I was coming off the platform one evening when I met a large,
fierce-looking, scowling man, who looked as if he wanted to strike me. I
stopped at once. “Friend,” I said, “you are in trouble.” “What is that
to you and such as you?” “It is much to me. You look like an employer of
men, yet here you have been taking the bread and coffee of charity.”
“Well, I have been an employer of men, but now I cannot even get
employment. I have been behind bars; now what hope in life is there for
me?” “Many men who have been behind bars have afterward made good
citizens and even made fortunes. Let us go down to the Board room and
talk this out.”
As he went along growling that there was no hope for him, I motioned to
Mr. McMasters and another worker to come with us. When we were seated,
he said, “Now, all I want of you people is to help me get work so that I
do not wander like a stray dog through the streets of the city where I
was born. My wife and family have deserted me and I am a desperate man.”
“Yes,” I said, “brother, no woman could live with you as you are now,
one would as soon live with a wolf; your hand is against every man and
every man's hand is against you. But God can again make you an employer
of men. He can make you a good husband and father, but you must find God
first. Where is your mother?” I saw him shrink, and I knew then I had
the key. “My going to prison killed my mother. I had a mill in a suburb
of Philadelphia, and sometimes, after the day's work was done, I would
step into a saloon and take a glass of beer with my foreman. I was not
what you would call a drinking man. One evening we got into a dispute
about something concerning the mill, and I picked up a monkey wrench and
struck my foreman just one blow, but I killed him. All our property went
for lawyer fees, all to no purpose, for I was sent to prison for ten
years. I have just been pardoned,” and he drew the governor's pardon
from his pocket. “When I went to my home I found strangers in it, but at
last I found my wife and my children now nearly grown, but they would
not let me live with them.” I knew perfectly well from other experiences
that he had gone in violence and had been met with violence.
Mr. McMasters now took the case. He said, “If your mother were now
living, do you believe she would have received you?” “I am sure she
would. The warden often told us that our mothers would stay by us, that
children grew ashamed of a father in prison, wives persuaded themselves
that it only kept up their grief, but a mother's love is like that of
the God above, it remains. But mother died.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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