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OUT OF MULBERRY STREET
JACOB.A.RIIS
[Illustration: Merry Christmas in the Tenements.]
Out of Mulberry Street
Stories of tenement
life in New York City
By Jacob A. Riis
Author of "How the Other Half Lives,"
"The Children of the Poor," etc.
New York
The Century Co.
1898
Copyright, 1897, 1898,
By THE CENTURY CO.
THE DE VINNE PRESS.
CONTENTS
PAGE
MERRY CHRISTMAS IN THE TENEMENTS 1
'TWAS LIZA'S DOINGS 47
THE DUBOURQUES, FATHER AND SON 60
ABE'S GAME OF JACKS 67
A LITTLE PICTURE 71
A DREAM OF THE WOODS 73
A HEATHEN BABY 80
HE KEPT HIS TRYST 86
JOHN GAVIN, MISFIT 91
IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL 96
NIGGER MARTHA'S WAKE 106
A CHIP FROM THE MAELSTROM 114
SARAH JOYCE'S HUSBANDS 118
THE CAT TOOK THE KOSHER MEAT 122
FIRE IN THE BARRACKS 126
A WAR ON THE GOATS 129
ROVER'S LAST FIGHT 135
WHEN THE LETTER CAME 142
THE KID 147
LOST CHILDREN 151
THE SLIPPER-MAKER'S FAST 162
PAOLO'S AWAKENING 166
THE LITTLE DOLLAR'S CHRISTMAS JOURNEY 182
A PROPOSAL ON THE ELEVATED 199
DEATH COMES TO CAT ALLEY 205
WHY IT HAPPENED 210
THE CHRISTENING IN BOTTLE ALLEY 213
IN THE MULBERRY STREET COURT 219
SPOONING IN DYNAMITE ALLEY 223
HEROES WHO FIGHT FIRE 229
PREFACE
Since I wrote "How the Other Half Lives" I have been asked many times upon
what basis of experience, of fact, I built that account of life in New
York tenements. These stories contain the answer. They are from the daily
grist of the police hopper in Mulberry street, at which I have been
grinding for twenty years. They are reprinted from the columns of my
newspaper, and from the magazines as a contribution to the discussion of
the lives and homes of the poor, which in recent years has done much to
better their lot, and is yet to do much more when we have all come to
understand each other. In this discussion only facts are of value, and
these stories are true. In the few instances in which I have taken the
ordering of events into my own hands, it is chiefly their sequence with
which I have interfered. The facts themselves remain as I found them.
J. A. R.
301 MULBERRY STREET.
OUT OF MULBERRY STREET
MERRY CHRISTMAS IN THE TENEMENTS
It was just a sprig of holly, with scarlet berries showing against the
green, stuck in, by one of the office boys probably, behind the sign that
pointed the way up to the editorial rooms. There was no reason why it
should have made me start when I came suddenly upon it at the turn of the
stairs; but it did. Perhaps it was because that dingy hall, given over to
dust and drafts all the days of the year, was the last place in which I
expected to meet with any sign of Christmas; perhaps it was because I
myself had nearly forgotten the holiday. Whatever the cause, it gave me
quite a turn.
I stood, and stared at it. It looked dry, almost withered. Probably it had
come a long way. Not much holly grows about Printing-House Square, except
in the colored supplements, and that is scarcely of a kind to stir tender
memories. Withered and dry, this did. I thought, with a twinge of
conscience, of secret little conclaves of my children, of private views of
things hidden from mama at the bottom of drawers, of wild flights when
papa appeared unbidden in the door, which I had allowed for once to pass
unheeded. Absorbed in the business of the office, I had hardly thought of
Christmas coming on, until now it was here. And this sprig of holly on the
wall that had come to remind me,--come nobody knew how far,--did it grow
yet in the beech-wood clearings, as it did when I gathered it as a boy,
tracking through the snow? "Christ-thorn" we called it in our Danish
tongue. The red berries, to our simple faith, were the drops of blood that
fell from the Saviour's brow as it drooped under its cruel crown upon the
cross.
Back to the long ago wandered my thoughts: to the moss-grown beech in
which I cut my name and that of a little girl with yellow curls, of
blessed memory, with the first jack-knife I ever owned; to the story-book
with the little fir-tree that pined because it was small, and because the
hare jumped over it, and would not be content though the wind and the sun
kissed it, and the dews wept over it and told it to rejoice in its young
life; and that was so proud when, in the second year, the hare had to go
round it, because then it knew it was getting big,--Hans Christian
Andersen's story that we loved above all the rest; for we knew the tree
right well, and the hare; even the tracks it left in the snow we had seen.
