Hot corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated Part 38

"What's the use? He is burnt, and must stand it. If he refuse, they will take his coat, or hat, or shoes. If he gets off with his breeches on he is lucky."

"What does this woman's husband do to support his family?"

"Deil a bit can I tell. It is not for me to pry into peoples' business who pay the rint like honest folks."

"The rent. How much rent do you pay for this room?"

"Fifty cents a week for each of us--that is two dollars in all, every Monday morning in advance; sure, you may well believe that, if you know Billy Crown, the agent. It's never a poor woman that he lets slip; if she was dying, and never a mouthful of bread or drop of anything in the house, the rint must be paid."

"Well, these women what do they do?"

"What should a lone woman do? she must live. There is but one way."

"Have you a husband?"

"The Lord be thanked, no. It is enough for me to live with me boys. What would I do if I had a drunken husband to support out of me arnings?"

Sure enough. What should any woman want of a drunken husband? Let us look above ground. Perchance misery only dwells in dark, low, damp cellars. Up, then, to the very garret of the same house. It is divided into three rooms, one is ten feet square with one window, without fire-place or stove. What may be inside we know not, for a strong hasp and padlock guard the treasure. Back of this, through a two feet wide pa.s.sage, is another room, eight feet by twelve. This is partly under the roof, has a dilapidated fire-place and broken window. This is inhabited by a black man and his wife. There is a bed, a table, dishes and two chairs, and an air of neatness, contrasting strongly with the cellar.

By the side of this is another room inhabited by a negro and his white wife, and a white man and wife. Did you ever see four uglier beasts in one cage? The white man is a hyena; his wife a tiger; the negro a hippopotamus; his wife a sort of human tortoise; the dirt, representing the sh.e.l.l, out of which the vicious head poked itself, glaring at the intruders upon her premises, with a look that plainly said, Oh, how I should like to bite and claw you, and strip off those clean clothes, and spoil that face, and put out those eyes, and make ye as dirty and ugly and miserable as I am. The black man was social, courteous and intelligent. He was a cobbler, and diligently plied his hammer and awl.

With a kind master and well cared for, he would be a faithful, good servant. He has no faculty to take care of himself. By nature the slave of one of nature's strongest pa.s.sions, he has sunk down into slavery to this hard-sh.e.l.l woman, and the tool of his designing hyena and tiger room-mates. The white man looked as if he were counting the contents of our pockets, and what chance there would be for a grab at our watches.

The shape of this room was peculiar. Take a large watermelon, cut it in quarters, cut one of those across--the flesh sides will represent the floor and one wall--the cross-cut the end, where there is a fire-place--the rind is the roof and other side of the room, through which at the b.u.t.t end, there is a window. There is no bedstead, or place for one. There is no table, or occasion for any. Two boxes and a stool serve for chairs. The bedding is very scarce, but the floor is of soft wood, and the weather is warm. Each of these rooms rents for three dollars a month, always in advance.

Now let us go down the rotten stairway to the next floor. Though what we have seen is bad, we may yet say:

"The worst is not So long as we can say, 'this is the worst.'"

What have we here?

Something worse. Yes, for coupled with poverty and crime, is fanatical hatred of everything that is not worse than itself. Let us rap at this door. A gruff woman's voice bids us enter. We are met by an insolent defiant scowl and an angry "what do you want here?"

"Good woman, is some one sick here?"

"Yes. What of that. n.o.body wants the like of you, with your pious faces and 'good woman,' prowling about at this time of night. You're after nothing good, any one might swear that."

"Perhaps we can give you some good advice for your sick child."

"Give your advice when we ask it. Haven't we got Father Mullany to give us advice, and he a good doctor too. I tell you we don't want any miserable heretics in the house and me child a dying. And who have I to thank for it?"

"Surely, madam, we cannot tell. Perhaps you can, or your husband, where is he?"

If a dog were thrown among the whelps in a wolf's lair, it would not arouse the dam quicker than these words did this human she-wolf. She sprang towards us, foaming with rage. A stout cane in my strong right hand caught her eye, and she stood at bay.

"What was she so mad at you and your companion for? Did she know either of you?"

"She knew us by sight, or rather she knew him as one of the active helpers of the Missionary, Mr. Pease, the House of Industry, and the Five Points Mission. What more should she know to hate us? She knew we were not of her faith; that we believed not in the efficacy of holy water and confession, to work out sin; that we did not kneel and receive a consecrated wafer with 'extreme unction', and so she hated us with all the fervent rancor of religious hate. She hated us for our mission of good; for she knew we hated what she dearly loved--drunkenness and all its concomitant evils. She hated us with that envious hate of depravity, which would sink everything to its own level. She knew that we would take her dying child to a clean bed and airy room, and give it food and medicine, and nurse it into life, and she hated us for that."

"How could she? How could a mother be so wicked to her poor sick child?

I am sure if I could not take care of mine, I would trust it with anybody who would save its life." Thus will say more than one Christian mother.

Think--be careful--be not uncharitable--good mother. Would you let it go with those who saved its life to be reared with them--taught their creed--perhaps to hate yours? Certainly if taught the principles of temperance--virtue--neatness--her child could not love its drunken mother, in her rags and dirt and life of sin.

"But then the child would be brought up by religious teachers, and taught to be a Christian."

Yes, a Protestant Christian; she is a good Catholic. Would you willingly give up your child if it were to be reared a Pagan, a Mahometan, or even a Jew?

"No! I would let it die."

There spoke the Five Points mother. Sooner than it should go into a Protestant house, she would see it die.

