the word echoes through these sweaters' tenements, where starvation
is at home half the time. It is an all-consuming passion with these
people, whose spirit a thousand years of bondage have not availed to
daunt. It breaks out in strikes, when to strike is to hunger and die.
Not until I stood by a striking cloak-maker whose last cent was gone,
with not a crust in the house to feed seven hungry mouths, yet who had
voted vehemently in the meeting that day to keep up the strike to the
bitter end,--bitter indeed, nor far distant,--and heard him at sunset
recite the prayer of his fathers: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God,
King of the world, that thou hast redeemed us as thou didst redeem our
fathers, hast delivered us from bondage to liberty, and from servile
dependence to redemption!"--not until then did I know what of sacrifice
the word might mean, and how utterly we of another day had forgotten.
But for once shop and tenement are left behind. Whatever other days may
have in store, this is their day of play, when all may rejoice.
The bridegroom, a cloak-presser in a hired dress suit, sits alone and
ill at ease at one end of the hall, sipping whiskey with a fine air of
indifference, but glancing apprehensively toward the crowd of women in
the opposite corner that surround the bride, a pale little shop-girl
with a pleading, winsome face. From somewhere unexpectedly appears a
big man in an ill-fitting coat and skullcap, flanked on either side
by a fiddler, who scrapes away and away, accompanying the improvisator
in a plaintive minor key as he halts before the bride and intones
his lay. With many a shrug of stooping shoulders and queer excited
gesture, he drones, in the harsh, guttural Yiddish of Hester Street,
his story of life's joys and sorrows, its struggles and victories in
the land of promise. The women listen, nodding and swaying their bodies
sympathetically. He works himself into a frenzy, in which the fiddlers
vainly try to keep up with him. He turns and digs the laggard angrily
in the side without losing the metre. The climax comes. The bride
bursts into hysterical sobs, while the women wipe their eyes. A plate,
heretofore concealed under his coat, is whisked out. He has conquered;
the inevitable collection is taken up.
The tuneful procession moves upon the bridegroom. An Essex Street
girl in the crowd, watching them go, says disdainfully: "None of this
humbug when I get married." It is the straining of young America at the
fetters of tradition. Ten minutes later, when, between double files of
women holding candles, the couple pass to the canopy where the rabbi
waits, she has already forgotten; and when the crunching of a glass
under the bridegroom's heel announces that they are one, and that until
the broken pieces be reunited he is hers and hers alone, she joins with
all the company in the exulting shout of "Mozzel tov!" ("Good luck!").
Then the _dupka_, men and women joining in, forgetting all but the
moment, hands on hips, stepping in time, forward, backward, and across.
And then the feast.
They sit at the long tables by squads and tribes. Those who belong
together sit together. There is no attempt at pairing off for
conversation or mutual entertainment, at speech-making or toasting. The
business in hand is to eat, and it is attended to. The bridegroom, at
the head of the table, with his shiny silk hat on, sets the example;
and the guests emulate it with zeal, the men smoking big, strong cigars
between mouthfuls. "Gosh! ain't it fine?" is the grateful comment
of one curly-headed youngster, bravely attacking his third plate of
chicken-stew. "Fine as silk," nods his neighbor in knickerbockers.
Christmas, for once, means something to them that they can understand.
The crowd of hurrying waiters make room for one bearing aloft a small
turkey adorned with much tinsel and many paper flowers. It is for the
bride, the one thing not to be touched until the next day--one day off
from the drudgery of housekeeping; she, too, can keep Christmas.
A group of bearded, dark-browed men sit apart, the rabbi among them.
They are the orthodox, who cannot break bread with the rest, for
fear, though the food be kosher, the plates have been defiled. They
brought their own to the feast, and sit at their own table, stern and
justified. Did they but know what depravity is harbored in the impish
mind of the girl yonder, who plans to hang her stocking overnight by
the window! There is no fireplace in the tenement. Queer things happen
over here, in the strife between the old and the new. The girls of the
College Settlement, last summer, felt compelled to explain that the
holiday in the country which they offered some of these children was
to be spent in an Episcopal clergyman's house, where they had prayers
every morning. "Oh," was the mother's indulgent answer, "they know it
isn't true, so it won't hurt them."
