Daughter of the Earth by Agnes Smedley (1929)
characters:
Marie Rogers – protagonist, narrator
Mr. John Rogers – father, part Indian, not from a farming family
Mrs. Rogers (Elly) – from Garfield farming family, Marie’s mother
Annie – Marie’s older sister
Beatrice – Marie’s younger sister
George – Marie’s younger brother
Grandmother / Aunt Mary – tall, strong, Mr. Rogers’ sister who married her after trying to get his daughter back from Mr. Rogers, brought three daughters and two sons into marriage, manages farm because husband dying of consumption
Grandfather – brought four daughters and three sons into marriage, dying of consuption
Mildred – daughter of Aunt Mary & grandfather
Helen – only stepdaughter Aunt Mary doesn’t beat, goes to work at a far-away farmhouse, later a prostitute
man Mr. Rogers cuts wood for
beautiful woman – rides in the forest, unmarried because once attacked by a tramp
Marie’s first schoolteacher – a man, leaves after a scandal involving male students
doctor – Mr. Rogers works for as a driver, says he will train Mr. Rogers
Dan – Marie’s younger brother
Helen – Marie’s Aunt, works at a house and then a prostitute
great-aunt – wins local fame for having an extramarital affair with Mr. Wolf and sticking with her husband after he is imprisoned for shooting her lover
Mr. Wolf – Marie’s great-aunt’s lover
great-uncle – imprisoned for life after shooting his wife’s lover
Sam – had been in love with Helen, married Annie
Mr. Turner – a mine owner
Mrs. Hampton – boarding house proprietress Marie works for
engineer – marries Mrs. Hampton, causes Marie to be fired
cigar shop owner – Jewish, tells Marie to stop daydreaming, eventually fires her
Big Buck – worked for Marie’s father, cares for her later
camp school teacher – had gone to normal school, suggests that Marie become a schoolteacher
County Superintendent of Schools– tall, lean, black-eyed, Mexican, intelligent
Mrs. Richards – wife of the mining camp supervisor
Robert Hampton – Columbus, OH man, student, Marie’s pen-pal
Mexican man – Marie stays with his family when she teaches at the Primero school; he has an inflated opinion of himself, talks her ear off
Mexican woman – silent, the man does not respect
Indian boy – pupil at the school in Primero, about Marie’s age, likes her, keeps the students in line
ignorant minister – in OK, presides over Marie’s mother’s burial and scolds Helen
Tony – with Helen until he leaves her for a healthier girl
old man with the stutter – in Denver, employs Marie as a stenographer, comes on to her
fuzzy brown man – Denver magazine editor, employs Marie as a stenographer, gets her to write, tries to seduce her, gives her a rail pass when she goes out to sell subscriptions
landlady – at hotel in Carlsburg, wants her money, distrustful of Marie
Negro Porter – at the hotel in Carlsburg, kind, finds and helps Marie when she is ill
Bartender – in Carlsbad, flirts with Marie, attacks a woman he thinks is her, nurses her to health from her starvation, and proposes marriage
Blackie – Buck’s friend in Arizona
Ma – proprietress of the hotel where Big Buck stays in Arizona
Biliard Cue / forest ranger / Mormon – Big Buck ridicules, Marie has a crush on
fair girl at dance – is going to study six years to become a teacher
fat, ugly Mormon girl – like Marie, does not attend school ball
girl who washes dishes at the restaurant – like Marie, does not attend school ball
Karin Larsen – tall, Scandinavian, slight limp, teacher who comes to the school to hear a State debating contest on woman suffrage
Knut Larsen – Karin’s brother, attractive
Bob – lawyer, friend of Karin, Socialist
Part One
setting:
Northern Missouri farm
woods a few days away
house on the outskirts of a little village
plot:
Part One opens with a description of a Danish sea and some reflection on writing. “What I have written is not a work of beauty, created that someone may spend an hour pleasantly; not a symphony to lift up the spirit, to release it from the dreariness of reality. It is the story of a life, written in desperation, in unhappiness” (3). The narrator Marie is thirty years old.
Marie was born on a farm in Northern Missouri. Her family was poor but all the world seemed like their home so the children did not know it. The horizon of her world is extended when a cousin goes to Kansas city for three months and comes back trained as a barber and wearing store clothes.
As a child Marie likes to build fires and has trouble distinguishing between her imagination and reality. Her mother whips her repeatedly for building fires and for lying. One day Marie is alone with her older sister Annie and the toddler Beatrice when a cyclone comes. Her mother and father come riding up to the house just in time and bring them down to the storm cellar. Marie learns her first of sex when some men bring a black stallion to mate with the family’s mares and the women and children are sent away from the pasture. “Slowly I was learning the shame and secrecy of sex. With it I was learning other things – that male animals cost more than female animals and seemed more valuable; that male fowls cost more than females and were chosen with more care” (11). When their little brother is about to be born, the children were taken away to another farmhouse and “secrecy and shame settled like a clammy rag over everything” (11).
Marie’s idea that her mother is perfect vanishes when she witnesses her parents having sex. Her one desire in life is to be as valuable to her father as her brother George. She begins to care deeply for George after her mother laughs at the baby and is scolded by her father.
