There is little delicacy or finesse about this discipline; it is of the hammer and tongs variety. In the vast majority of these homes, even those of higher type, the emotions rule at one moment with cuff and shout, at the next with a caress or a laugh. No consistency is maintained, and the clever youngster soon learns by the signs when to duck and when to “clear out,” just as a little later he learns the earmarks of the “dinny” and knows when to “cheese it.” There is a constant piling up of threats which mean nothing. When Joseph boasts of his gang and their glories, “What, are youse fightin’ with that crew?” Mrs. Dooley raps out. “You just better not let me catch you or you’ll get all that’s comin’ to youse.” But she can back him up as hotly and unreasonably as she berates him, and the ill-starred policeman who comes beneath the onslaught of her tongue and within the range of her invective will find discretion the better part of valor and do well to hold his peace.
But most tragic and helpless of all is the mother who has gone down before the vicissitudes of her life. She belongs to the scum of our cities, accorded no respect and scant pity, only the scorn of her more “decent” neighbor of the tenements. She may still be holding her family together, but is almost always weak and enervated. Their unkempt and wretched quarters, their nomadic wanderings from house to house and block to block, reflect her own failure. The father may be the “better of the two,” but without her aid he is almost always incapable of keeping their heads far above water. Often he is another of her kind, and both have become the victims of their own habits. Suspicion and surliness may well be expected from such a family, for they have often much to fear.
Yet it may be that even such a woman as Mrs. Catesby, in her three barren rooms at the top of a rear tenement shack on one of the far river blocks, will receive you without questioning your right to enter and to share her confidence. Perhaps it is a latent desire for human intercourse, perhaps merely the spirit of simple courtesy, so universal among the women of the tenements. She is a slatternly little figure, dressed in a shabby black waist that scarcely covers her, with a tangle of frizzled red hair slipping over her face and held in tether by an odd hairpin or two. Her cheeks are pink, though the skin is loose and flabby, and her eyes are watery but clear and blue. An empty whiskey bottle on the table is a needless index to the chief interest of her sordid life. But although she may not share your opinions, which in her life have proved mere extra weight and have gone overboard as valueless, she is nevertheless very well aware of them. It is harsh to term her effort to play up to your standards deception; perhaps it is a genuine remnant of more decent aspirations. “If company comes it’s then I’m bound not to be clean. Now, don’t you look at the dirt in this house.” The dirt is of long standing, but conventions are appeased.
The picture of her life, her husband, and her children, which the woman paints for you, is colored for your benefit, and is not to be taken at its face value. There are plenty of evasions and falsehoods. Yet the poor shams which she raises to shield herself from your criticism are pitifully weak defenses through which may easily be caught many an illuminating glimpse of the dingy realities behind. Nor is her confidence difficult to gain, once your claim to friendliness is established. “Yes, once I was down to that children’s court. I was that frightened they’d take the children off. They was only ten an’ eight when they come in one day, Jenny an’ Paul, with a man I’d never seed before. ‘Good day,’ says he, ‘you’re Mrs. Catesby?’ ‘I am,’ says I, ‘but I’ve never had the pleasure.’ ‘No,’ says he, ‘I’m from the Gerries, and I’ve come for the children. They’ll have to come along with me.’ I was that upset I a’most fainted an’ I was all shaky like. Well, I went out to call papa,—he had work that day,—an’ when we come back, he’d took them clear off just like they was. He’d even left their little caps, an’ there they was, layin’ on the table. There’d been a complaint, I found out, yes, a complaint about how papa was drinkin’ too much, but we got ’em back all right. Wouldn’t it been awful if they’d been took!”
Sometimes the family is broken up, the children are carried away, and the parents left to drink out the rest of their lives as they will. To remove the children may seem high-handed and brutal, but the reverse picture—the family left to vent its weakness and its vice on the plastic children in its care—is surely a worse alternative. Some of these women are known as “harborers.” They send the youngsters out to beg, and wink at their pilfering if they do no worse. School in their eyes, as in the boys’, is an unnecessary regulation and enforced by an arbitrary society. Evasion of law is part of their code, quite as much as is the “working” of any organization or church, which is legitimate prey if there is something to be gained. Beyond the calls upon their children to gather coal and wood and to mind babies there are few restrictions. “Lord, I can’t be aifter botherin’ me heads over thim, lady, they do be off somewheres an’ ye can thrust thim younguns to take care o’ thimselves.” And take care of themselves they do, and quite effectually, until they have the bad luck to run foul of the police. Even then it is probably no very serious matter till Tommy gets to be an old offender. His mother at least is not worried about the condition of his morals, and can be counted on to give the most glowing character to “the Gerry man.” What need to fear the streets for him? Surely they can furnish him few sights more sordid and more impressive to his childish imagination and prematurely sharpened mind than those with which he has grown intimate within the walls of his “home.”
Truly they have a hard life, these West Side tenement mothers, and though many fail and many despair, from first to last the majority make a brave fight of it. When one is born to the lowest rung of the ladder and lives among people who seldom aspire beyond, existence becomes a difficult matter. How can the boy’s home be attractive when there is scarcely room to turn round in it, the family is large, and when year in and year out his mother is merely a drudge? How can his mother, under such conditions, hope to make the home rival the ever-changing lure of the streets? What time and mental energy can she give to her children separately, when she is struggling from morning till night to clothe and feed them? Is the child, produced as he is, so much her fault? Is he not much more a product of a situation for which her responsibility is small?
Replenishing the Wood Box
A Rich Find