For a long, long time my heart ached and ached like a sore wound. If
murderers would have robbed me and killed me it wouldn’t have hurt me
so much. I couldn’t think through my pain. The minute I’d see before
me how they looked at me, the words they said to me--then everything
began to bleed in me. And I was helpless.
For a long, long time the thought of ever working in an “American”
family made me tremble with fear, like the fear of wild wolves.
No--never again would I trust myself to an “American” family, no matter
how fine their language and how sweet their smile.
It was blotted out in me, all trust in friendship from “Americans.” But
the life in me still burned to live. The hope in me still craved to
hope. In darkness, in dirt, in hunger and want, but only to live on!
There had been no end to my day--working for the “American” family.
Now rejecting false friendships from higher-ups in America, I turned
back to the ghetto. I worked on a hard bench with my own kind on either
side of me. I knew before I began what my wages were to be. I knew what
my hours were to be. And I knew the feeling of the end of the day.
From the outside my second job seemed worse than the first. It was in a
sweat-shop of a Delancey Street basement, kept up by an old, wrinkled
woman that looked like a black witch of greed. My work was sewing
on buttons. While the morning was still dark I walked into a dark
basement. And darkness met me when I turned out of the basement.
Day after day, week after week, all the contact I got with America
was handling dead buttons. The money I earned was hardly enough to
pay for bread and rent. I didn’t have a room to myself. I didn’t even
have a bed. I slept on a mattress on the floor in a rat-hole of a room
occupied by a dozen other immigrants. I was always hungry--oh, so
hungry! The scant meals I could afford only sharpened my appetite for
real food. But I felt myself better off than working in the “American”
family, where I had three good meals a day and a bed to myself. With
all the hunger and darkness of the sweat-shop, I had at least the
evening to myself. And all night was mine. When all were asleep, I
used to creep up on the roof of the tenement and talk out my heart in
silence to the stars in the sky.
“Who am I? What am I? What do I want with my life? Where is America? Is
there an America? What is this wilderness in which I’m lost?”
I’d hurl my questions and then think and think. And I could not tear it
out of me, the feeling that America must be somewhere, somehow--only I
couldn’t find it--_my America_, where I would work for love and not for
a living. I was like a thing following blindly after something far off
in the dark!
“Oi weh!” I’d stretch out my hand up in the air. “My head is so lost
in America! What’s the use of all my working if I’m not in it? Dead
buttons is not me.”
Then the busy season started in the shop. The mounds of buttons grew
and grew. The long day stretched out longer. I had to begin with the
buttons earlier and stay with them till later in the night. The old
witch turned into a huge greedy maw for wanting more and more buttons.
For a glass of tea, for a slice of herring over black bread, she would
buy us up to stay another and another hour, till there seemed no end to
her demands.
One day, the light of self-assertion broke into my cellar darkness.
“I don’t want the tea. I don’t want your herring,” I said with terrible
boldness. “I only want to go home. I only want the evening to myself!”
“You fresh mouth, you!” cried the old witch. “You learned already too
much in America. I want no clock-watchers in my shop. Out you go!”
I was driven out to cold and hunger. I could no longer pay for my
mattress on the floor. I no longer could buy the bite in the mouth. I
walked the streets. I knew what it is to be alone in a strange city
among strangers.
But I laughed through my tears. So I learned too much already in
America because I wanted the whole evening to myself? Well, America has
yet to teach me still more: how to get not only the whole evening to
myself, but a whole day a week like the American workers.
That sweat-shop was a bitter memory but a good school. It fitted me
for a regular factory. I could walk in boldly and say I could work at
something, even if it was only sewing on buttons.
Gradually, I became a trained worker. I worked in a light, airy
factory, only eight hours a day. My boss was no longer a sweater and a
blood-squeezer. The first freshness of the morning was mine. And the
whole evening was mine. All day Sunday was mine.
Now I had better food to eat. I slept on a better bed. Now, I even
looked dressed up like the American-born. But inside of me I knew
that I was not yet an American. I choked with longing when I met an
American-born, and I couldn’t say nothing.
Something cried dumb in me. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t know what it
was I wanted. I only knew I wanted. I wanted. Like the hunger in the
heart that never gets food.