Marie’s grandmother (Aunt Mary) manages her consumptive husband’s farm and the love lives of her daughters. She only refrains from beating two of her children – Mildred and her stepdaughter Helen. Helen becomes a hired girl at a far-away farmhouse.
A minister comes to the home of a great-aunt where Marie is eating and prays. It is the first time Marie has seen this, she asks what he’s doing and is shushed.
The minister had come to the home of Marie’s great-aunt because she is famous in the area. She had been married and having an affair with a married man named Wolf. Her husband had found out and shot the man, was giving life imprisonment with hard labor, and she comforted him and carried on her life as usual, proud of her husband. “The harvest dance and supper were drawing near, and this year our home was the scene of the great event. For weeks the farmers from miles about – too poor to employ hired hands – had joined in the annual communal labor, going from farm to farm to do the harvesting.” The women seem to preside – ordering the men out to do the harvesting, preparing the food while exchanging gossip, flirting regardless of marital bonds over dinner, and then men and women coming together for an all-night dance that Marie, as a child, misses out on when she is sent to bed with the other children.
In the winter, meat and crops are stored in the cold. Molasses pulling is another communal work/social gathering. Marie’s father is not content with farming life and wants to go to work and make lots of money. The family leaves by covered wagon and travels to a forest where Mr. Rogers works cutting wood. A beautiful woman rides on horseback in the forest, and Marie hears that she is wealthy but had been attacked by a tramp years ago and not no one would marry her. With the first heavy snow, the family returns to their farm. Mr. Rogers leaves for many months and Marie’s grandfather brings them food.
Marie goes to school and finds math tiresome but loves spelling. A scandal with the schoolteacher and little boy students becomes a subject of gossip among the wives. Marie breaks her arm and learns that illness gains her sympathy.
Mr. Rogers comes back in a fancy sled with a doctor for whom he has found work as driver. He says that the doctor is teaching him his trade. Marie’s new brother Dan has been born in Mr. Rogers’ absence and he accuses her of being unfaithful. She asks him not to leave with the doctor but he goes. The next Autumn Marie’s grandfather moves them into a small house on the outskirts of a little village. Mrs. Rogers is friendly to Marie with Mr. Rogers away and Marie dreams of plastering the house for her. Mr. Rogers returns without his fancy clothes and his dreams of being a doctor, but whenever someone asks about her father after that Marie says that he was a doctor. Mr. Rogers says that he has killed a man and must run away or be sent to prison for life, and Mrs. Rogers sees through the lie, accuses him of wanting to abandon the family. The next day the family watches him leave on a train.
Part Two
setting:
Trinidad, a mining town
mine of Mr. Turner, far back in the mountains
plot:
Marie likens the colorlessness of the Dutch sea to her life in the period she recalls. The family has moved to the mining town of Trinidad where they live on the banks of the Purgatory river. The children collect coal from the train tracks in gunnysacks, Mr. Rogers makes three dollars a day hauling bricks and other things, and Mrs. Rogers is content. Lured by the enthusiasm in her sister’s letters, Helen comes to stay with them. Helen goes to work in the laundry and gives most of her wages to Mrs. Rogers, earning her a position of respect in the family. “‘So it was! She paid for her room and board and no man had the right to ‘boss her around.’ My mother did not; she could never toss her head proudly and freely and say, ‘I’m payin’ for my keep here!’” (44).
Marie and her siblings go to school in Trinidad. The teacher likes Marie and she does well. She is fascinated by a neat, well-mannered girl who always wears white. A teacher reads to them from a book of manners about bathing daily, washing teeth, changing beds to help insomnia, etc., but material conditions make it impossible for Marie and her siblings to follow these rules or bathe more than once a week. Marie excells in school, which earns her an invitation to the birthday party of the “white girl” but does not give her the clothing, manners, or background that would allow her to feel at ease there. Her extravagant gift of three bananas is inadequate, she doesn’t eat the lovely food because she can’t do so correctly, and she leaves early when the mother mercifully asks whether she feels sick.
In the spring, a flood nearly strands the family and takes the family’s featherbed, sewing machine, clock, and Helen’s clothes. They spend a cold night on the porch of the pious Catholic section-house master’s wife.
The family tries to right itself, Mr. Rogers signing an agreement to haul coal for Mr. Turner, a mine-owner, and Mrs. Rogers taking in boarders. When it comes time for Mr. Turner to pay, they cook him a good dinner and the children go hungry so that he can eat. When Mr. Rogers objects to the inadequate pay, Mr. Turner invoked the contract Mr. Rogers signs without understanding and points to his own good meal as evidence that the family is not starving.
Mr. Rogers finds work in a distant mining town and Mrs. Rogers rents the “Tin Can Boarding House.” Things don’t go as well for Marie at school, and Mrs. Rogers has trouble with boarders who won’t pay and whose demands are too high for her to meet and still make money. Mr. Rogers makes the boarders pay up and kicks them out.
