AS A STUDENT at the University of Toronto in the 1960s, Rory “Gus” Sinclair gave money to draft dodgers and marched on the American consulate in Toronto to protest the Vietnam War. He demonstrated against campus recruiters from Dow Chemical because the company made napalm. He studied Marx. After graduating, he hitchhiked to the Yukon and worked in an asbestos mine, then made one of those trips around the world that is only possible when you’re young and fearless and broke. He scraped through China, India, and Europe, reading a dog-eared copy of an Abbie Hoffman book along the way. When he returned in 1969, he thought the time was right to create something that would bring meaning to his life. He wanted to start a commune.
Toronto nourished a vibrant counterculture centered on the small downtown neighborhood of Yorkville, which served as a magnet for student dropouts and American draft dodgers, miniskirted flower children and self proclaimed visionaries. There were plenty of drugs and free love and music, and it was easy to believe that the world could be remade on a wave of spirituality and enlightened thinking. Sinclair tapped into this heady optimism, seeking friends and college acquaintances who might be interested in a communal social experiment. The house would run on good socialist principles. Money would be put into a pot, and no one would go hungry. A rundown row house was rented in downtown Toronto in the midst of porno shops and liquor stores. In the first year, like-minded radicals drifted in and out of the house, but a core group eventually formed. It was an unusual mix of rich kids and poor ones, straights and gays, Catholics and Protestants, the nephew of a Nazi officer and the son of Jews who survived Bergen-Belsen. They were energized by the protest and politics of the era: they opposed the Vietnam War and despised any form of imperialism or colonialism; they distrusted government, scoffed at religion, and demonized parents; they believed that poverty was immoral, racism was a scourge, and business was corrupt.
While the commune’s antiestablishment views may have attracted its eight to ten members, the group was held together by a charismatic woman who became its leader.
Lisa Peters was petite, with a square face and long dark hair.* She was not especially pretty and was certainly not feminine. She smoked and cursed and spoke loudly. Her grammar was poor and she shunned makeup and was proud that she never wore a dress for a man. She hated to have her picture taken because she was self-conscious about her nose. She had few material possessions and little money. What she had, however, was unflinching self-confidence, a riotous laugh, barbed opinions, and fearlessness. “I’d go toe-to-toe with God,” she would say.
Her dramatic life story enhanced her mystique. As she told other members of the commune, she grew up in the small rural town of Emsdale in northern Ontario, about 140 miles from Toronto. Her mother died during childbirth, and she had been raised by an abusive, alcoholic father. He was a boxer turned evangelist, and he blamed Lisa for his wife’s death. They lived in poverty, their home heated by a woodstove. After Lisa refused confirmation in their church, she ran away from home when she was fourteen. She ended up on the streets of Toronto in the working-class Cabbagetown neighborhood, so named because Irish immigrants in the 1840s planted cabbages around their shacks. Lisa hung out with “rounders,” neighborhood toughs who liked to hot-wire cars and commit petty crimes. At seventeen she got pregnant. Still carrying her baby, she married a man who was not the child’s father. One day she looked at herself in the mirror, realized she could not stand the tedium of married life, and bolted from the union. Her son, Martin, was subsequently born, and she raised him by herself. She made some money working as a maid and nanny, but Lisa—ill educated, dirt poor, alone—lived on the edge. She described eating ice cubes to feed herself so she’d have money to feed her son.
Her cohorts in the commune, well educated and cultivated, were captivated by this game survivor from the grotty seams of Toronto. Her childhood scars sometimes surfaced in poignant moments. She was, for example, dedicated to giving other members of the group the perfect Christmas gift. This passion, she explained, stemmed from an experience she had as a ten-year-old. She had asked her father for a pair of white ice skates for Christmas, envisioning a sleek pair of women’s figure skates. When she opened the gift, she found instead an old pair of boy’s hockey skates, covered with a heavy coat of white house paint. When she recounted this story years later, disappointment and pain still etched her face.
