Why, after the failure of his attempt on General Walker, did Lee choose to go to New Orleans? It was the one place where he had resources—relatives who might shelter him and help him pick up the threads of his life. For Lee going to New Orleans was not like going some place new. It was the city where he was born and in which he had spent seven of his twenty-three years, more than in any other place. He had memories there.
Lee had lived in New Orleans until he was four, staying by turns with his mother, with his good-natured aunt Lillian Murret and her family, and in a children’s home with his brothers. At fourteen he had come to live there again, after an unhappy year and a half in New York, during which he had barely escaped being sent to a home for delinquent children. New Orleans had been a refuge to him then, and it was to be a refuge to him now.
The two and a half years Lee had spent there as a teenager—January 1954 to June 1956—when he was fourteen to sixteen years old, were filled with portents for his future. It was there he became interested in a cause, Marxism; there he began to visit the public library and read Das Kapital and other Communist books; and there he spoke for the first and only time about shooting a president of the United States. Indeed, during the summer that lay ahead of him, the summer of 1963, it was as if everything that happened to Lee had already happened before. He was a little like an actor on a stage, walking through a part he had already played.
But of course it was not the same. Lee was a man now, not a boy of sixteen. His cause this time was to be Cuba, not a vague, impersonal Marxism. And if he thought about killing anybody now, it would be as a volunteer for Fidel Castro, shooting up the American invader. The summer of 1963 was to be Lee’s time of peaceful political action, the time in which he came closer than ever in his life before to creating a serious, nonviolent, political identity for himself. By picketing, handing out leaflets, debating on the radio, Lee tried everything he could think of to change American policy toward Cuba. To him it was part of something bigger. He wanted to make a dent in the complacent American society he saw around him and change it peacefully from below.
Still, one gets the feeling of repetition. Shortly before his seventeenth birthday, from Fort Worth Lee had written the Young People’s Socialist League in New York to ask if there was a local YPSL chapter he could join. Now, during the summer of 1963, he was to engage in correspondence with three left-wing political organizations in New York and try to found his own chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Even when he left New Orleans for the last time, it was like a repetition of something he had done before: on September 19, 1959, he had embarked from New Orleans for the USSR. Almost exactly four years later, on September 25, 1963, he was to leave New Orleans again, this time trying to reach Cuba via Mexico City.
Lee’s memories of his adolescent years in New Orleans contained both good and bad. There had been the Friday night seafood suppers at his aunt Lillian’s—evenings he had loved and looked forward to. But there had also been fights: a fight with some white boys for riding in the black part of a segregated bus, and a couple of fights with the boys at Beauregard Junior High where Lee attended eighth and ninth grades. The boys at the school were a rough lot, and Lee got into fights because “he didn’t make friends,” and “he wasn’t going to take anything from anybody.”1
But Lee did make a friend or two in New Orleans. One was Edward Voebel, who patched him up in the restroom after his second fight at Beauregard. Voebel, a gentle boy who loved his piano lessons, occasionally dropped by the apartment Lee and his mother shared at 126 Exchange Place. Lee and Voebel would go downstairs to the pool hall just below the apartment, shoot a few games of pool, and spend some time throwing darts. Afterward they would walk along the riverfront.
It was to his friend Voebel that Lee, the proud but dissatisfied possessor of a plastic .45, confided his plan to break into a store on Rampart Street, using a glass cutter he had, and steal a real pistol that he had spotted in the window. Voebel accompanied Lee to the store, went inside to case it with him, then quietly talked him out of his scheme on the ground that the glass cutter would set off the burglar alarm. Voebel found Lee easy to dissuade.2
Another friend, Palmer McBride, with whom Lee worked as a messenger in a dental lab after quitting high school, remembered a threat that he made. They were listening to classical music when Lee announced that “he would like to kill President Eisenhower because he was exploiting the working class.” McBride recalled afterward that Lee did not seem to be speaking “in jest.”3 Lee also suggested to McBride that they join the Communist Party together to take advantage of its “social functions.”4
And a boy called William Wulf, then president of the New Orleans Amateur Astronomy Association, was engaged in only his second conversation with Lee when Lee came right out and said “he was looking for a Communist cell in town to join but he couldn’t find any … he couldn’t find any that would show interest in him as a Communist.” The two boys got to arguing, with Lee “hollering” about Communism in a “loudmouthed” and “boisterous” way.5 Wulf’s father, a refugee from Germany who was touchy in political matters, overheard them. He took Lee by the arm and politely ordered him out of the house.
“We were sixteen,” Wulf remembered later, and Lee “was quite violent for communism.” Then Wulf gave the epitaph, not only for Lee at sixteen, but for Lee during the summer of 1963 and indeed throughout his life. “He seemed to me a boy that was looking for something to belong to.” But, Wulf concluded, “I don’t think anybody was looking for him to belong to them.”6
Boy or man, it can at least be said that Lee was looking for truth. There is something touching in the fact that this man, for whom it was a struggle, because of his reading disability and his limited education, even to write at all, should have spent scores of hours in lonely written dialogue with himself over what a good society ought to be.
It may be, as Marina once said, that it was nothing but fame Lee was after. It may be that when he looked up from his books, it was not human beings he saw around him, but only an abstract vision of humanity. It may be that, struggling with the devils inside and pasting them onto politics, it was not others he was trying to help, only himself. And it may be that it was not truth he was seeking, only personal salvation. It may be that Lee was only an egotist after all.
But his ideals say something in his favor. He had lived in two great opposing social systems and tried to make sense of them. He believed that the perfect society would combine the best features of both. He thought that government ought to take care of people, give them medicine and education, guarantee their civil liberties and put an end to racial discrimination. And he believed in disarmament among nations.
It says something for Lee that the ideals he cherished were good ones, and that, had they been carried into practice, they would have meant a better life for others. Unlike the Nazis’, Lee’s was not an ideology of power. He opposed the supremacy of any racial or ethnic group over any other. He favored the weak over the strong. It was a better world he was after, and he had a generous vision.
And if at the end he failed, if the undertow of his old, angry, tumultuous self overwhelmed him one last time and swept him under, who is to deny that he made at least this attempt to carry his vision peacefully into practice?
New Orleans, in the summer of 1963, was the place where he made his last try.