My teacher was so much above me that he wasn’t a man to me at all. He was a God. His face lighted up the shop for me, and his voice sang itself in me everywhere I went. It was like healing medicine to the flaming fever within me to listen to his voice. And then I’d repeat to myself his words and live in them as if they were religion.
Often as I sat at the machine sewing the waists I’d forget what I was doing. I’d find myself dreaming in the air. “Ach!” I asked myself, “what was that beautifulness in his eyes that made the lowest nobody feel like a somebody? What was that about him that when his smile fell on me I felt lifted up to the sky away from all the coldness and the ugliness of the world? Gottunui!” I prayed, “if I could only always hold on to the light of high thoughts that shined from him. If I could only always hear in my heart the sound of his voice I would need nothing more in life. I would be happier than a bird in the air.
“Friend,” I said to him once, “if you could but teach me how to get cold in the heart and clear in the head like you are!”
He only smiled at me and looked far away. His calmness was like the sureness of money in the bank. Then he turned and looked on me, and said: “I am not so cold in the heart and clear in the head as I make-believe. I am bound. I am a prisoner of convention.”
“You make-believe—you bound?” I burst out. “You who do not have foreladies or bosses—you who do not have to sell yourself for wages—you who only work for love and truth—you a prisoner?”
“True, I do not have bosses just as you do,” he said. “But still I am not free. I am bound by formal education and conventional traditions. Though you work in a shop, you are really freer than I. You are not repressed as I am by the fear and shame of feeling. You could teach me more than I could teach you. You could teach me how to be natural.”
“I’m not so natural like you think,” I said. “I’m afraid.”
He smiled at me out of his eyes. “What are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of my heart,” I said, trying to hold back the blood rushing to my face. “I’m burning to get calm and sensible like the born Americans. But how can I help it? My heart flies away from me like a wild bird. How can I learn to keep myself down on earth like the born Americans?”
“But I don’t want you to get down on earth like the Americans. That is just the beauty and the wonder of you. We Americans are too much on earth; we need more of your power to fly. If you would only know how much you can teach us Americans. You are the promise of the centuries to come. You are the heart, the creative pulse of America to be.”