The parents often get a settled distrust of a girl with which they do not hesitate to confront her. Distrust is too often justified, for there are few girls who scruple about telling a lie. But constant accusation and doubt serve only to deepen suspicion and drive the girl on to more crafty concealment. The crassness of the punishment administered is especially bad for her years. To this can be traced so much of the “wildness” of the children here. But familiar as she is with brutality of one kind or another, a special resentment comes to the girl at this age. Violence outrages her self-respect and the ideals which are struggling for a foothold in her imagination.
The greatest strain in such households is that between mother and daughter. The girl is starting her course, undisciplined and eager. The woman has lived through checkered and hazardous years. She has suffered the bearing of many children; she has watched the death of some. What she has attained has been hardly won. Through it all, constant labor has drained her physical strength. She is spent, dragged, and worn, in pitiful need of the younger, more vigorous life at her side. As she turns to it there creeps into her attitude the note of appeal which the girl is too young to appreciate. If she deals a rebuff with the half conscious brutality of youth, her mother may draw back into a shell of hardness. Out of the scant wisdom of her years the child has been forced to a decision pregnant with results for her future; for often upon her response to the older woman’s first appeal trembles her entire relationship with her mother and her home.
There is no getting away from the girl’s economic value to her family. It seems ugly and crass that a child’s contribution to the common purse should have any bearing on the affection or guidance she will receive. Yet it has, and her manner of contributing has even more. Out of the conditions of this engulfing, material struggle, rise the spiritual forces at work in each narrow tenement home. Whatever breeds there of loyalty or bitter estrangement works out its certain effect. And the spirit of the household is of no greater import to any member than to the young, venturesome girl.
Here is a household where the girl’s wages have been the mainstay for the whole winter. Louisa’s father, a German, has always been frugal and hardworking and was even penurious in better days. He is now seventy-four. His eyes were weakened in the days of his strength by the strain of his trade as a tailor. Later he came to porter’s work, but now he is too feeble for this. The mother, like so many women in the neighborhood, earns the rent as a janitress. Louisa’s brother, a young man of twenty-one, is a glass cutter by trade. His work might be steady and his wages good, but the common blight of the West Side has struck him; he chooses to loaf with the gang and take things easy. The old father, inveighing against him, has wished to turn him out. But his mother, although she too takes her turn at upbraiding, shields him against the others and clings to a desperate belief in his transparent excuses.
In this crisis, they have looked to the $5.00 which Louisa brings home every week from the candy factory. She is a wilful little person, frail, underdeveloped, weak of build in character as in physique. The reins have been put into her hands. She has used her new-found power to add to her long day at the factory several nights every week at dance halls where she stays until 1 or 2 o’clock. The reproaches of her parents have no effect. “You say that you like me,” she wails, “but you make me miserable here. I’ll go out if I want to, and I’ll not tell where I am going. Anyhow I don’t come home drunk like Bill and make a fuss in the hall. And I work while he hangs around doing nothing.”
Leading the Grand March at the racket of the “Harlem Four,” Louisa has forgotten her outburst, and the dull, sad, cramped existence at home. She is thin, pale, sharp-featured, yet with a certain daintiness. Her attire is “flossy” tonight. She cannot boast a ball dress, to be sure. But her scant suit of brown serge with its sateen collar is trim and new. It was bought at an Eighth Avenue store on the instalment plan. Four out of the twelve dollars have been paid down. A great encircling hat of cheap black straw reaches to the middle of her back and bends under the weight of an enormous “willow.” It sets off her hair, which has been bleached with peroxide. A long bang hangs to her eyes. Her moment of elation comes as she receives the favor for the ladies who lead, a huge bunch of variegated flowers—roses, carnations, and daffodils. But the costume in which she steps out so triumphantly has cost many bitter moments at home. She has gotten it by force, with the threat of throwing up her job.
The breach is widening between her and the parents to whom she clung as a child. There comes the time when she gets a steady “gentleman friend.” She is out now almost nightly. At last the mother appears with her tale, tearful and anxious. “I don’t know whatever I’m goin’ to do with that girl. I’ve just beat her, I have—I guess I ruined three dollars’ worth o’ clothes. But I lost my temper. She stands up and answers me back. An’ she’s comin’ in at 2 o’clock, me not knowin’ where she has been. Folks will talk, you know, an’ it ain’t right fer a girl.” So Louisa is losing her only safeguards. Foolish, childish, easily flattered, she is drifting into a maelstrom of gaiety and pleasure from which only chance will bring her out unscathed.
The great issue between the home and the girl is the question as to whether her affections will center there. Only an emotional hold will take effect on this girl. Her mind is undeveloped. She is not going to reason far. Habit has not yet fastened her in a rut of eternal work and decency. Possibilities that menace health and strength and, in the long run, happiness, hedge her round. If she becomes estranged from those who are naturally near to her, she is set adrift. She is bound to express in some way the chaotic emotional forces within her. She is dangerous then to herself and others, in surroundings like these of the far West Side.
CHAPTER V
THE WILL TO PLAY
A girl from fourteen to eighteen is about as unstable and kaleidoscopic as any quantity in nature. She is changing, almost from day to day. It may be that poverty in her home has deprived her of her full share of youth’s vigor and supreme physical wellbeing. Even so, she keeps its impatient desire for action and experience. She feels its disdain of restraint and hindrance; its zest for swallowing life in hot, hasty gulps. The desire to play is strong in her. Lack-luster resignation and pessimism are rare among the young even where poverty weighs most heavily. The girl’s buoyant spirit breaks loose at the instant of release from factory walls or from the momentary depression of family want. It bubbles forth in girls’ laughter and girls’ play, and in girls’ capricious, whimsical, egoistic moods.