Read Ebook: My Mamie Rose: The Story of My Regeneration by Kildare Owen

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Ebook has 1009 lines and 62802 words, and 21 pages

Chapter

Map of Bowery District

Mr. Kildare's Birthplace on Catharine Street

Bill

A Typical Group at Barney Flynn's Side-Door

Mike Callahan's Saloon

MAP OF THE BOWERY DISTRICT.

The map on the left shows how small a fraction of Manhattan Island this world-famous district is. In this small section, called by Mr. Kildare "The Highway of the Foolish," he was born and lived, until he was thirty. Rarely did he leave it. In fact, he states that a large percentage of the people who are born here go through life with the very vaguest ideas of the world beyond--many living and dying without ever having passed north of 14th Street and West of Broadway. It is a strange world of strange people who live only from day to day and unto their daily needs.

Many men have told the stories of their lives. I shall tell you mine. Not because I, as they, have done great and important things, but because of the miracle which transformed me.

If lives may be measured by progress mine may have some interest to you. When a man at thirty cannot read or write the simplest sentence, and then eight years later is able to earn his living by his pen, his story may be worth the telling.

Before beginning, however, the recital of how I found my ambition awakened, let me make my position unmistakably definite. I am not a self-made man, having only contributed a mite in the making. A self-made man can turn around to the road traveled by him and can point with pride to the monuments of his achievements. I cannot do that. I have no record of great deeds accomplished. I am a man, reborn and remade from an unfortunate moral condition into a life in which every atom has but the one message, "Strive, struggle and believe," and I would be the sneakiest hypocrite were I to deny that I feel within me a satisfaction at being able to respond to the call with all the possible energy of soul and body. I have little use for a man who cloaks his ability with mock modesty. A man's conscience is the best barometer of his ability, and he who will pretend a disbelief in his ability is either untruthful or has an ulterior motif.

In spite of having, as yet, accomplished little, I have confidence in myself and my ability, because my aims are distinctly reasonable. I regret that in my story the first person singular will be so much in evidence, but it cannot be otherwise. Each fact, each incident mentioned, has been lived by me; the disgrace and the glory, the misery and the happiness, are all part of my life, and I cannot separate them from myself. I know you will not disbelieve me, and I am willing to be confronted by your criticism, which, for obvious reasons, will not be directed against my diction, elegance of style and literary quality. I am not an author. I only have a story to tell and all the rest remains with you.

There was nothing remarkable about my early childhood. Most of the boys of the tenements are having or have had the same experience.

The "front room" was kitchen, dining-room, living room and my bedroom all in one. Beside the cooking range in winter and beside the open window in summer was the old soap box on its unevenly curved supports, which, as my cradle, bumped me into childhood.

As may be surmised, both of my foster parents were Irish. My father, a 'longshoreman, enjoyed a reputation of great popularity in the Fourth Ward, at that time an intensely Irish district of the city. Popularity in the Fourth Ward meant a great circle of convivial companions and a fair credit with the ginmill keepers. His earnings would have been considerable had he been a persistent worker. But men of popularity cannot afford to be constantly at work. It would perhaps fill their pocketbooks, but decrease their popularity. These periods of conviviality, hilarious intervals to my father, were most depressing to my mother.

Life in tenements is a particularly busy one of its kind. When all efforts are directed toward the one end of providing the wherewithal for food and rent, each meal and each rent day is an epoch-making event.

As soon as one month's rent is paid, each succeeding day has its own thoughts of dread "against next rent day." The thrifty housekeeper lays aside a share of her daily allowance--increasing it during the last week of the month--until, with a sigh of relief, she can say, "Thank God, we got it this time."

I firmly believe that a great share of the dread is created by the aversion to a personal meeting with the rent collector or agent. People who have to measure the size of their meals by the length of their purses are very apt to become a trifle unsteady in their ethics concerning financial questions. They are willing to pay their grocer or butcher, but lose sight of the fact that the rent money is the payment for the most important purchase, the securing of their home. They are friendly with the shopkeeper, are often "jollied" by him into spending money otherwise needed, but regard the rent collector as their personal enemy.

