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 was
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 offence 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, 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 pedler'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 mouldy 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 candlesticks. 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 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,
scrubwomen,--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, laugh,
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 anise seed, and candy baked in little white
balls like marbles, are served with the indispensable cigarette; for
long callers, the pipe.