However light-hearted a people, and however worthy of praise the entertainment that brings a jolly, wholesome laugh, let us hope that in the near future the Negro will find a more complete expression for his musical and histrionic gifts. Some actor of commanding talent, whose claims cannot be ignored, may reveal the larger life of the race. The nineteenth century knew a great Negro actor, Ira Aldridge, a _protege_ and disciple of Edmund Kean. He played Oth.e.l.lo to Kean"s Iago, and in the forties toured Europe with his own company, receiving high honors in Berlin and St. Petersburg.[7] A dark-skinned African, of immense power, physically and emotionally, he made Desdemona cry out in real fear, and caused Ba.s.sanio instinctively to shrink as he demanded his pound of flesh. Today"s actor must be more subtle in his attack, but it may be given to him to reveal the thoughts at the back of the black man"s mind.
The genius of Zangwill gave us the picture of the children of the Ghetto; perhaps from the theatre"s seat the American will first understand the despised black race.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] On West 133d Street two former Hampton students have a prosperous little tailor and upholstering shop.
[2] Those interested in the Negro in business should look for an intensive study, shortly to be published, on the wage-earners and business enterprises among Negroes in New York. It is ent.i.tled "The Negro at Work in New York City," and has been made by George E. Haynes, under the direction of the Bureau of Social Research of the New York School of Philanthropy.
[3] Since going to press the new and very beautiful building of St.
Philips" Episcopal Church, on W. 134th Street, has been opened. This is a fine example of English Gothic and its architects are two young colored men, one of whom was for years in the office of a white firm.
[4] Mary Kingsley has some interesting generalizations on this point.
She speaks of the African mind approaching all things from a spiritual point of view while the English mind approaches them from a material point of view, and of "the high perception of justice you will find in the African, combined with the inability to think out a pulley or a lever except under white tuition."--_West African Studies_, p. 330.
[5] Lincoln Hospital in New York, while receiving white and colored patients, was especially designed to help the colored race. It has a training school for colored nurses, but neither accepts colored medical graduates as interns, nor allows colored doctors upon its staff. This is one of many cases in which the good white people of the city are glad to a.s.sist the poor and ailing Negro, but are unwilling to help the strong and ambitious colored man to full opportunity.
[6] See H. J. Wilson, "The Negro and Music," _Outlook_, Dec. 1, 1906.
[7] William J. Simmons"s "Men of Mark."
CHAPTER VI
THE COLORED WOMAN AS A BREAD WINNER
The life of the Negro woman of New York, if she belong to the laboring cla.s.s, differs in some important respects from the life of the white laboring woman. Generalizations on so comprehensive a subject must, of course, meet with many exceptions, but the observing visitor, familiar with white and colored neighborhoods, quickly notes marked contrasts between the two, contrasts largely the result of different occupational opportunities. These pertain both to the married woman and the unmarried working girl.
The generality of white women in New York, wives of laboring men, infrequently engage in gainful occupations. In the early years of married life the wife relies on her husband"s wage for support, and within her tiny tenement-flat bears and rears her children and performs her household duties--the sewing, cooking, washing, and ironing, and the daily righting of the contracted rooms. She is a conscientious wife and mother, and rarely, either by night or by day, journeys far from her own home. When unemployment visits the family wage earner, she turns to laundry work and day"s cleaning for money to meet the rent and to supply the household with scanty meals; but as soon as her husband resumes work she returns to her narrow round of domestic duties.
After a score of these monotonous years more prosperous times come to the housewife. Every morning two or three children go out to work, and their wages make heavier the family purse. Son and daughter, having entered factory or store, bring home their pay envelopes unbroken on Sat.u.r.day nights, and the augmentation of the father"s wage gives the mother an income to administer. After the young people"s wants in clothing and entertainment have been in part supplied, it becomes possible to buy new furniture on the instalment plan, to hire a piano, even to move into a better neighborhood. The earnings of a number of children, supplementing the wage of the head of the family, make life more tolerable for all.