There are many rent collectors, and, as in all greater numbers, quite a few are justly criticised for their manner. Many tenements are owned by men, who, though the owners, are only on a slightly different scale socially from their tenants. They are men, who, by great shrewdness or some fortunate chance, accumulated enough to make a real estate investment in their own ward. Naturally, they being familiar with the circumstances of their tenants and having a remnant of neighborly feeling for them, are more easily influenced.

Many blocks of tenements were then and are now owned by large estates. The management of these buildings is entrusted to real estate agents, who receive a commission on their collections, or to salaried representatives, who owe their position to the faculty of keeping rents up and keeping repairs down. These are the men who are hated by the poor.

It is said corporations have no souls, why then should a large estate, surely a corporation, have one? And there must be a soul to understand, to feel the woe, the pleading that comes to it in halting, sob-broken speech. How, then, is one whose feeling is long ago calloused by the repetition of these tales of misery, to be stirred to more than a sneer by another variation of the old, old wail: "Have pity on us this once, we are so poor, so ill, so miserable."

Here the poor could be reproached for shiftlessness in household matters, for not practising sufficiently the principles of economy. The reproach would be perfectly justified and would touch one of the most potent causes for the existing conditions among the poor. No one lives more lavishly and knows less how to save than the poor. Their expense account is not based on a sanitary or monetary basis, but shapes itself according to temporary income.

"Plenty of money in the house" and rent day far in the distance, and many families will absolutely gorge themselves at table with food and drink, only to return on perhaps the very next day to tea and dry bread.

For this reason no social movements on the East Side are worthier of hearty support than those carried on to teach children, and especially girls, "How to keep house." Teach them how to keep house, and they will make homes.

If rent days are the fearful anticipations of tenement house life, meals and their preparation are the pleasurable anticipations of it. At morning, noon and evening the smells of cooking and frying waft from the open doors of the apartments into the halls. The doors are open for two reasons--for ventilation and to "show" the neighbors that more than the tea kettle is bubbling away on the range. Behind the closed doors there is no feast, just the tea and the bread and scheming how to explain this unwelcome fact to the neighbors.

My mother found her best hold on her husband's affections by catering to his appetite, which was one of the marvels of the neighborhood. When working he was very exacting in the choice and preparation of his food; so, when idle his wife would strive still harder to cheer him into better humor by culinary feats.

Besides this promiscuous cooking, there were mending, washing, darning and other housework to be looked after, and little time was left for sentiment toward me beyond an occasional affectionate pat on the head.

Now, take the mind, the heart of a child, and then consider the influence of such a barren existence on it. A child can do without coddling--yes, most boys do not, or pretend not to like it--but a child's heart, sensitive as no other, hungers for a wealth of affection.

The child, a little ape, finding no outlet for his willing response to affection, seeks a field of mental activity in imitating the adults about him. And the models and patterns in tenement spheres are not those a child should imitate. All conditions there are primitive. To eat, drink, sleep and be clothed are the aims of life there, leaving but a small margin for emotions.

The forms of expression are also primitive and accepted. The worthy housewife, who, in a moment of anger at her husband's mellow state, should vent her feelings in an outburst of more emphatic than polite language, will not lose caste thereby, but will be told by sympathetic fellow-sufferers that "She did just right."

Among the men it is considered an indication of effeminacy or dudeism to utter one sentence without profanity. To be deemed manly one must curse and swear. Even terms of endearment are prefaced with an unintentionally opposite preamble.

There, not yet mentioning the other detrimental defects of environment, the child grows up, and then, when in the manhood days this foundation, faulty and vicious, breaks and crumbles to pieces and leaves naught but a being condemned by society and law, and seemingly by God, there is an army ready to pelt this creature, cursed by its own existence, with law, justice and punishment, but not with one iota of the spirit which even now, in our matter-of-fact days, echoes the grandest message, "He is thy brother."

Such was the setting of the stage on which the drama of my childhood began. The part I played in it was not very interesting.

An adult man or woman can do with a minimum of space, but a child must have much of it. To romp and play and scheme some mischief requires lots of room, and there being not an inch of room to spare in tenement apartments, the children in summer and winter claim the street as their very own realm.