The bell of a neighboring church tower strikes the vesper hour. A man
in working-clothes uncovers his head reverently, and passes on. Through
the vista of green bowers formed of the grocer's stock of Christmas
trees a passing glimpse of flaring torches in the distant square is
caught. They touch with flame the gilt cross towering high above the
"White Garden," as the German residents call Tompkins Square. On the
sidewalk the holy-eve fair is in its busiest hour. In the pine-board
booths stand rows of staring toy dogs alternately with plaster saints.
Red apples and candy are hawked from carts. Pedlers offer colored
candles with shrill outcry. A huckster feeding his horse by the curb
scatters, unseen, a share for the sparrows. The cross flashes white
against the dark sky.
In one of the side streets near the East River has stood for thirty
years a little mission church, called Hope Chapel by its founders,
in the brave spirit in which they built it. It has had plenty of use
for the spirit since. Of the kind of problems that beset its pastor
I caught a glimpse the other day, when, as I entered his room, a
rough-looking man went out.
"One of my cares," said Mr. Devins, looking after him with contracted
brow. "He has spent two Christmas days of twenty-three out of jail.
He is a burglar, or was. His daughter has brought him round. She is a
seamstress. For three months, now, she has been keeping him and the
home, working nights. If I could only get him a job! He won't stay
honest long without it; but who wants a burglar for a watchman? And how
can I recommend him?"
A few doors from the chapel an alley sets into the block. We halted at
the mouth of it.
"Come in," said Mr. Devins, "and wish Blind Jennie a Merry Christmas."
We went in, in single file; there was not room for two. As we climbed
the creaking stairs of the rear tenement, a chorus of children's shrill
voices burst into song somewhere above.
"It is her class," said the pastor of Hope Chapel, as he stopped on the
landing. "They are all kinds. We never could hope to reach them; Jennie
can. They fetch her the papers given out in the Sunday-school, and
read to her what is printed under the pictures; and she tells them the
story of it. There is nothing Jennie doesn't know about the Bible."
The door opened upon a low-ceiled room, where the evening shades lay
deep. The red glow from the kitchen stove discovered a jam of children,
young girls mostly, perched on the table, the chairs, in one another's
laps, or squatting on the floor; in the midst of them, a little old
woman with heavily veiled face, and wan, wrinkled hands folded in her
lap. The singing ceased as we stepped across the threshold.
"Be welcome," piped a harsh voice with a singular note of cheerfulness
in it. "Whose step is that with you, pastor? I don't know it. He is
welcome in Jennie's house, whoever he be. Girls, make him to home." The
girls moved up to make room.
"Jennie has not seen since she was a child," said the clergyman,
gently; "but she knows a friend without it. Some day she shall see the
great Friend in his glory, and then she shall be Blind Jennie no more."
The little woman raised the veil from a face shockingly disfigured, and
touched the eyeless sockets. "Some day," she repeated, "Jennie shall
see. Not long now--not long!" Her pastor patted her hand. The silence
of the dark room was broken by Blind Jennie's voice, rising cracked and
quavering: "Alas! and did my Saviour bleed?" The shrill chorus burst
in:--
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.
The light that falls from the windows of the Neighborhood Guild, in
Delancey Street, makes a white path across the asphalt pavement.
Within, there is mirth and laughter. The Tenth Ward Social Reform
Club is having its Christmas festival. Its members, poor mothers,
scrub-women,--the president is the janitress of a tenement near
by,--have brought their little ones, a few their husbands, to share
in the fun. One little girl has to be dragged up to the grab-bag. She
cries at the sight of Santa Claus. The baby has drawn a woolly horse.
He kisses the toy with a look of ecstatic bliss, and toddles away. At
the far end of the hall a game of blindman's-buff is starting up. The
aged grandmother, who has watched it with growing excitement, bids one
of the settlement workers hold her grandchild, that she may join in;
and she does join in, with all the pent-up hunger of fifty joyless
years. The worker, looking on, smiles; one has been reached. Thus is
the battle against the slum waged and won with the child's play.
