LOUISIANA.
Part of a Day Among the Poor.
MISS JOSEPHINE PIERCE, NEW ORLEANS.
In the rear of St. Charles Avenue you may enter and see an old man. He says he has been converted since he was ninety years of age. The Psalms are all his delight. There has not been a chip of wood nor a grain of coal in his room all this winter. With the strength of a hundred years in his muscles, he grasps a crust of bread, and asks for more. His daughter replies: “Father, you should put your mind on the Lord, and then you wouldn’t be so hungry; people that pray all the time don’t have such an appetite.” As if this were not enough, in this same room, the worse than fatherless baby, Leopold, has come into New Orleans life, with that stain upon his birth, which all the waters in the ocean cannot wash away. For these four generations, from the great-grandfather to the babe of yesterday, only one woman’s frail hands to keep the wolf from the door, and hers held from going out to work, by the sickness that cannot spare her from home. With all Father H’s ever-flowing liberality, there have been weeks in succession, this winter, when there has not been twenty-five cents’ worth of corn-meal to give the old man; for if he had it, Aunt Deborah, who has seen General Washington many and many a time, would have to go without; and if she had it, blind Aunt Bagatelle would have to go without; and if she had it, blind Aunt Milly would have to go without.
Perhaps it will be easier to breathe in the next house. Over the way, as the mother’s hand is clasped in greeting: “You miss your boy?” “Yes, James is dead. He wanted white sugar in his tea, and I couldn’t get it for him. He wanted medicine, and I couldn’t get it for him. He was hungry-like. So it’s good the Father has taken him; I gave him the medicine your minister sent him. I put a spoonful of the medicine that didn’t need sweetening into the medicine that did need sweetening. It seemed to do him good.”
Let us go to the sunny side, three miles away. “God bless you, my child,” was all the mother’s gift to Baby Vasa. A foster-mother welcomed the orphan to her heart and her home. As she stands by the tub—“I have no bonnet,” she says; “but we have the baby. We used to have milk in the family, but since the baby came we haven’t stopped the cart. I don’t know how to make clothes for him, but I think I can learn.” God bless thee, Baby Vasa, for all the unselfish love thy little fingers work out in the daily life about thee! A can of milk for Baby Vasa brought a never-to-be-forgotten light into the foster-mother’s eyes.
Here is a house without a number. As you lift the wooden latch, you feel that some one is waiting for a coming step. “I was sick last night,” Aunt Jemima says. “I thought the angels would come for me; I sometimes think they will come very soon.” Her bed is under the rafters, just at the head of those narrow stairs. The room, without a door, is the only thoroughfare for another family. There is no sheet on the bed; cotton was given for it, but was saved for something else. She goes on: “People won’t come in one of these mornings, and say, ‘Aunt Jemima’s dead, and she’s very poor, and we’ll have to go right out and buy her some clothes,’ for I have a skirt and a white dress, and a pair of new stockings.” “But the stockings were given to you year before last—ar’n’t they worn out yet?” “Oh, no! you don’t think I would ever put them on. When the sun shines, I hang them on that pole to air them.” A piece of sugar-cane is in the ashes for fuel. The old limbs failed the last time they went out to Lake Pontchartrain for drift-wood. A satisfied smile lights up the whole face—the ear bends close to the lips, and they murmur: “I am rich; when the angels come for me, I have a pair of new stockings.”