Poverty and Destitution

...Candles were used, empty rooms were used for toilets...

...In the front room which had two windows looking out on the street there was a dresser and two over-stuffed chairs and there had been plastic curtains and a davenport which had since fallen apart...

...But they were out of the wind and the rain, the snow and sleet, these destitute ones...

...At the age of thirteen she was seduced and had the baby in Bellevue Hospital...

...Big ones...

...This house has Italians and Jews, and the place is all run down anyway, and nobody cares as long as the rent is paid...

...She was a greasy, black-haired girl, short and stout, made more so by the fact that she wore several suits or dresses and two coats...

...115 Mott Street...

...ONE OF THE SADDEST things about the poor and the destitute is that they are blamed for it too...

...One set of immigrants exploiting the newest set of immigrants...

...Elizabeth was feeble-minded, and yet she tried to hang on to religion and one thing she knew was that she should not be married out of the church...

...So they left us, three destitute ones, and began their life again sleeping out...

...Perhaps if we would stop talking about our principles of personal responsibility which do not allow us to take state aid or endowments from foundations, which we consider money stolen from the worker and the poor, we might have been able to accomplish more...

...Little ghinko trees with their heart-shaped leaves and upstanding branches were bright green and shimmering...

...She did not trust our community any more than she did her father...

...The poor have some hope...

...We see enough of it, surely, around the offices of the Catholic Worker which in the last 28 years have been located successively on East Fifteenth Street, near Avenue A; West Charles Street, near the North River...

...he was cooperative, in other words...

...I'm lucky I'm on the third floor with the kids...

...It had been replaced by a smaller davenport bed which another neighbor had given her...

...There you can get a cubicle with clean bedding for a dollar a night and a cheap meal and companionship...

...This is a dangerous custom with rats around...

...So we signed a paper, that was last June, and moved in, and then from June to December we paid her $23 a week and she paid the rent for us...

...He was an inventor, a man of brains, talked intelligently to the relief people...

...At our persuading she got into a girl's shelter where she paid weekly rent and made her own meals in the basement and washed her own clothes...

...Not traps...

...She was taken in by a neighbor who used her for prostitution purposes...

...We never were able to reach him—to get inside that hard exterior...

...Anyway, something happens to them, they survive and there is a certain joy and freedom in their condition...

...And there is, of course, the holy poverty of those who try daily to strip themselves of all attachments and to approximate to some extent the physical condition of the destitute...

...The furniture looked quite good when we moved in," Maria tried to apologize for having been taken in...

...We urged her to put her money in the bank but she would not, and sure enough one night a purse snatcher ran off with her savings which by then amounted to several hundred dollars...

...How I got this place," she began, "it was this way...

...It will be $23 a week.' My husband was getting thirty-five and here we were going to have to pay $23...

...The stove in the kitchen was a combination coal and gas stove, but the gas had been turned off and the coal stove had holes in it and the pipe which led into the chimney had rusted apart...

...The telephone was defective, she lost her dime, had no other and began to make a scene with the bartender which ended with screams and kickings and led to police action...

...You can't imagine how good it looked...

...Maria never comes to us except when she is in real need and then a few dollars helps her out...

...Another evictee, jobless, the destitute helped by the poor...

...Celia, on the other hand, was one of the destitute...

...These are the two books of Kropotkin which Peter Maurin, our French peasant founder of the Catholic Worker movement very often quoted as texts...

...What wonder people turn to drink and dope and the dope of television to stupefy themselves and the children, so they will not suffer so much...

...It had not occurred to us, this simple solution...

...That, in combination with the kind of liquor he drank, was powerful enough to make him fall unconscious in his plate of soup when he came to eat with us...

...She had taken drugs, and later, to provide the money, to prostitution...

...She never missed meals, wandered in and out with a huge purse clutched under one arm (she probably slept with it that way), and with an armload of school books...

...Windows in the kitchen and bedrooms looked out on an airshaft and other windows and only by peering out and straining one's neck to look up four more flights was it possible to see the sky...

...For seven months she paid $93 a month, rent and furniture payment...

...The rent charged these babes in the woods was fantastic...

...It must have been unbearably cold in winter...

...And here are the receipts for the rent...

...One hand washes the other," he explains as he sweeps off the neighbors' sidewalk...

...If such desperate measures to escape from destitution (only of course one does not escape) seem fantastic—one can only say—go live in such circumstances for a while and see...

...There were no lights...

...There was a job open at a little movie house on the Bowery for an honest cashier and Celia got the job, which she held for five years...

...Pilar could speak no English and was a violently emotional young woman who was not too attractive and was always getting into fights and arguments...

...Here is poverty but not unhappiness...

