TONY AND HIS TRIBE
I have a little friend somewhere in Mott Street whose picture comes up
before me. I wish I could show it to the reader, but to photograph Tony is
one of the unattained ambitions of my life. He is one of the whimsical
birds one sees when he hasn't got a gun, and then never long enough in one
place to give one a chance to get it. A ragged coat three sizes at least
too large for the boy, though it has evidently been cropped to meet his
case, hitched by its one button across a bare brown breast; one sleeve
patched on the under side with a piece of sole-leather that sticks out
straight, refusing to be reconciled; trousers that boasted a seat once,
but probably not while Tony has worn them; two left boots tied on with
packing twine, bare legs in them the color of the leather, heel and toe
showing through; a shock of sunburnt hair struggling through the rent in
the old straw hat; two frank, laughing eyes under its broken brim--that is
Tony.
He stood over the gutter the day I met him, reaching for a handful of mud
with which to "paste" another hoodlum who was shouting defiance from
across the street. He did not see me, and when my hand touched his
shoulder his whole little body shrank with a convulsive shudder, as from
an expected blow. Quick as a flash he dodged, and turning, out of reach,
confronted the unknown enemy, gripping tight his handful of mud. I had a
bunch of white pinks which a young lady had given me half an hour before
for one of my little friends. "They are yours," I said, and held them out
to him, "take them."
Doubt, delight, and utter bewilderment struggled in the boy's face. He
said not one word, but when he had brought his mind to believe that it
really was so, clutched the flowers with one eager, grimy fist, held them
close against his bare breast, and, shielding them with the other, ran as
fast as his legs could carry him down the street. Not far; fifty feet away
he stopped short, looked back, hesitated a moment, then turned on his
track as fast as he had come. He brought up directly in front of me, a
picture a painter would have loved, ragamuffin that he was, with the
flowers held so tightly against his brown skin, scraped out with one foot
and made one of the funniest little bows.
"Thank you," he said. Then he was off. Down the street I saw squads of
children like himself running out to meet him. He darted past and through
them all, never stopping, but pointing back my way, and in a minute there
bore down upon me a crowd of little ones, running breathless with
desperate entreaty: "Oh, mister! give _me_ a flower." Hot tears of grief
and envy--human passions are much the same in rags and in silks--fell when
they saw I had no more. But by that time Tony was safe.
And where did he run so fast? For whom did he shield the "posy" so
eagerly, so faithfully, that ragged little wretch that was all mud and
patches? I found out afterward when I met him giving his sister a ride in
a dismantled tomato-crate, likely enough "hooked" at the grocer's. It was
for his mother. In the dark hovel he called home, to the level of which
all it sheltered had long since sunk through the brutal indifference of a
drunken father, my lady's pinks blossomed, and, long after they were
withered and yellow, still stood in their cracked jar, visible token of
something that had entered Tony's life and tenement with sweetening touch
that day for the first time. Alas! for the last, too, perhaps. I saw Tony
off and on for a while and then he was as suddenly lost as he was found,
with all that belonged to him. Moved away--put out, probably--and, except
the assurance that they were still somewhere in Mott Street, even the
saloon could give me no clue to them.
I gained Tony's confidence, almost, in the time I knew him. There was a
little misunderstanding between us that had still left a trace of
embarrassment when Tony disappeared. It was when I asked him one day,
while we were not yet "solid," if he ever went to school. He said
"sometimes," and backed off. I am afraid Tony lied that time. The evidence
was against him. It was different with little Katie, my nine-year-old
housekeeper of the sober look. Her I met in the Fifty-second Street
Industrial School, where she picked up such crumbs of learning as were for
her in the intervals of her housework. The serious responsibilities of
life had come early to Katie. On the top floor of a tenement in West
Forty-ninth Street she was keeping house for her older sister and two
brothers, all of whom worked in the hammock factory, earning from $4.50 to
$1.50 a week. They had moved together when their mother died and the
father brought home another wife. Their combined income was something like
$9.50 a week, and the simple furniture was bought on instalments. But it
was all clean, if poor. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking of the
plain kind. They did not run much to fancy cooking, I guess. She scrubbed
and swept and went to school, all as a matter of course, and ran the
house generally, with an occasional lift from the neighbors in the
tenement, who were, if anything, poorer than they. The picture shows what
a sober, patient, sturdy little thing she was, with that dull life wearing
on her day by day. At the school they loved her for her quiet, gentle
ways. She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a
question and without a smile.
"What kind of work do you do?" I asked, thinking to interest her while I
made ready.
"I scrubs," she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she
scrubbed came out clean.
[Illustration: "I SCRUBS."--KATIE, WHO KEEPS HOUSE IN WEST FORTY-NINTH
STREET.]
