Jacob A. Riis

“ KATE’S CHOICE
My winter lecture travels sometimes bring me to a town not a thousand miles from New York, where my mail awaits me. If it happens then, as it often does, that it is too heavy for me to attack alone—for it is the law that if a man live by the pen he shall pay the penalty in kind—I send for a stenographer, and in response there comes a knock at my door that ushers in a smiling young woman, who answers my inquiries after “Grandma” with the assurance that she is very well indeed, though she is getting older every day. ”

“ But it was one thing to ply her needle with deft young fingers and the songs of sunny Italy in her ears, when the world and its tasks were but play; another to bait grim poverty with so frail a weapon in a New York tenement, with the landlord to pay and hungry children to feed. At the end of the week, when she brought the product of her toil to the lace woman, she received in payment thirty cents. ”

“ The day before, a regiment of crabs had come ashore and surrendered to the cook at Sea Breeze. Christmas morn found the children’s “floor”—they called the stretch of clean, hard sand between high-water mark and the surf-line by that name—filled with gorgeous shells and pebbles, and strange fishes left there by the tide overnight. The fair-weather friends who turn their backs upon old ocean with the first rude blasts of autumn little know what wonderful surprises it keeps for those who stand by it in good and in evil report. ”

“ The nights are cold now, and Cinderella rides no more on the prancing steed of her fairy prince. The children’s songs have ceased. Beauty and the Beast are tucked away with the ivy and the bulbs and the green shrubs against the bright sunny days that are coming. The wolf is a bad memory, and the tenement windows that were filled with laughing faces are vacant [Pg 165] and shut. But many a child smiles in its sleep, dreaming of the happy hours in our roof garden, and many a mother’s heavy burden was lightened because of it and because of the children’s joy. ”

“ THE CITY’S HEART
“Bosh!” said my friend, jabbing impatiently with his stick at a gaunt cat in the gutter, “all bosh! A city has no heart. It’s incorporated selfishness; has to be. Slopping over is not business. City is all business. A poet’s dream, my good fellow; pretty but moonshine!”
We turned the corner of the tenement street as he spoke. ”

“ Behind that and the tenement stretched the endless days of suffering in their Galician home, where the Jew was hated and despised as the one thrifty trader of the country, tortured alike by drunken [Pg 3] peasant and cruel noble when they were not plotting murder against one another. With all their little savings they had paid Judah’s passage to the land where men were free to labor, free to worship as their fathers did—a twice-blessed country, surely—and he had gone, leaving Sarah, his wife, and their child to wait for word that Judah was rich and expected them. ”

“ Mr. Riley has broke loose!” Kate always spoke of her father in his tantrums as Mister, as if he were a doubtful acquaintance. Her story of the night’s doings was so lurid that the intimacy of many a post-bellum remorse felt unequal to the strain, and Miss Kane commandeered a policeman on the way to the house. The meat-cutter received her with elaborate inebriate courtesy, loftily ignoring the officer. ”

“ The neighbors were kind; the baker left them bread twice a week and the butcher gave them a little meat now and then. The father’s hemorrhages were more frequent. When, on a slippery day, one of the children, going for milk, fell in the street and spilled it, he went without his only food, as they had but eight cents in the house. In May came the end. The tailor died, and in the house of mourning there was one care less, one less to feed and clothe. The widow gathered her flock close and faced the future dry-eyed. The luxury of grief is not for those at close grips with stern poverty. ”

“ Riley was a capable meat-cutter earning good wages, who wouldn’t have done a neighbor out of a cent that was his due, a robust citizen with more than his share of good looks, a devoted husband and a doting father, inseparable when at home from little Mike, whose baby trick of squaring off and offering to “bust his father’s face” was the pride of the block. ”

“ There was still the bigger part of her little hoard; but one more rent day, and that would be gone. Thirty cents a week does not feed three mouths, even with the thousand little makeshifts of poverty that constitute its resources. The good-hearted woman next door found a spare potato or two for the children; the neighbor across the hall, when she had corned beef for dinner, brought her the water it was boiled in for soup. But though neighbors were kind, making lace was business, like running a railway, and its rule was the same—to buy cheap, lives or lace, and sell dear. ”

