Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

Alot of people thought anarchists were fools. I finished high school in 1924, and even during my girlhood, when the fiercest wing of anarchists still believed in “propaganda by deed” and threw bombs and shot at world leaders, people thought they did it out of a bloody kind of sappiness, a laughable naïveté. All this laughing, I came to think, ignored the number of things a person could be a fool for in this life — a fool for love, a fool for Christ, a fool for admiration. I had friends who were all of these, as it turned out. But I took my own route.

I wasn’t born into anarchism. I read myself into it. Someone handed me a pamphlet in the street, and that was the beginning. And my cousin Joe was an influence. Joe was a third cousin, hardly related at all, but in our teen years we were both enlisted in my mother’s brief attempt to distribute used clothes to the poor in our church. Musty woolen topcoats, faded school pinafores, piles and piles of men’s hats. The problem was, my mother was afraid of the people who showed up for the clothes. We stood behind a table in the dank church basement while she pled for an orderly line and whispered at me not to touch the children. On the other side, Joe was muttering to me about why we had these extra goods and they didn’t.

I was born in India, in the city of Madras in the state of Tamil Nadu, when my father was a missionary for the Congregationalist Church. We went home to Philadelphia when I was six, but I had memories. My father left the mission in a state of great disillusion, embittered by ecclesiastical infighting in a country so filled with suffering. In America, I was mocked for the way my speech sounded Indian and was hounded in school by a group of bullying girls.

In my adult life, when my friends heard I came from a missionary family, they teased me about how I naturally came from a long line of zealots, didn’t I, which was how I liked to view it. Actually, the zealotry had drained by the time I was growing up. My father was just another bald, tired minister who mumbled through the services and didn’t really want to look anyone in the eye. My mother was more ardent, more desperate.

I hated the unbearable Ladies’ Aid meetings in our living room and the tedious Sunday school with my poor mother teaching improbable platitudes. In high school I was infamous for cynical jokes about the Virgin Mary. Only Joe was worse. In the school auditorium, he passed me notes parodying the psalm read in assembly. ( He that hath clean hands and a pure heart and always washes with Boraxo .)

When I was reading the books Joe lent me, I felt a kind of joyous relief, once I got past the hard parts. What I loved in anarchism, from the first, was the obvious truth in it: people had gotten it all wrong to expect justice from any state. Power never protected the weak, it only protected itself. Tyranny was built into the system. The clarity of this argument was pretty stunning, I thought, and so was its insistence that this didn’t have to continue, despite its long human history.

I was a girl Joe had always known. It hadn’t occurred to him to be attracted in a noncousinly way until he saw me in the park one chilly autumn day, listening to speakers for Sacco and Vanzetti. I was leaning against an elm tree when he came striding toward me, with his slicked-back hair and his long-legged walk.

“They think I’m off studying in the library,” I said.

“Well, you are, Vera.”

“I’ve been here awhile,” I said. “Aren’t you cold? I’m freezing.” I shivered for effect, put my hand on his cheek so he could feel its coolness. I knew what I was doing.

I’d had a crush on him for a while. He took off his muffler and wrapped it around my shoulders, coming closer to knot it for me. “Is that better?” he said. How easy this part was.

All our excited feelings for each other were mixed up with ideas, with anger and vision, but what was wrong with that? Our meandering conversations, full of half-remembered reading and sudden bits of clarity, felt majestic. Together we picketed a textile mill with the workers — on a Saturday afternoon when my parents thought we were at the pictures, we took a streetcar and then we lined up with a big group. Joe was a fast walker and we were up in the front with the yelling schoolboys. I kept close to Joe, I heard myself yell and chant. It was my first time in public as this form of myself.

Joe was older than I was, by a year. Once he was done with high school, he got a managing job in a printing office. He liked being out in the world, and all the mechanical processes of rotary presses and dry offset were interesting enough to him, but he had to put in very long hours. And I had a baby brother I took care of. On Saturdays I’d take my fat little Robert to the park in his carriage, and Joe would walk the paths with us, wheeling the carriage for me, so I could take his arm.

My mother spoke of us as courting, but this was a misunderstanding on her part. We didn’t mean to marry at all. We both assumed we would be together for life, no papers needed. I really loved that idea — the purity of our bond, without the government having anything to say about it or any religious body presuming it could sanctify us. The whole notion of a legal wedding seemed profoundly disrespectful to us, us of all people. I was so insulted when my sister said, “What’s to keep Joe from taking off? He could go anytime. You want that?” No one believed how unfair that was to Joe or how belittling to me.

We were still at home with our families, and we didn’t hide our plans, we were nothing if not straightforward. My parents were not backward or strict, as clerical families went. They didn’t send me away to a distant relative, they didn’t lock me in my bedroom. But they wouldn’t let Joe in our house again. No matter how many times he came to the door. My mother told me, “You think we could ever get over it if you did this? We never would.” My father said, “There’s a reason for the commandments. Don’t you feel God all around you? You think you’re above God?”

Outrage might just have hardened us, if there hadn’t also been tears. I heard my father weeping! My tired, desiccated father. It was a choked, unnatural, gasping sound through the wall. What were we doing, Joe and I? I began to think we were sticking too blindly to a technical point. Like my friend Mary Elizabeth from grade school, who thought eating a raisin before going to Communion was wrong. One raisin. Who cared, what did it matter, if we said a few words in a public ceremony? Was cruelty better? Even Joe agreed, though his face had a terrible half-smile of embarrassment. It hurt us to have me see him. So, in the end, we were hypocrites for kindness. Both of us. Standing with my bouquet of orange blossoms, I thought: I’m happy but I’m in disguise . But probably many people feel that at their weddings.

We lived for two months in an apartment overlooking a box factory, and then, as soon as we could, we moved from the Philadelphia of our families to the freer, more unknown spaces of New York. First we were in a very cramped and desolate room in a boardinghouse, and then, after we started going to meetings and had more of a social life, we shared a place in the Village with a couple named Betsy and Norman and a single man named Richard and his dog, Bakunin. Sometimes other people too. I liked this arrangement very well.