THROWN IN WITH THE CITY'S DEAD
I read that headline in a newspaper one morning. Then I asked myself: Why should the city's dead be "thrown in?"
Where and how are they "thrown in?" Why are they thrown in?
Why, in a civilized land, should such an expression as that arouse no surprise – be taken as a matter of course? What is its full meaning? Are others as little informed upon the subject as I? Would the city's dead continue to be "thrown in" if the public stopped to think; if it understood the meaning of that single, obscure headline? Believing that the power of a free and fearless press is the greatest power for good that has yet been devised; and believing most sincerely, that wrongs grow greatest where silence is imposed or ignorance of the facts stands between the wrong doer, or the wrong deed, and enlightened public opinion, I decided to learn and to tell just the meaning —all of the meaning – of those six sadly and shockingly suggestive words.
Suppose you chanced to be very poor and to die in New York; or suppose, unknown to you, your mother, a stranger passing through the city, were to die suddenly. Suppose, in either case, no money were forthcoming to bury the body, would it be treated as well, with as humane and civilized consideration as if the question of money were not in the case? We are fond of talking about giving "tender Christian burial," and of showing horror and disgust for those who may wilfully observe other methods. We are fond of saying that death levels all distinctions. Let us see whether these are facts or fictions of life.
The island where the "city's dead" are buried – that is, all the friendless and poor or unidentified, who are not cared for by some church or society – is a mere scrap of land, from almost any point of which you easily overlook it all, with its marshy border and desolate, unkempt surface. It contains, as the officer in charge told me, about seventy-nine acres at low tide. At high tide much of the border is submerged. Upon this scrap of land – about one mile long and less than half a mile wide at its widest point – is concentrated so much of misery and human sorrow and anguish, that it is difficult to either grasp the idea one's self or convey it to others.
There are three classes of dead sent here by the city. Those who are imbecile or insane – dead to thought or reason; those who are dead to society and hope – medium term criminals; and those whom want, and sorrow, and pain, and wrong can touch no more after the last indignity is stamped upon their dishonored clay. I will deal first with these happier ones who have reached the end of the journey which the other two classes sit waiting for. Or, perhaps some of them stand somewhat defiantly as they look on what they know is to be their own last home, and recognize the estimate placed upon them by civilized, Christian society.
Upon this scrap of land there are already buried – or "thrown in" – over seventy thousand bodies. Stop and think what that means. It is a large city. We have but few larger in this country. Remember that this island is about one mile long and less than a half mile wide at the widest point. In places it is not much wider than Broadway.
The spot on which those seventy thousand are "thrown in" is but a small part of this miniature island. This is laid off in plots with paths between. These sections are forty-five feet by fifteen, and are dug out seven feet deep. Again, stop and picture that. It looks like the beginning of a cellar for a small city house. But in that little cellar are buried one hundred and fifty bodies, packed three deep. Remembering the depth of a coffin, and remembering that a layer of earth is put on each, it is easy to estimate about how near the surface of the earth lie festering seventy thousand bodies. They are not in metallic cases, as may well be imagined; but I need only add that I could distinctly see the corpse through wide cracks in almost every rough board box, for you to understand that sickening odors and deadly gases are nowhere absent.
But there is one thing more to add before this picture can be grasped. Three of these trenches are kept constantly open. This means that something like four hundred bodies, dead from three days to two weeks, lie in open pine boxes almost on the surface of the earth.
You will say, "That is bad, but the island is far away and is for the dead only. They cannot injure each other." If that were true, a part of the ghastly horror would be removed, but, as I have said, the city sends two other classes of dead here. Two classes who are beyond hope, perhaps, but surely not beyond injury and a right to consideration by those who claim to be civilized.
Standing near the "general" or Protestant trench – for while Christian society permits its poor and unknown to be buried in trenches three deep; while it forces its other poor and friendless to dig the trenches and "throw in" their brother unfortunates; while it condemns its imbeciles and lunatics to the sights, and sounds, and odors, and poisoned air and earth of this island, it cannot permit the Catholic and Protestant dead to lie in the same trenches! – standing near the general trench, in air too foul to describe, where five "short term men" were working to lower their brothers, the officer explained.
"We have to keep three trenches open all the time, because the Catholics have to go in consecrated ground and they don't allow the 'generals' and Protestants in there. Then the other trench is for dissected bodies from hospitals and the like."
