Brace Charles Loring
The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them
CHAPTER XIV
SCENES AMONG THE POOR
EFFECTS OF DRUNKENNESS. (FROM OUR JOURNAL.)
"It sometimes seems in our Industrial Schools as if each wretched, blear-eyed, half-starved, filthy little girl was a living monument of the curses of Intemperance. The rags, the disease, the ignorance, the sunny looks darkened, the old faces on young shoulders, are not necessarily the pitiable effects of overwhelming circumstances. The young creatures are not always cursed by poverty principally, but by the ungoverned appetites, bad habits and vices of their parents. On 'Dutch Hill' one can hardly enter a shanty where is a sober family. The women all drink; the men work, and then carouse. The hard earnings go off in alcohol. No savings are laid up for the winter. The children are ragged and unprotected, and, but for the Industrial School, uneducated. It is sometimes the saddest sight to see a neat little shanty grow day by day more filthy; the furniture sold, the windows broken, the children looking more thin and hungry, the parents falling out of honest work – all the slow effects of ungoverned passion for liquor.
"I entered, yesterday, a little hut on the 'Hill,' where a middle-aged woman lived, whom I knew. She was sitting near the door, weeping violently. I asked her the reason, and, after a little time, she told me. Her eldest daughter, a girl of twenty, had just been in drunk, and had struck her over the eye; and when her mother was looking at her bruise in the glass, she had dashed her fist through the glass.
'"There was no safety there, the mother said, when she came in. If they were away she would burst open the doors and break the furniture, and cut her sewing-work to pieces. 'She is a devil, sir, when she's in liquor!' Three times the mother had had her arrested and sent to Blackwell's Island; 'but somehow, sir, she's always worse when she comes out, and I niver heard her use bad words till she'd been there.
"'Now, God knows where she lives – they say it's in a bad house; and it's I who am afraid she's gittin' Tommy, her broder, into the same way, for he doesn't come home now. O God! I might as well be in hell!' Nothing can convey the tone of despair with which that was said. She told me how the girl had been such a bright little one. 'She was so pretty, sir; and maybe we flattered her, and made too much of her. And her father, he thought she ought to learn the dressmakin' trade, but she felt somehow above it, and she went to be a book-folder downtown. And one day we missed her till late o' night; and thin the next night it was later, and at last her father – bless his poor soul! – he said she shouldn't be out so, and whipt her. And thin she niver came back for three nights, and we thought, maybe, she's at her work, and has to stay late; and we niver suspected how it was, when, suddenly, Mrs. Moore came and said as how Maggy said she was at Mrs. Rooney's – the ould divil – and my husband wouldn't belave it at all; but I wint and bust open the door wid a stone, and found her– my own child – there wid a lot of men and women; and I swore at 'em, and the M. P.'s they come and cleared 'em all out, and there was the last of her. She's niver been an honest woman since, when she's in liquor. It broke her father's heart. He died the next Saturday; people said it was some sort of dysentry, but I know it was this. God help me! And, now, sir (almost fiercely), can't you get me out of this? All I want is, to sell my shanty, and wid my two little ones, git away from her. I don't care how far!'
"The mother fleeing her daughter. The pretty child becomes a drunken outcast! So ends many a sad history in our city."
THE DYING SEWING-WOMAN
"In East Thirty-fourth Street, in a tenement-house, a poor sewing-woman has lived for the last two years. She had formerly been in very good circumstances, and her husband, a respectable mechanic, earned a support for her and her children, until at length he fell into intemperate drinking. With the appetite for liquor on him, everything that he made was spent, and he himself was gradually becoming worse and worse. The poor wife was forced to the hardest work to keep her children and herself alive. Last winter, in a moment of desperation, the husband put his name down for a three-years' whaling voyage, and was taken off to sea, leaving the woman with an old father and three children to care for. Many a night, the old man says, has the poor creature walked up from the lower part of the city (some three or four miles) with four dozen shirts on her back, through snow and wet, and then, without fire or food, in her wet clothes, has worked till the dawn of day for the poor little ones dependent on her. He has seen the blood come from her mouth and nose after some of these efforts. Still more bitter than all this, was the sense of desertion by her husband. But it was all in vain. The children for whom she had slaved, and whom she loved more than her own life, were attacked with scarlet fever, and two of them died in the mother's arms. One only, a sweet little girl, was left. With them went the spring of hope and courage which had sustained the hard-working mother. Her father says she never shed a tear, but she lost heart; and, though never doubting of the goodness of her Great Father, she had not the spirit for the remaining work of life. Her exposures and hard labor had brought on a cough, and finally a disease of the lungs. She was at last unable to work, and could only lie upon her bed and depend on the chance charities of strangers.
