OCR Text |
Show OUR ITALIANS. Among all the foreign people who have emigrated to the United States, the Italians, with the sole exception of the Chinese, have kept closer and more exclusively to their own national habits and to enter into the localities they have almost entirely peopled seems more like stumbling among the narrow streets of Genoa than the midst of New York city. All those tenement houses lying on Baxter, Worth, Crosby, Mott and Mulberry streets and Five Points are inhabited chiefly by Italians, and few people who do not visit these places could imagine that a limited space within our midst could seem so entirely another country in all the chief characteristics, chiefest among them being the utter and entire disregard for cleanliness, so far surpassing the dirtiest of the lowest tenement houses where the other nationalities congregate. It has always been a sort of reproach in America to be called an Italian, and the reason is found in the class of people who come here. Of all the male emigrants in America of that nation, there are but few who did not leave their country out of pure laziness, expecting to pick up gold in the very streets here, a fiction that still exists in nearly all parts of Europe among the ignorant, and because they objected to being drafted into the army, or they came here to escape the consequences of some crime. In Genoa, Naples, Florence, Messina and Palermo, as well as all the interior cities and the country, a strong man might work a whole day with all his strength and earn but about twenty cents per day, whereas here they can earn six or seven times that amount and not work so hard. The Italian nature is one of superlative laziness, and not even the greed of money can make them love to work. With them, in their own countries, begging is a trade, and would be here were it permitted, and they feel themselves defrauded of a birth-right when not allowed to beg. In a previous article on tenement life mention was made of the fact that the Italians will not herd with people of other nations, if it can be helped, but the writer failed to mention that they also object most strenuously against any stranger making any inquiries about their way of living, so that it has not been easy to get an insight into their peculiar home life nor their different industries, but still, enough was discovered to say that the Italians in America are industrious after their own fashion and the trades or callings they mostly adopt are the sale of fruit on street corners and in baskets, barbering, boot-blacking, selling toy balloons and other small wares, rag-picking and traveling with hand organs and harps and other musical instruments. The musical branch of their industry is, without doubt, the hardest work they do, for in addition to walking miles and carrying the heavy instruments they must practice at night in their homes, if such they may be called. That is to say, those who play on the harps and violins. Some of them play really very well, and in the summer season frequently make long trips. The writer of this saw three young fellows in Huntsville, Alabama, who had tramped all the way there with a harp and violins. The musical line suits them better probably, for they are all born musicians, loving the music so well that perhaps even the doleful strains of a broken-down hand organ have no terrors for them. To visit the tenements where they congregate at night is to hear a confusion of opera and "Captain Jinks," "No One to Love Me," the "Marseillaise," and other morceaux, all mingling in one deafening medley. How they can each keep track of their own music is marvelous. Formerly little girls and boys went around also with accordeons [accordions], violins and tambourines, but there is less of that now. The organs cost from twenty dollars upward to one hundred. Monkeys seem in the musicians' houses to thrive and prosper like the children. It is a work of patient kindness to teach them the tricks that they learn for the owners' profit. Some of them are wonderfully intelligent and docile, but the majority are more mischievous than anything. The average earnings of a man and woman and baby, or monkey, with an organ per day, is about two and a-half dollars. Very few of the Italians care to learn regular trades. It involves too much labor. The men with their fruit-stands clear generally from two to ten dollars a day, according to position. Peddlers make about two to three. They have a better chance than the men with stands, as they can follow trade and do not have to wait for it. One man who sells popcorn candy at the Battery sometimes makes eight and ten dollars per day with his basket. The rag-pickers make still more, taking the year around, and sometimes they find very valuable articles. They will pick up anything on earth, it seems, except the very cobblestones, and somehow seem to turn everything into money. They spend no money on excursions nor fine clothes, like the inhabitants of other countries, and the greatest extravagance they ever exhibit is in the little altars and religious prints that the poorest of them have. The women and children are like birds of prey, ‘pouncing [pouncing] on every bit of coal or splinter of wood in the streets, or rag or nail. In fact, everything is fish for their nets. They do not seem to search work from outside as do the Irish and colored poor, but manage to live and seem to do nothing beyond going about the streets searching. West, some of the Italians work on farms, and in California, where there are a great many, they do a large business, catching fish, raising and peddling fruit and vegetables. They are several grades above those denizens of tenement holes in every sense, and some are quite rich, and life seems to mean something more than squalor and filth. It is safe to say that there is not one Italian who has been here a year but has money in some savings bank or other, and they will actually almost starve themselves to add to it day by day. They do not care what they eat, nor how little, so that they may save their