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prompt 1
prompt 1
Exploited as an immigrantΒ
Exploited as an immigrantΒ
π₯"Remember, learners don't get paid" (page 48).
π₯"Faster! Faster! Faster! Don't you know there are hundreds of girls arriving at Ellis Island right this minute who'd love taking your job? And they'd do it cheaper too. I'd wager" (70).
π₯"Bella forced herself to step a little faster, before he followed up his words with a slap or a punch" (70).
π₯"Bella had tried not to calculate how many thousands and thousands of flowers she'd already made without receiving a cent" (74).
π₯"'They'd never listen to me. I'm nobody and nothing. But someday... someday...'" (101).During the early 1900βsβ¦
Discriminated against as a Girl
Discriminated against as a Girl
π₯"'I'll go find him myself. I'll take you home and then I'll talk to him- it's not like he'd listen to a girl'" (27).Β
π₯"Signora Luciano laughed. 'No respectable female would go into places like that,' she said. 'You go there, I'd be forced to kick you out. Can't have you making a bad influence on my girls'" (53).
π₯ "'Search this one thoroughly' Bella guessed that was what she thought he said because that guard began sliding his hands along her sleeves then reaching for her waist, even her breasts." (page 49)
π₯"Nico was actually worse to walk with, because he was always leering at her and trying to touch her; at least Signor Luciano only hit her" (71).
π₯"Bella wished she could take money to the bank herself, that she could watch the bank officials writing out the directions where the money should go" (71).
π₯"Just because I am a girl, I don't have to be protected that much, she thought. That just made things worse when I did find out, that my family had been dead for so long and I didn't even know it" (175).
Solidarity in Grief
Solidarity in Grief
π₯"The policemen were completely different from how they'd been during the strike: they weren't slamming heads together and beating people... they were patting the backs of sobbing girls. They were... sobbing themselves" (314).Β
π₯When Bella's family had died, she'd felt so alone; she'd been frantic in her grief because she'd been the only one to mourn them" (315).Β
π₯"to Bella, at a moment when everything else seemed so tragically wrong, this, at least, seemed right: that all of New York City was grieving with her" (315).
π₯"I think people remember the Triangle fire because of the strike [...] People had cheered us on. They'd donated money to our cause, they'd bailed us out of jail, they'd marveled at our courage. We weren't faceless and anonymous and easily forgotten after the strike. And then so many of us died so young, so tragically, so soon after. People felt like they knew us. They took our deaths personally" (319).
Prompt 2
Prompt 2
Changing Goals
Changing Goals
π₯"I can't be fired, she told herself. I cannot lose this job" (20).
π₯"'I- I want to know how to read,' she said. 'If I'd been about to read the letter from back home, the one about my family... It wouldn't have changed what it said, but I wouldn't have felt so helpless, so stupid'" (231).
π₯"Yetta, you are saving for your family and Jane, you are saving for college and Europe, and me, there is nothing for me to save for. I so I can pay for our 'nows,' because we are not so poor that we cannot have anything" (267).
π₯"But I wanted to die young, Mama.' Bella sobbed. 'It's all right. I'll be with you'" (306).Β
π₯"No. Mama kept shaking her head, even as she faded back into the smoke, only her voice remaining. You're alive. Live. Save the living" (306).Β
π₯ "Sometimes Mrs. Livingston feels like Yetta, with her perpetual yearning. It's not enough to have two lovely daughters, to have a handsome, loving husband, to have charitable work and new friends and in-laws. Nothing can ever be enough when Mrs. Livingston has such gaping holes in her heart. But Mrs. Livingston has learned to live with that" (328).Β
π₯"She dares to hope that by then it will be hard for her daughter to believe, hard for her to even imagine a time when life meant so little, when tragedy came so easily, when the whole world needed to wake up. She dares to hope that she and her daughters and Harriet Blank can play a role in moving the world further and further away from that time" (329-330).Β
π₯"''We will not be stupid girls. We will not be powerless girls. We will not be useless girls''" (330).
Sense of Belonging to a Cause
Sense of Belonging to a Cause
π₯"But there was one girl in that lineup of picketers who'd once shown Bella the best way to snip threads from shirtwaists, who'd walked her home when Pietro vanished, who'd stopped another striker from hitting her" (131).Β
π₯"'I strike too, then!' Bella said. 'I-' Her Yiddish failed her. "Vendichero la mia famiglia!'" (159).
π₯"'You can come and live with Rahel and me,' Yetta said. 'Girls like us, we stick together'" (165).
π₯"Bella had not known it was possible to stand shoulder to shoulder with another girl, one from Poland or Lithuania or some other place Bella had never heard of, both of them holding signs high over their heads, both of them longing just as strongly for exactly the same thing" (168).Β
π₯"'And that's why I'm fine, don't you see? I'm standing up for myself'" (174).
π₯"And this was something different about Bella, maybe from being on strike and standing up for herself. She wasn't the terrified girl she'd been when she'd first come to America. She wasn't as easily fooled or as desperate as she'd been when Signor Luciano was stealing her money" (176).
π₯"Her family had not come back to life, but it was like she had a family again. She had Yetta and Jane. Her comari" (234).
Relationship with the Lucianos
Relationship with the Lucianos
π₯"'She would cheat you,' he said. 'Every week, there would be a reason she wouldn't pay. She is not an honest woman, Signora Luciano'" (12).Β
π₯"'You have to believe- they were good people, back in Italy. But here, it's always the money, the money, there's never enough money'" (130).
π₯"'I just always thought of him as a little boy. Until I... started thinking of him differently" (321).
π₯ "'They're so different now. We go over there every Sunday, and Mama Luciano is always nice to me'" (322).
π₯"Some weeks, Mrs. Livingston lives for those Sunday visits" (322).
Belief in what is Possible
Belief in what is Possible
π₯ "She has only an eighth-grade diploma, earned at night school, not a college degree. She was illiterate until she was sixteen; she grew up in a one-room hut and slept with goats and chickens. She is, still, nobody" (326).Β
π₯ "'How you live, how you spend your money, they ways you honor their memory- all of that can bring them back. Their spirit, anyway" (327).Β
π₯ "This is why, when they said on the boat, 'Anything is possible in America,,' they were not just talking about striking it rich. This is how I finally escape the fire, by becoming friends with Harriet Blanck, who is trying to escape too" (329).
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