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Jun. 21st, 2013 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unexpurgatedRose's parents James and Beulah Durrant, moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban cities of the north, thinking they had better job prospects there. By the time Rose was born in 1933, however, their luck had changed for the worse, as had that of almost everyone in the country during the Great Depression, and Rose was born in the Chicago Hooverville, at Randolph Street. She doesn't have many memories of this time, just a few patchy images, but they have stuck in her mind her whole life, on the one hand haunted by memories of people huddled under cardboard and freezing, and on the other a simple nostalgia for the community that being all forced together like that created. When she was three years old, in 1936, her father got a job with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of FDR's many alphabet agencies created to uplift the country from unemployment, and was involved in building many of Chicago's parks. His job meant that he could afford for himself and his family to move to an apartment in Bronzeville, where Rose and her brother Franklin, two years younger than her, grew up.
As a child, Rose was always far too inquisitive for her own good. She was always exploring, particularly in places that were dangerous or off limits, and often got in trouble, dragging her younger brother along with her and very much enjoying being the leader of their little adventures and having him as her unwitting accomplice. She also loved to read, and would read anything that she could get her hands on. While she enjoyed fiction, when she was ten or eleven she discovered that she loved reading news stories and opinion pieces, and got in trouble several times for stealing the neighbour's copy of the Chicago Defender and sneaking away to the rooftop to read it (the neighbour eventually gave in and just gave her the paper after he was done reading it). She began to cut out and keep articles in a scrapbook and dreamed of writing and reporting herself when she was older; the idea of having truth in front of her and having the power to put it out there or to manipulate it to suit her. Beulah was torn because on the one hand she knew that Rose was bright and wanted to encourage her to use her intelligence and transcend her circumstances, but on the other hand they were living during Jim Crow segregation in an area rife with poverty, and she didn't want her to go too far and get in serious trouble on the one hand, or become disillusioned and dejected when she got old enough to understand the state of the world on the other.
In 1942, James enlisted in the Army, and served in the 92nd Infantry Division, the only African American infantry division to see combat in Europe. After two years training in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, his regiment was sent overseas to the Italian Campaign in 1944. When he returned after the end of the war, he was a changed man. Rose was devastated to find that her once loving, attentive father had become distant and withdrawn, and was often angry and frustrated. James's frustration was due not only to the stress of combat, but also to the fact that he'd come home to find their neighbourhood even more dilapidated and impoverished while white America flourished in the post-war boom, and the knowledge that while he had given his all fighting for his country, America wasn't prepared to give him the hand up that he needed. He got a job working in a foundry, and barely made ends meet (while refusing to let his wife return to work as she had been during the war to provide for their children, as a matter of pride). One day, one of his co-workers presented him with an opportunity to go overseas and earn a better wage than he currently was, with the promise of a new and better place to live at the end of the contract. He agreed without a second thought, and became a construction worker on Rapture.
James quickly became enamoured with Andrew Ryan's idea of a society where hard work was all it took to get to the top, and race was irrelevant. Beulah was less sold on this dream society, knowing that it wouldn't play out like that in reality, and was hesitant to move there, but they had no choice since James had signed the contract with Ryan agreeing to secrecy and to move there when Rapture was completed to ensure that secrecy. They were among the first people to move to Rapture in 1946, when Rose was thirteen, and were given temporary housing in Maintenance Junction 17, while James secured another job building the Atlantic Express. However, as the months rolled by, this temporary housing beneath the railroad tracks became a more permanent community: Pauper's Drop.
Pauper's Drop was many times worse than the Chicago slums, and in some ways was worse than the Hooverville that Rose had been born in. At least there the abysmal poverty had only been a transient stage, and with FDR's new government had come many changes that had allowed them to climb out of poverty. In Rapture, there was never going to be any change like that, Andrew Ryan was for all intents and purposes the king of Rapture, and he was never going to allow aid to those struggling at the bottom. Furthermore, while in theory Rapture worked on the principle that all men were equal and it was what they achieved as individuals that was important, Beulah had been right in her worries about such an idealistic society. A large portion of Rapture still held the racist ideas common to the times, and employers could refuse to hire whoever they wanted and shops refuse to serve who they wanted. It was an impediment to equality, but it was also very easy to argue from a Ryanist perspective as the right of the businessman to hire or serve who he wants - if they didn't like it, they should set up in competition. Furthermore, since there were no public schools in Rapture, it was difficult for Rose and Franklin to get an education. Franklin always struggled with reading and writing, but was very skilled with his hands and dreamed of becoming some sort of engineer, while Rose continued to pore over any books and newspapers she could get her hands on, while realising even as a teenager the amount of propaganda and the suppression of free speech that was going on.
