Whoa, I thought. This. This is the true birth of our nation.
My brain whirred into action, offering up facts and figures on the immigrants who had just begun to turn the country into the melting pot it would one day become. The terrible injustice of slavery was only thirty years abolished. But as we passed through a largely African-American neighborhood, I watched men kiss their wives as they headed off to work. Women gathered around wagons to peruse the vendors’ morning wares. Two little girls in braids and spotless white dresses held hands as they skipped down the sidewalk. Pride gleamed from their mother’s face as she watched her little ones at play. I felt an upsurge of joy, knowing that horrific era was finally over. It would be a long road, but I knew that we were, at least, witnessing the infancy of a new age of freedom.
A mélange of scents wafted through the carriage window, changing at each cross street. Frying onions and garlic. Stewed cabbage. Exotic, unidentifiable spices that battled the overall stench of rotting garbage and crowded humanity.
With each block, however, the evidence of indescribable poverty grew more and more heartbreaking. Workers trudged by, heads bowed, lunch pails clasped tightly as they headed off to work in factories or mills. Packs of ragged children roamed sidewalks or huddled over metal grates in the ground to take advantage of the warm steam that billowed up.
During a brief traffic snarl, I watched a rouged woman haggle with three sailors. After counting and stuffing the bills into her low-cut bodice, she sighed and turned to follow the swaggering trio into the shadowed alley behind her. Her gaze snagged with mine. When I saw cheeks still rounded with baby fat, I realized the “woman” was a girl. A girl even younger than I was.
“God, she’s just a kid,” I whispered.
“What?” Phoebe leaned in, but I only shook my head as the girl tossed me an obscene gesture and disappeared into the alley.
When I looked out again, I realized we’d passed most of the worst of the destitution. The sidewalks here were choked with kerchiefed women in colorful skirts. I waved at a black-eyed baby propped on his mother’s hip as she gossiped with her neighbor in melodic Italian. When the baby graced me with a beaming, toothless grin, I laughed out loud.
“What?” Phoebe asked. “What’s funny?”
“I—?it’s just so incredible,” I said. “Look at them out there.”
Open carts piled with root vegetables or stacked with crates of squawking chickens took up half the street. A myriad of dialects twined into the air beneath a steady plink, plunk that bounced off the carriage roof.
Is that rain?
Sticking my head out, I peered up. Then jerked back just in time, as a piece of cloth came unmoored from the vast spider web of laundry lines strung between buildings and plopped wetly onto the road.
Before I could blink, two old women began scrabbling and shoving over the sad scrap.
We’d traveled only a few more blocks, when a cry came. “Hold!”
Mac, Phoebe, and I jolted as the carriage shuddered to a stop. Out the window, buildings crowded in. A worn-looking mother sat on a nearby stoop, nursing a fretful baby.
From the door behind her, a girl with the big teeth, braids, and gawky build of preadolescence emerged and dashed down the steps. She stooped to kiss the woman’s cheek and tickle the baby under its chin. She straightened as a large group of kids trekked down the street toward them.
“Witaj, Anika.” One of the older girls hurried forward, speaking in the consonant-heavy accent of Poland. “Are you ready? We must not be late, or Mister Johansen will dock us.”
As the girl, Anika, went to meet her friend, the older girl called up to Anika’s mother, “Is the baby feeling better today, Pani Wadisavka?”
I examined the thin, pale faces. None looked older than twelve or so. The boys in baggy overalls, flat caps shoved down over protruding ears. The girls in braids, work boots, and faded calico. All trudged past without once looking up from the cracked sidewalk. The group was eerily hushed, with little of the jollity that normally surrounds school-age kids.
As Anika joined her friend, an older woman wearing a babushka bustled out the front door toting a tin, cloth-covered pail.
The grandmother hobbled down the steps to pass Anika the lunch bucket. She paused for a moment to straighten the girl’s collar and fuss with her braids. Anika murmured something in Polish, then reached up to quickly buss her grandmother on her withered cheek before darting off.
When they’d disappeared around the corner, the old woman’s rounded shoulders slumped. She limped back toward the stairs.
“Wonder how far they have to walk to get to school?” Phoebe asked.
“I don’t think they’re going to school.”
Mac nodded. “In this age, children like those have to work to help support their families,” he said. “Mostly in the factories or sewing mills. They start young. Often as young as five or six.”
My excitement dimmed once more at the image of the cheery-faced Anika trapped inside a dank space with dozens of others just like her, laboring over the foot pedals of a sewing machine.
“But that’s awful,” Phoebe said.
“Aye,” Mac said. “Life here is hard for new immigrants, though it’s likely better than what they left. ’Tis especially difficult for the young ones. But they have to eat. Their fathers make little to nothing and their mums are usually nursing all the new babes that keep coming. So it’s left to the older children to bring in extra.”
“That’s just . . .” Phoebe trailed off, shaking her head. “The poor, wee things.”
“What’s the holdup, Douglas?” Mac called to where Doug was perched beside the driver.
The carriage began to inch forward. Half a block down, Doug yelled out to Collum. The springs bounced as Collum hopped down off the rear brace and tugged the newsboy cap over his eyes.
“Dead horse in the road,” he called with a grimace. “Looks like it’s been there a while. Still tied to the ice wagon. They’re moving it now.”
Phoebe gagged and turned pale as skim milk when the scent wafted in. The pervasive odor of death reminded me of Roadkill Alley, the stretch of curving two-lane highway near our house where possums and raccoons—?making a bid for freedom to one side or the other—?littered the surface of the county road.
When I was seven years old, after witnessing an injured raccoon drag itself off the blacktop, I decided to start a Save the Hurt Animals club. Who knew how many of those poor creatures might need my help, I reasoned. I’d gather them all up, take them to the vet, and once they were healed they’d become my pets.
Half a mile and two mangled corpses later, I realized that when starting a club, it really helped if you had more than one member.