Katie was one of the little mothers whose work never ends. Very early the
cross of her sex had been laid upon the little shoulders that bore it so
stoutly. Tony's, as likely as not, would never begin. There were ear-marks
upon the boy that warranted the suspicion. They were the ear-marks of the
street to which his care and education had been left. The only work of
which it heartily approves is that done by other people. I came upon Tony
once under circumstances that foreshadowed his career with tolerable
distinctness. He was at the head of a gang of little shavers like himself,
none over eight or nine, who were swaggering around in a ring, in the
middle of the street, rigged out in war-paint and hen-feathers, shouting
as they went: "Whoop! We are the Houston Streeters." They meant no harm
and they were not doing any just then. It was all in the future, but it
was there, and no mistake. The game which they were then rehearsing was
one in which the policeman who stood idly swinging his club on the corner
would one day take a hand, and not always the winning one.
The fortunes of Tony and Katie, simple and soon told as they are,
encompass as between the covers of a book the whole story of the children
of the poor, the story of the bad their lives struggle vainly to conquer,
and the story of the good that crops out in spite of it. Sickness, that
always finds the poor unprepared and soon leaves them the choice of
beggary or starvation, hard times, the death of the bread-winner, or the
part played by the growler in the poverty of the home, may vary the theme
for the elders; for the children it is the same sad story, with little
variation, and that rarely of a kind to improve. Happily for their peace
of mind, they are the least concerned about it. In New York, at least, the
poor children are not the stunted repining lot we have heard of as being
hatched in cities abroad. Stunted in body perhaps. It was said of Napoleon
that he shortened the average stature of the Frenchman one inch by getting
all the tall men killed in his wars. The tenement has done that for New
York. Only the other day one of the best known clergymen in the city, who
tries to attract the boys to his church on the East Side by a very
practical interest in them, and succeeds admirably in doing it, told me
that the drill-master of his cadet corps was in despair because he could
barely find two or three among half a hundred lads verging on manhood,
over five feet six inches high. It is queer what different ways there are
of looking at a thing. My medical friend finds in the fact that poverty
stunts the body what he is pleased to call a beautiful provision of nature
to prevent unnecessary suffering: there is less for the poverty to pinch
then. It is self-defence, he says, and he claims that the consensus of
learned professional opinion is with him. Yet, when this shortened
sufferer steals a loaf of bread to make the pinching bear less hard on
what is left, he is called a thief, thrown into jail, and frowned upon by
the community that just now saw in his case a beautiful illustration of
the operation of natural laws for the defence of the man.
Stunted morally, yes! It could not well be otherwise. But stunted in
spirits--never! As for repining, there is no such word in his vocabulary.
He accepts life as it comes to him and gets out of it what he can. If that
is not much, he is not justly to blame for not giving back more to the
community of which by and by he will be a responsible member. The kind of
the soil determines the quality of the crop. The tenement is his soil and
it pervades and shapes his young life. It is the tenement that gives up
the child to the street in tender years to find there the home it denied
him. Its exorbitant rents rob him of the schooling that is his one chance
to elude its grasp, by compelling his enrolment in the army of
wage-earners before he has learned to read. Its alliance with the saloon
guides his baby feet along the well-beaten track of the growler that
completes his ruin. Its power to pervert and corrupt has always to be
considered, its point of view always to be taken to get the perspective
in dealing with the poor, or the cart will seem to be forever getting
before the horse in a way not to be understood. We had a girl once at our
house in the country who left us suddenly after a brief stay and went back
to her old tenement life, because "all the green hurt her eyes so." She
meant just what she said, though she did not know herself what ailed her.
It was the slum that had its fatal grip upon her. She longed for its
noise, its bustle, and its crowds, and laid it all to the green grass and
the trees that were new to her as steady company.
From this tenement the street offered, until the kindergarten came not
long ago, the one escape, does yet for the great mass of children--a
Hobson's choice, for it is hard to say which is the most corrupting. The
opportunities rampant in the one are a sad commentary on the sure
defilement of the other. What could be expected of a standard of decency
like this one, of a household of tenants who assured me that Mrs. M----,
at that moment under arrest for half clubbing her husband to death, was "a
very good, a very decent, woman indeed, and if she did get full, he (the
husband) was not much." Or of the rule of good conduct laid down by a
young girl, found beaten and senseless in the street up in the Annexed
District last autumn: "Them was two of the fellers from Frog Hollow," she
said, resentfully, when I asked who struck her; "them toughs don't know
how to behave theirselves when they see a lady in liquor."
Hers was the standard of the street, the other's that of the tenement.