Ah, those were the Yule-tide seasons, when the old Domkirke shone with a
thousand wax candles on Christmas eve; when all business was laid aside to
let the world make merry one whole week; when big red apples were roasted
on the stove, and bigger doughnuts were baked within it for the long
feast! Never such had been known since. Christmas to-day is but a name, a
memory.
A door slammed below, and let in the noises of the street. The holly
rustled in the draft. Some one going out said, "A Merry Christmas to you
all!" in a big, hearty voice. I awoke from my reverie to find myself back
in New York with a glad glow at the heart. It was not true. I had only
forgotten. It was myself that had changed, not Christmas. That was here,
with the old cheer, the old message of good-will, the old royal road to
the heart of mankind. How often had I seen its blessed charity, that never
corrupts, make light in the hovels of darkness and despair! how often
watched its spirit of self sacrifice and devotion in those who had,
besides themselves, nothing to give! and as often the sight had made whole
my faith in human nature. No! Christmas was not of the past, its spirit
not dead. The lad who fixed the sprig of holly on the stairs knew it; my
reporter's note-book bore witness to it. Witness of my contrition for the
wrong I did the gentle spirit of the holiday, here let the book tell the
story of one Christmas in the tenements of the poor:
* * * * *
It is evening in Grand street. The shops east and west are pouring forth
their swarms of workers. Street and sidewalk are filled with an eager
throng of young men and women, chatting gaily, and elbowing the jam of
holiday shoppers that linger about the big stores. The street-cars labor
along, loaded down to the steps with passengers carrying bundles of every
size and odd shape. Along the curb a string of peddlers hawk penny toys in
push-carts with noisy clamor, fearless for once of being moved on by the
police. Christmas brings a two weeks' respite from persecution even to
the friendless street-fakir. From the window of one brilliantly lighted
store a bevy of mature dolls in dishabille stretch forth their arms
appealingly to a troop of factory-hands passing by. The young men chaff
the girls, who shriek with laughter and run. The policeman on the corner
stops beating his hands together to keep warm, and makes a mock attempt to
catch them, whereat their shrieks rise shriller than ever. "Them stockin's
o' yourn'll be the death o' Santa Claus!" he shouts after them, as they
dodge. And they, looking back, snap saucily, "Mind yer business, freshy!"
But their laughter belies their words. "They gin it to ye straight that
time," grins the grocer's clerk, come out to snatch a look at the crowds;
and the two swap holiday greetings.
At the corner, where two opposing tides of travel form an eddy, the line
of push-carts debouches down the darker side-street. In its gloom their
torches burn with a fitful glare that wakes black shadows among the
trusses of the railroad structure overhead. A woman, with worn shawl drawn
tightly about head and shoulders, bargains with a peddler for a monkey on
a stick and two cents' worth of flitter-gold. Five ill-clad youngsters
flatten their noses against the frozen pane of the toy-shop, in ecstasy at
something there, which proves to be a milk-wagon, with driver, horses, and
cans that can be unloaded. It is something their minds can grasp. One
comes forth with a penny goldfish of pasteboard clutched tightly in his
hand, and, casting cautious glances right and left, speeds across the way
to the door of a tenement, where a little girl stands waiting. "It's yer
Chris'mas, Kate," he says, and thrusts it into her eager fist. The black
doorway swallows them up.
Across the narrow yard, in the basement of the rear house, the lights of a
Christmas tree show against the grimy window-pane. The hare would never
have gone around it, it is so very small. The two children are busily
engaged fixing the goldfish upon one of its branches. Three little candles
that burn there shed light upon a scene of utmost desolation. The room is
black with smoke and dirt. In the middle of the floor oozes an oil-stove
that serves at once to take the raw edge off the cold and to cook the
meals by. Half the window-panes are broken, and the holes stuffed with
rags. The sleeve of an old coat hangs out of one, and beats drearily upon
the sash when the wind sweeps over the fence and rattles the rotten
shutters. The family wash, clammy and gray, hangs on a clothes-line
stretched across the room. Under it, at a table set with cracked and empty
plates, a discouraged woman sits eying the children's show gloomily. It is
evident that she has been drinking. The peaked faces of the little ones
wear a famished look. There are three--the third an infant, put to bed in
what was once a baby-carriage. The two from the street are pulling it
around to get the tree in range. The baby sees it, and crows with delight.
The boy shakes a branch, and the goldfish leaps and sparkles in the
candle-light.
