Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  In Utica George and I found ourselves in an industrial area, where workers were either foreign-born or the first generation born in the United States. A strong thread of radical ideas ran through workers in the foundries and in the arms, copper, textile, and shoe factories. In opposition to this working-class population, a politically organized upper class of owners and elected officials ruled the area. Traditionally, the cities voted Democrat whereas the surrounding counties voted Republican, and Oneida County was no exception. Utica had a Democratic mayor while the congressman and the senator, with district-wide votes, were right-wing Republican. Hamilton Fish was “our” congressman.

  Small groups of Communists were in the towns, and scattered about the countryside were people who in some other time or place had been involved in leftist politics or in trade union actions. George and I set ourselves to find and to talk to every one of these scattered radicals. George began by calling a convention of all the Communists to elect a new leadership; and, of course, George was elected chairman. He then organized meetings open to the public with speakers known to these old-time radicals; these meetings were well-attended and drew people who were interested in political events in Europe—Italians from the copper mills of Rome, New York Polish women who worked in the textile mills and who were militant, their men who worked in the foundries, Russians who had come to the United States to work in the mines and coal fields of Pennsylvania and who were now farmers in Oneida County, Czechs who worked in the Remington-Rand arms plant. Friends found friends at these meetings, and there was an awakening in this neglected area. A liberal doctor, three or four ministers, a few businessmen, and liberal intellectuals found us, or we found them. All these people endangered their livelihoods by their interest in the left, but nevertheless they were interested in defeating fascism. The group also attracted people who were accustomed to being alone with their ideas, and they met together and heard reports of the neighboring areas, where young people similar to George and me in age and background were working in other upper New York State communities. These intellectuals joined the League of Women Voters or the League against War and Fascism, or one of the many groups in the more liberal churches. The election of Roosevelt and the work done to alleviate the Depression had stirred people, and a strong liberal tendency was growing throughout the country, due not only to Roosevelt but to all of us who were opposed to fascism.

  Usually the vote is more radical in the United States than the apparent opinion of the people, and we met surprises when we went out door-to-door selling the Communist Sunday paper. People were not afraid of us in their own homes—the fear was for loss of jobs—and they asked us in. We made friends, and they trusted us not to expose them. These people knew at first-hand the long and frustrating struggle for trade unions and the continuing struggle to keep those unions honest. The CIO was organizing in this area at this time, and it was making sweeping inroads into the old craft unions of the AFL, which accepted the skilled workers but left the rest of the workers in the same plant unorganized. We were a small force with few allies, and yet we saw first-hand that we obtained results and that achievement came—slowly, but it came. Working in New York City had been frustrating because we lost touch with people and did not see the results directly as we did in this smaller city.

  A Methodist minister, an ebullient man from a neighboring church community, came to see us regularly just to talk with us, for he shared similar political ideas and preached his ideas as much as he dared. A Quaker invited us to a Quaker meeting which was really an anti-war group and asked us to take over his little group, but we said that although we shared political ideas and that we opposed fascism, we were neither religious nor pacifist, and in sincerity we could not join his group. Both of these men had graduated from Union Theological Seminary, where Harry F. Ward, a loved and respected teacher, had imprinted his liberal mark on many who passed through his classes.

  A minister on the staff of the Episcopal cathedral in Utica came to call late at night, a man with five children who was sure of his job only so long as one of the higher-ranking priests needed him. He was ghost-writing the memoirs of this priest. Our caller was the son of a coal miner, who had been educated into the priesthood, and he risked too much if he raised his voice at the cathedral; but he came to tell us that we were in danger. Hamilton Fish, the Republican congressman, was warning the upper bourgeoisie of the town against us, and George’s and my name headed the list that Fish wrote on the blackboard in the cathedral. We were not frightened; on the contrary, we were encouraged to know that we had made such an impact on the town.

  Farmers were protesting the prices that they received for their milk from the Borden and Sheffield milk companies, which held a grip on the milk market in the milk-sheds all over the country. Upper New York State was one milk-shed, and there were others wherever there was big dairy production. Some farmers formed a Farmers’ Union and held their milk, to pour it in protest in the streets of Boonville, where the road ran white with milk in front of the milk receiving depot. I went to visit Archie Wright, leader of the Farmers’ Union. Archie welcomed me and suggested that I help by visiting farmers and asking them to withhold their milk, to join the Farmers’ Union, or at least not to endanger the farmers’ strike. The farmers in the valleys where the soil was rich and deep were not seriously affected by the reduction in the price of milk; their farms were paid for, and they could weather the price-cutting and perhaps even benefit by the wiping out of the small hill-country farms. Enclaves of Welsh farmers in the valleys, whose ancestors had come to the United States in whole village groups to be weavers in the textile mills and who had in a later generation left the factories to take land in the valleys, had forgotten their fathers’ struggles as workers, and were now entrenched conservative rich farmers. I made no progress in talking to them about the milk strike, and after a few attempts I went to the “higher tiers,” as the hill country was called. Most farmers in the hills had been industrial workers for years in the mines of Pennsylvania, in the steel mills or foundries, or in arms plants or shoe factories. They had dreamed of retirement to a farm, but they could afford only marginal lands, and they still owed money on their land, for which they depended on the sale price for their milk. They had to oppose the price cuts.

