THE CHILD OF THE TENEMENT
Within the last few years white Americans, many of whom were formerly
ignorant of their condition, have been taught that they are possessed of
a racial antipathy for human beings whose color is not their own. They
have a "natural contrariety," "a dislike that seems constitutional"
toward the dark tint that they see on another's face. But however well
they may have conned their lesson, it breaks down or is likely to be
forgotten in the presence of a Negro baby; for a healthy colored baby
is a subject, not for natural contrariety, but for sympathetic
cuddling. They are most engaging new-comers, these "delicate bronze
statuettes,"[1] only warm with life, and smiling good will upon their
world.
Not many colored babies are born in New York, at least not enough to
keep pace with the deaths. The year 1908 saw in all the boroughs 1973
births as against 2212 deaths at all ages.[2]
In this same year the colored births for Manhattan and the Bronx were
1459, and the deaths under one year of age 424, an infant mortality rate
of 290 to every thousand.[3] That is, two babies in every seven died
under one year of age. The white infant mortality rate was 127.7, a
little less than half that of the colored.
Why should we have in New York this enormous colored infant death rate?
Many physicians believe it indicates a lack of physical stamina in the
Negro, an inability to resist disease. This may be so, but before
falling back upon race as an explanation of high infant mortality, we
need to exhaust other possible causes. We do not question the vitality
of the white race when we read that in parts of Russia 500 babies out
of every thousand die within the year; nor do we believe the people of
Fall River, a factory town in Massachusetts, have an inherent inability
to resist disease, though their infant mortality rate in 1900 was 260 in
one thousand births. We look in these latter cases, as we should in the
former, to see if we find those conditions which careful students of the
subject tell us accompany a high infant death rate.
Among the first of the accepted causes of infant mortality is the
overcrowding of cities. We have viewed overcrowding as a usual condition
among the Negroes of New York, and have seen the small, ill-ventilated
bedroom where the baby spends much of its life. Heat, with its
accompanying growth of bacteria and swift process of decomposition, is a
second cause. New York's high infant mortality comes in the summer
months when in the poorest quarters it has been known to reach four
hundred in the thousand.[4] In the hot, crowded tenements, and no
place can be so hot as New York in one of its July record-breaking
weeks, the babies die like flies, and yet not like flies, for the flies
buzz in hundreds about the little hot faces. Excitement, late hours,
constant restlessness, these, too, cause infant mortality. On a city
block tenanted by hundreds of men and women and little children, no hour
of the night is free from some disturbance. Children whimper as they
wake from the heat, babies cry shrilly, and the brightly-lighted streets
are rarely without the sound of human footsteps. The sensitive new-born
organism knows nothing of the quiet and restful darkness of nature's
night.
But the most important cause of infant mortality[5] is improper infant
feeding. And here we meet with a condition that confronts the Negro
babies of New York far more than it confronts the white. For a properly
fed baby is a breast fed baby, or else one whose food has been prepared
with great care, and mothers forced by necessity to go out to work,
cannot themselves give their babies this proper food. It is among the
infants of mothers at work that mortality is high. Mr. G. Newman, an
English authority on this subject, gives an interesting example of this
in Lancashire, where, during the American civil war, many of the cotton
operatives were out of employment and many more worked only half time.
Privation was great. A quarter of the mill hands were in receipt of poor
relief, the general death rate increased, but _the infant mortality rate
decreased_. The mothers, forced by circumstances to remain away from the
factory, though in a state of semi-starvation, by their nursing and by
their care of the home preserved the lives of their infants. Negro
mothers, owing to the low wage earned by their husbands, for the general
welfare of the family and to avoid semi-starvation, like the Lancashire
women, leave their homes, but they thereby sacrifice the lives of many
of their babies. The percentage for 1900 of Negro married women in New
York engaging in self-supporting work was 31.4 in every hundred; of
white married women 4.2 in every hundred, seven times as many in
proportion among the Negroes as among the whites.[6] The Negro also
shows a large percentage of widows, a quarter of all the female
population over ten years of age. Some of these, we have no means of
knowing how many, are widows only in name, and have babies for whom they
must in some way provide support. The colored mother who has no husband
often takes a position in domestic service and boards her baby, paying
usually by the month, and finding the opportunity to visit her infant
perhaps once a week. Sometimes she secures a "baby tender" who can give
kindly, intelligent care; but under the best conditions her child will
be bottle fed and in tenement surroundings inimical to health, while
sometimes the woman to whom she intrusts her infant will be ignorant of
the simplest matters of hygiene.
