Vera handed Charles an old newspaper clipping that she kept in a frame. The headline read: LITTLE GIRL DEFIES COSSACKS. A grainy, faded yellow, and torn photograph shows a train shape on the right, crowd shape on the left, a little girl half-standing, blurry with motion, a beached whale — the fallen horseman and his horse — in front of her, and two wide-eyed horsemen, still mounted, the whites of their eyes dominating their gray shapes, staring down at them.
“‘I felt,’ she once told me, ‘like a chicken buried up to my neck in the ground, waiting for them to come pluck my ’iddle head off. They came, I stayed, they came, I stayed. I stayed and stayed and still they came. The station was shaking with the thunder of their hooves, a ton of horses and riders bearing down on me, and still I stayed. At the last second, they reined back. One of them wasn’t paying close enough attention, I guess, and he went over the top of his mount. Landed at my feet. Actually rolled into me and knocked me down. That’s when the picture was taken. Just as I was scrambling to my feet.’” “For this show of fearlessness she was broadly denounced and publicly humiliated. Not only mill owners and conservative newspaper editors, but prominent socialists and leaders of mainstream unions — even some theorists within the dreaded IWW itself — had characterized ‘the evacuation of the children’ as a sensational stunt. ‘It was a sordid piece of advertising. Parents were bullied and children all but abducted from their homes,’ a House investigative committee in Washington, DC, was told. ‘We are to the labor movement what the high diver is to the circus,’ an old white-bearded Wobbly told us, in a stern but grandfatherly way. ‘Our big mouths can bind an audience with spells of hellfire and brimstone as surely as any old wild-eyed Puritan scourge. We can foam at the mouth like mad dogs and wink at the same time, and the audience cries out for more, and more, and more, and finally gets bored with thrills and marvels and goes home and the workers remain unorganized. We are like drunkards: very amusing until we take a swing at somebody and pass out.’ Nobody formally blamed Rosemary, and certainly there were many who all but canonized her on the spot, myself included, but because she was the girl in the photograph, she endured, as proxy or figurehead, a great deal of frustrated haranguing and oblique vituperation. She was only vaguely aware of it, but was being used in some way as a pawn between Wobblies based in Chicago, who were thought of by Wobblies based in Detroit as lawless boys playing at revolution, who in turn characterized the Wobblies based in Detroit as parlor-room socialists with sticks up their asses.”
“Yes. These characterizations persist. My masters at the MCPS speak in those flights of rhetoric as well.”
“One of the more dashing and devilishly handsome Italian men from Chicago befriended Rosemary in Lawrence, began to school her, and, after he’d secured an abortion for her, to sleep with her. By the time we arrived in Paterson, New Jersey, for a strike by silk workers that would last nearly half a year and include twenty-five thousand weavers, loomfixers, twisters, and warpers, she was again pregnant and again in charge, at least nominally and picturesquely, of ‘the evacuation of the children.’ Many years, a lifetime, and no time at all, seemed to have been passed — or rather, a moment was imperceptibly repeating. Rosemary found it nearly impossible to fix herself in a secure and ordinary sense of time and place, in the life of the community — on which fixing, of course, sanity, almost solely, depends. The irony of her situation was lost on no one, and the belief that her first child had been aborted not by a doctor but the fat Irish cop who fell off his horse and knocked her down, became common, and eventually legendary. Some versions even had her shoved off the platform and under the wheels of the train, which had just begun to move, or within days and not months of delivery, that she had given birth to a dead baby in the cloakroom of the station. She was also informally apprenticed to the editor of the Passaic Weekly Issue, a socialist who was shortly to write an editorial critical of Paterson policemen that would land him in prison for fifteen years. In the course of becoming something like the press secretary for the Chicago IWW, she found some purchase, entered into some valuable routine, and remained more or less sound.”
“This sounds unmistakably like you. Your life.”
“She learned to defend herself calmly and articulately: she had hurt and coerced no one, she had not even argued with people, she had simply stood there looking out for the children, who would tell you if you cared to speak to them of lives the stink of which would never leave their nostrils. And in this way she began to develop as well a persona and philosophy: ‘If you cannot obey’—she wrote with the aid of the PW editor, who had also begun to fuck her—‘you cannot command. I have found in my short life almost no one whom I wish to obey, and therefore must decline command. Obedience and commandment are the surest means of terror I know.’ She was something like a pacifist-anarchist, and people who could not conceive of anarchism as anything other than deeply, inherently violent — that is to say, nearly everybody, found her paradoxical stance, in a word, fascinating. Lusty young men who liked to sing songs in bars about mining camp massacres and stage free-speech fights on street corners were particularly mesmerized by her, though it seemed to me she was growing less beautiful — more crazy-looking, sometimes even scarily so, with her huge bright eyes and the dark exhausted flesh surrounding them, lank, unkempt hair that not even the sturdiest hats could organize, the long, sharp nose, the extraordinary curves of her mouth, the big pigeon-toed feet and big-palmed, long-fingered hands. She had a charismatic but self-effacing presence: people liked, even longed, to be near her. One night at Mabel Dodge’s fashionable Greenwich Village salon, the Broadway producer David Belasco declared he would find a vehicle for her ascent to stardom. ‘I can’t act,’ said Rosemary. ‘Even speaking in a room like this makes me nervous.’ The room was blindingly white, from a burning white porcelain chandelier to a polar-bear-skin rug before a white marble fireplace, wherein pale birch logs appeared to give off pure white flames. The furniture was delicate and Florentine. Rosemary was a dark, quiet, untidy center of gravity.
‘Ah, but we’ve all seen you act!’ shouted Belasco, referring to her stand against the mounted policemen. ‘That’s not acting,’ said Rosemary. ‘There’s acting,’ said Belasco, ‘and there’s acting. Shakespeare said that all the world is a stage.’ ‘Who,’ asked Rosemary, ‘is Shakespeare?’”