Gift
I was saved from utter despair by my interest in the Haymarket events. – Emma Goldman, Living My life
During a hot summer of coronavirus and civil discontent, I sprint miles to the grave of Emma Goldman, the anarchist feminist of early twentieth-century America. She rests alongside the Haymarket martyrs, five Chicago labor activists executed for their fight for the eight-hour workday. In the industrializing adolescence of the United States, working-class anarchism ignited the labor movement.
Goldman and the Haymarket martyrs are buried in a cemetery perched above the Eisenhower Freeway. Motorists in gridlock lurch toward the towers of downtown Chicago. In the heat, the glassy skyscrapers shimmer like a mirage.
No great shade tree graces the working-class anarchist section of the cemetery. I stand at Goldman’s tall gravestone. I notice a few shriveled red roses resting at the base.
She loved roses. As a garment worker in New York, she stepped into her boss’s office to ask for a raise. She noticed on his desk a sumptuous bouquet of American Beauties and said that the roses cost the same amount as half her week’s wages. Her boss told her that she had “rather extravagant tastes” for a “factory girl.”
At the base of Goldman’s gravestone, next to the shriveled red roses, is a small bottle of Fireball whiskey and several small stones, the stones a Jewish custom for remembering the dead. I have nothing to offer except for my face mask or tank top.
“I’ll be back with something,” I tell her. I pause at her grave and remember how I met her.
********
Twenty years ago, I encountered the life and work of Emma Goldman. My high school English teacher—and the husband of my dad’s former probation officer—assigned the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. In Ragtime, a novelized Goldman tells the novelized Evelyn Nesbit—who was basically America’s first top model—that corseted beauty is garbage.
That Christmas, my sister Emily, a year older than me, gifted me Goldman’s memoir, Living My Life, upon request. The book came in two volumes—a light purple one and a light blue. Emily ordered the volumes from a shop in Omaha and then drove to get them, as my Nebraska hometown lacked a decent bookstore. At the time, Emily was recently released from a short stint in the county correctional facility. A punishment resulting, in part, from her relationship with José, her husband at the time, who had been sentenced to two years in the Nebraska State Penitentiary for dealing methamphetamine earlier that fall.
Emily was no longer living at home. She was on her own, helping to raise José’s four girls from his prior marriage, while he was down in Lincoln serving out his sentence. In her adolescence, Emily felt the pains of our working-class upbringing more than me, even though I got called “trash” and “faggot” by my cohort and some adults with regularity. When I was in high school and gaining weight, a group of jocks shouted “Hippy fag” as I swished down the hallways in 25-cent garage sale Levis. Later, in college, I realized that these bros were really screaming “Hippo fag,” and I ranked the severity of the insults: being called fag, being fat shamed, being called trash. Fat trash hurt the most.
Being gay and poor in small-town Nebraska was dangerous. But being a woman and poor was more dangerous and infinitely more tedious. In Emily’s eyes, being from a poor, female-headed household meant that one had to look a certain way. At first, this manifested as an eating disorder. Like our mother, Emily and I both cut calories. And like our mother, we worked multiple jobs to make ends meet and tired out our bodies, laboring in cornfields, in fast food, and in telemarketing. During the summer months, Emily and I were often up at 4:30 AM to go work in the fields, followed by evening shifts at service jobs. Work. Sleep. Work. Repeat. Under this grind, Emily found relief in drugs and dropped out of school.
“I felt constantly judged,” Emily told me when I asked her about this time in our life. “And I formed friendships with troubled people.”
Into this world, landed Emma Goldman’s 1000-page memoir in two pastel volumes, like a pretty little bomb. Goldman arrived in my life at age seventeen, the same age that the news of the 1886 Haymarket Strike in Chicago arrived in hers. I was a gay teen in a Nebraska working-class family headed up by an anxious single mother. Goldman was a Jewish immigrant girl working in New York factories for pennies and living in the sad home of her oldest sister. I came of age in the era of neo-liberal capitalism, after the business class had snatched back some hard-earned gains from workers. Goldman came of age during the late-Victorian era, when workers had little clout, other than people power. I fell in line. She stepped out of line. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in its nascent form, regarded her as the most dangerous woman in the country for organizing workers and distributing literature on anarchism and birth control. In 1919, a young J. Edgar Hoover deported Goldman back to Russia. She wrote her memoir, Living My Life, in exile. Upon her death, the nation granted her final wish and permitted her remains to be interred next to the Chicago Haymarket martyrs, who roused her moral conscience.
