Cinnamon Girl, Guest Post by Trish MacEnulty

Winner of the Gold Medal in YA Fiction from The Historical Fiction Company!

When her beloved step-grandmother, a semi-retired opera singer, dies of cancer in 1970, 15-year-old Eli Burnes runs away with a draft-dodger, thinking she’s on the road to adventure and romance. What she finds instead is a world of underground Weathermen, Black Power revolutionaries, snitches and shoot-first police.

Eventually Eli is rescued by her father, who turns out both more responsible and more revolutionary than she’d imagined. But when he gets in trouble with the law, she finds herself on the road again, searching for the allies who will help her learn how to save herself.

The Weather Underground Organization

Many years ago, I had the chance to interview Cathy Wilkerson, author of Flying Close to the Sun, about her years as a member of the Weatherman organization. It was a fascinating and compelling story.

Wilkerson explained that activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s were so frustrated by their inability to affect U.S. policies relating to the war in Vietnam through peaceful means, they ultimately turned to more radical methods of shaking up the establishment, including the bombing of buildings. In the beginning, they were careful to make sure they did not kill people. But they believed that the United States’ military activities in Southeast Asia were so unspeakably wrong, radical and sometimes violent action was the only option.

People today don’t understand the depth of antipathy to the Vietnam war in this country. Civil rights activists, religious leaders, college students and professors, mothers and fathers, and many people from all walks of life believed we were doing the wrong thing in maintaining the war. No anti-war movement since then has been that vocal in the U.S. — mainly because we no longer have a draft. The draft terrified many young men, including boys I went to high school with.

Weatherman, which got its name from the Bob Dylan lyric, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” developed in response to this frustration. But the organization’s raison d’etre was not only about stopping the war. It was also a reaction to the deadly assaults on Black activists.

As Wilkerson says in her book, “The police had been harassing and threatening black activists with a relentlessness and brutality rarely used against white activists. If Weathermen constantly challenged the police, they argued, they could divert some police energy onto themselves, distracting them a little from black activists.” The point was to not be “good Germans” and stand by while one group of Americans was consistently oppressed.

These activists had a point. The war in Vietnam proved to be a senseless exercise in futility, sending thousands of young Americans to their death and making life a living hell for the poor citizens of several small countries (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) on the other side of the world. Secondly, racism in our own country exacted a terrible price. Black Americans experienced discrimination in almost every aspect of living from housing to education to the criminal justice system.

Bryan Burrough, author Days of Rage, describes the seeds of these movements: “More than anything else, it was the pictures young Americans began seeing on those new televisions in 1960—of stoic Southern blacks dragged away from all-white lunch counters, of black protesters being beaten bloody by red-faced Southern deputies—that laid the groundwork for the white protest movement. The violence and injustice was shameful enough, but it was what those pictures said about America, about what an entire generation of young people had been taught, that felt like betrayal. America wasn’t a land of equality…It was all a lie.”

Unfortunately, the Weather Underground Organization, as it came to be called, lost its focus, and there were members who engaged in criminal activities, including murder, that can only be described as terrorist. Some have said it became more of a cult than a movement. Burroughs quotes attorney Elizabeth Fink, who was initally active in the movement, as saying, “The sixties drove them all crazy, all of us. All they did was listen to their own people, their own opinions.”

I believe there are lessons to be taken from the various social change movements of that era. First, real change requires passion, sacrifice, and commitment. Secondly, violence rarely achieves that change and can morph into the complete opposite of what you intended. Third, be willing to listen to other people and other viewpoints.

All around us these days it seems like the world is falling apart. It’s easy to surrender to apathy or despair. In my novel Cinnamon Girl, Eli’s father, who has wound up on the wrong side of the law because of his own commitment to the peace movement, tells her to stay true, to remember that love and peace are more than abstract concepts or symbols and slogans on the bumper of a VW van. Love and peace can be a way of life.

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Meet Trish MacEnulty

Trish MacEnulty is the author of a historical novel series, literary novels, memoirs, a short story collection, children’s plays, and most recently, the historical coming-of-age novel, Cinnamon Girl (Livingston Press, Sept. 2023). She has a Ph.D. in English from the Florida State University and graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Florida. She currently writes book reviews and features for the Historical Novel Society.

She lives in Florida with her husband Joe and her two tubby critters, Franco and Tumbleweed. More info at her website: trishmacenulty.com.