money. In this country of abundance one would think they would pay more attention to the demands of appetite, but a scrap of bread and a little stale fruit is enough for them. On fete? Days they will indulge in macaroni, and, by the way that dish is prepared, you can tell from what part of Italy the party hails. Genoese make a dry gravy with much onion or garlic in it, and the Neapolitans, instead of that highly seasoned and greasy dish, prepare theirs so that it is pleasing to all, that is if one does not see it cooked. The macaroni is boiled in beef stock till tender and then grated cheese is heaped on it, and this again covered with a tomato sauce, making a delicious and nourishing dish. The Sicilians prepare it still differently, and so on. In Italy, that and bread and cheese and fruit are the staple articles of food, but here they bay up the leavings of the markets and eat almost anything. The dirt in these Italian dens, for they are little else, is so much beyond description that it is useless to try to describe it. The children seem to revel in it and the women to accept it as a normal condition, and never try to get clean. If one had never been in Italy and seem the better class of Italian women, one might believe that all the stories of dark-eyed beauties were false, for it is hard to think it possible when one might look in vain in all the Italian colony for that fabled beauty. Here and there, though, you will see a child's face like one of Raphael's angels; but the lives of abandon and privation, dirt and impure air, soon destroy any traces of youthful freshness. The rising generation will be a grade in advance of their parents, and so on, until at last it is to be hoped they will become useful and valuable citizens. There is much that is good in the Italian character. In their loves, if jealous, they are at least sincere, but they are neither domestic nor faithful to domestic obligations. They are very suspicious, being forced into that by dealings with sharpers of all grades; but once gain their confidence and you have it without limit. They are sober, and it is rare to find a drunkard; but this comes more from avarice than principle. Love of money is the incentive to the most of their crimes; jealousy next. Revenge for injuries is strong. Love for children or human consideration for women is something they seem to have no idea of. Money is their all, and the little boys who are bookt-blacks [boot-blacks] or who work in any way are looked upon only as a means of gain. The women love their children devotedly. Very few, comparatively, of the women here, mothers of families too, are really married, the lower class of Italians seeming very lax about those things. They have a superstitious reverence for the pieces and bits of the "true cross," and attribute almost all the cures in sickness to their virtue. The Italians seem to realize that their nation is in bad order here, and they will try to pass themselves off as French if possible. They are rarely thieves, however, and very few will steal. Whenever they do it is to make a big haul. They cannot be called thrifty as a colony here, because there is none of that cleanliness that is an accompaniment of thrift, but they are at least independent, or would be if they did not love laziness so well that they prefer to beg than to work [.] In tenement-house life they will live in a more crowded state than will even the lowest Irish, and are scarcely equalled [equaled] by the Chinese or negroes, and some of the houses at night have the floors literally packed with a sweltering mass of humanity. They will get along with one-tenth the furniture that would do other nations, and as to washtubs, etc., they never seem to need them. The women of the Italian colony always retain their marks of nationality even more pronounced than the men, and they dress their babies in the old country manner. When a child is born in one of these miserably crowded holes of rooms, all the quaint ceremonies in usage among the ignorant of their own country are gone through here, and the child christened as soon as possible with the ever present godfather and mother. These babies, if girls, are thought little of. If boys, they are put into pants when about six months old. It does not matter what kind of material. The women seldom were [wear] bonnets, and seem to feel no effects of heat. They put earrings into the little girl baby's ears at six months. They believe in the evil eye, and always have a charm against it over the door. They are all Catholics, and very devout when in church. The men meddle not at all in politics, and although they rarely return to their own country until too old to be drafted in the army, seldom become citizens here. Sometimes they do so to protect themselves from draft and then go home. They seem to attach themselves to places, and it is said that they rarely move, and the same room they take on arriving, or fraction of a room, they retain sometimes for years. A short time since a house was about falling in Ross street and the police had all they could do to force the families to vacate the premises. They care, however, but little for the adornment of the place they call home. In over forty of these tenement houses, inhabited exclusively by the Italians, there was not one even that had a sign of carpet in it. The women usually have necklace or earrings of some value that has been an heirloom, but beyond this there is not one atom of grace or beauty about these homes, nothing but filth and apparent destitution and utter neglect of all the decencies of life. There must be in America from statistical information about 100,000 Italians, of which some 5,000 or 10,000 live in New York alone. These are almost without exception the very lowest scum of all their countries in point of ignorance and character, and yet in spite of that, the worst of them we can say as a class is, that they are beyond measure dirty, ignorant and avaricious, and we are forced to admit that they generally are law-abiding and tranquil people. - N.Y. Mail |