I

It was always family lore that in 1968, when protesters had taken over the president’s office at Columbia University, my mother brought socks to one of the organizers of the Weather Underground. I can’t, and don’t particularly want to, fact check that statement, so I present it here with that caveat.

I can picture her, even though I am not 100% sure of the veracity of this story, sticking her impossibly thin fingers through the gate to a gruff stranger, and then pulling a pack of generic-brand socks through to the other side.

I know she was scared, though I wonder how she expressed it when she was 19 and in the thick of it, or as in the thick of it as she would let herself be. All I can picture of her at that age is one image–her hair long and dark, parted like curtains kept just off her face, knee high boots. Staring down the camera, despite herself.

My mother was often scared. I know that sometimes those fears held her back, and that sometimes those fears kept her safe. And I know that by the time she was raising a daughter, she had committed to pushing through them, though they were still there, the shadow we couldn’t always see. She needed them not to follow me into adulthood, but she also wasn’t sure how else to protect me. If it’s not our fears keeping us safe, what will?

My mother’s world was shaped as much by her well-earned sense of impending doom as it was by the values and commitment to fight for them that brought her to Columbia in ‘68. When she was almost too little to form memories, my grandfather would leave. He would change his name (to what, I wish I knew) and head down South (the fact that he felt safer in the South, was, in my reductionist thirteen year old brain, always hilarious).

Later, when they would talk about it, they would refer to it mostly as “the ‘50s”. When I was 11 my mother sat me down to explain, and my brother asked if this was “the sex talk or the Commie talk”. It was the latter. Much more complicated.

The details of the story–the fact that the Communist Party USA would send my mother’s father underground mostly to protect higher level members, the fact that he may have secretly liked it, that it probably made him feel important, would be filled in later. But only so much. Reader, I’m telling you all that I have.

What I have is mostly about her–a memory of falling asleep in her grandmother’s house, waiting for her mommy to come home. Instead, her grandmother pokes her head in. “Guess who’s come to see you?” She whispers. And it was her father. He’d been away. She hadn’t known when he’d return.

Memories of when they’d go down South to be with him, how she would get a new name, a new identity. She was always afraid of messing up, of calling someone by the wrong name. The right name. If she slipped up. I wonder when she knew who “they” were. I wonder if the knowing made it better or worse.

A memory of snooping through her mother’s jewelry box. Instead of whatever she was looking for, she found a letter from the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Not a letter, actually. A subpoena. Which left her wondering when they would come to the door. Or maybe they did come to the door. It’s hard to know whose memory is failing me in this retelling. Whose child-like brain is conflating or exaggerating.

And just like those moments raised her, the stories raised me. They were the lessons I learned–what to fight for and how to fight for it, but also, what cost those fights might come with. There were lessons of resistance, of reticence, of reprieve. With the fear came a lullaby, a safe bed to sleep in, an innocent child rifling through her mother’s things with curiosity. There were socks passed through the holes in a gate to keep someone warm.

When the world gets bad, and we know it gets bad a lot, we will have to raise hell. And when we raise hell, we should always wear warm socks.

II

I was 12 when I went to my first protest.  A 23 year old named Amadou Diallo had been shot 41 times in the Bronx, and the officers had been acquitted, and I had friends staging a walkout, and I had to go. Because we will have to raise hell.

My mother insisted on coming with me and stood across the street on the other side of Columbus Circle and watched while I tentatively joined a crowd of chanting high school kids. She needed to know I was safe. That figuratively, I was wearing socks.

I have been told, in the retelling of this part of my own lore, that there may have been other parents across the street. We were children, after all. I remember only being embarrassed at the presence of my own mother, who I know, without any independent verification, was standing off to the side by herself. It was different for her.

There were maybe 100 of us. Most of us were white, all of us were from the city’s most well-regarded public schools. Our privilege and the protest’s (lack of) numbers insulated us, but nothing would insulate my mother from her fears.

She knew she would always be afraid, and she knew she couldn’t let that stop me. She prepared me the best she could. Standing on the sidelines of other demonstrations with me, she taught me how to identify undercover cops, how to keep my head on a swivel, so I knew how to get out if I needed to. She passed down her caution along with everything else: if the crowd gets too loud, if something feels off, that’s not the part for me.

She bought me my first cellphone to check in. She was calmest when I went to anti-sweatshop marches where she knew I would run into my grandmother and her friends. They’d been marching for 60 years. They could keep me safe. She wanted me to raise hell. She needed me to be safe.

