Common Ground (117 page)

Then Haynes got to more personal matters. “Frederick,” he said, “I know your mother very well. As you know, she’s a very sick woman. She’s suffered a great deal. I know that having you in here has caused her more pain …”

Before he could finish, Freddie leapt to his feet and slammed both hands down on the kidney-shaped table separating him from the panel. Tears welling in his eyes, rage rising in his throat, he felt like grabbing the table and flipping it over on Haynes, but somehow he restrained the impulse, spun around, and rushed from the room. For a minute or so, he stood in the corridor, tears streaming down his face. When Haynes sent for him, Freddie said, “You were playing with my mind.”

“I wasn’t playing with you, Frederick,” said the minister. “I was trying to get the information we need to make a determination. I’m sorry you walked out and under the circumstances I think we’d better put your case over to next month.”

Three days later, the board’s administrative assistant wrote to Freddie: “It appeared that you were emotionally unable to deal with a hearing this month. Hopefully by February you will have enough impulse control to present yourself in a more positive light.” Realizing he’d blown his chance at the electrical training program, Freddie sank into a depression. In February and March the board took no action on his parole. He thought he’d never get out.

Then, abruptly, things turned for the better. In late March, he was transferred
to the farm dormitory just beyond the walls. In April, he passed his high school equivalency test, an essential step toward a decent job outside. Finally, on April 27, the board approved his parole. On May 7, 1976, after eight months behind bars, he left Concord.

Family and friends offered encouragement. “You can change your life,” his brother George said on the phone from Nashville. “You’ve got what it takes,” said Eddie Collins. “Now use it!”

Rachel gave him his old room at Methunion Manor, but as yet he had no job. On May 14, the Self-Development Group set up an interview with Inner City, Inc., a subsidiary of the Polaroid Corporation. The job provided electronics training, good pay, opportunities for advancement. Freddie got through the interview and the physical, then missed several appointments and was dropped from consideration. Instead, through a family friend, he got a municipal job, manning the Alewife Brook Sewerage Pumping Station. When that lasted barely a month, he took another dead-end position, raking leaves and sweeping walkways in Blackstone Park. For a time in midsummer he worked as a busboy in the Pavilion Room of the Sheraton-Boston Hotel, but lost that after three weeks when he violated a rule against hanging around the hotel on his day off. The Self-Development Group referred him to jobs as a radio-TV repairman and a pantry steward at the Harvard Medical School, but neither panned out. Through late summer and early fall Freddie was unemployed.

He didn’t care for his parole officer, a Latino named Juan Snowden, whom he called “the wrong kind of dude.” At first, Freddie reported regularly, but as the months went by he often remained out of touch for weeks on end. After he missed several appointments, Snowden tried in vain to reach him at home. Things came to a head on November 23, when he failed to appear once again. The next morning Freddie called in an agitated state. Snowden confronted him with his missed appointment, saying he was “tired of excuses.” Freddie explained that he was deeply upset about his sisters’ disappearance and asked Snowden to give him a lift to a place he’d heard one sister was hiding out. Sensing that his client was losing control, the parole officer told him to wait right there, he’d be over in a minute. But when Snowden got to Methunion Manor, Freddie was gone.

Distraught over Little Rachel’s alliance with Horace, Freddie had decided to take matters into his own hands. From behind the housing project he dug up a 22 caliber pistol he’d buried three months before and told a friend he was going up to Massachusetts Avenue to “get my sister back from the dude.” At the last moment, he thought better of this plan.

The next day—Thanksgiving—Freddie spent the afternoon at Alva’s house enjoying the goose and sweet potato pie. Then he joined the other guests at Susan Page’s party. Downstairs in the recreation room he met a young white woman named Marianne.

Marianne was a thirty-one-year-old graduate student and college teacher with impressive credentials. A 1969 graduate of the University of Maryland, she
had a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, had completed all her requirements, except the dissertation, for a Ph.D. in economics from Yale, and had spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Bangladesh Institute of Economic Research. After returning to the United States in 1975, she began teaching economic principles and international economics at Boston State College, while continuing her research at Harvard.

