her little body up and away. She was indeed such a wee mite that they
sometimes called her Mouse and Crumb and Poppy Seed. All of her eager,
flaming life was in her questioning eyes and her dark, wayward curls.
Because she was small and frail she was spared the hard work that early
fell to the lot of her older, stronger sister. So it happened that she
had time for her wonderings--time for her spirit to grow and try its
wings.
Mashke was still a very little child when she learned a very big
truth. She discovered that there were many prisons besides those
made by Russian laws; she saw that her people often shut themselves
up in prisons of their own making. There were hundreds of laws and
observances--ways to wash, to eat, to dress, to work--which seemed to
many as sacred as their faith in God. Doubtless the rules which were
now only empty forms had once had meaning, such as the law forbidding
her people to touch fire on the Sabbath, which came down from a time
before matches or tinder-boxes when making a fire was hard work. But all
good people observed the letter of the law, and, no matter what the need
of mending a fire or a light, would wait for a Gentile helper to come to
the rescue.
One memorable evening, however, Mashke saw her father, when he thought
himself unobserved, quietly steal over to the table and turn down a
troublesome lamp. The gleam of a new light came to the mind of the
watching, wondering child at that moment. She began to understand that
even her father, who was the wisest man in Polotzk, did many things
because he feared to offend the prejudices of their people, just as he
did many other things because of fear of the Russian police. There was
more than one kind of a prison.
When Mashke was about ten years old a great change came to her life.
Her father decided to go on a long journey to a place far from Polotzk
and its rules of life, far from Russia and its laws of persecution and
death, to a true Promised Land where all people, it was said, no matter
what their nation and belief, were free to live and be happy in their
own way. The name of this Promised Land was America. Some friendly
people--the "emigration society," her father called them--made it
possible for him to go try his fortune in the new country. Soon he would
make a home there for them all.
At last the wonderful letter came--a long letter, and yet it could
not tell the half of his joy in the Promised Land. He had not found
riches--no, he had been obliged to borrow the money for the third-class
tickets he was sending them--but he had found freedom. Best of all, his
children might have the chance to go to school and learn the things that
make a free life possible and worth while.
Mashke found that they had suddenly become the most important people in
Polotzk. All the neighbors gathered about to see the marvelous tickets
that could take a family across the sea. Cousins who had not thought of
them for months came with gifts and pleadings for letters from the new
world. "Do not forget us when you are so happy and grand," they said.
"You will see my boy, my Möshele," cried a poor mother again and again.
"Ask him why he does not write to us these many months. If you do not
find him in Boston maybe he will be in Balti-moreh. It is all America."
The day came at last when every stool and feather-bed was sold, and
their clothes and all the poor treasures they could carry were wrapped
in queer-looking bundles ready to be taken in their arms to the new
home. All of Polotzk went to the station to wave gay handkerchiefs and
bits of calico and wish them well. They soon found, however, that the
way of the emigrant is hard. In order to reach the sea they had to go
through Germany to Hamburg, and a fearful journey it proved to be. It
was soon evident that the Russians were not the only cruel people in the
world; the Germans were just as cruel in strange and unusual ways, and
in a strange language.
They put the travelers in prison, for which they had a queer name, of
course--"Quarantine," they called it. They drove them like cattle into
a most unpleasant place, where their clothes were snatched off, their
bodies rubbed with an evil, slippery substance, and their breath taken
away by an unexpected shower that suddenly descended on their helpless
heads. Their precious bundles, too, were tossed about rudely and steamed
and smoked. As the poor victims sat wrapped in clouds of steam waiting
for the final agony, their clothes were brought back, steaming like
everything else, and somebody cried, "Quick! Quick! or you will lose
your train!" It seemed that they were not to be murdered after all, but
that this was just the German way of treating people whom they thought
capable of carrying diseases about with them.