I remember an old colored woman, she must be dead by this time, who kept
a baby farm. Her health was poor, and when I saw her, she had taken to
her bed and lay in a dark room with two infants at her side. They were
indescribably puny, with sunken cheeks and skinny arms and hands,
weighing what a normal child should weigh at birth, and yet six and
seven months old. The woman talked to me enthusiastically of salvation
and gave filthy bottles to her charges. She was exceptionally
incompetent, but there are others doing her work, too old or too
ignorant properly to attend to the babies under their care.
Mothers who go out to day's-work are also unable to nurse their babies
or to prepare all their food. The infant is placed in the care of some
neighbor or of a growing daughter, who may be the impatient "little
mother" of a number of charges. When the hot summer comes, such a baby
is likely to fall the victim of epidemic diarrhoea, caused by pollution
of the milk. Newman has a striking chart of infant death rates in Paris
in which he pictures a rate mounting in one week as high as 256 in the
thousand among the artificially fed infants, while for the same week,
among the breast fed babies, the mortality is 32. The Negro mother,
seeking self-support by keeping clean another's house or caring for
another's children, finds her own offspring swiftly taken from her by a
disease that only her nourishing care could forestall.[7]
Remedial measures have for some time been taken in New York to check
infant mortality, and they have met with some success. The distribution
of pasteurized milk by Mr. Nathan Straus, the establishment of milk
stations during the summer months in New York and Brooklyn where mothers
at slight cost may secure proper infant food, and where much educative
work is done by the visiting nurse, the multiplication of day nurseries,
all these have helped to decrease the death rate. The Negroes have been
benefited by these remedial agencies, but their percentage of 290 is
still a matter for grave attention.
Two out of seven of New York's Negro babies die in the first year, but
the other five grow up, some with puny arms and ricketty legs, others
again too hardy for bad food or bad air to harm.
Like the babies these children suffer from their mother's absence at
work. Family ties are loose, and more than other children they are
handicapped by lack of proper home care. In an examination of the
records of the Children's Court for three years I found that out of 717
arraignments of colored children, 221 were for improper guardianship,
30.8 per cent of the whole. Among the Russian children of the East Side,
Tenth and Eleventh Wards, only 15 per cent of arraignments were on this
complaint, indicating twice as many children without parental care among
the colored as among the children of the Tenth and Eleventh Wards. Rough
colored girls, also, whose habits were too depraved to permit of their
remaining without restraint, were frequently committed to reformatories.
Truancy is not uncommon in colored neighborhoods, though few cases come
before the courts. Sometimes the boy or girl is kept at home to care for
the younger children, but again, lacking the mother's oversight, he
remains on the street when he should be in school, or arrives late with
ill prepared lessons.
Asking a teacher of long experience among colored and white children
concerning their respective scholarship, he assured me that the colored
child could do as well as the white, but didn't. "From 20 to 50 per cent
of the mothers of my colored children," he said, "go out to work. There
is no one to oversee the child's tasks, and consequently little
conscientious study."
One can scarcely blame the children; and certainly one cannot blame the
mothers for toiling for their support. And the fathers, though they work
faithfully, are rarely able to earn enough unaided to support their
families. Perhaps in time the city may improve matters by opening its
school-rooms for a study period in the afternoon.
But meanwhile the children are without proper care. This is not hard to
endure in the summer, but in winter it is very trying to be without a
home. Poor little cold boys and girls, some of them mere babies! You see
them in the late afternoon sitting on the tenement stairs, waiting for
the long day to be done. It seems a week since they were inside eating
their breakfast. The city has not pauperized them with a luncheon, and
they have had only cold food since morning. Sometimes they have been all
day without nourishment. When the door is opened at last, there are many
helpful things for them to do for their mother, and reading and
arithmetic are relegated to so late an hour that their problem is only
temporarily solved by sleep.
