Half a Man Part 2

Of the five Manhattan neighborhoods the oldest is Greenwich Village, according to Janvier once the most attractive part of New York, where the streets "have a tendency to sidle away from each other and to take sudden and unreasonable turns." Here one finds such fascinating names as Minetta Lane and Carmine and Cornelia Streets. These and neighboring thoroughfares grow daily more grimy, however, and no longer merit Janvier's praise for cleanliness, moral and physical. The picturesque, friendly old houses are giving way to factories with high, monotonous fronts, where foreigners work who crowd the ward and destroy its former American aspect.

Among the old time aristocracy bearing Knickerbocker names there are a few colored people who delight in talking of the fine families and past wealth of old Greenwich Village. Scornful of the gibberish-speaking Italians, they sigh, too, at their own race as they see it, for the ambitious Negro has moved uptown, leaving this section largely to widowed and deserted women and degenerates. The once handsome houses, altered to accommodate many families, are rotten and unwholesome, while the newer tenements of West Third Street are darkened by the elevated road, and shelter vice that knows no race. Altogether, this is not a neighborhood to attract the new-comer. Here alone in New York I have found the majority of the adults northern born, men and women who, unsuccessful in their struggle with city life, have been left behind in these old forgotten streets.[3]

The second section, north of the first, lies between West Fourteenth and West Fifty-ninth Streets, and Sixth Avenue and the Hudson River. In 1880 this was the centre of the Negro population, but business has entered some of the streets, the Pennsylvania Railroad has scooped out acres for its terminal, and while the colored houses do not diminish in number, they show no decided increase. No one street is given over to the Negro, but a row of two or three or six or even eight tenements shelter the black man. The shelter afforded is poorer than that given the white resident whose dwelling touches the black, the rents are a little higher, and the landlord fails to pay attention to ragged paper, or to a ceiling which scatters plaster flakes upon the floor. In the Thirties there are rear tenements reached by narrow alley-ways. Crimes are committed by black neighbor against black neighbor, and the entrance to the rear yard offers a tempting place for a girl to linger at night. A rear tenement is New York's only approach to the alley of cities farther south.

There are startling and happy surprises in all tenement neighborhoods, and I recall turning one afternoon from a dark yard into a large beautiful room. Muslin curtains concealed the windows, the bra.s.s bed was covered with a thick white counterpane, and on either side of the fireplace, where coal burned brightly in an open grate, were two rare engravings. It was a workroom, and the mistress of the house, steady, capable, and very black, was at her ironing-board. By her sat the colored mammy of the story book rocking lazily in her chair. She explained to me that her daughter had found her down south, two years ago, and brought her to this northern home, where she had nothing to do, for her daughter could make fifty dollars a month. This home picture was made lastingly memorable by the younger woman's telling me softly as she went with me to the door, "I was sold from my mother, down in Georgia, when I was two years old. I ain't sure she's my mother. _She_ thinks so; but I can't ever be sure."

Homes beautiful both in appearance and in spirit can rarely occur where people must dwell in great poverty, but there are many efforts at attractive family life on these streets. A few of the blocks are orderly and quiet. Thirty-seventh Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, is largely given over to the colored and is rough and noisy. Here and down by the river at h.e.l.l's Kitchen the rioting in 1900 between the Irish and the Negro took place. Men are ready for a fight today, and the children see much of hard drinking and quick blows.

"The poorer the family, the lower is the quarter in which it must live, and the more enviable appears the fortune of the anti-social cla.s.s."[4]

A vicious world dwells in these streets and makes notorious this section of New York. For this is a part of the Tenderloin district, and at night, after the children's cries have ceased, and the fathers and mothers who have worked hard during the day have put out their lights, the automobiles rush swiftly past, bearing the men of the "superior race." Temptation is continuous, and the child that grows up pure in thought and deed does so in spite of his surroundings.

