TILLIE OLSEN
(Based on a Letter by Felipe Ibarro in New Masses, Jan. 9th, 1934)

i want you women up north to know

how those dainty children’s dresses you buy

at macy’s, wanamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,

are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,

down in San Antonio, “where sunshine spends the winter.”

I want you women up north to see

the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill

“exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats”

vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,

gouging the wages down,

dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,

stitching these dresses from dawn to night,

in blood, in wasting flesh.

Catalina Rodriguez, 24,

body shriveled to a child’s at twelve,

catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,

works for three dollars a week from dawn to midnight.

A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching heat

breaks over her body,

and the bright red blood embroiders the floor of her room.

White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say,

white gulls of hands, darting, veering,

white lightning, threading the clouds,

this is the exquisite dance of her hands over the cloth,

and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,

like skeleton’s bones clattering,

is appropriate accompaniment for the esthetic dance

of her fingers,

and the tremolo, tremolo when the hands tremble with pain.

Three dollars a week,

two fifty-five,

seventy cents a week,

no wonder two thousand eight hundred ladies of joy

are spending the winter with the sun after he goes down—

for five cents (who said this was a rich man’s world?) you can

get all the lovin you want

“clap and syph aint much worse than sore fingers, blind eyes, and

t.m.”

Maria Vasquez, spinster,

for fifteen cents a dozen stitches garments for children she has

never had,

Catalina Torres, mother of four,

to keep the starved body starving, embroiders from dawn to

night.

Mother of four, what does she think of,

as the needle pocked fingers shift over the silk—

of the stubble-coarse rags that stretch on her own brood,

and jut with the bony ridge that marks hunger’s landscape

of fat little prairie-roll bodies that will bulge in the

silk she needles?

(Be not envious, Catalina Torres, look!

on your own children’s clothing, embroidery,

more intricate than any a thousand hands could fashion,

there where the cloth is raveled, or darned,

designs, multitudinous, complex and handmade by Poverty

herself.)

Ambrosa Espinoza trusts in god,

“Todos es de dios, everything is from god,”

through the dwindling night, the waxing day, she bolsters herself

up with it—

but the pennies to keep god incarnate, from ambrosa,

and the pennies to keep the priest in wine, from ambrosa,

ambrosa clothes god and priest with hand-made children’s dresses.

Her brother lies on an iron cot, all day and watches,

on a mattress of rags he lies.

For twenty-five years he worked for the railroad, then they laid him off

(racked days, searching for work; rebuffs; suspicious eyes of

policemen.)

goodbye ambrosa, mebbe in dallas I find work; desperate swing

for a freight,

surprised hands, clutching air, and the wheel goes over a

leg,

the railroad cuts it off, as it cut off twenty-five years of his life.)

She says that he prays and dreams of another world, as he lies

there, a heaven (which he does not know was brought to earth

in 1917 in Russia, by workers like him).

Women up north, I want you to know

when you finger the exquisite handmade dresses

what it means, this working from dawn to midnight,

on what strange feet the feverish dawn must come

to maria, catalina, ambrosa,

how the malignant fingers twitching over the pallid faces jerk them

to work,

and the sun and the fever mounts with the day—

long plodding hours, the eyes burn like coals, heat jellies the

flying fingers,

down comes the night like blindness.

long hours more with the dim eye of the lamp, the breaking

back,

weariness crawls in the flesh like worms, gigantic like earth’s in

winter.

And for Catalina Rodriguez comes the night sweat and the blood

embroidering the darkness.

for Catalina Torres the pinched faces of four huddled

children,

the naked bodies of four bony children,

the chant of their chorale of hunger.

And for twenty eight hundred ladies of joy the grotesque act gone

over—

the wink—the grimace—the “feeling like it baby?”

And for Maria Vasquez, spinster, emptiness, emptiness,

flaming with dresses for children she can never fondle.

And for Ambrosa Espinoza—the skeleton body of her brother on

his mattress

of rags, boring twin holes in the dark with his eyes to the image of

christ

remembering a leg, and twenty-five years cut off from his life by

the railroad.

Women up north, I want you to know,

I tell you this can’t last forever.

I swear it won’t.