August 19, 2025 • 24 mins
In the late 19th century, being a Jew in Russia came with its own set of challenges and dangers. Facing persecution for their faith, many sought solace in their rich cultural traditions. When Mary Antins father decided to abandon these customs, he discovered that he no longer belonged in Russia. Thus, he emigrated to America with his family. While life presented its own struggles, Mary recalls her childhood in Boston with an almost idyllic sense of wonder. A bright and resilient young girl, she finds beauty in adversity and shares her inspiring journey through her captivating autobiography. Join Bridget as she brings Marys story to life, allowing you to experience her trials and triumphs firsthand. (Summary by Stav Nisser)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter sixteen of The Promised Land. This LibriVox recording is
in the public domain. Recording by bridget Gage. The Promised
Land by Mary Anton, Chapter sixteen. Dover Street. What happened next?
Was Dover Street? And what was Dover Street? Ask? Rather,
what was it not? Dover Street was my fairest garden
(00:21):
of girlhood, a gate of paradise, a window facing on
a broad avenue of life. Dover Street was a prison,
a school of discipline, a battle field of sordid strife.
The air in Dover Street was heavy with evil odors
of degradation, but a breath from the uppermost heavens rippled
through whispering of infinite things. In Dover Street, the dragon
(00:43):
poverty gripped me for a last fight. But I overthrew
the hideous creature and sat on his neck as on
a throne in Dover Street. I was shackled with a
hundred chains of disadvantage, but with one free hand I
planted little seeds right there in the mud of shame
that blossomed into the honeyed rows of widest freedom. In
Dover Street there was often no loaf on the table,
(01:05):
but the hand of some noble friend was ever in mine.
The night in Dover Street was rent with the cries
of wrong, but the thunders of truth crashed through the
pitiful clamor and died out in prophetic silences. Outwardly, Dover
Street is in noisy thoroughfare cut through a South End slum,
and every essential the same as Wheeler Street. Turn down
(01:27):
any street in the slums at random and call it
by whatever name you please, you will observe there the
same fashions of life, death, and endurance. Every one of
those streets is a rubbish heap of damaged humanity, and
it will take a powerful broom and an ocean of
soap sets to clean it out. Dover Street is intersected
near its eastern end, where we lived by Harrison Avenue.
(01:49):
That street is to the south end what Salem Street
is to the north end. It is the heart of
the South End ghetto for the greater part of its length,
although its northern end belongs to the realm of China.
Its multifarious business bursts through the narrow shop doors and
overruns the basements the sidewalk. The street itself in push
carts and open air stands. Its multitude inous population bursts
(02:12):
through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the corridors, the doorsteps,
the gutters, the side streets, pushing in and out among
the push carts all day long and half the night. Besides,
rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely
is it found clean. Nothing less than a fire or
flood would cleanse the street. Even passover cannot quite accomplish
(02:35):
this feat, for although the tenements may be scrubbed to
their remotest corners, on this one occasion the cleansing stops
at the curbstone. A great deal of the filthy rubbish
accumulated in a year is pitched into the street, often
through the windows, and what the ashman on his daily
round does not remove is left to be trampled to powder,
in which form it steals back into the houses from
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which it was so lately removed. The city fathers provide
soap and water for the slums in the form of
excellent schools, kindergartens and branch libraries, and there they stop
at the curbstone of the people's life. They cleanse and
discipline the children's minds, but their bodies they pitch into
the gutter, for there are no parks and almost no
(03:17):
playgrounds in the Harrison Avenue district. In my day there
were none, and such as there are have been wrenched
from the city by public spirited citizens who have no
offices in city hall. No wonder the ashman is not
more thorough he learns from his masters. It is a
pity to have it so in a queen of enlightened
cities like Boston. If we of the twentieth century do
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not believe in baseball as much as philosophy, we have
not learned the lesson of modern science, which teaches, among
other things, that the body is the nursery of the soul,
the instrument of our moral development, the secret chart of
our devious progress from worm to man. The great achievement
of recent science, of which we are so proud, has
been the deciphering of the hieroglyphic of organic nature. To
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worship the facts and neglect the implications of the message
of science is to applaud to the drama without taking
the moral to heart. And we certainly are not taking
the moral to heart when we tried to make a
hero out of the boy by such foreign appliances as
grammar and algebra. While utterly despising the fittest instrument for
his uplifting the boy's own body. We had no particular
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reason for coming to Dover Street. It might just have
well been apple Pie Alley. For my father had sold
with the goods, fixtures and good will of the Wheeler
Street store all his hopes of ever making a living
in the grocery trade, and I doubt if he got
a silver dollar the more for them. We had to
live somewhere, even if we were not making a living,
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So we came to Dover Street, where tenements were cheap,
by which I mean that rent was low. The ultimate
cost of life in those tenements, in terms of human happiness,
is high enough. Our new home consisted of five small
rooms up two flights of stairs, with the right of
way through the dark corridors. In the parlor, the dingy
paper hung in rags and the plaster fell in chunks.
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One of the bedrooms was absolutely dark and air tight.
The kitchen windows looked out on a dirty court at
the back of which was the rear tenement of the
estate to us belonged, along with the five rooms and
the right of way. Aforesaid, a block of upper space
the length of a polley line across the squirt, and
the width of an arc described by a windy monday's
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washing in its remotest wanderings. The little front bedroom was
assigned to me with only one partner, my sister Dora.
