Hungry Hearts
barriers broke, and she saw into the world below from where I came?
Miss Whiteside had no particular reason for hounding and persecuting
me. Personally, she didn't give a hang if I was clean or dirty. She
was merely one of the agents of clean society, delegated to judge who
is fit and who is unfit to teach.
While they condemned me as unfit to be a teacher, because of my
appearance, I was slaving to keep them clean. I was slaving in a
laundry from five to eight in the morning, before going to college, and
from six to eleven at night, after coming from college. Eight hours of
work a day, outside my studies. Where was the time and the strength for
the "little niceties of the well-groomed lady"?
At the time when they rose and took their morning bath, and put on
their fresh-laundered linen that somebody had made ready for them, when
they were being served with their breakfast, I had already toiled for
three hours in a laundry.
When college hours were over, they went for a walk in the fresh
air. They had time to rest, and bathe again, and put on fresh clothes
for dinner. But I, after college hours, had only time to bolt a soggy
meal, and rush back to the grind of the laundry till eleven at night.
At the hour when they came from the theater or musicale, I came from
the laundry. But I was so bathed in the sweat of exhaustion that I
could not think of a bath of soap and water. I had only strength to
drag myself home, and fall down on the bed and sleep. Even if I had had
the desire and the energy to take a bath, there were no such things as
bathtubs in the house where I lived.
Often as I stood at my board at the laundry, I thought of Miss
Whiteside, and her clean world, clothed in the snowy shirt-waists
I had ironed. I was thinking--I, soaking in the foul vapors of the
steaming laundry, I, with my dirty, tired hands, I am ironing the
clean, immaculate shirt-waists of clean, immaculate society. I, the
unclean one, am actually fashioning the pedestal of their cleanliness,
from which they reach down, hoping to lift me to the height that I have
created for them.
I look back at my sweatshop childhood. One day, when I was about
sixteen, some one gave me Rosenfeld's poem, "The Machine," to
read. Like a spark thrown among oily rags, it set my whole being aflame
with longing for self-expression. But I was dumb. I had nothing but
blind, aching feeling. For days I went about with agonies of feeling,
yet utterly at sea how to fathom and voice those feelings--birth-throes
of infinite worlds, and yet dumb.
Suddenly, there came upon me this inspiration. I can go to
college! There I shall learn to express myself, to voice my
thoughts. But I was not prepared to go to college. The girl in the
cigar factory, in the next block, had gone first to a preparatory
school. Why shouldn't I find a way, too?
Going to college seemed as impossible for me, at that time, as for an
ignorant Russian shopgirl to attempt to write poetry in English. But I
was sixteen then, and the impossible was a magnet to draw the dreams
that had no outlet. Besides, the actual was so barren, so narrow,
so strangling, that the dream of the unattainable was the only air in
which the soul could survive.
The ideal of going to college was like the birth of a new religion in
my soul. It put new fire in my eyes, and new strength in my tired arms
and fingers.
For six years I worked daytimes and went at night to a preparatory
school. For six years I went about nursing the illusion that college
was a place where I should find self-expression, and vague, pent-up
feelings could live as thoughts and grow as ideas.
At last I came to college. I rushed for it with the outstretched
arms of youth's aching hunger to give and take of life's deepest
and highest, and I came against the solid wall of the well-fed,
well-dressed world--the frigid whitewashed wall of cleanliness.
Until I came to college I had been unconscious of my clothes. Suddenly
I felt people looking at me at arm's length, as if I were crooked
or crippled, as if I had come to a place where I didn't belong, and
would never be taken in.
How I pinched, and scraped, and starved myself, to save enough to come
to college! Every cent of the tuition fee I paid was drops of sweat and
blood from underpaid laundry work. And what did I get for it? A crushed
spirit, a broken heart, a stinging sense of poverty that I never felt
before.
The courses of study I had to swallow to get my diploma were utterly
barren of interest to me. I didn't come to college to get dull
learning from dead books. I didn't come for that dry, inanimate
stuff that can be hammered out in lectures. I came because I longed
for the larger life, for the stimulus of intellectual associations. I
came because my whole being clamored for more vision, more light. But
everywhere I went I saw big fences put up against me, with the brutal
signs: "No trespassing. Get off the grass."
I experienced at college the same feeling of years ago when I came to
this country, when after months of shut-in-ness, in dark tenements
and stifling sweatshops, I had come to Central Park for the first
time. Like a bird just out from a cage, I stretched out my arms, and
then flung myself in ecstatic abandon on the grass. Just as I began to
breathe in the fresh-smelling earth, and lift up my eyes to the sky, a
big, fat policeman with a club in his hand, seized me, with: "Can't
you read the sign? Get off the grass!" Miss Whiteside, the dean of
the college, the representative of the clean, the educated world, for
all her external refinement, was to me like that big, brutal policeman,
with the club in his hand, that drove me off the grass.