These days, however, do not last long. Sons and daughters marry and a.s.sume new responsibilities; the husband, his best strength gone, finds unemployment increasing; and since saving, except for wasteful industrial insurance, has seemed impossible without sacrificing the decencies and pleasures of the children, the end of the woman"s married life is likely to be hard and comfortless.
This rough description may fairly be taken to represent the life of the average New York white woman of the laboring cla.s.s. It is not, however, the life of the average colored woman. With her, self-sustaining work usually begins at fifteen, and by no means ceases with her entrance upon marriage, which only entails new financial burdens. The wage of the husband, as we have seen, is usually insufficient to support a family, save in extreme penury, and the wife accepts the necessity of supplementing the husband"s income. This she accomplishes by taking in washing or by entering a private family to do housework. Sometimes she is away from her tenement nearly every day in the week; again the bulk of her earnings comes from home industry. Her day holds more diversity than that of her white neighbor; she meets more people, becomes familiar with the ways of the well-to-do,--their household decorations, their dress, their refinements of manner; but she has but few hours to give to her children. With her husband she is ready to be friend and helpmate; but should he turn out a bad bargain, she has no fear of leaving him, since her marital relations are not welded by economic dependence. An industrious, competent woman, she works and spends, and in her scant hours of leisure takes pride in keeping her children well-dressed and clean.
At the second period of her married life, when her boys and girls, few in number if she be a New Yorker, begin to engage in self-supporting work, her condition shows less improvement than that of the white woman of her cla.s.s. Sometimes her children hand her their whole wage, far oftener they bring her only such part as they choose to spare. The strict accounting of the minor to the parent, usual among Northerners in the past, and today common among the immigrant cla.s.s, is not a part of the Negro"s training. Rather, as the race has attained freedom it has copied the indulgent att.i.tude of the once familiar "master," and regrets that its offspring must enter upon any work. Children with this tradition about them use the money they earn largely for the gratification of their vanity, not for the lessening of their mother"s tasks. But a more potent factor than lack of discipline keeps the mother from being the administrator of the family"s joint earnings. White boys and girls in New York enter work that makes it possible and advantageous for them to dwell at home; Negroes must go out to service, accept long and irregular hours in hotel or apartment, travel for days on boat or train. The family home is infrequently available to them, and money given in to it brings small return. Under these circ.u.mstances it is not strange if the mother must continue her round of washing and scrubbing.
The last years of life of the Negro woman, probably a little more than the last years of the white, are likely to bring happiness. With a mother at work a grandmother becomes an important factor, and elderly colored women are often seen bringing up little children or helping in the laundry--that great colored home industry. Accustomed all their lives to hard labor, it is easy for them to find work that shall repay their support, and in their children"s households they are treated with respect and consideration.
The contrast in the lives of the colored and white married women is not more strongly marked than the contrast in the lives of their unmarried daughters and sisters. Unable to enter any pursuit except housework, the unskilled colored girl goes out to service or helps at home with the laundry or sewing. Factory and store are closed to her, and rarely can she take a place among other working girls. Her hours are the long, irregular hours of domestic service. She brings no pay envelope home to her mother, the two then carefully discussing how much belongs rightfully for board, and how much may go for the new coat or dress, but takes the eighteen or twenty dollars given her at the end of the month, and quite by herself determines all her expenditures. Far oftener than any cla.s.s of white girls in the city she lives away from the parental home.
These are some of the differences found by the observer who looks into the Negro and the white tenement. They need not, however, rest alone upon any observer"s testimony. We have in the census abundant statistics for their verification. Scattered among the volumes on Population, Occupations, and Women at Work are many facts concerning Negro women workers of New York, all of them confirmatory of the description just given. We may note the most important.
