One Way Out: A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America

by William Carleton

"It's criminal. Billy—we can't allow a family in the same house with us to suffer like that, can we?"

I shook my head.

"Then go down and see what you can do. I guess we can squeeze out fifty cents for them, can't we, Billy?"

"I guess you could squeeze fifty cents out of a stone for a sick baby," I said.

The upshot of it was that I went down and saw Michele. As Ruth had said his quarters were anything but clean but they didn't impress me as being in so bad a condition as she had described them. Perhaps my work in the ditch had made me a little more used to dirt. I found Michele a healthy, temperate, able-bodied man and I learned that he was earning as much as I. Not only that but the women took in garments to finish and picked up the matter of two or three dollars a week extra. There were five in the family but they were far from being in want. In fact Michele had a good bank account. They had all they wanted to eat, were warm and really prosperous. There was absolutely no need of the dirt. It was there because they didn't mind it. A five cent cake of soap would have made the rooms clean as a whistle and there were two women to do the scrubbing. I didn't leave my fifty cents but I came back upstairs with a better appreciation, if that were possible, of what such a woman as Ruth means to a man. Even the baby began to get better as soon as the district nurse drove into the parent's head a few facts about sensible infant feeding.

I don't want to make out that life is all beer and skittles for the tenement dwellers. It isn't. But I ran across any number of such cases as this where conditions were not nearly so bad as they appeared on the surface. Taking into account the number of people who were gathered together here in a small area I didn't see among the temperate and able-bodied any worse examples of hard luck than I saw among my former associates. In fact of sheer abstract hard luck I didn't see as much. In seventy-five per cent of the cases the conditions were of their own making—either the man was a drunkard or the women slovenly or the whole family was just naturally vicious. Ignorance may excuse some of this but not all of it. Perhaps I'm not what you'd call sympathetic but I've heard a lot of men talk about these people in a way that sounds to me like twaddle. I never ran across a family down here in such misery as that which Steve Bonnington's wife endured for years without a whimper.

Bonnington was a clerk with a big insurance company. He lived four houses below us on our street. I suppose he was earning about eighteen hundred dollars a year when he died. He left five children and he never had money enough even to insure in his own company. He didn't leave a cent. When Helen Bonnington came back from the grave it was to face the problem of supporting unaided, either by experience or relatives, five children ranging from twelve to one. She was a shy, retiring little body who had sapped her strength in just bringing the children into the world and caring for them in the privacy of her home. She had neither the temperament nor the training to face the world. But she bucked up to it. She sold out of the house what things she could spare, secured cheap rooms on the outskirts of the neighborhood and announced that she would do sewing. What it cost her to come back among her old friends and do that is a particularly choice type of agony that it would be impossible for a tenement widow to appreciate. And this same self-respect which both Helen's education and her environment forced her to maintain, handicapped her in other ways. You couldn't give Mrs. Bonnington scraps from your table; you couldn't give her old clothes or old shoes or money. It wasn't her fault because this was so; it wasn't your fault.

When her children were sick she couldn't send them off to the public wards of the hospitals. In the first place half the hospitals wouldn't take them as charity patients simply because she maintained a certain dignity, and in the second place the idea, by education, was so repugnant to her that it never entered her head to try. So she stayed at home and sewed from daylight until she couldn't hold open her eyes at night. That's where you get your true "Song of the Shirt." She not only sewed her fingers to the bone but while doing it she suffered a very fine kind of torture wondering what would happen to the five if she broke down. Asylums and homes and hospitals don't imply any great disgrace to most of the tenement dwellers but to a woman of that type they mean Hell. God knows how she did it but she kept the five alive and clothed and in school until the boy was about fifteen and went to work. When I hear of the lone widows of the tenements, who are apt to be very husky, and who work out with no great mental struggle and who have clothes and food given them and who set the children to work as soon as they are able to walk, I feel like getting up in my seat and telling about Helen Bonnington—a plain middle-classer. And she was no exception either.

I seem to have rambled off a bit here but this was only one of many contrasts which I made in these years which seemed to me to be all in favor of my new neighbors. The point is that at the bottom you not only see advantages you didn't see before but you're in a position to use them. You aren't shackled by conventions; you aren't cramped by caste. The world stands ready to help the under dog but before it will lift a finger it wants to see the dog stretched out on its back with all four legs sticking up in prayer. Of the middle-class dog who fights on and on, even after he's wobbly and can't see, it doesn't seem to take much notice.

However Ruth started in with a few reforms of her own. She made it a point to go down and see young Michele every day and watch that he didn't get any more macaroni and gravy. The youngster himself resented this interference but the parents took it in good part. Then in time she ventured further and suggested that the baby would be better off if the windows were washed to let in the sunshine and the floor scrubbed a bit. Finally she became bold enough to hint that it might be well to wash some of the bed clothing.