WOMEN’S MEMORIES--REACTING ON LIFE AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF THE
DEVIL BABY
During the weeks when the Devil Baby seemed to occupy every room in
Hull-House, I was conscious that all human vicissitudes are, in the
end, melted down into reminiscence, and that a metaphorical statement
of the basic experiences which are implicit in human nature itself,
however crude in form the story may be, has a singular power of
influencing daily living.
At moments we also seemed to glimpse the process through which such
tales had been evolved. As our visitors to the Devil Baby came day by
day, it gradually became evident that the simpler women were moved
not wholly by curiosity, but that many of them prized the story as a
valuable instrument in the business of living. From them and from
the surprising number of others who had been sent by the aged and the
bed-ridden to secure an exact history and description of the child,
the suggestion finally became quite irresistible that such a story,
outlining a great abstraction, may once have performed the high service
of tradition and discipline in the beginnings of a civilized family
life.
The legend exhibited all the persistence of one of those tales which
has doubtless been preserved through the centuries because of its
taming effects upon recalcitrant husbands and fathers. Shamefaced men
brought to Hull-House by their women folk to see the baby, but ill
concealed their triumph when there proved to be no such visible sign of
retribution for domestic derelictions. On the other hand, numbers of
men came by themselves, one group from a neighboring factory on their
“own time” offered to pay twenty-five cents, a half dollar, two dollars
apiece to see the child, insisting that it must be at Hull-House
because “the women had seen it.” To my query as to whether they
supposed we would, for money, exhibit a poor little deformed baby, if
one had been born in the neighborhood, they replied: “Sure, why not?”
and “it teaches a good lesson, too,” they added as an afterthought, or
perhaps as a concession to the strange moral standards of a place like
Hull-House. All the members in this group of hard-working men, in spite
of a certain swagger towards one another and a tendency to bully the
derelict showman, wore a hang-dog look betraying that sense of unfair
treatment which a man is so apt to feel when his womankind makes an
appeal to the supernatural. In their determination to see the child,
the men recklessly divulged much more concerning their motives than
they had meant to do. Their talk confirmed my impression that such a
story may still act as a restraining influence in the sphere of marital
conduct which, next to primitive religion, has always afforded the most
fertile field for irrational taboos and savage punishments.
What story could be better than this to secure sympathy for the mother
of too many daughters and contumely for the irritated father; the
touch of mysticism, the supernatural sphere in which it was placed,
would render a man quite helpless.
The story of the Devil Baby, evolved in response to the imperative
needs of anxious wives and mothers, recalls the theory that woman first
fashioned the fairy story, that combination of wisdom and romance,
in an effort to tame her mate and to make him a better father to her
children, until such stories finally became a crude creed for domestic
conduct, softening the treatment men accorded to women. Because such
stories, expressing the very essence of human emotion, did not pretend
to imitate the outside of life, they were careless of verisimilitude
and absolutely indifferent to the real world. They did, however, meet
an essential requirement of the good story, in that they dealt with
fundamental experiences.
These first pitiful efforts of women were so widespread and powerful
that we have not yet escaped their influence. As subconscious memories,
they still cast vague shadows upon the vast spaces of life, shadows
that are dim and distorted because of their distant origin. They remind
us that for thousands of years women had nothing to oppose against
unthinkable brutality save “the charm of words,” no other implement
with which to subdue the fiercenesses of the world about them. Only
through words could they hope to arouse the generosity of strength,
to secure a measure of pity for themselves and their children, to so
protect the life they had produced that “the precious vintage stored
from their own agony” might not wantonly be spilled upon the ground.
Possibly the multitude of life’s failures, the obscure victims of
unspeakable wrong and brutality, have embodied their memories in a
literature of their own, of which the story of the Devil Baby is a
specimen, crude and ugly in form, as would be inevitable, but still
bringing relief to the surcharged heart.
During the weeks that the Devil Baby drew multitudes of visitors to
Hull-House, my mind was opened to the fact that new knowledge derived
from concrete experience is continually being made available for the
guidance of human life; that humble women are still establishing rules
of conduct as best they may, to counteract the base temptations of a
man’s world. I saw a new significance in the fact that thousands of
women, for instance, make it a standard of domestic virtue that a man
must not touch his pay envelope, but bring it home unopened to his
wife. High praise is contained in the phrase, “We have been married
twenty years and he never once opened his own envelope,” or covert
blame in the statement, “Of course he got to gambling; what can you
expect from a man who always opens his own pay?”
These humble domestic virtues, of which women see the need so much more
vividly than men do, have furthermore developed their penalties. The
latter, too, are put into aphorisms which, in time, when Memory has
done her work upon them, may become legendary wisdom.
