Common Ground (116 page)

“All those rules and stuff,” Rachel said. “Wash this. Dry this. Do that. Do this. I couldn’t stand no more of that shit.”

“Well, nothing’s going to change, you know. The same rules are still here. I work all day and I’m not coming home and clean up behind you all. You understand that?”

The girls stared back at her. Neither said a thing.

“Oh, Rachel,” Alva said. “Why don’t you ease up a bit? Give them a little slack.”

That did it. “Why don’t you mind your own business?” Rachel said. “Just butt out!”

“Rachel, your daughters have been out on the street, living with older men. What should I do? Close my eyes?”

That stung. “I never asked you to do anything, Miss Know-it-all.”

“Tell me something, Rach,” Alva said. “What would you do if you found my daughters in the street?”

“Step over ’em,” Rachel snapped. Then, wheeling on her own daughters, she said, “Look, it’s up to you. You can come home, but you’re coming back to the same rules you left. If not, you can go right out the door with your nosy aunt.”

“You’re putting them out?” Alva cried.

“No, they got a choice. They can do what they’re told to do here. Or they can go with you. What’s it going to be, girls?”

They said they’d go with Alva and, a moment later, they did.

That afternoon Rachel wept as she rarely had before. After years of holding
her family together by sheer force of will, now it was disintegrating before her eyes. One after another, her children were deserting her. What else could possibly go wrong?

At about 1:30 the next afternoon, Rachel was working on Methunion’s accounts when she had an official visitor. Detective John Farrell of the District 4 plainclothes squad was looking for a young man believed to live in Methunion Manor. The police had a description: nineteen or twenty years old, short-cropped black hair, very narrow shoulders, approximately 150 pounds, last seen wearing a beige suit, a white scarf, and a silver chain with a five-pointed star.

A terrible weariness washed over Rachel.

“He got a name?” she asked.

“All we know is ‘Freddie.’ ”

Just then Farrell’s partner, Eddie Twohig, rushed in, followed by a distraught young woman. “She thinks she saw him in the hallway,” Twohig said.

The two detectives and the woman hurried down the corridor. As they stood outside apartment 105, the door opened and a young man stood framed in the light, a five-pointed star glistening on a chain around his neck.

“That’s him,” shouted the woman.

Displaying his badge, Farrell asked the man’s name.

“Frederick Twymon.”

“Were you at a party in Hyde Park on Thanksgiving?”

“Yeh.”

“Jack!” said Twohig. “That’s enough!”

“All right,” said Farrell. “Mr. Twymon, I’m placing you under arrest.” Then he took out his Miranda Card and read the suspect his rights.

When Freddie Twymon was nine years old, he was named Roxbury’s “Tom Sawyer of 1967.” The annual contest, sponsored by the Roxbury Boys’ Club, sought out the local youth who most closely resembled Mark Twain’s hero. Thirty boys, decked out in straw hats and patched dungarees, competed in wood-chopping, apple-dunking, and fence-painting contests, and when Freddie emerged victorious, his beaming face appeared on page three of the Boston
Record-American
, making him something of a neighborhood celebrity.

When he was a child, Freddie’s ebullience and spunk were irresistible. He’d try anything once. Daisy Voight snapped a picture of him standing on his head in a massive snowbank, his mischievous smile beguiling even upside down. Many inner-city blacks were terrified of water, but Freddie took to it readily, becoming a star of the Boys’ Club swimming team. When others in the club science program shrank from a twenty-three-foot python, Freddie posed with the giant creature draped around his neck.

But somehow adolescence seemed to drain that formidable energy. When he was fifteen or so, Freddie stopped going to the Boys’ Club, preferring to spend his afternoons on the Boston Common with a gang of vagabonds. Those who saw him there in the summer of 1973 were astonished by the change in
his appearance. Once a spiffy dresser, he now looked more like a hippie, disheveled in ragged T-shirts and droopy jeans. His eyes bloodshot, his face impassive, he was drinking a lot of wine, smoking a lot of reefers. Coming home drunk night after night, he struck his brother George as “the spitting image of his father.”

