THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN
Who and where are the slum children of New York to-day? That depends on
what is understood by the term. The moralist might seek them in Hell's
Kitchen, in Battle Row, and in the tenements, east and west, where the
descendants of the poorest Irish immigrants live. They are the ones, as I
have before tried to show, upon whom the tenement and the saloon set their
stamp soonest and deepest. The observer of physical facts merely would
doubtless pick out the Italian ragamuffins first, and from his standpoint
he would be right. Irish poverty is not picturesque in the New World,
whatever it may have been in the Old. Italian poverty is. The worst old
rookeries fall everywhere in this city to the share of the immigrants from
Southern Italy, who are content to occupy them, partly, perhaps, because
they are no worse than the hovels they left behind, but mainly because
they are tricked or bullied into putting up with them by their smarter
countrymen who turn their helplessness and ignorance to good account.
Wherever the invasion of some old home section by the tide of business has
left ramshackle tenements falling into hopeless decay, as in the old
"Africa," in the Bend, and in many other places in the down-town wards,
the Italian sweater landlord is ready with his offer of a lease to bridge
over the interregnum, a lease that takes no account of repairs or of the
improvements the owner sought to avoid. The crowds to make it profitable
to him are never wanting. The bait he holds out is a job at the ash-dump
with which he connects at the other end of the line. The house, the job,
and the man as he comes to them fit in well together, and the
copartnership has given the Italian a character which, I am satisfied from
close observation of him, he does not wholly deserve. At all events, his
wife does not. Dirty as _he_ seems and is in the old rags that harmonize
so well with his surroundings, there is that about her which suggests not
only the capacity for better things, but a willingness to be clean and to
look decent, if cause can be shown. It may be a bright kerchief, a bit of
old-fashioned jewelry, or the neatly smoothed and braided hair of the
wrinkled old hag who presides over the stale bread counter. Even in the
worst dens occupied by these people, provided that they had not occupied
them too long, I have found this trait crop out in the careful scrubbing
of some piece of oil-cloth rescued from the dump and laid as a mat in
front of the family bed; or in a bit of fringe on the sheet or quilt,
ragged and black with age though it was, that showed what a fruitful soil
proper training and decent housing would have found there.
I have in mind one Italian "flat" among many, a half underground hole in a
South Fifth Avenue yard, reached by odd passage-ways through a tumbledown
tenement that was always full of bad smells and scooting rats. Across the
foul and slippery yard, down three steps made of charred timbers from some
worse wreck, was this "flat," where five children slept with their elders.
How many of those there were I never knew. There were three big family
beds, and they nearly filled the room, leaving only patches of the mud
floor visible. The walls were absolutely black with age and smoke. The
plaster had fallen off in patches and there was green mould on the
ceiling. And yet, with it all, with the swarm of squirming youngsters that
were as black as the floor they rolled upon, there was evidence of a
desperate, if hopeless, groping after order, even neatness. The beds were
made up as nicely as they could be with the old quilts and pieces of
carpet that served for covering. In Poverty Gap, where an Italian would be
stoned as likely as not, there would have been a heap of dirty straw
instead of beds, and the artistic arrangement of tallow-dips stuck in the
necks of bottles about the newspaper cut of a saint on the corner shelf
would have been missing altogether, fervent though the personal regard
might be of Poverty Gap for the saint. The bottles would have been the
only part of the exhibition sure to be seen there.
I am satisfied that this instinct inhabits not only the more aristocratic
Genoese, but his fellow countryman from the southern hills as well, little
as they resemble each other or agree in most things. But the Neapolitan
especially does not often get a chance to prove it. He is so altogether
uninviting an object when he presents himself, fresh from the steamer,
that he falls naturally the victim of the slum tenement, which in his keep
becomes, despite the vigilance of the sanitary police, easily enough the
convenient depot and half-way house between the garbage-dump and the
bone-factory. Starting thus below the bottom, as it were, he has an
up-hill journey before him if he is to work out of the slums, and the
promise, to put it mildly, is not good. He does it all the same, or, if
not he, his boy. It is not an Italian sediment that breeds the tough.
Parental authority has a strong enough grip on the lad in Mulberry Street
to make him work, and that is his salvation. "In seventeen years," said
the teacher of the oldest Italian ragged school in the city that, day and
night, takes in quite six hundred, "I have seen my boys work up into
decent mechanics and useful citizens almost to a man, and of my girls only
two I know of have gone astray." I had observed the process often enough
myself to know that she was right. It is to be remembered, furthermore,
that her school is in the very heart of the Five Points district, and
takes in always the worst and the dirtiest crowds of children.
