i am sassa

Mother Jones.

I knew her name, but I really didn’t know much about her at all. Apparently that’s pretty common.

She was such a badass that I wish her middle name was F’in. Here’s a tiny glimpse of what I learned, though I really can’t stress enough that you really should dig deeper. She’s worth it.

Real Name: Mary Harris Jones. Real age: Not 100. She lied about her birth date (an apparent commonality among badasses…Frida did that, too). The video I linked says Mother Jones celebrated her 100th birthday when she was 93.

She was an Irish-born school teacher, but the Potato Famine moved her family to Canada and then America. Then yellow fever took her husband, a union iron worker, and their four children. THEN the great Chicago fire took her home, and her dress-making shop. I have a theory that the fire tried to take her, too, but she rose out of its ashes a furious, foul-mouthed, shit-stirring grandma, fully scorned by tragedy and thirsty for vengeance.

She tried to go back to dress-making, but she felt sick making dresses for the rich families she worked for. They had no regard for the poor and hungry people whose labor they were profiting from, and it pissed Mother right on off. She gave them all the finger by becoming a labor activist, and earned the nickname the Miner’s Angel. She went where she was needed, and helped establish the Industrial Workers of the World, among a host of other achievements. She spent a good deal of time behind bars and was apparently afraid of nothing. She was still getting arrested at 82, right here in West Virginia, at a strike that got ugly. She was supposed to do 20 years, but the miners she fought so hard for fought back and got her pardoned.

I loved painting this woman. I’ve put gold/silver/copper leaf in all these paintings so far. On the others, the leaf became their jewelry, but that didn’t suit this painting. I wanted to gold to look like it was coming from the inside of her. Like the embers burning in her heart were floating in the air around her.

Five days in and I’ve cried during every one of these paintings so far. It’s a good cry, though. A cry of gratitude. Thank you, Mother Jones.