Together they stamp the child's life with the vicious touch which is
sometimes only the caricature of the virtues of a better soil. Under the
rough burr lie undeveloped qualities of good and of usefulness, rather,
perhaps, of the capacity for them, that crop out in constant exhibitions
of loyalty, of gratitude, and true-heartedness, a never-ending source of
encouragement and delight to those who have made their cause their own and
have in their true sympathy the key to the best that is in the children.
The testimony of a teacher for twenty-five years in one of the ragged
schools, who has seen the shanty neighborhood that surrounded her at the
start give place to mile-long rows of big tenements, leaves no room for
doubt as to the influence the change has had upon the children. With the
disappearance of the shanties--homesteads in effect, however humble--and
the coming of the tenement crowds, there has been a distinct descent in
the scale of refinement among the children, if one may use the term. The
crowds and the loss of home privacy, with the increased importance of the
street as a factor, account for it. The general tone has been lowered,
while at the same time, by reason of the greater rescue-efforts put
forward, the original amount of ignorance has been reduced. The big loafer
of the old day, who could neither read nor write, has been eliminated to a
large extent, and his loss is our gain. The tough who has taken his place
is able at least to spell his way through "The Bandits' Cave," the pattern
exploits of Jesse James and his band, and the newspaper accounts of the
latest raid in which he had a hand. Perhaps that explains why he is more
dangerous than the old loafer. The transition period is always critical,
and a little learning is proverbially a dangerous thing. It may be that in
the day to come, when we shall have got the grip of our compulsory school
law in good earnest, there will be an educational standard even for the
tough, by which time he will, I think, have ceased to exist from sheer
disgust, if for no other reason. At present he is in no immediate danger
of extinction from such a source. It is not how much book-learning the boy
can get, but how little he can get along with, and that is very little
indeed. He knows how to make a little go a long way, however, and to serve
on occasion a very practical purpose; as, for instance, when I read
recently on the wall of the church next to my office in Mulberry Street
this observation, chalked in an awkward hand half the length of the wall:
"Mary McGee is engagd to the feller in the alley." Quite apt, I should
think, to make Mary show her colors and to provoke the fight with the
rival "feller" for which the writer was evidently spoiling. I shall get
back, farther on, to the question of the children's schooling. It is so
beset by lies ordinarily as to be seldom answered as promptly and as
honestly as in the case of a little fellow whom I found in front of St.
George's Church, engaged in the aesthetic occupation of pelting the
Friends' Seminary across the way with mud. There were two of them, and
when I asked them the question that estranged Tony, the wicked one dug his
fists deep down in the pockets of his blue-jeans trousers and shook his
head gloomily. He couldn't read; didn't know how; never did.
"He?" said the other, who could, "he? He don't learn nothing. He throws
stones." The wicked one nodded. It was the extent of his education.
But if the three R's suffer neglect among the children of the poor, their
lessons in the three D's--Dirt, Discomfort, and Disease--that form the
striking features of their environment, are early and thorough enough. The
two latter, at least, are synonymous terms, if dirt and discomfort are
not. Any dispensary doctor knows of scores of cases of ulceration of the
eye that are due to the frequent rubbing of dirty faces with dirty little
hands. Worse filth diseases than that find a fertile soil in the
tenements, as the health officers learn when typhus and small-pox break
out. It is not the desperate diet of ignorant mothers, who feed their
month-old babies with sausage, beer, and Limburger cheese, that alone
accounts for the great infant mortality among the poor in the tenements.
The dirt and the darkness in their homes contribute their full share, and
the landlord is more to blame than the mother. He holds the key to the
situation which her ignorance fails to grasp, and it is he who is
responsible for much of the unfounded and unnecessary prejudice against
foreigners, who come here willing enough to fall in with the ways of the
country that are shown to them. The way he shows them is not the way of
decency. I am convinced that the really injurious foreigners in this
community, outside of the walking delegate's tribe, are the foreign
landlords of two kinds: those who, born in poverty abroad, have come up
through tenement-house life to the ownership of tenement property, with
all the bad traditions of such a career; and the absentee landlords of
native birth who live and spend their rents away from home, without
knowing or caring what the condition of their property is, so the income
from it suffer no diminution. There are honorable exceptions to the first
class, but few enough to the latter to make them hardly worth mentioning.