"See, sister!" he pipes; "see Santa Claus!" And they clap their hands in
glee. The woman at the table wakes out of her stupor, gazes around her,
and bursts into a fit of maudlin weeping.
The door falls to. Five flights up, another opens upon a bare attic room
which a patient little woman is setting to rights. There are only three
chairs, a box, and a bedstead in the room, but they take a deal of careful
arranging. The bed hides the broken plaster in the wall through which the
wind came in; each chair-leg stands over a rat-hole, at once to hide it
and to keep the rats out. One is left; the box is for that. The plaster of
the ceiling is held up with pasteboard patches. I know the story of that
attic. It is one of cruel desertion. The woman's husband is even now
living in plenty with the creature for whom he forsook her, not a dozen
blocks away, while she "keeps the home together for the childer." She
sought justice, but the lawyer demanded a retainer; so she gave it up, and
went back to her little ones. For this room that barely keeps the winter
wind out she pays four dollars a month, and is behind with the rent. There
is scarce bread in the house; but the spirit of Christmas has found her
attic. Against a broken wall is tacked a hemlock branch, the leavings of
the corner grocer's fitting-block; pink string from the packing-counter
hangs on it in festoons. A tallow dip on the box furnishes the
illumination. The children sit up in bed, and watch it with shining eyes.
"We're having Christmas!" they say.
The lights of the Bowery glow like a myriad twinkling stars upon the
ceaseless flood of humanity that surges ever through the great highway of
the homeless. They shine upon long rows of lodging-houses, in which
hundreds of young men, cast helpless upon the reef of the strange city,
are learning their first lessons of utter loneliness; for what desolation
is there like that of the careless crowd when all the world rejoices? They
shine upon the tempter, setting his snares there, and upon the missionary
and the Salvation Army lass, disputing his catch with him; upon the police
detective going his rounds with coldly observant eye intent upon the
outcome of the contest; upon the wreck that is past hope, and upon the
youth pausing on the verge of the pit in which the other has long ceased
to struggle. Sights and sounds of Christmas there are in plenty in the
Bowery. Juniper and tamarack and fir stand in groves along the busy
thoroughfare, and garlands of green embower mission and dive impartially.
Once a year the old street recalls its youth with an effort. It is true
that it is largely a commercial effort--that the evergreen, with an
instinct that is not of its native hills, haunts saloon-corners by
preference; but the smell of the pine-woods is in the air, and--Christmas
is not too critical--one is grateful for the effort. It varies with the
opportunity. At "Beefsteak John's" it is content with artistically
embalming crullers and mince-pies in green cabbage under the window lamp.
Over yonder, where the mile-post of the old lane still stands,--in its
unhonored old age become the vehicle of publishing the latest "sure cure"
to the world,--a florist, whose undenominational zeal for the holiday and
trade outstrips alike distinction of creed and property, has transformed
the sidewalk and the ugly railroad structure into a veritable bower,
spanning it with a canopy of green, under which dwell with him, in
neighborly good-will, the Young Men's Christian Association and the
Gentile tailor next door.
In the next block a "turkey-shoot" is in progress. Crowds are trying their
luck at breaking the glass balls that dance upon tiny jets of water in
front of a marine view with the moon rising, yellow and big, out of a
silver sea. A man-of-war, with lights burning aloft, labors under a rocky
coast. Groggy sailormen, on shore leave, make unsteady attempts upon the
dancing balls. One mistakes the moon for the target, but is discovered in
season. "Don't shoot that," says the man who loads the guns; "there's a
lamp behind it." Three scared birds in the window-recess try vainly to
snatch a moment's sleep between shots and the trains that go roaring
over-head on the elevated road. Roused by the sharp crack of the rifles,
they blink at the lights in the street, and peck moodily at a crust in
their bed of shavings.
The dime-museum gong clatters out its noisy warning that "the lecture" is
about to begin. From the concert-hall, where men sit drinking beer in
clouds of smoke, comes the thin voice of a short-skirted singer warbling,
"Do they think of me at home?" The young fellow who sits near the door,
abstractedly making figures in the wet track of the "schooners," buries
something there with a sudden restless turn, and calls for another beer.
Out in the street a band strikes up. A host with banners advances,
chanting an unfamiliar hymn. In the ranks marches a cripple on crutches.
Newsboys follow, gaping. Under the illuminated clock of the Cooper
Institute the procession halts, and the leader, turning his face to the
sky, offers a prayer. The passing crowds stop to listen. A few bare their
heads. The devoted group, the flapping banners, and the changing
torchlight on upturned faces, make a strange, weird picture. Then the
drum-beat, and the band files into its barracks across the street. A few
of the listeners follow, among them the lad from the concert-hall, who
slinks shamefacedly in when he thinks no one is looking.