In 1900, whereas 4.2 per cent of the white married women in New York were engaged in gainful occupations, 31.4 per cent of the Negro married women were earning their living, over seven times as many in proportion as the whites.[1]
Again, in the total population of New York"s women workers, 80 per cent were single, 10 per cent married, and 10 per cent widowed and divorced; while among the Negroes, the single women were only 53 per cent, the married 25 per cent, and the widowed 22.[2]
Statistics of the age period at which women are at work, show the Negro"s long continuing wage-earning activity. Between sixteen and twenty is a busy time for the women of both races. Among the whites 59 per cent are in gainful occupations, among the Negroes 66 per cent. But as the girl arrives at the period when she is likely to marry, the per cent of workers among the whites drops rapidly, until for white women, forty-five and over, it is 13.5, about one in seven. With the colored, among the women forty-five years of age and over, 53 per cent, more than half, still engage in gainful toil.[3]
Family life can be studied in the census table. While 59 per cent of the unmarried white girls at work live at home, this is found to be true of but 25 per cent of the colored girls; that is, 75 per cent, three-quarters of all the colored unmarried working women, live with their employers or board.[4]
The census volume on occupations reveals at once the narrow range of the New York colored woman"s working life. Personal and domestic service absorbs 90 per cent of her numbers against 40 per cent among the white.
But before considering more fully the colored girl at work, we need to notice another statistical fact, the preponderance in the city of Negro women over Negro men.
Like the foreigner, the youth of the Negro race comes first to the city to seek a livelihood. The colored population shows 41 per cent of its number between the ages of 20 and 35. But unlike the foreigner, the Negro women find larger opportunity and come in greater numbers than the men. Their range of work is narrow, but within it they can command double the wages they receive at home, and if they are possessed of average ability, they are seldom long out of work. With the immense growth of wealth in New York the demand for servants continually increases, and finding little response from the white native born population, many mistresses receive readily the services of the English-speaking southern and West Indian blacks. So the boats from Charleston and Norfolk and the British West Indies bring scores and hundreds of Negro women from country districts, from cities where they have spent a short time at service, girls with and girls without experience, all seeking better wages in a new land.
Mr. Kelly Miller was the first to call attention to the presence in American cities of surplus Negro women.[5] The phenomenon is not peculiar to New York. Baltimore, Washington, New Orleans, all show the same condition. In Atlanta the women number 143 to every hundred colored men. New York shows 123 to every masculine one hundred. These surplus women account in part for the number of Negro women workers in New York not living at home. Some are with their employers, but others lodge in the already crowded tenements, for the southern servant, unaccustomed to spending the night at her employer"s, in New York also, frequently arranges to leave her mistress when her work is done. In their hours of leisure the surplus women are known to play havoc with their neighbors"
sons, even with their neighbors" husbands, for since lack of men makes marriage impossible for about a fifth of New York"s colored girls, social disorder results. Surplus Negro women, able to secure work, support idle, able-bodied Negro men. The lounger at the street corner, the dandy in the parlor thrumming on his banjo, means a Malindy of the hour at the kitchen washboard. In a town in Germany, where men were sadly scarce, I was told that a servant girl paid as high as a mark to a soldier to walk with her in the Hofgarten on a Sunday afternoon.
Colored men in New York command their "mark," and girls are found who keep them in polished boots, fashionable coats, and well-creased trousers. Could the Negro country boy be as certain as his sister of lucrative employment in New York, or could he oftener persuade her to remain with him on the farm, he would better city civilization. But the demand for servants increases, and the colored girl continues to be attracted to the city where she can earn and spend.
The table on the following page shows in condensed form the occupations of the Negro women in New York. As we see, the Negro women number forty-four in every thousand women workers.