Then came the sixteen days on the big ship, when Mashke was too ill part
of the time even to think about America. But there were better days,
when the coming of morning found her near the rail gazing at the path of
light that led across the shimmering waves into the heart of the golden
sky. That way seemed like her own road ahead into the new life that
awaited her.
The golden path really began at a Boston public school. Here Mashke
stood in her new American dress of stiff calico and gave a new American
name to the friendly teacher of the primer class. Mary Antin she was
called from that day, all superfluous foreign letters being dropped off
forever. As her father tried in his broken English to tell the teacher
something of his hopes for his children, Mary knew by the look in his
eyes that he, too, had a vision of the path of light. The teacher
also saw that glowing, consecrated look and in a flash of insight
comprehended something of his starved past and the future for which
he longed. In his effort to make himself understood he talked with
his hands, with his shoulders, with his eyes; beads of perspiration
stood out on his earnest brow, and now he dropped back helplessly into
Yiddish, now into Russian. "I cannot now learn what the world knows;
I must work. But I bring my children--they go to school for me. I am
American citizen; I want my children be American citizens."
The first thing was, of course, to make a beginning with the new
language. Afterward when Mary Antin was asked to describe the way the
teacher had worked with her foreign class she replied with a smile, "I
can't vouch for the method, but the six children in my own particular
group (ranging in age from six to fifteen--I was then twelve) attacked
the see-the-cat and look-at-the-hen pages of our primers with the
keenest zest, eager to find how the common world looked, smelled, and
tasted in the strange speech, and we learned!" There was a dreadful
time over learning to say _the_ without making a buzzing sound; even
mastering the v's and w's was not so hard as that. It was indeed a proud
day for Mary Antin when she could say "We went to the village after
water," to her teacher's satisfaction.
How Mary Antin loved the American speech! She had a native gift for
language, and gathered the phrases eagerly, lovingly, as one gathers
flowers, ever reaching for more and still more. She said the words over
and over to herself with shining eyes as the miser counts his gold. Soon
she found that she was thinking in the beautiful English way. When she
had been only four months at school she wrote a composition on _Snow_
that her teacher had printed in a school journal to show this foreign
child's wonderful progress in the use of the new tongue. Here is a bit
of that composition:
Now the trees are bare, and no flowers are to see in the
fields and gardens (we all know why), and the whole world seems
like a-sleep without the happy bird songs which left us till
spring. But the snow which drove away all these pretty and
happy things, try (as I think) not to make us at all unhappy;
they covered up the branches of the trees, the fields, the
gardens and houses, and the whole world looks like dressed in a
beautiful white--instead of green--dress, with the sky looking
down on it with a pale face....
At the middle of the year the child who had entered the primer class in
September without a word of English was promoted to the fifth grade. She
was indeed a proud girl when she went home with her big geography book
making a broad foundation for all the rest of the pile, which she loved
to carry back and forth just because it made her happy and proud to be
seen in company with books.
"Look at that pale, hollow-chested girl with that load of books," said a
kindly passer-by one day. "It is a shame the way children are overworked
in school these days."
The child in question, however, would have had no basis for
understanding the chance sympathy had she overheard the words. Her
books were her dearest joy. They were indeed in a very real sense her
only tangible possessions. All else was as yet "the stuff that dreams
are made of." As she walked through the dingy, sordid streets her
glorified eyes looked past the glimpses of unlovely life about her into
a beautiful world of her own. If she felt any weight from the books she
carried it was just a comfortable reminder that this new Mary Antin and
the new life of glorious opportunity were real.
When she climbed the two flights of stairs to her wretched tenement her
soul was not soiled by the dirt and squalor through which she passed. As
she eagerly read, not only her school history but also every book she
could find in the public library about the heroes of America, she did
not see the moldy paper hanging in shreds from the walls or the grimy
bricks of the neighboring factory that shut out the sunlight. Her look
was for the things beyond the moment--the things that really mattered.
