Fools: Stories

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A lot 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.

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