Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (11 page)

Chapter
13

Tammany Hall and Police Headquarters both felt the stings of the
Tribune
articles. The paragraphs written by Simeon Lightner and Duncan Phair were talked of in every saloon, every drawing room, every club, and on every street corner in town. Daring young men who before had confined their pleasure-seeking to the Central Park and long excursions to Coney Island now walked the streets south of Bleecker in thick bands, exquisitely fearful, and imagining that murderous prostitutes would swing upon them out of every doorway. Timorous ladies, when their husbands had left the house for their offices, would ascend to the attic and, wiping clean a grimy pane, train their opera glasses shudderingly on the red-brick maze of the Black Triangle.

Other papers in the city at first deprecated the
Tribune’
s obvious strategy, but quickly, when they saw what commotion the articles and the letters stirred, took up the cause themselves. The
Herald
began an investigation of the tenements that still existed around Five Points, and the
Sun
gave daily and detailed instances of violence among the Jews, the Italians, the Cubans, and the Chinese.

The police department’s defense was ineffectual, for it was by their own statistics that they were most sorely trounced; so Mulberry Street launched a campaign against the Black Triangle in hope of bettering its position with the clamorous public.

On Thursday, January
19
, the gambling hall that Duncan Phair and Simeon Lightner had visited on their first night out together was invaded by the police. Though protesting vehemently that they were quite up-to-date in the matter of bribes, the proprietors were arrested. Gentlemen gamblers were politely escorted to the street, where they quickly availed themselves of the convenience of an uptown car, but players of lower or criminal class were taken away to the Tombs for a couple of nights. All the machinery of gambling was broken up. The tables and chairs were hacked to pieces with hatchets borrowed from the fire department and piled in the middle of King Street. The heap was garnished with cards, dice, counters, script, and printed advertisements—and then doused with kerosene and set alight. It was a symbolic and picturesque action meant to mollify the public, but unfortunately also a dangerous one—for a strong wind blew a handful of burning court cards from a pinochle deck through the open doorway of a tenement house, where they ignited a quantity of oily rags. Simeon Lightner and Duncan Phair, who were in the next street, came by for the commotion and were able to report another piece of police negligence and ineptitude in next morning’s
Tribune
. The police countered lamely that the building had been vermin infested and the infant that had perished in the blaze was already consumptive, but it was another point made against them.

Though somewhat daunted, the chief of police ordered that on the following Sunday some saloon be shut down, and a large place on Perry Street was chosen because it was the most ornate and nearly respectable in all the Black Triangle—not because it was forward in the matter of excise violations. Justified by the New York State law decreeing that no establishment selling liquor might be open during any hour of the Sabbath, seventy-three police invaded the place an hour before noon, dragged away the owners and bartenders, kicked the patrons out, broke every glass and bottle and mirror in the place, and smashed all the chairs and tables against the mahogany bar. Representatives from all the sympathetic press were there, and this was rather more of a successful engagement for the Democratic administration.

Thereafter, almost every other day some business in that part of the city was touched: seventeen prostitutes arrested in one house, a fence dragged away from King Street, a stale-beer dive emptied of all its human and potable refuse, a meeting place of thieves boarded up and condemned.

It would have gone harder with the Black Triangle had it not been for the other newspapers taking up the cause and celebrating, as it were, other criminal neighborhoods. The police were forced, to some extent, to deploy their forces to other sectors and show that they were intent on freeing all parts of the city from the dominion of corruption and depravity. But still, since the
Tribune
articles were the most virulent and powerfully antagonistic to the police, it was that area bordered by MacDougal, Canal and Bleecker streets that received the most frequent and meticulous attentions of the police department.

On many counts, the police were unhappy in setting up this systematic persecution. It was a troublesome and dangerous undertaking, for the thieves and criminals of New York were entrenched, and most of them had the idea that they were somehow an essential, if unsavory, arm of the community, and had as much right as any cotton-factor or dressmaker or bookseller to exist and ply their trades. They took umbrage at the incursions of the police into places the police had never dared go before. Already three men had been killed resisting arrest, and one policeman escaped death only at the price of a severe knock on the head, which had taken him out of commission. And quite beyond this it was an expensive affair, for many of the police department, on all levels—but especially the very highest and the very lowest—were used to taking bribes in return for ignoring crime when crime could be quietly ignored. When men and women were arrested, the bribes of course dried up and the criminal classes lost faith in the word of the police.