A mouse could not have led a cat much of
a chase across this room. Still we found space for
a narrow bed, a crazy bureau, and a small table.
From the window there was an unobstructed view of a
lumber yard, beyond which frowned the blackened walls of a factory.
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The fence of the lumber yard was gay with theater
posters and illustrated advertisements of tobacco, whisky, and kat and
baby foods. When the window was open, there was a
constant clang and whirr of electric cars, varied by the
screech of machinery, the clatter of empty wagons, or the
rumble of heavy trucks. There was nothing worse in all
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this than we had had before since our exile from
Crescent Beach. But I did not take the same delight
in the prop iniquity of electric cars and arc lights
that I had till now. I supposed the tenement began
to pall on me. It must not be supposed that
I enjoyed any degree of privacy because I had half
a room to myself. We were six in the five rooms.
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We were bound to be always in each other's way,
And as it was within our flat, so it was
in the house as a whole. All doors, beginning with
the street door, stood open most of the time, or
if they were closed, the tenants did not wear out
their knuckles knocking for admittance. I could stand at any
time in the unswept entrance hall and tell, from an
analysis of the medley of sounds and smells that issued
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from doors ajar what was going on in the several
flats from below up that guttural scolding voice unremitten as
the hissing of a steam pipe, as Missus Vernosky, I
make a guess that she is chastising the infant Isaac
for taking a second lump of sugar in his tea.
Spam bam, yes, and she is rubbing in her objections
with the flat of her hand. That blubbering and moaning
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accompanying an elfantine tread as fat Missus Casey second floor home,
drunk from an afternoon out in fear of the vengeance
of mister Casey. To propitiate home. She is burning a
pan of bacon. As the choking fumes and outrageous sizzling testify,
I hear a feeble whining interrupted by long silences. It
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is that scabby baby on the third floor, fallen out
of bed again, with nobody home to pick him up.
To escape these various horrors, I ascend to the roof,
where bacon and babies and child beating are not. But
there I find two figures in calico wrappers with bare
red arms akimbo, a basket of wet clothes in front
of each, and only one empty clothes line between them.
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I do not want to be dragged in as a
witness in case of assault and battery, so I descend
to the street again, grateful to note as I pass
that the third floor baby is still in front of
the door. I squeezed through a group of children. They
are going to play tag and are counting to see
who should be it. My mother and your mother went
out to hang clothes. My mother gave your another a
(08:25):
punch in the nose. If the children's couplet does not
give a vivid picture of the life, manners and customs
of Dover Street, no description of mine can ever do so.
Frida was married before we came to Dover Street and
went to live in East Boston. This left me the
eldest of the children at home. Whether on this account,
or because I was outgrowing my childish carelessness, or because
(08:48):
I began to believe, on the cumulative evidence of the
Crescent Beach, Chelsea and Wheeler Street adventures, that America, after all,
was not going to provide for my father's family. Whether
for any or all of these reasons, I began at
this time to take bread and butter matters more to heart,
and to ponder ways and means of getting rich. My
father saw employment wherever work was going on. His health
(09:11):
was poor, he aged very fast. Nevertheless, he offered himself
for every kind of labor. He offered himself for a
boy's wages. Here he was found too weak, here, too old.
Here his imperfect English was in the way, here his
Jewish appearance. He had a few short terms of work
at this or that. I do not know the name
of the form of drudgery that my father did not practice.
(09:34):
But all told, he did not earn enough to pay
the rent in full and buy a bone for the soup.
The only steady source of income for I do not
know what years was my brother's earnings from his newspapers.
Surely this was the time for me to take my
sister's place in the workshop. I had had every fair
chance until now. School my time to myself liberty to
(09:55):
run and play and make friends. I had graduated from
grammar school. I of legal age to go to work.
What was I doing sitting at home and dreaming? I
was minding my business, of course, with all my might.
I was minding my business as I understood it. My
business was to go to school, to learn everything there
was to know, to write poetry, become famous, and make
(10:17):
the family rich. Surely it was not shirking to lay
out such a program for myself. I had boundless faith
in my future. I was certainly going to be a
great poet. I was certainly going to take care of
the family. Thus mused I in my arrogance, and my
family they were as bad as I. My father had
not lost a whit of his ambition for me. Since
(10:39):
graduation day and the school committee man's speech and half
a column about me in the paper, his ambition had
soared even higher. He was going to keep me at
school till I was prepared for college. By that time.
He was sure I would more than take care of myself.
It never for a moment entered his head to doubt
the wisdom or justice of this course. And my mother
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was just as loyal to my cause, and my brother
and my sister. It is no wonder if I got
along rapidly. I was helped, encouraged and upheld by everyone.
Even the baby cheered me on. When I asked her
whether she believed in higher education, she answered, without a
moment's hesitation, dhaka daka dagh against her. I remember only
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that one day, when I read her a verse out
of a most pathetic piece I was composing, she laughed
right out, a most disrespectful laugh, for which I revenged
myself by washing her face at the faucet and rubbing
it red on the roller towel. It was just like
me when it was debated whether I would be best
fitted for college at the High or the Latin School,
to go in person to mister Tetlow, who was principal
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of both schools, and so get the most expert opinion
on the subject. I never send a messenger. You may
remember where I can go myself. It was vacation time,
and I had to find mister Tetlow at his home
away out to the wilds of Roxbury. I found my way,
perhaps half an hour's ride on the electric car from
Dover Street. I grew an inch taller and broader between
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the corner of Cedar Street and mister Tetlow's house. Such
was the charm of the clean green suburb on a
cramped waif from the slums. My faded calico dress, my
rusty straw sailor hat, the color of my skin and
all bespoke the waif. But never a bit daunted was I.
