Ida B. Wells: A Private Life

1930, Chicago

The desk is too full and the body too tired for any of it, but that has not yet been enough to make me stop. Chicago is muffled by winter this morning, street noise coming through the window in dull bursts, and inside the room there is only paper dust, cold tea, the drag of the pen, and now and then the doctor’s careful knock. Careful means bad. I have known that tone in white men for years. They speak gently when they hope to manage the terms of what follows. My hands are unreliable after an hour’s work. The shoulders burn. The eyes blur over old clippings unless I set them aside and return. Yet the files keep calling up the same offense: respectable memory, arranged to flatter the country that committed the crime. They would like me as pioneer, reformer, first lady of this or that cause, anything but witness with names, dates, and anger intact. If this account trails off into illness, they will praise me and bury the evidence in the same breath.