*******
After visiting Emma Goldman and the Haymarket martyrs at the cemetery on the freeway, I run home several miles in the blistering sun, my gray face mask chafing my beard. Weightlifting follows running. I work out in the living room, two blue yoga mats layered one on top of each other. The weightlifting exercises, involving a kettlebell, tire one arm, one leg, one side of the body at a time. I always start with the left, then the right, splitting myself down the middle into halves. The Siamese cat observes me from the stairs, from the spot where he stretches in the sun and yawns. He knows how to relax. I don’t.
To relax, I used to smoke. I’d tell friends it’s better to smoke in the evening than to eat cake. I inherited this line from my mother. So many of my childhood memories involve her smoking a slim Marlboro Light 100. Smoking while putting on her face for work before sunrise, a cigarette idling on the bathroom counter, its fumes spiraling, twirling upward toward the ceiling’s exposed lathing. Smoking during manic marathon cleaning sessions, a cigarette intermittently balanced between fingernails lacquered in bright pink polish. She’d scrub the walls, clean the counters, and dust into the evening until, at long last, she would pull out the roaring vacuum cleaner to unsettle her television-watching children—her responsibility from a failed teenage marriage—whose eardrums resounded with the knowledge that she was a proper martyr to keeping up appearances.
I owe my high-strung work ethic to my mother. After I run and workout, I clean house. I move the furniture. Roll up rugs. Then, mop. The smell of Pine Sol comforts me. A spot of dirt on the floor, probably from my tired Nikes, mocks me, and I drop to my knees with a rag in hand. My husband, a naturalized citizen from Honduras, says that he loves to see me, a white man, on hands and knees scrubbing away the dirt.
*******
I downed Emma Goldman’s memoir like a vodka shot, during the winter of my senior year in high school, while methamphetamine was undoing my working-class household. First, meth had come for Emily, ensnaring her but releasing her to move on. Next, meth came for my mom, and the drug would never totally let her go. To this drug, my mother would surrender her livelihood, her home, and her freedom through multiple incarcerations. The winter when I read Goldman’s memoir, my mom fell headlong into addiction, despite interventions and pleas, never to return again as the overworked single-mother who strove to keep up appearances. In America’s second Gilded Age, keeping up appearances, as the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer, broke my mom.
Before all of this came to pass, the mornings of my working-class childhood smelled of hairspray and Avon. The bathroom’s plastic laminate countertop was scorched by hot curling irons left sitting too long and stained by myriad shades of fingernail polish. In my teens, my mom and Emily competed with one another for bathroom space, each of them looking into the mirror and applying mascara to their eyelashes, each of them screaming to the other to get the hell out of the way.
“When you don’t have much money, you have to look good,” my mom once said, smoking a cigarette and driving down the gravel roads that crisscrossed my childhood.
To be poor and without beauty, in my mother’s eyes, was the meanest kind of poverty. She did not like the idea of her children sitting at the ugly kids table during lunch, which was where I sat. A nerd, I could not toss a football without it waffling and falling, like a pigeon dying in flight. I agonized over my studies, hunched over a book with my head in my hand, my hair always a little wild and uncombed.
“Comb your hair. You look like a deranged scientist,” my mom would scold.
In high school, I watched my face grow rounder, so I cut my calories down to near starvation and took to stealing my mom’s Marlboro Light 100s in the evening to cut the hunger. I ran past the train tracks to the graveyard on the edge of the country, where my family’s dead were buried. There, I would smoke alongside the fields in the pink dusk of September, when the crisp cornstalks glowed and meadowlarks darted from fence posts to silos.
