Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and stare through the darkness at an imaginary world of educated people that would invite me in to share with them their feast of learning. I saw them sitting around a table talking high thoughts, all the wisdom of the ages flowing from lip to lip like living light. I saw just how they talked and how they looked, because once I had worked as a waitress in a professor’s house. Their words were over my head, but the sound of their low voices went through me like music of all that I longed and dreamed and desired to be.
I used to hold myself tight-in, like a wooden dummy, when I passed them the food. My lips were tight together, my eyes half-closed, like a Chinaman’s, as though I didn’t see or hear anything but my one business of waiting on them. But all the time something in the choked stillness of me was crying out to them: “I’m no dummy of a servant. I want to be like you. I could be like all of you if I only had a chance.”
“If I only had a chance” kept going round and round in my head.
“Make your chance,” a still voice goaded me.
“If I could only write out my wonderful thoughts that fly away in the air I’d get myself a first place in America.”
“No, go ahead. Think connectedly for one minute. Catch your crazy wild birds and bring them down to earth.”
And so I pushed myself on to begin the adventure of writing out my thoughts.
But who’ll print what I write? was my next bother.
In my evenings off I used to go to the library and kept looking and looking through all the magazines to see where I could get a start. At last I picked out three magazines that stood out plainly for their special interest in working people. I will call them The Reformer, The People and Free Mankind.
Free Mankind was a thin, white, educated-looking magazine, without covers, without pictures, without any advertising. It gave me the feeling when I looked through the pages that it was a head without a body. Most of the articles were high words in the air. I couldn’t make out what they were talking about, but some of the editorials talked against paying rent. This at once got me on fire with interest, because all my life the people I knew were wearing out their years worrying for the rent. If this magazine was trying to put the landlords out of business, I was with it. So, fired by the inspiration of the moment, I rushed to see the editor of Free Mankind.