[III]
CLUB LIFE AMONG OUTCASTS
I
One of the first noticeable features of low life is its gregariousness. To be alone, except in a few cases where a certain morbidity and peculiar fondness for isolation prevail, is almost the worst punishment that can befall the outcast. There is a variety of causes for this, but I think the main one is the desire to feel that although he is forbidden the privileges and rights of a polite society, he can nevertheless identify himself with just as definite and exclusive a community as the one he has been turned out of.
His specialty in crime and rowdyism determines the particular form and direction of his social life. If he is a tramp he wants to know his partners, and the same instinct prevails in all other fields of outlawry. In time, and as he comes to see that his world is a large one,—so large, in fact, that he can never understand it all,—he chooses as he can those particular "pals" with whom he can get on the easiest. Out of this choice there develops what I call the outcast's club. He himself calls it a gang, and his club-house a "hang-out." It is of such clubs that I want to write in this chapter. I do not pretend to know all of them. Far from it! And some of those that I know are too vile for description; but the various kinds that I can describe, I have chosen those which are the most representative.
II
Low life as I know it in America is composed of three distinct classes, and they are called, in outcasts' slang, the "Kids," the "Natives," and the "Old Bucks." The Kids, as their name suggests, are boys and girls, the Natives are the middle-aged outcasts, and the Old Bucks are the superannuated. Each of these classes has clubs corresponding in character and purpose to the age of the members.
The clubs of the Kids are composed mainly of mischievous children and instinctively criminal children. As a rule, they are organized by boys alone, but I have known girls also to take part in their proceedings. The lads are usually between ten and fifteen years old. Sometimes they live at home with their parents, if they have any, and sometimes in lodging-houses. They get their living, such as it is, by rag-picking, selling newspapers, blacking boots, and doing odd errands fitted to their strength. None of them, not even the criminally inclined, are able to steal enough to support themselves.
To illustrate, I shall take two clubs which I knew, one in Chicago, and one in Cincinnati. The Chicago club belonged exclusively to a set of lads on the North Side who called themselves the "Wildcats." The most of them were homeless little fellows who lived in that district as newsboys and boot-blacks. They numbered about twenty, and although they had no officially elected leader, a little fellow called Fraxy was nevertheless a recognized "president," and was supposed to know more about the city and certain tricks than the rest, and I think it was he who started the club. He was an attractive lad, capable of exercising considerable influence over his companions, and I can easily understand how he persuaded them to form the club. For personality counts for as much in low life as it does in "high life," and little Fraxy had a remarkably magnetic one. He drew boys to him wherever he went, and before going to Chicago had organized a similar club in Toledo, Ohio.
The club-house of the Wildcats was a little cave which they had dug in a cabbage-field on the outskirts of the city. Here they gathered nearly every night in the week to smoke cigarettes, read dime novels or hear them read, tell tales, crack jokes, and plan their mischievous raids on the neighboring districts. The cave contained a brickwork stove, some benches, some old pots and cans, one or two obscene pictures, and an old shoe-box, in which were stored from time to time various things to eat.