To a good many of the children, or rather to their parents, this latter
statement and the experience that warrants it must have a sadly familiar
sound. The Irish element is still an important factor in New York's
tenements, though it is yielding one stronghold after another to the
Italian foe. It lost its grip on the Five Points and the Bend long ago,
and at this writing the time seems not far distant when it must vacate for
good also that classic ground of the Kerryman, Cherry Hill. It is Irish
only by descent, however; the children are Americans, as they will not
fail to convince the doubter. A school census of this district, the Fourth
Ward, taken last winter, discovered 2,016 children between the ages of
five and fourteen years. No less than 1,706 of them were put down as
native born, but only one-fourth, or 519, had American parents. Of the
others 572 had Irish and 536 Italian parents. Uptown, in many of the poor
tenement localities, in Poverty Gap, in Battle Row, and in Hell's Kitchen,
in short, wherever the gang flourishes, the Celt is still supreme and
seasons the lump enough to give it his own peculiar flavor, easily
discovered through its "native" guise in the story of the children of the
poor.
The case of one Irish family that exhibits a shoal which lies always close
to the track of ignorant poverty is even now running in my mind, vainly
demanding a practical solution. I may say that I have inherited it from
professional philanthropists, who have struggled with it for more than
half a dozen years without finding the way out they sought.
There were five children when they began, depending on a mother who had
about given up the struggle as useless. The father was a loafer. When I
took them the children numbered ten, and the struggle was long since over.
The family bore the pauper stamp, and the mother's tears, by a transition
imperceptible probably to herself, had become its stock in trade. Two of
the children were working, earning all the money that came in; those that
were not lay about in the room, watching the charity visitor in a way and
with an intentness that betrayed their interest in the mother's appeal. It
required very little experience to make the prediction that, shortly, ten
pauper families would carry on the campaign of the one against society, if
those children lived to grow up. And they were not to blame, of course. I
scarcely know which was most to be condemned, when we tried to break the
family up by throwing it on the street as a necessary step to getting
possession of the children--the politician who tripped us up with his
influence in the court, or the landlord who had all those years made the
poverty on the second floor pan out a golden interest. It was the
outrageous rent for the filthy den that had been the most effective
argument with sympathizing visitors. Their pity had represented to him, as
nearly as I could make out, for eight long years, a capital of $2,600
invested at six per cent., payable monthly. The idea of moving was
preposterous; for what other landlord would take in a homeless family with
ten children and no income?
Children anywhere suffer little discomfort from mere dirt. As an
ingredient of mud-pies it may be said to be not unwholesome. Play with the
dirt is better than none without it. In the tenements the children and the
dirt are sworn and loyal friends. In his early raids upon the established
order of society, the gutter backs the boy up to the best of its ability,
with more or less exasperating success. In the hot summer days, when he
tries to sneak into the free baths with every fresh batch, twenty times a
day, wretched little repeater that he is, it comes to his rescue against
the policeman at the door. Fresh mud smeared on the face serves as a
ticket of admission which no one can refuse. At least so he thinks, but in
his anxiety he generally overdoes it and arouses the suspicion of the
policeman, who, remembering that he was once a boy himself, feels of his
hair and reads his title there. When it is a mission that is to be raided,
or a "dutch" grocer's shop, or a parade of the rival gang from the next
block, the gutter furnishes ammunition that is always handy. Dirt is a
great leveller;[6] it is no respecter of persons or principles, and
neither is the boy where it abounds. In proportion as it accumulates such
raids increase, the Fresh Air Funds lose their grip, the saloon
flourishes, and turbulence grows. Down from the Fourth Ward, where there
is not much else, this wail came recently from a Baptist Mission Church:
"The Temple stands in a hard spot and neighborhood. The past week we had
to have arrested two fellows for throwing stones into the house and
causing annoyance. On George Washington's Birthday we had not put a flag
over the door on Henry Street half an hour before it was stolen. When they
neither respect the house of prayer or the Stars and Stripes one can feel
young America is in a bad state." The pastor added that it was a comfort
to him to know that the "fellows" were Catholics; but I think he was
hardly quite fair to them there. Religious enthusiasm very likely had
something to do with it, but it was not the moving cause. The dirt was; in
other words: the slum.
Such diversions are among the few and simple joys of the street child's
life, Not all it affords, but all the street has to offer. The Fresh Air
Funds, the free excursions, and the many charities that year by year
reach farther down among the poor for their children have done and are
doing a great work in setting up new standards, ideals, and ambitions in
the domain of the street. One result is seen in the effort of the poorest
mothers to make their little ones presentable when there is anything to
arouse their maternal pride. But all these things must and do come from
the outside. Other resources than the sturdy independence that is its
heritage the street has none. Rightly used, that in itself is the greatest
of all. Chief among its native entertainments is that crowning joy, the
parade of the circus when it comes to town in the spring. For many hours
after that has passed, as after every public show that costs nothing, the
matron's room at Police Headquarters is crowded with youngsters who have
followed it miles and miles from home, devouring its splendors with hungry
eyes until the last elephant, the last soldier, or the last policeman
vanished from sight and the child comes back to earth again and to the
knowledge that he is lost.
