A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo Read Free Book Online Page A

the condemnation of Fast, who had also written
Tony and the Wonderful Door,
a children’s book I loved, was bogus. The implication that he was no longer a good writer because he no longer believed in Stalin seemed absurd. As in a comic book, a Big Question Mark suddenly appeared over my head. I began to doubt.
    The forbidden had always had an allure for me. Growing up, I remember overhearing my parents whisper the name Carlo Tresca, together with the words
anarchist
and
anti-Communist.
I had no idea who Tresca was, but the fact that he was talked about sotto voce made me never forget his name. He was something illicit, an outlaw; and I was immediately curious. The secrecy surrounding Tresca made him infinitely attractive to me.
    It was the same with comic books, which we weren’t allowed to read. The babysitter was told never to bring any with her when she came to sit for us—so naturally I had to find out what they were about. Fortunately the other kids in the neighborhood had stacks of comic books in their rooms. Devouring them, I forgot all about Tresca.
    I loved looking at
Archie, Superman,
and those mysterious “love comics” that were easy to find in the hidden stash belonging to an older sister of a friend. I would come home from reading comics at other people’s apartments and spend hours making up characters and stories and drawing intricate maps of the towns they lived in. I came up with a complicated language, similar to hieroglyphics, for them to “speak.” When I showed these to a like-minded playmate, we worked hard to develop the hieroglyphics into a sign language that we used with each other, to the delight of the adults, because we were oh so clever and absolutely quiet for hours.
    I also made storybooks in which the main character was always sweet and sensitive yet tended to have some terrible fate befall him or her. My parents found these amusing and seemed to enjoy my developing sense of humor. When
Mad
magazine came out in the early 1950s, I was ready for it. Around that time, my parents’ disillusionment with the Soviet Union’s version of Communism was cresting. They had also forgotten about the comic book ban.
    As for Carlo Tresca, this is what I found out:
    Tresca was an Italian who became a well-known labor organizer in America and was an important man fighting for the soul of the Italian American community during the early years of the twentieth century. He published articles and newspapers in an attempt to educate Italian immigrants and all workers to fight for their right to better working conditions. Because he was an anarchist, an anti-Communist, and a foe of big business and the mob, he made many enemies. As a result, he also had few allies. He was murdered in broad daylight at Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street in 1943.
    The crime was never solved. My parents probably felt they had to speak of him sotto voce because he was anathema to Communists. I like to think that they secretly admired Carlo Tresca and disagreed with the Communist Party line.
             
    I n the summer of 1958, the friends I’d met at Kinderland and I heard about plans for a march on Washington, D.C., that fall called Youth March for Integrated Schools. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision,
Brown v. Board of Education
, declaring segregation of schools unconstitutional, the question of integration in the South was coming to a head. Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas and other Southern politicians were denouncing organizations, such as the NAACP, that were fighting against segregation, insisting they were really Communist groups. The majority of Americans were in favor of integration of the public schools, however, and the defamation didn’t stick. Leaders of various equal rights organizations banded together to announce there would be a demonstration by students in Washington on October 25, 1958. Young people nationwide would travel to the capital to demonstrate their support for the end of