Maggie (The Daughter)

    Hi, my name is Maggie and I am 8 years old.  I live in a rear tenement apartment on Chrystie Street.  I live with my mom, dad, and brother.  My baby sister died when she was four in 1896 of Tuberculosis when it spread through all the tenements.

    My house is small and we are so crowded.  One room is hardly enough for all four of us.  I never get any sleep.  There is only one bed in our home and dad snores so loudly when he passes out, Mom cries, and Johnny sneaks in and out so I can never sleep.

    On top of that, mom wakes me up at 5:00 am every day and depending on whether it is a weekend or a weekday, I go to bed at 11:00 PM or 10:00 PM respectively.  I was in school until third grade but when I couldn’t handle home labor and school work, mom decided that it was more important that I contribute to the family profit than to have an education.  Even though the compulsory education law states that I have to be in school at least until I am 14 years old, they can’t force mom to put me back in school, especially since now I have missed third grade three times.

    Mom tells me that I can not talk about the fact that she keeps me home to work because we are not licensed and if mentioned around the relief society men we could get in trouble.  I don’t understand what it means, maybe mom can explain it to you better.  The work we do at home is to sew black satin lining into very nice men’s overcoats.  On a good week I can make $1.04 alone, and on a bad week, I make as little as $ 0.50.  During the days, I am either sitting down, working straight through the day or I am running coats that we can’t finish over to our neighbor’s house so that they can contribute.  Mom always looks so upset when we have to do that.  If I work straight through the days for many days at a time my eyes start to hurt and I loose my attention very quickly.  The worst part is that my fingers start to bleed and since the house is so dirty and musty, they get infected all the time.  One time it got so bad that we couldn’t hide the swelling from the Relief Aid Society inspector and he called a doctor who told mom that I had to stop working until I healed.  Mom denied that there was any labor going on in the house and sent him away and instead soaked my fingers in salt and hot water and sent me to work again an hour later.  We are lucky to be making overcoats instead of artificial flowers or cigars, because at night we use the coats as blankets.  In 1896, when the TB disease swept through the tenements, we sent one of the coats to our neighbors to help to finish the lining.  When mom went to get it back, she found it around our neighbor’s sick son.  She grabbed the coat and brought it back to the house.  That night Sarah was cold so mom covered her with the coat and she caught TB.  She died four months later.  She was five, and she was valuable to our family income.  At age three, mom had her paying attention for 2 hours at a time.  Well the inspectors came and had us burn all the coats in the house.

    It is so hard to be a child and live here in the slums.  It’s so dirty, and dark, I never get to see the light of day and I never get to play.

To find out about Johnny, my brother, click here.