She looked at me like I’d turned into somebody else.
“I’m going out there,” I says, “with them. I see it like they do—I feel it like they do. And them that sees it and feels it and don’t help it along is holding it back. I’ll find my way home....”
I ran to them. I stepped right out in the street among them and fell in step with them, and then I saw something. While I was making my way through the crowd to them the line had passed on, and them I was with was all in caps and gowns. I stopped still in the road.
“Great land!” I says to the woman nearest, “you’re college, ain’t you? And I never even got through high school.”
She smiled and put out her hand.
“Come on,” she says.
Whatever happens to me afterward, I’ve had that hour. No woman that has ever had it will ever forget it—the fear and the courage, the pride and the dread, the hurt and the power and the glory. I don’t know whether it’s the way—but what is the way? I only know that all down the street, between the rows of watching faces, I could think of that little waxy woman going along ahead, and of the kind of place that she called home, and of the kind of a life she and her children had. And I knew then and I know now that the poverty and the dirt and some of the death in the world is our job, it’s our job too. And if they won’t let us do it ladylike, we’ll do it just plain.
When I got home, Aunt Ellis was having tea. She smiled at me kind of sad, as a prodigal guest deserved.
“Aunt Ellis,” I says, “I’ve give ’em the rest of my cook-stove money, except my fare home.”
“My poor Calliope,” she says, “that’s just the trouble. You all go to such hysterical extremes.”