Marie works as “kitchen help” for a family near the school. Annie goes to work as a mangle girl at the laundry. Marie feigns illness and loses her position as kitchen help. When she returns home, they are living in a frame house where Helen and Annie share their own room because they contribute to the family economy. Another girl, Gladys, had worked at the laundry but married and her husband refused to let her work even in the house. Once she became pregnant she relied on her husband, so that even when he demanded back the clothes he gave her she said, “‘Damn it, kid, you know I love you!’ . . . now she could not go back to work even if she wished” (66).
Marie goes to Church a few times and even offers herself to “be a lamb of Christ” but loses interest after three attractive young revival ministers move on. Mr. Rogers spends all his spare time in a Saloon across from the church on Commercial Street. Marie works at a boarding house nearby where only railway firemen and engineers can afford to stay. One night hears the owner Mrs. Hampton complaining to an engineer that Marie steals a sip from her milk each morning. It’s true, but Mrs. Hampton does not realize that sometimes there is no food left for Marie after the boarders finish. She goes home to confess to her parents and ask a pail of milk to replace what she has stolen, but finds he father in a serious quarrel with Annie, who he accuses of staying with a man at night.
Mrs. Hampton is going to marry the engineer, and she takes his advice and fires Marie. She seems sad to let Marie go, and Marie thinks she is doing it because the fiancé thinks she should. When Marie gets home, Annie has been caught with a man and Mr. Rogers is in a rage. Mr. Rogers kicks Helen and Annie out of the house and Helen has to persuade Elly not to go with them.
Weeks later, Mr. Rogers leaves home because Elly refuses to tell him how she voted. Mrs. Rogers takes in laundry and Marie works in a cigar shop where she notices how much easier and better compensated the men’s work is, and that they are allowed to talk while the girls are not. When she is fired for not working quickly and carefully enough, she goes to help her mother with the washing. She learns to steal from the nicer stores where she is not suspected when she goes out to buy soap, etc. for her mother. In the winter she takes a job at a bargain store where she works hard, steals shirts for her brothers, and is unsuspected.
Part Three
setting:
Tercio
Deluga – another mining camp
canyon outside Tercio
plot:
Mr. Rogers comes by occasionally to see if Mrs. Rogers will say how she voted, and refuses to come back until she does. She loses much of her laundry business in the Spring when people are able to do it easily in their own homes. Elly is ill and the next time John comes by, he doesn’t leave. Woman suffrage is never discussed in the house.
Elly gets well and they move to the mining camp Deluga where John will haul/excavate, Elly will board the men, and Marie will wait tables. Annie is going to be married to Sam, Helen’s former beau. He had come looking for Helen when she didn’t reply to her letters, and ended up with Annie. Helen reasoned that she couldn’t marry Sam because he had apparently been involved in helping her sell sex. “Anyway it would have been all right at first but when a woman gets married and can’t make her own livin’, a man starts remindin’ her of her past” (91).
Sam and Annie go to a homestead in western Oklahoma, becomes a farm wife, and dies two years later expressing regret that Marie had always seemed to hate her.
After Annie and Sam left Trinidad, the family had waited for the end of the first strikes in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company coal fields. United States soldiers had come to help keep the peace and put local girls in danger of sexual assault. In Deluga like in other mining towns, the Company owns the mines and everything for miles. Miners are paid in script, which is discounted in the town, and no store is permitted to exist but that of the Company. Prices are high, extra charges are billed for items never purchased, and the same conditions prevail anywhere else the miner might choose to try. “In all directions lay the lands and towns of the Company, and to the north lay other towns of other Companies with conditions just the same” (95). Mr. Rogers has 8-10 teams of horses and wagons and about twenty men working for him. He makes his bids for work verbally but asks Marie to keep books for him, then ridicules her when despite her education she is unable to. He is also bad at addition, and Elly takes over the book keeping. “From that moment onward his intellectual life lay in my mother’s hands” (98).
The cowboy Jim Watson, who works for Mr. Rogers, courts Marie, gives her a necklace and a gun and asks her to marry him. She agrees, then backs out when her parents object and remind her that marriage involves “dooties.” Big Buck, another man who works for her father and who had given Marie her first gun, looks on amused at the whole goings on. Marie returns the gold chain to Jim, and he rides away the next day.
Another year later, they live beyond the tracks again in Trinidad with their money gone and only one team left. Elly refuses to leave town and take the children away from school again. Elly and John quarrel, and Marie protects Elly when John threatens to hit her with a rope.
A barber named Bob takes Marie out in a buggy and becomes angry when she spurns his attempt at physical intimacy. She walks home.
Another strike arises and is quashed in Tercio. “As a native American himself, with hopes of becoming and employer, [Joe Rogers] tried to identify himself with the sheriff and the officials of the camp against the strikers, who were foreigners. Still he was unclear; he had men working for him and yet he was an ignorant working man himself, and however hard he worked he seemed to remain miserably poor. He was too unknowing to understand how or why it happened. But he, like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work the most do not make the most money. It was the fault of the rich, it seemed, but just how he did not know. He drowned his unclearness and disappointment in drink; or let poker absorb his resentment” (112). After threatening to beat Elly, Joe forces her to take the children from school and brings them to a lonely canyon where he works for the company and Elly and Marie work to clothe and feed the men who work for him. The men who work for Mr. Rogers sometimes also play music or dance.
