My Childhood in the Weather Underground

My mom stood in the doorway. Her hair, which she had kept short and dyed red, as part of a disguise, was starting to grow out, straight and dark down to her shoulders. She stood still, cradling my baby brother, but her eyes kept flickering to the Harlem intersection, following each car that passed.

Finally, my dad whistled twice, our usual signal—one short, one long—and she led me into the back seat. My dad glanced behind us once to see if we were being followed, winked at me in the rearview mirror, and then swung our car toward Interstate 80, headed west. My memories of this time are hazy, of course.

I remember them the way anyone “remembers” the important moments of their childhood—overlaid with family lore, stories my parents told, and details I’ve reconstructed from recent conversations. But underneath it all there are real sense memories. Among my earliest, maybe imprinted by the fear of that night: the cold smell of the city, and the fuzzy disorientation of waking up while it was still dark out.

I remember wondering why we were leaving, and what was going to happen to us next. A decade earlier, my mother, Bernardine Dohrn, had declared war on the United States government. She and my father, Bill Ayers, helped found the militant revolutionary group the Weather Underground, and committed themselves to opposing the Vietnam War and fighting back violently against what they saw as a fascist police state here at home.

They and their friends set off bombs at the N. Y. P.

D. headquarters, the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon. They wore disguises, lived under fake names, built a network of safe houses, and became the focus of an international manhunt. In 1970, the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover called my mom “the most dangerous woman in America.”

That October, she became only the fourth woman in history on the F.B.I.’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. I was born underground and spent my early years on the run. By 1980, though, my parents had finally decided to turn themselves in.

A plea deal awaited us in Chicago, but, for the deal to work, we had to make it to the courthouse in person. If we were caught along the way, my mom would spend decades in prison. It was a tense drive that night; my dad says that he kept our station wagon well below the speed limit.

The next morning, we pulled into a rest-stop Burger King. While my mom stayed in the car to nurse the baby, my father and I went inside, and a nice elderly couple started talking to me in line, just making conversation.

“Hey, sweetheart,” the man said, smiling down at me. I had shoulder-length blond hair at the time, and people always assumed I was a girl.

“You all on vacation?” I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, but my dad was busy ordering our food, and I felt like I had to say something. My response has, in the years since, become a running joke in my family.

“We’re going to Chicago,” I told them, “so my mom can turn herself in to the F.B.I.” My dad turned, surprised, trying to catch up.

“Oh. Yeah, I don’t know,” he said, trying to force a laugh.

“Maybe something he saw on TV? Hey, Z, you need to use the bathroom before we go? Say bye.”

I waved. And, before we got our food, he picked me up and ran for our car. As he peeled back out onto the highway, he told my mom that he thought somebody had recognized him.

He was trying to protect me, I think. My dad knew that I was desperate not to disappoint my mother—that I wouldn’t want to admit I had broken the underground’s strict codes of secrecy. I looked up to her.

I admired her. I wanted to be like her. Of course, as I got older, that got more complicated.

My parents’ brand of violent resistance, I now know, had tragic consequences for our family, and deadly costs for the people around us. Three of my parents’ closest friends were killed in an accidental dynamite explosion as they planned an attack on a U.S. Army base. Others spent decades behind bars, leaving their children without mothers or fathers.

And years later, when the group splintered into increasingly militant factions, some took part in a disastrous bank robbery that killed an innocent guard and two police officers—three men who were just doing their jobs that day, and who left behind their own kids, their own families. Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just remember watching my mom’s face in the rearview mirror, wondering what she was thinking—whether she was also scared—as she scanned the maps in our faded Rand McNally road atlas.

In our family, my father was usually the one driving, but there was never any doubt who was setting our direction.

“Get off at the next exit,” she ordered him.

“We’ll switch to local roads.” But letting your daughter see more of the world than you did means that she might come to see that world quite differently. In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago to lead a series of protests against racism and housing discrimination.

“Seeing King, night after night, speaking in churches,” my mom told me recently, “it changed my life.” The civil-rights movement needed lawyers—ideally people willing to work for free—and she soon signed up to volunteer.

“I knew nothing,” she said, laughing.

“Second-year law student. I had an armband that said ‘Legal.’ It was ridiculous!”

In 1968, my mother was in New York when she heard screams coming from the street outside. Dr. King had just been killed in Memphis, Tennessee. My mom grabbed her purse and got on a subway to Forty-second Street.

“I don’t know why I did,” she told me.

“But, by the time I got there, there were thousands and thousands of people in Times Square. I wanted to be in a crowd of people who were mourning. And angry.

Both.” That rage drove her away from King’s politics of nonviolence and toward a more militant ideology. She was soon elected to the national leadership of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student protest group in the country at that time.

It was through S. D.

S. that she met my dad, the son of a prominent utilities C. E.

O. He had grown up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, burned his draft card at the University of Michigan, and then dropped out of school to protest full time. Then, in 1969, my mother split S. D.

S. in half, forming a more radical faction of the group called Weatherman. (The name was taken from the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.”) That October, Weathermen rampaged through Chicago’s upscale shopping district—the Magnificent Mile—with bricks, chains, and baseball bats, breaking windows, smashing cars, and brawling with armed police officers: the so-called Days of Rage riots.