Caroling with Dorothy Day
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives.
January 1, 1958, Vol. III, No. 10
Postscript to Christmas
By Howard Smith
On Christmas Eve, Dorothy Day returned to the Womens House of Detention where she had spent almost a month this summer. With her were fellow members of the Catholic Worker Movement, pacifists, individualists -- several of whom had also gone to jail for refusing, because of their convictions, to take shelter during an air-raid drill. They had come to Village Square to sing carols to the women inside. They stood in the freezing street opposite the towering building, and sang...
Some passersby approached with the wry smile of sophistication, but no one sneered when he got close. In fact a great many stopped to join in.
...I sang right along with the group. I was singing with Catholic Workers, tourist, sailors, Villagers, actors, and a drunken woman who also felt the magnetism. We sang ourselves to tears to a bunch of tough girls we would never see.
[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job archive page to see excerpts back to 1956.]
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