If the delights of his life are few, its sorrows do not sit heavily upon
him either. He is in too close and constant touch with misery, with death
itself, to mind it much. To find a family of children living, sleeping,
and eating in the room where father or mother lies dead, without seeming
to be in any special distress about it, is no unusual experience. But if
they do not weigh upon him, the cares of home leave their mark; and it is
a bad mark. All the darkness, all the drudgery is there. All the freedom
is in the street; all the brightness in the saloon to which he early finds
his way. And as he grows in years and wisdom, if not in grace, he gets his
first lessons in spelling and in respect for the law from the card behind
the bar, with the big black letters: "No liquor sold here to children."
His opportunities for studying it while the barkeeper fills his growler
are unlimited and unrestricted.
Someone has said that our poor children do not know how to play. He had
probably seen a crowd of tenement children dancing in the street to the
accompaniment of a hand-organ and been struck by their serious mien and
painfully formal glide and carriage--if it was not a German neighborhood,
where the "proprieties" are less strictly observed--but that was only
because it was a ball and it was incumbent on the girls to act as ladies.
Only ladies attend balls. "London Bridge is falling down," with as loud a
din in the streets of New York, every day, as it has fallen these hundred
years and more in every British town, and the children of the Bend march
"all around the mulberry-bush" as gleefully as if there were a green shrub
to be found within a mile of their slum. It is the slum that smudges the
game too easily, and the kindergarten work comes in in helping to wipe off
the smut. So far from New York children being duller at their play than
those of other cities and lands, I believe the reverse to be true. Only in
the very worst tenements have I observed the children's play to languish.
In such localities two policemen are required to do the work of one.
Ordinarily they lack neither spirit nor inventiveness. I watched a crowd
of them having a donkey party in the street one night, when those parties
were all the rage. The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a
knot of tenement-house children with tails improvised from a newspaper,
and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly
across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a
heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any
crowd of children could have got in a fine parlor, until the storekeeper
came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide where
the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails;
every block a ball-ground when the policeman's back is turned, and every
roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city
ordinance "below Fourteenth Street."
[Illustration: PRESENT TENANTS OF JOHN ERICSSON'S OLD HOUSE NOW THE BEACH
STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.]
It is rather that their opportunities of mischief are greater than those
of harmless amusement; made so, it has sometimes seemed to me, with
deliberate purpose to hatch the "tough." Given idleness and the street,
and he will grow without other encouragement than an occasional "fanning"
of a policeman's club. And the street has to do for a playground. There is
no other. Central Park is miles away. The small parks that were ordered
for his benefit five years ago exist yet only on paper. Games like
kite-flying and ball-playing, forbidden but not suppressed, as happily
they cannot be, become from harmless play a successful challenge of law
and order, that points the way to later and worse achievements. Every year
the police forbid the building of election bonfires, and threaten
vengeance upon those who disobey the ordinance; and every election night
sees the sky made lurid by them from one end of the town to the other,
with the police powerless to put them out. Year by year the boys grow
bolder in their raids on property when their supply of firewood has given
out, until the destruction wrought at the last election became a matter of
public scandal. Stoops, wagons, and in one place a show-case, containing
property worth many hundreds of dollars, were fed to the flames. It has
happened that an entire frame house has been carried off piecemeal, and
burned up election night. The boys, organized in gangs, with the one
condition of membership that all must "give in wood," store up enormous
piles of fuel for months before, and though the police find and raid a
good many of them, incidentally laying in supplies of kindling-wood for
the winter, the pile grows again in a single night, as the neighborhood
reluctantly contributes its ash-barrels to the cause. The germ of the
gangs that terrorize whole sections of the city at intervals, and feed our
courts and our jails, may without much difficulty be discovered in these
early and rather grotesque struggles of the boys with the police.
Even on the national day of freedom the boy is not left to the enjoyment
of his firecracker without the ineffectual threat of the law. I am not
defending the firecracker, but arraigning the failure of the law to carry
its point and maintain its dignity. It has robbed the poor child of the
street-band, one of his few harmless delights, grudgingly restoring the
hand-organ, but not the monkey that lent it its charm. In the band that,
banished from the street, sneaks into the back-yard, horns and bassoons
hidden under bulging coats, the boy hails no longer the innocent purveyor
of amusement, but an ally in the fight with the common enemy, the
policeman. In the Thanksgiving Day and New Year parades which the latter
formally permits, he furnishes them with the very weapon of gang
organization which they afterward turn against him to his hurt.
