Annie Singer: Hello, this is Annie Singer and today I’m talking to Gregory Barbie for the oral history documentation project about the Chicago Communes. It is 9:03 am on September 19, 2073. We are in Lincoln Park and this is being recorded at the Animal Connection Haven. Hello Gregory.

Gregory Barbie: Hello. [Mumbles indistinctly.]

Singer: And who is this with us? [Looks down at a white-faced elderly yellow lab sitting on Barbie’s foot.] 

Barbie: That’s Mud. But call him Aloysius Devadander Abercrombie—that’s long for Mud, so I’ve been told.1

Singer: Okay, hello Aloysius Devadander Abercrombie.

Barbie: [Laughs until he is wheezing.] You can just call him Mud.

Singer: Okay, hello Mud. Mr. Barbie, are you ready to get started with the interview?

Barbie: Yes.

Singer: Can you tell us a little bit about where we are?

Barbie: [Still breathing heavily from laughing.] Yes, we are at the Animal Connection Haven at the Lincoln Park Commune. We’re on the third floor in my staying room.

Singer: What is the Animal Connection Haven?

Barbie: The Animal Connection Haven is a healing location that centers animal connection. We have seven dogs (including Mud, here), four cats, nine birds, a reptile room—I can’t tell you exactly who lives there, I don’t like snakes. We are adjacent to Lincoln Park, where we also have a small barn with nineteen goats and a coop with a dozen or so chickens and ducks. You can take a walk with a goat, a nap with a pup, have a mug of tea with a cat, learn animal caring skills—things like that. People come here when they need animal connection, which might be because they have experienced something traumatic or stressful and are working through it, or simply because they like the company of animals better than people. 

Barbie: [Mumbles indistinctly.]

Singer: What was that? I couldn’t quite hear what you said.

Barbie: Oh, never mind.

Singer: Okay. How long have you lived here? 

Barbie: I just moved in last month. There are only three permanent residents of this entire building, and a care staff. It’s mostly just animals after eight p.m. when it closes to the public, which is the way I prefer it. 

Singer: It sounds like a really special place. How did you come to live here?

Barbie: I was living in Paul, Idaho, before. I lived there most of my life. But I’ve been feeling my age more and more. I’m seventy-eight, you know. It’s been just me and Mud for the last thirteen years, but he’s even older than me, ninety-eight in dog years. It’s been harder and harder to care for him lately. I have a good friend, Steven. He comes here almost every day. At first, because he found it soothing to spend time with the animals. We discovered that together, years ago. And now he does his three-hour here. He was worried about me and Mud, so he suggested we come here.

Barbie: [Mumbles indistinctly.]

Singer: Excuse me? I’m sorry I didn’t catch that.

Barbie: It’s nothing. . . I do this thing. When I end a clause with a vowel, I have to rhyme it. I try to do it quietly with people I don’t yet know well.

Singer: Oh. That’s okay. You can rhyme out loud if you want, it doesn’t bother me.

Barbie: That’s kind of you. 

Barbie: [Quieter.] I believe it’s true.

Singer: Do you want to tell me more about your life in Idaho? You said you lived most of your life there. What was your childhood like?

Barbie: It wasn’t great, to be honest. I lived with my blood family until I was seventeen. My parents were overworked and underpaid. They had three kids, me the youngest, and put all of their hopes and dreams on us. My siblings thrived under that kind of pressure. They were a few years older and left for college while I was still a preteen. Me, on the other hand, I didn’t want to go to college. I didn’t like school much, and I wasn’t good at it. It made me feel like ants were crawling under my skin—sitting still in that small room with twenty other prepubescent bodies listening to a teacher try to download information into our brains. My parents made me feel like the biggest failure in the world. They yelled at me every time the school called or I came home with a report card.

Singer: Some of our younger listeners might not be familiar with older schooling systems. Can you tell us briefly what a report card is?

Barbie: Oh, yes. A report card was a paper they sent you home with at the end of the school term, telling your parents if you failed or succeeded in your classes. They assessed your ability to regurgitate the information they fed to you, and then assigned a letter grade to your intelligence from A to F. I usually got C’s and D’s, which wasn’t very good. Certainly not good enough to go to college on a scholarship.