Not all the colored working women, however, go out for employment.
Laundry work is an important home industry, and one may watch many
mothers at their tubs or ironing-boards from Monday morning until
Saturday night. This makes the tenement rooms, tiny enough at best,
sadly cluttered, but it does not deprive the children of the presence of
their mother, who accepts a smaller income to remain at home with them.
For after we have made full allowance for the lessening of family ties
among the Negroes by social and economic pressure, we find that the
majority of the colored boys and girls receive a due share of proper
parental oversight. They are fed on appetizing food, cleanly and
prettily dressed, they are encouraged to study and to improve their
position, and they are given all the advantages that it is possible for
their mothers and fathers to secure.
Jack London tells in the "Children of the Abyss" of the East Side of
London, where "they have dens and lairs into which to crawl for sleeping
purposes, and that is all. One can not travesty the word by calling such
dens and lairs 'homes.'" I have seen thousands of Negro dwelling-places,
but I cannot think of half a dozen, however great their poverty, where
this description would be correct. No matter how dingy the tenement, or
how long the hours of work, the mother, and the father, too, try to make
the "four walls and a ceiling" to which they return, home. Visitors
among the New York poor, in the past and in the present, testify that
given the same income or lack of income, the colored do not allow their
surroundings to become so cheerless or so filthy as the white, and that
when there is an opportunity for the mother to spend some time in the
house, the rooms take on an air of pleasant refinement. Pictures
decorate the walls, the sideboard contains many pretty dishes, and the
table is set three times a day. Meals are not eaten out of the paper bag
common on New York's East Side, but there is something of formality
about the dinner, and good table manners are taught the children. The
tenement dwelling becomes a home, and the boys and girls pass a happy
childhood in it.
Watching the colored children for many months in their play and work, I
have looked for possible distinctive traits. The second generation of
New Yorkers greatly resembles the "Young America" of all nationalities
of the city, shrill-voiced, disrespectful, easily diverted, whether at
work or at play, shrewd, alert, and mischievous--the New York street
child. I remember once helping with a club of eight boys where
seven nationalities were represented, and where no one could have
distinguished Irish from German or Jew from Italian, with his eyes
shut. Had a Negro been brought up among them he would quickly have taken
on their ways. Of the colored children who model their lives after their
mischievous young white neighbors, many outdo the whites in depravity
and lawlessness; but among the boys and girls who live by themselves, as
on San Juan Hill, one sees occasional interesting traits.
The records of the Children's Court of New York (Boroughs of Manhattan
and the Bronx) throw a little light on this matter, and are sufficiently
important to quote with some fulness. For the three years studied, 1904,
1905, 1906, I tabulated the cases of the colored children brought before
the court, and also the cases of the children of the Tenth and Eleventh
Wards, chiefly Hungarians and Russian Jews, expecting to find, in two
such dissimilar groups, interesting comparisons. The following table
shows the result of this study. The court in its annual report gives the
figures for the total number of arrests which I have incorporated in my
table:
RECORD OF ARRESTS IN CHILDREN'S COURT OF MANHATTAN AND THE BRONX FOR
1904, 1905, 1906
Key to Column Headers--
A: No. of children.
B: Arrests per cent.
