The Long Loneliness

Day tells of her childhood. Her father is a journalist and is often away. This leaves her mother to fill in the family history. Her paternal grandfather was a surgeon in the Confederate Army. Her mother’s father spoke “in a hoarse whisper” because of having tuberculosis as a youth (15). As a child, Day loves to hear about family tradition. She observes that people in the United States “lose their cult and their culture and their skills, and leave their faith and folk songs and costumes and handcrafts, and try to be something which they call ‘an American’” (16). Perhaps she clings to faith because she does not want to lose the feeling of connection to something greater than herself. However, she does not remember whether her ancestors believed in God, and as a child, she doesn’t recall ever asking the question.

As children, Day notes, she and her siblings “took God for granted” (17). They only pray when they need something. However, they do have an idea of what is right and what is wrong, which includes property rights. As infants and beyond, possession is power. The other siblings always want what the other one has. They do know that stealing is wrong. Morality, sex, and violence also have to do with the rights of property. They are ashamed of sex once they knew what it is. Intercourse then becomes evil, without them being sure why. As teens, they wonder how something associated with beauty and love could be so shameful. They also begin to understand the social outlooks surrounding sex. A baby out of wedlock is a sin and the blame falls upon the woman who has birthed the baby.

Day does not remember going to church at that time, but the children did pray at school. When she is very young, they live in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, where she is born on November 8, 1897. She recalls playing in the water around Fort Hamilton. The family moves to Berkeley, California, and then to Oakland. When Day moves to California, there is a neighbor who is very religious, and she goes to her house and prays with her: “No one went to church but me. I was alternately lonely and smug. At the same time, I began to be afraid of God, of death, of eternity” (20).

Day begins to have nightmares. She wonders whether these nightmares came before or after the famous 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which occurs when she is 8 years old: “The very remembrance of the noise which kept getting louder and louder, and the keen fear of death, makes me think now that [the dreams] might have only been due to the earthquake” (20). In any case, Day’s family is forced to move because the newspaper office where her father worked has caught on fire during the disaster. The week after the earthquake, Day and her family move to Chicago. 

The Day family moves to a place in Chicago facing Lake Michigan and the railroad tracks. Later on, the family moves to smaller, shabbier housing. Day is impressed by how her mother, then about 35 years old, raises four children in a small, six-room apartment without any help. As a result, she and her sister begin to assist their mother. Day notes that “[she] had imbibed a ‘philosophy of work,’ enjoying the creative aspect of it as well as getting satisfaction from a hard and necessary job well done” (24). This work ethic would prove useful to her later in life.

During her time in Chicago, Day has a friend named Mary Harrington who tells her about a saint. The young Dorothy Day doesn’t know what a saint even is, but when she learns about this person’s life, her heart feels like it is bursting. She wants to have a life like this saint. Another neighbor, Mrs. Barrett, shows Day what it is like to lead a Catholic life. She is always praying in the morning. Her neighbor shows her how to do it, and Day begins to pray every night.