Natural History Club

The Natural History Club, also known as the Hale House Natural History Club, was the organization at Hale House in Boston's West End that played a decisive role in Mary Antin's intellectual and social transformation. It was through this club that Mary, who had a deep aversion to bugs and no interest in nature study, discovered the drama of the natural world and, more significantly, learned her place in the American Commonwealth. Mary herself called her entry into the club the second transformation of her life, as truly as her coming to America was the first great transformation, and she could conjure up no better symbol of the genuine, practical equality of all citizens than this club, which played an important part in her final emancipation from the slums.

Discovery of the Club

Mary came to the Natural History Club almost by accident. Her younger siblings, Joseph and Dora, were so enthusiastic about Hale House that she had to go over and see what it was all about, and there she found the Natural History Club. Mrs. Black, who was then the resident of Hale House, persuaded Mary to try the club in spite of her aversion for bugs. Mary supposed that Mrs. Black had tried her in various girls' clubs and found that she did not fit, any more than she had fitted in the dancing-club she had attempted years before. The club was composed of adults, not people from the neighborhood, but workers at Hale House and their friends, and they often had eminent naturalists, travellers, and other notables lecture before them. Mary's curiosity to see a real live naturalist probably induced her to accept Mrs. Black's invitation in the end, for up to that time she had never met anyone who enjoyed the creepy society of snakes and worms, except in books.

At her first meeting, the club sat in a ring around the reception room, facing the broad doorway of the adjoining room. Mrs. Black introduced her, and Mary said "Glad to meet you" all around the circle, and sat down in a kindergarten chair beside the piano. It was a Friday evening, and she had the sense of leisure which pervades the school-girl's consciousness when there is to be no school on the morrow. She liked the pleasant room, pleasanter than any at home, and she liked the faces of the company she was in, and was prepared to have an agreeable evening, even if she was a little bored.

The Spider Lecture and the Awakening of Nature Study

The evening that changed everything was the lecture on spiders by Mr. Emerson. When Mary heard the subject, her nerves contracted into a tight knot, and she gripped the arms of her little chair, determined not to run with all those strangers looking on. She recalled a hideous experience of long ago, when, putting on a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks, she felt a thing with a hundred legs crawling down her bare arm, and shook a spider out of her sleeve. She watched the lecturer, expecting him to open a box of spiders, but after a while she realized that he had no menagerie in his pockets. He talked, in a familiar way, about different kinds of spiders and their ways, and as he talked, he wove across the doorway, where he stood, a gigantic spider's web, unwinding a ball of twine in his hand, and looping various lengths on invisible tacks he had ready in the door frame.

Mary was fascinated by the progress of the web. She forgot her terrors and began to follow Mr. Emerson's discourse, surprised to hear how much there was to know about a dusty little spider besides that he could spin his webs as fast as her broom could sweep them away. The drama of the spider's daily life became very real to her as the lecturer went on: his struggle for existence, his wars with his enemies, his wiles, his traps, his patient labors, the intricate safeguards of his simple existence, the fitness of his body for his surroundings, of his instincts for his vital needs. The whole picture of the spider's pursuit of life under the direction of definite laws filled her with a great wonder and left no room in her mind for repugnance or fear. It was the first time the natural history of a living creature had been presented to her under such circumstances that she could not avoid hearing and seeing, and she was surprised at her dulness in the past when she had rejected books on natural history.

She did not become an enthusiastic amateur naturalist at once, nor did she at once begin to collect worms and bugs. But on the next sweeping-day she stood on a chair, craning her neck, to study the spider webs she discovered in the corners of the ceiling, and one or two webs of more than ordinary perfection she suffered to remain undisturbed for weeks, although it was her duty, as a house-cleaner, to sweep the ceiling clean. She began to watch for the mice that were wont to scurry across the floor when the house slept and she alone waked, and even placed a crust for them on the threshold of her room, cultivating a breathless intimacy with them when the little gray beasts acknowledged her hospitality by nibbling her crust in full sight. And so by degrees she came to a better understanding of her animal neighbors on all sides, and she began to look forward to the meetings of the Natural History Club.

Field Excursions and the Club's Character

The club had frequent field excursions in addition to the regular meetings. At the seashore, in the woods, in the fields; at high tide and low tide, in summer and winter, by sunlight and by moonlight, the marvellous story of orderly nature was revealed to Mary, in fragments that allured the imagination and made her beg for more. Some of the members of the club were school-teachers, accustomed to answering questions. All of them were patient, and some of them took special pains with her. But nobody took her seriously as a member of the club. They called her the club mascot, and appointed her curator of the club museum, which was not in existence, at a salary of ten cents a year, which was never paid. And she was well pleased with her unique position in the club, delighted with her new friends, enraptured with her new study.

One memorable excursion was the day the club spent at Nahant, studying marine life in the tide pools, scrambling up and down the cliffs with no thought for decorum, bent only on securing the starfish, limpets, sea-urchins, and other trophies of the chase. There had been a merry luncheon on the rocks, with talk and laughter between sandwiches, and strange jokes, intelligible only to the practising naturalist. The tide had rushed in at its proper time, stealing away their seaweed cushions, drowning their transparent pools, spouting in the crevices, booming and hissing, and tossing high the snowy foam.

The Club's Deeper Significance: Citizenship and Equality

For all that Mary was regarded as a plaything by the serious members of the club, the attention and kindness they lavished on her had a deep significance. Every one of those earnest men and women unconsciously taught her her place in the Commonwealth, as the potential equal of the best of them. Few of her friends in the club could have rightly defined their benevolence toward her. Perhaps some of them thought they befriended her for charity's sake, because she was a starved waif from the slums. Some of them imagined they enjoyed her society, because she had much to say for herself, and a gay manner of meeting life. But all these were only secondary motives. Mary herself, in her unclouded perception of the true relation of things that concerned her, could have told them all why they spent their friendship on her. They made way for her because she was their foster sister. They opened their homes to her that she might learn how good Americans lived. In the least of their attentions to her, they cherished the citizen in the making.

This experience of the club stood in stark contrast to the cramped life Mary had known before. She had spent her childhood inland, believing that the great waters of the world were spread out before her in the Dvina, and her idea of the human world had grown enormously during the long journey to America. The club's excursions to the seashore and the woods gave her a new intimacy with nature that she had never had, and this intimacy was part of a larger awakening. She had been a bookworm before she began the study of natural history outdoors, and she confessed with a feeling of shame akin to the lover's how late in her life nature took the first place in her affections. The club's work was thus not merely educational but transformative, turning her from a child who brought grasses and cereals to school only because the teacher ordered it, content when nature study was over and the arithmetic lesson began, into a young woman who could feel the earth conscious of her step.

The club also embodied the promise of America that her father had sought when he led his children to school on that first day, taking long strides in his eagerness, the rest of the family running and hopping to keep up. He had failed in his primary quest for education and culture for himself, but he had a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them: he could send his children to school, to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The Natural History Club, with its adult members who were workers at Hale House and their friends, was one of the institutions that fulfilled this promise, showing Mary that in America everything was possible. It was a world away from the fears of her Russian childhood, when the church bell boomed over the roofs of the houses and she closed her eyes, seeing the people passing into the church, and wondering if it was in the church they would torture her when she refused to kiss the cross. The club, by contrast, was a place where she was free to learn, to wonder, and to grow, and where the natural world itself became a source of spiritual and intellectual renewal.