"Are not many, indeed most of those, also, Catholics?" I asked.
"Yes, I guess so; but they don't go in consecrated ground, because they aint whole." This with no sense of levity.
"Are not many of the unknown likely to be Catholics, too?"
"Yes, but when we find that out afterward, we dig them out if they were not suicides, and put them in the other trench. If they were suicides, of course, they have to stay with the generals. You see, we number each section; then we number each box, and begin at one end with number one and lay them right along, so a record is kept and you can dig any one out at any time."
"Then this earth – if we may call it so – is constantly being dug into and opened up?" I queried.
"I should think it would kill the men who work, and the insane and imbecile who must live here." "Well," he replied, smiling, "prisoners have to do what they are told to, whether it kills 'em or not, and I guess it don't hurt the idiots and lunatics none. They're past hurting. They're incurables. They never leave here."
"I should think not," I replied. "And if by any chance they were not wholly incurable when they came, I should suppose it would not be long before they would be. Where does the drinking water come from?"
"Drive wells, and – "
"What!" I exclaimed, in spite of my determination when I went that I would show surprise at nothing.
He looked at me in wonder.
"Yes, it is easy to drive wells here. Get water easy."
This time I remained silent. I did not wish to frighten away any farther confidences which he might feel like imparting.
There is one road from end to end of the island. The houses for the male lunatics and imbeciles are on the highest point overlooking at all times the trenches and at all times within hearing of whatever goes on there. The odors are everywhere so that night and day, every one who is on the island breathes nothing else but this polluted air, except as a strong wind blows it, at times, from one direction over another. The women's quarters – much larger and better houses – are at the other end of the island. Not all of these overlook the trenches.
Every fair day all these wretched creatures are taken out to walk. Where? Along this one road; back and forth, back and forth, beside the "dead trenches." To step aside is to walk on "graves" for about half the way. We sometime smile over the old joke that the Blue Laws allowed nothing more cheerful than a walk to the cemetery on Sunday. All days are Sundays to these wretches who depend on the "civilized" charity of our city. All laws are very, very blue; all walks lead through what can by only the wildest abandon of charity be called by so happy a name as a "cemetery," and even the air and water the city gives them is neither air nor water; it is pollution.
A gentleman by my side watched the long procession of helpless creatures walk past. One man waved his hand to me and mumbled something and smiled – then he called back, "Wie geht's? Wie geht's?" and smiled again. Several of the wretched creatures laughed at him; but when I smiled and bowed, nearly half of the line of three hundred, turned and joined in his salutation. They filed past four times (the whole walk is so short), and they did not fail each time to recognize me and bid for recognition. If they know me as a stranger, I thought, they know enough to understand something of all this ghastliness. The line of women was a long, long line. I was told that in all there were fourteen hundred women, and nearly five hundred men on the island. The line of women broke now and then as some poor creature would run out on the grass and pluck a weed or flower, and hold it gayly up or hide it in her skirts. One waved her hand at us, and said in tones that indicated that she was trying to assume the voice and manner of a public speaker: "The Lord deserteth not His chosen!" I did not know whether in her poor brain, they or we represented the chosen who were not to be deserted. Another said gayly and in an assumed lisp and voice of a little girl (although she must have been past fifty), "There's papa, oh, papa, papa, papa! My papa!" This to the gentleman who stood beside me. He smiled and waved his hand to her. Then he said, between his teeth:
"Civilized savages! To have them here!"
"It don't hurt 'em," said the officer beside us. "They're incurables. They won't any of 'em remember what they saw for ten minutes. People don't understand crazy folks and idiots. They're the easiest cowed people in the world. Long as they know they're watched, they'll do whatever you tell them – this kind will. They're harmless."
"But why have them here?" I insisted. "If they are to be poisoned, why not do it more quickly and – "
"Poisoned!" he exclaimed, astonished. "Why, if one of the attendants was caught even striking one, he'd be dismissed quick. They get treated well. Only it is hard to keep attendants. We can't get 'em to stay here more than a month or so – just till they get paid. We have to go to the raw immigrants to get them even then. Nobody else will come."
"Naturally," remarked the gentleman beside me.
"Yes, it's kind of natural. This kind of folks are hard to work with, and the men attendants get only about seventeen to twenty dollars a month, and the women from ten to twelve dollars."