Before reaching West Fifty-ninth Street, the beginning of our third district, we come upon a Negro block at West Fifty-third Street. When years ago the elevated railroad was erected on this fas.h.i.+onable street, white people began to sell out and rent to Negroes; and today you find here three colored hotels, the colored Young Men's and Young Women's Christian a.s.sociations, the offices of many colored doctors and lawyers, and three large beautiful colored churches. The din of the elevated drowns alike the doctor's voice and his patient's, the client's and the preacher's.

From Fifty-ninth Street, walking north on Tenth Avenue, we begin to ascend a hill that grows in steepness until we reach Sixty-second Street. The avenue is lined with small stores kept by Italians and Germans, but to the left the streets, sloping rapidly to the Hudson River, are filled with tenements, huge double deckers, built to within ten feet of the rear of the twenty-five foot lot, accommodating four families on each of the five floors. We can count four hundred and seventy-nine homes on one side of the street alone!

This is our third district, San Juan Hill, so called by an on-looker who saw the policemen charging up during one of the once common race fights.

It is a bit of Africa, as Negroid in aspect as any district you are likely to visit in the South. A large majority of its residents are Southerners and West Indians, and it presents an interesting study of the Negro poor in a large northern city. The block on Sixtieth Street has some white residents, but the blocks on Sixty-first, Sixty-second, and Sixty-third are given over entirely to colored. On the square made by the north side of Sixty-first, the south side of Sixty-second Streets, and Tenth and West End Avenues, 5.4 acres, the state census of 1905 showed 6173 inhabitants.[5] All but a few of these must have been Negroes, as the avenue sides of the block, occupied by whites, are short and with low houses. It is the long line of five-story tenements, running eight hundred feet down the two streets, that brings up the enumeration. The dwellings on Sixty-first and Sixty-second Streets are human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings.

Bedrooms open into air shafts that admit no fresh breezes, only foul air carrying too often the germs of disease.

The people on the hill are known for their rough behavior, their readiness to fight, their coa.r.s.e talk. Vice is abroad, not in insidious form as in the more well-to-do neighborhood farther north, but open and cheap. Boys play at c.r.a.ps unmolested, gambling is prevalent, and Negro loafers hang about the street corners and largely support the Tenth Avenue saloons.

But San Juan Hill has many respectable families, and within the past five years it has taken a decided turn for the better. The improvement has been chiefly upon Sixty-third Street where two model tenements, one holding one hundred, the other one hundred and sixty-one families, have been opened under the management of the City and Suburban Homes Company, the larger one having been erected by Mr. Henry Phipps. Planning for a four per cent return on their investment, these landlords have rented only to respectable families, and their rule has changed the character of the block.[6] Old houses have been remodelled to compete with the newer dwellings, street rows have ceased, and the police captain of the district, we are told, now counts this as one of the peaceful and law-abiding blocks of the city. When its other blocks show a like improvement, San Juan Hill will no longer merit its belligerent name.

The lower East Side of Manhattan, a many-storied ma.s.s of tenements and workshops, where immigrants labor and sleep in their tiny crowded rooms, was once a fas.h.i.+onable American district. At that time Negroes dwelt near the whites as barbers, caterers, and coachmen, as laundresses and waiting-maids. But with the removal of the people whom they served, the colored men and women left also, and it is difficult to find an African face among the hundreds of thousands of Europeans south of Fourteenth Street. On Pell Street, in the Chinese quarter, there used to be two colored families on friendly terms with their neighbors, who, however, went uptown for their pleasures and their church.

It is not until we reach Third Avenue and Forty-third Street that we come to the East Side Negro tenement. From this point, such houses run, a straggling line, chiefly between Second and Third Avenues, to the Bronx where the more well-to-do among the colored live. At Ninety-seventh Street, and on up to One Hundredth Street, dark faces are numerous. About six hundred and fifty Negro families live on these four streets and around the corner on Third Avenue. Occasionally they live in houses occupied by Jews or Italians. Above this section there are a number of Negro tenements in the One Hundred and Thirties, between Madison and Fifth Avenues--almost a West Side neighborhood, since it adjoins the large colored quarter to the west of Fifth Avenue. On the whole, the East Side is not often sought by the colored as a place of residence. Their important churches are in another part of the city, and every New Yorker knows the difficulty in making a way across Central Park. Yet, the neighborhood is not uncivil to them, and one rarely reads here of race friction. Doubtless this is in part owing to the smallness of the population, all of Manhattan east of Fifth Avenue containing but fourteen per cent of the apartments occupied by colored in the city; but it is partly, too, that Jews and Italians prove less belligerent tenement neighbors than Irish.