Right, young people. College was the school that followed childhood schooling, which you did as a young adult. Childhood schooling was free for most people, or paid by taxes, and everyone was mandated to go. But college was optional, and very expensive.

Barbie: I find that reprehensive.

Singer: Thank you for explaining. What happened next? Where did you go when you were seventeen?

Barbie: Things got much worse. They made me stay in school eight hours a day, only to go home to my parents’ resentment at the end of the day. They kept telling me I would end up just like them. They meant I would have a similar career, not that I would end up bitter and isolated like them. An elementary school cleaner or a day care worker. They found that so shameful. I didn’t see what was so bad about that, both of those jobs would allow me to be up and moving. I had so much energy and nowhere to channel it. It ended up turning into anger instead. I would yell and yell. The second they said anything I would scream at them, I was so angry all the damn time. And then they stopped talking to me altogether, but I knew what they were thinking. They had said it so many times I could hear their thoughts, and I still got angry and screamed. I wasn’t very pleasant to be around.

Singer: It sounds like they weren’t either.

Barbie: They really weren’t. The mistake I made was doing it in front of the wrong person. My parents dragged me to the school staff Christmas party. I didn’t want to go, but my dad was in line for a promotion to janitorial supervisor. “Don’t fuck this up for me,” he said. “Don’t say a fucking word while we’re there. You fucking stand there and you smile and you don’t say a fucking word.” It went fine for the first twenty minutes or so, but his coworker asked what college I was going to. He knew about my blood siblings. My dad lied, said I was joining my brother at UCLA. The lie didn’t bother me too much, but I could hear his thoughts. In his mind he was saying what a failure I was, that I was going nowhere. That he’d be stuck living with me into my middle age.

Barbie: I don’t like the taste of sage.

Singer: What happened next?

Barbie: I was holding a red cup of fruit punch. I threw it at his head, but missed. It smashed into the wall behind him. Everyone in the room fell silent, and then a woman called the police. They took me to the hospital.

Singer: Were you ill?

Barbie: Well, they thought so. They said I was bipolar schizoaffective, something like that. Actually I can’t remember. They gave me so many labels over the years, it’s hard to remember what came when. They said I was hearing voices that weren’t there. Which was a lie, because I had heard those exact words come out of my father’s mouth a hundred times. I could hear him thinking it. 

Singer: What happened at the hospital? How long were you there?

Barbie: The first time, only a few days. Nothing happened. Literally nothing. I saw a doctor once. I remember being so confused why I was in a hospital for throwing a cup. They wouldn’t tell me why I was there, or when I would go home.2 I sat in a room with a locked door. There was nothing on the walls. I wasn’t allowed to have anything in my room. Not even shoes, because they were afraid I would hang myself with the laces, or else try to swallow them. They gave us these socks with sticky pads on the bottom. No shoes. The nurse came by every six hours with a cart and gave me medication. And after a few days, they let me go.3 My parents didn’t visit me once in the time I was there, but my dad was at the curb to pick me up and drive me home.

Barbie: I didn’t bring a comb.

Singer: Did anything change after that hospital visit?

Barbie: Oh, yes, things got worse. Much, much worse. The hospital bill was as much as either of my parents earned in six months. We were barely scraping by at that point anyway. We only got meat on special occasions, because it was too expensive. I was wearing my dad’s hand-me-downs, which were two sizes too big. And now I had three medications they had to pay for, too. They were exorbitantly expensive and didn’t do much other than exhaust me and make my face retain a lot of water. I looked like a different person. I only took them for another week or two before throwing them away. I started smoking a lot of weed during the day instead. That actually made me feel better. It was my second to last year of high school. Well, it ended up being my last year, but there was supposed to be one more. I would cut class and go smoke weed behind Denny’s. For the young folks, that was a low-cost diner chain that sold breakfast food. When my parents found out, though, they called the police again. They reported me for truancy. It was only a couple of weeks after that first time. They were so mad and didn’t want to deal with me themselves, so they sent the cops.

Singer: What did the police do?

Barbie: They sent me back to the hospital. They picked up my friend Eric too. But they sent him to jail.

Singer: Why?