But it was Lisa’s intensity that enabled her to touch other people’s lives. When Gus Sinclair met her, he mentioned to her that his father drank, using the same line he gave everyone else: “He has a small drinking problem, but it doesn’t affect me.” His father, in fact, was an alcoholic, given to binge drinking of rum, and that was a source of insecurity and shame to the young man. Lisa looked at him hard, then gently said, “Oh yeah, tell me about it.” Sinclair realized that somehow she knew the truth, that he had been lying to others and even to himself about his father. For the first time, he expressed his pained feelings; Lisa leaned forward, listening intently to every word.
She had a way of cutting to the quick. One of Martin’s friends, Sean Cunningham, spent considerable time at the commune. Sean had received a Catholic education, and one day, when he was thirteen, he confided to Lisa that he disagreed with the church’s position on abortion. Without skipping a beat, Lisa said, “Good. You tell me what you think about it.” Her openness was exhilarating and she praised Sean’s wit; the teenager was enthralled. Sean had grown up in a troubled home, and now he knew Lisa, who laughed uproariously, talked candidly about sex, and never appeared to be wrong. Lisa sat in the corner of an L-shaped sectional couch, watching television or leading discussions, and Sean cherished the moments when he could curl up next to her.
Everyone in the commune needed Lisa in some way. She met Eitel Renbaum while she was volunteering at a drug intervention center for Toronto youths. Renbaum was eighteen, a heavy user of speed, and given to surly outbursts to anyone who tried to straighten him out. But Lisa admired his headstrong attitude. When she chastised him for using speed, he ridiculed her for experimenting with pot. He resisted her help, screaming invectives and trying to scare her off as he had others. But Lisa persuaded him to stay at the apartment where she lived with her son and Terry Swinton. (The commune’s members had not consolidated under one roof yet.) Renbaum could remain, however, only if he stayed off drugs. Lisa helped him through long nights of paranoid visions and delusions, and he appeared to be on the right track.
But Lisa also had a febrile temper, and when Renbaum had a relapse, she ripped him to shreds. “You dumb son of a bitch!” she screamed. “I said you could come into my house, but you couldn’t hit up. Everyone else says, ‘Poor guy.’ But now you’re out on your ass. Fuck off!” Lisa, however, did not abandon her project. She sent Renbaum to the row house where Sinclair and others were living, and Renbaum finally did kick his habit. He stayed in the commune for many years, and other members of the group credited Lisa with saving his life.
A year after the commune was established, the group became bored with Canada and decided it was time to bestow good deeds on other parts of the world. Sinclair had been to Malaysia before—and that seemed as good a spot as any. Through a contact in the embassy in Ottawa, they thought they could find jobs there in a school or a health clinic. So five members of the group plus a child—Lisa’s son—sold their possessions, got their typhoid shots, and packed their bags. They had a stopover in London, where they slept in Hyde Park for an afternoon. They knocked around England for almost a week, crossed the English Channel, and made it to Brussels by bus. On their flight to Kuala Lumpur, they had to stop in New Delhi, where the city’s raw poverty was clear even in the airport. Lisa, in tears at the sight of bedraggled women and homeless children, gave all the money in her pocket to a woman in the ladies’ bathroom handing out paper towels. Communism, she concluded, was the only thing that could save India.
This scaled-down Canadian Peace Corps finally arrived in Kuala Lumpur, but the teaching or health care jobs never materialized. They had no contacts and no way to support themselves. In desperation, they decided to do something contrary to everything they believed in: they opened a business, demonstrating the resourcefulness that would mark all their endeavors.
