Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 1

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes.

I remember running in the dust behind the medicine truck when it
came to the reservation, lifesavers was a free treat.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, of fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis.

That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact.

Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here. Four raggedy excuses planted by the city.

Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.

Last year New Jersey took a long backward step. A good law was repealed which had required women and [children] to stop work at six in the evening and at noon on Friday.

Would the New Jersey Legislature have passed that shameful repeal bill enabling girls of fourteen years to work all night, if the mothers in New Jersey were enfranchised?

They carry bundles of garments from the factories to the tenements, little beasts of burden, robbed of school life that they may work for us.

But we are almost powerless. Not wholly powerless, however, are citizens who enjoy the right of petition.

But we are almost powerless. Not wholly powerless, however, are citizens who enjoy the right of petition.

The England I was looking at was laid out on a map gently, beautifully, delicately, a very special jewel: it lay on a bed of sky blue—the background of the map—its yellow form mysterious, because though it looked like a leg of mutton, it could not really look like anything so familiar as a leg of mutton because it was England—with shadings of pink and green, unlike any shadings of pink and green I had seen before, squiggly veins of red running in every direction.

The shoes I wore were made in England; so were my socks and cotton undergarments and the satin ribbons I wore tied at the end of two plaits of my hair.