I went up the steps to the porch, rang the
bell and asked for the great man, with as much
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assurance as if I were a daily visitor on Cedar Street.
I calmly awaited the appearance of mister Tetlow in the
reception room and stated my errand without trepidation. And why not,
I was a solemn little person for the moment, earnestly
seeking advice on a matter of great importance. That is
what mister Tetlow saw to judge by the gravity with
(12:47):
which he discussed my business with me, and the courtesy
with which he showed me to the door he saw too.
I fancy that I was not the least bit conscious
of my shabby dress, and I am sure he did
not smile at my appearance, even when my turned. A
new life began for me when I entered the Latin
School in September. Until then I had gone to school
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with my equals, and as a matter of course, now
it was distinctly a feat for me to keep in school,
and my schoolmates were socially so far superior to me
that my poverty became conspicuous. The pupils of the Latin School,
from the nature of the institution, are an aristocratic set.
They come from refined homes, dress well, and spend the
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recess hour talking about parties, bows and the matinee. As students,
they are either very quick or very hard working. For
the course of study. In the lingo of the school
world is considered stiff. The girl with half her brain
asleep or with too many beaus drops out by the
end of the first year, or a one and only
beau may be the fatal element. At the end of
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the course. The weeding process has reduced the once numerous
tribe of academic candidates to a cozy little family. By
all these tokens, I should have had serious business on
my hands as a pupil in the Latin school, but
I did not find it hard. To make myself letter
perfect in my lessons required long hours of study, but
that was my delight. To make myself at home in
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an alien world was also within my talents. I had
been practicing it day and night for the past four years.
To remain unconscious of my shabby and ill fitting clothes
when the rustle of silk petticoats in the schoolroom protested
against them was a matter still within my moral reach.
Half address a year had been my allowance for many seasons,
even less, for as I did not grow much, I
(14:33):
could wear my dresses as long as they lasted, and
I had stood before editors and exchanged polite calls with
school teachers, untroubled by the detestable colors and archaic designs
of my garments. To stand up and recite Latin declensions
without trembling from hunger was something more of a feat,
because I sometimes went to school with little or no breakfast,
(14:53):
But even that required no special heroism. At most, it
was a matter of self control. I had the advant
of a poor appetite too. I really did not need
much breakfast, or if I was hungry, it would hardly show.
I coughed so much that my unsteadiness was self explained.
Everything helped, you see, My schoolmates helped aristocrats. Though they were,
(15:16):
they did not hold themselves aloof from me. Some of
the girls who came to school and carriages were especially cordial.
They raided me by my scholarship and not by my
father's occupation. They teased and admired me by turns for
learning the footnotes in the Latin grammar by heart. They
never reproached me for my ignorance of the latest comic opera.
And it was more than good breeding that made them
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seem unaware of the incongruity of my presence. It was
a generous appreciation of what it meant for a girl
from the slums to be in the Latin school on
the way to college. If our intimacy ended on the
steps of the schoolhouse, it was more my fault than theirs.
Most of the girls were democratic enough to have invited
me to their homes, although to some of course I
(15:58):
was impossible, but I had no time for visiting. Schoolwork
and reading and family affairs occupied all the daytime and
much of the night time. I did not go with
any of the girls in the schoolgirl's sense of the phrase.
I admired some of them, either for good looks or
beautiful manners, or more subtle attributes, but always at a distance.
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I discovered something inimitable in the way the back Bay
girls carried themselves, and I should have been the first
to perceive the incongruity of Commonwealth Avenue and twining arms
with Dover Street, some day, perhaps when I should be
famous and rich, but not just then. So my companions
and I parted on the steps of the schoolhouse in
mutual respect. They guiltless of snobbish, I innocent of envy.
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It was a graciously American relation, and I am happy
to this day to recall it. The one exception to
this rule of friendly distance was my chum, Florence Connolly,
But I should hardly have said chum. Florence and I
occupied adjacent seats for three years, but we did not
walk arm in arm, nor call each other nicknames, nor
share our lunch, nor correspond in vacation time. Florence was
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quiet as a mouse, and I was reserved as an oyster.
And perhaps we too had no more in common fundamentally
than those two creatures in their natural state. Still, as
we were both very studious and never strayed far from
our desks at recess, we practiced a sort of intimacy
of prop iniquity. Although Florence was of my social order,
her father presiding over a cheap lunch room, I did not,
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on that account, feel especially drawn to her. I spent
more time studying Florence than loving her, I suppose, and
yet I ought to have loved her. She was such
a good girl, always perfect in her lessons. She was
so modest that she recited in a noticeable tremor and
had to be told frequently to raise her voice. Florence
wore her light brown hair brushed flatly back and braided
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in a single plate, at a time when pompadors were
six inches high and braids hung in pears. Florence had
a pocket in her dress for her hanging kerchief, in
a day when pockets were repugnant to fashion. All these
things ought to have made me feel the kinship of
humble circumstances, the comradeship of intellectual earnestness. But they did not.