"The teacher of our Fortieth-street School, who, in a way unseen and unknown to the world, is a minister of mercy and goodness to all that quarter of the city, first discovered her, and has managed, with a little aid here and there, to lighten her dying hours.
"I was called in the other day and held a long conversation with her. She has no more fears or anxieties; she is not even troubled about her little one. God will care for her. 'Once,' she said, 'I felt it so hard to lose the children, but now I am glad they are gone! They will be much better where they are than here. I have put everything away now,' she added, with an expression of sublime faith and hope on a face whose worn features the hectic flush made almost beautiful again. 'I trust all to my Redeemer. Through him alone I hope. He will forgive me and receive me.' She spoke of her many trials and sorrows – they were all over, and she was glad she was soon to be at rest.
"We asked about her food. She said she could not relish many things, and she often thought if she could only get some of the good old plain things she had in Ireland at her brother's farm she should feel so much better.
"I told her we would get her some good genuine oat-meal cake from an Irish friend. Her face lighted up at once, and she seemed cheered by the promise.
"'Oh, sir! I have thought so much of my mother in this sickness, and those happy, happy days. I was such a happy girl! How little she thought I would come to this! We lived in the North, you know, and had everything very comfortable, as all the Protestant Irish do. But it's all gone, gone,' she said, dreamily, 'and I wouldn't have it back again, for God is the best friend – He knows,
"'Oh, how glad I am to die!
His rod and His staff they comfort me.'
"The words were simple, but the whole was touching beyond description, forcing tears whether one would or not.
"We were glad to find that her clergyman, the Missionary of the Calvary Church, had administered the sacraments to her that day. May she soon be where the sting of poverty, the rubs and blows of hard circumstances, the loneliness of desertion, the anxiety and care, and hopelessness, and disappointment which have followed her unhappy path, shall cease forever, and the unfortunate one shall enter on her new and blissful life of peace and abiding love!"
DISCOURAGEMENT
"I was lately visiting a poor woman, who had seen better circumstances, the wife of a worker in an iron-foundry. The room was bare but clean, and the woman was neatly dressed, though her face looked thin and worn, and her eyes had an unusual expression of settled, sad discouragement. A little girl of ten or eleven sat near her tending a baby, with the same large sad blue eyes, as if the expression of the mother had come to receive a permanent reflection in the child's face. Her husband had been sick for several months, which put them all behind, though now he was getting work enough.
"'You know how it is, sir,' she said, 'with working people: if a man falls out of work for a day, the family feels it for a week after. We can hardly make the two ends meet when he's well, and the moment he is sick it comes hard upon us. Many's the morning he's gone down to the foundry without his breakfast, and I've had to send out the little Maggy there, to the neighbors, for bits of bread, and then she's taken it down to him.'
"'She is a beggar, then?'
"'Yes, sir, and sorrow of it. We never thought we could come to that. My mother brought me up most dacently, and my husband, he's a very good scholard, and could be a clark or anything, but we can't help it! We must have bread. I would be willing to do anything, wash, scrub, or do plain sewing; and I keep trying, but I never find anything. There seems no help for us; and I sometimes feel clean gone and down-hearted: and I'm troubled at other things, too."
"'What other things?'
"'At my sin, ye see.'
"'What do you mean?'
"'Well, sir, if I could only have peace of mind! But I work on from Monday morn to Saturday night, and I never hear or see anything good; and when Sunday comes, I can't go out; I haven't any bonnet for my head, or any dress fit for a dacent church. I just walk the floor, and I don't dare to think of ever meeting God."
"'Are you a Catholic?'
"'Yes, sir; I was brought up one, and so was my husband, but now it's little we know, as they say, of mass, meeting, or church; we ain't neither Catholics or Protestants; I might as well be a haythen. We haven't any books, nor a prayer-book, or anything. I know it, sir, we ought to pray," she continued, "but I kneel down sometimes, and I get up and say to my husband, 'It's no use my praying, I am too much distracted.' If I could only get some good to my soul, for I think of dying often, and I see I should not be at all ready. Life is a burden to me.' I spoke of the hopes and consolations which can come to poor as well as rich, and of her children. 'Yes, sir; no one can tell the patience of the Lord. How much He has borne from me! Oh, if I could only have peace of mind, and see those children getting on well, I should be glad to die. That little girl cries every time we send her out to beg, and she's learning nothing good. But I am afraid nothing will ever come lucky to us; and oh, sir, if you could have seen how we started in Ireland, and what a home my mother had; she was a very different woman from what I am.'