I spent my high school years walking out of school to protest budget cuts, spending my Saturdays in marches against the Iraq War, standing in front of the Gap passing out leaflets about sweatshops. Every jacket and backpack I owned was decorated with an almost-uncountable number of buttons: “Not In Our Name”, “Justice for Amadou Diallo” “No More Sweatshops”, a Gandhi quote, probably. I don’t know, I’ve mostly left them behind.

My mother hated the buttons. They were an advertisement of what I was willing to fight for. Don’t flaunt, don’t make yourself a target. Never make yourself a target.

When the Republican National Convention came to New York, my friends and I learned to write our names and phone numbers on our forearms in case we got arrested. We calculated our risks, and the chances we were willing to take. While friends prepared to be in the thick of it, I begrudgingly de-buttoned my backpack, told my mother where I’d be at all times. I didn’t write anything on my arms, as if that would have been tacit permission. I wouldn’t be anywhere where they would need that information.

The fact that I wasn’t a target, that my race, often my gender, maybe my age, would keep me safe, didn’t particularly enter into the equation. It was not that she didn’t see those things, but to her, the world was chaotic in a way that superseded its systems of oppression and privilege. Yes, of course, I can see her saying to this caveat. But you never know. 

Eventually, I stopped marching as much as maybe I should. I found other ways to raise hell. In classrooms of immigrant students–one more verb conjugation and you’ll be safe. And then of college students–one more critical thinking question and you’ll be ready to raise hell.

Sometimes I wonder if I have inherited too much of my mother’s fear, if I use her voice in my head as an excuse. I have spent years finding reasons not going into the streets. Maybe that’s what happens when we get older, we get more cautious. We stop being the kids who write phone numbers on their arms, who carry bandanas and milk for the tear gas. I was born cautious. With my mother’s caution. The world kept showing my I needed to be fearless.  I never put those lessons into practice.

III

It had been months of watching news from Gaza flood my newsfeeds, and my conversations, and my thoughts. Months of feeling paralyzed, though not by any moral ambivalence. Paralyzed by the enormity, and the way that enormity rubs up against the mundanity of going about one’s life. I was feeling stuck, at a time when stuckness feels like collusion, like capitulation.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, though of course it’s never out of nowhere, my newsfeed was also flooded by images of students. Pitching tents on their campuses, walking out of their graduations, setting up ad hoc negotiating tables with the President’s of their universities on the lawns.

The first images came out of the same building at Columbia where my mother may or may not have delivered socks. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

She has been gone a long time. The kind of long time where sometimes I have to squint extra hard to picture her reactions. Not this time. She would have felt the same way as she did standing on the other side of Columbus Circle, even though now she’d be watching other people’s children. She would have wanted them to be there. She would have needed them to be ok.

I am a little older now, I am no longer a student on the lawn with my textbooks, with my hopes and my fears and my beliefs that this is the most important moment to raise hell. I am not a mother, but I am my mother’s daughter. I could be some of these kids’ teacher.

Her voice in my head has been getting louder–not just the voice that watched me from the side of Columbus Circle, but the voice that let me go in the first place, the voice that raised me to go in the first place. I have inherited her worry. I can’t forget I have also inherited her fight.

On the first day of the University of Toronto encampment I found myself on the subway headed down to where they were. I needed to watch them raise hell. I needed to make sure they were safe. For my mother. I considered bringing packs of socks, though it was May, and they weren’t asking for them.

 I showed up empty handed because I didn’t know what supplies were being requested, and found myself asking anyone I could find on the other side of the fence, “are you ok, is there anything you need?”  This was not the most effective way to help; I know this.

I stood slightly off to the side on the lawn, a folded up piece of paper in my pocket that read “Jewish educator for divestment and against genocide”. I’ve never much been one for signs. The buttons of my youth may have seemed fine, but my mother’s warnings about not making yourself a target seemed to have morphed into an aversion to signs. Sometimes you need to make yourself a target, I know this too.

I chanted along occasionally, my head on a swivel, knowing how to keep myself safe. Where is the way out of the crowd, where are the spots of tension. There were many ways out, there were no spots of tension. I still made sure to check,

Two men with Palestinian flags draped over their shoulders passed out fruit snacks. I smiled as I declined, make sure everyone else gets them. I’m ok. I wondered who had taught them to keep everyone safe.

I like to think my mother would have come down with me to the encampment that day. It is probably too poetic, but I like to think she would have brought socks. I would have shaken my head as she passed them through the fence. Maybe the kids would have laughed. Maybe they would have been a little warmer.

I imagine she would have stood with me, at that slight remove on the lawn. We both would allow ourselves to be a little nervous, and we would both know that our nerves did not rule the day. That we were there to witness. To raise hell, in our way. To keep people safe. We hoped.           

– Emma Sheppard