(18:12):
The truth is that my relation to persons and things
depended neither on social distinctions nor on intellectual or moral affinities.
My attitude at this time was determined by my consciousness
of the unique elements in my character and history. It
seemed to me that I had been pursuing a single
adventure since the beginning of the world, through highways and byways, underground, overground,
(18:35):
by land, by sea. Ever, the same star had guided me,
I thought, Ever, the same purpose had divided my affairs
from other men's. What that purpose was, where the fixed
horizon beyond which my star would not recede was an
absorbing mystery to me. But the current moment never puzzled me.
Would I chose instinctively to do I knew to be
right and in accordance with my destiny. I never hesitated
(18:58):
over great things, but I answered promptly to the call
of my genius. So what was it to me whether
my neighbors spurned or embraced me? If my way was
no man's way, Nor should any one ever reject me
whom I chose to be my friend, because I would
make sure of a kindred spirit by the coincidence of
our guiding stars. When where in the harum scarum life
(19:20):
of Dover Street was there time or place for such
self communing in the night, when everybody slept on a
solitary walk as far from home as I dared to go,
I was not unhappy on Dover Street. Quite the contrary,
Everything of consequence was well with me. Poverty was a superficial,
temporary matter. It vanished at the touch of money. Money
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in America was plentiful. It was only a matter of
getting some of it. And I was on my way
to the mint. If Dover Street was not a pleasant
place to abide in, it was only a wayside house.
And I was really happy, actively happy in the exercise
of my mind in Latin mathematics, history, and rest the
things that suffice a studious girl in the middle teens.
(20:04):
Still I had moments of depression when my whole being
protested against the life of the slum. I resented the
familiarity of my vulgar neighbors. I felt myself defiled by
the indecencies I was compelled to witness. Then it was
I took to running away from home. I went out
in the twilight and walked for hours, my blind feet
leading me. I did not care where I went. If
(20:25):
I lost my way, so much the better. I never
wanted to see Dover Street again. But behold, as I
left the crowds behind, and the broader avenues were spanned
by the open sky, my grievances melted away, and I
felt a dreaming of things that neither hurt nor pleased.
A fringe of trees against the sunset became suddenly the
symbol of the whole world, and I stood and gazed
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and asked questions of it. The sunset faded, the trees withdrew,
The wind went by, but dropped no hint in my ear.
The evening star leaped out between the clouds and sealed
the secret with a seal of splendor. A favorite resort
of mine after dark was a South Boston bridge across
South Bay and the Old Colony Railroad. This was so
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near home that I could go there at any time
when the confusion in the house drove me out, or
I felt the need of fresh air. I liked to
stand leaning on the bridge railing and look down on
the dim tangle of railroad tracks below. I could barely
see them branching out, elbowing, winding, and sliding out into
the night. In paars, I was fascinated by the dotted lights,
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the significant red and green of signal lamps. These simple
things stood for a complexity that it made me dizzy
to think of. 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
with an imperative shriek that shook me where I stood.
(21:51):
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. After my
watch is on the bridge, I often stayed up to
write or study. It is late before Dover Street begins
to go to bed. It is past midnight before I
feel that I am alone, seated in my stiff little
(22:13):
chair before my narrow table. I gather in the night
sounds through the open window, curious to assar and define them.
As little by little the city settles down to sleep.
The volume of sound diminishes, and the qualities of particular
sounds stand out. The electric car lurches by with silent gong,
taking the empty track by leaps, humming to itself. In
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the invisible distance. A benighted team swings restlessly around the corner,
sharp under my rattling window panes. The staccato pelting of
hoofs on the cobblestones changed suddenly to an even pounding
on the bridge. A few pedestrians hurry by, their heavy boots,
all out of step. The distant thoroughfares have long ago
ceased their murmur, And I know that a million lamps
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shine idly in the idle streets. My sister sleeps quietly
in the little bed. The rhythmic dripping of a faucet
is audible through the flat. It is so still that
I can hear the paper crackling on the wall. Silence
upon silence is added to the night. Only the kitchen
clock is the voice of my brooding thoughts, ticking, ticking, ticking. Suddenly,
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the distant whistle of a locomotive breaks a stillness with
a long drawn wail, like a threatened trouble. The sound
comes nearer, piercingly, nearer, then it dies out in a
mingled silence, complaining to the last. The sleepers stir in
their beds. Somebody sighs, and the burden of all his
trouble falls upon my heart. A homeless cat cries in
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the alley in the voice of a human child, and
the ticking of the kitchen clock is the voice of
my troubled thoughts. Many things are revealed to me as
I sit and watch the world asleep. But the silence
asks me many questions that I cannot answer. And I
am glad when the tide of sound begins to return,
by little and little, and I welcome the clatter of
(24:02):
tin cans that announces the milkman. I cannot see him
in the dusk, but I know his wholesome face has
no problem in it. It is one flight up to
the roof. It is a leap of the soul to
the sunrise. The morning mist rests lightly on chimneys and roofs,
and walls, wreaths, the lamp posts and floats, and gauzy
streamers down the streets. Distant buildings are massed like palace walls,
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with turrets and spires lost in the rosy clouds. I
love my beautiful city, spreading all about me. I love
the world. I love my place in the world. End
of Chapter sixteen.