How could the child feel poor and deprived when she knew that the city
of Boston was hers!
As she walked every afternoon past the fine, dignified buildings and
churches that flanked Copley Square to the imposing granite structure
that held all her hero books, she walked as a princess into her palace.
Could she not read for herself the inscription at the entrance: Public
Library--Built by the People--Free to All--? Now she stood and looked
about her and said, "This is real. This all belongs to these wide-awake
children, these fine women, these learned men--and to _me_."
Every nook of the library that was open to the public became familiar
to her; her eyes studied lovingly every painting and bit of mosaic. She
spent hours pondering the vivid pictures by Abbey that tell in color
the mystic story of Sir Galahad and the quest of the Holy Grail, and it
seemed as if the spirit of all romance was hers. She lingered in the
gallery before Sargent's pictures of the "Prophets," and it seemed as if
the spirit of all the beautiful Sabbaths of her childhood stirred within
her, as echoes of the Hebrew psalms awoke in her memory.
[Illustration: © _Falk_
Mary Antin]
When she went into the vast reading-room she always chose a place at
the end where, looking up from her books, she could get the effect of
the whole vista of splendid arches and earnest readers. It was in the
courtyard, however, that she felt the keenest joy. Here the child born
in the prison of the Pale realized to the full the glorious freedom that
was hers.
"The courtyard was my sky-roofed chamber of dreams," she said. "Slowly
strolling past the endless pillars of the colonnade, the fountain
murmured in my ear of all the beautiful things in all the beautiful
world. Here I liked to remind myself of Polotzk, the better to bring
out the wonder of my life. That I who was brought up to my teens almost
without a book should be set down in the midst of all the books that
ever were written was a miracle as great as any on record. That an
outcast should become a privileged citizen, that a beggar should dwell
in a palace--this was a romance more thrilling than poet ever sung.
Surely I was rocked in an enchanted cradle."
As Mary Antin's afternoons were made glorious by these visits to the
public library, so her nights were lightened by rare half-hours on the
South Boston Bridge where it crosses the Old Colony Railroad. As she
looked down at the maze of tracks and the winking red and green signal
lights, her soul leaped at the thought of the complex world in which
she lived and the wonderful way in which it was ordered and controlled
by the mind of man. Years afterward in telling about her dreams on the
bridge she said:
"Then the blackness below me was split by the fiery eye of a monster
engine, his breath enveloped me in blinding clouds, his long body shot
by, rattling a hundred claws of steel, and he was gone. So would I be,
swift on my rightful business, picking out my proper track from the
million that cross it, pausing for no obstacles, sure of my goal."
Can you imagine how the child from Polotzk loved the land that had
taken her to itself? As she stood up in school with the other children
and saluted the Stars and Stripes, the words she said seemed to come
from the depths of her soul: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the
Republic for which it stands--one nation indivisible, with liberty and
justice for all." Those were not words, they were heart throbs. The red
of the flag was not just a bright color, it was the courage of heroes;
the white was the symbol of truth clear as the sunlight; the blue was
the symbol of the wide, free heavens--her spirit's fatherland. The child
who had been born in prison, who had repeated at every Passover, "Next
year, may we be in Jerusalem," had found all at once her true country,
her flag, and her heroes. When the children rose to sing "America," she
sang with all the pent-up feeling of starved years of exile:
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills.
As the teacher looked into the glorified face of this little
alien-citizen she said to herself, "There is the truest patriot of them
all!"
Only once as they were singing "Land where my fathers died," the child's
voice had faltered and died away. Her cheek paled when at the close of
school she came to her teacher with her trouble.
"Oh, teacher," she mourned, "our country's song can't to mean me--_my_
fathers didn't die here!"
