Assured of her welcome I went the next day. But as I opened the door fear seized me. I paused trembling, holding the knob in my hand, too dazed by the sight before me to make a step. More than the strangeness of the faces awed me. Ordinary home comforts, cushioned chairs, green ferns between white curtains, the bright rugs on the floor were new and wonderful to me. Timorously I edged my way into the room, so blinded by the shimmering colours of the cakes and fruits and candies that covered the table that I did not see Becky approaching me with outstretched arms.
“Mamma, this is that little immigrant girl who never had a birthday,” she said, “so I wanted to show her mine.”
Becky’s father glanced at her all in white, with pink ribbons on her curls, as she stood beside me in my torn rags reeking with the grime of neglect. A shudder of revulsion went through him at the sight of me.
“See what Becky has to mix up with on the block,” he whispered to his wife. “For God’s sake, give her a nickel, give her some candy, give her anything, but let her run along.”
Street child that I was, my instinct sensed the cold wave of his thought without hearing the exact words. Breaking away from Becky’s detaining hand I made for the door.
“I want to go home! I want to go home!” I sobbed as I ran out of the room.
Whitman has said, “It is as lucky to die as it is to be born.” And I put his thought into my own words, “It is as lucky not to have advantages as it is to have them.” I mean that facing my disadvantages—the fears, the discouragements, the sense of inferiority—drove me to fight every inch of the way for things I demanded out of life. And, as a writer, the experience of forcing my way from the bottomest bottom gave me the knowledge of the poor that no well-born writer could possibly have.
I am thinking, for instance, of Victor Hugo and his immortal book, “Les Misérables.” It’s great literature, but it isn’t the dirt and the blood of the poor that I saw and that forced me to write. Or take the American, Jack London: when he wrote about tramps he roused the sense of reality in his readers, because he had been a tramp. But later, when he tried to make stories of the great unwashed of the cities—again this was only literature.
The clear realization that literature is beyond my reach, that I must either be real or nothing, enables me to accept my place as the cobbler who must stick to his last, and gives my work any merit it may have. I stand on solid ground when I write of the poor, the homeless and the hungry.