Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  During the East St. Louis riots, white women stabbed black women in the eyes with their hatpins while on a trolley, whites took potshots at blacks attempting to swim to safety across the Missouri, and the few blacks who managed to cross were then stoned by children waiting for them.

  Refugees were turned out of houses owned by whites, to be torn apart by the mob. W.B. DuBois and Martha Gruening reported that a Mrs. Cox saw a “baby snatched from its mother’s arms and thrown into the flames, to be followed afterwards by the mother.” Ridge commemorates this last with her searing “Lullaby.” “It is in the lyric of the East St. Louis burning of a Negro baby, that Ridge…fuses her emotion into her expression and becomes a full poet,” notes the New Republic.

  Lullaby

  Rock-a-by baby, woolly and brown…

  (There’s a shout at the door an’ a big red light…)

  Lil’ coon baby, mammy is down…

  Han’s that hold yuh are steady an’ white…

  Look piccaninny—such a gran’ blaze

  Lickin’ up the roof an’ the sticks of home—

  Ever see the like in all yo’ days!

  —Cain’t yuh sleep, mah bit-of-honey-comb?

  Rock-a-by baby, up to the sky!

  Look at the cherries driftin’ by—

  Bright red cherries spilled on the groun’—

  Piping-hot cherries at nuthin’ a poun’!

  Hush, mah lil’ black-bug—doan yuh weep.

  Daddy’s run away an’ mammy’s in a heap

  By her own fron’ door in the blazin’ heat

  Outah the shacks like warts on the street…

  An’ the singin’ flame an’ the gleeful crowd

  Circlin’ aroun’…won’t mammy be proud!

  With a stone at her hade an’ a stone on her heart,

  An’ her mouth like a red plum, broken apart…

  See where the blue an’ khaki prance,

  Adding brave colors to the dance

  About the big bonfire white folks make—

  Such gran’ doin’s fo’ a lil’ coon’s sake!

  Hear all the eagah feet runnin’ in town—

  See all the willin’ han’s reach outah night—

  Han’s that are wonderful, steady an’ white!

  To toss up a lil’ babe, blinkin’ an’ brown…

  Rock-a-by baby—higher an’ higher!

  Mammy is sleepin’ an’ daddy’s run lame…

  (Soun’ may yuh sleep in yo’ cradle o’ fire!)

  Rock-a-by baby, hushed in the flame…

  (An incident of the East St. Louis Race Riots, when some white women flung a living colored baby into the heart of a blazing fire.)

  (Ghetto 65-66)

  In modernist terms, Ridge’s ironic tone inverts the lullaby into anything but a calming song, and her derisive stance works to destabilize the ballad tradition from within, a technique she had already used in 1904 with “Sleep, Dolores,” in which the child remains unconsoled while “the grey wolves ride thee down.” Black poets like Sterling Brown and Claude McKay used similar strategies to invert traditional forms. In Ridge’s poem, the white woman mocks the baby, its parents, and all African Americans with her “blackface” language of minstrelsy, while at the same time failing the basic precept of motherhood—to protect infants. How much of this impulse was buried in Ridge, who tossed her own child away in an orphanage?

  The government was searching for ways to pin all this upheaval on the anarchists. Attorney General Palmer wanted to suppress all political dissent ever since an anarchist’s bomb blew up on his own doorstep, one of 10 that exploded in American cities at the end of 1919. He decided that blacks were susceptible to anarchism because of their subservient status, and that Red Summer was solely a result of radical foment. President Wilson laid the groundwork for this belief in a statement he made earlier that year: “The American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.”

  Whether or not she knew it, Ridge had already been mentioned in the subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee on January 23, 1919. Ostensibly investigating “Brewing and Liquor Interests and German Propaganda,” but in reality investigating German and Bolshevik influence in America, it was a predecessor of the House Un-American Activities Committee of the McCarthy era, with the express purpose of “repression carried on by and with the consent of the vast majority in the interests of that majority.” Attorney Archibald E. Stevenson discussed the politics of the Modern School with a Senator Overman and mentioned that Lola Ridge had lectured there on the unlikely titled “The anarchist’s relation to the law,” and that others were giving similar speeches in New York.