The rooms of my drafty Victorian childhood home were cold in winter. Assistance from the utility company kept the heat on, but it was still cold. The sight of my breath, like a ghost disintegrating, welcomed me into those dark mornings of my high school years when I awoke to no one. Emily was out of the picture. My mom was often gone at her boyfriend’s, himself a dealer who spent his nights wide awake on meth. Once, on a Tuesday at midnight, I locked the doors because my mom had not yet come home only to be awakened to her honking her Buick in the driveway during the hour right before sunrise, when the light is violet blue.
To keep the household together, I became a kind of mother, like my mom did as a teenager. I helped her pay the bills. I made sure she was safe. The clicks of her stride in high-heels in my first years of life were methodical and constant, as she strove to be the breadwinner without support from my father, who had his own stints in and out of jail. A poor yet pretty lady who worked in retail, my mom did not have the education to name the problem—the gender oppression which short changes working women—in which she was drowning. Then, as I left the crumbling Victorian of my childhood, came her unsteady stagger into a life of addiction. Her stumble. Her crash.
********
As the hot summer of coronavirus and civil discontent ripens, as I run to Emma’s grave, I ask myself what I remember of reading Emma Goldman’s memoir, Living My Life. I remember her snark. Her energetic organizing. Dancing was a part of revolution in her eyes. She would have loved disco. “At the dances I was one of the most untiring and the gayest,” she writes in her memoir.
I’ve since lost the two pastel volumes that my sister, Emily, gave me for Christmas. One of the volumes, the blue one, disappeared in college when I was moving from dorm to dorm. The other volume, the purple one, disappeared when I was on my way out of the United States to England for a Fulbright to study human rights.
Though Emily did not score high marks in terms of being a so-called role model, Emma sat with me on the lonely, dark mornings in my last year at home. We huddled under a blanket by the cast iron register of my bedroom. I escaped into her life. Reading Emma’s memoir, I felt as though I could hear her voice, ardent and cheerful, telling me stories about her traveling around the country, her organizing, her many lectures on anarchism and labor rights to audiences of workers dispossessed in the boom-bust dance of laissez-faire global capitalism. I remember her telling me about her many incarcerations, like the time when she was in jail in Buffalo and received hate mail, saying, “You damn bitch of an anarchist… I wish I could get at you. I’d tear out your heart and feed it to my dog.”
At the beginning of America’s first Gilded Age, the immigrant, Emma Goldman, was not a radical. She arrived from Russia in 1885 at age 16. She followed her older sisters to America, leaving behind in Saint Petersburg an Orthodox Jewish father, who had the year before thrown her French grammar into the fire. In her memoir, she writes that her father screamed, “Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.”
Goldman’s vision of America was idealistic. Arriving in New York harbor with her sister Helena, she saw rising from the mist the Statue of Liberty, which she writes about in her memoir: “Ah, there she was, the symbol of hope, of freedom, of opportunity! She held her torch high to light the way to the free country, the asylum for the oppressed of all lands… Our spirits were high, our eyes filled with tears.”
A stickler for facts, I asked myself, “Did Emma really see the Statue of Liberty in 1885, given that it wasn’t actually finished until 1886?”
I heard her reply to me, “Liberty was under construction when I arrived. It always is.”
After she landed in the United States, Goldman’s idealism faded fast into long workdays at garment factories. Then, the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago transpired, and the implications for immigrant workers haunted Goldman. On May 1, 1886, a peaceful workers’ strike for the eight-hour workday began at Haymarket Square. On the evening of May 4, Methodist preacher and anarchist Samuel Fielden was speaking to the demonstrators about why the laws of the land did not favor workers. Fielden’s anarchism came from the conviction that the rule-of-law institutions promised by America were controlled by industrialist strongmen who would never allow labor to be fairly compensated. As Fielden spoke, a bomb exploded. Police advanced on the crowd. Gunfire followed. Many died.