Realising that he had been tricked into the idea of a better life in Rapture, and knowing that he would never be able to achieve it, James turned to alcohol and splicing, isolating himself from his family and their attempts to reach him more and more. In 1954, when Rose was 21, her father died in a violent confrontation with another splicer. Her mother received support from the local community, who introduced her to Sofia Lamb's meetings, and she found great comfort there, in a similar way that she had received support from her church community back in Chicago. Meanwhile, 17 year old Franklin had begun to tinker with vandalized security cameras in his spare time, something that has security after him at first until they realise that he is actually fixing them instead of causing trouble, and through word of mouth his natural talent with machinery reaches Charles Milton Porter, who offers Franklin a job working under him in Minerva's Den. While Porter is quite distant due to the death of his wife, he still treats Franklin kindly and in turn he sees him as a figure to aspire towards, a feeling which transfers over to Rose even though she doesn't know him all that well, regarding him as a symbol that African Americans can achieve success in Rapture.
Rose herself, meanwhile, worked for several years in waitressing and office jobs in Pauper's Drop and Apollo Square, writing in her spare time. Franklin often said that she was good enough to be published, and encouraged her to send her work in to newspapers and magazines, but she found the Rapture newspapers to be a combination of society gossip and Ryanist propaganda, and quite frankly finds them distasteful. After the death of their father, however, Franklin went behind Rose's back and sent samples of her work to the Rapture Inquirer, not as prominent a newspaper as the Standard or Tribune, but a significant enough part of Rapture's media all the same. The editor of the Inquirer, Martin Forsythe, recognized that she was talented and insightful and offered her a job as a junior staff writer, offering her a salary that was more than she made waitressing so she couldn't really turn it down, as she needed to support her mother. One stipulation in her contract was that she wasn't allowed to publish outside of the Inquirer, and once EZWaves became popular that counted too - they could be argued to be the 1950s version of blogging, after all, and they wanted to make sure that anything their correspondents said was making the paper a profit for one thing and not going against the opinions the paper wanted to promote for another. In addition, she had no choice over what she wrote about, and both with her being lower class and fairly blunt in her opinions, Forsythe quickly decided to put her on writing human interest stories rather than actual news, so that she wouldn't say anything that might get contradict the paper's official stance or get them into trouble. Rose has always found this more frustrating than being in a dead end waitressing job, as she has in name been given her dream job but in fact she is completely ineffectual and unable to write anything that interests her or that she would deem as important. However, she was eventually able to afford to move from their crummy tenement in Pauper's Drop to an apartment in Apollo Square, which is still fairly basic but feels safer and more dignified.
At present, Rose has been writing for the Inquirer for four years. While the stories she writes are fairly facile, she does do a fair amount of investigative work - or more accurately, snooping around - for a couple of her colleagues when there is a story that she views as important. While she knows that she's being held in that position in the newspaper because her opinions might prove dangerous to the paper if she were allowed freer reign and to be allowed to report actual news that might critique Rapture even slightly, it has led to some of the higher up reporters, most of whom are white males, to deride her both on account of her race and her sex, saying that there's no way that someone like her is qualified to report "proper" news. It's one more thing over which she has to hold her tongue and swallow her replies, knowing that she would get fired and they'd see to it that she was blacklisted from the other papers if she didn't, and she's supporting her aging mother, she can't afford that.
One day, however, Rose came home from work to find that her apartment had been raided and ransacked, and her mother is gone. Rose doesn't know whether she has been killed, or if she has disappeared into the Drop with her friends who supported Lamb and are now becoming a bastion of support for Atlas, or if Security dragged her off knowing that she'd been a supporter of Lamb. What's worse is that Forsythe forbids her from investigating into the disappearance, saying that it isn't her place to, that Security will handle it if they deem it important, and that she could easily drag the paper down with her if she started to kick up a fuss. Rose decided that she had finally had enough, and began snooping into everything that smelled the least bit fishy, as well as finally getting an EZWave to make connections with the newcomers in Rapture who may be able to help her, and knowing too that Atlas has used it to communicate in the past, too. Currently she is clinging onto her job by a thread, using the network as discreetly as she can, and poking into things that might either reveal the truth about what happened to her mother or would give support to the movement rising against Andrew Ryan.
