A Taste of Power by Elaine Brown

Author:Elaine Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

Dismissing Eldridge from my mind and focusing on the strength of the Vietnamese for the duration of our two-week stay brought the alleviation of understanding. So many of them had died and would die for their independence.

There were the young guerrilla girls we met on the beach at the Gulf of Tonkin, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, up from Saigon for a rest, girls who should have been giggling about boys or lipstick or hairstyles. There were the children we met whose bodies had been maimed by napalm, and those who had only one arm or one leg, the missing limbs destroyed by U.S. bombs. There were the stalwart old women who had lost everyone in their families in U.S. troop destructions of their villages.

So, there would be many Jonathans. There would be more bloodshed and suffering. Perhaps Eldridge was right, I thought. Perhaps we should force the thing fast to its inevitable, ultimate confrontation. No, I decided, Eldridge was wrong. Ours was truly a vanguard organization, a small unit in a big endeavor, whose purpose was to trigger a step-by-step revolutionary process, to clarify the issues, develop the mass mind, solidify a base of struggle, prepare our people to achieve freedom as nonantagonistically as possible—or to prevail in a conflict decided by bloodshed.

—

We were still not returning to the United States. We were now, according to Eldridge’s private arrangements, going to Beijing. We would stay only one week, Eldridge promised, a few of his cherished delegates having found the fortitude to suggest they had to return to their lives. I had been gone from my baby for over two months.

I put on my happy, diplomatic face and found that Beijing in early autumn was not too burdensome. Even as I dragged myself around to the factories and hospitals and new housing developments, I was challenged by the enthusiasm of the Chinese people. Old and young would spontaneously give emotional testimonies, like Baptist converts, to the glories of socialism. There was a refrain, it seemed:

If it hadn’t been for Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, I never would have lived in a house of brick…

If it hadn’t been for Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, I never would have eaten meat and vegetables, or educated myself and my children, or had running water, or medical care…

They affirmed that, but for the revolution, they would not have had the possibility of a decent life. Most of them would have lived and died eating the garbage of the feudal landlords for whom they had toiled, simply surviving the brutalities of the landlords and the warlords and the opium wars and the invading armies of eight different colonizing nations, never imagining happiness.

—

In comparison to the clean crispness of Beijing, Algiers, a crumbling, dirty city, was a disaster. It was also a study in contradictions, eight years after liberation from French colonialism. As we rode along the highway abutting the Mediterranean, all the signs were in French. Along the streets, however, women were babbling in Arabic, still hidden behind the veil.

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