Since 1968, when I’d met and fallen in love with Sam Melville, a charismatic radical in his 30s, I’d shredded my former identity as a classics graduate student and scholarly book editor and become a full-time movement activist. I worked as a writer and office assistant at Rat, a counterculture paper, and devoted my free time to demonstrations and protest actions. Once I was arrested and faced a long prison sentence, the allure of the underground grew irresistible. On May 4, 1970, 1 pleaded guilty in federal court as part of a government deal to secure a shorter sentence for Melville, who had not been released on bail. On that day, National Guardsmen shot and killed four Kent State students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. A few days later, disguised by dyed blond hair and glasses, carrying a driver’s license that identified me as Frances Ethel Matthews, I squeezed my way through Penn Station, unrecognized by thousands of young protesters on their way to Washington, D.C. On a midnight train, I left behind my life as Jane Alpert, presumably forever.
Movement friends helped me with my disguise, false papers and my first place to stay underground, but after a few months, I found myself on my own. I never connected with the revolutionary underground I’d fantasized about, and soon came to doubt its existence. Instead, I traveled the country under a series of aliases, living on odd jobs and the generosity of friends from college and childhood. Their unquestioning acceptance spurred me to secret shame at the wreckage I’d left. But it took a long time for the ideological delusions to disappear completely.
After six months, I cautiously resumed contact with my parents, always through third parties to avoid phone taps and tails. My radical life had grieved and appalled them, yet they complied with every precaution I asked to avoid detection. My father would book detours on business trips under false names and we would meet at airports, using aliases. I remember one dinner in St. Louis’s revolving restaurant, high above the Mississippi, eating food from each other’s plates, drinking too much wine, laughing at family in-jokes. He slipped me some money, insisting he could afford it, and never brought up what I’d already cost him and my mother in dollars and worry.
Working and talking with ordinary people, I discovered how myopically we urban revolutionaries had viewed America. The savagery in Vietnam disgusted many besides me. Yet the values I’d rejected as bourgeois and sentimental–democracy, family, patriotism–still seemed to glue the country together. As my movement–induced fog began to lift, I caught glimpses of mortality. Close friends from college lost their first child to a sudden illness. Sam Melville was killed during an uprising at Attica prison. I couldn’t be in any of the places that mattered.
In 1971, out of loneliness, I joined a discussion group at the San Diego Women’s Center. The six women in that group, who knew me as Ellen Davis, became my closest friends, yet I didn’t confide my fugitive status to them until the week I left San Diego, fearing that the FBI was closing in. In 1973 1 wrote an article about my newfound feminism and sent it to the press under my own name. I celebrated alone when Ms. magazine published the piece, unable to take credit for it in the life I lived then as Carla Weinstein, secretary at a religious school in Denver.
At last, the desire to return to the path of my first 20 years of life, to reclaim my family, to take a chance on genuine intimacy, overrode the fear of prison. On Nov. 14,1974, four and a half years after going underground, I turned myself in. I served a 27-month sentence in county, state and federal prisons. The degradation and brutality of prison were hellish, but not enough to extinguish my dawning sense of liberation. Finally free to face and come to terms with my past and to try to shape a future, I began to keep a journal for the first time. I met twice with a prison psychiatrist whose wit and compassion defied my stereotypes of her profession. Ultimately, I spent many years in therapy, learning to understand, to tolerate and forgive both others and myself. Having lived a life of satisfaction in work and fulfillment in love and in friendships since then has been partly a matter of luck and partly of hard-earned wisdom. Still, from time to time, some ’60s kindred spirit will confess to knowing “who I really am.” And though I’ve never been more real than I am today, I understand.