They needed something to sell, so they looked around their new city and realized that colorful “batiks,” or fabrics dyed with removable wax, were made in Malaysia. The material was used for shirts, dresses, headpieces, and other apparel, and they were popular with Toronto’s youth culture. Terry Swinton, the son of a successful businessman, wrote to his father to borrow some extra cash, and a new business Five Believers’ Batiks Ltd.—was born. (The name derives from an obscure Bob Dylan song, “Obviously, Five Believers.”) The new entrepreneurs knew nothing about fashion, marketing, distribution, pricing, or exporting. Even mailing a letter back home was tricky. But they instructed the remaining three members of the commune in Toronto to rent an inexpensive storefront, while the Malaysian group set off to buy fabrics and find tailors. It was summer, and the goal was to have merchandise ready for sale by the Christmas season. The first tailor they hired, a Malay, could only make traditional Malay men’s shirts. He delivered a dozen caftans to the Canadians, but they were all too big. The group hired a more flexible Chinese tailor instead. When the first shipment was finally sent to Canada, the Toronto partners discovered that the Malaysian group had not put labels in the garments identifying country of origin and providing washing instructions. So they spent the night in an airport warehouse, printing labels by hand and sewing them on each piece of clothing. The items made it to their store for Christmas, and decent sales financed a new shipment.
Over time, the commune rotated members to Malaysia so that no one would be stuck there for more than a few years at a time. The Toronto side of the business scoured fashion magazines for apparel ideas, then every few months sent over a new order that included photographs and drawings. The Malaysian side made a sample of each new style and sent it back to Toronto for approval. Toronto also replenished older stock that was selling well. The business gradually migrated to larger storefronts and eventually settled in a shop in Yorkville Village, where the sex accessory stores and coffeehouses were beginning to give way to fancy boutiques. The store featured resplendent displays of bright fabrics and clothing set off smartly by chocolate-brown carpeting, stucco walls, and antique dressers. Sometimes the company’s ambitions outstripped its judgment. New stores in the United States—in Southampton on Long Island and in Palm Beach, Florida—fared poorly and were closed. But Five Believers’ Batiks tapped into new markets in Canada by selling its product wholesale to large retailers such as Hudson’s Bay Company. Five Believers’ best year, 1976, produced a profit of more than C$50,000.
This windfall played a vital role in the commune’s history, for it was used as down payment on a twenty-seven-room English manor on Walmer Road in downtown Toronto. Designed and built at the turn of the century by Eden Smith, a well-known Toronto architect, the house was expensive—C$190,000—but it gave the group its first true communal environment. The new occupants lovingly restored and modified the house and its grounds of more than an acre. They papered the gabled third-floor rooms in small Williamsburg prints; burned off the old exterior paint and applied purple brown and smoky-rose colors with putty trim; installed a three by-six foot skylight in the television room; sanded and polyurethaned all the exposed wood floors; installed a butcher’s block and ceramic tile counters in the kitchen and painted wildflowers on the cabinet doors; and made a gigantic copper hood for a restaurant size griddle and stove. They restored the garden by digging up and carefully replacing hundreds of limestone rocks that had been part of the original garden; they planted dozens of rhododendrons, azaleas, and flowering shrubs, then resodded the whole area. On the far hill, they designed and built a Japanese teahouse, and they used free truckloads of cobblestones from Toronto’s streets to make a spectacular patio and steps at the rear of the house.
The house became the self-contained world that the commune craved. Its members rarely went to movies or plays, and they avoided socializing with anyone outside their circle, coveting their secrecy. Most of the men and women paired off. Dating or sexual activity outside the house was forbidden. Sinclair never had a partner in the commune and was therefore celibate for eighteen years, until he left. Six foot fences surrounded the house, and when a knock was heard at the door, someone peered out a second-story window and alerted the group to the visitor. Phone calls were screened. Showing up at the house with a friend was considered an unforgivable breach of privacy, equivalent to inviting a stranger into your bathroom when a family member was taking a bath. Communications with parents were cut off. Sam Chaiton once sent postcards to his parents in Canada, but he gave them to friends who were going to France. They were to mail the cards back to Canada to persuade Chaiton’s parents that their son had moved to Europe.