Within a year there has been, through some caprice of immigration, a
distinct descent in the quality of the children, viewed from even the
standard of cleanliness that prevails at the Five Points. Perhaps the
exodus from Italy has worked farther south, where there seems to be an
unusual supply of mud. Perhaps the rivalry of steamship lines has brought
it about. At any rate, the testimony is positive that the children that
came to the schools after last vacation, and have kept coming since, were
the worst seen here since the influx began. I have watched with
satisfaction, since this became apparent, some of the bad old tenements,
which the newcomers always sought in droves, disappear to make room for
great factory buildings. But there are enough left. The cleaning out of a
Mulberry Street block left one lop-sided old rear tenement that had long
since been shut in on three sides by buildings four stories higher than
itself, and forgotten by all the world save the miserable wretches who
burrowed in that dark and dismal pit at the bottom of a narrow alley. Now,
when the fourth structure goes up against its very windows, it will stand
there in the heart of the block, a survival of the unfittest, that, in all
its disheartening dreariness, bears testimony, nevertheless, to the
beneficent activity of the best Board of Health New York has ever had--the
onward sweep of business. It will wipe that last remnant out also, even
if the law lack the power to reach it.
Shoals of Italian children lived in that rookery, and in those the workmen
tore down, in the actual physical atmosphere of the dump. Not a gun-shot
away there is a block of tenements, known as the Mott Street Barracks, in
which still greater shoals are--I was going to say housed, but that would
have been a mistake. Happily they are that very rarely, except when they
are asleep, and not then if they can help it. Out on the street they may
be found tumbling in the dirt, or up on the roof lying stark-naked,
blinking in the sun--content with life as they find it. If they are not a
very cleanly crew, they are at least as clean as the frame they are set
in, though it must be allowed that something has been done of late years
to redeem the buildings from the reproach of a bad past. The combination
of a Jew for a landlord and a saloon-keeper--Italian, of course--for a
lessee, was not propitious; but the buildings happen to be directly under
the windows of the Health Board, and something, I suppose, was due to
appearances. The authorities did all that could be done, short of tearing
down the tenement, but though comparatively clean, and not nearly as
crowded as it was, it is still the old slum. It is an instructive instance
of what can and cannot be done with the tenements into which we invite
these dirty strangers to teach them American ways and the self-respect of
future citizens and voters. There are five buildings--that is, five front
and four rear houses, the latter a story higher than those on the street;
that is because the rear houses were built last, to "accommodate" this
very Italian immigration that could be made to pay for anything. Chiefly
Irish had lived there before, but they moved out then. There were 360
tenants in the Barracks when the police census was taken in 1888, and 40
of them were babies. How many were romping children I do not know. The
"yard" they had to play in is just 5 feet 10 inches wide, and a dozen
steps below the street-level. The closets of all the buildings are in the
cellar of the rear houses and open upon this "yard," where it is always
dark and damp as in a dungeon. Its foul stenches reach even the top floor,
but so also does the sun at mid-day, and that is a luxury that counts as
an extra in the contract with the landlord. The rent is nearly one-half
higher near the top than it is on the street-level. Nine dollars above,
six and a half below, for one room with windows, two without, and with
barely space for a bed in each. But water-pipes have been put in lately,
under orders from the Health Department, and the rents have doubtless been
raised. "No windows" means no ventilation. The rear building backs up
against the tenement on the next street; a space a foot wide separates
them, but an attempt to ventilate the bed-rooms by windows on that was a
failure.