And yet this boy who, when taken from his alley into the country for the
first time, cries out in delight, "How blue the sky and what a lot of it
there is!"--not much of it at home in his barrack--has in the very love of
dramatic display that sends him forth to beat a policeman with his own
club or die in the attempt, in the intense vanity that is only a
perverted form of pride, capable of any achievement, a handle by which he
may be most easily grasped and led. It cannot be done by gorging him _en
masse_ with apples and gingerbread at a Christmas party.[7] It can be done
only by individual effort, and by the influence of personal character in
direct contact with the child--the great secret of success in all dealings
with the poor. Foul as the gutter he comes from, he is open to the
reproach of "bad form" as few of his betters. Greater even than his desire
eventually to "down" a policeman, is his ambition to be a "gentleman," as
his sister's to be a "lady." The street is responsible for the caricature
either makes of the character. On a play-bill I saw in an East Side
street, only the other day, this _repertoire_ set down: "Thursday--The
Bowery Tramp; Friday--The Thief." It was a theatre I knew newsboys, and
the other children of the street who were earning money, to frequent in
shoals. The play-bill suggested the sort of training they received there.
I wish I might tell the story of some of these very lads whom certain
enthusiastic friends of mine tried to reclaim on a plan of their own, in
which the gang became a club and its members "Knights," who made and
executed their own laws; but I am under heavy bonds of promises made to
keep the peace on this point. The fact is, I tried it once, and my
well-meant effort made no end of trouble. I had failed to appreciate the
stride of civilization that under my friends' banner marched about the
East Side with seven-league boots. They read the magazines down there and
objected, rather illogically, to being "shown up." The incident was a
striking revelation of the wide gap between the conditions that prevail
abroad and those that confront us. Fancy the _Westminster Review_ or the
_Nineteenth Century_ breeding contention among the denizens of East London
by any criticism of their ways? Yet even from Hell's Kitchen had I not
long before been driven forth with my camera by a band of angry women, who
pelted me with brickbats and stones on my retreat, shouting at me never to
come back unless I wanted my head broken, or let any other "duck" from the
(mentioning a well-known newspaper of which I was unjustly suspected of
being an emissary) poke his nose in there. Reform and the magazines had
not taken that stronghold of toughdom yet, but their vanguard, the
newspapers, had evidently got there.
"It only shows," said one of my missionary friends, commenting upon the
East Side incident, "that we are all at sixes and at sevens here." It is
our own fault. In our unconscious pride of caste most of us are given to
looking too much and too long at the rough outside. These same workers
bore cheerful testimony to the "exquisite courtesy" with which they were
received every day in the poorest homes; a courtesy that might not always
know the ways of polite society, but always tried its best to find them.
"In over fifty thousand visits," reports a physician, whose noble life is
given early and late to work that has made her name blessed where sorrow
and suffering add their sting to bitter poverty, "personal violence has
been attempted on but two occasions. In each case children had died from
neglect of parents, who, in their drunken rage, would certainly have taken
the life of the physician, had she not promptly run away." Patience and
kindness prevailed even with these. The doctor did not desert them, even
though she had had to run, believing that one of the mothers at least
drank because she was poor and unable to find work; and now, after five
years of many trials and failures, she reports that the family is at work
and happy and grateful in rooms "where the sun beams in." Gratitude,
indeed, she found to be their strong point, always seeking an outlet in
expression--evidence of a lack of bringing up, certainly. "Once," she
says, "the thankful fathers of two of our patients wished to vote for us,
as 'the lady doctors have no vote.' Their intention was to vote for
General Butler; we have proof that they voted for Cleveland. They have
even placed their own lives in danger for us. One man fought a duel with a
woman, she having said that women doctors did not know as much as men.
After bar-tumblers were used as weapons the question was decided in favor
of women doctors by the man. It seemed but proper that 'the lady doctor'
was called in to bind up the wounds of her champion, while a 'man doctor'
performed the service for the woman."
My friends, in time, by their gentle but firm management, gained the
honest esteem and loyal support of the boys whose manners and minds they
had set out to improve, and through such means worked wonders. While some
of their experiences were exceedingly funny, more were of a kind to show
how easily the material could be moulded, if the hands were only there to
mould it. One of their number, by and by, hung out her shingle in another
street with the word "Doctor" over the bell (not the physician above
referred to), but her "character" had preceded her, and woe to the urchin
who as much as glanced at that when the gang pulled all the other bells
in the block and laughed at the wrath of the tenants. One luckless chap
forgot himself far enough to yank it one night, and immediately an angry
cry went up from the gang, "Who pulled dat bell?" "Mickey did," was the
answer, and Mickey's howls announced to the amused doctor the next minute
that he had been "slugged" and she avenged. This doctor's account of the
first formal call of the gang in the block was highly amusing. It called
in a body and showed a desire to please that tried the host's nerves not a
little. The boys vied with each other in recounting for her entertainment
their encounters with the police enemy, and in exhibiting their intimate
knowledge of the wickedness of the slums in minutest detail. One, who was
scarcely twelve years old, and had lately moved from Bayard Street, knew
all the ins and outs of the Chinatown opium dives, and painted them in
glowing colors. The doctor listened with half-amused dismay, and when the
boys rose to go, told them she was glad they had called. So were they,
they said, and they guessed they would call again the next night.