Five years ago, those of us who were interested in the Negro poor continually heard of their difficulty in securing a place to live. Not only were they unable to rent in neighborhoods suitable for respectable men and women, but dispossession, caused perhaps by the inroad of business, meant a despairing hunt for any home at all. People clung to miserable dwellings, where no improvements had been made for years, thankful to have a roof to shelter them. Yet all the time new-law tenements were being built, and Gentile and Jew were leaving their former apartments in haste to get into these more attractive dwellings.

At length the Negro got his chance; not a very good one, but something better than New York had yet offered him--a chance to follow into the houses left vacant by the white tenants. Owing in part to the energy of Negro real estate agents, in part to rapid building operations, desirable streets, near the subway and the elevated railroad, were thrown open to the colored. This Negro quarter, the last we have to note and the newest, has been created in the past eight years. When the Tenement House Department tabulated the 1900 census figures for the Borough of Manhattan, and showed the nationalities and races on each block, it found only 300 colored families in a neighborhood that today accommodates 4473 colored families.[7] This large increase is on six streets, West Ninety-ninth, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, West One Hundred and Nineteenth, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and West One Hundred and Thirty-third to One Hundred and Thirty-sixth Streets, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, with a few houses between Seventh and Eighth, and on Lenox Avenues. There are colored tenements north and south of this; and while these figures are correct today,[8] they may be wrong tomorrow, for new tenements are continually given over to the Negro people. Moreover, on all of these streets are colored boarding and lodging houses, crowded with humanity. Houses today fall into the hands of the Negro as a child's blocks, placed on end, tumble when a push is given to the first in the line. The New York _Times_, in August, 1905, gives a graphic account of the entrance of the colored tenant on West Ninety-ninth Street. Two houses had been opened for a short time to Negroes when the other house-owners capitulated, and the colored influx came: "The street was so choked with vehicles Sat.u.r.day that some of the drivers had to wait with their teams around the corners for an opportunity to get into it. A constant stream of furniture trucks loaded with the household effects of a new colony of colored people who are invading the choice locality is pouring into the street. Another equally long procession, moving in the other direction, is carrying away the household goods of the whites from their homes of years." The movement is not always so swift as this, but it is continuous.

This last colored neighborhood perhaps ought not to be spoken of as belonging to the poor; not to Lanier's poor whose door pressed so tighteningly inward. Here are homes where it is possible, with sufficient money, to live in privacy, and with the comforts of steam heat and a private bath. But rents are high, and if money is scarce, the apartment must be crowded and privacy lost. Moreover, vice has made its way into these newly acquired streets. The sporting cla.s.s will always pay more and demand fewer improvements than the workers, and, unable to protect himself, the respectable tenant finds his children forced to live in close propinquity to viciousness. Each of these new streets has this objectionable element in its population, for while some agents make earnest efforts to keep the property they handle respectable, they find the owner wants money more than respectability.