When the health officers got through with the Barracks in time for the
police census of 1891, the 360 tenants had been whittled down to 238, of
whom 47 were babies under five years. Persistent effort had succeeded in
establishing a standard of cleanliness that was a very great improvement
upon the condition prevailing in 1888. But still, as I have said, the slum
remained and will remain as long as that rear tenement stands. In the four
years fifty-one funerals had gone out from the Barracks. The white hearse
alone had made thirty-five trips carrying baby coffins. This was the way
the two standards showed up in the death returns at the Bureau of Vital
Statistics: in 1888 the adult death-rate, in a population of 320 over five
years old, was 15.62 per 1,000; the baby death-rate, 325.00 per 1,000,
or nearly one-third in a total of 40. As a matter of fact 13 of the 40 had
died that year. The adult death-rate for the entire tenement population of
more than a million souls was that year 12.81, and the baby death-rate
88.38. Last year, in 1891, the case stood thus: Total population, 238,
including 47 babies. Adult death-rate per 1,000, 20.94; child death-rate
(under five years) per 1,000, 106.38. General adult death-rate for 1891 in
the tenements, 14.25; general child death-rate for 1891 in the tenements,
86.67. It should be added that the reduced baby death-rate of the
Barracks, high as it was, was probably much lower than it can be
successfully maintained. The year before, in 1890, when practically the
same improved conditions prevailed, it was twice as high. Twice as many
babies died.
[Illustration: THE MOTT STREET BARRACKS.]
I have referred to some of the typical Italian tenements at some length to
illustrate the conditions under which their children grow up and absorb
the impressions that are to shape their lives as men and women. Is it to
be marvelled at, if the first impression of them is sometimes not
favorable? I recall, not without amusement, one of the early experiences
of a committee with which I was trying to relieve some of the child misery
in the East Side tenements by providing an outing for the very poorest of
the little ones, who might otherwise have been overlooked. In our anxiety
to make our little charges as presentable as possible, it seems we had
succeeded so well as to arouse a suspicion in our friends at the other end
of the line that something was wrong, either with us or with the poor of
which the patrician youngsters in new frocks and with clean faces, that
came to them, were representatives. They wrote to us that they were in the
field for the "slum children," and slum children they wanted. It happened
that their letter came just as we had before us two little lads from the
Mulberry Street Bend, ragged, dirty, unkempt, and altogether a sight to
see. Our wardrobe was running low, and we were at our wits' end how to
make these come up to our standard. We sat looking at each other after we
had heard the letter read, all thinking the same thing, until the most
courageous said it: "Send them as they are." Well, we did, and waited
rather breathlessly for the verdict. It came, with the children, in a note
by return train, that said: "Not _that_ kind, please!" And after that we
were allowed to have things our own way.
The two little fellows were Italians. In justice to our frightened
friends, it should be said that it was not their nationality, but their
rags, to which they objected; but not very many seasons have passed since
the crowding of the black-eyed brigade of "guinnies," as they were
contemptuously dubbed, in ever-increasing numbers, into the ragged schools
and the kindergartens, was watched with regret and alarm by the teachers,
as by many others who had no better cause. The event proved that the
children were the real teachers. They had a more valuable lesson to impart
than they came to learn, and it has been a salutary one. To-day they are
gladly welcomed. Their sunny temper, which no hovel is dreary enough, no
hardship has power to cloud, has made them universal favorites, and the
discovery has been made by their teachers that as the crowds pressed
harder their school-rooms have marvellously expanded, until they embrace
within their walls an unsuspected multitude, even many a slum tenement
itself, cellar, "stoop," attic, and all. Every lesson of cleanliness, of
order, and of English taught at the school is reflected into some wretched
home, and rehearsed there as far as the limited opportunities will allow.
No demonstration with soap and water upon a dirty little face but widens
the sphere of these chief promoters of education in the slums. "By 'm by,"
said poor crippled Pietro to me, with a sober look, as he labored away on
his writing lesson, holding down the paper with his maimed hand, "I learn
t' make an Englis' letter; maybe my fadder he learn too." I had my doubts
of the father. He sat watching Pietro with a pride in the achievement that
was clearly proportionate to the struggle it cost, and mirrored in his own
face every grimace and contortion the progress of education caused the
boy. "Si! si!" he nodded, eagerly. "Pietro he good a boy; make Englis',
Englis'!" and he made a flourish with his clay-pipe, as if he too were
making the English letter that was the object of their common veneration.
Perhaps it is as much his growing and well-founded distrust of the
middle-man, whose unresisting victim he has heretofore been, and his need
of some other joint to connect him with the English-speaking world that
surrounds him, as any personal interest in book-learning, that impels the
illiterate Italian to bring his boy to school early and see that he
attends it. Greed has something to do with it too. In their anxiety to lay
hold of the child, the charity schools have fallen into a way of bidding
for him with clothes, shoes, and other bait that is never lost on Mulberry
Street. Even sectarian scruples yield to such an argument, and the
parochial school, where they get nothing but on the contrary are expected
to contribute, gets left.
