Anthony, and whenever she thought she hadn't...
Anthony, and whenever she thought she hadn't studied enough for a test, she prayed to StJude, and whenever her mother made her spend a Saturday morning cleaning up her messy room, she prayed to StJoseph, the patron saint of laborersOnce when she was nine and some diehards down at Cape May reported that the Virgin Mary appeared to their children in their barbecue and people flocked in from miles around and kept vigil in their yard, Merry was fascinated, perhaps less by the mystery of the Virgin's appearance in New Jersey than by a child's having been singled out to see her"I wish I could see that," she told her father, and she told him about how apparitions of the Virgin Mary had appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima, in Portugal, and he nodded and held his tongue, though when her grandfather got wind of the Cape May vision from his granddaughter, he said to her, "I guess next they'll see her at the Dairy Queen," a remark Merry repeated down in ElizabethGrandma Dwyer then prayed to StAnne to help Merry stay Catholic despite her upbringing, but in a couple of years saints and prayer had disappeared from Merry's life; she stopped wearing the Miraculous Medal, with the impression on it of the Blessed Virgin, which she had sworn to Grandma Dwyer to wear "perpetually" without even taking it off to batheShe outgrew the saints just as she would have outgrown the CommunismAnd she would have outgrown it--Merry outgrew lady dior bag everythingIt was merely a matter of monthsMaybe weeks and the stuff in that drawer would have been completely forgottenAll she had to do was waitIf only she could have waitedThat was Merry's story in a nutshellShe was always impatientMaybe it was the stuttering that made her impatient, I don't knowBut whatever it was she was passionate about, she was passionate for a year, she did it in a year, and then she got rid of it overnightAnother year and she would have been ready for collegeAnd by then she would have found something new to hate and new to love, something new to be intense about, and that would have been that
At the kitchen table one night Angela Davis appears to the Swede, as Our Lady of Fatima did to those children in Portugal, as the Blessed Virgin did down in Cape MayHe thinks, Angela Davis can get me to her--and there she isAlone in the kitchen at night the Swede begins to have heart-to-heart talks with Angela Davis, at first about the war, then about everything important to both of themAs he envisions her, she has long lashes and wears large hoop earrings and is more beautiful even than she looks on televisionHer legs are long and she wears colorful minidresses to expose themThe hair is extraordinaryShe peers defiantly out of it like a porcupineThe hair says, "Do not approach if you don't like pain
He tells her whatever she wants to hear, and whatever she tells him he believesShe praises his daughter, whom she calls "a costume jewelry chanel soldier of freedom, a pioneer in the great struggle against repression He should take pride in her political boldness, she saysThe antiwar movement is an anti-imperialist movement, and by lodging a protest in the only way America understands, Merry, at sixteen, is in the forefront of the movement, a Joan of Arc of the movementHis daughter is the spearhead of the popular resistance to a fascist government and its terrorist suppression of dissentWhat she did was criminal only inasmuch as it is defined as criminal by a state that is itself criminal and will commit ruthless aggression anywhere in the world to preserve the unequal distribution of wealth and the oppressive institutions of class dominationThe disobedience of oppressive laws, she explains to him, including violent disobedience, goes back to abolitionism--his daughter is one with John Brown!
Merry's was not a criminal act but a political act in the power struggle between the counterrevolutionary fascists and the forces of resistance--blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians, draft resist-ers, antiwar activists, heroic white kids like Merry herself, working, either by legal means or by what Angela calls extralegal means, to overthrow the capitalist-inspired police stateAnd he should not fear for her fugitive life--Merry is not alone, she is part of an army of eighty thousand radical young people who have gone underground the better to fight the social wrongs fostered by cartier roadster replica an oppressive politico-economic orderAngela tells him that everything he has heard about Communism is a lieHe must go to Cuba if he wants to see a social order that has abolished racial injustice and the exploitation of labor and is in harmony with the needs and aspirations of its people
Obediently he listensShe tells him that imperialism is a weapon used by wealthy whites to pay black workers less for their work, and that's when he seizes the opportunity to tell her about the black forelady, Vicky, thirty years with Newark Maid, a tiny woman of impressive wit, stamina, and honesty, with twin sons, Newark Rutgers graduates, Donny and Blaine, both of them now in medical schoolHe tells her how Vicky alone stayed with him in the building, round the clock, during the '67 riotsOn the radio, the mayor's office was advising everyone to get out of the city immediately, but he had stayed, because he thought that by being there he could perhaps protect the building from the vandals and also for the reason that people stay when a hurricane hits, because they cannot leave behind the things they cherishFor something like that reason, Vicky stayed
In order to appease any rioters who might be heading from South Orange Avenue with their torches, Vicky had made signs and stuck them where they would be visible, in Newark Maid's first-floor windows, big white cardboard signs in black ink: "Most of this factory's employees are negroes Two gucci bookbag nights later every window with a sign displayed in it was shot out by a band of white guys, either vigilantes from north Newark or, as Vicky suspected, Newark cops in an unmarked carThey shot the windows out and drove away, and that was the total damage done to the Newark Maid factory during the days and nights when Newark was on fireAnd he tells this to St
A platoon of the young National Guardsmen who were on Bergen Street to seal off the riot zone had camped out back by the Newark Maid loading dock on the second day of fighting, and when he and Vicky went down with hot coffee, Vicky talked to each of them--uniformed kids, in helmets and boots, conspicuously armed with knives and rifles and bayonets, white country boys up from south Jersey who were scared out of their witsVicky told them, "Think before you shoot into somebody's window! These aren't 'snipers'! These are people! These are good people! Think!" The Saturday afternoon the tank sat out in front of the factory--and the Swede, seeing it there, could at last phone Dawn to tell her, "We'll make it"--Vicky had gone up and knocked on the lid with her fists until they opened up"Don't go nuts!" she shouted at the soldiers inside"Don't go crazy! People have to live here when you're gone! This place is their home!" There'd been a lot of criticism afterward of Governor Hughes for sending in tanks, but not from the Swede--those tanks put a stop to what could have been total white ceramic chanel watch disaster