Autobiography of Margaret Sanger. Margaret Sanger
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they had been making glassware unsurpassed for texture and beauty of design, and hardly a family of means in the country did not have at least one cut-glass centerpiece from Corning. The factories had prospered during the kerosene lamp era, and now, with electricity coming into its own, they were working overtime blowing light bulbs.
Corning was not on the whole a pleasant town. Along the river flats lived the factory workers, chiefly Irish; on the heights above the rolling clouds of smoke that belched from the chimneys lived the owners and executives. The tiny yards of the former were a-sprawl with children; in the gardens on the hills only two or three played. This contrast made a track in my mind. Large families were associated with poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, fighting, jails; the small ones with cleanliness, leisure, freedom, light, space, sunshine.
The fathers of the small families owned their homes; the young-looking mothers had time to play croquet with their husbands in the evenings on the smooth lawns. Their clothes had style and charm, and the fragrance of perfume clung about them. They walked hand in hand on shopping expeditions with their children, who seemed positive in their right to live. To me the distinction between happiness and unhappiness in childhood was one of small families and of large families rather than of wealth and poverty.
In our home, too, we felt the economic pressure directly ascribable to size. I was always apprehensive that we might some day be like the families on the flats, because we always had another baby coming, another baby coming. A new litter of puppies was interesting but not out of the ordinary; so, likewise, the cry of a new infant never seemed unexpected. Neither excited any more curiosity than breakfast or dinner. No one ever told me how they were born. I just knew.
I was little more than eight when I first helped wash the fourteen-and-a-half-pound baby after one of mother’s deliveries. She had had a “terrible hard time,” but father had pulled her through, and, in a few weeks, tired and coughing, she was going about her work, believing as usual that her latest was the prize of perfect babies. Mother’s eleven children were all ten-pounders or more, and both she and father had a eugenic pride of race. I used to hear her say that not one of hers had a mark or blemish, although she had the utmost compassion for those who might have cleft palates, crossed eyes, or be “born sick.”
Late one night a woman rushed into our house, seeking protection, clutching in her shawl a scrawny, naked baby, raw with eczema. When her hysteria was calmed sufficiently we learned that her husband had reeled home drunk and had thrown the wailing infant out into the snow. Father was all for summoning the police, but mother was too wise for that. She dispatched him to talk to the man while she gave the weeping woman a warm supper and comforted her. Father returned shortly to say it was safe for her to go back to the multitude of other children because her husband had fallen asleep. Ugly and taciturn though he was I could picture him coming home after a hard day’s work to a household racked with the shrieks of the suffering little thing. I could see that he too was pathetic and a victim; I had sympathy for his rage.
But mother did lose one of her beautiful babies. Henry George McGlynn Higgins had been named for two of the rebel figures father most admired. The four-year-old was playing happily in the afternoon; a few hours later he was gasping for breath. Father heated his home-made croup kettle on the stove until it boiled, and then carried it steaming to be put under the blanket which rose like a covered wagon above the bed. As soon as he realized that home remedies were failing he sent for the doctor. But events moved too swiftly for him. We had gone to bed with no suspicion that by morning we should be one less. I was shocked and surprised that something could come along and pick one of us out of the world in so few hours.
I had no time, however, to consider the bewildering verity of death. We all had to turn to consoling mother. Perhaps unconsciously she had subscribed to father’s theory that the face was the mirror to the soul. She complained she had no picture of her lovely boy, and kept reminding herself of the fine shape of his head, the wide, well-set eyes, the familiar contours which had been wiped forever from her sight, and might soon be sponged from her memory as well.
Mother’s grief over her lost child increased father’s. Because in part he blamed himself, he was desperate to assuage her sorrow. The day after the burial he was constantly occupied in his studio, and when evening fell he took me affectionately by the hand asking me to stay up and help him on a piece of work he was about to do. I agreed willingly.
About eleven o’clock we went forth together into the pitch-black night, father pushing ahead of him a wheelbarrow full of tools and a bag of plaster of Paris. We walked on and on through the stillness for fully two miles to the cemetery where the little brother had been buried. Father knew every step, but it was scary and I clung to his hand.
Just beyond the gateway father hid the lighted lantern in the near-by bushes over a grave and told me to wait there unless I heard somebody coming. He expected me to be grown up at the age of ten. Nerves meant sickness; if any child cried out in the night it was merely considered “delicate.” Consequently I obeyed and watched, shivering with cold and excitement, darting quick glances at the ghostly forms of some of father’s monuments which loomed out of the darkness around me. I could hear the steady chunk, chunk, chunk of his pick and shovel, and the sharper sound when suddenly he struck the coffin.
Father had taken it as a matter of course that I should understand and had not explained what he was about to do. But I never questioned his actions. I did not know there was a law against a man’s digging up his own dead child but, even had I known, I would have believed that the law was wrong.
We traveled back the long, weary way, arriving home in the early hours of the morning. Nothing was said to mother or to the others about that amazing night’s adventure; I was not told to keep silent, but I knew there was mystery in the air and it was no time to talk.
For two evenings I worked with father, helping him break the death mask, mold and shape the cast. I remember the queer feeling I had when I discovered some of the hair which had stuck in the plaster. On the third day, just after supper, father said to us all, “Will you come into the studio?” With tender eyes on mother he uncovered and presented to her the bust of the dead little boy.
She was extraordinarily comforted. Though to me the model, perfect as it was, seemed lifeless, every once in a while she entered the studio, took off the cloth which protected it from the dust, wept and was relieved, recovered it and went on.
Not one of us dared to utter a word of criticism about mother’s adored and adoring husband; nevertheless her soul was harassed at times by his philosophy of live and let live, by his principles against locked doors and private property. She was merely selfless. Often when one of her children was feverish she went to the kitchen pump for water so that it might be cooler and fresher for parched lips. Once, groping her way on such an errand, she stumbled over a tramp who had taken advantage of the unlatched door and lay sprawled on the floor. She rushed back to arouse father, telling him he must put the man out. But he only turned over on his side and muttered, “Oh, let him alone. The poor divil needs sleep like the rest of us.”
Another night mother was awakened by noises outside. “Father,” she called, “there’s somebody at the hencoop!”
“What makes you think so?” he answered sleepily.
“I hear the chickens. They wouldn’t make a noise unless somebody was in there. Get up!”
Obediently father put on his trousers and coat; not even before thieves would he appear in his nightshirt out of his bedroom. He proceeded to the kitchen door, and, holding a lamp on high, addressed the two men, one of whom was handing out chickens to the other, “Hey, you, there! What do you mean by coming to a man’s house in the middle of the night and shtealing his chickens? What kind of citizens are you?”
This seemed to mother no time for a moral lecture. “Why don’t you go out?” she prodded.
“It’s raining.”
“Give me the lamp!” she demanded, exasperated.
She started towards our nearest neighbor, splashing through the little brook, getting her feet wet, calling, “Some one’s in our chicken house!”
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