Barbie: Racism, I suppose. I’m white. He’s Black. His family was the only Black family in town. That made me mentally ill, and him a criminal. Marijuana was illegal then, and it was illegal in Idaho far longer than anywhere else in the country. Anyway. It might have been because I was diagnosed with bipolar, too. I’m not sure if the cops had that information, but they knew exactly where to send me. They took me to the emergency room. But this time the ER shipped me to State Hospital South. I would get the help I needed there, they told me. The regional hospital wasn’t a mental health hospital. I’d have more qualified psychiatrists and therapists and the resources I needed. Some resources. [Chuckles.] I saw a doctor maybe once a week. The first month I was there, I mostly slept, but they said I was self-isolating. They said I wasn’t trying, I wasn’t compliant. I just wanted to get out of there, so I dragged myself out of bed. I sat in the dining room and stared at the beige wall. I sat in the rec room. I stared at the yellow wall.

Singer: How long were you there?

Barbie: I don’t remember. I went back there so many times, they all run together. 

Singer: What was going on in the world around that time?

Barbie: Well, it was around 2019 or 2020 by then. The height of neoliberalism and capitalism, a couple of decades before things started to change.

Barbie: I find it really strange.

Singer: Tell me what you mean by “things started to change”. When was that? What kinds of changes happened?

Barbie: This was around the early 40’s . . . I think it was a little earlier than big cities like Chicago or New York. There was this palpable anger. Idaho had always been a conservative place, but in a less fascist way than other parts of the country in some senses. More rural, less invested in big government. Everyone had guns. Everyone. And nobody liked being told what to do. Idaho had a lot of open land. The federal government decided Idavada was the perfect place to build a migrant detention center. That was a turning point for us. No one lived there, the nearest town was Jackpot, Nevada, but Idavada was technically in Idaho. Idaho was a very racist place. “We don’t have migrants here,” they said. “We don’t want them imported. You’ll just release them back on our streets.” A group took over the building site soon after they broke ground; they occupied it. The government sent in the National Guard, but the group—a militia, really—was just as well armed. You could print a gun from a computer at that time. People drove in from all over the state and from Eastern Oregon and Montana too. After three months of occupation, the government gave up and left. The feds had bigger things to worry about then. Tensions were starting to escalate everywhere, and the big cities were more of a concern. But the locals, they built the Monument of Idavada there, which has long since been torn down. 

Singer: That sounds significant. Why haven’t I heard about it?

Barbie: Oh, nobody cares about what happens in Idaho. And the motives were all wrong, so it’s not a history anyone is especially proud of. Racist, xenophobic shit. It was a holiday for a few years though. Idaho Freedom Day. July twenty-third. It was 2045, but had been a few years in the works. People stopped celebrating it by the late fifties.

Singer: Where were you when all of this was happening?

Barbie: In State Hospital South, mostly. County jail for a while before that. Doing meth in the back of my car. [Laughs.] That’s about when I got these. [Taps his finger on his dark sunglasses.]

Barbie: Mud is my main squeeze.

Singer: That’s when you went blind?

Barbie: Yes. Around that time, at least. Bilateral ischemic retinopathy, they said. From snorting ice. I knew something was going on, but I wouldn’t go to the doctor, I knew what they’d do. I knew they’d lock me up. Finally it happened anyway, but at that point my eyes were shot. That was in 2044. They said my blindness proved that I was a danger to myself. A church man was put in charge of my entire life. All my decisions. Where I could live. My money. Money was a big deal at the time. I didn’t feel the sun on my face again until 2049, when the hospital fell. That was a beautiful moment. I remember standing outside the hospital, with people shouting around me. My friend Skillet was with me, xe helped me outside since it’s hard to navigate on my own. We were standing arm-in-arm. I imagine xe was looking up too, feeling the sun on xis face. 

Barbie: I really like this place.

Singer: That sounds like a really special moment. Do you mind explaining what happened? How did the hospital fall?

Barbie: It was a long time coming. There were two hundred beds when I got there, about half of them filled. By the time I left, there were still only two hundred beds, but almost five hundred people. Our single rooms turned into double rooms. Some triple or quadruple rooms. I was in a room with Skillet and a guy named Jerome. Skillet was close to my age. I was fifty-one by the time I got out. I’d spent more than half my life there, on and off. Despite xir age, xe was still buzzing with energy, like I had been in my younger years. But xe was exceedingly patient at the same time. Jerome was younger. Intellectually disabled, they called it. He had really big feelings and a hard time tamping them down the way people wanted. He could be hard to live with in that small room sometimes. We traded bed days. Two of us would sleep in the bed, one on the floor. It was a twin-sized bed, small even for two lovers. He would try to trick us into giving him our bed days, but it never worked. He’d get so mad. He often thought he was sneakier than he was, but he really was sneaky. He was an excellent smooth talker, and would always bring us contraband snacks. He would always share. 