Tramp! tramp! comes the to-morrow upon the stage. Two hundred and
fifty pairs of little feet, keeping step, are marching to dinner in
the Newsboys' Lodging-house. Five hundred pairs more are restlessly
awaiting their turn upstairs. In prison, hospital, and almshouse
to-night the city is host, and gives of her plenty. Here an unknown
friend has spread a generous repast for the waifs who all the rest of
the days shift for themselves as best they can. Turkey, coffee, and
pie, with "vegetubles" to fill in. As the file of eagle-eyed youngsters
passes down the long tables, there are swift movements of grimy hands,
and shirt-waists bulge, ragged coats sag at the pockets. Hardly is the
file seated when the plaint rises: "I ain't got no pie! It got swiped
on me." Seven despoiled ones hold up their hands.
The superintendent laughs--it is Christmas eve. He taps one tentatively
on the bulging shirt. "What have you here, my lad?"
"Me pie," responds he, with an innocent look; "I wuz scart it would get
stole."
A little fellow who has been eying one of the visitors attentively
takes his knife out of his mouth, and points it at him with conviction.
"I know you," he pipes. "You're a p'lice commissioner. I seen yer
picter in the papers. You're Teddy Roosevelt!"
The clatter of knives and forks ceases suddenly. Seven pies creep
stealthily over the edge of the table, and are replaced on as many
plates. The visitors laugh. It was a case of mistaken identity.
Farthest down town, where the island narrows toward the Battery, and
warehouses crowd the few remaining tenements, the sombre-hued colony of
Syrians is astir with preparation for the holiday. How comes it that
in the only settlement of the real Christmas people in New York the
corner saloon appropriates to itself all the outward signs of it? Even
the floral cross that is nailed over the door of the Orthodox church
is long withered and dead; it has been there since Easter, and it is
yet twelve days to Christmas by the belated reckoning of the Greek
Church. But if the houses show no sign of the holiday, within there is
nothing lacking. The whole colony is gone a-visiting. There are enough
of the unorthodox to set the fashion, and the rest follow the custom
of the country. The men go from house to house, shake hands, and kiss
one another on both cheeks, with the salutation, "Kol am va antom
Salimoon." "Every year and you are safe," the Syrian guide renders it
into English; and a non-professional interpreter amends it: "May you
grow happier year by year." Arrack made from grapes and flavored with
aniseseed, and candy baked in little white balls like marbles, are
served with the indispensable cigarette; for long callers, the pipe.
In a top-floor room of one of the darkest of the dilapidated tenements,
the dusty window panes of which the last glow in the winter sky is
tinging faintly with red, a dance is in progress. The guests, most of
them fresh from the hillsides of Mount Lebanon, squat about the room.
A reed-pipe and a tambourine furnish the music. One has the centre of
the floor. With a beer jug filled to the brim on his head, he skips and
sways, bending, twisting, kneeling, gesturing, and keeping time, while
the men clap their hands. He lies down and turns over, but not a drop
is spilled. Another succeeds him, stepping proudly, gracefully, furling
and unfurling a handkerchief like a banner. As he sits down, and the
beer goes around, one in the corner, who looks like a shepherd fresh
from his pasture, strikes up a song--a far-off, lonesome, plaintive
lay. "'Far as the hills,'" says the guide; "a song of the old days and
the old people, now seldom heard." All together croon the refrain.
The host delivers himself of an epic about his love across the seas,
with the most agonizing expression, and in a shockingly bad voice. He
is the worst singer I ever heard; but his companions greet his effort
with approving shouts of "Yi! yi!" They look so fierce, and yet are so
childishly happy, that at the thought of their exile and of the dark
tenement the question arises, "Why all this joy?" The guide answers it
with a look of surprise. "They sing," he says, "because they are glad
they are free. Did you not know?"
The bells in old Trinity chime the midnight hour. From dark hallways
men and women pour forth and hasten to the Maronite church. In the loft
of the dingy old warehouse wax candles burn before an altar of brass.
The priest, in a white robe with a huge gold cross worked on the back,
chants the ritual. The people respond. The women kneel in the aisles,
shrouding their heads in their shawls; a surpliced acolyte swings his
censer; the heavy perfume of burning incense fills the hall.
The band at the anarchists' ball is tuning up for the last dance. Young
and old float to the happy strains, forgetting injustice, oppression,
hatred. Children slide upon the waxed floor, weaving fearlessly in and
out between the couples--between fierce, bearded men and short-haired
women with crimson-bordered kerchiefs. A Punch-and-Judy show in the
corner evokes shouts of laughter.