But Marianne had another life—as a dedicated Marxist. Her experience in Bangladesh had left her with the conviction that former colonial powers were systematically exploiting Third World peoples; back home she saw countless parallels in the treatment white America accorded its black, Hispanic, and other minorities. With little prior experience in political organization, she determined to enlist in the “socialist struggle,” and began scanning Boston’s radical spectrum for a group to which she could devote her formidable energies.

Her search ended in February 1976 when she attended a lecture by E. P. Thompson, the celebrated British Marxist. His address was followed by commentaries from several Boston Marxists, among them Michael Hirsch, organizer of the Boston branch of a tiny Trotskyist sect called International Socialists. IS, as it was known, concentrated its activity in the industrial realm, working to establish “opposition caucuses” within labor unions. At the time of the Thompson lecture, the branch had only eleven members, most of them young and working-class, all of them white. In early March, Marianne joined up.

Marianne’s passion was the race issue. That was fine with her new comrades, who had long sought some way for the organization to grapple with America’s racial crisis. Seeking principally to recruit white workers, it found issues like busing and affirmative action potentially divisive. Not surprisingly, it had concentrated on “Third World” causes as remote as possible from Boston: leading a campaign to expose the South African investments of the First National Bank of Boston, collecting clothing to send to guerrillas in Zimbabwe, and working to free Gary Tyler, a black teenager serving a life sentence for the 1974 killing of a white youth in Louisiana.

In the spring of 1976, Marianne was named the branch’s “black coordinator,” a position she took very seriously. Teaching only part-time at Boston State, she could devote plenty of time to IS business, seeking to rally Boston blacks to her agenda. One IS member recalls, “She put in a lot of time, but it just wasn’t working. Boston blacks didn’t give a damn about some kid in Louisiana or guerrillas in Zimbabwe. Moreover, Marianne, like the rest of us, was white. We were viewed with suspicion, and rightfully so.”

Marianne carried this commitment into her personal life. That summer she fell in love with a thirty-three-year-old black man who claimed to be a Panther fugitive. When he told Marianne that he needed $2,000, she gave it to him. Warning that the guy was a “con artist,” Mike Hirsch ordered her not to give him any more.

In her capacity as “black coordinator,” Marianne became involved with
Alva Debnam’s struggle on Centre Street. That spring she sat in several times at the Debnam house, and later she met Susan Page, who invited IS members to her Thanksgiving-night party. Marianne planned to go with Rob, who headed the branch’s work on the Gary Tyler campaign.

On Thursday, Mike Hirsch had Rob and several other branch members to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. With plenty of wine and grass, they were all high as kites by nightfall. Rob didn’t feel like going all the way across town to the party, so he called Marianne to beg off. Then Mike got on the phone to tell Marianne she didn’t have to go—it wasn’t an official duty, it was just a party. Of course, the branch needed all the black contacts it could get, so it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Marianne said she’d go. She’d already baked a pecan pie to take with her. Moreover, it was part of her job; she ought to be there.

Dressed in a heavy red sweater, blue maxi-skirt, and high leather boots, Marianne drove her 1968 van into Hyde Park, arriving at the Page house at about 10:00 p.m. At around midnight, Freddie Twymon asked her to dance, and for about forty-five minutes they moved together to the disco beat. Onlookers later testified in court that they seemed to be getting along very well.

At about 1:00 a.m. Marianne was ready to leave. “Anybody need a lift to Cambridge?” she asked. “I do,” said Freddie, explaining that he lived in Cambridgeport, an enclave on the Charles River. Unfamiliar with Hyde Park, Marianne wasn’t sure which route to take, but Freddie said he was a cabdriver and would show her the way.

Twenty minutes later, as they turned onto Shawmut Avenue in the South End, Marianne asked, “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Just do what I tell you.”

Freddie directed her into a darkened parking lot. Suddenly, he reached over and grabbed the keys. Opening the driver’s door, he pushed her out. Then he jumped out and grabbed her around the neck.

“Freddie!” she cried. “Don’t do it!”

