Not even thirty is it worth.”
But, coaxing and cajoling, my mother got a hundred rubles out of him.
* * * * *
Steerage, dirty bundles, foul odors, seasick humanity; but I saw and
heard nothing of the foulness and ugliness about me. I floated in
showers of sunshine; visions upon visions of the New World opened
before me. From lip to lip flowed the golden legend of the golden
country:
“In America you can say what you feel, you can voice your thoughts in
the open streets without fear of a Cossack.”
“In America is a home for everybody. The land is your land, not, as in
Russia, where you feel yourself a stranger in the village where you
were born and reared, the village in which your father and grandfather
lie buried.”
“Everybody is with everybody alike in America. Christians and Jews are
brothers together.”
“An end to the worry for bread, an end to the fear of the bosses over
you. Everybody can do what he wants with his life in America.”
“There are no high or low in America. Even the President holds hands
with Gedalyah Mindel.”
“Plenty for all. Learning flows free, like milk and honey.”
“Learning flows free.” The words painted pictures in my mind. I saw
before me free schools, free colleges, free libraries, where I could
learn and learn and keep on learning. In our village was a school, but
only for Christian children. In the schools of America I'd lift up my
head and laugh and dance, a child with other children. Like a bird in
the air, from sky to sky, from star to star, I'd soar and soar.
“Land! land!” came the joyous shout. All crowded and pushed on deck.
They strained and stretched to get the first glimpse of the “golden
country,” lifting their children on their shoulders that they might see
beyond them. Men fell on their knees to pray. Women hugged their babies
and wept. Children danced. Strangers embraced and kissed like old
friends. Old men and old women had in their eyes a look of young people
in love. Age-old visions sang themselves in me, songs of freedom of an
oppressed people. America! America!
Between buildings that loomed like mountains we struggled with our
bundles, spreading around us the smell of the steerage. Up Broadway,
under the bridge, and through the swarming streets of the Ghetto, we
followed Gedalyah Mindel.
I looked about the narrow streets of squeezed-in stores and houses,
ragged clothes, dirty bedding oozing out of the windows, ash-cans and
garbage-cans cluttering the sidewalks. A vague sadness pressed down my
heart, the first doubt of America.
“Where are the green fields and open spaces in America?” cried my
heart. “Where is the golden country of my dreams?” A loneliness for the
fragrant silence of the woods that lay beyond our mud hut welled up
in my heart, a longing for the soft, responsive earth of our village
streets. All about me was the hardness of brick and stone, the smells
of crowded poverty.
“Here's your house, with separate rooms like a palace,” said Gedalyah
Mindel, and flung open the door of a dingy, airless flat.
“_Oi weh!_” cried my mother in dismay. “Where's the sunshine in
America?” She went to the window and looked out at the blank wall of
the next house. “_Gottunieu!_ Like in a grave so dark!”
“It ain't so dark; it's only a little shady,” said Gedalyah Mindel,
and lighted the gas. “Look only!”--he pointed with pride to the dim
gas-light--“No candles, no kerosene lamps, in America. You turn on a
screw, and put to it a match, and you got it light like with sunshine.”
Again the shadow fell over me, again the doubt of America. In America
were rooms without sunlight; rooms to sleep in, to eat in, to cook
in, but without sunshine, and Gedalyah Mindel was happy. Could I be
satisfied with just a place to sleep in and eat in, and a door to shut
people out, to take the place of sunlight? Or would I always need the
sunlight to be happy? And where was there a place in America for me to
play? I looked out into the alley below, and saw pale-faced children
scrambling in the gutter. “Where is America?” cried my heart.
My eyes were shutting themselves with sleep. Blindly I felt for the
buttons on my dress; and buttoning, I sank back in sleep again--the
dead-weight sleep of utter exhaustion.
“Heart of mine,” my mother's voice moaned above me, “father is already
gone an hour. You know how they'll squeeze from you a nickel for every
minute you're late. Quick only!”
I seized my bread and herring and tumbled down the stairs and out
into the street. I ate running, blindly pressing through the hurrying
throngs of workers, my haste and fear choking every mouthful. I felt
a strangling in my throat as I neared the sweat-shop prison; all my
nerves screwed together into iron hardness to endure the day's torture.