FEMALES TEN YEARS OF AGE AND OVER, ENGAGED IN GAINFUL OCCUPATIONS IN NEW YORK
============================================================ | | | Number to | Total | Negro | every 1000 | | | workers ----------------------------+---------+--------+------------ Professional service | 22,422 | 281 | 12 | | | Domestic and personal | | | service | 146,722 | 14,586 | 100 Laundresses | 16,102 | 3,224 | 200 Servants and waitresses | 103,963 | 10,297 | 99 All others | 24,657 | 1,065 | 43 | | | Trade and transportation | 65,318 | 106 | Between one | | | and two Manufacturing and | | | mechanical pursuits | 132,535 | 1,138 | 7 Dressmakers | 37,514 | 813 | 22 Seamstresses | 18,108 | 249 | 14 All others | 76,913 | 76 | 1 | | | Total including some | | | occupations not specified | 367,437 | 16,114 | 44 ============================================================
Federal Census 1900: Occupations, Table 43, p. 638
Ninety per cent of all the Negro women workers of New York are in domestic and personal service. This includes a variety of positions.
Some Negro girls work in stores, dusting stock, taking charge of cloak or toilet rooms, scrubbing floors. Their hours are regular, but the pay, five or six, or very occasionally eight dollars a week, means a scanty livelihood without hope of advancement. The position of maid in a theatre where perquisites are larger is prized, and a new and pleasant place is that of a maid on a limited train. But the bulk of the girls are servants in boarding-houses, or are with private families as nurses, waitresses, cooks, laundresses, maids-of-all-work, earning from sixteen and eighteen to twenty-five and even thirty dollars a month.
Occasionally a very skilful cook can command as high a monthly wage as fifty dollars.
The colored girl is frequently found engaged at general housework in a small apartment. Her desire to return to her lodging at night makes her popular with families living in contracted s.p.a.ce. With the conveniences of a New York flat, dumb-waiter, clothes-dryer, gas, and electricity, general housework is not severe. Work begins early, seven at the latest, and lasts until the dinner is cleared away, at half-past eight or nine.
Released then from further tasks, the young girl goes to her tiny inner tenement room, dons a fresh dress, and then, as chance or her training determines, walks the streets, goes to the theatre, or attends the cla.s.s meeting at her church. Entertainments among the Negroes are rarely under way until ten o"clock, and short hours of sleep in ill-ventilated rooms soon weaken the vitality of the new-comer. Housework under these conditions does not create much ambition; the mistress moves, flitting, in New York fashion, from one flat to another, and the girl also flits among employers, changing with the whim of the moment.
Few subjects present so fascinating a field for discussion as domestic service, and the housewife of today enters into it with energy, sometimes decrying the modern working girl, again planning household economics that shall lure her from factory or shop. The only point we need to consider now is the dissatisfaction that results when 64 per cent of the women of a race are forced by circ.u.mstances into one occupation. Those with native ability along this line succeed and make others and themselves happy. The faithful, patient, loyal Negro servant is well-known, the black mammy has pa.s.sed into American literature, but not every colored woman can wisely be given this position. Some of the Negro girls who take up housework in New York are capable of more intelligent labor, and chafe under their limitations; others have not the ability to do good housework; for domestic service requires more mental capacity than is demanded in many factories. In short, a great many colored girls in New York are round pegs in square holes, and the community is the loser by it.
Among these round pegs are girls who, determining no longer to drudge in lonely kitchens, contrive, as we shall see later, to find positions at other more attractive reputable work. Others, deciding in favor of material betterment at whatever cost, lower their moral standard and secure easier and more remunerative jobs. A well-paying place, with short hours and high tips, at once offers itself to the colored girl who is willing to work for a woman of the demi-monde. In the sporting house also she is preferred as a servant, her dark complexion separating her from other inmates. In 1858, Sanger wrote in his "History of Prost.i.tution," "The servants (in these houses) are almost always colored women. Their wages are liberal, their perquisites considerable, and their work light." Untrained herself, bereft of home influence, with an ancestry that sometimes cries out her parent"s weakness in the contour and color of her face, the Negro girl in New York, more even than the foreign immigrant, is subject to degrading temptation. The good people, who are often so exacting, want her for her willingness to work long hours at a lower wage than the white; and the bad people, who are often so carelessly kind, offer her light labor and generous pay. It is small wonder that she sometimes chooses the latter.