“Shut up,” he said. “Do what I tell you.”

She tried to get away, but he tightened his grip around her throat, pushing her through narrow alleys and darkened playgrounds. At one point she spotted a car with its motor running and two shadowy figures inside. Hoping to attract the occupants’ attention, she jerked away from Freddie, but he quickly corralled her again, grasping her harshly across the shoulder. “If you had cooperated,” he growled, “it could all be over by now.”

At the front door to Methunion Manor, Freddie let them in with a key. Then—as Marianne later testified in court—he pulled her into the elevator, took her to the basement laundry room, and ordered her to get undressed. Once she’d removed her skirt, sweater, green tights, panties, and boots, he told her to lie down on the laundry table and had intercourse with her.

Then he made her get dressed again, pulled her back onto the elevator, and
rode to the sixth floor, where he directed her onto a stairwell landing. There he licked her vagina, had her take his penis in her mouth, had intercourse with her once again, then smeared his own excrement on his buttocks and made her lick it off.

After that, he took her across the sixth-floor hallway to the other landing and raped her on the cement floor.

Next he took her back down to the laundry room and made her lie down on the floor, where he raped her again, then forced her to masturbate while he masturbated.

“You didn’t come yet,” he said. “Why haven’t you come?”

“You do a good job,” she reassured him. “Sometimes I don’t come.”

Abruptly he told her to kneel against the wall while he urinated across her breasts.

Next he took her out into an alley behind the building and raped her on a car fender.

Leading her back into the laundry room, he had her lie down on the table and shoved a fabric-softener bottle up her vagina until she cried out in pain.

“What do you want me to do?” she exclaimed. “What else do you want to do?”

“You’re going to stay here until you have an orgasm,” Freddie said.

But a few minutes later he changed his mind. “I’m going to let you go,” he said. Opening the basement door, he told her to walk straight ahead. Threading her way through an alley, she found her van in the parking lot and drove back to Cambridge.

Reaching her apartment near Harvard Square at about 6:00 a.m., she stripped off her soiled clothing, took a hot shower, and applied contraceptive jelly around the diaphragm she’d worn all night. Then she collapsed into bed. When she woke several hours later, she went to the Harvard Community Health Plan for a physical. The next day, she and her roommate drove through the South End until they identified the building where the rape had taken place. But perhaps out of a woman’s reluctance to discuss her experience with male officers, perhaps out of a Trotskyist’s distaste for mobilizing the powers of the capitalist state against a poor black man, Marianne waited until noon Monday before going to the police. Later that afternoon she accompanied Detectives Farrell and Twohig to Methunion Manor.

Arraigned on November 30, Freddie was held at Charles Street Jail until his family came up with the $2,500 cash bail.

It was a terrible week for Rachel. A great sorrow and a great rage surged within her and she couldn’t quite tell them apart. Frederick’s arrest was bad enough, but the crime with which he was accused was more than she could bear. To a woman who prided herself on her church attendance and bourgeois respectability, rape seemed the most horrible of all offenses. To a lifelong integrationist and follower of Martin Luther King, rape of a white woman was
a repudiation of everything she believed. At moments she wondered whether Freddie hadn’t done this just to humiliate her.

Yet her anger at Little Rachel and Cassandra was, if anything, more powerful than her distress over Freddie’s arrest. For the girls had openly defied, even humiliated, her by choosing to live with Alva. After consulting her boss, David Dretler, Rachel filed an application that week with the Boston Juvenile Court asking that she be relieved of all responsibility for her daughters. The application—under Massachusetts’ “Child in Need of Services” law—would give the court authority to remove the girls from their mother’s home and place them in a setting where they could receive the services and discipline they required.

The court sent each girl a notice, announcing that her mother was seeking to designate her a “stubborn” child—namely, “a child below the age of seventeen who persistently refuses to obey the lawful and reasonable commands of his parents or legal guardian, thereby resulting in said parents’ or guardian’s inability to adequately care for and protect the child.” The court appointed a public defender—Sandy Brushart—to represent the girls’ interest.