In a few charity schools where the children are boarded they have
discovered this, and frown upon Italian children unless there is the best
of evidence that the father is really unable to pay for their keep and
not simply unwilling. But whatever his motive, the effect is to
demonstrate in a striking way the truth of the observation that real
reform of poverty and ignorance must begin with the children. In his case,
at all events, the seed thus sown bears some fruit in the present as well
as in the coming generation of toilers. The little ones, with their new
standards and new ambitions, become in a very real sense missionaries of
the slums, whose work of regeneration begins with their parents. They are
continually fetched away from school by the mother or father to act as
interpreters or go-betweens in all the affairs of daily life, to be
conscientiously returned within the hour stipulated by the teacher, who
offers no objection to this sort of interruption, knowing it to be the
best condition of her own success. One cannot help the hope that the
office of trust with which the children are thus invested may, in some
measure, help to mitigate their home-hardships. From their birth they have
little else, though Italian parents are rarely cruel in the sense of
abusing their offspring.
It is the home itself that constitutes their chief hardship. It is only
when his years offer the boy an opportunity of escape to the street, that
a ray of sunlight falls into his life. In his backyard or in his alley it
seldom finds him out. Thenceforward most of his time is spent there, until
the school and the shop claim him, but not in idleness. His mother toiled,
while she bore him at her breast, under burdens heavy enough to break a
man's back. She lets him out of her arms only to share her labor. How well
he does it anyone may see for himself by watching the children that swarm
where an old house is being torn down, lugging upon their heads loads of
kindling wood twice their own size and sometimes larger than that. They
come, as crows scenting carrion, from every side at the first blow of the
axe. Their odd old-mannish or old-womanish appearance, due more to their
grotesque rags than to anything in the children themselves, betrays their
race even without their chatter. Be there ever so many children of other
nationalities nearer by--the wood-gatherers are nearly all Italians. There
are still a lot of girls among them who drag as big loads as their
brothers, but since the sewing machine found its way, with the sweater's
mortgage, into the Italian slums also, little Antonia has been robbed to a
large extent even of this poor freedom, and has taken her place among the
wage-earners when not on the school-bench. Once taken, the place is hers
to keep for good. Sickness, unless it be mortal, is no excuse from the
drudgery of the tenement. When, recently, one little Italian girl, hardly
yet in her teens, stayed away from her class in the Mott Street Industrial
School so long that her teacher went to her home to look her up, she found
the child in a high fever, in bed, sewing on coats, with swollen eyes,
though barely able to sit up.
But neither poverty nor hard knocks has power to discourage the child of
Italy. His nickname he pockets with a grin that has in it no thought of
the dagger and the revenge that come to solace his after years. Only the
prospect of immediate punishment eclipses his spirits for the moment.
While the teacher of the sick little girl was telling me her pitiful story
in the Mott Street school, a characteristic group appeared on the
stairway. Three little Italian culprits in the grasp of Nellie, the tall
and slender Irish girl who was the mentor of her class for the day. They
had been arrested "fur fightin'" she briefly explained as she dragged them
by the collar toward the principal, who just then appeared to inquire the
cause of the rumpus, and thrust them forward to receive sentence. The
three, none of whom was over eight years old, evidently felt that they
were in the power of an enemy from whom no mercy was to be expected, and
made no appeal for any. One scowled defiance. He was evidently the injured
party.
"He hit-a me a clip on de jaw," he said in his defence, in the dialect of
Mott Street with a slight touch of "the Bend." The aggressor, a heavy
browed little ruffian, hung back with a dreary howl, knuckling his eyes
with a pair of fists that were nearly black. The third and youngest was in
a state of bewilderment that was most ludicrous. He only knew that he had
received a kick on the back and had struck out in self-defence, when he
was seized and dragged away a prisoner. He was so dirty--school had only
just begun and there had been no time for the regular inspection--that he
was sentenced on the spot to be taken down and washed, while the other two
were led away to the principal's desk. All three went out howling.