The commune did not want anyone to know how many people lived in the house or what the relationship of each member was to the other. Lisa’s son was trained to call everyone in the house “aunt” or “uncle” in the presence of outsiders. Members would come and go through a service entrance, not the front door. Mary Newberry worked in a convenience store for eight years without telling anyone where she lived or whom she lived with. Such information was never disclosed. Only one resident of the house was listed in the phone book.
Lisa’s influence grew over time. The group had one checking account, and Lisa, needing to approve expenditures, effectively controlled the purse strings. She decided what they ate for dinner and what television shows they watched. (She liked game shows and talk shows.) She insisted that the house be spotless, instructing others to wrap a cloth around a kitchen knife to clean corners, a trick she learned working as a maid. Terry Swinton’s sister, Kathy, copied the way Lisa smacked her gum. Lisa never drank alcohol or used drugs; thus, no one else drank alcohol or used drugs. She also determined who stayed and who left the commune. She summarily kicked out Bob Bartolomei when he was in Kuala Lumpur because he had personality clashes with other members of the group. She sent him C$500 and told him he could return to any city in North America except Toronto.
Her political views shaped conversations inside the house. Lisa loved to read or talk about conspiracy theories, such as a secret relationship between the Ford Motor Company and the Nazi war machine. A favorite book was The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, by Matthew Josephson, describing the abusive tactics of America’s early industrial titans. Her outrage was also triggered by the historical injustices against black people of any nationality, but particularly black Americans.
Before the commune was formed, Lisa had taken a trip to America’s South, meeting blacks in blues clubs in Mississippi, Alabama, and elsewhere. She identified with the struggles of African Americans, and she loved their music. Blues artists like Lightnin’ Hopkins, Brownie McGhee, and Mississippi John Hurt were played repeatedly in the house. The commune read books by or about Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, among other black subjects. Lisa believed that black Americans bore the pernicious legacy of slavery and that they still suffered beneath the heel of a racist white majority. With access and opportunity, blacks would flourish, but they lacked adequate education, housing, and employment. Lisa admired black men who would not be intimidated. All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, by Theodore Rosengarten, was the story of a poor black cotton farmer in Alabama, and provided a rambling first-person account of his life, giving it an authentic, bluesy tone.* The son of a slave, Shaw in 1932 faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor’s livestock, but he paid a heavy price for his defiance. He was shot three times and was sent to prison for twelve years. As Shaw explained: “The nigger was disrecognized; the white man in this country had everything fixed and mapped out. Didn’t allow no niggers to stand arm and arm together. The rule worked just like it had always worked: they was against me definitely just like they was against those Scottsboro boys … The nigger’s voice just wasn’t substantious to stand up for hisself.” Nate Shaw had died by the time Lisa read All God’s Dangers. But she soon found another book about racial injustice in which the victim was very much alive.
By 1979, the commune had shut down the batik business as the spandex craze cut into sales of funky cotton apparel. Searching for a fresh moneymaker, the group met an inventor who had patented a device that would save gas. The contraption was to induce turbulence in the gasoline entering the combustion chamber, which would somehow produce a cleaner, more efficient burn of the gas vapors. Several members in the commune began looking for factory space to mass produce the gadget, but before any serious money was invested, they had the sense to test it at an Environmental Protection Agency lab in Brooklyn, New York.
The miracle device turned out to be a bust when EPA tests proved it did not save gas. But while visiting the lab, the Canadians met a black teenager from Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of Brooklyn’s worst ghettos, who was working at the lab on an internship financed by the city. Lesra Martin was more interested in playing tag or shooting his water pistol at friends than doing EPA work, but he was intrigued by the group of white foreigners who were visiting the lab.
Lesra, who was fifteen years old but barely five feet tall, and a friend named William Fuller began following the group around the EPA facilities. Their English was poor, and the Canadians struggled to understand them. But they were charmed by the teens’ good humor and high spirits. One day Lisa, Renbaum, and Swinton offered Lesra a ride home. The drive turned into a journey of despair. The Canadians saw entire streets of desolation, where mattresses, garbage cans, and broken bottles were strewn all over. When they reached Lesra’s home, he mentioned that the boarded-up building next door housed drug addicts and winos.