Down at the foot of the Bowery is the "pan-handlers' beat," where the
saloons elbow one another at every step, crowding out all other business
than that of keeping lodgers to support them. Within call of it, across
the square, stands a church which, in the memory of men yet living, was
built to shelter the fashionable Baptist audiences of a day when Madison
Square was out in the fields, and Harlem had a foreign sound. The
fashionable audiences are gone long since. To-day the church, fallen into
premature decay, but still handsome in its strong and noble lines, stands
as a missionary outpost in the land of the enemy, its builders would have
said, doing a greater work than they planned. To-night is the Christmas
festival of its English-speaking Sunday-school, and the pews are filled.
The banners of United Italy, of modern Hellas, of France and Germany and
England, hang side by side with the Chinese dragon and the starry
flag--signs of the cosmopolitan character of the congregation. Greek and
Roman Catholics, Jews and joss-worshipers, go there; few Protestants, and
no Baptists. It is easy to pick out the children in their seats by
nationality, and as easy to read the story of poverty and suffering that
stands written in more than one mother's haggard face, now beaming with
pleasure at the little ones' glee. A gaily decorated Christmas tree has
taken the place of the pulpit. At its foot is stacked a mountain of
bundles, Santa Claus's gifts to the school. A self-conscious young man
with soap-locks has just been allowed to retire, amid tumultuous applause,
after blowing "Nearer, my God, to thee" on his horn until his cheeks
swelled almost to bursting. A trumpet ever takes the Fourth Ward by storm.
A class of little girls is climbing upon the platform. Each wears a
capital letter on her breast, and has a piece to speak that begins with
the letter; together they spell its lesson. There is momentary
consternation: one is missing. As the discovery is made, a child pushes
past the doorkeeper, hot and breathless. "I am in 'Boundless Love,'" she
says, and makes for the platform, where her arrival restores confidence
and the language.
In the audience the befrocked visitor from up-town sits cheek by jowl
with the pigtailed Chinaman and the dark-browed Italian. Up in the
gallery, farthest from the preacher's desk and the tree, sits a Jewish
mother with three boys, almost in rags. A dingy and threadbare shawl
partly hides her poor calico wrap and patched apron. The woman shrinks in
the pew, fearful of being seen; her boys stand upon the benches, and
applaud with the rest. She endeavors vainly to restrain them. "Tick,
tick!" goes the old clock over the door through which wealth and fashion
went out long years ago, and poverty came in.
Tick, tick! the world moves, with us--without; without or with. She is the
yesterday, they the to-morrow. What shall the harvest be?
Loudly ticked the old clock in time with the doxology, the other day, when
they cleared the tenants out of Gotham Court down here in Cherry street,
and shut the iron doors of Single and Double Alley against them. Never did
the world move faster or surer toward a better day than when the wretched
slum was seized by the health-officers as a nuisance unfit longer to
disgrace a Christian city. The snow lies deep in the deserted passageways,
and the vacant floors are given over to evil smells, and to the rats that
forage in squads, burrowing in the neglected sewers. The "wall of wrath"
still towers above the buildings in the adjoining Alderman's Court, but
its wrath at last is wasted.
It was built by a vengeful Quaker, whom the alderman had knocked down in a
quarrel over the boundary-line, and transmitted its legacy of hate to
generations yet unborn; for where it stood it shut out sunlight and air
from the tenements of Alderman's Court. And at last it is to go, Gotham
Court and all; and to the going the wall of wrath has contributed its
share, thus in the end atoning for some of the harm it wrought. Tick! old
clock; the world moves. Never yet did Christmas seem less dark on Cherry
Hill than since the lights were put out in Gotham Court forever.
In "the Bend" the philanthropist undertaker who "buries for what he can
catch on the plate" hails the Yule-tide season with a pyramid of green
made of two coffins set on end. It has been a good day, he says
cheerfully, putting up the shutters; and his mind is easy. But the "good
days" of the Bend are over, too. The Bend itself is all but gone. Where
the old pigsty stood, children dance and sing to the strumming of a
cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian and his wife. The
park that has come to take the place of the slum will curtail the
undertaker's profits, as it has lessened the work of the police. Murder
was the fashion of the day that is past. Scarce a knife has been drawn
since the sunlight shone into that evil spot, and grass and green shrubs
took the place of the old rookeries. The Christmas gospel of peace and
good-will moves in where the slum moves out. It never had a chance before.