"Oh! don't come to-morrow," said the doctor, in something of a fright;
"come next week!" She was relieved upon hearing the leader of the gang
reprove the rest of the fellows for their want of style. He bowed with
great precision, and announced that he would call "in about two weeks."
The testimony of these workers agrees with that of most others who reach
the girls at an age when they are yet manageable, that the most abiding
results follow with them, though they are harder to get at. The boys
respond more readily, but also more easily fall from grace. The same good
and bad traits are found in both; the same trying superficiality--which
merely means that they are raw material; the same readiness to lie as the
shortest cut out of a scrape; the same generous helpfulness,
characteristic of the poor everywhere. Out of the depth of their bitter
poverty I saw the children in the West Fifty-second Street Industrial
School, last Thanksgiving, bring for the relief of the aged and helpless
and those even poorer than they such gifts as they could--a handful of
ground coffee in a paper bag, a couple of Irish potatoes, a little sugar
or flour, and joyfully offer to carry them home. It was on such a trip I
found little Katie. In her person and work she answered the question
sometimes asked, why we hear so much about the boys and so little of the
girls; because the home and the shop claim their work much earlier and to
a much greater extent, while the boys are turned out to shift for
themselves, and because, therefore, their miseries are so much more
commonplace, and proportionally uninteresting. It is a woman's lot to
suffer in silence. If occasionally she makes herself heard in querulous
protest; if injustice long borne gives her tongue a sharper edge than the
occasion seems to require, it can at least be said in her favor that her
bark is much worse than her bite. The missionary who complains that the
wife nags her husband to the point of making the saloon his refuge, or the
sister her brother until he flees to the street, bears testimony in the
same breath to her readiness to sit up all night to mend the clothes of
the scamp she so hotly denounces. Sweetness of temper or of speech is not
a distinguishing feature of tenement-house life, any more among the
children than with their elders. In a party sent out by our committee for
a summer vacation on a Jersey farm, last summer, was a little knot of six
girls from the Seventh Ward. They had not been gone three days before a
letter came from one of them to the mother of one of the others. "Mrs.
Reilly," it read, "if you have any sinse you will send for your child."
That they would all be murdered was the sense the frightened mother made
out of it. The six came home post haste, the youngest in a state of high
dudgeon at her sudden translation back to the tenement. The lonesomeness
of the farm had frightened the others. She was little more than a baby,
and her desire to go back was explained by one of the rescued ones thus:
"She sat two mortil hours at the table a stuffin' of herself, till the
missus she says, says she, 'Does yer mother lave ye to sit that long at
the table, sis?'" The poor thing was where there was enough to eat for
once in her life, and she was making the most of her opportunity.
Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that
discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. It
was in March a year ago that a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human
shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the
tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with
his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out
the child, she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the
smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen climbing after, groped
around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came
upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll's trunk over the
floor.
"I could not leave it," she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized
her; "my mother----"
They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the
sidewalk and, breaking open, revealed no doll or finery, but the deed for
her dead mother's grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her
thirteen years.
Yet Bessie might, likely would, have been found in the front row where
anything was going on or to be had, crowding with the best of them and
thrusting herself and her claim forward regardless of anything or anybody
else. It is a quality in the children which, if not admirable, is at least
natural. The poor have to take their turn always, and too often it never
comes, or, as in the case of the poor young mother, whom one of our
committee found riding aimlessly in a street car with her dying baby, not
knowing where to go or what to do, when it is too late. She took mother
and child to the dispensary. It was crowded and they had to wait their
turn. When it came the baby was dead. It is not to be expected that
children who have lived the lawless life of the street should patiently
put up with such a prospect. That belongs to the discipline of a life of
failure and want. The children know generally what they want and they go
for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to
give or pictures to take. In the latter case they reversed my Hell's
Kitchen experience with a vengeance. Their determination to be "took," the
moment the camera hove in sight, in the most striking pose they could
hastily devise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met. The
recollection of one such occasion haunts me yet. They were serving a
Thanksgiving dinner free to all comers at a charitable institution in
Mulberry Street, and more than a hundred children were in line at the door
under the eye of a policeman when I tried to photograph them. Each one of
the forlorn host had been hugging his particular place for an hour,
shivering in the cold as the line slowly advanced toward the door and the
promised dinner, and there had been numberless little spats due to the
anxiety of some one farther back to steal a march on a neighbor nearer the
goal; but the instant the camera appeared the line broke and a howling mob
swarmed about me, up to the very eye of the camera, striking attitudes on
the curb, squatting in the mud in alleged picturesque repose, and shoving
and pushing in a wild struggle to get into the most prominent position.