About that time Freddie started stealing from the family. At night, while his mother slept, he’d sneak into her room and snitch a couple of dollars from her purse. Later he grew still bolder, taking money and clothing from his brothers; when caught, he invariably insisted he was “borrowing” the stuff for a few days. Richard and George warned him to stay away from their things, and finally, when he lifted an expensive tape deck from their room, they took him down to the boiler room and beat the hell out of him.

Nothing could turn Freddie around as he drifted deeper into trouble. For a time in 1973–74, he hung with the gang outside the Soul Center and Braddock Drugs, preying on the gentry across Columbus Avenue. But soon he found more professional company, spending his nights at the Rainbow Lounge on Tremont Street, a notorious hangout for South End stickup men, drug dealers, numbers runners, and prostitutes.

In the fall of 1974, Freddie was going with a girl from Chelsea. One night he stayed late at her house, then came home by subway. At the City Square Station in Charlestown, never a comfortable place for black passengers, he was arrested by two transit policemen for attempting to break into a safe in the change booth. Although he loudly protested his innocence, he was arraigned the next morning in Charlestown District Court, charged with breaking and entry (and later received a suspended sentence).

Not surprisingly, his nightly dissipation took a heavy toll of Freddie’s schoolwork. In elementary school he had shown considerable promise, often winning gold stars for achievement and deportment, but now he lagged badly in both English and math, failing to complete ninth grade at East Boston’s Barnes School. In the fall of 1974, as busing got underway in South Boston and Roxbury, his mother arranged for him to repeat that grade at the relatively tranquil Jamaica Plain High.

On September 12—two days after his arrest in Charlestown and with the case still pending—Freddie started at Jamaica Plain. A few days later he got into a fistfight with a white boy, was suspended for three days and told he couldn’t return unless escorted by his mother. On the appointed day, Rachel and Freddie were walking toward the subway when she noticed a knife sticking out of his pocket.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“If one of those white bastards messes with me today,” he said, “I’m going to kill him.”

“Freddie,” she said, “I’m not taking you anywhere with that knife.”

“Well, I ain’t going to school without it.”

He never returned to school and some weeks later he left home, moving in
with a pal on Tremont Street. Over the next year, Freddie engaged in a series of petty crimes: car theft, burglaries, and robberies. Occasionally he was arrested—for attempted auto theft in March 1975, for receiving stolen property in July—but he never got more than a suspended sentence, often committing his next crime while out on probation from the last one. His family grew increasingly impatient with him. Once, after he failed to appear in court for a hearing, his mother made him turn himself in to police. As the charges piled up, Freddie talked about leaving town altogether, running off to see his father in Alabama, but when he called to ask permission, Haywood Twymon said he had no place for his son to stay.

On August 18, 1975, Freddie crossed a critical boundary. Having spent the day hanging out with friends on the Boston Common, he was standing on Arlington Street just across from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel when he noticed an attractive young white woman parking her red Vega, then searching for change to put in the meter. When he offered her two dimes, the woman—a twenty-three-year-old vocational counselor named Gail Rockmore—thanked him profusely. They fell into conversation. Gail liked Freddie’s open face and ready smile; he seemed like “a nice, harmless kid.” When she went to get a hamburger at McDonald’s he tagged along, and they talked for another quarter hour at a table overlooking the Public Gardens. Then Gail left for her evening lesson at the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute a few doors away.

When she emerged at 9:30, Freddie was still standing on the corner, talking with a white youth. They asked for a ride up Beacon Hill. When the white boy got out on Charles Street, Freddie said he lived a few blocks away. Gail drove four blocks and stopped.

“No,” Freddie said. “It’s a little further.”

She drove another block. When her passenger made no move, she said, “I’m sorry. This is it. Please get out.”

“Just turn in there,” Freddie said, indicating an adjacent alley.

Starting to panic, Gail said, “No! I’d like you to get out now!”

Freddie leaned across the gap between the bucket seats and grabbed her by the neck.

“Stop!” Gail shouted. “I’ll do anything you want.” But as soon as he relaxed his grip, she pushed open her door and jumped out.

“If you leave,” he said, “I’ll take your car.”

“You can have it!” she shrieked.

Running back down Charles Street, she flagged a car and told the driver, “Some guy just tried to kill me.”