The children follow the organ, stepping in the slush to the
music,--bareheaded and with torn shoes, but happy,--across the Five Points
and through "the Bay,"--known to the directory as Baxter street,--to "the
Divide," still Chatham street to its denizens though the aldermen have
rechristened it Park Row. There other delegations of Greek and Italian
children meet and escort the music on its homeward trip. In one of the
crooked streets near the river its journey comes to an end. A battered
door opens to let it in. A tallow dip burns sleepily on the creaking
stairs. The water runs with a loud clatter in the sink: it is to keep it
from freezing. There is not a whole window-pane in the hall. Time was
when this was a fine house harboring wealth and refinement. It has neither
now. In the old parlor down-stairs a knot of hard-faced men and women sit
on benches about a deal table, playing cards. They have a jug between
them, from which they drink by turns. On the stump of a mantel-shelf a
lamp burns before a rude print of the Mother of God. No one pays any heed
to the hand-organ man and his wife as they climb to their attic. There is
a colony of them up there--three families in four rooms.
"Come in, Antonio," says the tenant of the double flat,--the one with two
rooms,--"come and keep Christmas." Antonio enters, cap in hand. In the
corner by the dormer-window a "crib" has been fitted up in commemoration
of the Nativity. A soap-box and two hemlock branches are the elements. Six
tallow candles and a night-light illuminate a singular collection of
rarities, set out with much ceremonial show. A doll tightly wrapped in
swaddling-clothes represents "the Child." Over it stands a
ferocious-looking beast, easily recognized as a survival of the last
political campaign,--the Tammany tiger,--threatening to swallow it at a
gulp if one as much as takes one's eyes off it. A miniature Santa Claus,
a pasteboard monkey, and several other articles of bric-a-brac of the kind
the tenement affords, complete the outfit. The background is a picture of
St. Donato, their village saint, with the Madonna "whom they worship
most." But the incongruity harbors no suggestion of disrespect. The
children view the strange show with genuine reverence, bowing and crossing
themselves before it. There are five, the oldest a girl of seventeen, who
works for a sweater, making three dollars a week. It is all the money that
comes in, for the father has been sick and unable to work eight months and
the mother has her hands full: the youngest is a baby in arms. Three of
the children go to a charity school, where they are fed, a great help, now
the holidays have come to make work slack for sister. The rent is six
dollars--two weeks' pay out of the four. The mention of a possible chance
of light work for the man brings the daughter with her sewing from the
adjoining room, eager to hear. That would be Christmas indeed! "Pietro!"
She runs to the neighbors to communicate the joyful tidings. Pietro comes,
with his new-born baby, which he is tending while his wife lies ill, to
look at the maestro, so powerful and good. He also has been out of work
for months, with a family of mouths to fill, and nothing coming in. His
children are all small yet, but they speak English.
"What," I say, holding a silver dime up before the oldest, a smart little
chap of seven--"what would you do if I gave you this?"
"Get change," he replies promptly. When he is told that it is his own, to
buy toys with, his eyes open wide with wondering incredulity. By degrees
he understands. The father does not. He looks questioningly from one to
the other. When told, his respect increases visibly for "the rich
gentleman."
They were villagers of the same community in southern Italy, these people
and others in the tenements thereabouts, and they moved their patron saint
with them. They cluster about his worship here, but the worship is more
than an empty form. He typifies to them the old neighborliness of home,
the spirit of mutual help, of charity, and of the common cause against the
common enemy. The community life survives through their saint in the far
city to an unsuspected extent. The sick are cared for; the dreaded
hospital is fenced out. There are no Italian evictions. The saint has
paid the rent of this attic through two hard months; and here at his
shrine the Calabrian village gathers, in the persons of these three, to do
him honor on Christmas eve.
Where the old Africa has been made over into a modern Italy, since King
Humbert's cohorts struck the up-town trail, three hundred of the little
foreigners are having an uproarious time over their Christmas tree in the
Children's Aid Society's school. And well they may, for the like has not
been seen in Sullivan street in this generation. Christmas trees are
rather rarer over here than on the East Side, where the German leavens the
lump with his loyalty to home traditions. This is loaded with silver and
gold and toys without end, until there is little left of the original
green. Santa Claus's sleigh must have been upset in a snow-drift over
here, and righted by throwing the cargo overboard, for there is at least a
wagon-load of things that can find no room on the tree. The appearance of
"teacher" with a double armful of curly-headed dolls in red, yellow, and
green Mother-Hubbards, doubtful how to dispose of them, provokes a shout
of approval, which is presently quieted by the principal's bell. School
is "in" for the preliminary exercises. Afterward there are to be the tree
and ice-cream for the good children. In their anxiety to prove their title
clear, they sit so straight, with arms folded, that the whole row bends
over backward. The lesson is brief, the answers to the point.
