Another of the many ways in which this versatile youngster amuses himself is by playing truant.
The equipment of the typical boy of the Middle West Side when he is first sent to school is pitiable. Excessive cigarette smoking, the wrangling atmosphere of the home, the excitement of the street, have sapped his nervous power. He is restless, easily reduced to sulkiness, and exceedingly hard to interest. The varied excitement of the streets, combined with the inevitable cigarette, has lost to him all power of continued thought or concentration. School itself, like the boy, has little chance. Perhaps it is lacking in anything which makes a vital appeal to his nature, but from the first it is handicapped. Not only is the lure of the streets tremendous, but the bewildered school teacher is presented with a child who has been born into ignorance and inexpansibility, reared in an atmosphere of discord and vice, and given every chance of acquiring disastrous physical and moral habits, before ever he reached the class room; and the problem that confronts the teacher is not that of building up a character but of making over one that is already seriously deformed.
The sources of the truancy habit are undoubtedly to be traced in the boy’s first acquaintance as an infant with the streets. As we have seen, he is familiar from babyhood with the bustle and confusion of street life and his first pleasurable experiences are associated with it. The atmosphere of the street, its scenes and sounds, permeate the child’s whole existence and fasten upon him the shackles of habit. After a year or two of more or less complete subjection of his budding mind to this influence, the child is expected to exchange without protest the thrilling, lawless streets for the orderly commonplace of the school room. Of course he is attracted by the novelty of the latter for a time, but after that he feels the strain of two conflicting influences—the lure of the street and the instinct of obedience to authority. If he wishes to yield to the street, he has the traditions of generations of truants and any number of conniving playmates to aid him to escape. And here we have the beginnings of the “delinquency” which almost inevitably sooner or later leads him to the juvenile court.[50]
Here is the confession of a ten-year-old truant, which is typical of school life in the district:
“I used to go to the Fifty-second Street school with Jimmie, but they made me change to Forty-eighth Street because I stayed away so much. I would leave home in the morning at school time and then come up here and play in the streets instead of going to school. I would just hang around the corners with the other boys or go after loot with them. A little while ago, Jimmie and I wanted money, and we got a dog to follow us into a candy store on Eleventh Avenue, and there we tried to sell it. It was a dandy dog, a thoroughbred, but the storekeeper said he had two already and wouldn’t buy it. We tried to sell it again but it got away from us. We tried that with another one once but it was a bum one. Nobody would buy it, and after spending the whole morning trying, we gave it a kick and chased it off. Jimmie and I and a bunch of boys all got a duck apiece in Jersey once and we were able to sell them for fifty cents apiece.”
“How do you get over to Jersey without paying?”
“That’s easy,” said Jimmie, “you go down to de ferry and wait till two or t’ree ladies comes in togeder. One of ’em gits two or t’ree tickets for the bunch, and you step right up in front of the first lady, like you was her son. The gateman sees the tickets in her hand, and then you beat it, while she’s tryin’ to explain to the gateman. Coming back is easier still, ’cos you can always sneak through the wagon, or express, or employes’ entrances there.”
“When our whole family goes to Jersey,” went on the narrator, “all of us kids sneak in that way. My father buys tickets and then we walk through the gates and he refuses to pay for us because he don’t know us. Just now it is too cold to go to Jersey much, or do anything but keep in school. Besides I’m on parole now. I have to have a good conduct card and have to go and see Mr. Carson once in so often and tell him about what I’m doin’.”
Truancy here is developed into a system, which the youngsters can adjust to any occasion with the greatest facility. If you start to school with your books in the morning it is an easy matter to leave them at a candy store or with a friend, and put in the morning furthering your own interests on the docks or in the streets. If a truant officer asks you your name or your business on the streets, one name is as good as another,—if it is far enough from your own; and there are many plausible reasons for being out of school, if you can avoid having to prove them. A placating note to your teacher written by yourself is as good as one by your mother, if you can only make the teacher believe that your mother wrote it. After two or three days in the street, it is necessary to maintain a strict watch over the mail box, if you would beat your parents to the truant officer’s notice which will sooner or later be found therein. This notice can be removed from the box by the judicious use of a bent pin, and communication between the school and the home is thus indefinitely postponed.
Once these details are arranged, the streets of New York are open to the boys for a holiday. Money, while not an absolute necessity, is much to be desired, and there are many ways of obtaining it,—witness the statement of “Jimmie’s” friend, above. It is against the law for boys under fourteen years to work, and the greater number of employers to whom they apply do their best to make this law effective; in any case, labor as a financial resource makes no strong appeal. But there are things to sell if you can only get hold of them without being caught. Pennies may be begged, or stolen from other and smaller children. Similarly food may be begged when necessary, or obtained unobtrusively from fruit stand and grocery counters. Jimmie’s friend is by no means the only boy who starts for school regularly every morning and very often does not return before nine or ten o’clock at night, staving off the pangs of hunger (which often seems to be the only form of homesickness known in this district) through the resources here described.