As a child, Rose was always far too inquisitive for her own good. She was always exploring, particularly in places that were dangerous or off limits, and often got in trouble, dragging her younger brother along with her and very much enjoying being the leader of their little adventures and having him as her unwitting accomplice. She also loved to read, and would read anything that she could get her hands on. While she enjoyed fiction, when she was ten or eleven she discovered that she loved reading news stories and opinion pieces, and got in trouble several times for stealing the neighbour's copy of the Chicago Defender and sneaking away to the rooftop to read it (the neighbour eventually gave in and just gave her the paper after he was done reading it). She began to cut out and keep articles in a scrapbook and dreamed of writing and reporting herself when she was older; the idea of having truth in front of her and having the power to put it out there or to manipulate it to suit her. Beulah was torn because on the one hand she knew that Rose was bright and wanted to encourage her to use her intelligence and transcend her circumstances, but on the other hand they were living during Jim Crow segregation in an area rife with poverty, and she didn't want her to go too far and get in serious trouble on the one hand, or become disillusioned and dejected when she got old enough to understand the state of the world on the other.
In 1942, James enlisted in the Army, and served in the 92nd Infantry Division, the only African American infantry division to see combat in Europe. After two years training in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, his regiment was sent overseas to the Italian Campaign in 1944. When he returned after the end of the war, he was a changed man. Rose was devastated to find that her once loving, attentive father had become distant and withdrawn, and was often angry and frustrated. James's frustration was due not only to the stress of combat, but also to the fact that he'd come home to find their neighbourhood even more dilapidated and impoverished while white America flourished in the post-war boom, and the knowledge that while he had given his all fighting for his country, America wasn't prepared to give him the hand up that he needed. He got a job working in a foundry, and barely made ends meet (while refusing to let his wife return to work as she had been during the war to provide for their children, as a matter of pride). One day, one of his co-workers presented him with an opportunity to go overseas and earn a better wage than he currently was, with the promise of a new and better place to live at the end of the contract. He agreed without a second thought, and became a construction worker on Rapture.
James quickly became enamoured with Andrew Ryan's idea of a society where hard work was all it took to get to the top, and race was irrelevant. Beulah was less sold on this dream society, knowing that it wouldn't play out like that in reality, and was hesitant to move there, but they had no choice since James had signed the contract with Ryan agreeing to secrecy and to move there when Rapture was completed to ensure that secrecy. They were among the first people to move to Rapture in 1946, when Rose was thirteen, and were given temporary housing in Maintenance Junction 17, while James secured another job building the Atlantic Express. However, as the months rolled by, this temporary housing beneath the railroad tracks became a more permanent community: Pauper's Drop.
Pauper's Drop was many times worse than the Chicago slums, and in some ways was worse than the Hooverville that Rose had been born in. At least there the abysmal poverty had only been a transient stage, and with FDR's new government had come many changes that had allowed them to climb out of poverty. In Rapture, there was never going to be any change like that, Andrew Ryan was for all intents and purposes the king of Rapture, and he was never going to allow aid to those struggling at the bottom. Furthermore, while in theory Rapture worked on the principle that all men were equal and it was what they achieved as individuals that was important, Beulah had been right in her worries about such an idealistic society. A large portion of Rapture still held the racist ideas common to the times, and employers could refuse to hire whoever they wanted and shops refuse to serve who they wanted. It was an impediment to equality, but it was also very easy to argue from a Ryanist perspective as the right of the businessman to hire or serve who he wants - if they didn't like it, they should set up in competition. Furthermore, since there were no public schools in Rapture, it was difficult for Rose and Franklin to get an education. Franklin always struggled with reading and writing, but was very skilled with his hands and dreamed of becoming some sort of engineer, while Rose continued to pore over any books and newspapers she could get her hands on, while realising even as a teenager the amount of propaganda and the suppression of free speech that was going on.
