My Mother Lived and Fought History’s Trenches

We had a service for my mother, Karen Saum, yesterday. She died May 9. She was 89. And she was a fighter.

From her birth in 1935 until her senior year of high school my mother lived in the city of Colón, a global melting pot on the Caribbean coast of Panama. Her father was an engineer for the Panama Canal. At that time, almost all American families lived in the canal zone, but not my mother’s. They lived in Panama proper, but my mother went to American schools.

The family’s maid hailed from Jamaica, a descendent of Caribbean slavery. Her name was Clementine, and the old, faded photos of her show a big, strong woman – a woman who left a lifelong impression on my mother. For my mother it was all a kind of innate lesson in colonialism she couldn’t possibly get from a book. And it stuck.

Mom finished high school at Mount Tamalpais High School in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, and went to Stanford, where she met my father, who was teaching at Stanford.

Two boys and a few years later, my mother was all of 24 when my father was fired from his teaching job at George Washington University for having been a member of the Communist Party while in graduate school at Harvard. My mother sat beside my father – with me and my older brother Peter on her knees – when my father testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was a long way from the Panama Canal.

Mom went on to get an all-but-dissertation in history from Johns Hopkins, all while raising three boys. I don’t know when my mother started protesting the Vietnam War, but it was before the November 22, 1963 Kennedy assassination ruined the 29th birthday of my mother’s new partner, Lynda Simmons, an architect who later became president of Phipps Houses, the largest non-profit housing builder in New York City. Lynda died February 8, three months and a day before my mom passed.

There were all of six people, myself included, at my mom’s first Vietnam protest, and it came years before the anti-war movement became a powerful force in the American landscape.

From there Mom dove into the civil rights movement, marching down south with King, and with Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael). She had a second-row seat to the growing conflict between a radicalizing King and a more quickly radicalizing Stokely.

Mom didn’t just study history. She lived it. And she taught it. She taught at Brooklyn College and Manhattan College in the 1960s. In New York City, down south, across the country, and around the world, history was alive and afire.

In 1968, my two brothers, my mother, my mother’s new partner and I sailed on the Holland America line from Montreal to Southampton, England, where we picked up a Volkswagen camper bus that became our home for the next year as we traveled through Europe.

We were in Florence November 5, 1968, when Nixon beat Humphrey by .7%, throwing a pall over our visit to that great 2,000-year-old city, and when we arrived in Greece, by ferry from Italy, our mother admonished my brothers and me to not speak ill of the junta that had taken power in Greece the year before and would rule Greece until 1974.  In Vienna our mother sent me and my brothers to a Viennese public school, without a word of German between us.

We sailed to Alexandria, Egypt and rode a train to Cairo, past farmers irrigating fields with ox-driven irrigation, as they had for thousands of years.

Less than a year after the Six-Day War, sandbag machine-gun nests were not uncommon on the streets of Cairo. And in Giza, my brothers and I rode a camel before the great 2,500-year-old pyramids. It was heady stuff for a 10-year-old.

After Europe my brothers and I went to live with our father in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Mom moved to Maine, where she spent the next 55 years, the rest of her life. She taught at the University of Maine in Augusta (UMA), where she was quietly let go, for Vietnam activism, for gay rights activism, for her own sexuality, for radical, unconventional teaching – take your pick.

Mom eventually found her way to H.O.M.E. Co-op in Orland, Maine. H.O.M.E. Co-op is a community of, for and by the rural poor of Maine, the northern frontier of rural Appalachia poverty. It was founded by Lucy Poulin, a former Carmelite nun who took seriously the gospel’s fight for the poor, and my mother, who was raised Catholic, had finally found her, well, home.

At H.O.M.E. Co-op my mother founded and ran the Rural Education Program (REP), a groundbreaking program that brought college to the rural working poor, especially women, and single mothers. At Mom’s service yesterday, in the H.O.M.E. Co-op chapel, a decades-long friend of my mother told of how Mom helped get her out of prison and into the REP – all of which changed her life.

Another service attendee, a Vietnam vet, was a student of my mother at UMA, 50-plus years ago, and he told of my mother’s role in his radicalization, and how my mother corresponded with him through his 18 years in the federal hellhole dungeons known as supermaxes – much of it in solitary. My mother’s letters helped get him through.

My mother spent her life in the trenches of history and the trenches of social change.

I can scarcely begin to recount how many times my mother, in her waning years, told me she was afraid she’d never get into heaven because she had never spent a night in jail.

Well, I think that sentiment alone should be enough. In fact, I know it is. Goodbye, Mom. We miss you. And we could damn sure use a few more like you.

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