Such a penalty was recently illustrated in our neighborhood by the
fate of an old man who was found in his room almost starved to death.
He was pointed out by many of our neighbors as an example of the
inevitable fate of one who deserts his family and therefore, “without
a woman to keep him straight,” falls into drink and shiftlessness and
the endless paths of wrong-doing, so that loneliness and destitution
inevitably overtake his old age.
The women were so fatalistically certain of this relation of
punishment to domestic sin, of reward to domestic virtue, that when
they talked about them, as they so constantly did in connection with
the Devil Baby, it often sounded as if they were using the words of a
widely known ritual. Among the visitors to the Devil Baby were many
foreign-born peasant women who, when they had come to America, had
been suddenly subjected to the complicated and constantly changing
environment of city life, and, finding no outlet for many inherited
tendencies, might easily have been thrown into that state described by
psychologists as one of “baulked disposition.” To them this simple
tale, with its direct connection between cause and effect, between
wrong-doing and punishment, brought soothing and relief, and restored
a shaken confidence as to the righteousness of the universe. They used
the story not only to tame restless husbands, but mothers threatened
their daughters that if they went to dance halls or out to walk with
strange young men, they would be eternally disgraced by devil babies.
As the story grew, the girls themselves seized upon it as a palpable
punishment to be held over the heads of reckless friends. That the
tale was useful was evidenced by many letters similar to the anonymous
epistle here given.
“me and my friends we work in talor shop and when we are going home on
the roby street car where we get off that car at blue island ave. we
will meet some fellows sitting at that street where they drink some
beer from pail. they keep look in cars all time and they will wait and
see if we will come sometimes we will have to work, but they will wait
so long they are tired and they dont care they get rest so long but a
girl what works in twine mill saw them talk with us we know her good
and she say what youse talk with old drunk man for we shall come to
thier dance when it will be they will tell us and we should know all
about where to see them that girl she say oh if you will go with them
you will get devils baby like some other girls did who we knows. she
say Jane Addams she will show one like that in Hull House if you will
go down there we shall come sometime and we will see if that is trouth
we do not believe her for she is friendly with them old men herself
when she go out from her work they will wink to her and say something
else to. We will go down and see you and make a lie from what she say.”
Because the Devil Baby embodied an undeserved wrong to a poor mother
whose tender child had been claimed by the forces of evil, his merely
reputed presence had power to attract to Hull-House hundreds of women
who had been humbled and disgraced by their children; mothers of the
feeble-minded, of the vicious, of the criminal, of the prostitute.
In their talk it was as if their long rôle of maternal apology and
protective reticence had at last broken down, as if they could speak
out freely because for once a man responsible for an ill-begotten
child had been “met up with” and had received his deserts. Their
sinister version of the story was that the father of the Devil Baby had
married without confessing a hideous crime committed years before, thus
basely deceiving both his innocent young bride and the good priest who
performed the solemn ceremony; that the sin had become incarnate in his
child which, to the horror of the young and trusting mother, had been
born with all the outward aspects of the devil himself.
As if drawn by a magnet, these forlorn women issued forth from the
many homes in which dwelt “the two unprofitable goddesses, Poverty
and Impossibility.” Occasionally it seemed to me that the women were
impelled by a longing to see one good case of retribution before they
died, as a bullied child hopes to deal at least one crushing blow at
his tormentor when he “grows up,” but I think, on the whole, such an
explanation was a mistake; it is more probable that the avidity of the
women demonstrated that the story itself, like all interpretative art,
was “one of those free, unconscious attempts to satisfy, outside of
life, those cravings which life itself leaves unsatisfied.” At moments,
however, baffled desires, sharp cries of pain, echoes of justices
unfulfilled, the original material from which such tales are fashioned,
would defy Memory’s appeasing power and break through the rigid
restraints imposed by all Art, even that unconscious of itself.
With an understanding quickened, perhaps, through my own acquaintance
with the mysterious child, I listened to many tragic reminiscences
from the visiting women; of premature births, “because he kicked me
in the side”; of children maimed and burnt because “I had no one to
leave them with when I went to work”; women had seen the tender flesh
of growing little bodies given over to death because “he wouldn’t let
me send for the doctor,” or because “there was no money to pay for the
medicine.” But even these mothers, rendered childless through insensate
brutality, were less pitiful than some of the others, who might well
have cried aloud of their children as did a distracted mother of her
child centuries ago:
“That God should send this one thing more
Of hunger and of dread, a door
Set wide to every wind of pain!”