Those high in the police department and the city government who received substantial bribes from the larger criminals of the city and the politicians who depended on the wiles of petty malefactors to secure their offices year after year in election-day frauds, were necessarily made uneasy by this call for a wholesale sweep of the city’s criminal population. This was fortunately only January and the next election many months away; the politicians considered that, if all this were got through quickly, there would be time to recoup their losses or with large favors, win back the confidence of those on whom their positions and their fortunes depended.

Lena Shanks watched these developments with increasing concern, and in her business was even more discreet than usual; for the first time in many a year, she actually gave out pawn tickets—printed up by Louisa on the small press that she kept in her bedchamber—in exchange for the merchandise that she received from her women. Her clients were fewer, and those who continued to come came less often, for all in the Black Triangle were fearful, and ever wary of the police.

Lena had a standing order with Crook-Back Bob, the ragged newsboy who haunted West Houston Street, and each morning and afternoon the little cripple brought to the shop all the journals that carried the sensational stories of New York crime and New York criminals. Ella read the articles aloud, and in a few weeks her reading was substantially improved, though her eyesight had deteriorated.

Lena was distressed by the frequency with which the Stallworth name cropped up, particularly in the pages of the
Tribune
. Every Monday the journal printed Edward Stallworth’s sermon enumerating and condemning the enormities of the Black Triangle. This minister, Lena discovered from Weeping Mary, was the son of the hated Judge James Stallworth, whose cursory trials, lengthy concluding remarks, and harsh sentencings appeared in the
Tribune’
s columns from Tuesday through Sunday. Many of those sent to Blackwell’s Island and Sing Sing Lena was acquainted with, and three of Lena’s women had already come up before the judge. Two received four-year sentences for prostitution and the third eight years for operating an illegal gambling establishment. There was even a female Stallworth—called Helen—who had signed her name, among those of many other ladies, to a letter that expressed horrified indignation at the number of abortionists—euphemistically called “angel-makers” in the epistle—allowed to practice within the precincts of the Black Triangle. Lena began to feel that the Stallworths had risen in a body against her and her family, threatening not only their livelihood but their very freedom.

Chapter
14

Edward Stallworth stood at the door of his church and greeted the Sunday morning congregation as it filed out. He modestly accepted his parishioners’ murmured applause for his powerful and affecting address, the fifth of his sermons dilating upon the dangers and iniquities of the Black Triangle. He was pleased with the compliment of a pretty young woman, reputed to be an heiress, who said, “Oh, Mr. Stallworth, with that voice of yours, and those hands of yours, you could talk me into rope dancing or arson.”

He and Helen and Benjamin were expected at one o’clock at Gramercy Park for luncheon, but that was half an hour away and Edward felt the need of a little rest and liquid to massage his throat. Helen, according to her custom, had come to his church study directly after the postlude and prepared tea, and now Edward Stallworth sat comfortably back in a deep leather chair before the fire burning in the glazed-brick hearth. Helen sat opposite him with a saucer perched on the narrow arm of her narrow hard chair.

“Helen,” said her father with a kindness prompted by the success of the sermon, “I suppose that tomorrow there will be another meeting of Marian’s committee.”

Helen nodded hesitantly. “Yes, just at two o’clock, at Marian’s again.”

“I hope it will be as successful as the last!”

Helen said nothing.

Her father looked at her with an exhausted wariness. “You do not feel, Helen, after two full meetings, that the Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice has been a success?”

“I suppose,” said Helen with downcast eyes, “it would depend on how one defined success, or perhaps on what one interpreted the aims of the committee to be.”

“Go on please,” said her father blandly, but no longer with a smile. “With me, Helen, your words need not be chosen with so much care.”

“All the ladies come dressed very fine,” said Helen meekly, “and they talk of the articles that appear in the
Tribune
and the
Sun
. Marian praises the articles highest of all, though of course she doesn’t say that it’s Duncan who helps to write them, so I wish that she wouldn’t—I think she should say as little as possible, for it’s sure to be found out sooner or later that it’s Duncan behind it, and then what will everyone think of Marian’s praise?”

“They’ll think that she’s proud of her husband, as well she should be,” said Edward Stallworth. “Duncan’s exertions in this matter are entirely commendable, and I see nothing objectionable in Marian’s praise. But what did you object to, Helen? You seem to have disapproved of something more than Marian’s fulsomeness, which you ought to be used to by this time anyway.”