===================================================================
| | 10th | Total arrests
| | and | for all
| Negro | 11th | children
| Arrests | Wards | in Manhattan
| | Arrests | and Bronx
+-----+------+-----+------+-------+------
| A | B | A | B | A | B
-------------------------+-----+------+-----+------+-------+------
Petit larceny | 56 | 7.8 | 139 | 6.8 | 2,697 | 10.1
Grand larceny | 27 | 3.8 | 108 | 5.3 | 878 | 3.3
Burglary--Robbery | 27 | 3.8 | 116 | 5.7 | 1,383 | 5.2
Assault | 27 | 3.8 | 61 | 3.0 | 669 | 2.5
Improper guardianship | 221 | 30.8 | 305 | 15.0 | 6,386 | 23.9
Disorderly | | | | | |
child--ungovernable | | | | | |
child | 90 | 12.6 | 124 | 6.1 | 1,980 | 7.4
Depraved girl | 33 | 4.6 | 21 | 1.1 | 312 | 1.2
Violation of labor law | 0 | 0 | 73 | 3.5 | 592 | 2.1
Unlicensed peddling[8] | 0 | 0 | 130 | 6.4 | 0 | .0
Truancy | 5 | .7 | 23 | 1.0 | 298 | 1.1
Malicious mischief | 1 | .1 | 9 | .4 | 179 | .7
Violation of Park | | | | | |
Corporation ordinances | 0 | 0 | 25 | 1.2 | 175 | .7
Mischief, including | | | | | |
craps, throwing stones, | | | | | |
building bonfires, | | | | | |
fighting, etc. | 214 | 29.8 | 896 | 43.7 |10,267 | 38.4
Unclassified felonies, | | | | | |
misdemeanors | 13 | 1.8 | 16 | .7 | 799 | 3.0
All others | 3 | .4 | 3 | .1 | 90 | .4
-------------------------+-----+------+-----+------+-------+------
| 717 |100.0 |2049 |100.0 |26,705 |100.0
===================================================================
Percentage of Negro to total, 1904-1907 2.7
Percentage of Negro to total, 1907-1910 1.9
Our table shows us that which we have already noted, the high percentage
of improper guardianship among the Negroes and the grave number of
depraved Negro girls. For the sins of petit larceny, grand larceny, and
burglary, putting the three together, the colored child shows a slightly
smaller percentage than the East Side white, a noticeably smaller
percentage than the total number of children. The sin of theft is often
swiftly attributed to a black face, but this percentage indicates that
the colored child has no "innate tendency" to steal. Ten per cent of the
arrests among the East Side children are for unlicensed peddling and
violation of the labor law, but no little Negro boys plunge into the
business world before their time. They have no keen commercial sense to
lead them to undertake transactions on their own account, and they are
not desired by purchasers of boy labor in the city.
The most important heading, numerically, is that of mischief, and here
the Negro falls far behind the Eastsider, behind the average for the
whole. While depravity among the girls and improper guardianship are the
race's most serious defects, as shown by the arrests among its children
in New York, tractability and a decent regard for law are among its
merits. The colored child, especially if he is in a segregated
neighborhood, is not greatly inclined to mischief. My own experience has
shown me that life in a tenement on San Juan Hill is devoid of the
ingenious, exasperating deviltry of an Irish or German-American
neighborhood. No daily summons calls one to the door only to hear wildly
scurrying footsteps on the stairs. Mail boxes are left solely for the
postman's use, and hallways are not defaced by obscene writing. There is
plenty of crap shooting, rarely interfered with by the police, but there
is little impertinent annoyance or destructiveness.
An observer, watching the little colored boys and girls as they play on
the city streets, finds much that is attractive and pleasant. They sing
their songs, learned at school and on the playground, fly their kites,
spin their tops, run their races. They usually finish what they begin,
not turning at the first interruption to take up something else. They
move more deliberately than most children, and their voices are slower
to adopt the New York screech than those of their Irish neighbors on the
block above them. Altogether they are attractive children, particularly
the smaller ones, who are more energetic than their big brothers and
sisters. Good manners are often evident. While receiving an afternoon
call from two girls, aged four and five, I was invited by the older to
partake of half a peanut, the other half of which she split in two and
generously shared with her companion. "Gim'me five cents," I once heard
a Negro boy of twelve say to his mother who walked past him on the
street. She did not seem to hear, but the boy's companion, a youth of
the same age, reproved him severely for his rude speech. When walking
with an Irish friend, who had worked among the children of her own race,
I saw a colored boy run swiftly up the block to meet his mother. He
kissed her, took her bundle from her, and carrying it under his arm,
walked quietly by her side to their home. "There are many boys here," I
said, "who are just as courteous as that." "Is that so?" she retorted
quickly, "Then you needn't be explaining to me any further the reason
for the high death rate."
