Prologue
WILD WAVES AND BONFIRES
1971
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
A HOWARD JOHNSON'S PARKING LOT NEAR I-95 I packed an overnight bag and counted
out eighty dollars, all the money I had in the world. My mother drove me to a
Howard Johnson's near I-95. A car pulled up with four friends, each of whom had
come from a different point north of Maryland. At age twenty-one I left my
family, my hometown, and, with my four friends, took off for California. We
wanted to see America and to make sense, each in our own way, of what to do with
all the breakage and promise that had been released through the antiwar
movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the
beginning of the environmental movement, and the bra-burning, brief as it was,
of the women's movement. And there was the masculine glamour and fashion of the
black liberation movement. Years later I would talk to some of those Black
Panthers. One of them mused openly, "I think we got caught up in the theater of
it. We began to believe we were in a movie." One of the Chicago Eight would
similarly say, "It was theater, until the cops showed us the difference between
reality and theater, an ... read full excerpt from Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines ebook