I said that the Italians do not often abuse their children downright. The
padrone has had his day; the last was convicted seven years ago, and an
end has been put to the business of selling children into a slavery that
meant outrage, starvation, and death; but poverty and ignorance are
fearful allies in the homes of the poor against defenceless childhood,
even without the child-beating fiend. Two cases which I encountered in the
East Side tenements, in the summer of 1891, show how the combination works
at its worst. Without a doubt they are typical of very many, though I hope
that few come quite up to their standard. The one was the case of little
Carmen, who last March died in the New York Hospital, where she had lain
five long months, the special care of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children. One of the summer corps doctors found her in a Mott
Street tenement, within stone-throw of the Health Department office,
suffering from a wasting disease that could only be combated by the most
careful nursing. He put her case into the hands of the King's Daughters'
Committee that followed in the steps of the doctor, and it was then that I
saw her. She lay in a little back room, up two flights and giving upon a
narrow yard where it was always twilight. The room was filthy and close,
and entirely devoid of furniture, with the exception of a rickety stool, a
slop pail, and a rusty old stove, one end of which was propped up with
bricks. Carmen's bed was a board laid across the top of a barrel and a
trunk set on end. I could not describe, if I would, the condition of the
child when she was raised from the mess of straw and rags in which she
lay. The sight unnerved even the nurse, who had seen little else than such
scenes all summer. Loathsome bedsores had attacked the wasted little body,
and in truth Carmen was more dead than alive. But when, shocked and
disgusted, we made preparations for her removal with all speed to the
hospital, the parents objected and refused to let us take her away. They
had to be taken into court and forced to surrender the child under warrant
of law, though it was clearly the little sufferer's only chance for life,
and only the slenderest of chances at that.
Carmen was the victim of the stubborn ignorance that dreads the hospital
and the doctor above the discomfort of the dirt and darkness and suffering
that are its every-day attendants. Her parents were no worse than the
Monroe Street mother who refused to let the health officer vaccinate her
baby, because her crippled boy, with one leg an inch shorter than the
other, had "caught it"--the lame leg, that is to say--from his
vaccination. She knew it was so, and with ignorance of that stamp there is
no other argument than force. But another element entered into the case of
a sick Essex Street baby. The tenement would not let it recover from a bad
attack of scarlet fever, and the parents would not let it be taken to the
country or to the sea-shore, despite all efforts and entreaties. When
their motive came out at last, it proved to be a mercenary one. They were
behind with the rent, and as long as they had a sick child in the house
the landlord could not put them out. Sick, the baby was to them a source
of income, at all events a bar to expense, and in that way so much
capital. Well, or away, it would put them at the mercy of the
rent-collector at once. So they chose to let it suffer. The parents were
Jews, a fact that emphasizes the share borne by desperate poverty in the
transaction, for the family tie is notoriously strong among their people.
No doubt Mott Street echoed with the blare of brass bands when poor little
Carmen was carried from her bed of long suffering to her grave in Calvary.
Scarce a day passes now in these tenements that does not see some little
child, not rarely a new-born babe, carried to the grave in solemn state,
preceded by a band playing mournful dirges and followed by a host with
trailing banners, from some wretched home that barely sheltered it alive.
No suspicion of the ludicrous incongruity of the show disturbs the
paraders. It seems as if, but one remove from the dump, an insane passion
for pomp and display, perhaps a natural reaction from the ash-barrel, lies
in wait for this Italian, to which he falls a helpless victim. Not content
with his own national and religious holidays and those he finds awaiting
him here, he has invented or introduced a system of his own, a sort of
communal celebration of proprietary saints, as it were, that has taken
Mulberry Street by storm. As I understand it, the townsmen of some Italian
village, when there is a sufficient number of them within reach, club
together to celebrate its patron saint, and hire a band and set up a
gorgeous altar in a convenient back yard. The fire-escapes overlooking it
are draped with flags and transformed into reserved-seat galleries with
the taste these people display under the most adverse circumstances.
Crowds come and go, parading at intervals in gorgeous uniforms around the
block. Admission is by the saloon-door, which nearly always holds the key
to the situation, the saloonist who prompts the sudden attack of devotion
being frequently a namesake of the saint and willing to go shares on the
principle that he takes the profit and the saint the glory.
[Illustration: AN ITALIAN HOME UNDER A DUMP.]
The partnership lasts as long as there is any profit in it, sometimes the
better part of the week, during which time all work stops. If the feast
panned out well, the next block is liable to be the scene of a rival
celebration before the first is fairly ended. As the supply of Italian
villages represented in New York is practically as inexhaustible as that
of the saloons, there is no reason why Mulberry Street may not become a
perennial picnic ground long before the scheme to make a park of one end
of it gets under way. From the standpoint of the children there can be no
objection to this, but from that of the police there is. They found
themselves called upon to interfere in such a four days' celebration of
St. Rocco last year, when his votaries strung cannon fire-crackers along
the street the whole length of the block and set them all off at once. It
was at just such a feast, in honor of the same saint, that a dozen
Italians were killed a week later at Newark in the explosion of their
fireworks.