The friendly teacher, whose understanding and sympathy were never
failing, understood now:
"Mary Antin," she said earnestly, looking through the child's great,
dark eyes into the depths of her troubled soul, "you have as much right
to those words as I or anybody else in America. The Pilgrim Fathers
didn't all come here before the Revolution. Isn't your father just like
them? Think of it, dear, how he left his home and came to a strange land
where he couldn't even speak the language. And didn't he come looking
for the same things? He wanted freedom for himself and his family, and
a chance for his children to grow up wise and brave. It's the same
story over again. Every ship that brings people from Russia and other
countries where they are ill-treated is a _Mayflower_!"
These words took root in Mary Antin's heart and grew with her growth.
The consciousness that she was in very truth an American glorified her
days; it meant freedom from every prison. Seven years after her first
appearance in the Boston primer class she entered Barnard College.
After two years there and two more at Teachers College, she entered
the school of life as a homemaker; her name is now Mary Antin Grabau.
Besides caring for her home and her little daughter, she has devoted her
gifts as a writer and a lecturer to the service of her country.
In her book, "The Promised Land," she has told the story of her life
from the earliest memories of her childhood in Russia to the time when
she entered college. It is an absorbing human story, but it is much
more than that. It is the story of one who looks upon her American
citizenship as a great "spiritual adventure," and who strives to quicken
in others a sense of their opportunities and responsibilities as heirs
of the new freedom. She pleads for a generous treatment of all those
whom oppression and privation send to make their homes in our land. It
is only by being faithful to the ideal of human brotherhood expressed
in the Declaration of Independence that our nation can realize its true
destiny, she warns us.
Mary Antin was recently urged to write a history of the United States
for children, that would give the inner meaning of the facts as well as
a clear account of the really significant events.
"I have long had such a work in mind," she wrote, "and I
suppose I shall have to do it some day. In the meantime I _talk_
history to my children--my little daughter of eight and the
Russian cousin who goes to school in the kitchen. Only yesterday
at luncheon I told them about our system of representative
government, and our potatoes grew cold on our plates, we were
all so absorbed."
In all that Mary Antin writes and in all that she says her faith in her
country and her zeal for its honor shine out above all else. To the new
pilgrims who lived and suffered in other lands before they sought refuge
in America, as well as to those who can say quite literally, "Land where
my fathers died," she brings this message:
"We must strive to be worthy of our great heritage as American citizens
so that we may use wisely and well its wonderful privileges. To be alive
in America is to ride on the central current of the river of modern
life; and to have a conscious purpose is to hold the rudder that steers
the ship of fate."
A CAMPFIRE INTERPRETER:
ALICE C. FLETCHER
Ho! All ye heavens, all ye of the earth,
I bid ye hear me!
Into your midst has come a new life;
Consent ye! Consent ye all, I implore!
Make its path smooth, then shall it travel
beyond the four hills.
_Omaha Tribal Rite._
Translated by Alice C. Fletcher.
A CAMPFIRE INTERPRETER
A great poet once tried to look into the future and picture the kind of
people who might some day live upon the earth--people wiser and happier
than we are because they shall have learned through our mistakes and
carried to success our beginnings, and so have come to understand fully
many things that we see dimly as through a mist. These people Tennyson
calls the "crowning race":
Of those that eye to eye shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book.
You see he believed that the way to gain command of Earth is through
learning to read the open book of Nature. That book is closed to most
of us to-day, but we are just beginning to spell out something of its
message, and as we begin to understand we feel that it is not a strange
speech but our own true mother tongue, which ears, deafened by the noise
of the busy world, have almost ceased to hear and understand. There
comes a time, however, when we feel "the call of the wild." We long to
get away from the hoarse cries of engines, and the grinding roar of
turning wheels, to a quiet that is unbroken even by a passing motor horn.
Have you ever found yourself for a happy half-hour alone among the great
trees of the friendly woods? You must have felt that in getting near to
Nature you were finding yourself. Did not the life of the trees, of the
winged creatures of the branches, of the cool mossy ground itself, seem
a part of your life?
