Charlotte Shane at Bookforum:
FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN TURNED FORTY-NINE WHILE HIDING FROM THE FBI IN THE SPRING OF 1970, though pictures from that time suggest the playfulness of a younger man. In shots taken by civil rights movement photographer Bob Fitch, Berrigan mugs at the camera from under a rat’s-nest wig and sombrero, a lampoon of disguise. Beanie-clad, he grins in a parking lot while holding a Coke, takes a comically large step in sparse woods, smiles in a daylit diner booth at someone out of frame. At Cornell University’s Freedom Seder, part of a multiday festival thrown in his honor, he flashes a peace sign from the stage, sunglasses pointlessly and conspicuously on. He’d planned to surrender himself there, then decided not to, and escaped.
He analogized going underground to dying, to “closing the lid of a tomb,” and wrote of the loneliness that came with the necessary separation from family, especially his hospitalized mother. Yet “what fun!” he thought after he evaded the FBI at Cornell in, famously, an oversize puppet costume.
more here.
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