For an instant I hesitated as I faced the grated windows of the old
building. Dirt and decay cried out from every crumbling brick. In the
maw of the shop raged around me the roar and the clatter, the merciless
grind, of the pounding machines. Half-maddened, half-deadened, I
struggled to think, to feel, to remember. What am I? Who am I? Why am I
here? I struggled in vain, bewildered and lost in a whirlpool of noise.
“America--America, where was America?” it cried in my heart.
Then came the factory whistle, the slowing down of the machines,
the shout of release hailing the noon hour. I woke as from a tense
nightmare, a weary waking to pain. In the dark chaos of my brain reason
began to dawn. In my stifled heart feelings began to pulse. The wound
of my wasted life began to throb and ache. With my childhood choked
with drudgery, must my youth, too, die unlived?
Here were the odor of herring and garlic, the ravenous munching
of food, laughter and loud, vulgar jokes. Was it only I who was
so wretched? I looked at those around me. Were they happy or only
insensible to their slavery? How could they laugh and joke? Why were
they not torn with rebellion against this galling grind, the crushing,
deadening movements of the body, where only hands live, and hearts and
brains must die?
I felt a touch on my shoulder and looked up. It was Yetta Solomon, from
the machine next to mine.
“Here's your tea.”
I stared at her, half-hearing.
“Ain't you going to eat nothing?”
“_Oi weh_, Yetta! I can't stand it!” The cry broke from me. “I didn't
come to America to turn into a machine. I came to America to make from
myself a person. Does America want only my hands, only the strength of
my body, not my heart, not my feelings, my thoughts?”
“Our heads ain't smart enough,” said Yetta, practically. “We ain't been
to school, like the American-born.”
“What for did I come to America but to go to school, to learn, to
think, to make something beautiful from my life?”
“'Sh! 'Sh! The boss! the boss!” came the warning whisper.
A sudden hush fell over the shop as the boss entered. He raised his
hand. There was breathless silence. The hard, red face with the pig's
eyes held us under its sickening spell. Again I saw the Cossack and
heard him thunder the ukase. Prepared for disaster, the girls paled as
they cast at one another sidelong, frightened glances.
“Hands,” he addressed us, fingering the gold watch-chain that spread
across his fat stomach, “it's slack in the other trades, and I can get
plenty girls begging themselves to work for half what you're getting;
only I ain't a skinner. I always give my hands a show to earn their
bread. From now on I'll give you fifty cents a dozen shirts instead
of seventy-five, but I'll give you night-work, so you needn't lose
nothing.” And he was gone.
The stillness of death filled the shop. Every one felt the heart of
the other bleed with her own helplessness. A sudden sound broke the
silence. A woman sobbed chokingly. It was Balah Rifkin, a widow with
three children.
“_Oi weh!_”--she tore at her scrawny neck,--“the bloodsucker! the
thief! How will I give them to eat, my babies, my hungry little lambs!”
“Why do we let him choke us?”
“Twenty-five cents less on a dozen--how will we be able to live?”
“He tears the last skin from our bones.”
“Why didn't nobody speak up to him?”
Something in me forced me forward. I forgot for the moment how my whole
family depended on my job. I forgot that my father was out of work and
we had received a notice to move for unpaid rent. The helplessness of
the girls around me drove me to strength.
“I'll go to the boss,” I cried, my nerves quivering with fierce
excitement. “I'll tell him Balah Rifkin has three hungry mouths to
feed.”
Pale, hungry faces thrust themselves toward me, thin, knotted hands
reached out, starved bodies pressed close about me.
“Long years on you!” cried Balah Rifkin, drying her eyes with a corner
of her shawl.
“Tell him about my old father and me, his only bread-giver,” came from
Bessie Sopolsky, a gaunt-faced girl with a hacking cough.
“And I got no father or mother, and four of them younger than me
hanging on my neck.” Jennie Feist's beautiful young face was already
scarred with the gray worries of age.
America, as the oppressed of all lands have dreamed America to be, and
America as it is, flashed before me, a banner of fire. Behind me I felt
masses pressing, thousands of immigrants; thousands upon thousands
crushed by injustice, lifted me as on wings.
I entered the boss's office without a shadow of fear. I was not I; the
wrongs of my people burned through me till I felt the very flesh of my
body a living flame of rebellion. I faced the boss.