Eight labor leaders, including Fielden, were arrested. In a climate of prejudice against foreign labor and employer opposition to the eight-hour workday, a sham trial ensued. Much alleged, no hard evidence. The actual bomber was never determined. Five of the eight labor leaders—August Spies, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons, Louis Lingg, and George Engle—were hanged. Of the five, only Parsons—a white Southerner married to the daughter of a former slave—was American-born.
“The newspapers called these men anarchists, bomb throwers,” Goldman writes, reflecting on her younger self’s political awakening. “What was anarchism?”
*******
As a young man in the early 2000s, I was no self-declared anarchist. At the time, I saw anarchism, in its contemporary manifestations, as being hijacked by angry white men on the political extremes. At the time, I saw the abolition of government, with its many protections for the vulnerable, as a shitty outcome that would make the powerful more powerful. I believed that anarchism—when understood to mean abolition of the government—would do little to mend America’s growing wealth chasm or historical racial divisions.
At the same time, I also knew anarchism, as a political philosophy, had its place in democracy. From its Greek root, anarchism means to be without a ruler, an ingredient for people power. Socrates, before his execution by hemlock for “impiety” and “corrupting the youth,” had offended Athenian elites by calling out excessive use of force by the state, the logic of might makes right. In his summary of Socrates’ trial, Plato referred to him as a gadfly: the fly that bites the horses’ ass, and, figuratively, the rabble rouser who stings the powerful in service of the truth.
Goldman, as an immigrant woman in a time when women had very little power, was an intriguingly formidable gadfly. She believed in free love for women. She saw property as robbery (except where roses on her writing desk were concerned). She despised puritanical dogmas and eventually disavowed all violence, even though, in her early years, she wanted to horsewhip industrialists. She knew that excessive power in the hands of the few was dangerous. And her words and public speeches had the power to rally crowds of overtired workers to strike. Her charisma had the power to send throngs of unemployed workers into the neighborhoods of the rich to demand work. In one of her more famous speeches, she said that if the rich would not give work, then the workers must demand bread. And if no bread was on offer, the workers should take the bloody bread.
In Anarchism and Other Essays, Goldman writes that all government rests on violence and is easily corrupted by wealth and influence. In the same set of essays, she writes that the key principle of anarchism is to investigate and analyze every proposition. Central to Goldman’s conception of anarchism was the idea that the individual must attain consciousness of her material circumstances, her economic and social position. She writes that anarchism, as an intellectual proposition, calls for the individual to awaken to “the storm raging within” and in relation to one’s surroundings. Anarchism is not equivalent to chaos. According to Goldman, money and greed are the root of all suffering and conflict.
As a senior in high school, I was halfway convinced. But more than beautiful ideas and words, I needed a way to support myself. I agreed with Goldman’s attitude toward possessions as the root of suffering. But a part of me—the Midwestern and rural, hardworking and striving part of me—felt that I had to be industrious, a workaholic. I was a product of the gendered capitalist paradigm of my upbringing: an only son, even if a bit effeminate, must be confident and must get ahead and one day be of means to help his family from sliding into greater poverty.
Even though Goldman had seeped into my conscience, I lived in tension with ideals she championed. I wanted to fit in. Get good grades. Go to college. Stand up for just causes. Move into the middle-class. Be green. Out of pragmatism and principle, never own a car. Instead, run while envisioning success. Fake it until you make it! Push the storm raging within—the one from a fractured working-class upbringing—into the background. And be fucking haunted by it.
*******
Storms swept in the summer before I went to college. Fields of corn lay flattened by the increasing ferocity of the winds. The fact that my mom was falling prey to meth was well known, by both my family and the local police. I witnessed firsthand the dangers of this drug, by virtue of my sister’s experience and my mom’s boyfriend at the time, the tweaker dealer who scratched his face a lot and belonged to a group of bikers whom I regarded as a gang of toxic bigots. But I didn’t really fathom the behavioral madness unique to meth. This knowledge would be acquired over time, month by month, as my mom, the mother I knew, vanished into the body of a meth addict, which was the strangest kind of casualty. The kind where the person is yet living while at the same time on the other side of dying. A contradiction. A zombie.