"So the attendants of these helpless creatures are raw immigrants," I said; "who, perhaps, do not speak English, who are constantly changing. The water they get is from driven wells, the sights and exercise are obtained from and in and by the dead trenches. The air they breathe is like this, night and day, you say, and no one ever leaves alive when once sent here."
"No one."
"Who does the work – the digging, the burying, the handling of the dead, the carting, and the work for the insane?"
"Medium term prisoners. All these are from one to six months men," waving his hand over the men working below us in the horrible trench.
"Do you think they leave here with an admiration for our system of caring for the city's dead – whether the death be social, mental, or physical? Do they go back with a desire to reform and become like those who devise and conduct this sort of thing?"
He laughed.
"Why, it's just a picnic for them to come up here. You can't hardly keep 'em away with a club. Of course, the same ones don't work right here long; but when a fellow gets sent up to any of these places, he comes over and over until he gets ambitious to go to Sing Sing and be higher toned."
I thought of the same information given me at the Police and Criminal Courts a little while ago. I wondered if there might not be some flaw somewhere in the whole reformatory and punitive system. From the time a fourteen-year-old boy is taken up for breaking a window; sent to the reform school, where he is herded with older and worse boys, until he passes through the police court again, – let us say at sixteen, as a "ten-day drunk," – to herd again in a windowless prison van, packed close with fifteen hardened criminals (as I saw a messenger boy of fifteen on my way to the island), and taken where for ten days he enjoys the society of the most abandoned; returns to town the companion of thieves; and goes the next time for three or six months for petit larceny, then for some graver crime, on and up. At last, when he has no more to learn or to teach, he is given a cell or room alone until the State relieves him of the necessity of following the course which has been mapped out for and steadily followed by so many. He knows when he is a three months' man where he is going at last. Has he not helped to dig the trenches for the men who looked so hard and vile to him when he broke that window and stood in the Police Court by their sides?
Perhaps you will ask: "Why did he not take the warning, and follow a better course, turn the other way?"
Perchance it might be asked on the other hand – since court, and morgue, and cemetery officials unite in the assertion that the above record is almost universal, and that our present methods not only do not reform, but actually prevent the reform of offenders – why this system is still followed by the State, and if the warning has not been ample and severe here, also.
Are we to expect greater wisdom, more far-seeing judgment and a loftier aim in these unfortunates of society than is developed in those who control them?
Since it is all such a dismal failure, why not plan a better way? Why not begin at the other end of the line to keep offenders apart? Why herd them – good, bad, and indifferent – together, in the stage of their career when there is hope for some, at least, to reform; and begin to separate them only when the last mile of the road is reached?
Why, if the city must bury its dead in trenches and under the conditions only half described above (because much of it is too sickening to present), why, if cremation or some better mode of burial is not possible – and certainly I think it is – why, at least, need the awful, the ghastly, the inhuman combination be made of burying together medium term criminals, imbeciles, lunatics, and thousands of corpses all on one mere scrap of land? If a seven-foot mass of corruption exhaling through the air and percolating through land and water must be devoted to the dead poor of a great city, why in the name of all that is civilized or humane, permit any living thing to be detained and poisoned on the same bit of earth?
I saw a woman who had come to visit her mother who was one of these poor, insane creatures. "I can't afford to keep her at home," she said, "and then at times she gets 'snags' and acts so that people are afraid of her, so I had to let her come here. It is kind of awful, ain't it?"
I thought it was "kind of awful," for more reasons than the poor woman could realize, for she was so used to foul air and knew so little of sanitary conditions that she was mercifully spared certain thoughts that seem to have escaped the authorities also.
"It is her birthday and I brought her this," she said, showing me a colored cookie. "She will like it. We can visit here one day each month if we have friends."
"How many bodies do you carry each week?" I asked of the captain of the city boat.
"About fifty," he said. But later on both he and the official on the Island told me that there were six thousand buried here yearly, so it will be seen that his estimate per week was less than half what it should have been.
I looked at the stack of pine boxes, the ends of which showed from beneath a tarpaulin on the deck.
They were stacked five deep. There were seven wee ones, hardly larger than would be filled by a good-sized kitten.
I said: "They are so very small. I don't see how a baby was put inside."
