That Slight Height Beneath One’s Feet

A few inches will not make a sentence truer, but they can make a body suddenly required to justify its standing. The soapbox on the street corner was originally just a box, its edges dusty, its planks darkened by shoe soles; someone steps onto it, the box gives a slight wobble, and passersby’s eyes fall first on the bottoms of his shoes. What the city begins to judge is often not yet the opinion, but why this person gets to be a little higher than others: whether he is a speaker, or someone blocking the way; a bad woman, or a nuisance who ought to be dragged off.

What is fascinating about the soapbox is not that it guarantees equal speech. It is too light, liable to be moved away at any moment; it has no editors, seating order, or tickets to screen people in advance on its behalf. It merely lifts an ordinary body temporarily above the crowd, letting a sentence fall at an intersection. Some stop, some detour around it, wheels roll past nearby, a patrolman’s hand rests on his baton. Public speech is not clear at the beginning; first it is a wobbling plank, a small height permitted or endured.

Chicago’s Bughouse Square once let many voices that did not yet resemble public opinion stand for a while. Some spoke beautifully, some could not quite make their words whole; sermons, strange tales, poetry, and radical slogans crowded into the same patch of air. But the box was never gentle. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was very young when she began speaking in the streets, and later, while pregnant, stood between lumber workers and employment agencies. Male speakers were often called dangerous agitators; when women stood on the box, they were first interrogated over whether they were respectable women. Those few inches of height did not make the body disappear; instead they handed clothing, age, belly, and posture over to strangers’ eyes.

The voice on the corner did not arrive by throat alone. In the IWW free speech fights, people came from other cities, climbed onto the box one after another, were arrested, and the next person took their place. “Filling the jails” sounds like a slogan, but it was in fact a hard arithmetic of bodies: someone had to be present, someone had to be willing to be dragged away, or silence would close again at once. In San Diego, mobs blocked the railways, beat the arriving speakers, and drove them beyond the county line; the street corner became quiet again not because some argument had lost, but because bodies could not enter the city.

Nor should the box be imagined as too clean. The words spoken from it are not naturally more just; there may be brutality, superstition, humiliation, and a hunger to perform. The box creates opportunity, and it also creates a local form of coercion: whoever stands higher pulls the surrounding ears a little toward himself. Someone may only want to cross the intersection, yet find a ring of shoulders in the way; someone else is not opposed to freedom, but does not want to be intercepted by a stranger’s anger on the way to buy bread. Yet it is precisely in this discomfort that judgment becomes clear: who will be driven down immediately, and who can be reluctantly heard through to the end. The order of the city is not written only in charters; it is also there, when the plank wobbles, in whether a few hands reach out.

Later the box is carried away, and the street surface becomes level again. Wheels pass over it, the onlookers return to their own paths, and the plank leaves no mark. Yet that patch of ground has already had someone stand higher upon it; a few inches are enough to make an ordinary sidewalk briefly no longer ordinary.