Outside the snow is falling. It sifts silently into each nook and
corner, softens all the hard and ugly lines, and throws the spotless
mantle of charity over the blemishes, the shortcomings. Christmas
morning will dawn pure and white.
WHAT THE CHRISTMAS SUN SAW IN THE TENEMENTS
The December sun shone clear and cold upon the city. It shone upon rich
and poor alike. It shone into the homes of the wealthy on the avenues
and in the up-town streets, and into courts and alleys hedged in by
towering tenements down town. It shone upon throngs of busy holiday
shoppers that went out and in at the big stores, carrying bundles big
and small, all alike filled with Christmas cheer and kindly messages
from Santa Claus.
It shone down so gayly and altogether cheerily there, that wraps and
overcoats were unbuttoned for the north wind to toy with. "My, isn't it
a nice day?" said one young lady in a fur shoulder cape to a friend,
pausing to kiss and compare lists of Christmas gifts.
"Most too hot," was the reply, and the friends passed on. There was
warmth within and without. Life was very pleasant under the Christmas
sun up on the avenue.
Down in Cherry Street the rays of the sun climbed over a row of tall
tenements with an effort that seemed to exhaust all the life that was
in them, and fell into a dirty block, half choked with trucks, with
ash barrels and rubbish of all sorts, among which the dust was whirled
in clouds upon fitful, shivering blasts that searched every nook and
cranny of the big barracks. They fell upon a little girl, barefooted
and in rags, who struggled out of an alley with a broken pitcher in her
grimy fist, against the wind that set down the narrow slit like the
draught through a big factory chimney. Just at the mouth of the alley
it took her with a sudden whirl, a cyclone of dust and drifting ashes,
tossed her fairly off her feet, tore from her grip the threadbare
shawl she clutched at her throat, and set her down at the saloon door
breathless and half smothered. She had just time to dodge through the
storm-doors before another whirlwind swept whistling down the street.
"My, but isn't it cold?" she said, as she shook the dust out of her
shawl and set the pitcher down on the bar. "Gimme a pint," laying down
a few pennies that had been wrapped in a corner of the shawl, "and
mamma says make it good and full."
"All'us the way with youse kids--want a barrel when yees pays fer a
pint," growled the bartender. "There, run along, and don't ye hang
around that stove no more. We ain't a steam-heatin' the block fer
nothin'."
The little girl clutched her shawl and the pitcher, and slipped out
into the street where the wind lay in ambush and promptly bore down on
her in pillars of whirling dust as soon as she appeared. But the sun
that pitied her bare feet and little frozen hands played a trick on
old Boreas--it showed her a way between the pillars, and only just her
skirt was caught by one and whirled over her head as she dodged into
her alley. It peeped after her halfway down its dark depths, where it
seemed colder even than in the bleak street, but there it had to leave
her.
It did not see her dive through the doorless opening into a hall
where no sun-ray had ever entered. It could not have found its way
in there had it tried. But up the narrow, squeaking stairs the girl
with the pitcher was climbing. Up one flight of stairs, over a knot of
children, half babies, pitching pennies on the landing, over wash-tubs
and bedsteads that encumbered the next--house-cleaning going on in
that "flat"; that is to say, the surplus of bugs was being turned out
with petroleum and a feather--up still another, past a half-open door
through which came the noise of brawling and curses. She dodged and
quickened her step a little until she stood panting before a door on
the fourth landing that opened readily as she pushed it with her bare
foot.
A room almost devoid of stick or rag one might dignify with the name of
furniture. Two chairs, one with a broken back, the other on three legs,
beside a rickety table that stood upright only by leaning against the
wall. On the unwashed floor a heap of straw covered with dirty bedtick
for a bed; a foul-smelling slop-pail in the middle of the room; a
crazy stove, and back of it a door or gap opening upon darkness. There
was something in there, but what it was could only be surmised from a
heavy snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the bedroom of the
apartment, windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented at a price a
millionaire would denounce as robbery.
"That you, Liza?" said a voice that discovered a woman bending over the
stove. "Run 'n' get the childer. Dinner's ready."