In our walk up and down Manhattan, turning aside and searching for Negro-tenanted streets, we ought to see one thing with clearness--that the majority of the colored population live on a comparatively few blocks. This is a new and important feature of their New York life, and in certain parts of the city it develops a color problem, for while you seem an inappreciable quant.i.ty when you const.i.tute two per cent of the population in the borough, you are of importance when you form one hundred per cent of the population of your street. This congestion is accompanied by a segregation of the race. The dwellers in these tenements are largely new-comers, men and women from the South and the West Indies,[9] seeking the North for greater freedom and for economic opportunity. Like any other strangers they are glad to make their home among familiar faces, and they settle in the already crowded places on the West Side. Freedom to live on the East Side next door to a Bohemian family may be very well, but sociability is better. The housewife who timidly hangs her clothes on the roof her first Monday morning in New York is pleased to find the next line swinging with the laundry of a Richmond acquaintance, who instructs her in the perplexing housekeeping devices of her flat. No chattering foreigner could do that. And while to be welcome in a white church is inspiring, to find the girl you knew at home, in the next pew to you, is still more delightful when you have arrived, tired and homesick, at the great city of New York. So the colored working people, like the Italians and Jews and other nationalities, have their quarter in which they live very much by themselves, paying little attention to their white neighbors. If the white people of the city have forced this upon them, they have easily accepted it. Should this two per cent of the population be compelled to distribute itself mathematically over the city, each ward and street having its correct quota, it would evince dissatisfaction. This is not true of the well-to-do element, but of the ma.s.s of the Negro workers whose homes we have been visiting. Loving sociability, these new-comers to the city--and it is in the most segregated districts that the greater number of southern and British born Negroes are found--keep to their own streets and live to themselves. If they occupy all the sidewalk as they talk over important matters in front of their church, the outsider pa.s.sing should recognize that he is an intruder and take to the curb. He would leave the sidewalk entirely were he on Hester Street or Mulberry Bend. New-comers to New York usually segregate, and the Negro is no exception.

While congestion and segregation seem important to us as we look at these colored quarters, I suspect that the matter most pertinent to the Negro new-comer is, not where he will live nor how he will live, but whether he will be able to live in New York at all, whether he can meet the landlord's agent the day he comes to the door. For New York rents have mounted upwards as have her tenements. The Phipps model houses, built especially to benefit the poor, charge twenty-five dollars a month for four tiny rooms and bath; and while this is a little more than the dark old time rooms would bring, it takes about all of the twenty-five dollars you make running an elevator, to get a flat in New York. What wonder that, once secured, it is overrun with lodgers, or that, if privacy is maintained, there is not enough money left to feed and clothe the growing household. The once familiar song of the colored comedian still rings true in New York:

"Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown, What you gwine ter do when de rent comes roun'?"

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Harold M. Finley in _Federation_, May, 1908.

[2] Thomas Clarkson, "History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade," p.

378.

[3] Place of birth of 1036 New York Negro tenement dwellers. These figures were obtained chiefly from personal visits:

======================================================================== | Totals | East | Greenwich | Middle | San | Upper | | Side | Village | West | Juan | West | | | | Side | Hill | Side ---------------------+--------+------+-----------+--------+------+------ New England | 18 | 1 | 4 | 7 | 5 | 1 West | 11 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 4 | 1 New York | 157 | 6 | 47 | 42 | 55 | 7 New Jersey | 18 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 9 | 1 Pennsylvania | 19 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 12 | 1 Maryland | 37 | 1 | 0 | 6 | 27 | 3 District of Columbia | 26 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 16 | 4 Virginia | 375 | 8 | 15 | 71 | 244 | 37 Carolinas | 217 | 6 | 16 | 64 | 127 | 4 Gulf States | 65 | 0 | 2 | 23 | 39 | 1 Canada | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 West Indies | 87 | 1 | 6 | 13 | 67 | 0 Europe | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 0 ---------------------+--------+------+-----------+--------+------+------ | 1036 | 25 | 100 | 243 | 608 | 60 ========================================================================

[4] S. N. Patten, "New Basis of Civilization," p. 52.

[5] Some doubt is cast upon this figure. The New York Health Department in an enumeration of its own, in 1905, found a population of 3833. There is no question, however, of the great congestion of this block and the one north and south of it. The erection of new tenements has gone on rapidly since 1905, sweeping away the children's playgrounds, and making this one of the most crowded centres of New York.