  These farm families usually consisted of a farmer and his wife and as many of their sons as could be supported by the operation of the farm. Extra cash came from sons who went to work in the factories. These farmers supported the milk strike, but their idea of action was to pick up their rifles. They took a few pot-shots at tank cars carrying milk, and they frightened strike-breaking farmers with occasional armed threats. They were accustomed to acting on their own, and it was a delicate line that Archie Wright trod in holding the strikers to dumping their milk, while at the same time persuading them not to go out and shoot their enemies.

  In the higher tiers I met a strange household. A young German immigrant, alone on his farm, had desperately needed a workmate, a woman. He advertised in a farm journal for a woman housekeeper, and from Florida a stranded circus performer answered the ad. She had been born in Bavaria to a bourgeois family, from which she had run away to join the circus because she loved horses. She was an accomplished horsewoman and had also been the lady who got sawed in half; she had lived twenty years in circus life. She and the German farmer married soon after she came to the farm; she wanted a child and the farmer wanted a son, so they adopted a little boy, a scrawny, pitiful small child. They were, I thought, severe with him, but it may have been that their accents in English made their speech seem rough. They were a strange little family and very lonely. They begged me to sleep at their farm when I was in the vicinity, and I slept on a straw tick on the floor. Supper was boiled potatoes with skim milk to drink and maybe onions to eat raw, but I had found that this was usual fare on the hill farms, except that sometimes a bowl of boiled eggs was set out to eat with the potatoes and onions. One farmer, born in the Ukraine, had ear
ned the money in the mines for the down payment on his farm and had moved to it with his wife and five children. All the children died in a diphtheria epidemic; their graves were near the house. But now there were five more, who sat at table with us.

  The women worked as hard as the men; they kept house, ran the dairy, and kept a kitchen garden if they could find time and strength. Electricity was used to run machines—not for reading, there was little time for reading. Farmers rose at dawn and went to bed early. Poor farmers kept twenty cows, the limit the farm could feed, but fewer cows made a dairy farm uneconomical to run. Rich farmers kept a hundred and twenty cows, with electric milkers and conveyors to bring feed to the cows and to convey manure out of the barn. While I was at one hill farm a cream separator was purchased, and they were using it for the first time. These were radicalized people, still very close to their European backgrounds in Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia, and I found a skein of ideas which intertwined with mine and made these people dear to me. This was not placid country of rolling meadows, but rough country with forest patches where land was too steep and earth too thin for anything but wood-lot. I was driving down out of this country when I passed the local Catholic priest, who motioned me to stop. I stopped and we talked; we were far away from any habitation. He told me that I should get out of this country, that I was not wanted here, and that the farmers were benighted in their demands against Borden and Sheffield milk companies—that I was an arm of the devil and that I was surely headed for hell. I said, “Well, suppose we both go to the Farmers’ Union meeting tonight and ask the membership whether you or I should leave this country.”

  I drove on, but I was angry and drove slowly because it had been a violent, virulent attack. We both were at the union meeting that night. I spoke, then the priest spoke, in the style of Father Coughlin the Radio Priest. Archie defended me and spoke of the divisive role the priest was playing in the strike. He called for a vote, and although the union membership was predominantly Catholic, they voted resoundingly for me to stay.

  Transition

  1938–1941

  In 1938 the war in Spain was ending just as the Second World War was beginning. Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, giving Hitler the Czechoslovak munitions works, and in the town all around us in Utica the church bells rang, “For peace in our times.” Only a handful of Communists and Socialists understood that the betrayal of Czechoslovakia was the first act in World War II.

  I was thirty years old and I wanted a child. My attempts had all ended in still births, and I became obsessed with my desire for a child. Some of the tension of those times probably entered into my preoccupation: I had to have a child, difficult as it proved for me to give birth to a live child.

