a whole sweet potato

"That night the entire Rudd family sat at the round kitchen table, and while we talked of hurt and guilt and war, the chicken soup and matzoh balls appeared, plus a steady stream of Jewish appetizers—pickles, chopped liver, coleslaw. (A few days later a reporter for The New York Post got through to my mother and obtained her recipe for chicken soup, including her secret ingredient—a whole sweet potato.)"

~~ from Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen by Mark Rudd

afraid of violence

"A few days later, back in New York, I got a call from Walter, an acquaintance in the black high-school movement in the city, who said that he had watched me during the demonstration and that I had 'just been running with the girl' and done nothing violent at all. I had seen him and a partner throw a garbage can through a bank window. He said he now knew I was a phony and couldn't be relied on in the coming revolutionary struggle.

"I was devastated . . . because his criticism was true. Since I was a little kid, I'd been (and still am) afraid of violence. I was always ashamed of not standing up to bullies, even when they directly challenged me. In my family, violence was for the goyim or the trombeniks (hoodlums). I knew no one who hit another person. I did not play football. I had never lost my fear of violence."

~~ from Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen by Mark Rudd

dogs, too, changed our lives

"Owning a dog was for most people a commonplace--completely unremarkable. For us, having a dog marked a dramatic new direction. Months earlier it would have been unthinkable, an irresponsible indulgence, derided and ridiculed. The time it takes you to walk that damn dog is time stolen from organizing, a comrade might have said, and another would have added, The food that thing eats could feed five Vietnamese for a week. But now, whenever Jeffrey showed up with Red Dog, someone, or several people together, would romp around with him in dizzy excitement. It was strange, but the dogs, too, changed our lives."

~~ from Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers

The Bookshelf

"The bookshelf was an immediate giveaway—every Weatherman read Malcolm X, the poetry of Ho Chi Minh, Amical Cabral, and Mari Sandoz's marvelous biography of Crazy Horse. Harry Haywood was on our reading list, and so was Amiri Baraka, C.L.R. James, and James and Grace Lee Boggs. And somewhere, usually the bedroom, was a modest, framed black-and-white photo of Che."

~~ from Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers