Bread and Roses, Too Read Free Page B

make out the words: "Short pay! All out! Short pay! All out!!" over and over again. She now got up and made her way across the room, leaving only the still sleeping Khoury boys at their desks.
    She pushed her way to the window and looked down. The crowd marching below seemed immense. She could almost feel the heat of their anger as they shouted in unison. "Short pay! All out!"
    Behind the children, Miss Finch fluttered and begged and commanded, but none of them left the window. The bell had warned, but now they knew that in that crowd their world was turning upside-down. "There's my mamma!" Celina Cosa cried. She leaned over the sill and waved. "Mamma! Mamma!
Guarda qui!
Up here!" as though someone from below could have heard a child's voice over the chants of thousands, as the stream of marchers coming up from the mills on the river seemed unending.
    "Sit down!" Miss Finch's face was red and blotched, her eyes wide, like a frightened horse.
    No one sat down for the length of time it took the line of marchers to pass under the window and around the corner of the street, leaving behind the sound of their defiance. "Short pay! All out!"
    Not long after the children had reluctantly returned to their seats, the bell rang. They looked now to their teacher for the words of dismissal that would send them out to an hour of freedom, since dinner hour promised very little dinner in any of the tenements these days.
    Miss Finch, still red-faced, acted almost as though she had not heard the bell. The children shifted restlessly in their seats. At last, she sighed, looking at them with such disappointment in her eyes that all except Joe O'Brien hung their heads again. "I am not sure it is safe to let you out on the streets." She shuddered. "There is no telling what an angry mob will do. Why, you might be trampled to death—the mood that mob is in!"
    They sat there, staring at their desktops, some of them, no doubt, more willing to risk trampling by their loving parents in the streets than to remain imprisoned with their teacher indefinitely. They sat tense and silent, eyes on desks, ears straining in vain to hear the chanting of the strikers. Finally, Miss Finch shook her head. "Dismissed," she said, in the tone of one resigning another to certain ruin.
    The children jumped to their feet and jostled each other to get out the door, all but the still sleeping brothers and Rosa. Rosa got her history book—the only one Mamma had been able to afford—out of her desk and started slowly for the door.
    "Rosa."
    She turned at the sound of her name. Miss Finch was sitting at her desk, straightening books and papers.
    "Yes, Miss Finch."
    "I have hopes for you, Rosa. You're not like the others. You're bright and ambitious. Don't let anyone lead you astray."
    "No, ma'am."
    "No matter what your father says. You must stay in school. You understand?"
    "He's dead, ma'am," Rosa whispered.
    "Sorry?"
    "Papa's dead."
    "Oh, I'm sorry. I should have known that." She fumbled a bit with some pencils. "But it doesn't change what I'm saying. You mustn't let your mother—"
    "No, ma'am."
    She guessed Miss Finch would like her to say that her mother stayed home like a proper American lady and took care of the family. Ever since she had been in the first grade, all her teachers had told the children that in proper homes, unlike the foreign tenements in the Plains, men went out to work and supported their families and women stayed home and cooked nutritious meals and took care of their children. This was the ideal they were to aim for—to leave behind the unnatural lives of their immigrant parents and become Americans. What Miss Finch didn't explain was why American women needed to go to school and study hard if they were just going to stay home and have babies, or why she, with an education, had no husband or babies. It was all very confusing. Still, the one thing that Rosa had learned in her nearly six years of schooling was that education was the key to escape