"What do we receive at Christmas?" the teacher wants to know. The whole
school responds with a shout, "Dolls and toys!" To the question, "Why do
we receive them at Christmas?" the answer is not so prompt. But one
youngster from Thompson street holds up his hand. He knows. "Because we
always get 'em," he says; and the class is convinced: it is a fact. A baby
wails because it cannot get the whole tree at once. The "little
mother"--herself a child of less than a dozen winters--who has it in
charge cooes over it, and soothes its grief with the aid of a
surreptitious sponge-cake evolved from the depths of teacher's pocket.
Babies are encouraged in these schools, though not originally included in
their plan, as often the one condition upon which the older children can
be reached. Some one has to mind the baby, with all hands out at work.
The school sings "Santa Lucia" and "Children of the Heavenly King," and
baby is lulled to sleep.
"Who is this King?" asks the teacher, suddenly, at the end of a verse.
Momentary stupefaction. The little minds are on ice-cream just then; the
lad nearest the door has telegraphed that it is being carried up in pails.
A little fellow on the back seat saves the day. Up goes his brown fist.
"Well, Vito, who is he?"
"McKinley!" shouts the lad, who remembers the election just past; and the
school adjourns for ice-cream.
It is a sight to see them eat it. In a score of such schools, from the
Hook to Harlem, the sight is enjoyed in Christmas week by the men and
women who, out of their own pockets, reimburse Santa Claus for his outlay,
and count it a joy--as well they may; for their beneficence sometimes
makes the one bright spot in lives that have suffered of all wrongs the
most cruel--that of being despoiled of their childhood. Sometimes they are
little Bohemians; sometimes the children of refugee Jews; and again,
Italians, or the descendants of the Irish stock of Hell's Kitchen and
Poverty Row; always the poorest, the shabbiest, the hungriest--the
children Santa Claus loves best to find, if any one will show him the
way. Having so much on hand, he has no time, you see, to look them up
himself. That must be done for him; and it is done. To the teacher in this
Sullivan-street school came one little girl, this last Christmas, with
anxious inquiry if it was true that he came around with toys.
"I hanged my stocking last time," she said, "and he didn't come at all."
In the front house indeed, he left a drum and a doll, but no message from
him reached the rear house in the alley. "Maybe he couldn't find it," she
said soberly. Did the teacher think he would come if she wrote to him? She
had learned to write.
Together they composed a note to Santa Claus, speaking for a doll and a
bell--the bell to play "go to school" with when she was kept home minding
the baby. Lest he should by any chance miss the alley in spite of
directions, little Rosa was invited to hang her stocking, and her
sister's, with the janitor's children's in the school. And lo! on
Christmas morning there was a gorgeous doll, and a bell that was a whole
curriculum in itself, as good as a year's schooling any day! Faith in
Santa Claus is established in that Thompson-street alley for this
generation at least; and Santa Claus, got by hook or by crook into an
Eighth-Ward alley, is as good as the whole Supreme Court bench, with the
Court of Appeals thrown in, for backing the Board of Health against the
slum.
But the ice-cream! They eat it off the seats, half of them kneeling or
squatting on the floor; they blow on it, and put it in their pockets to
carry home to baby. Two little shavers discovered to be feeding each
other, each watching the smack develop on the other's lips as the acme of
his own bliss, are "cousins"; that is why. Of cake there is a double
supply. It is a dozen years since "Fighting Mary," the wildest child in
the Seventh-Avenue school, taught them a lesson there which they have
never forgotten. She was perfectly untamable, fighting everybody in
school, the despair of her teacher, till on Thanksgiving, reluctantly
included in the general amnesty and mince-pie, she was caught cramming the
pie into her pocket, after eying it with a look of pure ecstasy, but
refusing to touch it. "For mother" was her explanation, delivered with a
defiant look before which the class quailed. It is recorded, but not in
the minutes, that the board of managers wept over Fighting Mary, who, all
unconscious of having caused such an astonishing "break," was at that
moment engaged in maintaining her prestige and reputation by fighting the
gang in the next block. The minutes contain merely a formal resolution to
the effect that occasions of mince-pie shall carry double rations
thenceforth. And the rule has been kept--not only in Seventh-Avenue, but
in every industrial school--since. Fighting Mary won the biggest fight of
her troubled life that day, without striking a blow.
