Laura Earle

This is the cat formerly known as Theodora. I took her and her mother in last January, and after about four false alarms, Alice (the mom) was transfered tp a pet supply store window, where she will stay until she's adopted. But this little sweety in the picture isn't going anywhere.

Back in the early 1890s, an anarchist leader who lived here in Philadelphia named her cat Thomas Earle, after Pennsylvania's leading abolitionist in the period just preceding the Civil War. Earle was a lawyer, and when a runaway slave was caught by a slave-catcher, he would defend the person in court and secure his or her rights.

During my reseearch on "my dead anarchists," as I call them, I also learned that one of them, Laura Earle, was the granddaughter of the very same Thomas. Thus my choice of her name for my cat. The original owner of the name was a poet of no mean talent as well as a very accomplished pianist who studied in Weimar, Germany as a teenager with Franz Liszt himself. She would perform music at fund-raising events to support anarchist journals and prisoners' relief funds.

Laura once fell quite in love with Horace Traubel, whose wife was taking music lessons and who himself was a noteworthy socialist editor and the executor of Walt Whitman's estate. Her surviving letters tell of her heavy disappointment when Horace simply ignored Laura's many invitations.

An image of Laura's face has as yet escaped my research, but I did learn of her sad death. She never married, and she moved to the Florida panhandle (on the Gulf of Mexico) with her mother, who died a few years later. Finally Laura was found alone and dead by gunshot wounds. Attempts by her family to figure out what had happened in that then-remote place were fruitless. At first it was ruled a suicide but the authorities changed that to a murder and robbery.

There you have it: this cat and a handful of short poems are all that's left of Laura Earle. Here is a passage from her 1898 poem "The Spider:"

So when thy malice all is done,
Then, spider fate, in spite of thee,
We know the battle will be won;
We know the peace at set of sun,
In spite of thee.