Part Four
setting:
Tercio, NM
school on the mesa in NM
school in a canyon back from Primero, NM (C.F. & I company camp) in the rockies
plot:
Marie finds work as a schoolteacher in an isolated town in New Mexico. As a teacher, she is valued and respected. She had been encouraged to take the teachers’ exam by a camp teacher who told her to lie about her age and take the test. The County Superintendent of Schools had noted that her grammar and arithmetic scores were low but said that if she spoke a little Mexican and could wash her own clothes, cook her own food, etc. there was a remote school where she could work. Marie’s mother is proud and now raises her head around the camp superintendent’s wife, Mrs. Richards. In a housewife’s magazine Marie finds the name and address of a man who wants to exchange postcards. Robert Hampton send his old history, literature and botany books for Marie to read and she sends them on to her mother when she is through. Marie’s first homecoming from her teaching job is good because she feels like a contributing member of the family.
Marie’s second school is in a canyon far back of Primero, another C.F. & I. company camp. She stays with a Mexican family. The man takes his dinner with her and always wants to talk to her because she is the top female intellect in the area. His wife eats after them with the couple’s son. Because he is a man, the Mexican thinks that she should benefit from hearing his opinions and she finds his talk tedious. Marie tries to emulate the handwriting of Robert Hampton. One day, the Mexican man comes to the schoolhouse to tell Marie that her mother is sick. Not waiting for his team of horses to return from their work later, Marie makes the long track to the train station, where people are in a panic because there is a fire in the mine and they are going to block the entrances, suffocating the men inside. Marie takes the first train home.
Marie is at her mother’s bedside for three days and nights. The doctor sees nothing wrong that could not be cured with good food and prohibits the bicarbonate soda that Marie’s mother has been taking for the pain. Her mother is uncharacteristically emotional and expresses her pride in her daughter. Marie finally gives the bicarbonate soda that her mother pleads for, and then rushes to get Beatrice, George and Dan from the schoolroom. When they get back her father, who had returned home that morning, is there. Marie holds her mother, whose last word is “Marie!”
Helen comes and they take the body to Oklahoma to rest beside Annie’s. The ignorant minister who presides over the burial calls on them to turn from sin. Marie’s father goes forward while she and Helen leave in disgust. They shock the crowd by rejoining it for the march from the church to the burial site.
Helen leaves the school and comes home to care for her family and her sister Annie’s baby. She thinks that if she tries hard to make the home look nice, then her father will pull his weight. He doesn’t, coming home drunk one night and threatening to whip Dan. Dan hides behind his sister and she stares her father down until he turns and leaves the room.
Part Five
setting:
Denver
Carlsbad, NM
Clifton, AZ (a mining town)
school near Phoenix, AZ
plot:
Marie has left her father’s home with Sam’s baby and is in Denver with Helen. Helen doesn’t understand how she could just walk out, but Marie says that her sister Beatrice was to have gone to a ranch family soon anyway and that George and Dan would be taken to Western Oklahoma to live with their father and Sam. Although for them “study” is associated with idleness and luxury, Marie wants to study and Helen suggests she study to be a stenographer. Marie goes to a town south of Denver to learn the trade, does not fit in with the girls there, and when her course is complete is happy to return to Denver where Sam has just taken the baby away from Helen. Marie works for an elderly man with grey hair who stutters but he tries to make a move on her after work one day and she bites him.
Marie goes to work for the “brown fuzzy” man, editor of a magazine. He gets her to write things, which he edits beyond recognition and publishes with her name, and they become friends.
Some of the men work out “on the road” soliciting subscriptions and Marie wants to try her hand at this, but the editor says it is no job for a lady. He takes her driving to a restaurant with a fancy private room. When she understands his intentions and is upset, and he is surprised.
Marie goes “out on the road” and the brown man gives her a railroad pass that is also good for her return. In soliciting subscriptions she approaches some neat, smug, private houses but the women scorn her. She is much luckier at offices with men, who subscribe and flirt with her. Out of curiosity, Marie stops at Trinidad where she sees a drunk who reminds her of, and then turns out to be, her father. He is living in a shabby room with Dan and George, who wear his worn out clothing. They had never gone to Oklahoma. She buys them new clothes thinking that she will make the money back easily, but her charm is gone and the men no longer want to buy from her. She is restless.
Marie deserts her brothers and father, assuring herself without really believing that she will return.
