Chapter VII: Introduction: 9 (6)

Mother had not traveled since she took that long trip, twenty-five years ago, from Poland to America, to come to her husband. And now she was preparing to come from Soho--to us, to her first grandchild. We were excited as the letters from home told us that they were. Day after day, my sisters wrote to us, women came to mother, giving her messages to take to me, whom they had known so well as a child. They brought mother cake and jellies and wines, as if she were about to travel a year instead of one night. My aunts came to help her sew her clothes, my uncles came to pack her suitcases. It was as if all Soho were coming here to us in the person of mother. Father hurried back and forth securing mileages, a berth. He carefully explained to mother what a berth was, and warned her above all not to forget to give the black man, when he gave her her hat, a quarter. My sisters wrote such dear letters, describing it all there at home.

We could hardly wait. Our little boy asked every day for “grammy.” There came a deluge of telegrams to us, which clearly told us the haste and nervousness in the little home in Soho, and we knew that mother was on her way to us.

She came in the morning. She did not stop to kiss me, nor to look about her, but as soon as she entered my home she cried breathlessly, “Where is my grandchild?” And she held him to her, and the tears filled her eyes. “Such a boy! But a boy!” she cried. We had written to her that our boy was speaking now. She sat down beside him, and she crooned love-words to him.

Son is a friendly little lad. I felt that, if I left them alone together, he and mother would grow close in a day or two. I peeped one morning into the nursery. Mother was standing, looking dully at the spotless baby cot, the white wicker chairs, the little washable rugs on the floor, the gay pictures on the white walls. Her worn plump hands were folded one upon the other in a gesture that I know. Little son was in a corner, gravely building a tower. Little son has been taught that he must play without demanding help or attention from adults about him, that “son must help himself.” In Soho little boys are spanked and scolded and carried and physicked and loved and fed all day and all night.

Mother called to little son a quaint love name, and he turned to her with his bright smile, understanding her love tone. Then he quietly turned away from her to his toys again. And mother stood there in that strange white baby world which was her grandson’s. Perhaps she was thinking of what she had thought to find him, like one of the children of her own young motherhood, dear burdens that one bore night and day. She was afraid to touch the crib, to soil the spotless rugs. Here was her grandchild, they were together, it is true. And her grandchild had no need of her. She felt alien, unnecessary.

I felt the tears in my eyes. I ran in, called son to come to play with grammy and mother. He came readily, laughingly, speaking his baby phrases that are so adorably like the words we adults, his parents, use. I had been anticipating, even before she came, how much mother and I would enjoy his baby talk. But mother said in a very low voice, “You say he speaks, daughter. I do not understand the words he means to say now. And--he will never learn--learn my language.”

And mother’s first tears fell.

We had planned for every hour of her visit to us, even for the hours of needed rest between whiles. In those rest spaces she would come into our living room. She is not accustomed to sitting in living rooms. Her life has been a life of toil. And our living room is to her as strange a place as was to me the first sitting room I saw long ago.

She looked with a little smile about her. She glanced at the bookcase, filled with books she cannot read, and about things she does not know. Finally her gaze rested upon a certain place, and my eyes followed hers. There stood the old candlesticks which she had known in her father’s home in Poland, and which had stood in her own kitchen in Soho. And there, in my living room stands also, with its bronze curves holding autumn leaves--the copper fish pot! “In America,” said mother quaintly, with a little “crooked smile” only on her trembling, questioning lips, “they have all things--so different.”

There is no need for mother’s pot in my kitchen; it has become an emblem of the past, an ornament in my living room. Mother cannot understand our manner of cooking, the manner I learned _away_ from home. She cannot eat the foods we have; her plate at meals was left almost untouched. She does not understand my white kitchen, used only for cooking. When she came into my kitchen, my maid asked her quickly, eager to please her, pleasantly and respectfully, “What can I do for you?”

So mother went out to the porch, and she looked out upon the tree-shaded street. And an infinite loneliness was hers, a loneliness at thought of the crowded, homely ghetto street, where every one goes about in shirt sleeves, or apron and kimono, where every one knows his neighbor, where every one speaks mother’s speech.