Such was the mother of a feeble-minded boy who said: “I didn’t have
a devil baby myself, but I bore a poor ‘innocent’ who made me fight
devils for twenty-three years.” She told of her son’s experiences from
the time the other little boys had put him up to stealing that they
might hide in safety and leave him to be found with “the goods on him,”
until grown into a huge man he fell into the hands of professional
burglars; he was evidently the dupe and stool-pigeon of the vicious and
criminal until the very day he was locked into the State Penitentiary.
“If people played with him a little, he went right off and did anything
they told him to, and now he’s been sent up for life. We call such
innocents ‘God’s Fools’ in the old country, but over here the Devil
himself gets them. I’ve fought off bad men and boys from the poor lamb
with my very fists; nobody ever came near the house except such-like
and the police officers, who were always arresting him.”
There were a goodly number of visitors to the Devil Baby of the type of
those to be found in every large city, who are on the verge of nervous
collapse, or who exhibit many symptoms of mental aberration, and yet
are sufficiently normal to be at large most of the time, and to support
themselves by drudgery which requires little mental effort, although
the exhaustion resulting from the work they are able to do is the one
thing from which they should be most carefully protected. One such
woman, evidently obtaining inscrutable comfort from the story of the
Devil Baby even after she had become convinced that we harbored no such
creature, came many times to tell of her longing for her son, who had
joined the army eighteen months before and was now stationed in Alaska.
She always began with the same words.
“When Spring comes and the snow melts so that I know he could get out,
I can hardly stand it. You know I was once in the Insane Asylum for
three years at a stretch, and since then I haven’t had much use of
my mind except to worry with. Of course I know that it is dangerous
for me, but what can I do? I think something like this: ‘The snow is
melting, now he could get out, but his officers won’t let him off and
if he runs away he’ll be shot for a deserter--either way I’ll never
see him again; I’ll die without seeing him’--and then I begin all over
again with the snow.” After a pause, she said: “The recruiting officer
ought not to have taken him, he’s my only son and I’m a widow. It’s
against the rules, but he was so crazy to go that I guess he lied a
little--at any rate, the government has him now and I can’t get him
back. Without this worry about him my mind would be all right; if he
were here he would be earning money and keeping me and we would be
happy all day long.”
Recalling the vagabondish lad, who had never earned much money and had
certainly never “kept” his hard-working mother, I ventured to suggest
that, even if he were at home, he might not have work these hard times,
that he might get into trouble and be arrested--I did not need to
remind her that he had already been arrested twice--that he was now fed
and sheltered and under discipline, and I added hopefully something
about his seeing the world. She looked at me out of her withdrawn,
harried eyes, as if I were speaking a foreign tongue. “That wouldn’t
make any real difference to me--the work, the money, his behaving well
and all that, if I could cook and wash for him. I don’t need all the
money I earn scrubbing that factory. I only take bread and tea for
supper and I choke over that, thinking of him.”
She ceased to speak, overcome by a thousand obscure emotions which
could find no outlet in words. She dimly realized that the facts in
the case, to one who had known her boy from childhood, were far from
creditable, and that no one could understand the eternally unappeased
idealism which, for her, surrounded her son’s return. She was even
afraid to say much about it, lest she should be overmastered by her
subject and be considered so irrational as to suggest a return to the
Hospital for the Insane.
Those mothers who have never resisted fate nor buffeted against the
black waters, but have allowed the waves to close over them, worn and
bent as they are by hard labor, subdued and misshapen by the brutality
of men, are at least unaffrighted by the melodramatic coarseness
of life, which Stevenson more gently describes as “the uncouth and
outlandish strain in the web of the world.” The story of the Devil Baby
may have made its appeal through its frank presentation of this very
demoniac quality, to those who live under the iron tyranny of that
poverty which threatens starvation, and under the dread of a brutality
which may any dark night bring them or their children to extinction;
to those who have seen both virtue and vice go unrewarded and who have
long since ceased to explain.
This more primitive type embodies the eternal patience of those humble,
toiling women who through the generations have been held of little
value, save as their drudgery ministered to their men. One of them
related her habit of going through the pockets of her drunken son
every pay day, and complained that she had never found so little as
the night before, only twenty-five cents out of fifteen dollars he had
promised for the rent, long overdue. “I had to get that as he lay in
the alley before the door; I couldn’t pull him in, and the copper who
helped him home, left as soon as he heard me coming and pretended he
didn’t see me. I have no food in the house, nor coffee to sober him up
with. I know perfectly well that you will ask me to eat something here,
but, if I can’t carry it home, I won’t take a bite nor a sup. I have
never told you so much before. Since one of the nurses said he could
be arrested for my non-support, I have been awful close-mouthed. It’s
the foolish way all the women in our street are talking about the Devil
Baby that’s loosened my tongue, more shame to me.”