Have you ever climbed a hill when it seemed that the wind was blowing
something of its own strength and freshness into your soul? Did you not
feel as if you were mounting higher and higher into the air and lifting
the sky with you? Have you ever found yourself at evening in a great
clear open place where the tent of the starry heavens over your head
seemed nearer than the shadowy earth and all the things of the day?
This is the story of a girl who loved to listen to the deep chant of
the ocean, to the whisper of the wind in the trees, and to the silence
in the heart of the hills. She came to feel that there was a joy and a
power in the open--in the big, free, unspoiled haunts of furtive beasts
and darting birds--that all the man-made wonders of the world could not
give.
"If I am so much happier and more alive," she said to herself, "in the
days that I spend under the open sky, what must it be like _always_
to live this freer life? Did not the people who lived as Nature's own
children in these very woods that I come to as the guest of an hour or a
summer, have a wisdom and a strength that our life to-day cannot win?"
Again and again the thought came knocking at her heart: "The men whom we
call savages, whom we have crowded out of the land they once roamed over
freely, must have learned very much in all the hundreds of years that
they lived close to Nature. They could teach us a great deal that cannot
be found in books."
Alice C. Fletcher grew up in a cultured New England home. She had the
freedom of a generous library and early learned to feel that great
books and wise men were familiar friends. They talked to her kindly and
never frightened her by their big words and learned looks. She looked
through the veil of words to the living meaning.
She was, too, very fond of music. Playing the piano was more than
practising an elegant accomplishment--just as reading her books was more
than learning lessons. As the books stirred her mind to thinking and
wondering, so the music stirred her heart to feeling and dreaming.
It often seemed, however, that much that her books and music struggled
in vain to bring to her within walls was quite clear when she found
herself in the large freedom of Nature's house. The sunshine, the blue
sky, and the good, wholesome smell of the brown earth seemed to give a
taste of the
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
Once in her reading she came upon the story of the scholar who left
Oxford and the paths of learning to follow the ways of the wandering
gypsies in order that he might learn the natural wisdom they had won.
"Ah," she said to herself, "some day when I am free to live my life in
my own way I shall leave my books and go out among the Indians. Our
country should know what its first children saw and thought and felt. I
shall try to see with their eyes and hear with their ears for a while
and I shall discover, in that way, perhaps, a new world--one that will
be lost forever when the Red Men are made to adopt all the tricks and
manners of civilized life."
The time came when she found herself free to realize this dream.
"You don't mean to say you are really going to live with the Indians?"
her friends exclaimed.
"How else can I know them?" she replied quietly.
"But to give up every necessary comfort!"
"There is something perhaps better than just making sure that we are
always quite comfortable," said Miss Fletcher. "Of course, I shall miss
easy chairs and cozy chats, and all the lectures, concerts, latest
books, and daily papers, but I'm glad to find out that all these nice
things are not really so _necessary_ that they can keep me from doing a
bit of work that is really worth while, and which, perhaps, needs just
what I can bring to it."
At this time Miss Fletcher's earnest, thoughtful studies of what books
and museums could teach about the early history of America and the
interesting time before history, had given her a recognized place among
the foremost scholars of archeology--the science that reads the story of
the forgotten past through the relics that time has spared.
"Many people can be found to study the things about the Indians which
can be collected and put in museums," said Miss Fletcher, "but there is
need of a patient, sympathetic study of the people themselves."
In order to make this study, she spent not only months but years among
the Dakota and Omaha Indians. From a wigwam made of buffalo skins she
watched the play of the children and the life of the people and listened
to their songs and stories.
"The Indian is not the stern, unbending wooden Indian that shows
neither interest nor feeling of any sort, as many people have come
to think of him," said Miss Fletcher. "Those who picture him so have
never really known him. They have only seen the side he turns toward
strangers. In the home and among their friends the Indians show fun,
happy give-and-take, and warm, alert interest in the life about them."