...Celia on the other hand was obviously defective and when she told tales of her father trying to rape her, she was not taken seriously...

...I sat there for a while with Maria at her kitchen table, pondering over the slips before me, wondering how we could help her out of this immediate slough...

...She also had a locker with a key so she stopped wearing all her clothes at once...

...Elizabeth She was a big blousy red-headed woman with a good-natured face and eyes that squinted at you between long lashes...

...Like all hospital workers he has no more than thirty dollars a week takehome pay, and that to support Maria and four children...

...He prayed for himself and for those around him, the destitute and the poor I suppose...

...It hap pened about a mile away from us...

...The destitute are the ill and lonely, the hopeless ones...

...It makes good chowder...

...Maria got up from the chair by the good kitchen table, the only whole thing in the house, that table with its four chairs, and fetched a box from the kitchen shelf full of papers and odds and ends, and began sorting through them...

...There was a crib which Maria herself had bought at a second-hand store and in the kitchen an icebox, the old-fashioned kind that you put a cake of ice in when you had the money for the cake of ice...

...39 Spring Street, and now our address is 175 Chrystie Street...

...When we became more acquainted with them we learned that they were legally married, and "in the church" too...

...The gas and electric bill was $38.64 and had to be paid before the "utilities" could be turned on again...

...And because Peter Maurin was a saint, as well as a social thinker, we keep to his program, which we feel is fundamentally sound and holy, and so we have not, in these short twenty-eight years, been able to found any true cooperative farms, though there are a goodly number of houses...

...There is life of a sort on the Bowery, a wild boisterous life, and seamen, longshoremen, restaurant and institution help and all kinds and conditions of workers come to live there for a time...

...ELIZABETH'S HUSBAND was one of the destitute...

...Her baby was born, and died, and she returned from Bellevue Hospital and rested a day or so, and then rejoined him...

...The mother was an exceptional one as far as Puerto Rican mothers go...

...The toilets were in the hall, and the halls smelled of cats and rats and toilets, a most familiar tenement-house odor...

...I wash them off of course," another neighbor says...

...It was the Second World War and its dearth of manpower that finally parted us...

...He had lost his job through a very bad accident to his hand where he worked...

...There are always clothes coming in for children...

...The tailor and his wife and three children lived in the other rooms and there was always work and the gas had never been turned off...

...The poor feel guilty too...

...I frowned over the arithmetic before me...

...I'll catch them and drown them every day and after a while they'll stay away...

...The relief worker would not put her on separate relief, so she came to us...

...Mike is public relations man as well...

...One of our staff furnished her first home after marriage with the bits of furniture which are put out even in the slum areas to be carted away by the garbage disposal men...

...It is a life-time work...

...She was goodlooking in her way, but the day she came in to us she was filthy from sleeping out in basements, hallways, even on fire escapes...

...If you would do this—" "This is what I would do if I were in your place—" Yes, we know the poor and the destitute, from twenty-eight years of close association, and if we did not have so many social theories, if we did not constantly proclaim our philosophical anarchism, and our nonviolent pacifist means by which we sought to attain it, we might have come a little closer to "Fields, Factories and Workshops" and "The Conquest of Bread...

...When we met her she was eighteen, married again to an amiable young fellow who was always losing his job and she had a child by him and another coming...

...I won't eat...

...and Larry makes the stock answer, "Dead fish...

...There is involuntary poverty and voluntary poverty, and we all know voluntary poverty who try to earn a living by writing...

...It was only when a relief worker who had Pilar on her "caseload" came and pushed in the unlocked door of the little one-room apartment, that two infants were found dead in their cribs of starvation and thirst...

...Mike was happy, standing over his garbage cans waiting for the trash collector, surveying his clean-swept sidewalk...

...Or perhaps we did not have the money for lockers then, as we do not have now...

...When he was conscious he was only anxious to become unconscious again as quickly as possible, and when he could find no other companion on the Bowery, no other means to get money for drugs and liquor, he came pounding on Elizabeth's door, demanding that she go out and get a job as dishwasher to take care of him...

...Her household furnishings are certainly not of the best, but recently they moved into a project, the dream of every slum family and there they sleep on mattresses on the floor because the wages of Francisco are not enough for furniture again and they had worn out their old...

...He would not let her stay longer with us, nor could we let him stay because falling asleep with lighted cigarettes he set fire to mattresses and he stole...

...Since then she had paid $40 a month to the avaricious widow and $28 to the landlord, $68 in all, instead of $93...

...But here there was no fire to cook by, and according to the Arabs, "fire is twice bread...

...Another man said the best way was to sit quietly by the rat holes, and as they came out to hit them over the head with a club...