When Lisa and the rest of the crew returned to Toronto, they could not stop thinking about Lesra and William. The commune had helped Canadians in need, but could it do the same for two black youths in Brooklyn? The group decided to invite Lesra and William to visit Toronto for a long weekend, coinciding with an annual Caribbean festival. The youngsters were dazzled by the well-appointed surroundings. After they returned home, the commune made its boldest move yet. It wanted, in effect, to adopt Lesra, to bring him to Toronto to save him from his environment. William’s family was relatively stable and prosperous compared to Lesra’s. His parents, Earl and Alma Martin, had eight children, but both adults had a drinking problem and were on welfare. The family lived on the fourth floor of a condemned building that still housed eight families. The Canadians, returning to Bedford-Stuyvesant, bought Lesra a new television set to show their generosity. They appealed to his parents that their son was better off in Toronto. He needed a structured home environment and focused instruction if he—like his biblical namesake, Lazarus—was going to rise above the ashes of his surroundings. The Martins agreed, so Lesra headed north.
Lesra’s arrival transformed the commune. Suddenly, eight adults channeled their energy into repairing the youngster’s varied maladies. They bought him his first pair of prescription glasses, literally bringing his life into focus. They cut back his consumption of sugar to relieve nagging headaches. Antibiotics solved a runny nose while an improved diet helped him grow. A broken front tooth was capped. They called him the “ghetto urchin.”
Lesra’s guardians wanted to expose him to the world beyond the ghetto. They encouraged him to walk barefoot on the grass of a wooded ravine, so he could feel the softness of his new home compared to the glass-strewn streets of Brooklyn. New clothing brought comfort, and accessories evoked richness. Lesra soon had a velour bathrobe, Italian shoes, a sheepskin coat, and a gold bracelet. He learned to drive on the commune’s Mercedes-Benz.
Lisa lavished attention on Lesra. When she wasn’t actually with him, she spoke incessantly of his education, his physique, his clothes, or his health. In the social hierarchy of the house, whoever sat next to Lisa on the couch was in special favor, and now Lesra had that spot. She would spontaneously hug him, smother him in playful kisses, snuggle with him before bedtime, drape an arm around him while he was reading, and lean against him on walks in the garden. Her physical affection for Lesra prompted speculation among other housemates of a sexual relationship between the two—a relationship that struck some as inappropriate, given Lisa’s role as leader of the commune. In one of the few group pictures of the commune, Lesra and Lisa are sitting next to each other on the couch, holding hands.
While he was being assimilated into a white world, Lesra did not leave the ghetto behind. In fact, he was encouraged to play up his streetwise persona. He liked to hunch up his shoulders, pull his cap over his eyes, and stick his hands in his pockets antics that were playfully mimicked by others in the commune. When Lesra saw a Cadillac go by, he would say, “There go pimp.” When his guardians saw a Cadillac, they would echo, “There go pimp.” The Canadians wanted him to understand and celebrate black culture. They gave him a statue of an African drummer, observed a “soulful Christmas” by eating chitterlings, beans, and greens, and played Christmas carols by Ray Charles. Lesra was encouraged to dance and rap in front of the group. In a Superman rap, he chanted:
Me and Supe Had a Fight
Hit ’em in the head with a kryptonite.
Hit ’em so hard I bust his brain
And now I’m bustin’ out Lois Lane.
While Lesra basked in all the attention, he was in Toronto primarily to get an education. Originally, he was going to be enrolled in a public school, but after he took a placement exam, the extent of his academic neglect became fully known. Lesra was supposed to enter the eleventh grade, but in fact he was illiterate. He didn’t know the name of his country. He had never written a school paper and never read a news paper. He could not even read street signs. He was no more adept in math, geography, or history. He also had no inkling of how far behind he was, for he performed at the same level as the other students in his Brooklyn class.
