Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement life in New York City

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Jacob August Riis. Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement life in New York City

PREFACE

MERRY CHRISTMAS IN THE TENEMENTS

’TWAS LIZA’S DOINGS

THE DUBOURQUES, FATHER AND SON

ABE’S GAME OF JACKS

A LITTLE PICTURE

A DREAM OF THE WOODS

A HEATHEN BABY

HE KEPT HIS TRYST

JOHN GAVIN, MISFIT

IN THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL

NIGGER MARTHA’S WAKE

A CHIP FROM THE MAELSTROM

SARAH JOYCE’S HUSBANDS

THE CAT TOOK THE KOSHER MEAT

FIRE IN THE BARRACKS

A WAR ON THE GOATS

ROVER’S LAST FIGHT

WHEN THE LETTER CAME

THE KID

LOST CHILDREN

THE SLIPPER-MAKER’S FAST

PAOLO’S AWAKENING

THE LITTLE DOLLAR’S CHRISTMAS JOURNEY

A PROPOSAL ON THE ELEVATED

DEATH COMES TO CAT ALLEY

WHY IT HAPPENED

THE CHRISTENING IN BOTTLE ALLEY

IN THE MULBERRY STREET COURT

SPOONING IN DYNAMITE ALLEY

HEROES WHO FIGHT FIRE

Отрывок из книги

IT was just a sprig of holly, with scarlet berries showing against the green, stuck in, by one of the office boys probably, behind the sign that pointed the way up to the editorial rooms. There was no reason why it should have made me start when I came suddenly upon it at the turn of the stairs; but it did. Perhaps it was because that dingy hall, given over to dust and drafts all the days of the year, was the last place in which I expected to meet with any sign of Christmas; perhaps it was because I myself had nearly forgotten the holiday. Whatever the cause, it gave me quite a turn.

I stood, and stared at it. It looked dry, almost withered. Probably it had come a long way. Not much holly grows about Printing-House Square, except in the colored supplements, and that is scarcely of a kind to stir tender memories. Withered and dry, this did. I thought, with a twinge of conscience, of secret little conclaves of my children, of private views of things hidden from mama at the bottom of drawers, of wild flights when papa appeared unbidden in the door, which I had allowed for once to pass unheeded. Absorbed in the business of the office, I had hardly thought of Christmas coming on, until now it was here. And this sprig of holly on the wall that had come to remind me,—come nobody knew how far,—did it grow yet in the beech-wood clearings, as it did when I gathered it as a boy, tracking through the snow? “Christ-thorn” we called it in our Danish tongue. The red berries, to our simple faith, were the drops of blood that fell from the Saviour’s brow as it drooped under its cruel crown upon the cross.

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It was in the Seventh-Avenue school last Christmas that I offered the truant class a four-bladed penknife as a prize for whittling out the truest Maltese cross. It was a class of black sheep, and it was the blackest sheep of the flock that won the prize. “That awful Savarese,” said the principal in despair. I thought of Fighting Mary, and bade her take heart. I regret to say that within a week the hapless Savarese was black-listed for banking up the school door with snow, so that not even the janitor could get out and at him.

Within hail of the Sullivan-street school camps a scattered little band, the Christmas customs of which I had been trying for years to surprise. They are Indians, a handful of Mohawks and Iroquois, whom some ill wind has blown down from their Canadian reservation, and left in these West-Side tenements to eke out such a living as they can weaving mats and baskets, and threading glass pearls on slippers and pin-cushions, until, one after another, they have died off and gone to happier hunting-grounds than Thompson street. There were as many families as one could count on the fingers of both hands when I first came upon them, at the death of old Tamenund, the basket-maker. Last Christmas there were seven. I had about made up my mind that the only real Americans in New York did not keep the holiday at all, when, one Christmas eve, they showed me how. Just as dark was setting in, old Mrs. Benoit came from her Hudson-street attic—where she was known among the neighbors, as old and poor as she, as Mrs. Ben Wah, and believed to be the relict of a warrior of the name of Benjamin Wah—to the office of the Charity Organization Society, with a bundle for a friend who had helped her over a rough spot—the rent, I suppose. The bundle was done up elaborately in blue cheese-cloth, and contained a lot of little garments which she had made out of the remnants of blankets and cloth of her own from a younger and better day. “For those,” she said, in her French patois, “who are poorer than myself”; and hobbled away. I found out, a few days later, when I took her picture weaving mats in her attic room, that she had scarcely food in the house that Christmas day and not the car-fare to take her to church! Walking was bad, and her old limbs were stiff. She sat by the window through the winter evening, and watched the sun go down behind the western hills, comforted by her pipe. Mrs. Ben Wah, to give her her local name, is not really an Indian; but her husband was one, and she lived all her life with the tribe till she came here. She is a philosopher in her own quaint way. “It is no disgrace to be poor,” said she to me, regarding her empty tobacco-pouch; “but it is sometimes a great inconvenience.” Not even the recollection of the vote of censure that was passed upon me once by the ladies of the Charitable Ten for surreptitiously supplying an aged couple, the special object of their charity, with army plug, could have deterred me from taking the hint.

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