Blindly, Sophie turned to go. She reached for the door. The professor’s perfunctory good-bye fell on deaf ears.
She swung the door open. The president of the college stood before her. She remembered it was he who had welcomed the extension students on the evening of her first attendance. He moved deferentially aside for her to pass. For one swift instant Sophie looked into kindly eyes. “Could he understand? Should I cry out to him to help me?” flashed through her mind. But before she could say a word he passed and the door had closed.
Sophie stopped in the hall. Had she the courage to wait until he came out? “He’s got feelings,” her instincts urged her. “He’s not an all-rightnik, a stone heart like the rest of them.”
“Ach!” cried her shattered spirit, “what would he, the head of them all, have to do with me? He wouldn’t even want to stop to listen.”
Too crushed to endure another rebuff, she dragged her leaden feet down the stairs and out into the street. All the light went out of her eyes, the strength out of her arms and fingers. She could think or feel nothing but the choked sense of her defeat.
That night she lay awake staring into the darkness. Every nerve within her cried aloud with the gnawing ache of her unlived life. Out of the dim corners the spectre of her stunted girlhood rose to mock her—the wasted, poverty-stricken years smothered in the steaming pots of other people’s kitchens. “Must I always remain buried alive in the black prison of my dumbness? Can’t I never learn to give out what’s in me? Must I choke myself in the smoke of my own fire?”
Centuries of suppression, generations of illiterates, clamoured in her: “Show them what’s in you! If you can’t write in college English, write in ‘immigrant English.’”
She flung from her the college catalogue. About to trample on it, she stopped. The catalogue had fallen open at the photograph of the president. There looked up at her the one kind face in that heartless college world. The president’s eyes gazed once more steadily into hers. Sophie hesitated; but not to be thwarted of her vengeance, she tore out his picture and laid it on the table, then she ripped the catalogue, and stuffed the crumpled pages into the stove. It roared up the chimney like the song of the Valkyrie. She threw back her head with triumph, and once more her eyes met the president’s.
“Let them burn, these dead-heads. Who are they, the bosses of education? What are they that got the say over me if I’m fit to learn or not fit to learn? Dust and ashes, ashes and dust. But you,” she picked up the picture, “you still got some life. But if you got life, don’t their dry dust choke you?”
The wrestlings of her sleepless night only strengthened her resolve to do the impossible, just because it seemed impossible. “I can’t tear the stars out of heaven if it wills itself in me,” her youth cried in her. “Whether I know how to write or don’t know how to write, I’ll be a writer.”