I first confided my mom’s addiction to my friend Angie, the daughter of the English instructor who assigned E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Angie, with her boyish hairdo and black baseball cap with Ms. in pink letters, spoke of modern intellectuals like John Rawls, whose philosophical positions on wealth redistribution rest on the concept of the veil of ignorance. I found Rawls’s concept to be a gorgeous thought experiment, that individuals ought to make decisions about the kind of society they want to live in without foreknowledge of their particular race or gender or class. I pondered the veil of ignorance while I read discourses on politics, my head in my hand, my hair unkept.
“My mom’s doing meth,” I told Angie, one day while she was driving me around during my senior year.
“I’m sorry,” she told me. “How do you know?”
“I just do,” I said. I didn’t want to explain all of the evidence.
“You want to know one thing I never told you?” Angie asked.
“That your mom was my dad’s probation officer?” I responded, finishing her sentence.
“How’d you know?” she asked.
“A hunch,” I responded.
One summer’s day, a week before my 18th birthday, Angie drove me to my house, where two squad cars were parked on the brick street in front of the old Victorian. The details of that day are fuzzy. Angie remembers.
“It was probably my first firsthand experience with police mistreatment,” Angie told me when I asked her about that day.
The police officers, two middle-aged men, wanted to speak to my mom. First, under the pretext that our dog had bitten someone. Then, I discerned, because they wanted to enter the house without a warrant. The police informed me I was the “man of the house” and that I needed to own up to the problems with my mom and my family. And “the damn dog,” too.
“In response, you were like, ‘Well, that’s not exactly fair,’” Angie recalled. “They were clearly staking you all out.”
As this scene unfolded, my mom pulled into our driveway in her old Buick. The car had some bruises. Her boyfriend, the tweaker dealer, had been taking out fits of rage on it. Cracks zigzagged across the front window. Three holes, the size of bullets, dotted the trunk. My mom, for her part, often came home black and blue. At first, she blamed the bruises on accidents. So clumsy, she called herself. A woman with blond highlights and a thin waist—the ideal feminine performance of her class and place—always in search of a man. A woman who took what she could get. Which meant slaps, a busted car, a chauvinist who called her a “tired, old bitch,” despite being young. Often, strangers mistook her for my sister.
As the police officers argued that I had better own up to being the man of the house, my mom got out of her Buick with our dog, the female German shepherd she bought us for Christmas years before. Before my mom said anything, she wept. She sat down on the rotting floorboards of the porch. Mascara tears rolled down her cheeks. The leash of our big, whimpering dog tangled around her legs.
“What’s wrong with you, lady?” the cops asked.
“Yeah, what’s wrong with you, nowadays?” chimed in our gray-haired neighbors, who congregated on the sidewalk in front of our house to take in the show.
In the end, the police took their pound of flesh that day in the German shepherd. They wrested the dog away from my mom as I stood there persuading her to do what the police commanded. They put the dog to sleep. Then, that fall, two months after I left for college, my mom was arrested for possession of meth.
*******
Emma Goldman was a buxom woman in a time when body fat, especially on a female factory worker, was a sign of being able to bear many children. As a garment worker, Goldman made corsets. She herself did not wear them, except for the time she posed as a sex worker to advance the cause of labor. In the photos of Goldman—which are mostly mugshots—she is unsmiling, her hair unkempt, her pince-nez glasses pinching her nose.
I left my house with Goldman’s memoir among the possessions I carried to college. Her books moved into my college dorm room, a shoebox with wood floors in the oldest dormitory on campus. I shared this room with random roommate Bill. His name was not even William. Simply Bill, who never cleaned his side of the shoebox. His mother, with her chirpy voice, drove 150 miles to collect trash bags full of Bill’s musty laundry.
“Isn’t that a waste of gas and money?” I’d ask him.
Bill, who was bearded and balding at 18, shrugged in response, his eyes absorbed by the game on his computer.
