Criminals -- Fiction; Social problems -- Fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918 -- Fiction
On this money, four dollars and a half, Graves lived for a week,
meanwhile hunting another job. He could do nothing except manual labor,
for he was not properly clothed for any clerical employment. He walked
along the entire river front, seeking work on the wharves as a
stevedore, but no one could work there who was not a member of the
Longshoremen’s Union, and no one could be a member of the Longshoremen’s
Union who did not work there; so this plan failed. He visited
employment bureaus, but these demanded fees and deposits. Graves read
the want advertisements in the newspapers, but none of these availed
him; each prospective employer demanded references which Graves could
not give.
The snow-storm brought him a prosperity as fleeting as the snow itself;
he went into the residence district--where as yet he had not had the
heart to go because of memories that haunted it--and cleaned the
sidewalks of the well-to-do. After a day or so, the sidewalks of the
well-to-do were all cleaned,--that is, the sidewalks of those who
respected the laws sufficiently to have their sidewalks cleaned. Then
the rain came, and Graves tramped the slushy streets. His prison-made
shoes were as pervious to water as paper, of which substance, indeed,
they were made; he contracted a cold, and his cough grew rapidly worse.
He had no place to sleep. He spent a night in each of the two
lodging-houses in the city, then he "flopped" on the floor of a police
station. In this place he became infested with vermin, though this was
no new experience to him after eleven months in the cells of the
penitentiary. Meanwhile, he had little to eat. Once or twice, he
visited hotel kitchens and the chefs gave him scraps from the table;
then he did what for days he had been dreading--he tried to beg. After
allowing twenty people to go by, he found the courage to hold out his
hand to the twenty-first; the man passed without noticing him; a dozen
others did likewise. Then a policeman saw him and arrested him on a
charge of vagrancy. At the police station the officers, recognizing his
prison clothes, held him for three days as a suspicious character. Then
he was arraigned before Bostwick, who scowled and told him he would give
him twenty-four hours in which to leave the city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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