As a result, his new guardians would now have to be his teachers. They had already had plenty of practice. Lisa’s son, Martin, was about the same age as Lesra; he had dyslexia, and for years the commune had educated him at home. Lesra now made it a class of two. Chaiton and Sinclair handled most of the teaching, but Lisa oversaw the curriculum. Their new student studied seven days a week. They started with the basics—grammar, arithmetic, diction but in time Lesra would write papers, take tests, and do research projects. History lessons came with an Afro-centric bias. While black men and women built great African civilizations, he was taught, whites in this century were respon sible for slaughtering millions in two world wars. Books by black authors or on black themes were also required reading.
The goal was to help Lesra gain admission to the University of Toronto. That seemed impossible at the outset, but the commune believed it was exceptional. Its members thrived on establishing lofty objectives, then rallying to achieve them, and Lesra was the perfect recipient of their largesse. They did not pity him for his deprivation but revered him for his sacrifices. He symbolized all that was wrong with America a rich but complacent country whose institutional racism stifled the development of a whole class of noble citizens. “He was American racism invited to your dinner table each night, and that made him a god in his own way,” Sean Cunningham said.
In the summer of 1980, about a year after Lesra had moved to the commune, several members and Lesra went to a warehouse book sale held by the Metropolitan Toronto Public Libraries. Paperbacks went for a quarter, and a crush of people scrambled for the bargains. Lesra and his guardians returned home with three cartons of books, including one by a writer they had never heard of, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Lisa was a boxing fan, and The Sixteenth Round piqued her interest. Carter seemed to be part of a disturbing trend of strong American black heroes, such as Malcolm X, who served time in prison.
If Lesra’s life story struck a nerve with Lisa, Carter’s tale hit her like a seismic jolt. She admired tough men, survivors like herself, and Carter was the quintessential survivor. His book supported themes long embraced by Lisa: racist public officials, courtroom conspiracies, and the indomitable will of black men. His profanity, his rage, and his righteousness all galvanized a woman whose moral indignation was easily triggered. Lisa made everyone else in the house read the book, and all agreed that Carter was an amazing man who had been grievously wronged. For Lesra, The Sixteenth Round represented a breakthrough. He had become despondent over his difficulties in reading, but he was able to read this book all the way through, paving the way for many more.
Published in 1974, The Sixteenth Round ended with Carter in prison, pleading for help. But there was no indication of what had become of him. Was he still in prison? Was he free? Lisa told Terry Swinton to call the New Jersey Department of Corrections, and an official broke the news: Rubin Carter was still in prison. Several members of the commune, including Lesra, went to the library and unearthed newspaper articles that made them familiar with Carter’s life since the book was published. They learned about the recantations from key witnesses, about Carter’s celebrity supporters, and about the second trial. They also learned that Carter was back in Trenton State Prison, estranged from his wife and two children, awaiting court appeals, and still protesting his innocence.
Lisa and the whole house were shocked and outraged, but they had no idea what they could do. Unlike Lesra, whom they could save by appealing to his parents, Rubin was inside a maximum-security prison with a triple-homicide verdict hanging around his neck. But Lisa saw an opportunity to reach out to their new hero and to further Lesra’s education. Lesra had never written a letter, so he was instructed to write his first letter to Carter in prison. He too had been touched by The Sixteenth Round. He had a brother who had served time, and many people in his neighborhood had been in prison, and he believed that he too could have met that fate had he not been pulled out of Bedford Stuyvesant by his new family. Lesra’s message, dated September 20, 1980, was carefully edited by members of the house. Lisa included a money order so Carter could buy stamps and respond. The envelope was mailed.
If the Canadians thought an American ghetto was equivalent to a prison, they would soon discover the real thing.
* Lisa’s maiden name was Peters. According to Sinclair, her married name was Hetherington, which was the name under which she filed her taxes. In the commune, she often used Swinton after she and Terry Swinton paired off as a couple.
* Shaw’s real name was Ned Cobb.