Seeing her enter the other vehicle, Freddie gunned the red Vega up Cambridge Street. Gail and her companion gave chase, alerting two policemen in a cruiser, who chased the Vega onto Tremont Street, where it jumped a red light, swerved right, and hit a utility pole. Freddie leapt out and ran down Winter Street, ducking into Locke-Ober, Boston’s most elegant restaurant. Taking refuge in its basement men’s room, he was arrested there a few minutes
later by Patrolman John O’Brien. Convicted of larceny of a motor vehicle, assault and battery, operating a car without a license, and leaving the scene of an accident, Freddie was sentenced on September 8, 1975, to up to two and a half years in Concord Prison.

The Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, as it was officially known, was a grim bastion of penal servitude not far from the Old North Bridge and hard by the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The Commonwealth’s younger, more malleable offenders usually ended up at Concord, while more seasoned criminals went to the maximum-security prison at Walpole. But there was nothing easygoing about Concord. Those who had served there called it “tough time,” a severe, unrelenting regime.

Freddie—henceforth Prisoner No. 49471—shared a two-man cell with a succession of short-timers. Put to work varnishing park benches in the woodworking shop, he was later transferred to the kitchen, where he washed pots and milk trays.

From the moment he walked through the gates, Freddie drew ardent attention from the prison “queens,” always on the lookout for good-looking young “punks.” One husky pederast—known to guards and prisoners alike as “Diane”—showed a special interest in Freddie. “Here’s a pack of cigarettes,” he’d say. “Come up to my room.” Terrified by these advances, Freddie did his best to rebuff them, but Diane didn’t give up. Gradually his importunings became more urgent, laced with not so subtle threats of violence. Finally one day, when Freddie rejected him again, Diane forced him to his knees and was about to sodomize him when a sympathetic guard intervened. Frantic to escape Diane’s energetic courtship, Freddie sought some means of hurrying his parole. Strictly speaking, the Parole Board wouldn’t release a prisoner until he had guarantees of a home and a job; but such assurances were so difficult to obtain inside prison that a private organization, called the Self-Development Group, had received the board’s approval for an experimental “release and support program” in which the group began working with prisoners before their release and continued to provide assistance once they were out.

On November 8, 1975, Freddie scrawled a note to the Self-Development Group: “I would like to talk to you about your program. I think I’ll be interested in getting into it. I see the Parole Board in January.” Some days later, in a formal application, he listed his skills as “electrical, repair radio, TV,” his job interests as “help kids stay away from where I’ve been (jail),” his occupational goals, “teaching, swimming.”

Once he was accepted, he began working with Eddie Collins, the group’s Concord representative, a hip young black man who knew his way around Boston’s streets. Through that winter, Freddie attended Ed’s counseling sessions, learning to set “short- and long-term goals,” “establish a realistic budget,” and make a good impression at job interviews. When Freddie decided he wanted to be an electrician, Ed enrolled him in the Recruitment Training Program
that provided released prisoners with thirty hours of instruction in a construction trade, then guaranteed them a job. It was a sweet deal and Freddie wanted it badly. But all depended on his being paroled by February, when the training got underway.

On January 13, the day of his scheduled appearance before the Parole Board, Freddie had a particularly unpleasant run-in with Diane, in which the older man warned him: “Punk, you better come across pretty soon if you know what’s good for you.” The confrontation left him shaken, in no shape for a crucial showdown with the board. And when he walked into the hearing room later that morning, he was further unnerved to find that he recognized one of the two board members serving on the panel that day. The Reverend Michael Haynes, minister of the Twelfth Baptist Church and Martin Luther King’s longtime ally in Boston, had grown up around the corner from the Walkers and had known them all their lives. He didn’t know Freddie well, but recognizing the name on the file before him, he began by asking, “Mr. Twymon, do you know me?”

“Yes, sir,” said Freddie, “I do.”

Then Haynes launched his formal interrogation: why had Freddie dropped out of school, whom had he been hanging out with, was he on dope or alcohol, how had he gotten into trouble in the first place?

As the questions poured out, Freddie grew angry. Here was this big-shot minister, a friend of his mother’s, interrogating him as though he were a member of the family. What right did he have to ask questions like that?