“We can't stand it,” I cried. “Even as it is we're hungry. Fifty cents
a dozen would starve us. Can you, a Jew, tear the bread from another
Jew's mouth?”
“You fresh mouth, you! Who are you to learn me my business?”
“Weren't you yourself once a machine slave, your life in the hands of
your boss?”
“You loafer! Money for nothing you want! The minute they begin to
talk English they get flies in their nose. A black year on you,
trouble-maker! I'll have no smart heads in my shop! Such freshness! Out
you get! Out from my shop!”
Stunned and hopeless, the wings of my courage broken, I groped my way
back to them--back to the eager, waiting faces, back to the crushed
hearts aching with mine.
As I opened the door, they read our defeat in my face.
“Girls,”--I held out my hands--“he's fired me.” My voice died in the
silence. Not a girl stirred. Their heads only bent closer over their
machines.
“Here, you, get yourself out of here!” the boss thundered at me.
“Bessie Sopolsky and you, Balah Rifkin, take out her machine into the
hall. I want no big-mounted _Americanerins_ in my shop.”
Bessie Sopolsky and Balah Rifkin, their eyes black with tragedy,
carried out my machine. Not a hand was held out to me, not a face met
mine. I felt them shrink from me as I passed them on my way out.
In the street I found I was crying. The new hope that had flowed in me
so strongly bled out of my veins. A moment before, our unity had made
me believe us so strong, and now I saw each alone, crushed, broken.
What were they all but crawling worms, servile grubbers for bread?
And then in the very bitterness of my resentment the hardness broke
in me. I saw the girls through their own eyes, as if I were inside of
them. What else could they have done? Was not an immediate crust of
bread for Balah Rifkin's children more urgent than truth, more vital
than honor? Could it be that they ever had dreamed of America as I had
dreamed? Had their faith in America wholly died in them? Could my faith
be killed as theirs had been?
Gasping from running, Yetta Solomon flung her arms around me.
“You golden heart! I sneaked myself out from the shop only to tell you
I'll come to see you to-night. I'd give the blood from under my nails
for you, only I got to run back. I got to hold my job. My mother--”
I hardly saw or heard her. My senses were stunned with my defeat. I
walked on in a blind daze, feeling that any moment I would drop in the
middle of the street from sheer exhaustion. Every hope I had clung to,
every human stay, every reality, was torn from under me. Was it then
only a dream, a mirage of the hungry-hearted people in the desert lands
of oppression, this age-old faith in America?
Again I saw the mob of dusty villagers crowding about my father as he
read the letter from America, their eager faces thrust out, their eyes
blazing with the same hope, the same faith, that had driven me on. Had
the starved villagers of Sukovoly lifted above their sorrows a mere
rainbow vision that led them--where? Where? To the stifling submission
of the sweat-shop or the desperation of the streets!
“God! God!” My eyes sought the sky, praying, “where--where is America?”
* * * * *
Times changed. The sweat-shop conditions that I had lived through had
become a relic of the past. Wages had doubled, tripled; they went up
higher and higher, and the working-day became shorter and shorter. I
began to earn enough to move my family uptown into a sunny, airy flat
with electricity and telephone service. I even saved up enough to buy a
phonograph and a piano.
My knotted nerves relaxed. At last I had become free from the worry
for bread and rent, but I was not happy. A more restless discontent
than ever before ate out my heart. Freedom from stomach needs only
intensified the needs of my soul.
I ached and clamored for America. Higher wages and shorter hours of
work, mere physical comfort, were not yet America. I had dreamed
that America was a place where the heart could grow big with giving.
Though outwardly I had become prosperous, life still forced me into an
existence of mere getting and getting.
_Ach!_ how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to
whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the
Bronx, the uptown Ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit
of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet
alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that
would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx
good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving.
The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once
brought them to America.
More and more the all-consuming need for a friend possessed me. In the
street, in the cars, in the subways, I was always seeking, ceaselessly
seeking for eyes, a face, the flash of a smile that would be light in
my darkness.
I felt sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a shadow, an
echo, a wild dream, but I couldn't help it. Nothing was real to me but
my hope of finding a friend. America was not America to me unless I
could find an American that would make America real.