“I . . . I do not concur with the ladies’ views on—the unfortunate people who live in the poorer sections of the city. They look on the whole matter rather lightly, as if it were nothing more than a new kind of scandal to amuse them. They talk about vice, and how the police ought to stop it, and how all those people ought to be put into the jails, and the houses burnt to the ground, and opera houses and restaurants and theaters set up there instead. They have”—she paused before making so stern a judgment—“little compassion. . . .”

“You do not believe that to raze the Black Triangle and all other such areas would be a species of improvement to this city, Helen?”

“Father,” cried Helen with earnest intensity, “I believe that our purpose ought to be to alleviate the misery and poverty of these people. If we could only insure them enough to eat and give them proper medical care; if we found jobs for the men and educated and clothed their children—why then there wouldn’t be any need for them to engage in criminal activity.”

“It’s a novel idea, Helen, but I think that it ignores the basic disagreeableness of the human character. You’ve memorized your catechism, I believe, so you must know the definition of Original Sin, even if you haven’t applied its precept to the machinations of human society.”

Helen was silent.

“You don’t wish to argue?” said her father with raised eyebrows, holding out his cup to be replenished.

“No,” said Helen, taking the cup, “you are an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and my theology I know is faulty. I only wish,” said she softly, turning her back momentarily to fill his cup again, but more so that she would not have to face him while she voiced a criticism, “that you concentrated more on matters of doctrine and interpretation in your sermons. I was very sorry when you abandoned the exegesis of
Isaiah
. I hope it will not be long before you return to it.” Her voice was plaintive.

Edward Stallworth paused a moment before answering, and when he did speak his voice was sharp and ironical: “There are fifty-two Sundays in the year, with which fact I suppose that you are acquainted, Helen. And I suppose that you also are well enough informed on matters of church procedure to know that I preach two sermons each Sunday. Considering that I am generally absent on two Sundays in June taking rest at the seashore, I preach one hundred sermons a year. I have thus far delivered five sermons on the wickedness of the city of New York, I may prepare a dozen more. That is less than twenty percent of the number of sermons I shall preach in the course of
1882
. It is insignificant when compared to the number of sermons I have preached in my sixteen years as shepherd to my Madison Avenue flock. I hope that you do not imagine that I do this for my own aggrandizement—”

He paused for a denial from his daughter who, in truth, had feared just that, but she only weakly shook her head no.

“You are correct, Helen, I do not. I have seen the opportunity to do some good in this city by drawing the attention of members of our congregation to the vice and criminality—and, as you say, to the poverty and wretchedness—that lie upon our doorstep. I do not do it toward the social or political or financial uplifting of myself or any members of my family, I hope you understand.”

Helen nodded tremulously, for her father’s stern and cold voice made her now, as always, unhappy, and she was sorry that she had said anything.

“You did not object last year when I preached on the African mission, I believe. In fact, I believe that you yourself composed prayers for the continued safety and health of our Presbyterian missionaries in the Congo. I see no reason to distinguish the natives of Africa from the denizens of the Black Triangle, which peoples are equally ignorant, equally vicious, equally unhappy, and equally in danger of eternal damnation.”

“No,” agreed Helen.

“
No
,” repeated her father, “and I do not know why you set yourself up against the ladies of Marian’s committee either, whose only purpose is to do good by eradicating evil. If the evil is brushed away, Helen, why then the good is sure to shine through. I do not understand why you cannot grasp this really very simple concept, which a child of three years would unquestionably embrace as a tenet for the operation of all the societies of mankind, past and present and to come.

“So,” concluded Edward Stallworth, “I hope that you will go to the meeting of the Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice with a different cast of mind; with an eagerness, I may say, to do what you can for this desperately wicked place we call the Black Triangle.”

Helen nodded obediently, having allowed herself to be defeated, not by her father’s arguments so much as merely by his will to conquer; for Helen felt that she would be remiss in filial obedience if she did not prostrate herself before her father’s inclinations.

“Yes, Father,” said Helen, after a moment’s sad reflection, “of course I shall go to Marian’s tomorrow and take the minutes of the meeting and do all that I can to further the committee’s laudable schemes.”