It is bad that it is so, for there is much in the street which is of physical and moral danger to the child. Hardly a day passes without having a boy or girl hurt by some passing vehicle. It is almost impossible to guard against these accidents. The drivers are careful. No one can make me believe that these men would wantonly drive into a swarm of playing children, but there are so many, so many.

Convince yourself of this. You need not have to travel very far. Take any street, east or west of the Bowery, and the young generation, crowding before your very feet or jostling against you in innocent play, will tell you more effectively than my pen could of what the real need of the East Side is.

But then parks and play grounds do not bring rentals; tenement houses do, and, further, even the child-life of those districts is dependent on the whims of our patriotic ward politicians.

Among the very poor--and my parents were of that class--it is the custom to send out the children to pick up wood and coal for the fire. My mother, being constantly engaged in looking after the welfare of my father, had not very much time to spare on me, and I grew up very much by myself.

Even before it had become my duty to "go out for coal," I loved to take my basket and make my way to the river front to pick up bits of coal dropped in unloading from the canal boats or by too generously filled carts.

Among my playmates I held a very unimportant position, being neither very popular nor unpopular. I did not mind this much, as I felt, instinctively, that something was wrong and that I was not on a level footing with them. It is impossible for me to explain why I felt so at the time, but I can distinctly remember that quite often I felt myself entirely isolated.

No one minded me or censured me for my long absences from home, provided my basket was fairly well filled with coal. Then spells of envy often came to me. I envied the caresses given by mothers to their sons and, yes, I also envied the cuffs given to them for having spent too much time at the retail coal business.

I reasoned so then and I reason so now, that behind every whipping given to a child a father's or mother's love and justice is hidden. But even parental chastisement was denied me--a fact for which, according to popular opinion, I should have been thankful.

In this way I lived the dull life of a tenement house child, made more dull in my case by the lack of a certain inexplicable something in my relations to my parents and in my home conditions. I missed something, yet could not tell what it was.

It can hardly be termed a hidden sorrow, but make a boy ponder and worry about something, for which no explanation is vouchsafed to him, and he will get himself into a mental state not at all healthy for his years.

Close to the cooking range was an old box used as a receptacle for wood and coal. There was my seat, and from there I watched the little domestic comedies and tragedies played before me with my father and mother as chief actors.

My father's popularity made our home the calling place for many visitors. At these visits the most frequently used utensil was the "can," or "growler," and the functions usually assumed the character of an "ink pot." Several houses in the ward had well proven reputations as "mixed ale camps," meaning thereby places where certain cronies could meet nightly and "rush the growler" as long as the money lasted. If the friends were more than usually plentiful, the whisky bottle, called always the "bottle," besides the "can," was kept well filled, producing a continuation of effects, sometimes running to fighting; at other times running to maudlin sentimentality. These occasions--no one knows why--are called "ink pots."

My father's house was in a fair way to become listed among the well established "mixed ale camps." In those days no law had yet been passed making the selling of "pints" of beer to minors a punishable offense, and children of both sexes were employed until late in the night, when the bar-rooms were crowded with drunken and boisterous men, to "rush the growler" for their seniors at home. The children did not object to it, as a few pennies were always given to them for the errand.

I, also, had to make these journeys to the nearest saloon, and, also, did not mind it for the above mentioned reason. Sometimes, after returning from my trip, a man would ask me to sing him one of the popular songs of the day, but I would refuse with the diffidence of a boy. My father never missed these opportunities to inform his friends that "that brat ain't good for nothing. Don't bother with him."

I began to dislike my foster father, rather than hate him. More than once I met his casual glance with a bitter scowl.

It was winter, still. I was running about bare-footed. This was preferred by me to having my feet shod with the old shoes of my mother. She had a small foot, yet her old shoes were miles too large for me, and furthermore, always made me the butt of the jeers and jibes of my playmates in the street. Therefore, I never wore the cast-off shoes unless snow or ice was on the ground.

But whether bare-footed or slouching along in my unwieldy cast-offs, the comments became so personal that I resolved to ask my father for a pair of real, new shoes.

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