The last time she was in Ann Arbor, Rosa had lost her baby, almost died in childbirth, and gotten arrested. She had only wispy snippets of memory from that day: the steamy heat, the jangle of Emma playing with her keys, the piling-up of contractions, the metallic stench of fear and blood. Certainly last time there was no guy in a business suit at the airport holding a sign with her name on it, and no one chauffeured her to the campus hotel in a biofuel car. The tweedy academic dean who gushed at her at the cocktail party was a generation younger than the dean who expunged her academic record when she went to prison. Even the January freeze seemed more forgiving. Maybe that was her fleece-lined trousers; in the 1960s she wore miniskirts despite the harsh Michigan winter.
Rosa pushed open the door to Angell Hall and scanned the conference board. There she was, under “Honor Our History: Anti-War Leaders from the Vietnam Era Speak Out 35 Years Later,” 10:00 a.m. Auditorium B. Her first anthropology class had met in that room in 1961.
How pathetic, getting so nostalgic about this moldy old place. She checked her watch. She had time for a walk, which was what she had told her student minder after breakfast. “I’m going to wander around campus a bit.” She had slid from the booth and grabbed her parka.
“A stroll down memory lane?” the student asked.
“Something like that.” Rosa tried to smile. He didn’t mean to be snide, and he couldn’t help being so young.
Rosa untangled the misshapen scarf Emma had knit her for Chanukah the year she was released from prison, and wound it twice around her neck. She walked across the Diag toward the Engineering Arch. It could be a mistake, returning to the university, but she was intensely curious to see Ann Arbor again. Allen had urged her to accept the conference invitation, saying you didn’t often get a chance to return as a hero to a place you left in the back of a police van. The campus looked so different now, ringed by chain bookstores and yuppie coffeehouses. The expansive windows of the Fishbowl were bricked up. The Diag looked small.
Her steps slowed as she reached the Engineering Building and passed under the Engine Arch, where the Ann Arbor police broke up a draft resistance rally with tear gas and billy clubs during her last semester at the university. It had been the first time she saw unprovoked cops attack demonstrators. Methodically, brutally. She had never forgotten the way blood gushed over the face of Esther’s friend Nathan, or that he never returned to school after being released from the hospital. At the edge of the wide sidewalk, a tall stone monument with a metal plaque had been erected. For a moment, Rosa imagined that the memorial was for her SDS comrades. She must really be losing it—they didn’t build monuments for student activists. Without reading the inscription, she turned back toward Angell Hall and her panel.
Allen was right: it was fun to be treated as a hero and an expert, although truthfully she had spent much of the Vietnam War protest years in court, underground, and in prison. Still, the students at the conference took a break from their anti-Iraq War organizing to ask her probing questions about how to stop a war-mongering bully in the White House. Heady stuff. Her afternoon panel was even more satis fying. Following talks by a Black Panther lieutenant and an ex-political prisoner from the American Indian Movement, Rosa was introduced as a distinguished alumna and winner of the 1978 Prison Activist of the Year award. She described how Counter Intelligence agents targeted anti-war activists.
“I was sentenced to fifteen years,” she said. “COINTELPRO is responsible for a big chunk of that time. They fabricated evidence, perjured testimony, and conspired with local cops and prosecutors to manipulate the legal system.”
“Weren’t you responsible for a large part of that fifteen-year sentence?” a student asked during the Q & A. “After all, you threw rocks and injured a police officer.”
“Apples,” Rosa said. “Not rocks.”
The student pushed on. “Was that right? Was throwing anything at people or animals justified?”
“I’m not positive it was right.” Rosa tried to keep her voice low and even. Tried not to let the student’s words burrow into the bloodstream of her own doubts. “We were attempting to stop an unjust war. And right there, right then, we had to stop mounted police from brutally beating unarmed, peaceful demonstrators. Kids, really. Maybe our tactics were wrong, but when you watch people being hurt, sometimes you just react to stop the violence.”
“Do you think fighting violence with violence is still okay, in our world today?”
Rosa shook her head. “In 1968, I did what felt right. We did stop the mounted police assault on Grand River Street in Detroit. Our movement did help end the war in Vietnam. But would I do it today? Or advise my daughter to? I’m not sure. Maybe not. I’m planning to demonstrate against the invasion of Iraq on Saturday in New York City, and I don’t plan to throw apples or rocks.”
That got a ripple of laughter, and the student sat down. Rosa sighed. Did she believe her own words? Had throwing the apples been justified, in that context? She no longer knew.
“That’s liberal bullshit,” a woman’s voice called out from the back of the auditorium. “The problem wasn’t your puny little apples. The problem is that we want change, but we’re afraid to meet the violence of the US government and their corporate buddies head on. Until we’re ready to do that, nothing will change.”