And, true to her word, on the following day Helen was at her aunt’s house ensconced in a corner with a small tablet and a sharpened pencil. At the end of two hours she had noted only the observation of the fifteen ladies in attendance that “vice was a bad thing and ought to be suppressed” and the resolution that four carriages ought to be hired to drive them through the Black Triangle on the following afternoon. Fully half an hour was taken up in discussion of what sort of dress was most appropriate for viewing misery and crime, and nothing was of consensus but that each lady ought to be equipped with a heavy black veil, smelling salts, and plenty of pennies to distribute to children. Recalling her father’s injunction, Helen went along with this scheme without protest, but with inward misgiving.

At three o’clock on the next afternoon, four closed black carriages made their way south from Gramercy Park to MacDougal Street, and began a small tour of the Black Triangle. Some of the streets were too narrow to admit the carriages, being blocked with evil-smelling refuse, the carts of vendors of rotten merchandise, heaps of burning rubbish which warmed the itinerant beggars, or simply with milling crowds of the poor who had nowhere to live but the back streets themselves. The progress of the vehicles was slow, being constantly interrupted by wagons that would not move and crowds that would not get out of the way and idlers who seemed to take some delight in annoying this caravan of overdressed ladies from uptown. More than two hours were required to make a circuit around the scant two hundred acres of the Black Triangle.

The ladies, for their part, were almost immediately sorry that they had come. The odors were so noxious and powerful that they kept their handkerchiefs before their faces for the duration of the trip. The cries and shouts directed at them were profane and obscene. Nothing was colorful and nothing was picturesque and nothing was quaint; all was black grimy wretchedness and foul stinking misery. The children that they had thought they would toss pennies to ran up against the carriages with sticks which they broke off in the spokes of the wheels, or they tossed missiles of hard mud—and worse—against the sides of the vehicles. The sixteen ladies saw men sitting against the sides of buildings, in frozen puddles of their own sickness, and they saw babies—little bundles of filthy rag and bloodshot gristle—lined up in rows on the stone steps of a house while their mothers reeled in and out of a saloon hard by. They saw dogs tortured by laughing children, and a man’s skull broken open with a brickbat. And their drivers assured them that they had not seen the worst; but when the sun fell behind the houses along MacDougal Street, the ladies grew anxious, for the unfriendly faces in the street began to look positively fiendish. The caravan turned onto Broadway and made as swift a journey back to Gramercy Park as possible.

The ladies gratefully accepted tea at Marian’s table and sat stonily silent in the parlor as they drank it. No one talked of what she had seen, and no one suggested any method to effect the suppression of vice in the streets they had driven through. The ladies, even Marian Phair herself, who knew more than the rest, had expected something else, had imagined a world that was more or less like their own, except only dingy and tawdry and dull. No one had expected that crime and violence, destitution and horribly degrading poverty would stare back at them with grinning toothless mouths and infernal gleaming eyes, like fantastical medieval emblems. The suppression of vice in a place where vice seemed the very foundation of life suddenly seemed to be too much of an undertaking for sixteen women who had nearly fainted from the effluvia of the streets alone.

At last, when most had had two cups of strong bolstering tea, one lady mentioned having seen a trained dog performing on a board held across the arms of its owner and another declared that she was sure she heard someone playing “In the Garden” on an untuned piano; and they felt better for these remembrances. Then Marian suggested that all meet again the following Monday and that everyone should bring a list of three things that might be done toward the suppression of vice in such a place as they had just seen. The ladies, a little recovered, took their leave; and Helen Stallworth, who on any other occasion would have remained behind with her aunt a while longer, departed also.

Helen walked home alone. Though it was dark, the manse was only two squares away and she was known in most of the houses she passed. She had been appalled, frightened, and struck dumb by what she had seen that afternoon and she had come away with the conviction that she had been right and her father and all the rest had been wrong. There was no way to suppress vice in a place of such poverty and wretchedness. Crime was a material not a spiritual evil, and the only hope for the Black Triangle lay in the alleviation of its material misery.

She had done her duty by her father and attended Marian’s meeting. She would continue to attend and take the scanty minutes of the gathering, but she had no hope that anything would come of the Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice—certainly no more than a few indignant letters directed to the daily and the religious journals and perhaps a nominal subscription to help fund some charity for the improvement of redeemed Magdalens. Helen’s heart was punctured and bled for those who lived in the Black Triangle. And she knew that if she wanted to do any good for that unhappy place she would have to return there alone, but not protected by a carriage, a heavy black veil, and a bottle of smelling salts.