An English class for foreigners started in our factory. The teacher had
such a good, friendly face, her eyes looked so understanding, as though
she could see right into my heart. So I went to her one day for an
advice:
“I don’t know what is with me the matter,” I began. “I have no rest in
me. I never yet done what I want.”
“What is it you want to do, child?” she asked me.
“I want to do something with my head, my feelings. All day long, only
with my hands I work.”
“First you must learn English.” She patted me as though I was not yet
grown up. “Put your mind on that, and then we’ll see.”
So for a time I learned the language. I could almost begin to think
with English words in my head. But in my heart still hurt the
emptiness. I burned to give, to give something, to do something, to
be something. The dead work with my hands was killing me. My work left
only hard stones on my heart.
Again I went to our factory teacher and cried out to her: “I know
already to read and write the English language, but I can’t put it into
words what I want. What is it in me so different that can’t come out?”
She smiled at me down from her calmness as if I were a little bit out
of my head. “What _do you want_ to do?”
“I feel. I see. I hear. And I want to think it out. But I’m like dumb
in me. I only feel I’m different--different from everybody.”
She looked at me close and said nothing for a minute. “You ought to
join one of the social clubs of the Women’s Association,” she advised.
“What’s the Women’s Association?” I implored greedily.
“A group of American women who are trying to help the working-girl find
herself. They have a special department for immigrant girls like you.”
I joined the Women’s Association. On my first evening there they
announced a lecture: “The Happy Worker and His Work,” by the Welfare
director of the United Mills Corporation.
“Is there such a thing as a happy worker at his work?” I wondered.
“Happiness is only by working at what you love. And what poor girl can
ever find it to work at what she loves?” My old dreams about my America
rushed through my mind. Once I thought that in America everybody works
for love. Nobody has to worry for a living. Maybe this welfare man came
to show me the _real_ America that till now I sought in vain.
With a lot of polite words the head lady of the Women’s Association
introduced a higher-up that looked like the king of kings of business.
Never before in my life did I ever see a man with such a sureness in
his step, such power in his face, such friendly positiveness in his eye
as when he smiled upon us.
“Efficiency is the new religion of business,” he began. “In big
business houses, even in up-to-date factories, they no longer take
the first comer and give him any job that happens to stand empty.
Efficiency begins at the employment office. Experts are hired for the
one purpose, to find out how best to fit the worker to his work. It’s
economy for the boss to make the worker happy.” And then he talked a
lot more on efficiency in educated language that was over my head.
I didn’t know exactly what it meant--efficiency--but if it was to make
the worker happy at his work, then that’s what I had been looking
for since I came to America. I only felt from watching him that he
was happy by his job. And as I looked on this clean, well-dressed,
successful one, who wasn’t ashamed to say he rose from an office-boy,
it made me feel that I, too, could lift myself up for a person.
He finished his lecture, telling us about the Vocational Guidance
Centre that the Women’s Association started.
The very next evening I was at the Vocational Guidance Centre. There I
found a young, college-looking woman. Smartness and health shining from
her eyes! She, too, looked as if she knew her way in America. I could
tell at the first glance: here is a person that is happy by what she
does.
“I feel you’ll understand me,” I said right away.
She leaned over with pleasure in her face: “I hope I can.”
“I want to work by what’s in me. Only, I don’t know what’s in me. I
only feel I’m different.”
She gave me a quick, puzzled look from the corner of her eyes. “What
are you doing now?”
“I’m the quickest shirtwaist hand on the floor. But my heart wastes
away by such work. I think and think, and my thoughts can’t come out.”
“Why don’t you think out your thoughts in shirtwaists? You could learn
to be a designer. Earn more money.”
“I don’t want to look on waists. If my hands are sick from waists, how
could my head learn to put beauty into them?”
“But you must earn your living at what you know, and rise slowly from
job to job.”
I looked at her office sign: “Vocational Guidance.” “What’s your
vocational guidance?” I asked. “How to rise from job to job--how to
earn more money?”
The smile went out from her eyes. But she tried to be kind yet. “What
_do_ you want?” she asked, with a sigh of lost patience.
“I want America to want me.”
She fell back in her chair, thunderstruck with my boldness. But yet, in
a low voice of educated self-control, she tried to reason with me:
“You have to _show_ that you have something special for America before
America has need of you.”
