Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York

by Mary White Ovington

Mothers who go out to day's-work are also unable to nurse their babies or to prepare all their food. The infant is placed in the care of some neighbor or of a growing daughter, who may be the impatient "little mother" of a number of charges. When the hot summer comes, such a baby is likely to fall the victim of epidemic diarrhœa, caused by pollution of the milk. Newman has a striking chart of infant death rates in Paris in which he pictures a rate mounting in one week as high as 256 in the thousand among the artificially fed infants, while for the same week, among the breast fed babies, the mortality is 32. The Negro mother, seeking self-support by keeping clean another's house or caring for another's children, finds her own offspring swiftly taken from her by a disease that only her nourishing care could forestall.[7]

Remedial measures have for some time been taken in New York to check infant mortality, and they have met with some success. The distribution of pasteurized milk by Mr. Nathan Straus, the establishment of milk stations during the summer months in New York and Brooklyn where mothers at slight cost may secure proper infant food, and where much educative work is done by the visiting nurse, the multiplication of day nurseries, all these have helped to decrease the death rate. The Negroes have been benefited by these remedial agencies, but their percentage of 290 is still a matter for grave attention.

Two out of seven of New York's Negro babies die in the first year, but the other five grow up, some with puny arms and ricketty legs, others again too hardy for bad food or bad air to harm.

Like the babies these children suffer from their mother's absence at work. Family ties are loose, and more than other children they are handicapped by lack of proper home care. In an examination of the records of the Children's Court for three years I found that out of 717 arraignments of colored children, 221 were for improper guardianship, 30.8 per cent of the whole. Among the Russian children of the East Side, Tenth and Eleventh Wards, only 15 per cent of arraignments were on this complaint, indicating twice as many children without parental care among the colored as among the children of the Tenth and Eleventh Wards. Rough colored girls, also, whose habits were too depraved to permit of their remaining without restraint, were frequently committed to reformatories.

Truancy is not uncommon in colored neighborhoods, though few cases come before the courts. Sometimes the boy or girl is kept at home to care for the younger children, but again, lacking the mother's oversight, he remains on the street when he should be in school, or arrives late with ill prepared lessons.

Asking a teacher of long experience among colored and white children concerning their respective scholarship, he assured me that the colored child could do as well as the white, but didn't. "From 20 to 50 per cent of the mothers of my colored children," he said, "go out to work. There is no one to oversee the child's tasks, and consequently little conscientious study."

One can scarcely blame the children; and certainly one cannot blame the mothers for toiling for their support. And the fathers, though they work faithfully, are rarely able to earn enough unaided to support their families. Perhaps in time the city may improve matters by opening its school-rooms for a study period in the afternoon.

But meanwhile the children are without proper care. This is not hard to endure in the summer, but in winter it is very trying to be without a home. Poor little cold boys and girls, some of them mere babies! You see them in the late afternoon sitting on the tenement stairs, waiting for the long day to be done. It seems a week since they were inside eating their breakfast. The city has not pauperized them with a luncheon, and they have had only cold food since morning. Sometimes they have been all day without nourishment. When the door is opened at last, there are many helpful things for them to do for their mother, and reading and arithmetic are relegated to so late an hour that their problem is only temporarily solved by sleep.

Not all the colored working women, however, go out for employment. Laundry work is an important home industry, and one may watch many mothers at their tubs or ironing-boards from Monday morning until Saturday night. This makes the tenement rooms, tiny enough at best, sadly cluttered, but it does not deprive the children of the presence of their mother, who accepts a smaller income to remain at home with them. For after we have made full allowance for the lessening of family ties among the Negroes by social and economic pressure, we find that the majority of the colored boys and girls receive a due share of proper parental oversight. They are fed on appetizing food, cleanly and prettily dressed, they are encouraged to study and to improve their position, and they are given all the advantages that it is possible for their mothers and fathers to secure.

Jack London tells in the "Children of the Abyss" of the East Side of London, where "they have dens and lairs into which to crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all. One can not travesty the word by calling such dens and lairs 'homes.'" I have seen thousands of Negro dwelling-places, but I cannot think of half a dozen, however great their poverty, where this description would be correct. No matter how dingy the tenement, or how long the hours of work, the mother, and the father, too, try to make the "four walls and a ceiling" to which they return, home. Visitors among the New York poor, in the past and in the present, testify that given the same income or lack of income, the colored do not allow their surroundings to become so cheerless or so filthy as the white, and that when there is an opportunity for the mother to spend some time in the house, the rooms take on an air of pleasant refinement. Pictures decorate the walls, the sideboard contains many pretty dishes, and the table is set three times a day. Meals are not eaten out of the paper bag common on New York's East Side, but there is something of formality about the dinner, and good table manners are taught the children. The tenement dwelling becomes a home, and the boys and girls pass a happy childhood in it.