Miss Dwight

Miss Dwight was Mary Antin's teacher at the Chelsea public school, the figure who first gave institutional recognition to the immigrant girl's extraordinary literary gift. She appears at the pivotal moment when Mary, barely two years into her English education, composed a poem in honor of George Washington for the school's Washington celebration. Where others might have seen only a child's ambitious doggerel, Miss Dwight saw something worth preserving, and her response to the poem — astonishment, kind words, and a stream of questions — marked the first time an American authority figure took Mary's writing seriously as an achievement rather than a curiosity.

Recognition of the Washington Poem

The Washington's Birthday poem was the product of what Mary called "travail of the spirit," a fevered struggle to force lofty sentiments and polysyllabic rhymes out of a vocabulary less than two years old. When Mary finished, she was herself impressed with the poem's length, gravity, and nobility; her father's hands trembled as he held the paper to the light and the mist gathered in his eyes. But it was Miss Dwight who gave the work its first official validation. She was plainly astonished at Mary's performance, said many kind things, and asked many questions, all of which the young poet took very solemnly, "like one who had been in the clouds and returned to earth with a sign upon him." When Miss Dwight asked Mary to read the poem to the class on the day of celebration, Mary readily consented — it was not in her, she said, to refuse a chance to tell her schoolmates what she thought of George Washington.

The Recitation and Its Aftermath

On the great day, Mary stood before her class — thin, pale, and hollow, with a shadow of short black curls on her brow and the staring look of prominent eyes, dressed in a red-and-green plaid frock that had a ghastly effect on her complexion. Heels clapped together and hands glued to her sides, she lifted up her voice in praise of George Washington, her faulty pronunciation and flat declamation notwithstanding. The forty Fellow Citizens in clean blouses and extra frills sat as if fascinated, even the bad boys hypnotized by the solemnity of her demeanor, though they likely understood little of the hail of big words. When she finished, they woke up and applauded heartily, following the example of Miss Dwight, who wore the happy face that meant one of her pupils had done well. The recitation was repeated by request before several other classes, with equally prolonged applause at each repetition, and afterward Mary was surrounded, praised, questioned, and made much of by teachers and pupils alike. The teachers asked if anybody had helped her with the poem; the girls invariably asked how she could have thought of all those words — none of them thought of the dictionary.

The Preservation of the Manuscript

Miss Dwight's most significant act came after the celebration had passed. When Mary, persuaded by someone — perhaps her father — that her tribute to Washington ought to be printed, she crossed the Mystic River to Boston and boldly invaded Newspaper Row with an absolutely perfect copy of her verses, achieved at the expense of a dozen sheets of blue-ruled note paper. The original copy she threw into the wastebasket, laughing at the impossible metres, the grandiose phrases, the verbose repetitions. But Miss Dwight had faithfully preserved that discarded manuscript all those years, and it was this loaned copy that Mary was turning over as she wrote her memoir. Miss Dwight kept the poem, she supposed, "for the sake, no doubt, of what I strove to express when I laboriously hitched together those dozen and more ungraceful stanzas." The preservation was an act of faith in the child's aspiration, a recognition that the striving itself — the laborious hitching together of ungraceful stanzas — was worth remembering even when the result could be laughed at.

Presence at the Graduation

Miss Dwight's connection to Mary extended beyond the single poem. On Graduation Day, when Mary stepped up on the stage to read her composition about her little cousin who had died in far-distant Russia, Miss Dillingham and some others of her Chelsea teachers were present, seated among the guests of honor on the platform. Mary was very proud to see her friends treated with such distinction. The occasion was nothing less than a triumph for Mary, known in her school district as the "smartest" girl in the class, with two pieces to speak, one of them an original composition. Yet the triumph nearly collapsed into catastrophe when, after the exercises, Mary rose to thank her eulogist and was silenced by Mr. Swan, the principal, realizing she had brazenly called attention to herself when there was no need. In her agony of shame, she wondered what Miss Dillingham was thinking of her — the teachers who had nurtured her were precisely the audience whose judgment she most feared.

The Teacher as Mentor and Witness

Miss Dwight belongs to the constellation of American teachers and mentors — Miss Dillingham, Miss Bland, Miss Hale, and others — who passed the immigrant child "from hand to hand by the ready teachers," as Mary herself described the process. Where Miss Dillingham taught Mary the doctrine of the separation of Church and State after the schoolyard religious dispute, and Miss Hale later painted her portrait, Miss Dwight's role was specifically literary: she was the first to recognize, preserve, and celebrate Mary's poetic voice. Her quiet act of keeping the discarded manuscript for years, and her willingness to lend it back when Mary needed to recover her own past, made possible the very scene of recollection in the memoir. The teacher who had once asked the young poet many questions became, in the end, the custodian of the answer — the proof that a Jewish immigrant girl's laboriously composed praise of George Washington had been heard, and had mattered.