“ For their enemy was that foe of mankind, the White Plague, that for thousands of years has taken tithe and toll of the ignorance and greed and selfishness of man, which sometimes we call with one name— [Pg 193] the slum. Gimpy never would have dreamed that the tenement held no worse threat for the baby he yearned for than himself, with his crippled foot, when he was there. These things you could not have told even the fathers and mothers; or if you had, no one there but the doctor and the nurses would have believed you. They knew only too well. ”

“ We renewed our invitation after that, and, when he didn’t respond, sent him four blossoming geraniums with the friendly regards of a neighbor who bore no grudge. For in our social creed the longing for a flower in the child-heart covers a maze of mischief; and a maze it is always with the boys. ”

“ And he was right; that would be charity in the real meaning of the word: friendship, the neighborly lift that gets one over the hard places in the road. The other half would cease to be, on that plan, and we should all be one great whole, pulling together, and our democracy would become real. I promised to find him such a widow.
But it proved a harder task than I had thought. None of the widows I knew had six children. The charitable societies had no family that fitted my friend’s case. But in time I found people who knew about Mrs. Josefy. ”

“ In the midnight hour my friend of Heartsease hears of a young girl, evidently a new-comer, whom the brothel or the saloon has in its clutch, and she gets out of bed, and, going after her, demands her sister, and gets her out from the very jaws of hell. Again, on a winter’s night, a drunken woman finds her way to her door—a married woman with a husband and children. ”

“ In his mingling with the poorer classes he comes in contact intimately with a life which most writers know only by hearsay, and interesting bits of this life and that which is picturesque and romantic and unlooked for he transcribes to paper with a freshness and vividness that mark him a good mixer with men, a keen observer, and a skillful adept with the pen. ”

“ Coupled with his own intimate knowledge and appreciation of the oceans and the life that is lived on them—a knowledge and appreciation born in him through a long line of seafaring ancestry and fostered by his own love for the sea—he has a powerful style of writing. Vividness is perhaps its distinguishing characteristic, though fluency and a peculiar feeling for words also mark it. ”

“ Riis and his works that he is one man among a thousand. He is unique. He does his work of benevolence and reform under conditions that would harden the hearts of many men and certainly excite disgust; but he comes out of the grime and dust with some cheery note or some heroic incident, some story of self-sacrifice among the poor, or some thought which ennobles the struggle.”—New York Mail. ”

“ I see him return before the week’s end, nine starved urchins clinging to his hands and the skirts of his coat, the first Fresh Air party that went out of New York twoscore years ago. I see the big-hearted farmers take them into their homes and hearts. I see the sun [Pg 116] and the summer wind put back color in the wan cheek, and life in the shrunken and starved frame. I hear the message of one of the little ones to her chums left behind in the tenement: “I can have two pieces of pie to eat, and nobody says nothing if I take three pieces of cake” ”

“ A smile lit up Judge O’Sullivan’s face. “Filippo Portoghese,” he said, “you are a very fortunate man. The law bids me send you to prison for ten years, and but for a miraculous chance would have [Pg 155] condemned you to death. But the man you maimed for life pleads for you, and the jury that convicted you begs that you go free. The Court remembers what you have suffered and it knows the plight of your family, upon whom the heaviest burden of your punishment would fall. Go, then, to your home. And to you, gentlemen, a happy holiday such as you have given him and his! ”

“ Well, they did grow, never better, and the whole block grew up to them. Their message went into every tenement house home. Not the crabbedest old bachelor ever threw anything on our roof to disgrace it; and as for the children, they loved the flowers. That tells it all. The stone we made light [Pg 166] of proved the cornerstone of the building. There is nothing in our house, full as it is of a hundred activities to bring sweetening touch to weary lives, that has half the cheer in it which our roof garden holds in summer, nothing that has tenderer memories for us all the year round. ”

“ Over and over he counted the many miles of stormy ocean and the days to their coming, Sarah and the little Judah. Once they were together, he would work, work, work—and should [Pg 5] they not make a living in the great, wealthy city?
With the dawn lighting up the eastern sky he slept the sleep of exhaustion, his question unanswered.
That was six years ago—six hard, weary years. They had worked together, he at his push-cart, Sarah for the sweater, earning a few cents finishing “pants” when she could. Little Judah did his share, pulling thread, until his sister came and he had to mind her. ”