It was in the Seventh-Avenue school last Christmas that I offered the
truant class a four-bladed penknife as a prize for whittling out the
truest Maltese cross. It was a class of black sheep, and it was the
blackest sheep of the flock that won the prize. "That awful Savarese,"
said the principal in despair. I thought of Fighting Mary, and bade her
take heart. I regret to say that within a week the hapless Savarese was
black-listed for banking up the school door with snow, so that not even
the janitor could get out and at him.
Within hail of the Sullivan-street school camps a scattered little band,
the Christmas customs of which I had been trying for years to surprise.
They are Indians, a handful of Mohawks and Iroquois, whom some ill wind
has blown down from their Canadian reservation, and left in these
West-Side tenements to eke out such a living as they can weaving mats and
baskets, and threading glass pearls on slippers and pin-cushions, until,
one after another, they have died off and gone to happier hunting-grounds
than Thompson street. There were as many families as one could count on
the fingers of both hands when I first came upon them, at the death of old
Tamenund, the basket-maker. Last Christmas there were seven. I had about
made up my mind that the only real Americans in New York did not keep the
holiday at all, when, one Christmas eve, they showed me how. Just as dark
was setting in, old Mrs. Benoit came from her Hudson-street attic--where
she was known among the neighbors, as old and poor as she, as Mrs. Ben
Wah, and believed to be the relict of a warrior of the name of Benjamin
Wah--to the office of the Charity Organization Society, with a bundle for
a friend who had helped her over a rough spot--the rent, I suppose. The
bundle was done up elaborately in blue cheese-cloth, and contained a lot
of little garments which she had made out of the remnants of blankets and
cloth of her own from a younger and better day. "For those," she said, in
her French patois, "who are poorer than myself"; and hobbled away. I found
out, a few days later, when I took her picture weaving mats in her attic
room, that she had scarcely food in the house that Christmas day and not
the car-fare to take her to church! Walking was bad, and her old limbs
were stiff. She sat by the window through the winter evening, and watched
the sun go down behind the western hills, comforted by her pipe. Mrs. Ben
Wah, to give her her local name, is not really an Indian; but her husband
was one, and she lived all her life with the tribe till she came here. She
is a philosopher in her own quaint way. "It is no disgrace to be poor,"
said she to me, regarding her empty tobacco-pouch; "but it is sometimes a
great inconvenience." Not even the recollection of the vote of censure
that was passed upon me once by the ladies of the Charitable Ten for
surreptitiously supplying an aged couple, the special object of their
charity, with army plug, could have deterred me from taking the hint.
Very likely, my old friend Miss Sherman, in her Broome-street cellar,--it
is always the attic or the cellar,--would object to Mrs. Ben Wah's claim
to being the only real American in my note-book. She is from down East,
and says "stun" for stone. In her youth she was lady's-maid to a general's
wife, the recollection of which military career equally condones the
cellar and prevents her holding any sort of communication with her common
neighbors, who add to the offense of being foreigners the unpardonable one
of being mostly men. Eight cats bear her steady company, and keep alive
her starved affections. I found them on last Christmas eve behind
barricaded doors; for the cold that had locked the water-pipes had brought
the neighbors down to the cellar, where Miss Sherman's cunning had kept
them from freezing. Their tin pans and buckets were even then banging
against her door. "They're a miserable lot," said the old maid, fondling
her cats defiantly; "but let 'em. It's Christmas. Ah!" she added, as one
of the eight stood up in her lap and rubbed its cheek against hers,
"they're innocent. It isn't poor little animals that does the harm. It's
men and women that does it to each other." I don't know whether it was
just philosophy, like Mrs. Ben Wah's, or a glimpse of her story. If she
had one, she kept it for her cats.
In a hundred places all over the city, when Christmas comes, as many
open-air fairs spring suddenly into life. A kind of Gentile Feast of
Tabernacles possesses the tenement districts especially. Green-embowered
booths stand in rows at the curb, and the voice of the tin trumpet is
heard in the land. The common source of all the show is down by the North
River, in the district known as "the Farm." Down there Santa Claus
establishes headquarters early in December and until past New Year. The
broad quay looks then more like a clearing in a pine-forest than a busy
section of the metropolis. The steamers discharge their loads of fir-trees
at the piers until they stand stacked mountain-high, with foot-hills of
holly and ground-ivy trailing off toward the land side. An army-train of
wagons is engaged in carting them away from early morning till late at
night; but the green forest grows, in spite of it all, until in places it
shuts the shipping out of sight altogether. The air is redolent with the
smell of balsam and pine. After nightfall, when the lights are burning in
the busy market, and the homeward-bound crowds with baskets and heavy
burdens of Christmas greens jostle one another with good-natured
banter,--nobody is ever cross down here in the holiday season,--it is
good to take a stroll through the Farm, if one has a spot in his heart
faithful yet to the hills and the woods in spite of the latter-day city.
