The Children of the Poor

by Jacob A. Riis

“Oh! don’t come to-morrow,” said the doctor, in something of a fright; “come next week!” She was relieved upon hearing the leader of the gang reprove the rest of the fellows for their want of style. He bowed with great precision, and announced that he would call “in about two weeks.”

The testimony of these workers agrees with that of most others who reach the girls at an age when they are yet manageable, that the most abiding results follow with them, though they are harder to get at. The boys respond more readily, but also more easily fall from grace. The same good and bad traits are found in both; the same trying superficiality—which merely means that they are raw material; the same readiness to lie as the shortest cut out of a scrape; the same generous helpfulness, characteristic of the poor everywhere. Out of the depth of their bitter poverty I saw the children in the West Fifty-second Street Industrial School, last Thanksgiving, bring for the relief of the aged and helpless and those even poorer than they such gifts as they could—a handful of ground coffee in a paper bag, a couple of Irish potatoes, a little sugar or flour, and joyfully offer to carry them home. It was on such a trip I found little Katie. In her person and work she answered the question sometimes asked, why we hear so much about the boys and so little of the girls; because the home and the shop claim their work much earlier and to a much greater extent, while the boys are turned out to shift for themselves, and because, therefore, their miseries are so much more commonplace, and proportionally uninteresting. It is a woman’s lot to suffer in silence. If occasionally she makes herself heard in querulous protest; if injustice long borne gives her tongue a sharper edge than the occasion seems to require, it can at least be said in her favor that her bark is much worse than her bite. The missionary who complains that the wife nags her husband to the point of making the saloon his refuge, or the sister her brother until he flees to the street, bears testimony in the same breath to her readiness to sit up all night to mend the clothes of the scamp she so hotly denounces. Sweetness of temper or of speech is not a distinguishing feature of tenement-house life, any more among the children than with their elders. In a party sent out by our committee for a summer vacation on a Jersey farm, last summer, was a little knot of six girls from the Seventh Ward. They had not been gone three days before a letter came from one of them to the mother of one of the others. “Mrs. Reilly,” it read, “if you have any sinse you will send for your child.” That they would all be murdered was the sense the frightened mother made out of it. The six came home post haste, the youngest in a state of high dudgeon at her sudden translation back to the tenement. The lonesomeness of the farm had frightened the others. She was little more than a baby, and her desire to go back was explained by one of the rescued ones thus: “She sat two mortil hours at the table a stuffin’ of herself, till the missus she says, says she, ‘Does yer mother lave ye to sit that long at the table, sis?’” The poor thing was where there was enough to eat for once in her life, and she was making the most of her opportunity.

Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. It was in March a year ago that a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out the child, she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen climbing after, groped around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll’s trunk over the floor.

“I could not leave it,” she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized her; “my mother——”

They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the sidewalk and, breaking open, revealed no doll or finery, but the deed for her dead mother’s grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her thirteen years.

