Working With the Working Woman

by Cornelia Stratton Parker

If it were only the human element that counted, everyone would stay at the brassworks forever. I feel like a snake in the grass, walking off “on them” when they all were so nice. Nor was it for a moment the “dearie” kind of niceness that made you feel it was orders from above. From our floor boss down, they were people who were born to treat a body square. All the handicaps against them—the work itself, the surroundings, the low pay—had so long been part of their lives, these “higher ups” seemed insensible to the fact that such things were handicaps.

To-day was sunny and the factory not so dark—in fact, part of the time we worked with no electric lights. The crisp early morning air those four blocks from the Subway to the factory—it sent the spring fever through the blood. In the gutter of that dirty East Side street a dirty East Side man was burning garbage. The smoke curled up lazily. The sun just peeping up over the hospital at the end of the street made slanting shafts through the smoke. As I passed by it suddenly was no longer the East Side of New York City....

Now the Four Way Lodge is open,
Now the hunting winds are loose,
Now the smokes of spring go up to clear the brain....

Breakfast in a cañon by the side of a stream—the odor of pines.... The little bobbing doors went to behind me and there I stood in floor three, the stale gas and metal smell ... the whirs of the belts ... the jarring of the presses....

Next to me this glorious morning sat a snip of a little thing all in black—so pretty she was, so very pretty. I heard the boss tell her it's not the sort of work she's been used to, she'll find it hard. Is she sure she wants to try it? And in the course of the morning I heard the story of Mame's life.

Mame's husband died three weeks ago. They had been married one month and two days—after waiting three years. Shall I write a story of Mame on the sob-sister order to bring the tears to your eyes? It could easily be done. But not honestly. Little Mame—how could her foot ever reach the press? And when she walked off after a drink, I saw that she was quite lame. A widow only three weeks. She'd never worked before, but there was no money. She lived all alone, wandered out for her meals—no mother, no father, no sisters or brothers. She cried every night. Her husband had been a traveling salesman—sometimes he made eighty-five dollars a week. They had a six-room apartment and a servant! She'd met him at a dance hall. A girl she was with had dared her to wink at him. Sure she'd do anything anybody dared her to. He came over and asked her what she was after, anyhow. That night he left the girl he'd taken to the dance hall to pilot her own way back to home and mother, and he saw Mame to her room. He was swell and tall. She showed me his picture in a locket around her neck. Meanwhile Mame kicked the foot press about twice every five minutes.

Why had they waited so long to get married? Because of the war. He was afraid he'd be killed and would leave her a widow. “He asked me to promise never to get married again if he did marry me and died. But,”—she leaned over my way—“that only meant if he died during the war, ain't that so? Lookit how long the war was over before he died.”

He was awful good to her after they got married. He took her to a show every night—jes swell; and she had given him a swell funeral—you bet she did. The coffin had cost eighty-five dollars—white with real silver handles; and the floral piece she bought—“Gee! What's your name?... Connie, you oughtta seen that floral piece!” and Mame laid off work altogether to use her hands the better. It was shaped so, and in the middle was a clock made out of flowers, with the hands at the very minute and hour he'd died. (He passed away of a headache—very sudden.) Then below, in clay, were two clasped hands—his and hers. “Gee! Connie, you never seen nothin' so swell. Everybody seen it said so.”

Once he bought her a white evening dress, low neck, fish-tail train, pearls all over the front—cost him one whole week's salary, eighty-five dollars! She had diamond earrings and jewels worth at least one thousand dollars. She had lovely clothes. Couldn't she just put a black band around the arms and go on wearing them? She took a look at my earrings. Gee! they were swell. She had some green ones herself. Next morning she appeared in her widow's weeds with bright-green earrings at least a quarter of an inch longer than mine.

From the first Mame clung to me morning and night. Usually mornings she threw her arms around me in the dressing room. “Here's my Connie!” I saw myself forced to labor in the brassworks for life because of Mame's need of me. This need seemed more than spiritual. One day her pocketbook with twelve dollars had been stolen in the Subway. I lent her some cash. Another time she left her money at the factory. I lent her the wherewithal to get home with, etc. One day I was not at work. Somehow the other girls all were down on Mame. I have pondered much on that. When it came to the needed collection Mame found it hard pickings. She got a penny from this girl, another from that one, until she had made up a nickel to get home with. Irish Minnie gave her a sandwich and an apple. The girls all jumped on me: “The way you let that Frenchie work ya! Gee! you believe everything anybody tells ya.”