Little Susie
From “The Children of the Poor.”
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
And now here are the “old church tenements” I spoke of (see illustration facing page [92]); upon the records of the Health Department “among the largest contributors to the hospitals” in the city. The cellar, where the tenants paid two and three dollars a month,—that was before the day when the whole population of “cave-dwellers,” more than five thousand in number, was dragged out upon the street by the police and not allowed to go back—was the old vault in which the sexton stored corpses in the days when the building was a church. Do you wonder, when you come to think of it, that the church lost its grip upon the people of that day, and that some of the feeling of that still survives? Do you wonder that these people were not attracted by a scheme of salvation that meant damnation in this life, so far as they could see? I do not. Bear in mind the old church for a little while; I shall have more to tell you of that. That, too, was atoned for, thank God!
Tenement Where a Home was Murdered
This is Gotham Court (see illustration facing page [94]), that stood, until three or four years ago, almost on the identical spot where George Washington lived when he was the first President of this Republic. His house was directly across the street, and in his day it was of course as fine a neighborhood as there was in the city. Within sixty years after his death, the slum had moved in. That tells the story of the mighty strides New York took towards metropolitan greatness, and of the perils that hedged in our path in the race for sudden wealth. For that was the time when we forgot. When I made a census of the Court some years before it was demolished, I found one hundred and forty-two families there. It happened that just half of them were Italians and the other half the original Irish, except that there were two German families there. Perhaps you can imagine the kind of time those two German families were having. The process of displacing the Hibernian element with the Italian is not altogether a peaceful one, as the constant presence of the policemen in the alley bore witness. It was an Irishman, of course, who told me, when I asked him why the policeman was there, that it was “all on account of them two Dutch families in the alley; they make so much trouble that no one can stand it.” Nobody else would have thought of it. I shall not try to describe to you in detail what life meant in that place, for it is gone now and I am glad. One Christmas when I was Santa Claus in the alley for the King’s Daughters, two hundred little girls came out of it and claimed dolls from me. They might have told you. Do you see the “wall of wrath” of which I spoke? Wait till I will give you a better view of it. There, now, are the Alderman’s tenements (see illustration facing page [96]) that were cursed by it, as were his tenants all the days of their lives. But the wall, too, is gone. It went one Christmas, and in its fall it was to me as if I heard again the chorus of angels’ voices singing, “Peace on earth, good-will towards men.” I had never heard any angels’ voices in that alley before.
A “Drunken” Flat
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Here is one of the little girls who got my dolls (see illustration facing page [98]), little Susie Rocco, whose story I promised to tell you. Susie was as good a girl as you can find in Philadelphia, search where you may. Perhaps she was not very well instructed in the higher ethics of things. It may be that Mrs. Carrie Nation would not have approved of her, because the work she did and by which she helped her mother run the household was pasting covers on pocket-flasks, whiskey flasks, which, I suppose, come under the ban entirely. Susie did not, I know. She was not concerned about that; she was concerned about helping her mother, and, though I am no champion of the whiskey flask, I stand with Susie. Her father was a loafer and when he ran away at last and the mother fell ill and Susie’s work gave out, the evil days came that are never far away in a slum alley. Everything went to the pawnshop, last of all the mother’s wedding ring. I should have sent that first, but she was a woman; I am a man. She had to go to the hospital then; the doctor said so. It was the only place where she could be properly cared for.
Susie wept. She was afraid of the hospital. You know it, all of you who have had any dealings with the poor, that one of their very real hardships is that, when most they need that friend, they are afraid of him. Susie could not bear the thought. She cast about in the house for something that was yet of value enough to take to the pawnshop, so that she might stay the evil day, and she found my doll. It was not a nice doll by that time; it was very much in need of the hospital itself. But to Susie it was precious beyond compare, for was it not her doll baby? She did it up in a newspaper and carried it to the pawnshop with tears, for she was bringing the greatest sacrifice of all. And that bad man, when he unrolled the bundle and saw what it held, smashed the doll angrily against the stove and put little Susie out into the street. There she stood and wept, as if she would cry her eyes out, and there one of the King’s Daughters found her; and that was how I came to know Susie and her story.
Better days came for her and her mother, for the ladies took them up and cared for them. They were made happy and I ought to have been, but I was not. Let me confess it right here and have done with it. I am no scrapper; I have too much else to do to go around picking quarrels with everybody. I try hard to do as the Apostle says: “live peaceably with all men as far as in me lies”; but how can it lie very far in anybody with that kind of a pawnbroker in the landscape? I own that the notion of having one little round with that man, just one little one, has charms that I cannot get around.