Practically every family has rubbed elbows with poverty too familiar for comment,[22] or seen it close at hand among the neighbors in the house and the children who play with their own on the street. In many families poverty is a basic condition underlying their many catastrophes and the whole tenure of their unstable fortunes. Often the budget simply cannot be stretched by any system of economy to cover the requisites for healthy and sturdy growth. Such requisites become luxuries, too extravagant for many a child. Teeth and eyes go uncared for, nourishment is inadequate, and misbehavior may easily spring in the wake of this negligence; often it does. For none of these children is good air obtainable except in short intervals. And very closely associated with the moral indifference of many an adolescent boy are the noise and overcrowding within his own home to which he is accustomed from babyhood. Sleep in a stuffy, dark bedroom, with two or three other occupants, has a telling effect both on mind and body, and never from morning to night are these tenements quiet. At the very outset poverty destroys the possibilities of normal development. The tenement child runs his race, but it is always a handicap.
Facing these harsh circumstances is a set of women who, though intimacy reveals among them varied dispositions and abilities, have yet developed out of the common experience many of the same ideas and lines of action. To their share falls the heaviest responsibility for the discipline and training of the children. The father is in the background and may be used as a court of appeal. Or perhaps he is to be guarded against,—another source of anxiety to the mother, who assumes the difficult role of “standing between.” Among the more intelligent families he usually has a decisive voice in important questions as to school or work, and frequently he is the stricter parent, and carries more authority. But the day-in and day-out management and care is the woman’s. These mothers of the tenements are confronted by the same problems, and they conform to certain types which it is not difficult to recognize.
Very familiar is the figure of the well-meaning woman who has kept her own decency, not without a struggle, but has proved hopelessly ineffective as a mother. She is usually ill-equipped to conceive or enter into the feelings of an imperious, self-absorbed, and overstimulated youngster. Her very decency has often forced her into a dull routine with a gray, colorless outlook, out of sympathy with youth that refuses to accept the shadows of her own overworked and saddened lot. Many of these women came from Ireland as mere girls, alone or “brought by a friend,” to go into the drudgery of living out. Their working days began in childhood. Mrs. Macy drew her own picture: Herself a child of twelve, she started out to “mind” children. “I had a little hat wi’ daisies all roun’ the brim an’ ribbons hangin’ off the back with daisies fastened on, and with one hand I was hangin’ on to a hunk of m’lasses candy. I sure was childish lookin’ help but I held the job for six years.” Then came the marriage “to get a home of my own,” followed by those terrible first years of bitter disillusionment and wretchedness. “He’d leave me alone in the house of an evening—I’d never been used to that. I was frightened, an’ I’d cry.” Soon child came after child, probably with a quota early given to death, and with those who lived arose the problem of their rearing.
Almost at once the women are awakened to the menace of the streets which become their common enemy. “To keep the boy off the streets” is the phrase everywhere repeated, pitiful in its futility. For every contrivance or device is useless once the boy has responded to their lure. The “fixed up” parlor with its lavishness of staring rugs and curtains, its piano, the symbol of many an hour’s toil and ambition, or its phonograph, is exhibited by the mother with much satisfaction. Yet it crops out that in spite of these attractions Willie does not stay at home, and that only for severe punishment is he “kept up.” Or, where restriction is tried, a boy makes use of every sort of subterfuge in order to escape. An errand, a visit to a boy’s house, a club, even church, are the alleged destinations which really serve as a pathway to the “hang-out” of the gang.
If such competition with the street is futile when the family is comparatively well-to-do, what chance has the mother with no such attractions at hand? Her home consists of three or four dark, stuffy rooms, destitute of carpet, or perhaps with a frayed strip or two, and a meager allowance of shabby furniture. There is no space for a separate parlor. The evening meal, the one family event, is eaten in the kitchen, perhaps in cramped quarters where each one takes his turn for a chair. The very conditions which her own standards impose, the fact that she “does not bother with such like in this house,” has “no time for comp’ny,” or “never set foot in one o’ them silly shows,” cut her off completely from comprehending the excitement and charm of the streets to which her children yield so eagerly.
Some of these women have carried for years the burden of a shiftless husband. With dumb patience they accept their lot—there is always the fact that “four or five dollars is better than none, an’ it means a lot to me on the rent.” And when even this help is lacking, it may be “he did used t’ be a good man t’ me an’ in his day he’s worked hard in the slaughter house. He sez I’d be pretty mean t’ turn him out after all these years. He can’t last much longer, an’ it’s hard t’ know what’s right. Most every night he comes up here done. We have to laugh at him a good deal an’ so manage t’ get along.” A pretty grim kind of humor, this. In such cases it is well if the man is no longer there. Sometimes the wife has mustered all her power of decision and made the effort to eject a chronic loafer from the home. “I talked and I talked for years,” said Mrs. McCarthy, “an’ he thought I wouldn’t do nothin’. I couldn’t put him away, but I got the judge t’ make him keep out of my home. ‘Don’t you never bother this woman,’ he sez. I had got to hate him so I couldn’t stand it to look at him when I heard him come down the hall to the door an’ me standin’ there over me irons and me tub.”
The bitter lesson of endurance so well learned, familiar as second nature, is repeated again and again with sons who are too lazy to work and depend upon the mother’s earnings for what they cannot get by gambling or stealing. Often her force is spent. She is weak, querulous, discouraged. To expect her to stem the tide of outside forces which are molding the boy into the nerveless or vicious man his father was before him is to ask the utterly impossible. Perhaps she will close her eyes, like Mrs. Gates, whose only son has joined a gang of sneak thieves but who maintains that “Jimmy is a good boy and never was no trouble to me.” In her heart she knows there is something amiss, but she turns a deaf ear to any hint of wrongdoing. Sometimes the mother admits everything, enlarging and complaining, but at the end sits weakly back. “What can I do? What th’ b’ys does outside they don’t bes aifter tellin’ inside, an’ I can’t be keepin’ tracks on thim all th’ toime.”
Approaching the “Gopher” Age
