YIPPIE GIRL

Gumbo delivers a sharp-edged memoir of years of protest and resistance.

“In addition to being a child of communists, an immigrant, a pot smoking Jewish Yippie, a friend to Black Panthers, a woman who slept with America’s enemy, a prime suspect in a famous bombing, and a woman who tried to bend her gender boundaries, I’ve also had an abortion,” writes Gumbo, whose last name owes to a pun by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. She was and did all those things, indeed, having left her native Canada to attend a conference in the Bay Area and fallen in with the burgeoning radical left. The Cleaver pun comes from her relationship with Stew Alpert (stew/gumbo), with whose memory the author spars throughout the book as lovers and occasional antagonists. Indeed, Gumbo, striking often angry tones, comes off as a scrapper without much room for compromise or debate, which she cheerfully attributes to the “Stalinist Discipline” her parents instilled in her and which she says “served me well—especially in the anarchic world of Yippie.” Gumbo became a roving ambassador for the Youth International Party, visiting Vietnam (where she began a long relationship with a North Vietnamese poet) and Russia (where, she notes, longhairs were dissed just as much as they were in America). Along the way, and surprisingly early on, she earned a hefty FBI file but managed to elude most of their attempts to rein her in. After a time, she struck out on her own as a leader of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. “In the before times,” she writes, “you could use the word terrorist as satire without fear of surveillance, arrest or being cancelled by your peers.” Her eventful book concludes with a sad litany of the dead of the era: Cleaver, Alpert, Rubin, Hoffman, Ochs, and many others.

A welcome addition to the literature of radical activism in the age of Johnson, Nixon, and beyond.