Barbie: I don’t really care.

[A warbling sound comes through the cracked door from the hallway.]

Singer: What was that sound?

Barbie: That’s Pato. [Speaking louder.] Come in, Pato.

Barbie: I like to eat to-mah-to.

[A turkey cautiously pushes through the cracked door and approaches Barbie. He pats its head.]

Singer: Doesn’t Pato mean “duck” in Spanish?

Barbie: Yes. 

Singer: Okay. Hello, Pato.

[Pato settles on Barbie’s other foot, its back resting against Mud’s. It warbles contentedly.]

Barbie: Anyway. Where was I?

Barbie: Pie in the sky.

Singer: The fall of the hospital. What happened?

Barbie: That’s right. Idaho had a love-hate relationship with government. They hated big government, but they loved local government for a while. They loved the police, they loved their prisons, to the extent that they had one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.4 They were happy about it, too, until the Californians started moving in. Californians brought big money. They bought up properties. They’d own a house in Sun Valley for ski season, and another in Boise where they’d live most of the year, but have a summer home in Coeur d'Alene. Idaho was already poor, and they bought up so much housing that prices nearly tripled between 2020 and 2040. And with that came homelessness and hunger. And with that came acts of survival that were criminalized. They called it “breaking and entering” when people reclaimed vacant houses during the winter when they had no place to stay. They’d always had a high rate of incarceration, but this really put them near the top. And at that point, people finally turned on the police and prisons. They were the private army of the Californians, and no one was more hated by the people than the Californians. It became synonymous with the ruling class, probably because the vast majority of the ruling class in Idaho had moved from California. At one point, Idaho had the most hundred-millionaires and billionaires out of anywhere in the world.

Singer: But that changed.

Barbie: Yes, that changed. Blaine County Jail was the first to be liberated. That was back in 2043, a few years after Idaho Freedom Day. Sun Valley was in Blaine County, which was the billionaires’ playground. They locked up one too many common folk and people reached a breaking point. It started on the inside. The jail was overcrowded while awaiting the construction of a new facility. They were in portables. The guards were working class folks, they called it a “good job” because it was just about the only job you could get at the time with government benefits, but prices had inflated so much that the guards themselves kept getting arrested for doing what they needed to do to feed their families. They locked people up so indiscriminately that the line between inmate and guard started to blur. A few of the guards turned. It was their friends and their colleagues they were guarding. That was all it took before the whole facility was overrun. It was like dominoes, then. The vast majority of the counties in the state were rural—I mean three or four overcrowded cells in the back of a podunk police station. Once people got excited about it, all it took was a couple dozen armed folks to take them over completely.

Singer: So what happened then?

Barbie: People thought they were free. Policing had become increasingly unpopular, and communities formed small militias to protect their people. But the Californians were strategic. It wasn’t just happening in Idaho, it had been happening in California too. They were really the world leaders in various forms of incarceration. They found a way to make community members lock each other up. Lock themselves up. And for a while, no one was the wiser.

Singer: How was that?

Barbie: Mental illness. 

Singer: Some of our younger listeners might not be familiar with that term. Can you explain what mental illness meant around that time, in the early and mid 2040s?

Barbie: I can try. You know how you might get a cold or a flu? That is what we think of as illness. Mental illness was what they called it when they thought your morality was ill. They framed it as personal suffering. They said they were helping people who were suffering. For decades they insisted it was a biological illness. That your brain was malfunctioning, or that it was passed down in your DNA, but rather than finding conclusive evidence of specific, concrete categories, they just kept shifting and shifting.5 Don’t get me wrong, people were suffering. People had differences. They perceived things differently. Had different sensory experiences. Of course, it’s still that way.6 But that’s the human experience, especially if you consider the time we’re talking about under fascism and late-stage capitalism. Hell, and so what if it is biological? Why does getting angry sometimes and doing drugs and rhyming stuff mean I should live most of my life in a cage?