“But I never had a chance to find out what’s in me, because I always
had to work for a living. Only, I feel it’s efficiency for America to
find out what’s in me so different, so I could give it out by my work.”
Her eyes half closed as they bored through me. Her mouth opened to
speak, but no words came from her lips. So I flamed up with all that
was choking in me like a house on fire:
“America gives free bread and rent to criminals in prison. They got
grand houses, with sunshine, fresh air, doctors and teachers, even
for the crazy ones. Why don’t they have free boarding-schools for
immigrants--strong people--willing people? Here you see us burning up
with something different, and America turns its head away from us.”
Her brows lifted and dropped down. She shrugged her shoulders away from
me with the look of pity we give to cripples and hopeless lunatics.
“America is no Utopia. First you must become efficient in earning a
living before you can indulge in your poetic dreams.”
I went away from the vocational guidance office with all the air out of
my lungs. All the light out of my eyes. My feet dragged after me like
dead wood.
Till now there had always lingered a rosy veil of hope over my
emptiness, a hope that a miracle would happen. I would open up my eyes
some day and suddenly find the America of my dreams. As a young girl
hungry for love sees always before her eyes the picture of lover’s arms
around her, so I saw always in my heart the vision of Utopian America.
But now I felt that the America of my dreams never was and never could
be. Reality had hit me on the head as with a club. I felt that the
America that I sought was nothing but a shadow--an echo--a chimera of
lunatics and crazy immigrants.
Stripped of all illusion, I looked about me. The long desert of wasting
days of drudgery stared me in the face. The drudgery that I had lived
through, and the endless drudgery still ahead of me rose over me like
a withering wilderness of sand. In vain were all my cryings, in vain
were all frantic efforts of my spirit to find the living waters of
understanding for my perishing lips. Sand, sand was everywhere. With
every seeking, every reaching out I only lost myself deeper and deeper
in a vast sea of sand.
I knew now the American language. And I knew now, if I talked to the
Americans from morning till night, they could not understand what the
Russian soul of me wanted. They could not understand _me_ any more than
if I talked to them in Chinese. Between my soul and the American soul
were worlds of difference that no words could bridge over. What was
that difference? What made the Americans so far apart from me?
I began to read the American history. I found from the first pages that
America started with a band of courageous Pilgrims. They had left their
native country as I had left mine. They had crossed an unknown ocean
and landed in an unknown country, as I.
But the great difference between the first Pilgrims and me was that
they expected to make America, build America, create their own world of
liberty. I wanted to find it ready-made.
I read on. I delved deeper down into the American history. I saw how
the Pilgrim Fathers came to a rocky desert country, surrounded by
Indian savages on all sides. But undaunted, they pressed on--through
danger--through famine, pestilence, and want--they pressed on. They
did not ask the Indians for sympathy, for understanding. They made no
demands on anybody, but on their own indomitable spirit of persistence.
And I--I was for ever begging a crumb of sympathy, a gleam of
understanding from strangers who could not sympathize, who could not
understand.
I, when I encountered a few savage Indian scalpers, like the old witch
of the sweat-shop, like my “Americanized” countryman, who cheated me of
my wages--I, when I found myself on the lonely, untrodden path through
which all seekers of the new world must pass, I lost heart and said:
“There is no America!”
Then came a light--a great revelation! I saw America--a big idea--a
deathless hope--a world still in the making. I saw that it was the
glory of America that it was not yet finished. And I, the last comer,
had her share to give, small or great, to the making of America, like
those Pilgrims who came in the _Mayflower_.
Fired up by this revealing light, I began to build a bridge of
understanding between the American-born and myself. Since their life
was shut out from such as me, I began to open up my life and the lives
of my people to them. And life draws life. In only writing about the
Ghetto I found America.
Great chances have come to me. But in my heart is always a deep
sadness. I feel like a man who is sitting down to a secret table
of plenty, while his near ones and dear ones are perishing before
his eyes. My very joy in doing the work I love hurts me like secret
guilt, because all about me I see so many with my longings, my burning
eagerness, to do and to be, wasting their days in drudgery they hate,
merely to buy bread and pay rent. And America is losing all that
richness of the soul.
The Americans of to-morrow, the America that is every day nearer coming
to be, will be too wise, too open-hearted, too friendly-handed, to
let the least last-comer at their gates knock in vain with his gifts
unwanted.