Chapter sixteen of The Promised Land. This LibriVox recording is
in the public domain. Recording by bridget Gage. The Promised
Land by Mary Anton, Chapter sixteen. Dover Street. What happened next?
Was Dover Street? And what was Dover Street? Ask? Rather,
what was it not? Dover Street was my fairest garden
(00:21):
of girlhood, a gate of paradise, a window facing on
a broad avenue of life. Dover Street was a prison,
a school of discipline, a battle field of sordid strife.
The air in Dover Street was heavy with evil odors
of degradation, but a breath from the uppermost heavens rippled
through whispering of infinite things. In Dover Street, the dragon
(00:43):
poverty gripped me for a last fight. But I overthrew
the hideous creature and sat on his neck as on
a throne in Dover Street. I was shackled with a
hundred chains of disadvantage, but with one free hand I
planted little seeds right there in the mud of shame
that blossomed into the honeyed rows of widest freedom. In
Dover Street there was often no loaf on the table,
(01:05):
but the hand of some noble friend was ever in mine.
The night in Dover Street was rent with the cries
of wrong, but the thunders of truth crashed through the
pitiful clamor and died out in prophetic silences. Outwardly, Dover
Street is in noisy thoroughfare cut through a South End slum,
and every essential the same as Wheeler Street. Turn down
(01:27):
any street in the slums at random and call it
by whatever name you please, you will observe there the
same fashions of life, death, and endurance. Every one of
those streets is a rubbish heap of damaged humanity, and
it will take a powerful broom and an ocean of
soap sets to clean it out. Dover Street is intersected
near its eastern end, where we lived by Harrison Avenue.
(01:49):
That street is to the south end what Salem Street
is to the north end. It is the heart of
the South End ghetto for the greater part of its length,
although its northern end belongs to the realm of China.
Its multifarious business bursts through the narrow shop doors and
overruns the basements the sidewalk. The street itself in push
carts and open air stands. Its multitude inous population bursts
(02:12):
through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the corridors, the doorsteps,
the gutters, the side streets, pushing in and out among
the push carts all day long and half the night. Besides,
rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely
is it found clean. Nothing less than a fire or
flood would cleanse the street. Even passover cannot quite accomplish
(02:35):
this feat, for although the tenements may be scrubbed to
their remotest corners, on this one occasion the cleansing stops
at the curbstone. A great deal of the filthy rubbish
accumulated in a year is pitched into the street, often
through the windows, and what the ashman on his daily
round does not remove is left to be trampled to powder,
in which form it steals back into the houses from
(02:57):
which it was so lately removed. The city fathers provide
soap and water for the slums in the form of
excellent schools, kindergartens and branch libraries, and there they stop
at the curbstone of the people's life. They cleanse and
discipline the children's minds, but their bodies they pitch into
the gutter, for there are no parks and almost no
(03:17):
playgrounds in the Harrison Avenue district. In my day there
were none, and such as there are have been wrenched
from the city by public spirited citizens who have no
offices in city hall. No wonder the ashman is not
more thorough he learns from his masters. It is a
pity to have it so in a queen of enlightened
cities like Boston. If we of the twentieth century do
(03:39):
not believe in baseball as much as philosophy, we have
not learned the lesson of modern science, which teaches, among
other things, that the body is the nursery of the soul,
the instrument of our moral development, the secret chart of
our devious progress from worm to man. The great achievement
of recent science, of which we are so proud, has
been the deciphering of the hieroglyphic of organic nature. To
(04:03):
worship the facts and neglect the implications of the message
of science is to applaud to the drama without taking
the moral to heart. And we certainly are not taking
the moral to heart when we tried to make a
hero out of the boy by such foreign appliances as
grammar and algebra. While utterly despising the fittest instrument for
his uplifting the boy's own body. We had no particular
(04:26):
reason for coming to Dover Street. It might just have
well been apple Pie Alley. For my father had sold
with the goods, fixtures and good will of the Wheeler
Street store all his hopes of ever making a living
in the grocery trade, and I doubt if he got
a silver dollar the more for them. We had to
live somewhere, even if we were not making a living,
(04:46):
So we came to Dover Street, where tenements were cheap,
by which I mean that rent was low. The ultimate
cost of life in those tenements, in terms of human happiness,
is high enough. Our new home consisted of five small
rooms up two flights of stairs, with the right of
way through the dark corridors. In the parlor, the dingy
paper hung in rags and the plaster fell in chunks.
(05:09):
One of the bedrooms was absolutely dark and air tight.
The kitchen windows looked out on a dirty court at
the back of which was the rear tenement of the
estate to us belonged, along with the five rooms and
the right of way. Aforesaid, a block of upper space
the length of a polley line across the squirt, and
the width of an arc described by a windy monday's
(05:30):
washing in its remotest wanderings. The little front bedroom was
assigned to me with only one partner, my sister Dora.
A mouse could not have led a cat much of
a chase across this room. Still we found space for
a narrow bed, a crazy bureau, and a small table.
From the window there was an unobstructed view of a
lumber yard, beyond which frowned the blackened walls of a factory.