Barbie: It fills me with rage.

Singer: Thank you for that explanation. So, how did they use mental illness to make community members lock each other up?

Barbie: People were mad about criminalization, so they rejected it. But they still had deep cultural beliefs about mental illness. White people did, anyway. The Californians had already been working on conflating criminalization with mental illness. They lobbied for years, and when the DSM-7 was released in 2045, it included a diagnosis called Entitlement Personality Disorder, which pathologized and medicalized things like taking or using property that doesn’t belong to you, and feeling resentful towards those who have more than you.7

Barbie: I am wearing my dog for a shoe.

Singer: For those who don’t know, can you tell me more about the DSM-7? How did things change once Entitlement Personality Disorder was added to it?

Barbie: I don’t remember what DSM stands for. It was a book of detailed categories of these made up mental diseases. They had long lists of characteristics and behaviors, and if you had enough of those characteristics or behaviors, they would say you had a disease. They had always used this book to lock people up. I was locked up for the first time just after the DSM-5 was released. Homelessness was also in there, even as far back as the DSM-5, I think. Well, the failure to care for oneself, as in, failure to pay for a house for oneself. And queerness has been pathologized all throughout the book’s history.8 They used to force people to conform to the gender norms associated with their genitals in those times, and then call them diseased when it caused distress, can you believe that?9 [Laughs heartily.] Anyway, the addition of Entitlement Personality Disorder made it so most of the people who had been locked up in jails now qualified to be locked up in hospitals. The stigma associated with criminalization had eased as criminalization lost its power in public opinion, but now these people weren’t criminals, they were “mentally ill.” They weren’t being punished by the evil Californians, they “needed help.” The Californians ran massive public opinion campaigns, convincing people that folks who disrespected their constitutionally guaranteed right to property were sick and needed help. They needed to be rehabilitated. But rehabilitation meant sitting in a windowless room, guarded with guns.

Singer: And people fell for it?

Barbie: People had always fallen for it. Any behavior that was a nuisance to the wealthy class was medicalized, if not criminalized. People saw the two as completely different things. And so, that is how State South grew from a hundred or so captives in 2039, to nearly five hundred when it was finally liberated in 2044. 

Singer: So what triggered the liberation of the hospital?

Barbie: I’d like to say that people overcame the logics that allowed people to be locked up in warehouses, but that wasn’t really how it happened. Funnily enough, one of the biggest things that happened was that it started getting expensive. [Does finger quotes.] “Hospitals” were more expensive than jails. They required guards, yes, but also doctors. There weren’t enough doctors, so they had to pay exorbitant amounts of money to entice them to move. Because they were claiming to be medical facilities based on scientific, biological illnesses, they needed expensive equipment. And the exact type of people they locked up were the type that could not pay for the [does finger quotes] “care” that they were receiving, so it all fell on the state. Which meant it fell on the taxpayers. Which meant it fell back on the Californians. They had made their own beds, and then were pissed off that their three houses each had taxes that funded county mental hospitals. We got magazines in State South. Actual paper magazines. It was mostly the awful local publications. I can remember word for word, Skillet read aloud to me the headline: “Sydney Sweeney: Property Taxes Are Pricing Me Out of My Dream Sun Valley Retirement.” She was a popular actress of the time.

Singer: So did the Californians decide to defund the hospitals?

Barbie: Yes. They took away the [does finger quotes] “care” part. They took away the doctors and the nurses. They took away the therapy. Mind you, most people didn’t want these things anyway. They didn’t want doctors. They wanted to leave. They wanted to see their friends every day. They wanted to choose what they ate for breakfast. They wanted to have pets. And so all that propaganda that they were still running started to backfire, because it no longer logically made sense. Most people were stuck in the facilities for a long time, but sometimes people were released. People started speaking out about their experiences. Forced medication. The violent use of physical restraints, sometimes breaking wrists or cutting off circulation so severely that a limb had to be amputated.10 The people coming out of these facilities were comparing them to the jails and prisons that had just been overthrown.

Singer: Is that why people overthrew the hospital you were in?

