Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (62 page)

I start my day here at five o‘clock. I get up and prepare all the children’s clothes. If there’s shoes to shine, I do it in the morning. About seven o’clock I bathe the children. I leave my baby with the baby sitter and I go to work at the settlement house. I work until twelve ’. Sometimes I’ll work longer if I have to go to welfare and get a check for somebody. When I get back, I try to make hot food for the kids to eat. In the afternoon it’s pretty well on my own. I scrub and clean and cook and do whatever I have to do.

Welfare makes you feel like you’re nothing. Like you’re laying back and not doing anything and it’s falling in your lap. But you must understand, mothers, too, work. My house is clean. I’ve been scrubbing since this morning. You could check my clothes, all washed and ironed. I’m home and I’m working. I am a working mother.

A job that a woman in a house is doing is a tedious job—especially if you want to do it right. If you do it slipshod, then it’s not so bad. I’m pretty much of a perfectionist. I tell my kids, hang a towel. I don’t want it thrown away. That is very hard. It’s a constant game of picking up this, picking up that. And putting this away, so the house’ll be clean.

Some men work eight hours a day. There are mothers that work eleven, twelve hours a day. We get up at night, a baby vomits, you have to be calling the doctor, you have to be changing the baby. When do you get a break, really? You don’t. This is an all-around job, day and night. Why do they say it’s charity? We’re working for our money. I am working for this check. It is not charity. We are giving some kind of home to these children.

I’m so busy all day I don’t have time to daydream. I pray a lot. I pray to God to give me strength. If He should take a child away from me, to have the strength to accept it. It’s His kid. He just borrowed him to me.

I used to get in and close the door. Now I speak up for my right. I walk with my head up. If I want to wear big earrings, I do. If I’m overweight, that’s too bad. I’ve gotten completely over feeling where I’m little. I’m working now, I’m pulling my weight. I’m gonna get off welfare in time, that’s my goal—get off.

It’s living off welfare and feeling that you’re taking something for nothing the way people have said. You get to think maybe you are. You get to think, Why am I so stupid? Why can’t I work? Why do I have to live this way? It’s not enough to live on anyway. You feel degraded.

The other day I was at the hospital and I went to pay my bill. This nurse came and gave me the green card. Green card is for welfare. She went right in front of me and gave it to the cashier. She said, “I wish I could stay home and let the money fall in my lap.” I felt rotten. I was just burning inside. You hear this all the way around you. The doctor doesn’t even look at you. People are ashamed to show that green card. Why can’t a woman just get a check in the mail: Here, this check is for you. Forget welfare. You’re a mother who works.

This nurse, to her way of thinking, she represents the working people. The ones with the green card, we represent the lazy no-goods. This is what she was saying. They’re the good ones and we’re the bad guys.

You know what happened at the hospital? I was put in a nice room, semiprivate. You stay there until someone with insurance comes in and then you get pushed up to the fifth floor. There’s about six people in there, and nobody comes even if you ring. I said, “Listen lady, you can put me on the roof. You just find out what’s the matter with me so I can get the hell out of here.”

How are you going to get people off welfare if they’re constantly being pushed down? If they’re constantly feeling they’re not good for anything? People say, I’m down, I’ll stay down. And this goes on generation to generation to generation. Their daughter and their daughter and their daughter. So how do you break this up? These kids don’t ask to be born —these kids are gonna grow up and give their lives one day. There will always be a Vietnam.

There will always be war. There always has been. The way the world is run, yes, there will always be war. Why? I really don’t know. Nobody has ever told me. I was so busy handling my own affairs and taking care of my children and trying to make my own money and calling up welfare when my checks are late or something has been stolen. All I know is what’s going on here. I’m an intelligent woman up to a certain point, and after that . . . I wish I knew. I guess the big shots decided the war. I don’t question it, because I’ve been busy fighting my own little war for so long.

The head of the settlement house wants me to take the social worker’s job when I get back to work. I visit homes, I talk to mothers. I try to make them aware that they got something to give. I don’t try to work out the problems. This is no good. I try to help them come to some kind of a decision. If there’s no decision, to live with it, because some problem doesn’t have any answer.

There was one mother that needed shoes, I found shoes for her. There was another mother that needed money because her check was late. I found someplace for her to borrow a couple of dollars. It’s like a fund. I could borrow a couple of dollars until my check comes, then when my check comes I give it back. How much time have mothers left to go out and do this? How many of us have given time so other mothers could learn to speak English, so they’ll be able to go to work. We do it gladly because the Lord gave us English.

I went to one woman’s house and she’s Spanish speaking. I was talking to her in English and she wouldn’t unbend. I could see the fear in her eyes. So I started talking Spanish. Right away, she invited me for coffee and she was telling me the latest news . . .

I would like to help mothers be aware of how they can give to the community. Not the whole day—maybe three, four hours. And get paid for it. There’s nothing more proud for you to receive a check where you worked at. It’s yours, you done it.

 

 

The people from the settlement house began visiting me, visiting welfare mothers, trying to get them interested in cooking projects and sewing. They began knocking on my door. At the beginning I was angry. It was just like I drew a curtain all around me. I didn’t think I was really good for anything. So I kind of drew back. Just kept my troubles to myself, like vegetating. When these people began calling on me, I began to see that I could talk and that I did have a brain. I became a volunteer.