  “Are any of these people educated people?” asked Overman.

  “One is Hutchins Hapgood, who is the brother of Norman Hapgood.”

  Norman Hapgood would be appointed American ambassador to Denmark a month later, so his black sheep brother’s political connections did not compromise his rising career. Stevenson suggested that “It was through their influences [the anarchists’] that the German Spartacus group, headed by Liebkneicht and Rosa Luxembourg got their start…We have several avowed agents of the Bolsheviki government here—avowed propagandists.”

  A Senator Nelson asked: “In this country, operating here?”

  “Yes,” answered Stevenson. “Two of them are American citizens. One is John Reed, a graduate of Harvard University…who is a descendant of Patrick Henry.”

  The investigator certainly had his man there—John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World would soon become a bestseller. The Senate shortly summoned him for interrogation.

  “I’m again trying to get to Russia,” Ridge writes Mitchell Dawson on July 16, 1919. Although an anarchist, not a communist, she was anxious to see the revolution for herself. Her Ferrer literary comrade, Manuel Komroff, was already there, having taken advantage of free passage from the provisional government in May, 1917, sailing via Siberia and publishing a newspaper, staging plays and lecturing onboard. Komroff reported for the Russian Daily News, took the Trans-Siberian railroad to China, and got a job working for the China Press. Ridge’s acquaintance, Lincoln Steffens, also reported from Russia and pronounced: “I have been over into the future and it works.” But 1919 was also the year that union leader—and presidential candidate—Eugene Debs went to jail for sedition, for calling Lenin and Trotsky the “foremost statesmen of the age.” Socialism, that close cousin of communism, had become a political threat, with Debs garnering nearly a million votes for president in 1920, despite being incarcerated at the time.

  In July 1919 Ridge published “To Alexander Berkman In Solitary” in The Modern School. Berkman had spent the last seven and a half months of his two-year sentence in solitary confinement for protesting the treatment of fellow prisoners.

  The prison squats

  with granite haunches

  on the young spring,

  battened under with its twisting green…

  .............................................................

  and the silence shuffles heavy dice of feet in iron corridors…

  until the day…that has soiled herself in this black hole

  to caress the pale mask of your face…

  withdraws the last wizened ray

  to wash in the infinite

  her discolored hands.

  Can you hear me, Sasha,

  in your surrounded darkness? (Sun-up 89)

  Berkman was not a U.S. citizen, a situation that made him eligible for deportation under the new sedition laws, but Emma Goldman, held in a Missouri prison, assumed that she was a citizen, as she had twice married Jacob Kershner, who had been naturalized. Palmer’s assistant, 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, managed to convince the court to deny her citizenship rights in order to deport her.

  A going-away party was held for Goldman and Berkman in October at the Hotel Brevoort, where Ridge read her poem to Berkman. Leonard Abbott spoke, objecting to the wave of arres
ts and deportations of radicals that had occurred all over the country: “The Constitution of America, so far as it relates to free speech and free press, is a dead letter.” Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, a friend of Goldman’s who had dined with her and invited her as a guest to his home, “who had insisted that even Leon Czolgosz [President McKinley’s assassin] should be safeguarded in his constitutional rights,” signed the order for Goldman’s deportation. When Goldman and Berkman sailed past the Statue of Liberty, Goldman said to reporters: “It may be only the beginning.”

  When the couple was arrested, all lists and ledgers on the premises were confiscated, including a complete registry of the anarchists’ friends in the United States. On November 7, 1919, as many as 10,000 suspected Communists and anarchists were arrested in twenty-three states. An FBI official declared, “I believe that with these raids the backbone of the radical movement in America is broken.”

  Ridge’s political sympathies were already well known, and although passports were not required when she entered the country under an assumed name, she had asserted when she landed at Ellis Island 11 years earlier that she was a citizen. Perhaps the threat of deportation forced her into her second marriage. Although she was not divorced from her first husband, nor had he died, she married David Lawson five days before the Berkman/Goldman going-away party, the wedding having taken place after almost ten years of living together.