Marie wanders through little settlements in Texas, barely making enough to eat by. Her railway pass has expired. A cattle rancher invites her to live with him and takes her refusal good-heartedly. The landlord of a cheap boarding house suggests that he should spend the night in her room and kicks her out when she refuses. At a town where she changes trains, the clerk at a cheap hotel comes to her room to assault her and she cuts him with her dagger, then runs to the railroad station and takes the first train, which brings her to Carlsbad, New Mexico. She uses her last two pennies to write to Aunt Helen for enough money to get to the Arizona mining town where Big Buck is living and where she thinks she can get work. A bartender flirts with her each day as she is on her way to the post office. Nine days pass as Marie finishes the last of her bread and grows hungrier. A slim lady comes to stay in the room across from Marie’s in the hotel and is assaulted in the night by three men who had gotten her to open the door by claiming to be the porter with ice water. One of the men was the bartender. The next day Marie is too weak to go to the post office, and the landlady demands that she leave by the next morning. The Negro porter finds her collapsed on the floor the next morning when he comes to clean the room. He and the bartender nurse her back to health, and the bartender gives her his month’s wages. He comes to visit her as she recovers and they talk. He proposes marriage, explaining his previous disrespect with the explanation that he did not realize she was really “straight.” Marie reflects on the expectation that men bring money into marriage while women bring virginity. She rejects his offer. The next day she nearly gives into her desire for the bartender but then pulls away, and he leaves. By dawn she remembers all her reasons for being weary of marriage. She packs her suitcase and waits for light, then asks the Negro porter to help her with her bag. He carries her bag and supports her on her walk to the railroad.
Marie arrives at the town where Big Buck is working in Arizona. He takes a room for her in a hotel where he lives with his friend Blackie and where the proprietor, Ma, calls her Miss Buck. Buck had told them that he was expecting his sister. Marie goes for weekly rides with a forest ranger Buck calls the Billiard Cue. On their way to a dance to celebrate Arizona gaining statehood, he bitterly wonders why she never falls in love with him, and says that he is not as old as his beard makes him appear. Marie brags to a girl at the dance that she is already a teacher, only to learn that this girl is about to embark upon six years of study for the position. Marie and Billiard Cue go to where Big Buck is and he listens as she talks about how she could go to the school and perhaps finish in two rather than the usual six years. She dances with Billiard Cue and feels at the top of the world. After the dance, Big Buck offers to support her study for six months and says the offer of marriage is still good. She agrees, mentions paying him back, and says she isn’t sure if she will want to marry but will think it over – knowing all along that her mind is made up. He does not look at her on the ride back.
Marie shows up outside the school near Phoenix on an afternoon a few days later, and without knowing much about her and despite her lack of preparation they accept her as an irregular student. The well-mannered girls do not like her but she works tirelessly and becomes the laboratory assistant of a professor of zoology and, within five months, the editor of a weekly school newspaper. She plays the role of the intellectual scorning the frivolous, but is sad when the other girls dress up and go with dates to the school ball and she is left behind along with the fat, ugly Mormon girl and a girl who washes dishes in the restaurant. She walks out into the desert to distract herself. This section says of the desert: “The Arizona desert came closer to my spirit than has any place I have ever known. I came gradually to resent the river that was fed from the colossal Roosevelt Dam in the mountains; and I resented the towns – Mormon settlements – that had sprung up along the irrigated country, gradually transforming the contemplative desert into fat, well-fed little ant-heaps of human beings” (171). “The desert is never-ending and at night the imprint of oblivious ages lies upon it, ages that have swallowed up all things human – passion, hope and high resolve. The stars that hang in endless space with such complete finality strip the soul of all earthly passion and leave but a burden of wonder and an all-pervading unrest” (174).
Karin Larsen, a beautiful tall Scandinavian teacher with a slight limp, comes West to be near her brothers and “see a little of life” and to the school to hear a State debating contest on woman suffrage. She critiques educational institutions and asks Marie for her opinion. “She spoke of ‘society,’ and I learned that she didn’t mean fashionable society people, but everybody, including myself” (175). Karin’s brother Knut comes and the three are often together. They go to the Easter dance of a Yaqui Indian village and Marie admires the mutual love and comradeship in the way that they discuss the dance with each other. After six months Marie is a top student, and Buck writes that the six months he promised are up and that he and Blackie are going to help in the Mexican Revolution. She never hears from him again. She tries to support her studies by working but it is too much and she has to leave with a month left in the school year. Knut and Karin laugh off her situation, saying that schools do not necessarily teach you anything, but Marie reflects that it is easy to be critical standing on a firm foundation of knowledge as they do. Knut and Karin plan to leave for San Francisco. On a night before they go, Marie and Knut go riding. Marie’s horse spooks and she gives in to terror, but Knut stops the animal and comforts her where she has jumped to the ground and collapsed. They embrace in the desert.
Part Six
setting:
San Francisco, CA
El Centro, Southern CA
southern town – home of Robert Hampton
New York, NY
anti-war rallies in various cities, drive through Princeton, NJ
At nineteen, Marie desires love, tenderness and companionship. She fears sex but resents virginity and the emphasis on female purity. In her hatred of marriage she had thought of prostitution as preferable for the control women maintain over their bodies and their living. When Knut writes from San Francisco asking her to marry him and saying that they will be poor but that they can work and study, it is a different conception of marriage than the one to which she is accustomed. As she is packing to go to San Francisco, a letter comes from George. He and Dan had been left on a farm in Oklahoma by their father, and the man in whose care they had been left worked them hard, did not educate them, and had beaten Dan until he was bloody. Marie can not go back to where she would be another mouth to feed. She writes a letter to her father accusing him of neglect, one to her brother with all her money and instructions to go to her father, and one to the man who had beat Dan promising to kill him one day. Marie goes to San Francisco and she and Knut talk the marriage over – neither wants children, both want to work, and Marie won’t cook for Knut. Marie imagines a marriage without sex, like a friendship. On the day Knut is called to go into the desert in the south to work for several months, they decide to get a marriage license and split the cost. They then get married, Knut suppressing laughter at the seriousness of the official, and again split the cost. They go to a restaurant to eat, Knut impressing her with his knowledge that the music playing is Wagner’s “Pilgrim’s Chorus.”