[6] Too much cannot be said of the beneficial effect of good housing in a colored neighborhood, when under such able management as the City and Suburban Homes Company. Decent homes under competent management are absolutely necessary to an improvement in the Negro quarters of Manhattan and of Brooklyn as well. I can speak with some authority of the good done by the Phipps houses on West Sixty-third Street, as I lived, for eight months, the only white tenant in the one hundred and sixty-one apartments. Church and philanthropy had done and are doing excellent work on these blocks, but a sudden and marked improvement came from good housing, from the building of clean, healthful homes for law-abiding people.

[7] The Tenement House Department tabulated the number of Negro families living in tenements on these streets. I have counted the number of flats rented to colored people.

[8] July 15, 1910.

[9] The yearly arrivals of "African blacks" at the port of New York, secured from the Immigration Commissioner, are as follows: 1902-03, 110; 1903-04, 547; 1904-05, 1189; 1905-06, 1757; 1906-07, 2054; 1907-08, 1820; 1908-09, 2119. The year runs from July 1 to June 30.

CHAPTER III

THE CHILD OF THE TENEMENT

Within the last few years white Americans, many of whom were formerly ignorant of their condition, have been taught that they are possessed of a racial antipathy for human beings whose color is not their own. They have a "natural contrariety," "a dislike that seems const.i.tutional"

toward the dark tint that they see on another's face. But however well they may have conned their lesson, it breaks down or is likely to be forgotten in the presence of a Negro baby; for a healthy colored baby is a subject, not for natural contrariety, but for sympathetic cuddling. They are most engaging new-comers, these "delicate bronze statuettes,"[1] only warm with life, and smiling good will upon their world.

Not many colored babies are born in New York, at least not enough to keep pace with the deaths. The year 1908 saw in all the boroughs 1973 births as against 2212 deaths at all ages.[2]

In this same year the colored births for Manhattan and the Bronx were 1459, and the deaths under one year of age 424, an infant mortality rate of 290 to every thousand.[3] That is, two babies in every seven died under one year of age. The white infant mortality rate was 127.7, a little less than half that of the colored.

Why should we have in New York this enormous colored infant death rate?

Many physicians believe it indicates a lack of physical stamina in the Negro, an inability to resist disease. This may be so, but before falling back upon race as an explanation of high infant mortality, we need to exhaust other possible causes. We do not question the vitality of the white race when we read that in parts of Russia 500 babies out of every thousand die within the year; nor do we believe the people of Fall River, a factory town in Ma.s.sachusetts, have an inherent inability to resist disease, though their infant mortality rate in 1900 was 260 in one thousand births. We look in these latter cases, as we should in the former, to see if we find those conditions which careful students of the subject tell us accompany a high infant death rate.

Among the first of the accepted causes of infant mortality is the overcrowding of cities. We have viewed overcrowding as a usual condition among the Negroes of New York, and have seen the small, ill-ventilated bedroom where the baby spends much of its life. Heat, with its accompanying growth of bacteria and swift process of decomposition, is a second cause. New York's high infant mortality comes in the summer months when in the poorest quarters it has been known to reach four hundred in the thousand.[4] In the hot, crowded tenements, and no place can be so hot as New York in one of its July record-breaking weeks, the babies die like flies, and yet not like flies, for the flies buzz in hundreds about the little hot faces. Excitement, late hours, constant restlessness, these, too, cause infant mortality. On a city block tenanted by hundreds of men and women and little children, no hour of the night is free from some disturbance. Children whimper as they wake from the heat, babies cry shrilly, and the brightly-lighted streets are rarely without the sound of human footsteps. The sensitive new-born organism knows nothing of the quiet and restful darkness of nature's night.

But the most important cause of infant mortality[5] is improper infant feeding. And here we meet with a condition that confronts the Negro babies of New York far more than it confronts the white. For a properly fed baby is a breast fed baby, or else one whose food has been prepared with great care, and mothers forced by necessity to go out to work, cannot themselves give their babies this proper food. It is among the infants of mothers at work that mortality is high. Mr. G. Newman, an English authority on this subject, gives an interesting example of this in Lancas.h.i.+re, where, during the American civil war, many of the cotton operatives were out of employment and many more worked only half time.