  Chapter 17

  “We Who Touched Liberty”

  “You can’t let anyone rock Little Review, and E.P. has for some time needed just such a cool and unperturbed hand to press him back into his seat,” writes Ridge to the The Little Review editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in January 1919. At the time, the magazine’s collaborative effort was between Anderson, a “finishing school-educated lesbian leftist,” Jane Heap, “the dour art school-educated transvestite,” and E.P. (Ezra Pound), “a University of Pennsylvania-educated womanizing totalitarian,” and it was this last character that Ridge was objecting to. Pound’s power game of manipulating literary reputations was the antithesis of a free and democratic endeavor that Ridge espoused. In an earlier issue, Heap herself had written that “Pound has appeared always as some Pied Piper, luring his swarm of literary rodents out of their conventional stables to their doom.”

  But by October, the editors of The Little Review had gone too far. Madness was touted as art, in the form of the work of Baroness Freytag-Loringhoven, which began the issue. “Are you hypnotized, or what, that you open the Little Review with such a retching assault upon Art…?” Ridge writes. Jane Heap dodges the question: “No one has yet done much about the Art of Madness.” Ridge, along with others, had vehemently objected to the nine page long “Cast-Iron-Lover.”

  Mine body—thou maketh me sad—thou VERILY hast made sad—

  thine soul—!

  Mine body—alas!—I bid thee—GO!

  THOU—mine soul?!

  I—mine body.

  ……

  SQUATING IN SHADOW DARKNESS UPON CENTER

  OF CRIMSON THRONE—SQUATING CON-

  TENTEDLY—FEEDING SWIFTLY—EYES CLOSING IN

  PASSION—OPENING NOT KNOWING PASSION—BOWELS

  DANCING—EYES STONY JEWELS IN ITS HEAD!

  TOADKING!

  (“Mineself——Minesoul——and——Mine——Cast-Iron Lover.”)

  Freytag-Loringhoven wandered the Village with a pack of big dogs, her head shaved and half of it painted red, wearing black lipstick, a bra made of two tin cans tied together, and an electric tail light winking on her derriere. She was a German émigré who sent her lover Marcel Duchamp the urinal to be exhibited in the Independents Exhibition (“No judge, no prize” was its motto), an artwork that was famously turned down as his own. She met him through Man Ray at the Ferrer Center, where she modeled. The three of them made a movie of her shaving her pubis, but she was not necessarily heterosexual—one of her more successful affairs was with Djuna Barnes. Williams was awed and attracted to her, until she stalked him, which is when he punched her in the mouth. He called her “America personified in the filth of its own imagination.” She in turn reviewed his book, Kora in Hell for the The Little Review in an anti-Semitic diatribe so long it ran in two issues. She replied to Ridge and the many who objected to her work that “in the nations of high culture [madness] was a public custom, as it still is—for instance in the mardi gras—or ‘Fasching’—and in old Greece in the feast of Dionysus.”

  For Freytag-Loringhoven, making art meant expressing what was most shocking and therefore most authentic, in particular, her unorthodox and outrageous views on gender and sex. She should have appealed to Ridge on both those counts, but Ridge had too much experience dealing with her dead stepfather’s mental illness. “You know how the thought of insanity scares me after my experience with the crazy,” she writes her husband years later. In Freytag-Loringhoven’s defense, Amelia Jones writes in Irrational Modernism that she represented:

  the cacophonous clash of races, sexes, sexualities, and classes of people which made up New York City between the wars, and this allowed her to embody the “irrational effects…the seedy and seamy underside of modernism that discourses of high art and architecture have labored to contain through their dominant models of rational practice.

  “She’s not a futurist,” said Marcel Duchamp, “she is the future.” Whether her practice was literary was what provoked questions from Ridge and others, and one that Ridge confronted head-on later with the work of Gertrude Stein. Now contemporary curators of the avant-garde have created the category of “outsider art” and “performance” to categorize work like Freytag-Loringhoven’s. Recent critical analysis stresses her use of many voices, channelling the schizophrenic chorus that drove her into institutions. Much to Ridge’s credit, however, she recognized the extremes of freedom that the Baroness practiced, and reversed her stance on her work—at least compared to Gertrude Stein’s—during her Broom editorship.