"We spoke of her attending the mission meeting in Fortieth Street, and reading a Testament given by us. She seemed glad to do both.
"'Oh, sir, if I could only feel that friendship with God you spoke of, I shouldn't care; I could bear anything; but to work as we are doing, and to have such trouble, and see the poor wee thing grow thinner and poorer, and my man almost down broken, and then to get no nearer – no, we keep getting farther from the Lord! Oh, if I was only ready to die! I haven't nothing in this world.'
"Let us hope that the peace-giving words of Christ, the love of the Redeemer, may at length plant in that poor, weary discouraged soul the seeds of hope and immortal faith, even as they have done in so many thousands weary and heavy-laden!"
THE SWILL-GATHERER'S CHILD
"Most of those familiar with the East River Industrial School will remember a poor widow – a swill-gatherer – who lived in the notorious village of shanties near Forty-second Street, known as 'Dutch Hill.' She owned a small shanty, which had been put up on some rich man's lot as a squatter's hut, and there, with her pigs and dogs and cat in the same room, she made her home. From morning till evening she was trailing about the streets, filling up her swill-cans, and at night she came back to the little dirty den, and spent her evenings – we hardly know how. She had one smart little girl who went to the Industrial School. As the child came back day by day, improving in appearance, singing her sweet songs, and with new ideas of how ladies looked and lived, the mother began to grow ashamed of her nasty home. And I remember entering one day, and finding, to my surprise, pigs and rubbish cleared out, the walls well scrubbed, and an old carpet on the floor, and the mother sitting in state on a chair! It was the quiet teachings of the school coming forth in the houses of the poor.
"After a while the little girl began to get higher ideas of what she might become, and went out with another girl to a place in the West. She did well there, and was contented, but her mother was continually anxious and unhappy about her, and finally, after some years, forced her to return to the city. She was now a very neat, active young girl, far above her mother's condition, and the change back to the pig-shanty and Dutch Hill was anything but pleasant. The old woman hid away her best clothes to prevent her going back, and seemed determined to make her a swill-gatherer like herself. Gradually, as might be expected, we began to hear bad stories about our old scholar. The people of the neighborhood said, she drank and quarreled with her mother, and that she was frequenting houses where low company met. Another of the worst Dutch Hill girls – the daughter of a drunkard – was constantly with her. Soon we heard that the other young girl had been sent to Blackwell's Island, and that this one must be saved now, or she would be utterly lost. I went up at once to the old woman's shanty, though with but the feeblest hopes of doing anything, yet with many unuttered prayers. For who that knows the career before the street-girl of the city can help breathing out his soul in agony of prayer for her, when the time of choice comes?
"When I entered the shanty, the young girl was asleep on the bed, and the mother sat on a box, crooning and weeping.
"'Och, and why did I iver tak ye from that swate place – ye that was makin' an honest woman of yoursel'! Ach, God bless your honor! can ye help her? She's a'most gone. Can't ye do somethin'?'
"'Well, how is she doing now?'
"'Och (in a whisper), your honor, she brought three bad fellers last night, and she brake my own door in, and I tould 'em-says I, I'm an honest woman, and I never had ony sich in my kin – and she was drunk – yes, yer honor, she, my own darlint, strak me, and wanted to turn me out – and now there she's been sleepin' all the mornin'. Ach, why did I tak her out of her place!'
"Here the girl woke up, and sat up on the bed, covering her face in shame. I said some few sober words to her, and then the mother threw herself down on the floor, tears pouring down her cheeks.
"'Ach, darlint! my own swate darlint! will ye not list to the gintleman?
Sure an' ye wouldn't bring disgrace to yer ould mither and yer family!
We've had six generations of honest people, and niver wan like this!
Ach, to think of comin' to your ind on the Island, and be on the town!
For the love of the blessed Vargin, do give them all up, and say ye won't taste a drop – do, darlint!'
"The girl seemed obdurate; so I took up the sermon, and we both pleaded, and pictured the shame and pain and wretched life and more wretched death before her. There is no need of delicacy in such cases, and the strongest old Bible Saxon words come home the deepest. At last, her tears began to flow, and finally she gave her full assent to breaking off from liquor and from her bad company (it should be remembered she was only about sixteen); and she would show her repentance by going back to the place where she was, if they would receive her. I hardly expected she would do so; but in a day or two she was in the office, and started for her old situation. Since that we have had a letter from her and her mistress, and she seems to be getting on wonderfully well. May God uphold her!