“ He did not give Judah his wages. He had not earned them, he said, and showed him the door. The man pleaded hotly, despairingly. They were hungry, the little kids and his wife. Only fifty cents of the two dollars—fifty cents! The painter put him out, and when he would not go, kicked him.
“Look out for that Jew, John,” he said, putting up the shutters. “We shall have him setting off a bomb on us next. They turn Anarchist when they get desperate.” ”

“ I am earning five dollars a week; that is more than when you first helped us, and I shall soon get a raise. Grannie and I will move into other rooms that are not so high up, for the stairs are hard on her. She shall stay with me while she lives and I will mind her.”
She was as good as her word. With her own hands and the aid of every man in the tenement who happened to be about, she moved their belongings to the new home, while the mothers and children cheered her on the way. ”

“ They illustrate as few other books can the possibilities of American life and reveal how from an almost penniless and friendless immigrant, at times on the verge of want in the search for work, he rose through trying and strenuous experiences by the sheer force of will and character, to well-deserved fame and an honored position in the councils of the mightiest of the land. ”

“ The baby needed attention, and there were the beds to make and the washing for two lodgers, who paid the rent and to whom the charity workers closed their eyes even if they had not directly connived at procuring them. It is thus that the grim facts [Pg 59] of poverty set at naught all the benevolent purposes of those who fight it. It had forced upon the widow home-work and the lodger, two curses of the tenement, and now it added the third in child labor. Little Louisa’s fingers were nimbler than her mother’s. She was only eight, but she learned soon to tie a plume as well as the mother. ”

“ Then he [Pg 30] pledged lasting friendship to the whole Bureau, including Miss Kane, whom he generously forgave the wrong she had done him, presented little Mike to the Court as “de foinest kid in de ward,” took the gurgling baby from Mrs. Riley and gallantly gave her his arm. Leaning fondly upon it, a little lame and sore yet from the fight and with one eye in deep mourning, she turned a proudly hopeful look upon her husband, like a rainbow spanning a black departing cloud. ”

“ There was not a penny in the house, and the rent money was long in arrears. Judah went out and asked for work. He sought no alms; he begged merely for a chance to earn a living at any price, any wages. Nobody wanted him, as was right and [Pg 7] proper, no doubt. To underbid the living wage is even a worse sin against society than to “debase its standard of living,” we are told by those who should know. Judah Kapelowitz was only an ignorant Jew, pleading for work that he might earn bread for his starving babies. ”

“ Signor Salvini in life had belonged to a benefit society of good intentions but poor business ways. It had therefore become defunct at the time of his death. However, its members considered their moral obligations and pitied the widow. They were all poor workingmen, but they dug down into their pockets and raised two hundred dollars for the stricken family. When the undertaker and the cemetery and the other civilizing agencies that take toll of our dead [Pg 52] were paid, there was left twenty dollars for the widow to begin life with anew. ”

“ With the music of the baby voice in her ears the widow girded up her loins and went out scrubbing, cleaning, became janitress of the tenement in which she and Kate occupied a two-room flat—anything so that the thorns should be plucked from the path of the child’s blithesome feet. Seven years she strove for her “lamb.” When Kate was ten and getting to be a big girl, she faced the fact that she could do it no longer. She was getting too old.
What struggles it cost, knowing her, I can guess; but she brought that [Pg 75] sacrifice too. Friends who were good to the poor undertook to pay the rent. ”

“ The widow of Poverty Gap was Irish and married to a brute. Mrs. Salvini was an Italian; her husband was a hard-working fellow who had the misfortune to be killed on the railway. The point of contact is in the earrings. The widow Salvini did wear mourning earrings, a little piece of crape draped over the gold bangles of her care-free [Pg 50] girlhood, and it was not funny but infinitely touching. It just shows how little things do twist one’s mind.
Signor Salvini was one of a gang of trackmen employed by the New York Central Railroad. ”