(05:53):
The fence of the lumber yard was gay with theater
posters and illustrated advertisements of tobacco, whisky, and kat and
baby foods. When the window was open, there was a
constant clang and whirr of electric cars, varied by the
screech of machinery, the clatter of empty wagons, or the
rumble of heavy trucks. There was nothing worse in all
(06:14):
this than we had had before since our exile from
Crescent Beach. But I did not take the same delight
in the prop iniquity of electric cars and arc lights
that I had till now. I supposed the tenement began
to pall on me. It must not be supposed that
I enjoyed any degree of privacy because I had half
a room to myself. We were six in the five rooms.
(06:35):
We were bound to be always in each other's way,
And as it was within our flat, so it was
in the house as a whole. All doors, beginning with
the street door, stood open most of the time, or
if they were closed, the tenants did not wear out
their knuckles knocking for admittance. I could stand at any
time in the unswept entrance hall and tell, from an
analysis of the medley of sounds and smells that issued
(06:57):
from doors ajar what was going on in the several
flats from below up that guttural scolding voice unremitten as
the hissing of a steam pipe, as Missus Vernosky, I
make a guess that she is chastising the infant Isaac
for taking a second lump of sugar in his tea.
Spam bam, yes, and she is rubbing in her objections
with the flat of her hand. That blubbering and moaning
(07:20):
accompanying an elfantine tread as fat Missus Casey second floor home,
drunk from an afternoon out in fear of the vengeance
of mister Casey. To propitiate home. She is burning a
pan of bacon. As the choking fumes and outrageous sizzling testify,
I hear a feeble whining interrupted by long silences. It
(07:40):
is that scabby baby on the third floor, fallen out
of bed again, with nobody home to pick him up.
To escape these various horrors, I ascend to the roof,
where bacon and babies and child beating are not. But
there I find two figures in calico wrappers with bare
red arms akimbo, a basket of wet clothes in front
of each, and only one empty clothes line between them.
(08:03):
I do not want to be dragged in as a
witness in case of assault and battery, so I descend
to the street again, grateful to note as I pass
that the third floor baby is still in front of
the door. I squeezed through a group of children. They
are going to play tag and are counting to see
who should be it. My mother and your mother went
out to hang clothes. My mother gave your another a
(08:25):
punch in the nose. If the children's couplet does not
give a vivid picture of the life, manners and customs
of Dover Street, no description of mine can ever do so.
Frida was married before we came to Dover Street and
went to live in East Boston. This left me the
eldest of the children at home. Whether on this account,
or because I was outgrowing my childish carelessness, or because
(08:48):
I began to believe, on the cumulative evidence of the
Crescent Beach, Chelsea and Wheeler Street adventures, that America, after all,
was not going to provide for my father's family. Whether
for any or all of these reasons, I began at
this time to take bread and butter matters more to heart,
and to ponder ways and means of getting rich. My
father saw employment wherever work was going on. His health
(09:11):
was poor, he aged very fast. Nevertheless, he offered himself
for every kind of labor. He offered himself for a
boy's wages. Here he was found too weak, here, too old.
Here his imperfect English was in the way, here his
Jewish appearance. He had a few short terms of work
at this or that. I do not know the name
of the form of drudgery that my father did not practice.
(09:34):
But all told, he did not earn enough to pay
the rent in full and buy a bone for the soup.
The only steady source of income for I do not
know what years was my brother's earnings from his newspapers.
Surely this was the time for me to take my
sister's place in the workshop. I had had every fair
chance until now. School my time to myself liberty to
(09:55):
run and play and make friends. I had graduated from
grammar school. I of legal age to go to work.
What was I doing sitting at home and dreaming? I
was minding my business, of course, with all my might.
I was minding my business as I understood it. My
business was to go to school, to learn everything there
was to know, to write poetry, become famous, and make
(10:17):
the family rich. Surely it was not shirking to lay
out such a program for myself. I had boundless faith
in my future. I was certainly going to be a
great poet. I was certainly going to take care of
the family. Thus mused I in my arrogance, and my
family they were as bad as I. My father had
not lost a whit of his ambition for me. Since
(10:39):
graduation day and the school committee man's speech and half
a column about me in the paper, his ambition had
soared even higher. He was going to keep me at
school till I was prepared for college. By that time.
He was sure I would more than take care of myself.
It never for a moment entered his head to doubt
the wisdom or justice of this course. And my mother
(11:00):
was just as loyal to my cause, and my brother
and my sister. It is no wonder if I got
along rapidly. I was helped, encouraged and upheld by everyone.
Even the baby cheered me on. When I asked her
whether she believed in higher education, she answered, without a
moment's hesitation, dhaka daka dagh against her. I remember only
(11:20):
that one day, when I read her a verse out
of a most pathetic piece I was composing, she laughed
right out, a most disrespectful laugh, for which I revenged
myself by washing her face at the faucet and rubbing
it red on the roller towel. It was just like
me when it was debated whether I would be best
fitted for college at the High or the Latin School,
to go in person to mister Tetlow, who was principal
(11:42):
of both schools, and so get the most expert opinion
on the subject. I never send a messenger. You may
remember where I can go myself. It was vacation time,
and I had to find mister Tetlow at his home
away out to the wilds of Roxbury. I found my way,
perhaps half an hour's ride on the electric car from
Dover Street. I grew an inch taller and broader between
(12:04):
the corner of Cedar Street and mister Tetlow's house. Such
was the charm of the clean green suburb on a
cramped waif from the slums. My faded calico dress, my
rusty straw sailor hat, the color of my skin and
all bespoke the waif. But never a bit daunted was I.