Not all the colored girls who work in questionable places and with questionable people take the jobs from choice; some are sent without knowing the character of the house they enter. A few years ago an agitation was started for the protection of helpless Negro immigrants who had fallen into the hands of unscrupulous employment agencies. A system existed, and still exists, by which employment agencies were able to advance the travelling expenses of southern girls, who on their arrival in New York were held in debt until the cost of the journey had been many times repaid. Helpless in the power of the agent, the new-comer was forced to work where he wished. Under the city"s department of licenses some of the more unscrupulous of these agencies have been closed, and philanthropy has placed a visitor at the docks to give aid and advice to unprotected girls. But the danger is by no means over. Those familiar with the subject a.s.sert that there is a proportionately larger black slave than white slave traffic.
There is a gainful occupation for women, black and white, too important to be left unnoticed. The census does not tabulate it. The best people strive to ignore it, and carefully sheltered girls grow up unconscious of its existence. But the employment agent understands its commercial value, and little children in the red light neighborhood are as familiar with it as with the vending of peanuts on the street. To the poor it is always an open door affording at least a temporary respite from dispossession and starvation. How many of the colored turn to it, we do not know--certainly not a few. Some gain from it a meagre livelihood, but others, for a time at least, achieve comfort and even luxury.
Among the round pegs that the square holes so uncomfortably chafe are colored girls of intelligence and charm who deliberately join the anti-social cla.s.s. Probably a few in any case would lead this life, but the history of many shows an unsuccessful struggle for congenial work, ending with a choice of material comfort however high the moral cost. In One Hundred and Thirty-fourth and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Streets are apartments where such girls live, two or three together, surrounded by comforts that their respectable neighbors who go out to cook, wash, and iron may fruitlessly long for all their lives. A colored philanthropic worker, stopping by chance at the door of one of these places, saw an old college friend. "How can you do it!" she cried as she recognized the life the girl was leading, "How can you do it! I would rather kill myself scrubbing!" "There is the difference between us,"
came the answer, "I am not willing to die, and I cannot and will not scrub."
It is pleasant and encouraging to turn from colored women who have given up the struggle, to ambitious, successful workers. Some among these are in the domestic service group and enjoy with heartiness their tasks as nurse-maid or cook. "This is my piano day," an expert colored washerwoman says of a Monday morning. Among the domestic service workers, as cla.s.sified by the census, is the trained nurse, filling an increasingly important position in New York. In 1909, Lincoln Hospital graduated twenty-one colored nurses, some of whom remain in New York to do excellent work.
In the professions, with the women as with the men, the first place numerically is occupied by performers upon the stage. So much has been said of the Negro as an actor that there is little to add. A rather better cla.s.s of colored than of white women join musical comedy chorus troupes, for fifteen or eighteen dollars a week that will attract a Negro to the stage can be made by a white girl in a dozen other ways.
Lightness of color seems a requisite for a stage position, unless a dark skin is offset by very great ability, as in the case of Aida Walker, one of the most graceful and charming women in musical comedy.
No record is kept of the number of colored teachers in the city"s public schools, but each year Negro graduates from the normal college secure positions. These are found from the kindergarten through the primary and up to the highest grammar grade. The colored girl with intellectual ability, particularly if she comes of an old New York family, is apt to turn to teaching. Her novitiate is long, but a permanent certificate secured, she is sure of a good salary, increasing with her years of service, and ending in a pension. This path of security has perhaps tended to keep New York colored girls from going into other lines of work. I have not yet found one who has graduated from a university.
Pratt Inst.i.tute and the Teachers" College have colored normal students, but they are usually from the South or West, not New Yorkers born.