The man to whom I spoke – a deck hand who was a "ten-day-self-committed," so the captain told me later – smiled a grim, sly smile and said:
"I reckon you're allowin' fer trimmin's. This kind don't get piliers and satin linin's. It don't take much room for a baby with no trimmin's an' mighty little clothes."
"Why are two of them dark wood and all the rest light?" I asked of the same man.
"I reckon the folks of them two had a few cents to pay fergittin' their baby's box stained. It kind of looks nicer to them, and when they get a little more money, they'll come and get it dug up and put it in a grave by itself or some other place. It seems kind of awful to some folks to have their little baby put in amongst such a lot."
He said it all quite simply, quite apologetically, as if I might think it rather unreasonable – this feeling that it was "kind of awful to think of the baby in amongst such a lot."
At that time, I did not know that he was a prisoner. He showed me a number of things about the boxes and spoke of the open cracks and knot holes through which one could see what was inside. I declined to look after the first glance.
"You don't mind it very much after you're used to it," he said. "Of course, you would, but I mean us."
I began to understand that he was a prisoner.
"When you're a prisoner, you get used to a good deal," he said, later on, when they were unloading the bodies and some of the men looked white and sick. "They're new to it," he explained to me. "It makes them sick and scared; but it won't after a while."
"Why are most of them here?" I asked. "Most of them look honest – and – "
"Honest!" he exclaimed, with the first show he had made of rebellion or resentment. "Honest! Of course most of us are honest. It is liquor does it mostly. None of us are thieves – yet!"
I noticed the "us," but still evaded putting him in with the rest.
"Why do they not let liquor alone, after such a hard lesson?"
He laughed. He had a red, bloated, but not a bad face. He was an Englishman.
"Some of us can't. Some don't want to, and some – some – it is about all some can get."
Later on, I was told that this man was honest, a good worker, and that he was "self-committed to get the liquor out of him. He's been here before. When he gets out, he will be drunk before he gets three blocks away from the dock, and he'll be sent here again – or to the Island!"
"And has this system gone on for a hundred years," I asked, "without finding some remedy?"
"Well, since the women began to take a hand, some little has been done," the officer replied. "They built a coffee and lodging house right near the landing, and take returning prisoners there, and give them a chance to work if they want to – in a broom factory they built. Some get a start that way and if they work and are honest, they get a letter saying so when they find places. It is only a drop in the bucket, but it helps a few."
"It looks a little as though, if women were to take a hand in public, municipal, or governmental affairs, that reform, and not punishment, might be made the object of imprisonment if imprisonment became necessary, doesn't it?"
He laughed.
"Politics is no place for women. This they are doing is charity. That is all very well, but they got no business meddling with city government, and courts, and prisoners only as charity."
"Yet you say that, for a hundred years, those who look after the criminal population, thought very little of helping the men who came out, much less did they think of beginning at the other end and trying to keep them from going in. Women have been allowed to devise public charities, even, for only a few years past. They had no experience in building manufactories and conducting coffee and lodging houses; they have but little money of their own to put into such things and yet they have bethought them to start, in embryo, right here where the returning convict lands, what appears to have vast possibilities as you say. Now if this effort for the prevention of crime and want were at the other end of the line in municipal government, don't you think it might go even nearer the root of the matter and do more good?"
"How would you like to be a ward politician and a heeler?" he inquired, wiping a smile away and looking at my gloves.
"I should not like it at all."
"Well, now, look at that! Of course no lady would, so – "
"Do you think it possible that the world might get on fairly comfortably without having 'heelers' and 'ward politicians' – in the sense you mean – in municipal or state government? And that it might be better without such crime producers?" I added, as he began to laugh.
"You women are always visionary. Never practical. You – "
"I thought you said that the one and only really practical measure yet taken to reduce the criminal population as it returns from the Islands was invented and is conducted by women and – "
"You can just make up your mind that in every family of six there'll be one hypocrite and one fool, either one of which is liable to be a criminal, too, and the State has got to take care of 'em somehow. But the prisons are getting too full and the Almshouses and Insane Asylums are growing very large. But there is the Two Brothers' Island. I've got to attend to my business now. Take the trip with me again some time."
But it seems to me, I shall not need to go again, and that no judge or legislator would need to take the journey more than once, unless, perchance, he took it in the person of either the hypocrite or the fool of his family; which, let us hope, no judge and no legislator is in a position to do.