I would not have believed that words could accomplish anything much to ameliorate the conditions of an unjust world—not the hundreds of thousands strung together in knotty sentences by Henry James or the incendiary ones of two elderly women in Murray Hill that I typewrote on my Sholes & Glidden. “You must believe that words can change the world,” said Elizabeth, “if not for the world’s sake, then for your own. The fruit of which Eve ate was a book.”
A Minotaur in Bellevue
TOWARD THE END OF OCTOBER, we were visited by Jacob Riis, a police reporter for the New-York Tribune. In a rented room on Mulberry Bend, called “Death’s Thoroughfare,” he wrote about the slums, especially those of the Lower East Side, and photographed the poor who scrabbled in the noisome tenements. His grim pictures—not easy to look at—were pricking the conscience of those who had one and inciting reformists to demand the enactment of laws against exploitation by landlords and sweatshops.
When we four had seated ourselves and made polite inquiries into one another’s health—even revolutionaries will observe the rudimentary social conventions—Riis explained the reason for his visit.
“I do not involve myself with the subjects of my photographs,” he said without apology, his English muddied by the Danish he had grown up speaking before emigrating to America. “It is for people who see my photographs to involve themselves. I take a picture, like a burglar breaking into a house; I have time to steal only one, and then I must quickly leave. If I asked for permission, the tenants would be suspicious and not let me inside. If they did, they might turn their faces away in shame or put on false ones, which would not tell the truth about themselves. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, and Susan concurred. His question had not been addressed to me, so I thought it best to say nothing.
“Good!” said Riis. “I knew you would.”
He opened a worn leather case and took out a print he’d recently made from a dry-plate negative of a girl lying in a stairwell. The way she had folded her arms and legs to make herself compact reminded me of Miss Etta, only the girl was dirty and miserable.
“She’s no more than fifteen or sixteen,” said Riis. “She is skin on bone, sick; her eyes are sunken. I took the picture and hurried away, as if I’d stumbled on a corpse. Something must be done! I told myself. But what? Would the Female Almshouse on Blackwell’s Island be better than her filthy place under the stairs?” He opened and closed his hands helplessly. “I wonder. Good ladies, what’s to be done?”
The photograph had spoken in tongues of fire, inflaming the suffragists.
“In the morning, we will see what can be done!” vowed Elizabeth and Susan, as if they were Grant and Sherman preparing to take Vicksburg. “Mr. Riis, will you show us the way?”
They arranged to meet at ten o’clock at the corner of Mulberry and Baxter streets, near Ragpickers’ Row. In back alleys, stable lanes, and byways—familiar to rent collectors, if not to health inspectors—men, women, and children hunted for anything that could be eaten, burned, sold, or pawned. Inside ramshackle, foul, lice-infested cavities, the poor (in possessions as well as in spirit) sat waiting, sullen and oppressed, surrounded by the “amenities” the city’s ash heaps and refuse barrels afforded them. For what were they waiting? Eviction, the asylum, death, potter’s field. Perhaps a few Christian hearts still waited for Jesus to roll away the stones from their tombs.
I recall reading in the Herald from a speech given by Clarence Harrington, whose opinion of the city’s multitude of indigents was uncharitable, though not exclusively his own.
The poor are our common enemy. They must be dealt with harshly before their desperation turns into enmity; in other words, we must defeat them and drive them out before their self-hatred can be turned against us. Henry George, the communist, speaks of “wage-slavery” and the “tyranny of non-producers over producers.” He accuses us of a “crime against the poor,” and he would have you empty your pockets in redress. He and the Mugwumps would have you tithe, like the papists, a tenth of what you earn by your labor and industriousness. And should a tenth not be enough, because the poor are many and you are few by comparison, then give them twenty, thirty, fifty per cent—give all that you have until you and your family are the poor!
The tenement house where Riis had photographed the girl stood—or rather, slumped—at number 79 Baxter. The girl was lying under the stairs on torn newspaper. I’ve seen dogs do as much in preparation for their newborn. The sight and smell were too much even for the suffragists, who blinked, pinched their nostrils, and stepped backward into the comparative spaciousness of the cellar, whose earthen floor was crowded with crates, battered and mildewed furniture, and old tools too rusted from neglect to be of use. The New Jerusalem would never be built here.
Inured to the stink by his frequent visits to the city’s rankest slums, Riis bent over the girl and felt her forehead. “She is burning with fever.” She was muttering—call it “gibbering,” since the effect it had on me was terrifying—the same words over and over: “I lost my baby. I lost my baby. I lost my baby.”
We heard footsteps on the stairs. Raising our eyes from the wounded animal—forgive the word, but in her helplessness, she seemed like one—we watched an old woman descend, carrying a plate of soup and a cup of water.
“Two days she’s been like this,” said the woman, whose dress looked as if it had been fished from a barrel with a stick. “She won’t eat or drink, poor thing.”
With few to pity them and still fewer to help, the poor pitied one another. I hope there’s a Heaven and a big gate to slam in Clarence Harrington’s face.
“She says she lost her baby.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the woman, whose face was as crazed as the china cup she had set down next to the girl, together with the bowl of soup, which looked revolting. “She was here when I came down to look for something to burn in the stove.”
“You never saw her before?”
The woman shook her head. “There be plenty that look like her, though.”
“But not so many who would look after her.” Riis’s remark was meant in praise of the old woman, whose eyes registered nothing except weariness—and maybe a little wariness, since she could not make out what these fine people were doing in the cellar.
“The well-to-do want the poor to be well behaved and deserving of their charity,” said Elizabeth, who could mint epigrams in the most direful situations. “This girl would have been neither.”
“Maybe not,” said Riis.
“Which is her right!” Defiance was never far from Susan’s reach. “We’re not here by the sufferance of the rich!”
I thought the girl was likely to die before the argument was finished, and said so.
“We must get her to the hospital!” declared Elizabeth capably.
“I’ll get my old man,” said the woman.
Her husband looked frail. But the girl weighed almost nothing, and he and Riis carried her outside and put her into a coach for hire. Susan opened her purse and handed the old man a two-dollar bill. He hesitated. I guessed that he felt a remnant of shame, but his wife’s had died an unnatural death, and she snatched the bill and gripped it in her fist.