But each for the joy of working,
And each in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as she sees it
For the God of things as they are.
As the people came in and poured their stories out to the woman in black, a young man stood and took notes behind them. When a client was finished telling his or her story, Grace would, with a flush of animation, grasp their hands to give them a feeling of hope. The next person was then beckoned in with a welcoming smile. Today, though, a small man and his associates were seated in Grace’s office. She was not smiling.
“You know,” said Grace, “I should not hesitate to send any of you men to jail if you don’t do what is right.” The man, a German, was an East Side employment bureau proprietor involved in crooked practices. Grace paused, letting her words sink in.
“But,” she continued. “if you will do the best you can and work on the level, I will do everything in my power to help you.” That was her standing promise to all.
Grace left the Legal Aid Society because she felt that she could do better on her own. So on her own dime, she opened the People’s Law Firm. Her mission was to help the city’s poor immigrants with their legal problems. Her main goal was to avoid taking cases to court. Instead, she worked toward private settlements. It was less expensive for her clients, avoided endless hours in court, and helped speed up matters when a client couldn’t speak English well. Grace had seen countless of examples of how language barriers hindered the judicial process at the Legal Aid Society and seemed assured of her solution. Grace wasn’t so sure that the poor needed a lawyer so much as they needed someone to plainly interpret the law for them. The convoluted phrasing and mouth-twisting Latin words spoken by lawyers were hard enough even for English speakers to understand.
As new waves of people were sifted into New York’s sundry neighborhoods, the city was full of new legal problems, which were caused by everything from wicked employers to the slumlords running the city’s many stylike tenements. The location of the People’s Law Firm in the center of lower New York was ideal. To the east were the Hungarians; to the west, the Austrian and Russian Jews. There were Italians, Armenians, and sometimes even a Greek or an Egyptian in Grace’s sitting room. She caught her cases from walkins or through local groups such as the New York Charity Organization Society, which sent new people to her almost every day. Her settlement fees were sometimes the whole sum of one dollar, with the time of payments made to suit the condition of the client. If people were desperate and had no money, Grace would reassure them that it would be fine. She was affectionately known as the “Portia of the East Side.” Among the Italians, her card announced her as “Prezzi Moderati per Cliente di Modeste Condizioni.” Near the Williamsburg Bridge, her cards were in Yiddish. Her most popular nicknames however, were “sister” and “mother.”
The lines outside the People’s Law Firm began to stretch so long that an Upper West Side branch was soon opened at 216 West Twenty-third Street, followed by a Lower East Side location at 156 Leonard Street in Little Italy. Soon, the little headquarters itself had to be moved to 10 Bible House, across from Cooper Union, the free institution of higher education whose great hall was still filled with the invisible words of presidents, including the echo of Lincoln himself.
On Monday evenings, Grace joined the heads of the East Side branch to hear the more complicated cases. In her little office after hours or sometimes on the warm front steps in the summertime, unofficial courts were convened where both parties would plead their case. Grace, her face alive with sympathy and interest, would listen carefully. Afterward, she would confer with her lawyers, and they would try to work out a fair settlement. This was the outcome Grace always strived for, but, despite all her efforts, there were some cases that defied that hope. This was New York, after all.
One such case involved a young, lost-looking boy with black hair who wandered into the People’s Law Firm one night asking for the lady lawyer. He looked like he was wearing hand-me-down clothes cut from a man triple his size. Through an interpreter, Grace learned that the boy had been sent over from Russia by his relatives and put to work by a kinsman who ran a haberdashery in the city. The boy worked hard for a year and half without any wages. When he realized that his friends were getting paid at their jobs, the boy went to his boss and boldly asked for his money. The boss pulled him aside, smiled broadly, and said he would give the boy twenty-five dollars and a ticket back home to Russia instead. He knew that the boy was very homesick. Months passed by, and the boy never saw the money or a ticket. But he had heard of the woman who wore black.
Grace wrote a note to the boy’s employer asking him to meet with her and the boy the following Monday. The man wrote back and agreed to come around in the evening. When the time came, Grace lurked outside the building, around the corner and out of sight. But no one showed up. Grace briskly walked up to some women who had gathered near the steps and asked if they had seen a boy. The ladies said they had seen a boy approaching from the other direction but that he had gone away with an older man. Grace had guessed that the boss might try something like this. Mad at herself, Grace stormed home. Later that night, she was summoned to the police station to attend to two little girls she knew, who were accused of stealing a hundred dollars.