"The following is a letter we have received from her since:
"'B – , PENN., October 11.
"'MY DEAR MOTHER – I have the pleasure of writing a few lines to you, to let you know that I am well. I got safe back to my place; kind friends took me back again; I have got into the country, where there is plenty of everything to live on. Dear mother, I would like very much to hear from you. I hope you are all well; please write soon. I want you to show this letter to Miss Spratt. [Now Mrs. Hurley.] Good-by, dear mother. M.
"'DEAR MISS SPRATT – As I was writing to my mother, I thought I would like to write a few lines to you. Now that I am so far away, I feel a grateful remembrance of your kindness, I am very sorry I did not have a chance of going to see you before I left the city. Please tell Mr. Brace I am much obliged to him for his kindness: tell him I got safe back to Mr. M.'s, and have a very good home. Good-by, Miss Spratt'"
The East River Industrial School (at No. 206 East Fortieth Street) still continues its humble but profound labors of love. Mrs. Hurley is still there, the "Mend of the poor" for miles around, carrying sympathy, advice, and assistance to thousands of unbefriended creatures, and teaching faithfully all day in the School. Two gentlemen have especially aided her in providing food and clothing for her little ones; and the lady-volunteers still give liberally of their means and time. May the School long shine as a light in one of the dark places of the city.
CHAPTER XV
THE PROTESTANT POOR AND STREET-ROVERS
It is not often that our efforts carry us among Protestant poor, but it happens that on the west side of the city, near Tenth Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, is a considerable district of English and Scotch laboring people, who are mainly Protestants.
A meeting of ladies was called in the western part of the city, in like manner with the proceedings at the formation of the other Schools; and a School was proposed. The wife of a prominent property-holder in the neighborhood, a lady of great energy of character, Mrs. R. R., took a leading part, and greatly aided the undertaking; other ladies joined, and the result was the formation of the
HUDSON RIVER INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL,
the fourth of our Schools founded in 1854. With all these Schools, in the beginning, the ladies themselves raised all the funds for their support, and, as I have related, devoted an incredible amount of time to aiding in them, there being usually, however, two salaried teachers.
The experience in the Edinburgh Ragged Schools, I was assured, when there, was, that you cannot depend on volunteer help after the first enthusiasm has passed by. This is not our experience.
As one set of "volunteers" have withdrawn or leave the work, others appear, and there are still in this and some of our other Industrial Schools, most active and efficient voluntary helpers. Gradually, however, the support and supervision of the Schools fell more and more into the hands of the central authority – The Children's Aid Society.
The obtaining a share in the Common School Fund enabled the Society to do more for these useful charities and to found new ones.
In the Hudson River School, it cannot be said that the Protestant poor proved much better than the Catholic; in fact, it has often seemed to me that when a Protestant is reduced to extreme poverty, and, above all, a Yankee, he becomes the most wretched and useless of all paupers. The work and its results were similar on the west side to those in the other districts which I have already described.
"MUSCULAR ORPHANS."
Our attention had thus far been directed mainly to girls in these Industrial School efforts. They seemed the class exposed to the most terrible evils, and besides, through our other enterprises, we were sheltering, teaching, and benefiting for life vast numbers of lads.
We determined now to try the effect of industry and schooling on the roving boys, and I chose a district where we had to make head against a "sea of evils." This was in the quarter bordering on East Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. There seemed to be there a society of irreclaimable little vagabonds. They hated School with an inextinguishable hatred; they had a constitutional love for smashing windows and pilfering apple-stands. They could dodge an "M. P." as a fox dodges a hound; they disliked anything so civilized as a bed-chamber, but preferred old boxes and empty barns, and when they were caught it required a very wide-awake policeman, and such an Asylum-yard as hardly exists in New York, to keep them.
I have sometimes stopped, admiringly, to watch the skill and cunning with which the little rascals, some not more than ten years old, would diminish a load of wood left on the docks; the sticks were passed from one to another, and the lad nearest the pile was apparently engaged eagerly in playing marbles. If the woodman's attention was called to his loss, they were off like a swarm of cockroaches.