But it is when the moonlight is upon the water and upon the dark phantom
forest, when the heavy breathing of some passing steamer is the only sound
that breaks the stillness of the night, and the watchman smokes his only
pipe on the bulwark, that the Farm has a mood and an atmosphere all its
own, full of poetry, which some day a painter's brush will catch and hold.
Into the ugliest tenement street Christmas brings something of
picturesqueness as of cheer. Its message was ever to the poor and the
heavy-laden, and by them it is understood with an instinctive yearning to
do it honor. In the stiff dignity of the brownstone streets up-town there
may be scarce a hint of it. In the homes of the poor it blossoms on stoop
and fire-escape, looks out of the front window, and makes the unsightly
barber-pole to sprout overnight like an Aaron's rod. Poor indeed is the
home that has not its sign of peace over the hearth, be it but a single
sprig of green. A little color creeps with it even into rabbinical Hester
street, and shows in the shop-windows and in the children's faces. The
very feather-dusters in the peddler's stock take on brighter hues for the
occasion, and the big knives in the cutler's shop gleam with a lively
anticipation of the impending goose "with fixin's"--a concession, perhaps,
to the commercial rather than the religious holiday: business comes then,
if ever. A crowd of ragamuffins camp out at a window where Santa Claus and
his wife stand in state, embodiment of the domestic ideal that has not yet
gone out of fashion in these tenements, gazing hungrily at the
announcement that "A silver present will be given to every purchaser by a
real Santa Claus.--M. Levitsky." Across the way, in a hole in the wall,
two cobblers are pegging away under an oozy lamp that makes a yellow
splurge on the inky blackness about them, revealing to the passer-by their
bearded faces, but nothing of the environment save a single sprig of holly
suspended from the lamp. From what forgotten brake it came with a message
of cheer, a thought of wife and children across the sea waiting their
summons, God knows. The shop is their house and home. It was once the hall
of the tenement; but to save space, enough has been walled in to make room
for their bench and bed. The tenants go through the next house. No matter
if they are cramped; by and by they will have room. By and by comes the
spring, and with it the steamer. Does not the green branch speak of spring
and of hope? The policeman on the beat hears their hammers beat a joyous
tattoo past midnight, far into Christmas morning. Who shall say its
message has not reached even them in their slum?
Where the noisy trains speed over the iron highway past the second-story
windows of Allen street, a cellar door yawns darkly in the shadow of one
of the pillars that half block the narrow sidewalk. A dull gleam behind
the cobweb-shrouded window-pane supplements the sign over the door, in
Yiddish and English: "Old Brasses." Four crooked and moldy steps lead to
utter darkness, with no friendly voice to guide the hapless customer.
Fumbling along the dank wall, he is left to find the door of the shop as
best he can. Not a likely place to encounter the fastidious from the
Avenue! Yet ladies in furs and silk find this door and the grim old smith
within it. Now and then an artist stumbles upon them, and exults
exceedingly in his find. Two holiday shoppers are even now haggling with
the coppersmith over the price of a pair of curiously wrought brass
candle-sticks. The old man has turned from the forge, at which he was
working, unmindful of his callers roving among the dusty shelves. Standing
there, erect and sturdy, in his shiny leather apron, hammer in hand, with
the firelight upon his venerable head, strong arms bared to the elbow, and
the square paper cap pushed back from a thoughtful, knotty brow, he stirs
strange fancies. One half expects to see him fashioning a gorget or a
sword on his anvil. But his is a more peaceful craft. Nothing more warlike
is in sight than a row of brass shields, destined for ornament, not for
battle. Dark shadows chase one another by the flickering light among
copper kettles of ruddy glow, old-fashioned samovars, and massive andirons
of tarnished brass. The bargaining goes on. Overhead the nineteenth
century speeds by with rattle and roar; in here linger the shadows of the
centuries long dead. The boy at the anvil listens open-mouthed, clutching
the bellows-rope.
In Liberty Hall a Jewish wedding is in progress. Liberty! Strange how the
word echoes through these sweaters' tenements, where starvation is at home
half the time. It is as 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 cloakmaker 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 whisky with a fine air of
indifference, but glancing apprehensively toward the crowd of women in the
opposite corner that surrounds 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 skull cap, 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 meter.
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
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. Peddlers 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."