I went up the steps to the porch, rang the
bell and asked for the great man, with as much
(12:26):
assurance as if I were a daily visitor on Cedar Street.
I calmly awaited the appearance of mister Tetlow in the
reception room and stated my errand without trepidation. And why not,
I was a solemn little person for the moment, earnestly
seeking advice on a matter of great importance. That is
what mister Tetlow saw to judge by the gravity with
(12:47):
which he discussed my business with me, and the courtesy
with which he showed me to the door he saw too.
I fancy that I was not the least bit conscious
of my shabby dress, and I am sure he did
not smile at my appearance, even when my turned. A
new life began for me when I entered the Latin
School in September. Until then I had gone to school
(13:07):
with my equals, and as a matter of course, now
it was distinctly a feat for me to keep in school,
and my schoolmates were socially so far superior to me
that my poverty became conspicuous. The pupils of the Latin School,
from the nature of the institution, are an aristocratic set.
They come from refined homes, dress well, and spend the
(13:27):
recess hour talking about parties, bows and the matinee. As students,
they are either very quick or very hard working. For
the course of study. In the lingo of the school
world is considered stiff. The girl with half her brain
asleep or with too many beaus drops out by the
end of the first year, or a one and only
beau may be the fatal element. At the end of
(13:49):
the course. The weeding process has reduced the once numerous
tribe of academic candidates to a cozy little family. By
all these tokens, I should have had serious business on
my hands as a pupil in the Latin school, but
I did not find it hard. To make myself letter
perfect in my lessons required long hours of study, but
that was my delight. To make myself at home in
(14:10):
an alien world was also within my talents. I had
been practicing it day and night for the past four years.
To remain unconscious of my shabby and ill fitting clothes
when the rustle of silk petticoats in the schoolroom protested
against them was a matter still within my moral reach.
Half address a year had been my allowance for many seasons,
even less, for as I did not grow much, I
(14:33):
could wear my dresses as long as they lasted, and
I had stood before editors and exchanged polite calls with
school teachers, untroubled by the detestable colors and archaic designs
of my garments. To stand up and recite Latin declensions
without trembling from hunger was something more of a feat,
because I sometimes went to school with little or no breakfast,
(14:53):
But even that required no special heroism. At most, it
was a matter of self control. I had the advant
of a poor appetite too. I really did not need
much breakfast, or if I was hungry, it would hardly show.
I coughed so much that my unsteadiness was self explained.
Everything helped, you see, My schoolmates helped aristocrats. Though they were,
(15:16):
they did not hold themselves aloof from me. Some of
the girls who came to school and carriages were especially cordial.
They raided me by my scholarship and not by my
father's occupation. They teased and admired me by turns for
learning the footnotes in the Latin grammar by heart. They
never reproached me for my ignorance of the latest comic opera.
And it was more than good breeding that made them
(15:37):
seem unaware of the incongruity of my presence. It was
a generous appreciation of what it meant for a girl
from the slums to be in the Latin school on
the way to college. If our intimacy ended on the
steps of the schoolhouse, it was more my fault than theirs.
Most of the girls were democratic enough to have invited
me to their homes, although to some of course I
(15:58):
was impossible, but I had no time for visiting. Schoolwork
and reading and family affairs occupied all the daytime and
much of the night time. I did not go with
any of the girls in the schoolgirl's sense of the phrase.
I admired some of them, either for good looks or
beautiful manners, or more subtle attributes, but always at a distance.
(16:19):
I discovered something inimitable in the way the back Bay
girls carried themselves, and I should have been the first
to perceive the incongruity of Commonwealth Avenue and twining arms
with Dover Street, some day, perhaps when I should be
famous and rich, but not just then. So my companions
and I parted on the steps of the schoolhouse in
mutual respect. They guiltless of snobbish, I innocent of envy.
(16:43):
It was a graciously American relation, and I am happy
to this day to recall it. The one exception to
this rule of friendly distance was my chum, Florence Connolly,
But I should hardly have said chum. Florence and I
occupied adjacent seats for three years, but we did not
walk arm in arm, nor call each other nicknames, nor
share our lunch, nor correspond in vacation time. Florence was
(17:08):
quiet as a mouse, and I was reserved as an oyster.
And perhaps we too had no more in common fundamentally
than those two creatures in their natural state. Still, as
we were both very studious and never strayed far from
our desks at recess, we practiced a sort of intimacy
of prop iniquity. Although Florence was of my social order,
her father presiding over a cheap lunch room, I did not,
(17:30):
on that account, feel especially drawn to her. I spent
more time studying Florence than loving her, I suppose, and
yet I ought to have loved her. She was such
a good girl, always perfect in her lessons. She was
so modest that she recited in a noticeable tremor and
had to be told frequently to raise her voice. Florence
wore her light brown hair brushed flatly back and braided
(17:52):
in a single plate, at a time when pompadors were
six inches high and braids hung in pears. Florence had
a pocket in her dress for her hanging kerchief, in
a day when pockets were repugnant to fashion. All these
things ought to have made me feel the kinship of
humble circumstances, the comradeship of intellectual earnestness. But they did not.