Privation was great. A quarter of the mill hands were in receipt of poor relief, the general death rate increased, but _the infant mortality rate decreased_. The mothers, forced by circ.u.mstances to remain away from the factory, though in a state of semi-starvation, by their nursing and by their care of the home preserved the lives of their infants. Negro mothers, owing to the low wage earned by their husbands, for the general welfare of the family and to avoid semi-starvation, like the Lancas.h.i.+re women, leave their homes, but they thereby sacrifice the lives of many of their babies. The percentage for 1900 of Negro married women in New York engaging in self-supporting work was 31.4 in every hundred; of white married women 4.2 in every hundred, seven times as many in proportion among the Negroes as among the whites.[6] The Negro also shows a large percentage of widows, a quarter of all the female population over ten years of age. Some of these, we have no means of knowing how many, are widows only in name, and have babies for whom they must in some way provide support. The colored mother who has no husband often takes a position in domestic service and boards her baby, paying usually by the month, and finding the opportunity to visit her infant perhaps once a week. Sometimes she secures a "baby tender" who can give kindly, intelligent care; but under the best conditions her child will be bottle fed and in tenement surroundings inimical to health, while sometimes the woman to whom she intrusts her infant will be ignorant of the simplest matters of hygiene.

I remember an old colored woman, she must be dead by this time, who kept a baby farm. Her health was poor, and when I saw her, she had taken to her bed and lay in a dark room with two infants at her side. They were indescribably puny, with sunken cheeks and skinny arms and hands, weighing what a normal child should weigh at birth, and yet six and seven months old. The woman talked to me enthusiastically of salvation and gave filthy bottles to her charges. She was exceptionally incompetent, but there are others doing her work, too old or too ignorant properly to attend to the babies under their care.

Mothers who go out to day's-work are also unable to nurse their babies or to prepare all their food. The infant is placed in the care of some neighbor or of a growing daughter, who may be the impatient "little mother" of a number of charges. When the hot summer comes, such a baby is likely to fall the victim of epidemic diarrhoea, caused by pollution of the milk. Newman has a striking chart of infant death rates in Paris in which he pictures a rate mounting in one week as high as 256 in the thousand among the artificially fed infants, while for the same week, among the breast fed babies, the mortality is 32. The Negro mother, seeking self-support by keeping clean another's house or caring for another's children, finds her own offspring swiftly taken from her by a disease that only her nouris.h.i.+ng care could forestall.[7]

Remedial measures have for some time been taken in New York to check infant mortality, and they have met with some success. The distribution of pasteurized milk by Mr. Nathan Straus, the establishment of milk stations during the summer months in New York and Brooklyn where mothers at slight cost may secure proper infant food, and where much educative work is done by the visiting nurse, the multiplication of day nurseries, all these have helped to decrease the death rate. The Negroes have been benefited by these remedial agencies, but their percentage of 290 is still a matter for grave attention.

Two out of seven of New York's Negro babies die in the first year, but the other five grow up, some with puny arms and ricketty legs, others again too hardy for bad food or bad air to harm.

Like the babies these children suffer from their mother's absence at work. Family ties are loose, and more than other children they are handicapped by lack of proper home care. In an examination of the records of the Children's Court for three years I found that out of 717 arraignments of colored children, 221 were for improper guardians.h.i.+p, 30.8 per cent of the whole. Among the Russian children of the East Side, Tenth and Eleventh Wards, only 15 per cent of arraignments were on this complaint, indicating twice as many children without parental care among the colored as among the children of the Tenth and Eleventh Wards. Rough colored girls, also, whose habits were too depraved to permit of their remaining without restraint, were frequently committed to reformatories.

Truancy is not uncommon in colored neighborhoods, though few cases come before the courts. Sometimes the boy or girl is kept at home to care for the younger children, but again, lacking the mother's oversight, he remains on the street when he should be in school, or arrives late with ill prepared lessons.