...So she said, 'There's an empty place in the house where some friends of mine moved out, and it is my furniture and if you will buy the furniture you can get the apartment...

...First I speak of overcrowding and yet here was a case where Pilar herself guarded her one-room shelter and neighbors did not come in...

...They usually are loyal to their chil dren...

...Put them in a gunny sack and they filled an ash can...

...One of the seamen staying with us told me this...

...Traps get blood on them and the rats smell the blood and get wise and stay away...

...So she came to live with us for the time...

...They may be of any age...

...How can such things be...

...She came to us years ago because she could not live with her father who was on relief, because when he got his check he drank and tried to attack her...

...To make the rich poor and the poor holy" (that is, whole men) that is what the late Eric Gill, artist-philosopher, said should be our aim...

...Evidently no one on the ward spoke Spanish and she could not make herself understood and the next few days were an utter horror for her, leading only to more hysteria...

...Or perhaps the poor taken in by the poor, as between the two of them they were able to raise some food to feed the hungry mouths...

...It was a bright sunny day in May and across the street in the little Spring Street playground, old men sat at chess boards painted on the tables and the children ran screaming around at their games which always involved jumping, dancing and whirling...

...Ah, the pain, the anguish, the sin and despair, the remorse, at not living as one knows one should live, as a human being should live, fully and abundantly...

...They stay with us for months and years sometimes and then, finally, they get jobs, or they go back to school or they get married, or rejoin their marriage partners...

...I didn't look into the bedrooms, the two of them, but the older boy slept in one and another family had the other...

...No I want a cage," Mike insisted...

...My husband got sick in December and had to stay home from work, so then the neighbor told us we could pay ten dollars a week to her and the rent, $28, to the 'super,' so that it what we have been doing...

...The officers' arrival meant terror for Pilar who was dragged hysterical into a police car and taken away to a psychiatric ward at Bellevue where her behavior was such that she was given heavy sedation...

...Pilar But another story of utter horror and tragedy gives some indication of the destitution of a new people like the Puerto Ricans coming into the city and living on starvation wages and in noisy slums...

...Here are a few stories of some of the people we have encountered in New York who have lived with us for long periods so that they became part of our community...

...There are schools for the children, and free medical care for the family, and all the little comforts and luxuries which spill over in a big city...

...In our front building on Mott Street a Iittle child had once pulled a pot of boiling soup off the stove and over herself and no one but her family had heard her screams what with the noise of the slums...

...They were both very much afraid...

...His mother took him in with his one child and Maria was sleeping in the hallway, pregnant as she was, because their house too was overcrowded...

...Her child was taken from her and put into a foster home since she would not give it up or put it out for adoption...

...She was eight months pregnant and the two of them felt that some shelter was needed now...

...Once when he was F44'1 staying at Peter Maurin Farm with us on Staten Island he refused to come in to dinner at noon...

...Before our Chrystie Street house was torn down we could look into the windows of the tenement which was to one side of us and see the Puerto Rican family which shared its home with others, bedding down on the floor in each of the three rooms...

...In all the empty, boarded-up houses on the lower East Side there were heaps of rags in corners, old mattresses dragged in, evidences of humans living like animals, like rats, in these old tenements...

...He had killed thirteen one night...

...Everything is expected of them...

...Later when Bob Steed and Kerran Dugan and other members of the Catholic Worker staff were looking for a house to which we could move after notice had been served on us by the city because they wanted to put a subway under our house and were demolishing the entire block around us, we found many evidences of such families as Elizabeth and John...

...You buy for one, and you have to buy for all...

...I have seen the scars of her injuries...

...Here are the receipts for the statue of the Blessed Mother—you pay every week until you pay the thirteen dollars and thirty-four cents and it takes twenty-five weeks to pay...

...They were with us some years ago, and I do not feel that I am violating their privacy by writing in this way...

...John used to get down on his knees at night and pray...

...There is always someone in the office who chips in to help if we are short...

...She was forty before she finally left us and was still going to school...

...John Cort, at present an organizer for the Newspaper Guild in Boston, had just come to us from Harvard hoping to become more acquainted with the field of labor, and found himself instead helping as he said to run "a flophouse...

...She was afraid someone would steal her clothes so she wore them all the time...

...What is wrong with them that they cannot get out of the morass, they wonder...

...It is very expensive to be poor," a friend says...

...It has been dinned into them so often that here we have a land of opportunity, of equality, of abun dance...

...She was allowed to bring it home with her but her mother put her out— the house was already too crowded...

...The poor can live in such places and have some measure of comfort but the destitute are on every side, dogged by ill health, unemployment, accident and hunger...