We opened a School with all the accessories for reaching and pleasing them; our teacher was a skillful mechanic, a young man of excellent judgment and hearty sympathy with boys; he offered to teach them carpentering and box-making and pay them wages. Common-school lessons were given, also, and a good warm meal provided at noon. We had festivals and magic-lantern exhibitions and lectures. We taught, and we fed and clothed. In return, they smashed our windows; they entered the premises at night and carried off everything they could find; they howled before the door, and yelled "Protestant School!" We arrested one or two for the burglary, as a warning, but the little flibbertigibbets escaped from the police like rats, and we let them go with the fright they had had. Some few of the worst we induced to go to the country, and others we had arrested as vagrants, without appearing ourselves, until a kind of dark suspicion spread among them against the writer that he had the power of spiriting away bad boys to distant regions by some mysterious means. Those that did go to the country proved of the kind called by a Western paper "muscular orphans," for an unfortunate employer undertaking to administer corporal punishment to two of them, the little vagabonds turned and chastised him and then fled.
The following case is noted in our Journal of these up-town boys:
A HARD CASE REFORMED
"MR. BRACE —Dear Sir: You request me to send you some reminiscences of the early life of Michael S – n. My most vivid recollection of him is his taking the broomstick to me once, as I was about to punish him for some misdemeanor. Being the first and last of my pupils who ever attempted anything of the kind, it stands out in bold relief in my memory. I soon conquered the broomstick, but on the first opportunity he ran out, thus ending his Industrial School career.
"His most marked characteristic was a desire to travel, and he presented himself with the freedom of the city at a very early age, going off for weeks at a time, sleeping in entries and around engine-houses, and disdaining bolts and bars when they were turned upon him. One of your visitors calling to consult with his mother as to what could be done with him, found him vigorously kicking the panels out of the door, she having locked him in for safe-keeping till she came home from work. The Captain of Police, tired of having him brought in so frequently, thought one day of a punishment that he expected would effectually frighten him, which was – to hang him. His mother consenting, he was solemnly hung up by the feet to a post, till he promised reformation. This failing to produce the desired effect, she placed him with "the Brothers," who put him in a kind of prison, where he had to be chained by the leg to prevent him from scaling the walls. Taking him from there, after some months of pretty severe discipline, he very soon went back to his old habits, when she had him sent to Randall's Island. Here he was discovered in a plan to swim to the opposite shore (something of a feat for a boy of twelve). Fearing he would attempt it and be drowned, she took him away and put him in the Juvenile Asylum, where he remained several months, and finally seemed so much tamed down that she ventured on taking him out and sending him to a place which you procured for him at Hastings. But, pretty soon, the ruling passion, strong as ever, took possession of him, and he started on a tour through the surrounding villages.
"Being brought home again, he told his mother very deliberately, one morning, that she need not expect him home any more; he was going to live with a soldier's wife. Knowing that if he went he would be in a very den of wickedness, she came to the resolution to give him to your care, and let him be sent to the West.
"It would require a volume to tell of all his freaks and wanderings; his scaling of fences, and breaking out of impossible places. Towards the last of his New York life he began to add other vices to his original stock – such as drinking, smoking, and swearing; yet strange to say, he disdained to lie, and was never known to steal; and his face would glow with satisfaction when he could take charge of an infant. His mother hears, with trembling hope, the good accounts of him from the West, scarcely daring to believe that her wild and vagrant son will ever make a steady, useful man. "Truly yours, "Mrs. E. S. Hurley."
The young rovers gradually became softened and civilized under the combined influences of warm dinners, carpentering, and good teaching; but we found the difficulty to be that we did not have sufficient hold over them out of school hours; we needed more appliances for such habitual vagabonds. What was wanted was a Lodging-house and all its influences, as well as School, for the former gives a greater control than does a simple Industrial School.
We accordingly transferred the whole enterprise to a still worse quarter, where I had done my first work in visiting, and which I thoroughly knew, the region on East River, at the foot of Eleventh Street. Here was a numerous band of similar boys, who slept anywhere, and lived by petty pilferings from the iron-works and wood-yards and by street jobs.
In this place we combined our carpenters' shop with Day-school, Night-school, Reading-room, and Lodging-house, and exerted thus a variety of influences over the "Arabs," which soon began to reform and civilize them. Here we had no difficulties, and made a steady progress as we had done everywhere else.
At present, some gentle female teachers guide the Industrial School. We have dropped the carpentering, as what the boys need is the habit of industry and a primary school-training more than a trade; and we have found that a refined woman can influence these rough little vagabonds even more than a man.
Subsequently, another school was founded in the quarter from which we removed this, and is now held in East Thirty-fourth Street.
One of the benefactions which we hope for in the future is the erection of a suitable building for a Lodging-house, Reading-room, Day-school, and Mission, in the miserable quarter on East River, near Thirty-fourth Street.