The following selections under altered titles are taken from chapters one, seven and eight.
AN IMMIGRANT AND HIS FATHER
I remember sitting with the family and the neighbors’ families about the fireplace, while father, night after night, told us stories of the Knights of the Crusades or recounted the glories of the heroes of proud Italy.
How he could tell a story! His voice was strong and soft and soothing, and he had just sufficient power of exaggeration to increase the attractiveness of the tale. We could see the soldiers he told us about pass before us in all their struggles and sorrows and triumphs. Back and forth he marched them into Asia Minor, across Sicily, and into the castles of France, Germany and England. We listened eagerly and came back each night ready to be thrilled and inspired again by the spirit of the good and the great.
Then came the journey over the sea, and the family with the neighbors’ families were part of the life of New York. We were Little Italy.
I was eleven before I went to a city school. All the English I knew had been learned in the street. I knew Italian. From the time I was seven I had written letters for the neighbors. Especially the women folk took me off to a corner and asked me to write letters to their friends in Italy. As they told me the story, I wrote it down. I thus learned the beat of plain folks’ hearts.
My uncle from whom I had learned Italian went back to Italy, and I was left without a teacher; so one day I attached myself to a playmate and went to school,—an “American” school. I gave my name and my age, and was told to sit in a long row of benches with some sixty other children. The teacher stood at the blackboard and wrote “March 5, 1887.” We all read it after her, chanting the singsong with the teacher. Each morning we did the same thing; that is, repeated lessons after the teacher. That first day and the second day were alike, and so were the years that followed. “If one yard of goods cost three cents, how much will twenty-five yards cost?” If one yard costs three cents, then twenty-five yards will cost twenty-five times three cents, or seventy-five cents. The explanation could not vary, or it might not be true or logical.
But there was one thing that was impressed more strongly than this routine. I had always been a sickly, thin, pale-faced child. I did not like to sit still. I wanted to play, to talk, to move about. But if I did any of these things, I was kept after school as a punishment. This would not do. I had to get out of the room, and frequently I endured agonies because the teacher would not permit me to leave the room whenever I wanted to. Many times I went home sick and lay abed.
Soon I discovered that the boys who sat quietly, looked straight ahead and folded their arms behind their backs, and even refused to talk to their neighbors, were allowed the special privilege of leaving the room for one minute, not longer. So I sat still, very still, for hours and hours, so that I might have the one minute. Throughout my whole school life this picture remains uppermost. I sat still, repeated words, and then obtained my minute allowance.
For ten years I did this, and because I learned words I was able to go from the first year of school through the last year of college. My illness and the school discipline had helped after all. They had made my school life shorter by several years than it otherwise might have been.