Larger than life they were, “like lesser
gods,” to use the title of Mari Tomasi’s all-but-forgotten novel about their granite-working
Italian comrades farther to the north. I am
looking at a photograph of daughter Eva Botto, proud, solid, and swarthy; she stands behind
the seated figures of sister-in-arms Mary gallo
and the Wobbly agitator Elizabeth gurley
Flynn (not to be confused with helen gurley
Brown), who fathoms the camera with her dark
sober eyes. Each presents us with the image of
a strong woman, not in our revisionist sense of
the term, which if Ambrose Bierce were still
alive he might define as a lap dancer who insists on ordering her own drink whenever a
man insists on buying her one. These women
have their own wine to drink, thank you, and
the grapes of wrath are ripening behind them.
Couple, Fernando Botero, 1984.
That arbor is gone now. The Bottos’ house
has been preserved as the American Labor
Museum, a registered national Landmark. I
also like to think of it as the American Family Museum, though the associations of
museum trouble me in both cases. This last Father’s
Day, my wife and daughter ordered me a box
of notecards from the museum shop and an illustrated history of haledon, which happens to
be my wife’s hometown, with pictures of the
Bottos and the Paterson strike. occasionally I
will call the place myself, always relieved when
someone is there to answer the phone.
The house that Dr. Johnson built
If the Bottos serve as an example of a conventional family willing to stretch out its arms
in a larger embrace, Samuel Johnson’s human
“menagerie,” as one contemporary
called it, presents us with a case of
altruism stretching toward family. A widower in the years when
this menagerie flourished, Johnson had famously remarked that
while marriage has many pains,
celibacy offers no pleasures. In his
fabled house in London’s gough
Square, Johnson must sometimes
have felt that he had opted for
the worst of both worlds, celibacy
plus all of the pains of cohabitation, including a few from hell.
At one time his amalgamated
household included a blind woman poet (who waited up for him
to come home from his late-night
rambles and take a cup of tea, and
whose verses he managed to have
published), a widowed companion of his late wife (who prevailed
upon him to take in her thirty-year-old daughter as well), an
irascible and dubiously reformed
female prostitute, a freed African
slave (who would eventually acquire an English wife and children,
who also lived in the house for a