She cannot understand my friends, nor they her. I am the only thing here that is part of her life. I for whom those hands of hers are hard and worn, and her eyes weary with the stitching of thousands of seams. She helped me to come into this house, to reach the quiet peace of this street. And she has come to see this place whither she toiled to have me come; and now that she came to see my goal she was afraid, lonely. She did not understand.

There is nothing that we have in common, it may appear, this mother of mine, and I, the mother of my son. Her life has lain always within the four dim walls of her ghetto home. And I have books, clubs, social service, music, plays. My motherhood is a privilege and an experience which is meaningful not only to my son and to me, but to my community. In this short visit of hers, for the first time mother saw me as that which I had always wished to be, an American woman at the head of an American home. But our home is a home which, try as I may, we cannot make home to mother. She has seen come to realization those things which she helped me to attain, and she cannot share, nor even understand, them.

But there is one thing we have in common, mother and I. We have this woman that I am, this woman mother has helped me to become. And I shall always remember that, though my life is now part of my land’s, yet, if I am truly part of America, it was mother, she who does not understand America, who made me so. I wonder if, as the American mother I strive to be, I can find a finer example than my own mother!

There are many men and women who have gone, as I have, far from that place where we started. When I think of them lecturing on the platform, teaching in schools and colleges, prescribing in offices, pleading before the bar of law, I shall never be able to see them standing alone. I shall always see, behind them, two shadowy figures who will stand with questioning, puzzled eyes, eyes in which there will be love, but no understanding, and always an infinite loneliness.

For those men and women who are physicians and lawyers and teachers and writers, they are young, and they belong to America. And they who recede into the shadow, they are old, and they do not understand America. But they have made their contribution to America--their sons and their daughters.

ROBERT M. WERNAER

Robert Maximilian Wernaer was born in 1865 in Jena, Germany, where he
received his early education. After coming to the United States in
1884, he took a course in law at the Albany Law School, and attended
Harvard University, from which he received his Ph.D. degree in 1903.
His studies were continued abroad at Leipzig, Heidelberg, Geneva,
and Berlin. He was admitted to the Bar in 1889 and practiced law
in Brooklyn and New York. Later he was instructor in German at the
universities of Wisconsin and Harvard, being also lecturer on German
literature at the latter institution in 1908.

In 1917 there was published his stirring, patriotic poem, “The Soul
of America,” which leaves no doubt concerning his stand on the great
question of the hour. The parts reprinted here are taken chiefly from
the opening cantos of the poem.

THE SOUL OF AMERICA[11]

O America! Land of forests and prairies.
Land of races and peoples,
Land of freedom and tolerance,
Looked-for haven of the nations of the world!
To you I came, and you I adopted.
I have infolded you as a child infolds its mother.
I say to you: “My mother!”

I love you because you hold the torch of liberty in your outstretched
hand.
I love you because your constitution speaks of the people as the
rulers.
(I am a man--I salute you, brother!)
I love you because you are not governed by a king.
I love you because princes and nobles are not met on your streets--
The dignity of man is not lowered.
I love you because of the true red mixture of human blood that flows
in your veins.
Blessed are the dreams of the first settlers!
I love you because, in the beginning of your history,
You gathered together your people;
You girded your loins;
You armed yourself with weapons of steel;
And you fought.
You fought for liberty;
You fought for independence;
O divine freemanship!
You fought for democracy;
You fought for nature’s own laws;
And you won.
Blessed are the noble men in whom the dreams of our fathers still
live!
And since those days, the peoples came from the ends of the earth,
And you increased;
And your stars now count forty and eight.
I love you because of what you did in the middle of the nineteenth
century,--
You liberated some millions of dark-colored people living among you;
You emancipated them.
I love you because you gave your blood for the Cubans.
You fought for them, but took no soil.
You made them free.
The Filipinos will be free also.
I love [you] because you are a nation of givers.
Above all else, I love you because of your Soul,
The infinite vistas opening out from your Soul.
Blessed be that Soul!

And since I love you,
Since my life is entwined with your life,
My ideals with your ideals,--
Gray matter and red blood have sealed the pledge,--
I wish you to guard the beacon fires lit on your mountains,
I wish you to grow,
And increase in the strength of body,
In the strength of Soul,
The things unseen,
Your birthrights, O America!