Ever since I began to read the American magazines one burning question has consumed me: why is it that only the thoughts of educated people are written up? Why shouldn’t sometimes a servant girl or a janitress or a coal-heaver give his thoughts to the world? We who are forced to do the drudgery of the world, and who are considered ignorant because we have no time for school, could say a lot of new and different things, if only we had a chance to get a hearing. Very rarely I’d come across a story about a shop-girl or a washerwoman. But they weren’t real stories. They were twisted pictures of the way the higher-ups see us people. They weren’t as we are. They were as unreal as the knowledge of the rich about the poor. Often I’d read those smooth-flowing stories about nothing at all, and I’d ask myself: why is it that so many of the educated, with nothing to say, know how to say that nothing with such an easy flow of words, while I, with something so aching to be said, can say nothing? I was like a prison world full of choked-in voices, all beating in my brain to be heard. The minute I’d listen to one voice a million other voices would rush in crying for a hearing, till I’d get too excited and mixed up to know what or where. Sometimes I’d see my brain as a sort of Hester Street junk-shop, where a million different things--rich up-town silks and velvets and the cheapest kind of rags--were thrown around in bunches. It seemed to me if I struggled from morning till night all my years I could never put order in my junk-shop brain. Ach! If I only had an education, I used to think. It seemed to me that educated people were those who had their hearts and their heads so settled down in order that they could go on with quiet stillness to do anything they set out to do. They could take up one thought, one feeling at a time without getting the rest of themselves mixed up and excited over it. They had each thought, each feeling, laid out in separate shelves in their heads. So they could draw out one shelf of ideas while the rest of their ideas remained quiet and still in the orderly place inside of them. With me my thoughts were not up in my head. They were in my hands and feet, in the thinnest nerves of my hair, in the flesh and blood of my whole body. Everything hurt in me when I tried to think; it was like struggling up towards something over me that I could never reach--like tearing myself out inch by inch from the roots of the earth--like suffering all pain of dying and being born.