Yet Bessie might, likely would, have been found in the front row where anything was going on or to be had, crowding with the best of them and thrusting herself and her claim forward regardless of anything or anybody else. It is a quality in the children which, if not admirable, is at least natural. The poor have to take their turn always, and too often it never comes, or, as in the case of the poor young mother, whom one of our committee found riding aimlessly in a street car with her dying baby, not knowing where to go or what to do, when it is too late. She took mother and child to the dispensary. It was crowded and they had to wait their turn. When it came the baby was dead. It is not to be expected that children who have lived the lawless life of the street should patiently put up with such a prospect. That belongs to the discipline of a life of failure and want. The children know generally what they want and they go for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to give or pictures to take. In the latter case they reversed my Hell’s Kitchen experience with a vengeance. Their determination to be “took,” the moment the camera hove in sight, in the most striking pose they could hastily devise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met. The recollection of one such occasion haunts me yet. They were serving a Thanksgiving dinner free to all comers at a charitable institution in Mulberry Street, and more than a hundred children were in line at the door under the eye of a policeman when I tried to photograph them. Each one of the forlorn host had been hugging his particular place for an hour, shivering in the cold as the line slowly advanced toward the door and the promised dinner, and there had been numberless little spats due to the anxiety of some one farther back to steal a march on a neighbor nearer the goal; but the instant the camera appeared the line broke and a howling mob swarmed about me, up to the very eye of the camera, striking attitudes on the curb, squatting in the mud in alleged picturesque repose, and shoving and pushing in a wild struggle to get into the most prominent position. With immense trouble and labor the policeman and I made a narrow lane through the crowd from the camera to the curb, in the hope that the line might form again. The lane was studded, the moment I turned my back, with dirty faces that were thrust into it from both sides in ludicrous anxiety lest they should be left out, and in the middle of it two frowsy, ill-favored girls, children of ten or twelve, took position, hand in hand, flatly refusing to budge from in front of the camera. Neither jeers nor threats moved them. They stood their ground with a grim persistence that said as plainly as words that they were not going to let this, the supreme opportunity of their lives, pass, cost what it might. In their rags, barefooted, and in that disdainful pose in the midst of a veritable bedlam of shrieks and laughter, they were a most ludicrous spectacle. The boys fought rather shy of them, of one they called “Mag” especially, as it afterward appeared with good reason. A chunk of wood from the outskirts of the crowd that hit Mag on the ear at length precipitated a fight in which the boys struggled ten deep on the pavement, Mag in the middle of the heap, doing her full share. As a last expedient I bethought myself of a dog-fight as the means of scattering the mob, and sent around the corner to organize one. Fatal mistake! At the first suggestive bark the crowd broke and ran in a body. Not only the hangers-on, but the hungry line collapsed too in an instant, and the policeman and I were left alone. As an attraction the dog-fight outranked the dinner.

This unconquerable vanity, if not turned to use for his good, makes a tough of the lad with more muscle than brains in a perfectly natural way. The newspapers tickle it by recording the exploits of his gang with embellishments that fall in exactly with his tastes. Idleness encourages it. The home exercises no restraint. Parental authority is lost. At a certain age young men of all social grades know a heap more than their fathers, or think they do. The young tough has some apparent reason for thinking that way. He has likely learned to read. The old man has not; he probably never learned anything, not even to speak the language that his son knows without being taught. He thinks him “dead slow,” of course, and lays it to his foreign birth. All foreigners are “slow.” The father works hard. The boy thinks he knows a better plan. The old man has lost his grip on the lad, if he ever had any. That is the reason why the tough appears in the second generation and disappears in the third. By that time father and son are again on equal terms, whatever those terms may be. The exception to this rule is in the poorest Irish settlements where the manufacture of the tough goes right on, aided by the “inflooence” of the police court on one side and the saloon on the other. Between the two the police fall unwillingly into line. I was in the East Thirty-fifth Street police station one night when an officer came in with two young toughs whom he had arrested in a lumber yard where they were smoking and drinking. They had threatened to kill him and the watchman, and loaded revolvers were taken from them. In spite of this evidence against them, the Justice in the police court discharged them on the following morning with a scowl at the officer, and they were both jeering at him before noon. Naturally he let them alone after that. It was one case of hundreds of like character. The politician, of course, is behind them. Toughs have votes just as they have brickbats and brass-knuckles; when the emergency requires, an assortment to suit of the one as of the other.

The story of the tough’s career I told in “How the Other Half Lives,” and there is no need of repeating it here. Its end is generally lurid, always dramatic. It is that even when it comes to him “with his boots off,” in a peaceful sick bed. In his bravado one can sometimes catch a glimpse of the sturdiest traits in the Celtic nature, burlesqued and caricatured by the tenement. One who had been a cut-throat, bruiser, and prizefighter all his brief life lay dying from consumption in his Fourth Ward tenement not long ago. He had made what he proudly called a stand-up fight against the disease until now the end had come and he had at last to give up.

“Maggie,” he said, turning to his wife with eyes growing dim, “Mag! I had an iron heart, but now it is broke. Watch me die!” And Mag told it proudly at the wake as proof that Pat died game.

And the girl that has come thus far with him? Fewer do than one might think. Many more switch off their lovers to some honest work this side of the jail, making decent husbands of them as they are loyal wives, thus proving themselves truly their better halves. But of her who goes his way with him—it is not generally a long way for either—what of her end? Let me tell the story of one that is the story of all. I came across it in the course of my work as a newspaper man a year ago and I repeat it here as I heard it then from those who knew, with only the names changed. The girl is dead, but he is alive and leading an honest life at last, so I am told. The story is that of “Kid” McDuff’s girl.