"I believe that I am going to be happy--really and truly happy!" She
does not smile but looks seriously at her father as she presses his hand
and pats it. "I am finding my place--doing my work--creating
something--not the home that I once hoped for--not the home that I would
have now, but it is something good and worth while. It is self respect
in me and self respect in those wives and mothers and children in South
Harvey. All over the place I find its roots--the shrivelled parching
roots of self-respect, and the aspiration that grows with self respect.
Sometimes I see it in a geranium flowering in a tomato can, set in a
window; oftentimes in a cheap lace curtain; occasionally in a
struggling, stunted yellow rose bush in the hard-beaten earth of a
dooryard; or in a second hand wheezy cabinet organ in some front
bedroom--in a thousand little signs of aspiration, I find America
asserting itself among these poor people, and as I cherish these things
I find happiness asserting itself in my life. So it's my job, my
consecrated job in this earth--to water the geranium, to prune the rose,
to mulch the roots of self-respect among these people, and I am happy,
father, happier every day that I walk that way."
She looks wistfully into her father's face. "Father, you won't quite
understand me when I tell you that the tomato cans with their geraniums
behind those gray lace curtains, that make Harvey people smile, are
really not tomato cans at all. They are social dynamite bombs that one
day will blow into splinters and rubbish the injustices, the cruel
injustices of life that the poor suffer at the hands of their
exploiters. The geranium is the flower, the spring flower of the divine
discontent, which some day shall bear great and wonderful fruit."
"Rather a swift pace you're setting for a fat man, Laura," pipes the
Doctor, adding earnestly: "There you go talking like Grant Adams! Don't
let Grant Adams fool you, child: the end of the world isn't here.
Grant's a good boy, Laura, and I like him; but he's getting a kind of
Millerite notion that we're about to put on white robes and go straight
up to glory, politically and socially and every which way, in a few
years, and there's nothing to it. Grant's a good son, and a good
brother, and a good friend and neighbor, but"--the Doctor pounds his
chair arm vehemently, "there are bats, my dear, bats in his belfry just
the same. Don't get excited when you see Grant mount his haystack to
jump into the crack o' doom for the established order!"
The daughter smiles at him, but she answers:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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