(18:12):
The truth is that my relation to persons and things
depended neither on social distinctions nor on intellectual or moral affinities.
My attitude at this time was determined by my consciousness
of the unique elements in my character and history. It
seemed to me that I had been pursuing a single
adventure since the beginning of the world, through highways and byways, underground, overground,
(18:35):
by land, by sea. Ever, the same star had guided me,
I thought, Ever, the same purpose had divided my affairs
from other men's. What that purpose was, where the fixed
horizon beyond which my star would not recede was an
absorbing mystery to me. But the current moment never puzzled me.
Would I chose instinctively to do I knew to be
right and in accordance with my destiny. I never hesitated
(18:58):
over great things, but I answered promptly to the call
of my genius. So what was it to me whether
my neighbors spurned or embraced me? If my way was
no man's way, Nor should any one ever reject me
whom I chose to be my friend, because I would
make sure of a kindred spirit by the coincidence of
our guiding stars. When where in the harum scarum life
(19:20):
of Dover Street was there time or place for such
self communing in the night, when everybody slept on a
solitary walk as far from home as I dared to go,
I was not unhappy on Dover Street. Quite the contrary,
Everything of consequence was well with me. Poverty was a superficial,
temporary matter. It vanished at the touch of money. Money
(19:42):
in America was plentiful. It was only a matter of
getting some of it. And I was on my way
to the mint. If Dover Street was not a pleasant
place to abide in, it was only a wayside house.
And I was really happy, actively happy in the exercise
of my mind in Latin mathematics, history, and rest the
things that suffice a studious girl in the middle teens.
(20:04):
Still I had moments of depression when my whole being
protested against the life of the slum. I resented the
familiarity of my vulgar neighbors. I felt myself defiled by
the indecencies I was compelled to witness. Then it was
I took to running away from home. I went out
in the twilight and walked for hours, my blind feet
leading me. I did not care where I went. If
(20:25):
I lost my way, so much the better. I never
wanted to see Dover Street again. But behold, as I
left the crowds behind, and the broader avenues were spanned
by the open sky, my grievances melted away, and I
felt a dreaming of things that neither hurt nor pleased.
A fringe of trees against the sunset became suddenly the
symbol of the whole world, and I stood and gazed
(20:47):
and asked questions of it. The sunset faded, the trees withdrew,
The wind went by, but dropped no hint in my ear.
The evening star leaped out between the clouds and sealed
the secret with a seal of splendor. A favorite resort
of mine after dark was a South Boston bridge across
South Bay and the Old Colony Railroad. This was so
(21:08):
near home that I could go there at any time
when the confusion in the house drove me out, or
I felt the need of fresh air. I liked to
stand leaning on the bridge railing and look down on
the dim tangle of railroad tracks below. I could barely
see them branching out, elbowing, winding, and sliding out into
the night. In paars, I was fascinated by the dotted lights,
(21:29):
the significant red and green of signal lamps. These simple
things stood for a complexity that it made me dizzy
to think of. 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
with an imperative shriek that shook me where I stood.
(21:51):
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. After my
watch is on the bridge, I often stayed up to
write or study. It is late before Dover Street begins
to go to bed. It is past midnight before I
feel that I am alone, seated in my stiff little
(22:13):
chair before my narrow table. I gather in the night
sounds through the open window, curious to assar and define them.
As little by little the city settles down to sleep.
The volume of sound diminishes, and the qualities of particular
sounds stand out. The electric car lurches by with silent gong,
taking the empty track by leaps, humming to itself. In
(22:34):
the invisible distance. A benighted team swings restlessly around the corner,
sharp under my rattling window panes. The staccato pelting of
hoofs on the cobblestones changed suddenly to an even pounding
on the bridge. A few pedestrians hurry by, their heavy boots,
all out of step. The distant thoroughfares have long ago
ceased their murmur, And I know that a million lamps
(22:56):
shine idly in the idle streets. My sister sleeps quietly
in the little bed. The rhythmic dripping of a faucet
is audible through the flat. It is so still that
I can hear the paper crackling on the wall. Silence
upon silence is added to the night. Only the kitchen
clock is the voice of my brooding thoughts, ticking, ticking, ticking. Suddenly,
(23:20):
the distant whistle of a locomotive breaks a stillness with
a long drawn wail, like a threatened trouble. The sound
comes nearer, piercingly, nearer, then it dies out in a
mingled silence, complaining to the last. The sleepers stir in
their beds. Somebody sighs, and the burden of all his
trouble falls upon my heart. A homeless cat cries in
(23:42):
the alley in the voice of a human child, and
the ticking of the kitchen clock is the voice of
my troubled thoughts. Many things are revealed to me as
I sit and watch the world asleep. But the silence
asks me many questions that I cannot answer. And I
am glad when the tide of sound begins to return,
by little and little, and I welcome the clatter of
(24:02):
tin cans that announces the milkman. I cannot see him
in the dusk, but I know his wholesome face has
no problem in it. It is one flight up to
the roof. It is a leap of the soul to
the sunrise. The morning mist rests lightly on chimneys and roofs,
and walls, wreaths, the lamp posts and floats, and gauzy
streamers down the streets. Distant buildings are massed like palace walls,
(24:25):
with turrets and spires lost in the rosy clouds. I
love my beautiful city, spreading all about me. I love
the world. I love my place in the world. End
of Chapter sixteen.
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