With immense trouble and labor the policeman and I made a narrow lane
through the crowd from the camera to the curb, in the hope that the line
might form again. The lane was studded, the moment I turned my back, with
dirty faces that were thrust into it from both sides in ludicrous anxiety
lest they should be left out, and in the middle of it two frowsy,
ill-favored girls, children of ten or twelve, took position, hand in hand,
flatly refusing to budge from in front of the camera. Neither jeers nor
threats moved them. They stood their ground with a grim persistence that
said as plainly as words that they were not going to let this, the supreme
opportunity of their lives, pass, cost what it might. In their rags,
barefooted, and in that disdainful pose in the midst of a veritable bedlam
of shrieks and laughter, they were a most ludicrous spectacle. The boys
fought rather shy of them, of one they called "Mag" especially, as it
afterward appeared with good reason. A chunk of wood from the outskirts of
the crowd that hit Mag on the ear at length precipitated a fight in which
the boys struggled ten deep on the pavement, Mag in the middle of the
heap, doing her full share. As a last expedient I bethought myself of a
dog-fight as the means of scattering the mob, and sent around the corner
to organize one. Fatal mistake! At the first suggestive bark the crowd
broke and ran in a body. Not only the hangers-on, but the hungry line
collapsed too in an instant, and the policeman and I were left alone. As
an attraction the dog-fight outranked the dinner.
This unconquerable vanity, if not turned to use for his good, makes a
tough of the lad with more muscle than brains in a perfectly natural way.
The newspapers tickle it by recording the exploits of his gang with
embellishments that fall in exactly with his tastes. Idleness encourages
it. The home exercises no restraint. Parental authority is lost. At a
certain age young men of all social grades know a heap more than their
fathers, or think they do. The young tough has some apparent reason for
thinking that way. He has likely learned to read. The old man has not; he
probably never learned anything, not even to speak the language that his
son knows without being taught. He thinks him "dead slow," of course, and
lays it to his foreign birth. All foreigners are "slow." The father works
hard. The boy thinks he knows a better plan. The old man has lost his grip
on the lad, if he ever had any. That is the reason why the tough appears
in the second generation and disappears in the third. By that time father
and son are again on equal terms, whatever those terms may be. The
exception to this rule is in the poorest Irish settlements where the
manufacture of the tough goes right on, aided by the "inflooence" of the
police court on one side and the saloon on the other. Between the two the
police fall unwillingly into line. I was in the East Thirty-fifth Street
police station one night when an officer came in with two young toughs
whom he had arrested in a lumber yard where they were smoking and
drinking. They had threatened to kill him and the watchman, and loaded
revolvers were taken from them. In spite of this evidence against them,
the Justice in the police court discharged them on the following morning
with a scowl at the officer, and they were both jeering at him before
noon. Naturally he let them alone after that. It was one case of hundreds
of like character. The politician, of course, is behind them. Toughs have
votes just as they have brickbats and brass-knuckles; when the emergency
requires, an assortment to suit of the one as of the other.
The story of the tough's career I told in "How the Other Half Lives," and
there is no need of repeating it here. Its end is generally lurid, always
dramatic. It is that even when it comes to him "with his boots off," in a
peaceful sick bed. In his bravado one can sometimes catch a glimpse of the
sturdiest traits in the Celtic nature, burlesqued and caricatured by the
tenement. One who had been a cut-throat, bruiser, and prizefighter all his
brief life lay dying from consumption in his Fourth Ward tenement not long
ago. He had made what he proudly called a stand-up fight against the
disease until now the end had come and he had at last to give up.
"Maggie," he said, turning to his wife with eyes growing dim, "Mag! I had
an iron heart, but now it is broke. Watch me die!" And Mag told it proudly
at the wake as proof that Pat died game.
And the girl that has come thus far with him? Fewer do than one might
think. Many more switch off their lovers to some honest work this side of
the jail, making decent husbands of them as they are loyal wives, thus
proving themselves truly their better halves. But of her who goes his way
with him--it is not generally a long way for either--what of her end? Let
me tell the story of one that is the story of all. I came across it in the
course of my work as a newspaper man a year ago and I repeat it here as I
heard it then from those who knew, with only the names changed. The girl
is dead, but he is alive and leading an honest life at last, so I am told.
The story is that of "Kid" McDuff's girl.
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