A sorrowful woman clad in heavy black, who came one day, exhibited such
a capacity for prolonged weeping that it was evidence in itself of the
truth of at least half her statement, that she had cried herself to
sleep every night of her life for fourteen years in fulfilment of a
“curse” laid upon her by an angry man, that “her pillow would be wet
with tears as long as she lived.” Her respectable husband had a shop
in the Red Light district because he found it profitable to sell to
the men and women who lived there. She had kept house in the room over
the “store” from the time she was a bride newly come from Russia, and
her five daughters had been born there, but never a son to gladden her
husband’s heart.
She took such a feverish interest in the Devil Baby that, when I was
obliged to disillusion her, I found it hard to take away her comfort in
the belief that the Powers that Be are on the side of the woman when
her husband resents too many daughters. But, after all, the birth of
daughters was but an incident in her tale of unmitigated woe, for the
scoldings of a disappointed husband were as nothing to the curse of a
strange enemy, although she doubtless had a confused impression that if
there were retribution for one in the general scheme of things, there
might be for the other. When the weeping woman finally put the events
of her disordered life in some sort of sequence, it became clear that
about fifteen years ago she had reported to the police a vicious house
whose back door opened into her own yard. Her husband had forbidden
her to do anything about it and had said that it would only get them
into trouble, but she had been made desperate one day when she saw her
little girl, then twelve years old, come out of the door, gleefully
showing her younger sister a present of money. Because the poor woman
had tried for ten years without success to induce her husband to move
from the vicinity of such houses, she was certain that she could save
her child only by forcing out “the bad people” from her own door yard.
She therefore made her one frantic effort, found her way to the city
hall and there reported the house to the chief himself. Of course,
“the bad people stood in with the police” and nothing happened to them
save, perhaps, a fresh levy of blackmail, but the keeper of the house,
beside himself with rage, made the dire threat and laid the curse upon
her. In less than a year from that time he had enticed her daughter
into a disreputable house in another part of the district. The poor
woman, ringing one doorbell after another, had never been able to find
her, but her sisters, who in time came to know where she was, had been
dazzled by her mode of life. The weeping mother was quite sure that
two of her daughters, while still outwardly respectable and “working
downtown,” earned money in the devious ways which they had learned all
about when they were little children, although for the past five years
the now prosperous husband had allowed the family to live in a suburb,
where the two younger daughters were “growing up respectable.”
Certain of the visitors, although confronted by those mysterious and
impersonal wrongs which are apparently inherent in the very nature of
things, gave us glimpses of another sort of wisdom than that expressed
in the assumptions that the decrees of Fate are immutable.
Such a glimpse came to me through a conversation with a woman whose
fine mind and indomitable spirit I had long admired; I had known her
for years, and yet the recital of her sufferings, added to those the
Devil Baby had already induced other women to tell me, pierced me
afresh. The story of the Devil Baby may have incited these women to
put their experiences more vividly than they had hitherto been able to
do. It may have been because they were unconsciously spurred by the
hope that a supernatural retribution might intervene even for them, or
because they were merely comforted by the knowledge that it had once
done so for some one else that they spoke with more confidence than
they had ever done before.
“I had eleven children, some born in Hungary and some born here, nine
of them boys; all of the children died when they were little but my
dear Liboucha. You know all about her. She died last winter in the
Insane Asylum. She was only twelve years old when her father, in a fit
of delirium tremens, killed himself after he had chased us around
the room, trying to kill us first. She saw it all, the blood splashed
on the wall stayed in her mind the worst; she shivered and shook all
that night through, and the next morning she had lost her voice,
couldn’t speak out loud for terror. After a while she went to school
again and her voice came back, although it was never very natural.
She seemed to do as well as ever and was awful pleased when she got
into High School. All the money we had I earned scrubbing in a public
dispensary, although sometimes I got a little more by interpreting for
the patients, for I know three languages, one as well as the other.
But I was determined that whatever happened to me, Liboucha was to be
educated. My husband’s father was a doctor in the old country, and
Liboucha was always a clever child. I wouldn’t have her live the kind
of life I had, with no use for my mind except to make me restless and
bitter. I was pretty old and worn out for such hard work, but when
I used to see Liboucha on a Sunday morning ready for church in her
white dress, with her long yellow hair braided round her beautiful pale
face, lying there in bed as I was, being brought up a free-thinker,
and needing to rest my aching bones for the next week’s work, I’d feel
almost happy, in spite of everything. But of course no such peace could
last in my life; the second year at High School Liboucha began to seem
different and to do strange things. You know the time she wandered
away for three days and we were all wild with fright, although a kind
woman had taken her in and no harm came to her. I could never be easy
after that; she was always gentle, but she was awful sly about running
away and at last I had to send her to the asylum. She stayed there off
and on for five years, but I saw her every week of my life and she was
always company for me, what with sewing for her, washing and ironing
her clothes, cooking little things to take out to her, and saving a bit
of money to buy fruit for her. At any rate, I had stopped feeling so
bitter, and got some comfort out of seeing the one thing that belonged
to me on this side of the water, when all of a sudden she died of
heart failure and they never took the trouble to send for me until the
next day.”