Goldman’s books rested on my desk that freshmen year as the twin towers smoldered on the television. Her books sat on my dorm room shelf when I assumed leadership over various left-leaning human rights groups on campus. With other student activists, I staged “die-ins” in the lead-up to the war in Afghanistan: we lay down on the plaza outside the student union, our bodies outlined in pink chalk. Then came walkouts when we left our classes to protest the bombs of shock and awe over Baghdad. On a cold March day, we ended our walkout with a peaceful rally at the Federal Building, our winter coats glittering with little wet snowflakes. Days before this protest, because my name was on the permit, a gruff law enforcement officer from the U.S. Marshal Service called me on my dorm room landline.
“Mr. Jones,” he said. “We need you to come down to be interviewed by the U.S. Marshals. This is mandatory.”
“Don’t go,” came a whisper from Emma’s memoirs.
At least, this was what I heard in my head. I hung up the phone. I never went to be interviewed, despite the daily calls from Federal police. Our rally, which entailed about 200 students, was lap-dog polite.
Meanwhile, Emily, who had gifted me Goldman’s memoirs, did not have the luxury of being a full-time student. She worked overtime in telemarketing and in sales, trying to put her life back together, year by year. After her visits to José in the Nebraska State Penitentiary, she would stop by my dorm room, four miles from the prison, and take Goldman’s memoirs from my bookcase.
“Did I give these to you?” she’d ask, thumbing through them.
“Yes,” I’d say.
While I was off studying and organizing, Emily was a mother to José’s four daughters, none of whom were her own. She became a parent too young, like our mom before her. José beat Emily up in the trailer home she bought for him and the girls on the outskirts of Omaha, broke her bones. To save her life, she nailed down a restraining order. José’s crying girls looked out the back window of his Toyota, tears rolling down their cheeks, and waved goodbye to my sister. She wept as she stood there, waving back.
When I graduated from college and left for England, Emily met a kinder man: Luis, who worked at a meatpacking plant; Luis, who came to the United States by paying a great deal of money to a coyote; Luis, with whom my sister would have her own child; Luis, who would, years after the birth of his and Emily’s child, be rounded up in an ICE sting of undocumented workers; Luis, who during the summer of plague and civil discontent, would call from Mexico to talk to his child.
A call, in fact, to say goodbye. Luis, who would die from the coronavirus.
When my sister calls me with this news, I listen to her sob. I listen to her contemplate her child’s loss. I listen to her ask why she did not fight harder for him to get back into the country, how eventually she gave up and gave in to being a single parent. I tell her that I promise to be like a father to the child, forever. But recognizing the advantages of my material and social circumstances relative to Luis, I correct myself. Remembering the gender paradigm in which I was raised, where men have one role and women have another, I amend my offer.
“I mean, I’ll be a fairy goddess parent,” I tell my sister.
*******
Throughout the summer of coronavirus and civil discontent, I sprint miles to Emma’s grave. Months of running. As the president presiding over the coronavirus’s debut and hundreds of thousands dead blames popular unrest on anti-fascists and “invisible anarchists” and labels diverse cities like Chicago as “anarchist jurisdictions,” I make my runs to Emma a weekly ritual.
I take her flowers. Not lovely American beauty roses. I stop by the grassy embankment near the off ramp of the freeway where patches of wildflowers grow. Cars zoom past. I pick an assortment. Purple echinacea, the tips of the petals turning brown in the dry heat. Daises. Pink cornflowers. Weeds.
I carry my messed-up flowers to the cemetery. Late in summer, a terrible storm sweeps through Nebraska, across Iowa, and into Chicago. The so-called derecho—a “straight” wall of winds—charges through with its ominous clouds and mysterious cyclones and leaves so much in ruin. The shade trees beyond the working-class anarchist section of the cemetery splinter, their trunks cut in two. In the midst of lost and broken branches, sun hits skin with heat that feels like budding anger. Without the shade, cars honking on the freeway sound more desperate.
I set my flowers at Emma’s gravestone. I pause. I remember how I met her.