I want to be a social worker. Somebody that is not indifferent, that bends an ear to everybody. You cannot be slobberish. You cannot cry with the people. Even if you cry inside, you must keep a level head. You have to try to help that person get over this bump. I would go into a house and try to make friends. Not as a spy. The ladies have it that welfare comes as spies to see what you have. Or you gotta hide everything’cause welfare is coming. There is this fear the social worker is gonna holler, because they got something, maybe a man or a boyfriend. I wouldn’t take any notes or pens or paper or pencils or anything. I would just go into the house and talk. Of course, I would look around to see what kind of an environment it is. This you have to absorb. You wouldn’t say it, but you would take it in.

I promised myself if I ever get to work all day, I’m going to buy me a little insurance. So the next time I go to the hospital I’ll go to the room I want to go. I’m gonna stay there until it’s time for me to leave, because I’m gonna pay my own bill. I don’t like to feel rotten. I want my children, when they grow up, they don’t have to live on it. I want to learn more. I’m hungry for knowledge. I want to do something. I’m searching for something. I don’t know what it is.

 

At first no one taught me. I wasn’t doing much of anything. Then a
marvelous
woman, who’s a brilliant artist, gave me a
marvelous
frame that her father made for her, for sewing books and that sort of thing. So I learned to sew books. They’re really good books, it’s just the covers that are rotten. You take them apart and you make them sound and you smash them in and sew them up. That’s all there is to it.

I have a bindery at home, it’s kind of a cave, really. It’s where you have your gear—a table where you work, a cutter, a press, and those kinds of things. You have a good screw press, a heavy one that presses the books down. A binder’s gear is principally his thumbnail. You push, you use your thumbnail more than anything else.

I mustn’t pose as a fine binder because I’m not. That’s exhibition binding, gold tooling. You roll out this design and you fill it with egg white. Then you cover it with pure gold leaf. I enjoy restoration very much—when you restore an old book that’s all ragged at the back. You must make a rubbing of the spine. The spine’s all rotten, so you put that aside and you turn back the pages
very carefully
. That’s what I enjoy most of all.

Obviously I don’t make much money binding books, but it’s very cozy work. Carolyn
⁴⁷
and I did simple, necessary things for the university. We bound precious pamphlets in a way that preserved them. Incunabula—books printed before 1500. Architectural works and something of the Latin poets.

Those made of vellum are usually just rotten in the back. Vellum’s a wild thing, the hide of a calf or a lamb. It’s treated with acid. The pages are falling apart. You take them out if you can and you wash them, de-acidify them in a certain solution. Then you fold them together and press them in your press.

Some of my private customers have very splendid collections, beautiful bindings you’ll never see again. I have very specific, lovely clients. One, who’s no longer living, had a magnificent collection of Stevenson and Dickens, first editions.

I go to the house and take my equipment, oils and paints and a certain binder’s paste. And a painter’s drop cloth. There’s a beautiful Oriental rug, and indeed you may not drop anything on it. You set up a card table and book ends and that’s about it, really.

We calculate the books. We make a point of being sure that the books go back exactly where they were before. We look at each book and pull it out and test it for tears. Almost everybody pulls books out by their tops, and they’re always broken. Torn from beautiful leather bindings. In dusting books, you never touch them inside. The dust only goes to the top. People who pull them out with the idea of dusting them—it’s just ridiculous. It only destroys the book.

My assistant takes the cloth for me, and then we line up the books. She dusts the tops. You always dust from the spine out, cleaning the book. Then you use the
marvelous
British Museum formula, potassium lactate. It’s swabbed on the books to put back in the leather the acids that were taken out, that were in the hide in the beginning. They’ve been dried out completely and all the salts have been destroyed. So we swab all the leather goods with this potassium lactate. A very little swab, and let it sink in. Then these books are polished and put back on the shelves. It preserves books that could never exist in this climate after five years.

It’s an arduous thing, but I suppose it’s important because if that kind of thing didn’t happen, the books would just disintegrate. Father’s library did. Especially in the city with its very high potency of sulfur dioxide, which eats up the books. The hideous air, the poisonous air of the city. People love to have whole sets of Dickens or Mark Twain or Dumas—the kinds of popular acquisitions in our mothers’ age, when they filled up their shelves. The books in Chicago are disintegrating to a most appalling degree in comparison to the books of the same issue in Lake Forest.
⁴⁸
It’s been going on for years. It destroys them. It eats them up. Terrible.

I usually arrive at about ten thirty. I work as long as it pleases me. If I fill up the table and the books are oiled, I often leave at four or six. I might work for one client two or three weeks. In the case of Mrs. Armour’s books, it was a matter of six months. She had a superb collection stored in the old house. It took two days to unpack the crates. Her mother was a collector of exceedingly marvelous taste. It was undeniably one of the most beautiful collections of books I’ve ever seen. Not only in the binding, but in the selection. It was kind of wonderful to be there at that moment.

I wouldn’t want to bind anything that was flimsy. You have to think of what’s inside. If you’re binding a book about a big idea—Karl Marx! (laughs)—you obviously would accommodate a binding, wouldn’t you? The idea of the binding should reflect what’s inside. The books at the Arboretum are among the most interesting. Some of them are sixteenth-and seventeenth-century books, marvelous herbals. Beautiful, beautiful books. Flower papers. There is no special way you relate your own taste, your reflections.

If they’re the
marvelous
trees of Japan—oh dear, oh dear. I was reared in California where I saw the redwoods that are now being systematically destroyed. And there’s some redwood trees in Japan that relate to what you’re thinking, oh dear (softly). You must be very clever with a binding and give it the dignity it deserves. Because the pages are so full of stunning,
fantastic
things that say, This is life. So what do you do with a binding like that? I don’t know. You just give it a strength. If it’s leather or it’s cloth or it’s paper, you give it strength, an indication of what is inside.