...So they had just as soon rent to Puerto Ricans...

...Meanwhile we are free and freedom is an inestimable treasure...

...She was not alone, there was a tall gaunt man with a grey face with her...

...Just yesterday Italian Mike told me that rats were jumping on his shoulders at night as he slept...

...He had brought in some alley cats but he wanted rat cages...

...So we just had to move...

...If the children had wailed, their voices were feeble and could not be heard above the din of traffic and radio and television...

...It looked wonderful...

...Each apartment is supposed to be for $28 a month and there are four apartments on a floor and seven floors walk-up...

...When we finally got this mess straightened out for them, Maria's husband's job sufficed to keep them...

...Every Friday he calls out to Larry the cook, "What kind of fish...

...There was often screaming and fighting and sobbing and crying in these rooms...

...There was an Italian woman living in the building and she told me about this place when I was over at Eldridge Street in a two-room place and we were desperate, the water frozen in the pipes and the toilet stopped up and the gas and electric turned off...

...When I was in jail for refusing to take shelter in the April 1959 fifth Civil Defense Drill, there was a little Negro girl in the bed opposite me who claimed that the only place she could be alone was in the toilet...

...We might as well clarify this notion of the destitute and the poor...

...But Elizabeth was too far gone to work...

...You never see them reading a book or a newspaper as they wait on the breadline, or listening to music, or playing with an alley cat as they sit on a curb in the sun, or laughing, or telling stories...

...Over a thousand dollars for junk, and nothing left of it by the time it was paid for...

...She went to make a telephone call at a neighboring tavern to find out if her two older children had arrived at the agency which was to take them to camp for a few weeks...

...But Maria was too dark...

...Mike fetches the bread each day from Poppilardo's bakery, ten dollars' worth, and on Friday gets the free swordfish tails which a big wholesale house at the Fulton Fish Market saves for us...

...She jumped out of the window of the rooming house and was brought to the hospital with broken legs which kept her there for a long while...

...He never got compensation, nor his job back...

...They have not been so long in this condition but that they see some way out...

...which never fails to get a burst of laughter, and from me too...

...Maria Then there is Maria, a beautiful young Puerto Rican...

...Our Mike had done just such work and had supported his father and sisters until his father had died and his sisters had married...

...The relief people had no remedy for this...

...I did no work today," he said...

...He also talked constantly on "the art of human contacts," and man's freedom which must impel him, rather than the use of force...

...I LIKE TO INTERPOLATE the little sketch of Mike, one of the poor, possessing nothing, with no salary, just the clothes on his back, a bed in a rat-ridden tenement, yet one of our best workers and in general a happy man, because he loves his work, he loves to be part of a community, serving others and working for the common good...

...John, the farmer, had taken away his hoe that morning and had done the cultivating himself...

...That had been a generous reduction indeed...

...The last three houses of Hospitality have been within two blocks of the Bowery so the men and women we see have reached what is considered the lowest depths of degradation...

...There are still coal and ice men in cellars all over the east side, carrying heavy loads of ice and coal up steep tenement-house steps...

...He was the first addict I had ever encountered, and as far as I knew what he was taking were what they called on the Bowery "goof balls...

...The destitute on the other hand have nothing—physically, intellectually, spiritually...

...After the baby was born her husband found a job and an apartment...

...Celia and Mike We were talking about Celia the other night and how enormously she ate at table, and how she used to take away some crusts of bread and put them wrapped up, under her pillow at night...

...Water had been shut off, of course...

...Her screams brought the police, who caught the thief and from then on they cared for the purse, honestly, until she spent the money for the tombstone...

...Her father meanwhile had died and she was saving her money, she said, to buy him a tombstone...

...But the destitute are those who are always drunk or drug-ridden, who are always lying in gutters and in doorways, who are finally picked up by the morgue wagon early in the morning, who are afflicted mentally, who stare stonily around them, or rush about with anguished faces, and who suffer the torments of hell...

...Ti was summer...

...TRUE ENOUGH, there were the evidences of man's inhumanity to man, the exploitation of the poor by the poor...

...We did not have accommodations for married couples so we took Elizabeth into the rear house at Mott Street and put her husband in the front house into the ten-bed dormitory on the top floor...

...She went to night school and got good grades...

...And there was still a year and three months to pay on it...

...Landan Brothers, down on Chambers Street...

...on 223 Chrystie Street...

...That back bedroom was just the kind of place I had lived in when I went to work for the New York Call at the time of World War I. I paid five dollars a month, and I had a phonograph on which I had paid a dollar down and a dollar a month, and the bed was warm with a sheet-covered featherbed, and there was a good smell of cooking from the kitchen...