The gentle, chivalrous affection of the child for its mother is daily to
be seen among these boys and girls. "Your African," said Mary Kingsley,
"is little better than a slave to his mother, whom he loves with a love
he gives to none other. This love of his mother is so dominant a factor
in his life that it must be taken into consideration in attempting to
understand the true Negro."[9] And if the child lavishes affection upon
its parent, the mother in turn gives untiringly to her child. She is the
"mammy" of whom we have so often heard, but with her loving care
bestowed, as it should be, upon her own offspring. She tries to keep her
child clean in body and spirit and to train it to be gentle and good;
and in return usually she receives a stanch devotion. I once found
fault with a colored girl of ten years for her rude behavior with her
girl companions, adding that perhaps she did not know any better, at
which she turned on me almost fiercely and said, "It's our fault; we
know better. Our mothers learn us. It's we that's bold." As one watches
the boys and girls walking quietly up the street of a Sunday afternoon
to their Sunday-school, neatly and cleanly dressed, one appreciates the
anxious, maternal care that strives as best it knows how, to rear honest
and God-fearing men and women.
Paul Lawrence Dunbar has painted the Negro father, his "little brown
baby wif sparklin' eyes," nestling close in his arms. Working at unusual
hours, the colored man often has a part of the day to give to his
family, and one sees him wheeling the baby in its carriage, or playing
with the older boys and girls.
Negroes seem naturally a gentle, loving people. As you live with them
and watch them in their homes, you find some coarseness, but little
real brutality. Rarely does a father or mother strike a child.
Travellers in Central and West Africa describe them as the most friendly
of savage folk, and where, as in our city, they live largely to
themselves, they keep something of these characteristics. But it is only
a step in New York from Africa into Italy or Ireland; and the step may
bring a sad jostling to native friendliness. To hold his own with his
white companions on the street or in school, the Negro must become
pugnacious, callous to insult, ready to hit back when affronted. Many
are like the little girl who told me that she did not care to play with
white children, "because," she explained, "my mother tells me to smack
any one who calls me nigger, and I ain't looking for trouble." The
colored children aren't looking for trouble. They have a tendency to run
away from it if they see it in the form of a gang of boys coming to them
around the corner. They believe if they had a fight, it wouldn't be a
fair one, and that if the policeman came, he would arrest them and not
their Irish enemies. So they grow up on streets through which few white
men pass, leading their own lives with their own people and thinking not
overmuch of the other race that surrounds them. But the day comes when
school is over, and the outside world, however indifferent they may be
to it, must be met. They must go out and grapple with it for the means
to hire a cooking stove and a dark bedroom of their own; they must think
of making money. So they stand at the corner of their street, looking
out, and then move slowly on to find what opportunity is theirs to come
to a full manhood. The way ahead does not seem very bright, and some
move so timidly that failure is sure to meet them at the first turning.
But some have the courage of the little colored girl, aged four, who led
a line of kindergarten children up their street and then on to the
unknown country that lay between them and Central Park. At the first
block a mob of Irish boys fell upon them, running between the lines,
throwing sticks, and calling "nigger" with screams and jeers. The leader
held her head high, paying no attention to her persecutors. She neither
quickened nor slowed her pace, and when the child at her side fell back,
she pulled her hand and said, "Don't notice them. Walk straight ahead."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dudley Kidd's, "Savage Childhood," a delightful book.
[2] Report of the Department of Health, City of New York, 1908, pp.
844, 849. The returns for births, the report states, are incomplete.
[3] This per cent is obtained from two sources, the births from the
Department of Health report, and the deaths from the Mortality
Statistics of the United States Census, 1908. "Colored" includes
Chinese, a negligible quantity in the infant population.
[4] Third Annual Report of the New York Milk Committee, 1909.
[5] See G. Newman, "Infant Mortality," for a careful study of this
whole subject.
[6] Census, 1900, combination of Population table and Women at Work.
[7] It is interesting to see that the married women of Fall River,
where we found a very high infant death rate, show a percentage of
married women at work of twenty in a hundred.
[8] My tabulations of the Negro and Tenth and Eleventh Ward Children
are from the Court's unpublished records to which I was allowed access.
The absence of any figures for Unlicensed Peddling in the Total
indicates that in its printed reports the Court has included Unlicensed
Peddling with Unclassified Misdemeanors.
[9] Mary Kingsley, "West African Studies," p. 319.