The hunger of my heart drove me to the night-school. Again my dream
flamed. Again America beckoned. In the school there would be education,
air, life for my cramped-in spirit. I would learn to think, to form
the thoughts that surged formless in me. I would find the teacher that
would make me articulate.
I joined the literature class. They were reading “The De Coverley
Papers.” Filled with insatiate thirst, I drank in every line with
the feeling that any moment I would get to the fountain-heart of
revelation. Night after night I read with tireless devotion. But of
what? The manners and customs of the eighteenth century, of people two
hundred years dead.
One evening, after a month's attendance, when the class had dwindled
from fifty to four, and the teacher began scolding us who were present
for those who were absent, my bitterness broke.
“Do you know why all the girls are dropping away from the class? It's
because they have too much sense than to waste themselves on 'The De
Coverley Papers.' Us four girls are four fools. We could learn more
in the streets. It's dirty and wrong, but it's life. What are 'The De
Coverley Papers'? Dry dust fit for the ash-can.”
“Perhaps you had better tell the principal your ideas of the standard
classics,” she scoffed, white with rage.
“All right,” I snapped, and hurried down to the principal's office.
I swung open the door.
“I just want to tell you why I'm leaving. I--”
“Won't you come in?” The principal rose and placed a chair for me
near her desk. “Now tell me all.” She leaned forward with an inviting
interest.
I looked up, and met the steady gaze of eyes shining with light. In a
moment all my anger fled. “The De Coverley Papers” were forgotten. The
warm friendliness of her face held me like a familiar dream. I couldn't
speak. It was as if the sky suddenly opened in my heart.
“Do go on,” she said, and gave me a quick nod. “I want to hear.”
The repression of centuries rushed out of my heart. I told her
everything--of the mud hut in Sukovoly where I was born, of the czar's
pogroms, of the constant fear of the Cossack, of Gedalyah Mindel's
letter, of our hopes in coming to America, and my search for an
American who would make America real.
“I am so glad you came to me,” she said. And after a pause, “You can
help me.”
“Help you?” I cried. It was the first time that an American suggested
that I could help her.
“Yes, indeed. I have always wanted to know more of that mysterious,
vibrant life--the immigrant. You can help me know my girls. You have so
much to give--”
“Give--that's what I was hungering and thirsting all these years--to
give out what's in me. I was dying in the unused riches of my soul.”
“I know; I know just what you mean,” she said, putting her hand on
mine.
My whole being seemed to change in the warmth of her comprehension. “I
have a friend,” it sang itself in me. “I have a friend!”
“And you are a born American?” I asked. There was none of that sure,
all-right look of the Americans about her.
“Yes, indeed. My mother, like so many mothers,”--and her eyebrows
lifted humorously whimsical,--“claims we're descendants of the Pilgrim
Fathers, and that one of our lineal ancestors came over in the
_Mayflower_.”
“For all your mother's pride in the Pilgrim Fathers, you yourself are
as plain from the heart as an immigrant.”
“Weren't the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants two hundred years ago?”
She took from her desk a book and read to me.
Then she opened her arms to me, and breathlessly I felt myself drawn to
her. Bonds seemed to burst. A suffusion of light filled my being. Great
choirings lifted me in space. I walked out unseeingly.
All the way home the words she read flamed before me: “We go forth all
to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of
our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.”
So all those lonely years of seeking and praying were not in vain.
How glad I was that I had not stopped at the husk, a good job, a good
living! Through my inarticulate groping and reaching out I had found
the soul, the spirit of America.
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS
1. What is the effect of the abrupt beginning? Where else in the
essay is abruptness made a means of producing literary effect?
2. Point out excellent use of local color.
3. Divide the essay into its principal parts.
4. Show that the essay rises in power.
5. How does the writer arouse the reader's sympathy for the
characters?
6. How does the writer awaken the reader's patriotism?
7. What opinion of America do oppressed foreigners have? To what
extent is their opinion well founded? To what extent is their
opinion not well founded?
8. What impressions does a sea-coast city make upon immigrants?
9. What sort of people oppress the immigrants after arrival in
America?