Marie goes to a Socialist picnic with Karin and her lawyer friend Bob. When she protests against the cheap ugliness of the crowd he replies, “But what made them like this? Stop and think – what made them like this?” His answer is “The system!” and although she does not know exactly what he means, the question and its vehemence stay with her.
Karin disagrees with Marie’s idea of love and, when Knut takes Marie’s side, she considers going South with him to the small town El Centro. She asks if she can make enough money there to return to school and he says he thinks she can. Their sexual relationship begins in the desert town but they are both novices and Marie is afraid of pregnancy, so it does not bring her pleasure. Another couple in the house where they are staying exemplifies Marie’s understanding of marriage: she stops working and gets pregnant while showing signs of syphilis. The woman is now stuck because of the disease and the pregnancy, and the man begins to beat her. Marie says things that hurt Knut and make him want to die, but he will not leave because he loves her. Knut goes back to work for a few months and Marie works as a stenographer and receives several solicitations for sexual services. She refuses them, but negotiates a position as a newspaper correspondent from one of the men by offering a percentage of her wages in lieu of the “consideration” he had proposed. She raises her stenography rates from 10 to 20 cents per letter. Marie begins to get morning sickness and her landlady says she is pregnant. She goes to a doctor who says he cannot perform the operation but gives her instructions to get something from the drugstore; he would have the legal right to perform the abortion of it went wrong. She writes to Knut who convinces the doctor to perform the abortion (the doctor makes a diagnosis of tuberculosis to justify it) because Marie is threatening to kill herself. When she wakes up, Knut is smiling and she thinks, “how dared he smile when a child had been taken from my body, and now my body and mind called for it” (198). She refuses to let him help pay for the surgery, insisting that it is her body and no man can pay for it. She writes Knut to say that she is going to the normal school and never coming back; if he wants to see her he must follow her.
Marie works tirelessly for three years in the school, typing and waiting tables for her room and board. Marie becomes involved in the protest against the suppression of Emma Goldman’s lectures and then in the free speech fight with Socialists and the I.W.W. Marie defends a working man being abused by police and becomes a part of the scuffle.
Beatrice comes to Marie, strong and scared from her life in the mountains. She takes an interest first in a woodworking workshop and then in other classes and becomes an elegant girl student. She maintains her faith in physical strength and her distance from Marie, who she thinks doesn’t have class.
Marie is admitted to UC Berkeley and Beatrice is admitted as a special student. Knut comes to stay with them. Marie does well in her studies but becomes pregnant, and Knut takes her to San Francisco for an abortion. In the street car on the way home, he snaps at her to “Sit up! People are looking at you – do you want to make a scene in public?” (209). She cannot forgive him this one cruel moment “the command of a husband to a wife – and I would be owned or ordered about by no man” (209). When Marie returns to her school, Knut remains at the university and they agree to a divorce. He takes the blame and he reluctantly files against her for desertion. In a letter, he says that he loves her, hopes that they can be friends and says he will help her if she ever needs it.
An Indian comes to speak at Marie’s school but is barred from lecturing after some English men on the Board of Trustees protest. Marie tells him that she wished she could have heard his talk, and he takes her address promising to send material.
The President of the school and the Dean of Women tell Marie that she must leave and go to a better school. They also think that it is better that she leave Beatrice behind, because her Socialist ideas are a bad influence.
Marie goes to Denver, where Helen is living with Marie’s cousin/aunt Mildred. Helen works making felt pendants for college girls to supplement an income from prostitution that is dwindling with her advancing age. Mildred is younger and has more clients, and she spends all her money on clothing. Marie tells Helen that she is going to New York to work and to study. When Helen asks why Marie doesn’t marry a rich man, she says that if she is rich it will be money that she has made herself. Marie feels bad as she leaves that Helen will be an old woman before Marie could ever help her.
On her way to New York, Marie stops in the South to see Robert Hampton. She does not recognize him at the station – he is short and looks shabby. She decides to leave on the next train and before it comes he takes her to dinner, tells her about his work as a clerk, and is surprised to hear that she is not religious. As she leaves, he asks Marie to send her old books to him when she is at the University. This is a reversal.
Arriving in New York, Marie stays with Karin and finds a job as a stenographer at The Graphic Magazine. The Book Review Editor she works for is English and they do not get along well, but he lets her do a few reviews on her own. Karin introduces Marie to Chopin, Motzart, Beethoven, and other composers as well as poetry but Marie does not appreciate them. “Only if they told a story of endeavor, of struggle, could I understand their purpose” (229). Karin also introduces Marie to many intellectuals and Socialists but Marie never quite understands them. Marie goes out for a while with a seaman she calls Red who she meets in a bookstore, but he eventually ships off. She receives a letter from George that he has been imprisoned for stealing a horse, and replies with fifty dollars and a self-righteous letter condemning his action. No reply comes for weeks and she regrets the letter. Dan telegrams that George has been killed.
