Rose (The Mother)

    Hi, my name is Rose and I am 39 years old.  My family and I live on Chrystie Street in a rear apartment.  My husband is a plasterer who gets infrequent jobs and uses the money he finally does make to drink at the local saloons.  My daughter, Maggie, is hard working but complains of headaches too much and has bad fingers.  They sent a doctor once who told me that he knew we were working in the house un-liscenced, and that the darkness of the apartment was killing my daughter’s eyesight and the constant pressure to make her focus on her work was obstructing the development of her brain, but I always ignore those doctors.  He had come because her fingers were bleeding again, but I just soaked them in some hot water with salts, an old remedy for weak fingers.  I understand the complaints of my daughter though.

    The house is a one -room dump, with no direct sunlight and no ventilation.  There are no bathtubs or showers to the water that I use to clean dishes, clothes, and my children has to come from the water pumps from the street which is five floors down from out home.  It smells a bit and is an unusual brown but I refuse to bring my children to the public baths that have been set up and I am very against letting my children bathe in the river like some of the other families’ children.  There is an airshaft that runs through the house, but people dump their trash down it.  We would dump it on the street but the garbage collection is so rare and haphazard that there is no point in making the trip down all those stairs.

    In my house we sew the black satin linings into men’s overcoats.  I’m sure Maggie will tell you a bit more about this.  She’s a good girl, hard worker.  We are up at 5:00 AM every morning and we always work late into the night.  She makes as much as I do per day, from $0.50 to $1.04.  When Sarah was alive we made a bit more than that, but she died during the TB epidemic that spread through the slums like wild fire in 1896-1897.  That was very difficult for me.  I sent Maggie to school for a while but she couldn’t handle both school and work and I needed her to help make money since Benny makes money so rarely and gives it to us even more rarely, so I had to take her out before the third grade.

    The compulsory education law demands that I send her to school, but I make sure that it does not get out that we are not licensed.  If mine were a licensed house, like those on Sullivan, Macdougal, Thompson and Houston Streets, I would not have to fight the education department (or if Maggie was over 14 since the law looses its jurisdiction when children are over 14).  Those streets are in the artificial flowers district and a license means that they have been inspected and that the home labor is regulated.  Under the "New Law", provisions for light and air are made in order to prevent work in homes where diseases exist.  But I can’t get a license because our tenement is disease ridden, in fact just the other day scabies infected our neighbor’s house.  Poor children; Christina is only 4 years old.  She can’t stop itching.  Johnny, my son, he is another story.  I can’t control him, he is never home when I am awake, except early in the mornings when Sarah and I wake up to work.  He is involved in the youth gang scene here in the slums.  It scares me.  I have never seen him get in trouble but Benny has dragged Johnny home with a fat lip before.  Benny says he caught him in a fight, but I can’t help but think that he just caught him gambling and gave him that fat lip himself.

    It’s  so hard being a mother here in the slums, I can’t give my children any hope because I just don’t have any to give.  We are just scraping by.
 

To find out about Maggie, my daughter, click here