10. To what false beliefs is such oppression due?
11. What opportunities does America present?
12. What spirit should meet the aspirations of immigrants?
13. What will do most to make immigrants into good Americans?
14. Explain how the _Sir Roger de Coverley Papers_ may be taught so
that they will apply to the present as well as to the past.
15. How may we help immigrants to do work that will make them into
good Americans?
16. Show that the conclusion of the essay emphasizes its entire
thought.
17. Show what rhetorical methods are employed in the essay.
SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION
1. How I Became a Good American 11. Modernizing the De
Coverley Papers
2. An Immigrant's Experience 12. The Value of Sympathy
3. The Meaning of Freedom 13. The Spirit of America
4. The Land of Opportunity 14. Showing the Way
5. Making Good Americans 15. First Experiences in America
6. The School and the Immigrant 16. Letters from People
in Other Lands
7. My Coming to America 17. Being a Good American
8. Life in the Crowded Sections 18. Enemies of America
9. Sweat Shop Experiences 19. Uplifting the Foreign-Born
10. My Various Homes 20. The America I Love
DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING
Write down some worthy thought that you have concerning America.
Then write a series of extremely personal incidents that will
show graphically how you arrived at the thought you have in mind.
Make the incidents short, condensed, and highly emphatic. Employ
realistic characters, and give realistic quotations from their speech.
Use the incorrect grammar, the slang, and the foreign words that
the characters employ daily. Arrange the incidents so that they
will rise more and more to your principal thought. Make your last
incident reveal that thought.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] Nijny-Novgorood. A Russian city on the Volga, the scene of a great
annual fair.
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD
By WILLIAM HENRY SHELTON
_(1840-). An American patriot and author. He served in many battles
in the Civil War, and had thrilling experiences as a prisoner of
war, escaping no less than four times. He is author of_ A Man
Without a Memory; The Last Three Soldiers; The Three Prisoners.
=Every one has happy memories of childhood. He loves to conjure up
the old familiar scenes, the kindly people, and the days that were
days of wonder.=
=The two sketches by Mr. Shelton are extracts from a long essay
called _Our Village_, in which he recalls delightfully all his
early surroundings and all his old companionships.=
=In these extracts, as in the entire essay, Mr. Shelton avoids
formal autobiography. He merely recalls the things that impressed
him most. As far as possible he lifts himself back into the spirit
of the past, and sees once again, but with added love, the things
that have gone forever.=
MY FIRST SCHOOL
One day in the summer when I was four years old I was taken to the
village school at the foot of the hill below the tavern. I have no
recollection of how I got there, but my return to my grandmother's
was so dramatic that it has impressed itself indelibly on my memory.
Perhaps I was taken to school by the sentimental schoolmistress
herself, who was a girl of sixteen and an intimate friend of my aunt,
to whom, in after years, when she became a famous novelist, she used
to send her books. Her maiden name was Mary Jane Hawes, but there was
a red-haired, freckle-faced boy in one of the pretty houses facing the
side of the church, who went to Yale College and gave her another name.
The school-house consisted of one room, with an entry without any floor
where the wood was cut and stored. The school-room was square, with a
box-stove in the center. A form against the wall extended around three
sides of the room, affording seats for the larger pupils, and in front
of these a row of oak desks for slates and books was fantastically
carved by generations of jack-knives, and made against the backs of a
second row of desks was a low front form for the A-B-C children. On
the fourth side, flanking the door, were a blackboard on one hand and
on the other the schoolma'am's desk, usually decorated with a bunch of
wild flowers or a red apple, either the gifts of a sincere admirer or
the would-be bribe of some trembling delinquent.
On the occasion of my first visit to the school I wore a blue-and-white
dress of muslin-de-laine that was afterward made into a cushion for a
rocking-chair in my mother's parlor. I was evidently dressed in my very
best in honor of the occasion, and all went well until recess came.
There was a rumble of thunder, and the sky had been growing dark with
portent of storm, and the leaves and dust were flying on the wind when
the children were released for play. I wanted to do everything that
the other boys did, and so, when they scampered out with a rush, I
followed without fear. Just as we came into the open the thunder-storm
burst upon us. The wind blew off one boy's hat and whirled it in the
direction of the village, and all the other boys joined in the chase.
As I started to follow them a gust of wind and rain beat me to the
ground, and drenched my dress with mud and water.