Dan writes that George has been killed digging a sewer ditch in a town in Oklahoma. He had been released when the horse stealing charge was dropped and had worked. He had never forgiven her for the letter she wrote.
Months go by and America enters World War I. Marie does not understand the technical Marxist subjects of lectures and workshops she attends, but opposes the war from her awareness that working people will be the ones who die while the wealthy sit at desks as officers. Karin explains to Marie that American financiers have a financial interest in ensuring a victory by the Allied powers. Marie goes with a group of pacifists, socialists and anarchists holding meetings against the war in many towns, and in one of these gatherings someone pushes her to speak to the crowd. “I have often heard or read in novels how a man or woman suddenly faced with great responsibility rises to the occasoin; how eloquently and magnificently they speak or act until the audience breaks into wild applause. It seems that their rise to fame begins from that moment. But I was not a character in a novel, and I stood on the fender of the automobile, looking with astonishment into the up-turned faces of working men. I had nothing to give them. Suddenly I realized how very ignorant, how very confused, I was” (240).
Marie has a disagreement with the English Book Review editor about the war and is transferred to another department. Robert Hampton writes a patriotic letter to say that he was enlisting. Beatrice is doing war work. Dan writes that he will join the army unless Marie can help him. Marie borrows fifty dollars for Dan and writes telling him to try to hold out a few weeks longer. No word comes from Dan but Sam writes to say that Dan received the money and worked irregular jobs until he eventually had to enlist. Marie looks for Dan in the faces of the enlisted who march through New York but they begin to look the same – she sees both of her brothers in all of them.
Part Seven
setting:
New York
Adirondaks
plot:
After George’s death and Dan’s enlistment Marie has trouble facing her conscience. She wonders whether she will ever be as learned as her Socialist friends.
Marie meets the Indian scholar Sandar Ranjit Singh after his lecture at the University, and says that she met him before when he was barred from speaking at her college. He tells her to come by his home if she is really interested in learning about India.x
Marie studies India with Sandar Ranjit Singh and his two students Viren and Kumar. When Sandar leaves for California, she goes again to work at The Graphic. She occasionally sees Juan Diaz, who flirts with her. Talver Singh comes to her room and asks her to help him plublish a manuscript. As an American, and is able to. The next Sunday he knocks at her door and leaves some addresses in her safekeeping, telling her that he is a revolutionary and was in danger from British spies.
Two days later, Marie reads of Talvar’s arrest. He escapes and comes to her room to ask for her help getting across the frontier. She finds help for Talvar and leaves a note for for him detailing the plan. When she returns, Juan Diaz is waiting. She refuses to tell him where Talvar is and they have a sexual encounter which she protests but later thinks she may have desired.
Juan Diaz leaves a letter to another woman and fifty dollars on Marie’s table. Depressed, she leaves the gas on in her apartment.
Marie awakens in a hospital.
Marie is in the hospital for three days and then returns to her room. She opens to a knock at 7am and is taken into police custody, denied the right to see a lawyer, and interrogated about her relationship to the Indians. The police take her things from her apartment, including a black notebook in which she and Talvar have hidden the addresses of the Indians. She is taken to a cold cell that night and given nothing to eat or drink. The next day she is interrogated again, and at night her terror moves the policewoman and police man who guard her to give her a blanket and some coffee. They interrogate her again the next day, and at night the policeman again gives her blankets and drink, as well as a hot dog. The next day they interrogate her again and, suspecting that Talvar has been arrested and asking to use the restroom, she flings back a door to see him in custody. In court she refuses to give information against the Indians and challenges the judge’s assertion that helping the Indians rather than the British is un-American. Before she is taken from the court Talvar calls her bahin, which means sister.
Marie is brought to the Tombs where she spends six months. She sees a rich girl convicted for grand larceny released immediately, and a poor black girl imprisoned for petty larceny. A priest tells her that she is in jail because she rejects the values of home and children, and she points to the women around her. Nellie, an old Irish prositute, held those values and was a devout Catholic. Marie meets an old forger who loved the man she forged for and was devastated that he did not come to her sentencing. A girl named Alice with a new baby had stolen fifty dollars after being turned out of her parents home, and refused to give her name because her disgrace might keep the man from marrying her. Another unmarried mother is in jail because she forged a check to the hospital where her babies were being treated for whooping cough. When Marie is released Sandar and Viren are waiting for her, and bring her to a lawyer, Mr. Gilbert, who worked for her release and was working for that of the Indian prisoners.
Mr. Gilbert brings Hyder Ali and Talvar Singh from prison. Marie shares an apartment with a young Jewish poet named Florence.
Marie has trouble finding work after her trouble with the authorities. She is approached by and works for the leader of the birth control movement, and works on her magazine for many weeks. Talvar is being followed by a spy but develops a cordial relationship with him – the man had been out of work. Karin comes by with a young reporter from The Call who gets Marie a position there. The editor of The Call is harsh in his criticism of Marie’s writing, but helps her even as he demands a lot. Marie secures an interview with an Irish labor leader by pretending to be his lover and sitting on the train with him on the way to Sing Sing, then getting his last message to the Communists while strolling with him before he entered the prison. She joins the I.W.W. but does not take an active part. She pretends to be a student of criminology and writes a report on the Dannemora prison that exposes conditions there and leads to the prisoners being removed. Barges parked along the East River are causing sickness, killing babies in a poor community there and when the major presses pick up the story the barges are removed.