  In 1920, Ridge published twelve poems in Poetry, Current Opinion, Ainslee’s, New Republic and The Modern School. In this last appeared “To the Free Children.” At a February 1920 Modern School dinner celebrating its new buildings in New Jersey, she read “Will Shakespeare Sees the Children of the Ferrer Modern School Playing A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “To the Free Children.” This second poem is particularly revealing of her attitude toward the school’s anarchist principles.

  To The Free Children

  We of our generation

  who touched liberty

  had to leap for it.

  —Not as over a chasm

  aided by the momentum of running feet;

  but up in the air…one glimpse…

  lash-breadth of glory

  white as flame on snow…

  then shock of falling backward…

  …you

  we hold up high above our heads. (Red Flag 71)

  She also read “To Alexander Berkman In Solitary,” although a number of the guests would have heard it at Goldman and Berkman’s going-away party the year before. By now the two anarchists were settled in Petrograd. They had been welcomed by William Shatoff, the Russian-born linotype operator who managed the Ferrer Center for a time, acted as their bodyguard, organized in the I.W.W., and now worked as Commissar of Railroads—“the greatest railway builder of Russia”—but who would disappear around 1935 in the Great Purge. John Reed also met them and quarreled with Goldman about the realities of Russian politics. In a few weeks Goldman and Berkman would voice their disillusionment with the Revolution and with Lenin himself.

  By early 1920, Ridge, Dawson, Kreymborg, and Williams had collected a number of manuscripts for their launch of Compromise or New Moon or Glue, the various titles of the magazine that was to replace Others, but they were stalled. Timidity was the reason McAlmon put forward in a “June some date” letter to Dawson. He starts off by declaring, “In spite of your letter, I shall now try to get out a magazine,” suggesting that acrimony lay th
ick between them. For the next two years, Dawson corresponded with Ridge about his attempts to get a literary magazine of his own started. Ridge responded to one of them with a potential submission. “I was going to send you my long poem ‘Sun-up,’” she writes, “though perhaps it would have been impossibly long [at] 41 x pages. And I won’t have it cut.” Although she encouraged his work and ambitions for a press, she began a habit of asking for money. She was a bit coy. “One should never take from anyone who has—I think it spoils the friendship…” In September, 1920 she writes: “I’ll pay back that cheque but can’t just now.” When Ridge didn’t ask for money outright, she hinted: “The Scotts want to take me back with them to Rio de Janeiro for a visit. I’d love to go. The doctor says sea and a change of climate might do a lot.” She mentions trying to get to Russia but not having the funds. She was about to be admitted to St. John’s Hospital in Yonkers when she writes: “Sorry I couldn’t pay back that money, but it has been quite impossible. Please pay it for me and to [?]…will pay you back later on. I’m going in above hospital in half an hour.” He sent her more money in light of her hospitalization.

  I know the gentle and humanly loving spirit in which it was sent and shall accept it in that way. This is a crisis and I know it would be foolish not to let my friends help me through it. Please don’t send any more. I shall not accept it.

  What she was suffering from isn’t clear. A Doctor Carrington wants to put her under electrical treatment, “especially as he says nothing wrong but stomach troubles and nerves.”

  Perhaps it is a kind of nervous breakdown. She has been working awfully hard: editorships of The Birth Control Review and Others, editing and throwing parties for Others, scheming with Dawson and Williams to put together yet another magazine, publishing so many poems everywhere, writing five reviews of other books, getting married, finishing another book of poems, giving and expanding her Chicago speech for book publication, all in 1919.

  For the last two weeks I’ve had to stop work on my book Woman and the Creative Will owing to the monstrous ever present financial pressure and do work on reviews—how I hate them! I don’t want to criticize. I’m afraid the truth is I don’t want to work any more than Emmanuel does.