It goes without saying that the children enter into this sort of thing
with all the enthusiasm of their little souls. The politician watches it
attentively, alert for some handle to catch his new allies by and effect
their "organization." If it is a new experience for him to find the saloon
put to such use, he betrays no surprise. It is his vantage ground, and
whether it serve as the political bait for the Irishman, or as the
religious initiative of the Italian, is of less account than that its
patrons, young and old, in the end fall into his trap. Conclusive proof
that the Italian has been led into camp came to me on last St. Patrick's
Day through the assurance of a certain popular clergyman, that he had
observed, on a walk through the city, a number of hand-organs draped in
green, evidently for the occasion.
This dump of which I have spoken as furnishing the background of the
social life of Mulberry Street, has lately challenged attention as a slum
annex to the Bend, with fresh horrors in store for defenceless childhood.
To satisfy myself upon this point I made a personal inspection of the
dumps along both rivers last winter and found the Italian crews at work
there making their home in every instance among the refuse they picked
from the scows. The dumps are wooden bridges raised above the level of the
piers upon which they are built to allow the discharge of the carts
directly into the scows moored under them. Under each bridge a cabin had
been built of old boards, oil-cloth, and the like, that had found its way
down on the carts; an old milk-can had been made into a fireplace without
the ceremony of providing stove-pipe or draught, and here, flanked by
mountains of refuse, slept the crews of from half a dozen to three times
that number of men, secure from the police, who had grown tired of driving
them from dump to dump and had finally let them alone. There were women at
some of them, and at four dumps, three on the North River and one on the
East Side, I found boys who ought to have been at school, picking bones
and sorting rags. They said that they slept there, and as the men did, why
should they not? It was their home. They were children of the dump,
literally. All of them except one were Italians. That one was a little
homeless Jew who had drifted down at first to pick cinders. Now that his
mother was dead and his father in a hospital, he had become a sort of
fixture there, it seemed, having made the acquaintance of the other lads.
[Illustration: A CHILD OF THE DUMP.]
Two boys whom I found at the West Nineteenth Street dumps sorting bones
were as bright lads as I had seen anywhere. One was nine years old and
the other twelve. Filthy and ragged, they fitted well into their
environment--even the pig I had encountered at one of the East River dumps
was much the more respectable, as to appearance, of the lot--but were
entirely undaunted by it. They scarcely remembered anything but the dump.
Neither could read, of course. Further down the river I came upon one
seemingly not over fifteen, who assured me that he was twenty-one. I
thought it possible when I took a closer look at him. The dump had stunted
him. He did not even know what a letter was. He had been there five years,
and garbage limited his mental as well as his physical horizon.
Enough has been said to show that the lot of the poor child of the
Mulberry Street Bend, or of Little Italy, is not a happy one, courageously
and uncomplainingly, even joyously, though it be borne. The stories of two
little lads from the region of Crosby Street always stand to me as typical
of their kind. One I knew all about from personal observation and
acquaintance; the other I give as I have it from his teachers in the Mott
Street Industrial School, where he was a pupil in spells. It was the death
of little Giuseppe that brought me to his home, a dismal den in a rear
tenement down a dark and forbidding alley. I have seldom seen a worse
place. There was no trace there of a striving for better things--the
tenement had stamped that out--nothing but darkness and filth and misery.
From this hole Giuseppe had come to the school a mass of rags, but with
that jovial gleam in his brown eyes that made him an instant favorite with
the teachers as well as with the boys. One of them especially, little
Mike, became attached to him, and a year after his cruel death shed tears
yet, when reminded of it. Giuseppe had not been long at the school when
he was sent to an Elizabeth Street tenement for a little absentee. He
brought her, shivering in even worse rags than his own; it was a cold
winter day.
"This girl is very poor," he said, presenting her to the teacher, with a
pitying look. It was only then that he learned that she had no mother. His
own had often stood between the harsh father and him when he came home
with unsold evening papers. Giuseppe fished his only penny out of his
pocket--his capital for the afternoon's trade. "I would like to give her
that," he said. After that he brought her pennies regularly from his day's
sale, and took many a thrashing for it. He undertook the general
supervision of the child's education, and saw to it that she came to
school every day. Giuseppe was twelve years old.
