Living My Life - Emma Goldman [223]
It was madness, and yet I felt that Helena was right. I was inconsistent. I saw her dying by inches with a desperate determination to escape from life. It would be an act of humanity to help her do so. I had no doubt as to the justification of making an end to one’s misery or aiding another in it when there is no hope of recovery. Moved by Helena’s plea, I would decide to comply with her wishes; and yet I could not bring myself to cut short her life—the life of one who had been mother, sister, friend to me, everything I had had in my childhood. I continued to struggle with her in the silent hours of the night. In the daytime, when I had to leave her, I would go through sickening terror lest on my return home I should find her dashed on the sidewalk. I could not absent myself unless I knew that someone was staying with her when Minnie and I were out.
My deportation hearing, twice postponed, was finally set for October 27. Sasha had already made his statement prior to leaving Atlanta. He had refused to answer the questions of the Federal immigration agent, who had called on him in the prison to give him “a hearing” in the matter of deportation. [...]
Sasha, not being a citizen and not caring about that side of the issue, nevertheless joined me in my fight against deportation because he considered such governmental methods as the worst form of autocracy. I also had an additional reason for contesting the Washington scheme to drive me out of the country. The United States Government still owed me an explanation for the shady methods it had employed in 1909 to rob me of my citizenship. And I was determined to have them disclosed.
I had always longed to revisit Russia, and after the February-October Revolution I had definitely decided to return to my native land to help in its reconstruction. But I wanted to go of my own free will, at my own expense, and I denied the right of the government to force me. I was aware of its brutal strength, but I did not propose to submit without a fight. [ ... ]
At my hearing before the immigration officials I found the inquisitors sitting at a desk piled high with my dossier. The documents, classified, tabulated, and numbered, were passed on to me for inspection. They consisted of anarchist publications in different languages, most of them long out of print, and of reports of speeches I had delivered a decade previously. No objection had been made to them at the time by the police or the Federal authorities. Now they were being offered as proof of my criminal past and as justification for banishing me from the country. It was a farce I could not participate in, and I consequently refused to answer any questions. I remained silent throughout the “hearing,” at the end of which I handed to my examiners a statement, reading in part:
[...] The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society. In truth, it is such free expression and discussion alone that can point the most beneficial path for human progress and development. But the object of deportations and of the Anti-Anarchist Law, as of all similar repressive measures, is the very opposite. It is to stifle the voice of the people, to muzzle every aspiration of labour. That is the real and terrible menace of the star-chamber proceedings and of the tendency of exiling those who do not fit into the scheme of things our industrial lords are so eager to perpetuate.
With all the power and intensity of my being I protest against the conspiracy of imperialist capitalism against the life and the liberty of the American people.
EMMA GOLDMAN
[...] A year had passed since the Armistice, and political amnesty had been granted