"When can you come over? We need to talk," V said. I asked what was up. V wouldn't say.

Some things V simply refused to discuss over the phone

It was the middle of the Reagan years. The White House was running an illegal war from its basement and paying for the war with arms sales to Iran and cocaine smuggling. Bodies of impoverished peasants were strewn across Central America, killed by troops trained by the US and armed with US weapons

I met V only because I had finally decided I really had to do more and so wandered into a small meeting in town. The oldest among them had been active since the 30s. Y, a bit younger and the real leader of the group, had takenher young children in strollers to the first small anti-Vietnam-War protest in the early 60s. I suspect V still bore indelible psychic scars from 1968

I had by then been putting up posters and carting projectors around campus for a year or more, trying to stir up interest in anti-apartheid work. Behind the scenes, and unknown to me, Y's group had been organizing around the same issue, and they actually knew what they were doing. Six months or so after I first walked into their group, they had a thousand show at an anti-apartheid event

V, of course, wouldn't ever talk about certain matters over the phone because he simply assumed someone could be listening uninvited. He didn't seem particularly paranoid about the possibility but believed it came with the territory: if you were effective, somebody would badly want to shut you down; you couldn't always keep such people from finding out what you were were doing, but there was no reason to hand them your plans nicely wrapped with pretty bow; let them expend time and manpower trying to learn

O believed in making friends: once (O told me) a friend who worked for the telephone company had found a few extra wires with something or other on O's phone line and had thoughtfully removed them before remembering to ask O if that was alright. O thought it was alright. Naturally, I had no way to verify this: it might have been a fable with some moral about friendship

U relayed some stories too. Back in the Nixon era, a copy of FBI guys jingled the front doorbell to explain that people who didn't support government policy tended to lose their scholarship money. Somewhat later, a person U had never met approached with a proposal to provide a small amount of an illegal high explosive with the idea that U could use it to show the government didn't track the stuff carefully enough -- but U, for some unexplained reason, thought this suggestion smelled like an entrapment and successfully encouraged the fellow to be gone

They all voted, but without illusions. Y remembered a day spent registering voters, after which a quick peek at the forms revealed almost all the registrants were Republicans; she handed the forms in, as required by law, but Y believed we should learn from our mistakes. They taught me a bit about lobbying on the Hill, and a bit about approaching the local Republican Congressman. But Joe Hill and Mother Jones lived in their hearts

"Look," I remember V saying, "whether we win or lose an election, we're going to do the same thing: organize! It may be easier or harder, depending on who's in power, but it will still be the same struggle"

I don't remember anymore how many times V asked me to come for dinner instead of talking on the phone, nor do I remember when we discussed what. We were supporting the ANC, which the US then officially considered a terrorist organization, and we were supporting the Sandinistas, similarly regarded. But the caution was tactical: don't hand your opponents your plans nicely wrapped with pretty bow! They all kept their noses clean

It was a long time ago. And I find some of them now only in my memory. I imagine Y beside a table set at the gates of heaven, encouraging the throngs streaming past to learn about today's issues, sign a petition, and then take more substantial action