The Children of the PoorRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
The Children of the Poor
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Child welfare -- New York (State) -- New York; Poor; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York
"His girl," she said promptly. "An' he stuck to her till he was pulled for
the job he didn't do; then he had to let her slide. She stuck to him too,
you bet.
"Annie wasn't no more nor thirteen when she was tuk away from home by the
Kid," the girl went on, talking as much to herself as to me; the policeman
nodded in his chair. "He kep' her the best he could, 'ceptin' when he was
sent up on the Island the time the gang went back on him. Then she kinder
drifted. But she was all right agin he come back and tuk to keepin' bar
for his brother Jim. Then he was pulled for that Bridgeport skin job, and
when he went to the pen she went to the bad, and now----"
Here a thought that had been slowly working down through her besotted mind
got a grip on her strong enough to hold her attention, and she leaned over
and caught me by the sleeve, something almost akin to pity struggling in
her bleary eyes.
"Say, young feller," she whispered hoarsely, "don't spring this too hard.
She's got two lovely brothers. One of them keeps a daisy saloon up on
Eighth Avenue. They're respectable, they are."
Then she went on telling what she knew of Annie Noonan who was sitting
dead there before us. It was not much. She was the child of an honest
shoemaker who came to this country twenty-two or three years before from
his English home, when Annie was a little girl of six or seven. Before she
was in her teens she was left fatherless. At the age of thirteen, when she
was living in an East Side tenement with her mother, the Kid, then a young
tough qualifying with one of the many gangs about the Hook for the
penitentiary, crossed her path. Ever after she was his slave, and followed
where he led.
The path they trod together was not different from that travelled by
hundreds of young men and women to-day. By way of the low dives and
"morgues" with which the East Side abounds, it led him to the Island and
her to the street. When he was sent up the first time, his mother died of
a broken heart. His father, a well-to-do mechanic in the Seventh Ward, had
been spared that misery. He had died before the son was fairly started on
his bad career. The family were communicants at the parish church, and
efforts without end were made to turn the Kid from his career of wicked
folly. His two sisters labored faithfully with him, but without avail.
When the Kid came back from the Island to find his mother dead, he did not
know his oldest sister. Grief had turned her pretty brown hair a snowy
white.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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