The death-blows to all aspiration began when I graduated from college
and tried to get a start at the work for which I had struggled so hard
to fit myself. I soon found other agents of clean society, who had
the power of giving or withholding the positions I sought, judging
me as Miss Whiteside judged me. One glance at my shabby clothes, the
desperate anguish that glazed and dulled my eyes and I felt myself
condemned by them before I opened my lips to speak.
Starvation forced me to accept the lowest-paid substitute position. And
because my wages were so low and so unsteady, I could never get the
money for the clothes to make an appearance to secure a position with
better pay. I was tricked and foiled. I was considered unfit to get
decent pay for my work because of my appearance, and it was to the
advantage of those who used me that my appearance should damn me, so as
to get me to work for the low wages I was forced to accept. It seemed
to me the whole vicious circle of society's injustices was thrust
like a noose around my neck to strangle me.
The insults and injuries I had suffered at college had so eaten into
my flesh that I could not bear to get near it. I shuddered with horror
whenever I had to pass the place blocks away. The hate which I felt
for Miss Whiteside spread like poison inside my soul, into hate for all
clean society. The whole clean world was massed against me. Whenever I
met a well-dressed person, I felt the secret stab of a hidden enemy.
I was so obsessed and consumed with my grievances that I could not get
away from myself and think things out in the light. I was in the grip
of that blinding, destructive, terrible thing--righteous indignation. I
could not rest. I wanted the whole world to know that the college
was against democracy in education, that clothes form the basis of
class distinctions, that after graduation the opportunities for the
best positions are passed out to those who are best-dressed, and the
students too poor to put up a front are pigeon-holed and marked unfit
and abandoned to the mercy of the wind.
A wild desire raged in the corner of my brain. I knew that the dean
gave dinners to the faculty at regular intervals. I longed to burst
in at one of those feasts, in the midst of their grand speech-making,
and tear down the fine clothes from these well-groomed ladies and
gentlemen, and trample them under my feet, and scream like a lunatic:
"Soap and water are cheap! Soap and water are cheap! Look at me! See
how cheap it is!"
There seemed but three avenues of escape to the torments of my wasted
life, madness, suicide, or a heart-to-heart confession to some one who
understood. I had not energy enough for suicide. Besides, in my darkest
moments of despair, hope clamored loudest. Oh, I longed so to live, to
dream my way up on the heights, above the unreal realities that ground
me and dragged me down to earth.
Inside the ruin of my thwarted life, the _unlived_ visionary immigrant
hungered and thirsted for America. I had come a refugee from the
Russian pogroms, aflame with dreams of America. I did not find America
in the sweatshops, much less in the schools and colleges. But for
hundreds of years the persecuted races all over the world were nurtured
on hopes of America. When a little baby in my mother's arms, before I
was old enough to speak, I saw all around me weary faces light up with
thrilling tales of the far-off "golden country." And so, though my
faith in this so-called America was shattered, yet underneath, in the
sap and roots of my soul, burned the deathless faith that America is,
must be, somehow, somewhere. In the midst of my bitterest hates and
rebellions, visions of America rose over me, like songs of freedom of
an oppressed people.
My body was worn to the bone from overwork, my footsteps dragged with
exhaustion, but my eyes still sought the sky, praying, ceaselessly
praying, the dumb, inarticulate prayer of the lost immigrant:
"America! Ach, America! Where is America?"
It seemed to me if I could only find some human being to whom I
could unburden my heart, I would have new strength to begin again my
insatiable search for America.
But to whom could I speak? The people in the laundry? They never
understood me. They had a grudge against me because I left them when I
tried to work myself up. Could I speak to the college people? What did
these icebergs of convention know about the vital things of the heart?
And yet, I remembered, in the freshman year, in one of the courses in
chemistry, there was an instructor, a woman, who drew me strangely. I
felt she was the only real teacher among all the teachers and
professors I met. I didn't care for the chemistry, but I liked to
look at her. She gave me life, air, the unconscious emanation of
her beautiful spirit. I had not spoken a word to her, outside the
experiments in chemistry, but I knew her more than the people around
her who were of her own class. I felt in the throb of her voice, in the
subtle shading around the corner of her eyes, the color and texture of
her dreams.
Often in the midst of our work in chemistry I felt like crying out to
her: "Oh, please be my friend. I'm so lonely." But something
choked me. I couldn't speak. The very intensity of my longing for
her friendship made me run away from her in confusion the minute she
approached me. I was so conscious of my shabbiness that I was afraid
maybe she was only trying to be kind. I couldn't bear kindness. I
wanted from her love, understanding, or nothing.
About ten years after I left college, as I walked the streets bowed
and beaten with the shame of having to go around begging for work, I
met Miss Van Ness. She not only recognized me, but stopped to ask how I
was, and what I was doing.
I had begun to think that my only comrades in this world were the
homeless and abandoned cats and dogs of the street, whom everybody
gives another kick, as they slam the door on them. And here was one
from the clean world human enough to be friendly. Here was one of the
well-dressed, with a look in her eyes and a sound in her voice that was