There came an evening when business had been very bad, so bad that he
thought a bed in the street healthier for him than the Crosby Street
alley. With three other lads in similar straits he crawled into the iron
chute that ventilated the basement of the Post-office on the Mail Street
side and snuggled down on the grating. They were all asleep, when fire
broke out in the cellar. The three climbed out, but Giuseppe, whose feet
were wrapped in a mail-bag, was too late. He was burned to death.
The little girl still goes to the Mott Street school. She is too young to
understand, and marvels why Giuseppe comes no more with his pennies. Mike
cries for his friend. When, some months ago, I found myself in the Crosby
Street alley, and went up to talk to Giuseppe's parents, they would answer
no questions before I had replied to one of theirs. It was thus
interpreted to me by a girl from the basement, who had come in out of
curiosity:
"Are youse goin' to give us any money?" Poor Giuseppe!
My other little friend was Pietro, of whom I spoke before. Perhaps of all
the little life-stories of poor Italian children I have come across in the
course of years--and they are many and sad, most of them--none comes
nearer to the hard every-day fact of those dreary tenements than his,
exceptional as was his own heavy misfortune and its effect upon the boy. I
met him first in the Mulberry Street police-station, where he was
interpreting the defence in a shooting case, having come in with the crowd
from Jersey Street, where the thing had happened at his own door. With his
rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, he seemed to fit
in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of
the police-station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but
for his maimed hand and his oddly grave yet eager face, which no smile
ever crossed despite his thirteen years. Of both, his story, when I
afterward came to know it, gave me full explanation. He was the oldest son
of a laborer, not "borned here" as the rest of his sisters and brothers.
There were four of them, six in the family besides himself, as he put it:
"2 sisters, 2 broders, 1 fader, 1 modder," subsisting on an unsteady
maximum income of $9 a week, the rent taking always the earnings of one
week in four. The home thus dearly paid for was a wretched room with a
dark alcove for a bed-chamber, in one of the vile old barracks that until
very recently preserved to Jersey Street the memory of its former bad
eminence as among the worst of the city's slums. Pietro had gone to the
Sisters' school, blacking boots in a haphazard sort of way in his
off-hours, until the year before, upon his mastering the alphabet, his
education was considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his
graduating into the ranks of the family wage-earners, that were sadly in
need of recruiting. A steady job of "shinin'" was found for him in an
Eighth Ward saloon, and that afternoon, just before Christmas, he came
home from school and putting his books away on the shelf for the next in
order to use, ran across Broadway full of joyous anticipation of his new
dignity in an independent job. He did not see the street-car until it was
fairly upon him, and then it was too late. They thought he was killed, but
he was only crippled for life. When, after many months, he came out of the
hospital, where the company had paid his board and posed as doing a
generous thing, his bright smile was gone; his "shining" was at an end,
and with it his career as it had been marked out for him. He must needs
take up something new, and he was bending all his energies, when I met
him, toward learning to make the "Englis' letter" with a degree of
proficiency that would justify the hope of his doing something somewhere
at sometime to make up for what he had lost. It was a far-off possibility
yet. With the same end in view, probably, he was taking nightly
writing-lessons in his mother-tongue from one of the perambulating
schoolmasters who circulate in the Italian colony, peddling education
cheap in lots to suit. In his sober, submissive way he was content with
the prospect. It had its compensations. The boys who used to worry him,
now let him alone. "When they see this," he said, holding up his scarred
and misshapen arm, "they don't strike me no more." Then there was his
fourteen months old baby brother who was beginning to walk, and could
almost "make a letter." Pietro was much concerned about his education,
anxious evidently that he should one day take his place. "I take him to
school sometime," he said, piloting him across the floor and talking
softly to the child in his own melodious Italian. I watched his grave,
unchanging face.
[Illustration: PIETRO LEARNING TO MAKE AN ENGLIS' LETTER.]
"Pietro," I said, with a sudden yearning to know, "did you ever laugh?"
The boy glanced from the baby to me with a wistful look.
"I did wonst," he said, quietly, and went on his way. And I would gladly
have forgotten that I ever asked the question; even as Pietro had
forgotten his laugh.