Deliverance from Evil

In the early 1900’s, no other city in the country was like mine. It was so very vibrant with people who fascinated me. I noticed some wore strange fashions and spoke with unusual accents. Later, of course, I was to learn of all the foreign delegations that were present in the city of Washington, and that all the states in the union sent representatives to the Congress. Their homes were opulent and designed solely for entertaining. The city was also vibrant with beautification projects and activities. There was always building going on, monuments being dedicated, and parades—so many parades!

While some swamp land and dirt roads remained on the outskirts, the city’s streets were mostly paved or bricked. Broad, tree lined avenues, like spokes on a wheel, extended from the Capitol. Pennsylvania avenue was dense with shops and hotels. There were parks with lawns, fountains, and statuary located on the squares, circles, and triangles formed by the intersecting streets. The Central Market was downtown, and I always wanted to go with Mama for I enjoyed the bustling activity and the ride to and from.

The sidewalks were made of brick and concrete, leaving room for trees planted along the way. It was nothing to walk many miles in a day, but there were also the street cars and horse-drawn carriages, and as far back as I can remember, automobiles were coming more and more into common use. Papa had one of the first cars in the city. Once, as he approached an intersection with a policeman in the middle of the street, Papa put out his hand to signal a left hand turn and the policeman shook it! Mama wasn’t too keen on them, at first, because of the noise and spewing exhaust, but in time, she began to appreciate their usefulness.

I was kept from seeing the section of the city where the negroes lived, apart from the rest of us, and the alleys where impoverished families were crowded together in horrid living conditions. That was their life, and I had mine. All I genuinely experienced was from within my own circle. My father made his reputation and fortune in Washington, where society was wide open to the nouveau riches, a circumstance not found in other East Coast cities. This is the city in which I lived, and grew, and fell in love.

My father, T. F. Schneider was an architect and a builder of thousands of various dwellings. My earliest memory was living in the house my father built on Q Street, where I was born, and then, when I was about five or six, we moved to the Cairo. Papa’s revolutionary design created the Cairo as a hotel for elegant apartment living. Built of brick and stone supported by a steel skeleton, no one, but he, was confident in this innovative structure. The first steel-framed building, and the city’s first and only skyscraper at one hundred and fifty-six feet high, was an architectural triumph. It was, for a time, one of the most luxurious hotels in Washington. The “Cairo,” as it was called, drew the famous, the rich, and the mighty. It was here that my story took place.

I was just a girl of seventeen when I first laid eyes on Tom. I was in the budding stage of life and, as I tended to think in terms of ideals, I made him the object of my idealism. With little experience of love and life, this was easy to do, especially as my most significant relationships affirmed the ideals I had been formulating. Other girls my age thought the same as I, moving within the conventions of the late-Victorian era—marry young and in love, and seek a union that will provide for our well-being and maintain our status in society. This way of thinking compelled a necessary dependence upon a man. Therefore, all I dreamed of was a future happiness in my own little home. It was a simple dream, but a dream that would cost me much.