Rosa couldn’t see the speaker’s face. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said mildly. “Many of us in this auditorium probably disagree about tactics. But there’s room in the anti-war movement for all of us.”
The woman hooted. “That’s a cop-out. There’s no room for chickens.”
Chicken. That’s the reason Danny gave for going to Vietnam. “Because I’m no chicken,” he’d said. Rosa’s face flamed as she remembered her reply: “Fine. Go shoot civilians and napalm babies.” If only she could take back her words. I’m sorry, Danny. She turned away from the podium.
After the panel, a group of young women wearing Code Pink sweatshirts crowded around Rosa and invited her to join them for pizza before the evening session.
“I’ll meet you later.” Rosa scribbled the address of the restaurant on the back of her program. Making her excuses also to her student guide, Rosa walked back to the hotel and fifteen minutes later lowered herself slowly into a hot bathtub. Her arthritis was worse in the frigid Michigan air, pregnant with the damp promise of snow. She let her hands soak for a few minutes, then dried them and reached for her phone. She dialed Mama’s number.
“I’m in Ann Arbor,” she said, “at that conference I told you about.”
“So close. And you’re not coming to see me?”
Mama never changed. “Not this trip. Allen and I will visit in March.”
“I’m eighty-three years old, Rosa. Don’t keep me waiting too long.”
“March is just next month.” Rosa turned the knob to add more hot water. “I have to get back to the city. It’s only two weeks until the anti-war rally, and they’re still fighting us on the permit. And Maggie’s coming to town next week to get an award.”
There was a pause. “That’s not what I mean and you know it. I want you girls to make things right with each other. That’s what I’m waiting for.”
After years of insisting she would never “meddle,” Mama had started nagging Rosa about forgiving Esther, contacting her. Rosa preferred the old hands-off policy. Did Mama nag at Esther too?
“Got to go, Ma. There’s an evening session soon and I’m still in the bathtub.”
“Rosa? Promise?”
“I’ll try.”
Rosa dropped the phone on the bath mat. She balanced her notebook across the white metal tub tray.
Dear Esther,
I just talked to Mama. She made me promise to contact you.
I’m in Ann Arbor for a conference. You’d hate the way this place has changed. Your old art school is gone, moved to a new complex somewhere. I looked but I couldn’t find it. And remember the giant black cube in Regent’s Plaza where we splashed blood-red paint on the administration building? I pushed it around and around, but couldn’t begin to summon up our ghosts. The whole damn square was filled with gray-haired people in Tai Chi positions.
And that house near the hospital, where you and Jake rented the basement apartment the year after Allen and I moved back to the city—it’s gone. Demolished. Replaced by a Ronald McDonald House.
So much has changed. We were so young when we lived here, so certain we knew the answers to the big political questions that had eluded our parents and grandparents. Now I’m less sure. Oh, we’ve learned some things. At least I have. And having several hundred college anti-war activists listening to your every word is good for the ego, but when I think about how far from justice we still are in this country, I feel worn out.
My joints are worn out too. They ache and throb. It’s a souvenir of prison—I could never get warm there. The constant damp of the concrete walls invited the dank cold deep into the marrow of my bones. Corroded my joints from the inside out. The specialist claims that the arthritis is an autoimmune disease and has nothing to do with damp. He says my body is attacking itself. He’s wrong; this illness is my legacy from prison. There are some things you don’t need a rocket scientist for. Or a rheumatologist.
My hands are affected the most. Stiff stick bones connected by swollen knobs of knuckles. On bad days, hot water massage is the only thing that gets me going in the morning. I think of you sometimes when I’m in the bathtub. All I have to do is look down at my left breast, at my drooping red star. Don’t worry—I mean that literally, not metaphorically. The tattoo is stretched out with my sagging boobs. Has time been kinder to you, little sister?
Are you okay? I know you had cancer, but I heard you were cured. Sometimes, I’d like to rip my crown of correctness off my head—which is more gray than red, by the way. Sometimes, I wish I were the kind of person who could let it go, could give up the certainty that has protected me from doubts all these years. Then I could forgive you.
But that doesn’t sound like me, does it?
Besides, if I weren’t steadfast, I might have to conclude that those years in prison were meaningless. I don’t think I could face that.
I want to make it clear: I still think what you did was utterly, absolutely, irrevocably wrong. But I miss you. So here I am. Back to a letter that I’ve written dozens of times in my head but will never, ever mail.
Did we find those answers we searched for on these streets? Would I do it again? I know we made a difference in our world. Our efforts helped end the war, I absolutely believe that. But what a price I paid.
Nine years in prison.
Not being there to raise my daughter.
Missing Pop’s funeral.
Losing a sister.