The winter sun glancing down the wall of the opposite tenement, with a
hopeless effort to cheer the back yard, might have peeped through the
one window of the room in Mrs. McGroarty's "flat," had that window not
been coated with the dust of ages, and discovered that dinner party in
action. It might have found a score like it in the alley. Four unkempt
children, copies each in his or her way of Liza and their mother,
Mrs. McGroarty, who "did washing" for a living. A meat bone, a "cut"
from the butcher's at four cents a pound, green pickles, stale bread
and beer. Beer for the four, a sup all round, the baby included. Why
not? It was the one relish the searching ray would have found there.
Potatoes were there, too--potatoes and meat! Say not the poor in the
tenements are starving. In New York only those starve who cannot get
work and have not the courage to beg. Fifty thousand always out of a
job, say those who pretend to know. A round half-million asking and
getting charity in eight years, say the statisticians of the Charity
Organization. Any one can go round and see for himself that no one need
starve in New York.
From across the yard the sunbeam, as it crept up the wall, fell
slantingly through the attic window whence issued the sound of
hammer-blows. A man with a hard face stood in its light, driving nails
into the lid of a soap box that was partly filled with straw. Something
else was there; as he shifted the lid that didn't fit, the glimpse of
sunshine fell across it; it was a dead child, a little baby in a white
slip, bedded in straw in a soap box for a coffin. The man was hammering
down the lid to take it to the Potter's Field. At the bed knelt the
mother, dry-eyed, delirious from starvation that had killed her child.
Five hungry, frightened children cowered in the corner, hardly daring
to whisper as they looked from the father to the mother in terror.
There was a knock on the door that was drowned once, twice, in the
noise of the hammer on the little coffin. Then it was opened gently,
and a young woman came in with a basket. A little silver cross shone
upon her breast. She went to the poor mother, and, putting her hand
soothingly on her head, knelt by her with gentle and loving words. The
half-crazed woman listened with averted face, then suddenly burst into
tears and hid her throbbing head in the other's lap.
The man stopped hammering and stared fixedly upon the two; the children
gathered around with devouring looks as the visitor took from her
basket bread, meat, and tea. Just then, with a parting wistful look
into the bare attic room, the sun-ray slipped away, lingered for a
moment about the coping outside, and fled over the housetops.
As it sped on its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in
an Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes"? An army
of thousands, whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of
home, is that poverty-stricken cabin in the desolate bog, are herded
in such barracks to-day in New York. Potatoes they have; yes, and meat
at four cents--even seven. Beer for a relish--never without beer.
But home? The home that was home, even in a bog, with the love of it
that has made Ireland immortal and a tower of strength in the midst
of her suffering--what of that? There are no homes in New York's poor
tenements.
Down the crooked path of the Mulberry Street Bend the sunlight slanted
into the heart of New York's Italy. It shone upon bandannas and
yellow neckerchiefs; upon swarthy faces and corduroy breeches; upon
black-haired girls--mothers at thirteen; upon hosts of bow-legged
children rolling in the dirt; upon pedlers' carts and rag-pickers
staggering under burdens that threatened to crush them at every step.
Shone upon unnumbered Pasquales dwelling, working, idling, and gambling
there. Shone upon the filthiest and foulest of New York's tenements,
upon Bandits' Roost, upon Bottle Alley, upon the hidden byways that
lead to the tramps' burrows. Shone upon the scene of annual infant
slaughter. Shone into the foul core of New York's slums that was at
last to go to the realm of bad memories because civilized man might not
look upon it and live without blushing.
It glanced past the rag-shop in the cellar, whence welled up stenches
to poison the town, into an apartment three flights up that held two
women, one young, the other old and bent. The young one had a baby at
her breast. She was rocking it tenderly in her arms, singing in the
soft Italian tongue a lullaby, while the old granny listened eagerly,
her elbows on her knees, and a stumpy clay pipe, blackened with age,
between her teeth. Her eyes were set on the wall, on which the musty
paper hung in tatters, fit frame for the wretched, poverty-stricken
room, but they saw neither poverty nor want; her aged limbs felt not
the cold draught from without, in which they shivered; she looked far
over the seas to sunny Italy, whose music was in her ears.
"O dolce Napoli," she mumbled between her toothless jaws, "O suol
beato----"