Barbie: No. [Laughs]. The general, white, abled public were so complacent and so slow to act. If it wasn’t affecting them directly, they could hardly be bothered. And sure, it was affecting more and more people, but not enough. It was really the Shoshone-Bannock people. Theirs had always been locked up disproportionately, at every kind of carceral facility.11 Skillet lived on the reservation before being sent to State South. Tons of people were from the reservation. It was only half an hour away. The Shoshone-Bannock weren’t quite as deeply invested culturally in mental illness and the need for carceral control over disabled bodies as white settler folks were. They had traditions much older and deeper than the DSM that honored folks with differences instead of alienating them.12 So they were the first ones to reject the exponential increase in psychiatric hospitalizations, and they did an astounding amount of work to get their people and everyone else free. They started coalition-building on the outside. Disabled and queer folks were also disproportionately pathologized and locked up. And a lot of disabled people they worked with had been newly disabled by the jails and prisons that they’d just been liberated from.13 Either it had caused so much trauma that they couldn’t survive under capitalism alone, or they had been tear-gassed so often that they had extreme lung sensitivities, or they had insufficient access to medical care for things like diabetes and pregnancy, causing long-term injury.

Singer: So how did the liberation take place?

Barbie: How most of them do. Our friends from the Fort Hall Reservation gathered a massive, armed group of Indigenous, queer, mad, and disabled folks and stormed the hospital. The hospitals were carceral for sure.14 They had guards. But they didn’t have the same firepower as jails and prisons. The external architecture was less panoptic. They weren’t expecting armed resistance. In truth, it could have happened with a small fraction of the number of people who showed up that day. I don’t know what happened exactly, just that Skillet knew ahead of time. Xe told me to be ready, and xe stayed by my side the whole time. There wasn’t any gunfire, just five minutes of frantic shouting; I think the guards and staff just surrendered when they saw what they were facing. Then xe guided me outside where I soaked in the sun for the first time in half a decade.

Barbie: I thought I had it made.

Singer: Did other mental hospitals fall in the same way?

Barbie: Yes, we made sure of it. By the end of 2058 we had liberated all of the hospitals in Idaho. It didn’t become a widespread trend until a bit later, though.

Singer: What was your role in these liberations?

Barbie: I wanted so badly to be on the forefront. I wanted to run into the buildings screaming my rage, ripping doors open and leading people to safety. And I tried those first few times. But it’s extremely difficult to navigate new places without guidance when you’re blind, and it took me a few years to get a guide dog. People ended up having to help me, rather than the other way around. It was a blow to my ego for a second, but I was surrounded by so many intensely creative disabled folks. Someone in a wheelchair can’t physically liberate the third floor of a hospital when the power’s been cut and the elevators aren’t working. Someone with deep traumas from family histories of genocide or interpersonal violence might not feel comfortable confronting armed oppressors. They can do other things. Everyone can do something. I was surrounded by people who wanted me there, who knew without any doubt that I could contribute to the movement even when I wasn’t sure of it.15 I ended up learning that I was good at hospitality. I would help coordinate housing for the liberated people, and then connect them with healing resources. I would take them in myself when they needed it.

Singer: What did your life look like after the psychiatric liberations? What was Idaho like at the time?

Barbie: Urban communes didn’t develop in the way that New York and Chicago did because most of Idaho was pretty rural. They still hated the idea of communism at the time, but what they had was basically a more distributed version. It always had been. Rural communities were ahead of the curve in some ways. We already relied on one another, and took care of one another in ways unlike the big city. I wound up back in Paul, which at the time had fewer than two thousand residents. Skillet and I lived together in a two-bedroom house there for years, taking in newly liberated folks who needed a place to stay. Xe hand-built a ramp up the two steps to the front door so folks using mobility devices could stay with us. It was a small place, but we were used to sleeping three to a room anyway, so we could really cram people in there. Skillet was traveling all around the state with the movement, and it was hard for me to get around without xim. You’d have to put your name on a list and wait for three years or more to get a guide dog at the time, so we got a pup named Charlie and xe and I worked together to train her under the guidance of a friend who had done it before. I learned Braille for the first time. I didn’t have any way to read on the inside, not even audiobooks, so I read so many books when I got out. Skillet and I both had lasting traumas from our time inside. We talked a lot. We cried a lot. We started a garden. Friends and travelers shared herbal wisdom. We held block parties every weekend with food and dancing. Sometimes on cold winter nights, we went outside in the evening and screamed into the void at the tops of our lungs. Charlie helped a lot. She slept with me, but on nights when we had guests, all three of us slept in the same bed together. That felt like the most healing thing to me, sleeping next to Skillet with Charlie sandwiched between us.

