“By the way! Do you know that old Martin had a half brother Frederick—as fine a man as the country owned—who lived about twenty miles from here? You see, Martin’s mother was a young girl in Revolutionary times when Martin’s father was a soldier. Afterwards he went back home and married a respectable woman.”
“Did you ever see the mother of old Martin?” the field worker asked. “No, she was dead before my time, but I have heard the folks talk about her. She lived in the woods not far from here. Dear me!” he went on, “it’s been so long since I’ve thought of these people that many things I forget, but it would all come back to me in time.”
Two daughters of Jemima lived in B——. A little study of Chart V, sections [A] and [B], will place them in their relation to the rest of the family and give the chief facts of their lives. Little more need be added. One of them was early put out to service and later married a cobbler to whom she has borne many children. She is not known to have had any illegitimate offspring, but if she escaped, her daughter has made up for her deficiency in this respect. The other sister grew up in the mountain hut with her mother, and was living there when her grandfather died. Her husband and most of her children are defective, but there are two by unknown fathers who are normal. One of these, a girl of considerable ability, supports herself and mother in a decent way and is respected by her townspeople. The mother is tall, lean, angular, much resembling Jemima, except that the latter was even more masculine. Many are the living inhabitants of B—— to whom the old woman was a well-known figure, for she often came down into the town bringing berries to sell, her large feet shod with heavy boots, her skirts short, while her sharp, angular features were hidden in the depths of a huge sunbonnet. She thus formed a striking picture that could not easily be forgotten.
A third daughter of Jemima had gone to Brooklyn to live, and the question kept repeating itself, “What will she be like?” and this all the more because of the uncertainty of the parentage on the father’s side. Perhaps he was a normal man. Perhaps this will prove to be a normal woman and so break the dead monotony of this line of defectives.
In a back tenement, after passing through a narrow alley, the home of this woman was found. It was about ten o’clock in the morning. After climbing a dark and narrow stairway, one came to a landing from which a view could be had of the interior of the apartment. In one room was a frowsled young woman in tawdry rags, her hair unkempt, her face streaked with black, while on the floor two dirty, half-naked children were rolling. At the sight of a stranger, they all came forward. The field worker made her way as best she could, across heaps of junk that cluttered the room, to a chair by an open window through which a breath of outside air could be obtained. On the bureau by the window a hideous diseased cat was curled in the sunshine. The mother, Jemima’s daughter, was not at home, but the woman who had presented herself was her daughter, and these were the grandchildren. The woman’s feeble-mindedness made it possible to ask her question after question, such as could not have been put to a normal person. Her answers threw a flood of light upon the general depravity of life under such conditions. When the mother at last arrived, she proved to be of a type somewhat different from anything before encountered in this family. She appeared to be criminalistic, or at least capable of developing along that line. Unfortunately, the visit could not either be prolonged or repeated, so that no satisfactory study was made.
In the city, the individual is lost in the very immensity of the crowd that surrounds him, so that his individual actions, except such as he himself chooses to reveal or can be made to reveal, are lost to the people about him; therefore there was little hope of obtaining much side light on the problem here presented. During the short interview the older woman showed unmistakable signs of wanting to appear respectable in the midst of her depravity, something quite characteristic of the high-grade moron type in the family. She was friendly and distinctly more intelligent than her daughter, but there was little more will power or ability to cope with the problems of life. One of her daughters had disappeared off the face of the earth a few years before—there had been a baby—that was all they knew. She was working at Coney Island. One day she came home and, when she left the next morning, it was the last they ever saw of her. A brother of the girl had also disappeared in much the same way.
The field worker left the tenement with the positive assurance that environment without strict personal supervision made little difference when it was a question of the feeble-minded.
Great-grandchildren of “Old Sal.”