Florence takes a vacation and a girl named Margaret rents her room. She is a manicurist, goes on dates with men, and has them buy her nice things. She refuses to pay her rent when Florence returns and they remark that “such women will get along well in life” (338).
Karin wants Marie to visit her in Denmark. Dan writes of the miserable conditions in the war and tells her that he has been given useless desert land in New Mexico. He is going to stay with Sam and his father and will not go back to war if they call him up from the reserves.
Marie works all night for the Socialist paper The Call and then sleeps a few hours and campaigns for the release of Indian prisoners with Talver and Viren. Marie’s socialist friends do not understand why she works with the Indians, and accuse their cause of being nationalist – with Britain out, India will still have a class problem. She respects those wealthy Americans who work for social justice and are regarded by their families as “freaks or as bad-mannered betrayers of respectability” – she understands these almost as a physical type (345). She has romantic relationships with friends she respects – a newspaperman she sees in secret, a man she lived with who she left after he wanted to marry, a writer who would use his heartbreak to write. Her roommate Florence thinks she works so hard to expiate some sin, and that she would be happier if she lived with a man.
Marie goes for a week’s vacation walking in the Adirondacks. Her boss at The Call says she has been writing “sob sister” stories lately. When she gets back Viren brings her to a meeting where she meets Hussain Ali Khan, Comrade Feroz Chand (from Paris), Anand Manvekar. She is taken with Anand, who had been in Prison in Delhi and attacked the opinions of Juan Diaz (also present), and finds herself wondering if he is married. A week later he walks her home and they discuss her disbelief in love, his idea of it, and then they kiss. She objects that he does not know who she is and he reassures and silences her.
Marie marries Anand. Marie begins to consider the power of love and points out that Ghandi believes in it. Anand admits that without guns Indians may have to evolve new weapons but is not sure that Ghandi’s preaching of personal perfection in the face of political difficulties will be effective. Anand is at first unbothered by Marie’s previous sexual experience, but says he hopes that she has not been with one of his countrymen for the sake of the movement. She keeps Juan Diaz’s secret but Anand does not like the way Diaz looks at her, senses her nervousness, and becomes jealous even about non-Indian men.
Marie’s editor complains about her work – she is asked to summarize a report on a strike but has trouble focusing. Anand says she should take her name off her column because it is cheap and American to attach it, and her editor finally agrees but she resents the coercion. At a restaurant he says he feels that she is keeping a secret from him and she cries.
Marie is afraid when Anand sneaks up on her from behind in play and asks him to forgive her. She thinks he must think she knows what is wrong but is lying. She tries to protect their love.
At an Indian Conference, Marie opposes a point introduced by Juan Diaz and Anand and others agree. He objects to the presence of a woman and a foreigner and says that Anand is being influenced by his wife. Anand objects and says he will leave is Juan Diaz does not. Marie sees Juan Diaz talking to a shocked Hussein Ali Khan, and they leave.
Hussein Ali Khan comes to tell Anand that Juan Diaz and Marie had been lovers and that she opposes him only because he had refused to marry her, and to ask him not to be influenced by her. Marie tells him the real story, he believes her, and she says she will defend herself before the conference. He says that he will handle it instead, and rely on their respect for him. He says that the men will judge her rather than Juan Diaz even if they do believe her. Because she has hidden one thing from him, he fears that she may have slept with other of his countrymen and that he will always be vulnerable to attacks like Diaz’s. She sees the depth of his distrust. She dreams of a beautiful Chinese bowl that breaks in her hand, slowly, through no fault of her own.
Marie’s work is deteriorating. Anand asks her to go to a dinner with the Indians, where Juan Diaz will be in attendance, and to act like nothing happened. He is nervous throughout. She confronts Diaz afterward and then Anand reminds Diaz that he has promised to deny the story. Anand admit that he feels crippled as he never has before and Marie says he should leave and blame her, that his work is more important. He says that he cannot, both because he loves her and on principle.
Marie shows Anand an article that she has written, which he says is not good. He says she should stop writing because what she writes can have no influence now. Juan Diaz and Hussein Ali Khan come to “borrow” money from Anand, and Marie tells Anand it is blackmail and objects to his giving in. Marie dreams of kissing death on the mouth and then wakes Anand, telling him that she cannot endure it.
Marie becomes ill for weeks. When she is better she says she wants to go along to visit Karin in Denmark. She dreams of a dead Juan Diaz who says (like the husband of a trapped woman she had once overheard), “Give me back the clothes I bought you!” Anand wakes Marie to tell her that Anand has been found out as a spy, and that he will boast of his alleged relationship with Marie in order to ruin Anand. She tells Anand that she must go. He says that she will no longer be able to work in the movement and she says she knows. She asks him to go and he does, reluctantly. The book ends with her beginning to pack.