  Birth . . . I think I am afraid to try to write of it. In childbirth I was isolated; I never talked about it even to George. He was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it. Exposure of the experience has been attempted, and although I concur with the attempt, I do not think it has yet been told in a form in which it is whole. I would wish it to remain whole, and I have preserved the wholeness of my own experience of birth by not telling it; it is too precious to me. Even now, writing of the experiences of age twenty-four to thirty, I wish to encompass my isolation and the wracking devastation of loss, the sense of being a nothing on the delivery table, knocked out by anesthetic, only to regain consciousness and be told once more, “The fetus is dead.” Finally, I was not anesthetized; I labored and gave birth in the delivery room. Back in my room, I asked to see the fetus. If the nurse had carried it in her hands, or even wrapped in a towel, it might have seemed a shred of humanity, but in a hospital pan it was viscera. Another time the fetus lived a few hours, but I never saw it. Months later, in wartime Detroit where George had been drafted into the Army, I received a telephone call: “You have not given the order for disposal of the prematurely born infant that you gave birth to.” I thought, a swindle, an ambulance-chasing outfit, and I threatened them with exposure.

  Death of the male was conceived in me each time the sperm and ovum joined. One male lived through birth, and at six weeks his death, not accomplished in the womb, overtook him—cradle death. He did not breathe his next breath, and that was death. Of course, every birth is conceived to include its death, but to carry the life and the death of one’s own child before its own birth . . . I confronted that birth and that death with every male I conceived.

  Our only girl child passed her birth date and was born a small but tenacious infant. The pediatrician stood in the doorway of the cubicle where the baby lay naked. “What a female shape!” he exclaimed.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Oh, would you like me to tell you more about her?”

  “Of course.”

  “She is an ascetic type, so do not expect her to eat much; but she is a hardy type, her hold on life is strong, although she seems delicate and probably always will seem fragile.”

  All true, for in her later life this prophecy proved accurate; and as I had more experience with babies I found I could foresee in the newborn a type that continues into adult life. We are what we are from conception; we are influenced by the environment, but we also influence that environment by what we are conceived to be.

  With my first pregnancy I could not eat or drink, and in the first months I became emaciated. In the hospital I had visions of water, of drowning, and in hallucination I was submerged in water, and satisfied, I entered my death, but George was there, young, eager, demanding, needing me. And I returned. A priest came by to tell me that his prayers had saved me, and he gave me a little colored card such as good boys and girls receive in Protestant Sunday schools. I recovered spindle-legged, with my belly showing the child within. I have never received an explanation for the males’ fetal death after seven months of fetal life. For cradle death some explanation has been offered, and it is now possible to monitor infant breathing. If breathing stops, the parents have two minutes in which to restore it. I don’t know if we could have survived that strain and been normal parents. I read of one infant who stopped breathing many times, and the hope was that he would develop beyond this plight. I believe that the deaths I bore were not my fault; even this small sop is a comfort, for the burden of guilt in infant death is almost unbearable.

  Later I held another baby, the one who lived, and my fear diminished as she lived and flourished, and as I gradually believed in her will to live. But our fears made us frantically anxious parents. We would rush to Linda’s room and shake her, just to hear her cry the cry that meant she was alive.

  Our child Linda was an infant when George began training in a government-run school. After six weeks of courses, the workers were sent into defense plants to build planes. George became in a year what previously had taken a seven-year apprenticeship to attain, but on Long Island he still could not get the classification in the union of Machinist or Pattern-maker which he wanted for work after the war. He went to Detroit, giving up his draft exemption—if a worker changed jobs, he was drafted into the armed forces.

  Linda and I moved to Detroit too, a crowded wartime city, with rats as big as cats in the alleys where garbage was not collected. Our dog hunted at night, and sometimes in the morning he guarded on our doorstep the rat he had killed in his hunt. Housing was nearly impossible to find. I sat in the newspaper office downtown to get the paper before it was on the stands to look for ads for a house. I found an apartment, but the landlord locked the furnace room door; I broke down the door and turned up the heat. It was an embattled existence. Winter in Detroit is cold, the apartment was cheerless and every necessity was surrounded by difficulties. People were pouring into the industrial centers from the south for war work; families were torn apart, slums proliferated and all of us were strangers to one another. Women as well as men worked long hours; George worked a seventy-hour week those months before he was dra
fted.

  I was with child and lost the child. A young black girl took care of Linda while I was in the hospital; the girl was kind, and Linda was well cared for, but when I came home Linda pressed her body close to mine and could not let go. We were frightened.

  Wartime

  1942–1945

  George wanted to go to the war. The enemy was fascism, and we agreed that the war must be fought. It seemed to us that the lives of all Jews were endangered by fascism; our lives were in danger, and not to fight in the war was to ask of others what we would not do for ourselves. But it was hard, and I remember those years as strange, unreal, and strained. George had the classification of Pattern-maker in the Machinists’ Union by the time he was drafted. He proved to himself that he was as good as any worker, as good as any soldier; when he went to the war, he fought for himself and for Linda and me. That was how we put it to ourselves, and although it now seems a foolhardy and even meaningless decision, it was the experience of manhood in those times. George suffered over his decision to go to the war and leave us, Linda and me, without husband and father. He agonized over this during the war, and I told him, “You must come back alive, do not throw yourself away in any moment’s heroism. I want you to return.”