Realising that he had been tricked into the idea of a better life in Rapture, and knowing that he would never be able to achieve it, James turned to alcohol and splicing, isolating himself from his family and their attempts to reach him more and more. In 1954, when Rose was 21, her father died in a violent confrontation with another splicer. Her mother received support from the local community, who introduced her to Sofia Lamb's meetings, and she found great comfort there, in a similar way that she had received support from her church community back in Chicago. Meanwhile, 17 year old Franklin had begun to tinker with vandalized security cameras in his spare time, something that has security after him at first until they realise that he is actually fixing them instead of causing trouble, and through word of mouth his natural talent with machinery reaches Charles Milton Porter, who offers Franklin a job working under him in Minerva's Den. While Porter is quite distant due to the death of his wife, he still treats Franklin kindly and in turn he sees him as a figure to aspire towards, a feeling which transfers over to Rose even though she doesn't know him all that well, regarding him as a symbol that African Americans can achieve success in Rapture.
Rose herself, meanwhile, worked for several years in waitressing and office jobs in Pauper's Drop and Apollo Square, writing in her spare time. Franklin often said that she was good enough to be published, and encouraged her to send her work in to newspapers and magazines, but she found the Rapture newspapers to be a combination of society gossip and Ryanist propaganda, and quite frankly finds them distasteful. After the death of their father, however, Franklin went behind Rose's back and sent samples of her work to the Rapture Inquirer, not as prominent a newspaper as the Standard or Tribune, but a significant enough part of Rapture's media all the same. The editor of the Inquirer, Martin Forsythe, recognized that she was talented and insightful and offered her a job as a junior staff writer, offering her a salary that was more than she made waitressing so she couldn't really turn it down, as she needed to support her mother. One stipulation in her contract was that she wasn't allowed to publish outside of the Inquirer, and once EZWaves became popular that counted too - they could be argued to be the 1950s version of blogging, after all, and they wanted to make sure that anything their correspondents said was making the paper a profit for one thing and not going against the opinions the paper wanted to promote for another. In addition, she had no choice over what she wrote about, and both with her being lower class and fairly blunt in her opinions, Forsythe quickly decided to put her on writing human interest stories rather than actual news, so that she wouldn't say anything that might get contradict the paper's official stance or get them into trouble. Rose has always found this more frustrating than being in a dead end waitressing job, as she has in name been given her dream job but in fact she is completely ineffectual and unable to write anything that interests her or that she would deem as important. However, she was eventually able to afford to move from their crummy tenement in Pauper's Drop to an apartment in Apollo Square, which is still fairly basic but feels safer and more dignified.
At present, Rose has been writing for the Inquirer for four years. While the stories she writes are fairly facile, she does do a fair amount of investigative work - or more accurately, snooping around - for a couple of her colleagues when there is a story that she views as important. While she knows that she's being held in that position in the newspaper because her opinions might prove dangerous to the paper if she were allowed freer reign and to be allowed to report actual news that might critique Rapture even slightly, it has led to some of the higher up reporters, most of whom are white males, to deride her both on account of her race and her sex, saying that there's no way that someone like her is qualified to report "proper" news. It's one more thing over which she has to hold her tongue and swallow her replies, knowing that she would get fired and they'd see to it that she was blacklisted from the other papers if she didn't, and she's supporting her aging mother, she can't afford that.
One day, however, Rose came home from work to find that her apartment had been raided and ransacked, and her mother is gone. Rose doesn't know whether she has been killed, or if she has disappeared into the Drop with her friends who supported Lamb and are now becoming a bastion of support for Atlas, or if Security dragged her off knowing that she'd been a supporter of Lamb. What's worse is that Forsythe forbids her from investigating into the disappearance, saying that it isn't her place to, that Security will handle it if they deem it important, and that she could easily drag the paper down with her if she started to kick up a fuss. Rose decided that she had finally had enough, and began snooping into everything that smelled the least bit fishy, as well as finally getting an EZWave to make connections with the newcomers in Rapture who may be able to help her, and knowing too that Atlas has used it to communicate in the past, too. Currently she is clinging onto her job by a thread, using the network as discreetly as she can, and poking into things that might either reveal the truth about what happened to her mother or would give support to the movement rising against Andrew Ryan.