She stopped as if wondering afresh that the Fates could have been so
casual, but with a sudden illumination, as if she had been awakened
out of the burden and intensity of her restricted personal interests
into a consciousness of those larger relations that are, for the most
part, so strangely invisible. It was as if the young mother of the
grotesque Devil Baby, that victim of wrong doing on the part of others,
had revealed to this tragic woman much more clearly than soft words had
ever done, that the return of a deed of violence upon the head of the
innocent is inevitable; as if she had realized that, although she was
destined to walk all the days of her life with the piteous multitude
who bear the undeserved wrongs of the world, she would walk henceforth
with a sense of companionship.
At moments it seemed possible that these simple women, representing
an earlier development, eagerly seized upon the story because it
was primitive in form and substance. Certainly, one evening, a
long-forgotten ballad made an unceasing effort to come to the surface
of my mind as I talked to a feeble woman who, in the last stages of an
incurable disease from which she soon afterwards died, had been helped
off the street car in front of Hull-House. The ballad tells how the
lover of a proud and jealous mistress, who demanded as a final test of
devotion that he bring her the heart of his mother, had quickly cut
the heart from his mother’s breast and impetuously returned to his
lady, bearing it upon a salver; and how, when stumbling in his gallant
haste, he stooped to replace upon the silver plate his mother’s heart,
which had rolled to the ground, the heart, still beating with tender
solicitude, whispered the hope that her child was not hurt. The ballad
itself was scarcely more exaggerated than the story of our visitor that
evening, who had made the desperate effort of a journey from home in
order to see the Devil Baby. I was familiar with her vicissitudes; the
shiftless, drinking husband and the large family of children, all of
whom had brought her sorrow and disgrace, and I knew that her heart’s
desire was to see again, before she died, her youngest son, who was
a life prisoner in the penitentiary. She was confident that the last
piteous stage of her disease would secure him a week’s parole, founding
this forlorn hope upon the fact that “they sometimes let them out to
attend a mother’s funeral, and perhaps they’d let Joe come a few days
ahead; he could pay his fare afterwards from the insurance money. It
wouldn’t take much to bury me.” Again we went over the hideous story:
Joe had violently quarrelled with a woman, the proprietor of the house
in which his disreputable wife was living, because she had withheld
from him a part of his wife’s “earnings,” and in the altercation had
killed her--a situation, one would say, which it would be difficult for
even a mother to condone. But not at all, her thin gray face worked
with emotion, her trembling hands restlessly pulled at her shabby
skirt as the hands of the dying pluck at their sheets, but she put
all the vitality she could muster into his defence. She told us he had
legally married the girl, who supported him, “although Lily had been
so long in that life that few men would have done it. Of course, such
a girl must have a protector or everybody would fleece her. Poor Lily
said to the day of her death that he was the kindest man she ever knew,
and treated her the whitest; that she herself was to blame for the
murder because she told on the old miser, and Joe was so hot-headed
she might have known that he would draw a gun for her.” The gasping
mother concluded: “He was always that handsome and had such a way. One
winter, when I was scrubbing in an office building, I’d never get home
much before twelve o’clock, but Joe would open the door for me just
as pleasant as if he hadn’t been waked out of a sound sleep.” She was
so triumphantly unconscious of the incongruity of a sturdy son in bed
while his mother earned his food, that her auditors said never a word,
and in silence we saw a hero evolved before our eyes, a defender of
the oppressed, the best beloved of his mother, who was losing his high
spirits and eating his heart out behind prison bars. He could well defy
the world even there, surrounded as he was by that invincible affection
which assures both the fortunate and unfortunate alike that we are
loved, not according to our deserts, but in response to some profounder
law.
This imposing revelation of maternal solicitude was an instance of what
continually happened in connection with the Devil Baby. In the midst
of the most tragic reminiscences, there remained that something in the
memories of these mothers which has been called the great revelation
of tragedy, or sometimes the great illusion of tragedy; that which has
power in its own right to make life palatable and at rare moments even
beautiful.