Alas! poor human nature; yes, poor human nature, sunk down into those depths of misery and degradation, yet every one of them are our brothers and sisters, who are rearing up children like themselves, as true as like produces like, while we look on, shrug our comfortably-wrapped shoulders, and "Thank G.o.d we are not like one of these," and yet never give, out of our abundance, one cent to make one of them like one of us.

"Well, what of her husband?"

"My husband, is it?" she said, as she stood glaring at us; "my husband?

Go, look in your city prison, you old gray-headed villains, where ye or the likes of ye, murdered him without judge or jury. Did you try him for his life? No. Had he been a murderer? No. Had he done any crime? No. You licensed him to sell liquor, and he drank too much--I drank too much--what else can you expect, when you set fools to play with live coals, but they will burn themselves? What next? What is the natural consequence of getting drunk? A quarrel. I know it. Don't ask me what I get drunk for; I know you did not speak, but I saw it in your eye--yes, your eye--turn it away--I cannot bear it, it looks right into my soul.

Don't look at me that way, or I shall cry, and I had rather die than do that. It would kill me to cry for such as you, who murdered my poor husband. You licensed him to sell rum, in the first place, to make other wives miserable with drunken husbands--mine was not drunken then, and I did not have to live in such a hole as this--look around you, ye murdering villains. What do you see?--poverty, filth, and rags; starvation, misery, crime--on that bed is my dying boy--that is nothing.

Let him die, I am glad of it--the priest has made it all right with him.

Now, look in that bed, rum-selling, licensing whelps that you are--that is worse than the dying boy in the other--see what we have bought with our money paid to your excise office. See what a mother is sunk to by rum. Yes, I do drink it--why do your eyes ask the question? I do drink, and will again. What else have I got to live for? What lower hole can I sink to? Me, a mother. A mother! Mother of that shameless girl, do you see her, there in that bed, before her mother's eyes?"

"Yes, and a pretty looking, bright-eyed girl she is."

"Bright-eyed. Yes, bright-eyed. I would to Heaven she had none--that she had been born blind. Her bright eyes have been her ruin--a curse to her and the mother that bore her--they are a curse to any poor girl among such villains as you are. Ye are men--how many hearts have you broken?--withered, trampled on?--there, go, go. I hate the sight of all men."

"Who is this man I see with your daughter; is he her husband?"

"Husband! husband! Do the like of her get husbands? Where is my husband?"

"We cannot tell, can you?"

"Tell! who can tell where a man is that died drunk--died--murdered in your man-killing city prison, and the priest not there to give him absolution. What had he done? What crime? Drank rum that you licensed him to sell--beat me because I drank too. What next? Next come your dirty police--the biggest scoundrels in the city--mad at my husband because he would not 'touch their palms,' and drag him to the Tombs--a right name--good name--true name--Tombs indeed--a tomb to my husband."

"Did he die there?"

"No! he was murdered there. Look here. Can you read? Yes, yes, I know ye can. So can I. Do you see that account of prisoners dying by suffocation--poisoned by carbonic acid gas--there, read it,"--and she thrust a crumpled paper before us--"read how ye reform drunkards--shut them up in prison cells, and in spite of their prayers, and groans, and dying cries for air, ye let them die. Are ye not murderers? Do you see that name? That is--that was my husband. Ha, ha, ha! Now, what is he, where is he? Don't answer--I know your answer; but if he is in h.e.l.l, who sent him there? Who, who, who?"

And she sank down upon one of the pallets which were spread over the floor, in a paroxysm of wild, delirious grief and rage, speechless as her dying boy, lying unheeded and unheeding, by her side. What could we do? Nothing here; much elsewhere; and we looked up and registered a vow, that much as she hated us for what we had not done, yet had permitted our fellows to do without crying out against them, that she should be avenged. If we could do nothing here--if we could not pull down the st.u.r.dy oak by taking hold of its topmost branches, yet, although its mighty strength defies our weak efforts thus applied, we can and will dig around its roots--we will take away the life-sustaining earth--and that strong tree shall be made to feel our power--it shall wither, dry up, and die, and time shall rot down its strong trunk, and the place that once knew it, shall know it no more.

This then is our pledge, made over that dying boy, and, worse than by murder, widowed mother, and here now we redeem it. Here we expose the hydra-headed monster--the orphan and widow-maker--the property, health, and virtue-destroyer. Sad, harrowing as these scenes of wretchedness and misery are, they must be laid open to the gaze of the world. "Wounds must be seen to be healed." Weak nerves tremble at the idea that physicians cut and carve the dead, talking, aye laughing, as freely over the quiet heart and still nerves in the dissecting-room, as the butcher over his beef upon the market house block; yet without the dissecting of one and butchering of the other, how should the maimed be healed, or meat-eating mult.i.tude be fed? So let us on with our panorama of scenes from life in New York.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD PLATO COOKING HOT CORN.--_Page 321._]

Let us open this door. Ah! we have been here before.

The room is seven by twelve feet, under the roof, which comes down at one end within a foot of the floor. There is a broken, dirty, window in the roof, at the right hand of the door as we enter on the side. No fire-place or stove, no table, only two broken chairs--a very old bureau--a dilapidated trunk--a band-box--a few articles of female apparel--some poor dishes and a few cooking utensils--used upon a little portable furnace standing in the room--a poor old bedstead and straw bed in one corner--a child's cot and a doll; and yet the only occupant of the room is an old negro man, who sits of nights upon cold stones, crying Hot Corn. We look about wonderingly, peering in here and there, but except the old man we see no one.

"She gone, ma.s.sa, clean gone--cry old eyes out when I come home next day arter dat one, you know ma.s.sa, which one dis child mean--sad day--don't like to mention him, ma.s.sa--give me chaw terbacca, ma.s.sa--come home and find her and little sis--nice child dat--"