Singer: That sounds like a really beautiful time. Around what years was that?

Barbie: It started in the early fifties.

Singer: Wow. Right when everyone else was in the thick of it.

Barbie: Oh yes. People were struggling all around Turtle Island and the world. Other places went through a similar process with the abolition of local police and prisons, where they started filling hospitals instead. But we were ready. We were well organized by that time.

Barbie: I don’t have a rhyme.

Singer: How did that feel?

Barbie: I felt guilty sometimes, peace having already arrived in my life. But we were still working. There was so much pain at the time. There was so much trauma. At the same time, a lot of things were significantly better.

Singer: Like what?

Barbie: Family structures started expanding around that time. People stopped feeling constrained to living with their blood family, and more started making families of their own. Our understanding of gender became much more expansive and fluid. Work, too. People used to work forty hours under capitalism. Some people worked fifty or sixty hours, or more, and they may not have had a lot of say in what types of work they did. Now three-hours are the most popular labor model, though it varies, especially in rural areas. It’s voluntary, and you still get a roof over your head even if you don’t want to work, or can’t. There are so many things that changed in ways that reduced daily distress and improved wellbeing, even through the many challenges.

Singer: You said you were organized and ready in those times. How did you support the movement then?

Barbie: I took people in. People experienced so much violence. Police brutality. Incarceration. There were famines. There was mass death from the various pandemics and resulting endemics. So much grief and loss. And the only mainstream conceptions of healing were psychiatry and psychology, which was often a greater cause of harm than it was good. Our coalition taught different ways of being and different ways of healing. We’d been mad and disabled long before the folks who went mad from the trauma of the revolution. 

Singer: What did that sharing of healing look like?

Barbie: I took in travelers. Refugees. People who had caused so much harm in their communities that they were banished. People who had lost their blood or chosen families and no longer knew how to be. People who had newly gained blindness and were struggling to navigate the change. They would come stay with me and Charlie, and Skillet, when xe was around. By the late fifties xe spent twice as much time away than at home. It was just me and a revolving door of new friends most of the time. Charlie left us in 2060, and I met Mud. And, of course, our neighbors were always around. When we first moved in the house it had a fence around it to delineate property lines. That means only I was allowed to use the land inside the fence, and only my neighbors were allowed to use the land outside the fence. But none of that mattered any more. I only had enough space inside the fence to grow food for myself. But when we pulled the fence down, we had enough space to grow food for the whole neighborhood. Anyway, I bet I met at least a thousand people in those years. That’s how I met Steven, like I said. He came back every time he traveled through. He loved Charlie so much. He spent six months with me when Charlie passed. I don’t know what I would have done without him. He was the one who introduced me to Mud. And when he came back this summer and saw that Mud and I were struggling to care for each other, he asked me to move here.

Barbie: I hold him dear.

Singer: You’ve never lived in a commune before, then?

Barbie: No, I haven’t.

Singer: How are you finding things?

Barbie: Good, mostly. It reminds me of the hospitals, sometimes. Being in such a big building with so many people. I’ve never lived in a building more than one story except when I was locked up, and the Animal Connection Haven is four stories high! But the hospital didn’t have any dogs. Or turkeys. I still don’t eat at the canteen. I tried it my first week, but it reminded me too much of the mess hall of my ward. I would lose my appetite completely every time I stepped in. The noise swirling all around was overwhelming. Steven would take me to dinner each night, but he saw how miserable I was. We have a kitchen here, where we cook for the animals. So he started cooking dinner here. The other animal and facility caretakers started joining us, and then our guests. We have a twelve-person dining room on the first floor. Now it’s full every night, and we often have to bring in more chairs. Steven worried that it would be overwhelming for me to have so many people around, like the canteen. But it’s different here. This is home.

Barbie: I don’t like to be alone.

Singer: I love that for you. Thank you so much for this interview. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish?

Barbie: I think I’ve rambled on too much already. I hope that if you are ever feeling down you will feel welcome to come spend time with our animals. Stay for dinner if you want.

Singer: I definitely will. Thank you Gregory.