s truck robbery that sent Judith Clark to prison. Only 14 months old and still nursing when his mother disappears, Chesa is traumatized. His distress is intense, and he begins having seizures; his entrance into the family is chaotic and confusing for the other children. Amid this devastation, Bernardine is incarcerated for seven months for refusing to cooperate and testify against her fellow revolutionaries.
This registers to young Ayers Dohrn as abandonment. In the letters she writes her son from prison, Bernardine explains to her 5-year-old that she is away because she has chosen not to betray her cause. “Lots of times here I cry because I miss you so much and not being free is a horrible thing,” she writes. “But you know that what the government is trying to make me do is unfair. I can’t tell them about my friends because this government is only good to rich people, and they might hurt someone if I talk to them.” Young Ayers Dohrn is left “sick with grief and loneliness,” so distraught that he begins wetting the bed.
The 5-year old’s helplessness and vulnerability are absolute. He cannot understand what his mother is saying to him about the government or its treatment of rich people — he barely has a grasp on what “rich people” are. He cannot quite understand why his mother would choose her comrades over him. A male friend who steps in to be the boys’ “Mary Poppins” during Bernardine’s months away serves as the voice of protective outrage here. In an interview with Ayers Dohrn he admits that he was horrified that Chesa’s parents ever risked being separated from him. “I would never have left him, for anything. Ever!” he says. “I would never have that deep of a conviction of anything.” Bernardine, of course, did have that conviction.
And yet, in the letters, we also see a mother who is trying to pay her son a kind of respect — to connect with him, to explain herself to him, to help him see the wider world he is only one part of and to connect him to a notion of care that’s bigger than the link between one parent and one child. Her trust that he will be OK without her, that others in the network can fill the void she’s leaving, is suggesting to him an expanded definition of family and community. In refusing to betray a cause, she is offering her son a broader kind of fidelity — the unbending refusal to accept the world he was born into, the unbending determination to insist it change for the better.
Where Ayers Dohrn’s writing about his childhood is direct, searching, confessional, Clark’s sensibility is poetic and restrained. The novel is a peculiar and beautiful bildungsroman, following Suzanna from her earliest memories into the beginning of her adulthood, though her life is characterized less by maturation or metamorphosis than by what does not (and can never) change: her relationship to “the hill.” Clark’s characterization of the prison where Suzanna’s mother lives has the quality of a fairy tale. “As I climbed,” Suzanna thinks, “I imagined my silhouette upon the summit and saw my shape, a hero’s shape, my climb, a hero’s journey. All around me were women saving up for other lives, but I’d been saved for this life.” Suzanna is quiet, disinclined to show the people around her what she is thinking or feeling. She seems set apart from other children, awkwardly straddling worlds — as if the realest part of her life is the part that happens on the hill, the one place where she is a child with a mother.