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Editor’s Note: This is the first of two parts.
It was a sweltering August day, and an injured horse was lying on its side in the street. When I say that horses in the streets were a daily sight in my childhood, the average millennial might assume that I was born in the last decade of the 19th century or at least the first decade of the 20th century in a small town in the meadow. The Wild West would come to mind. However, I am referring to the streets of New York in the third decade of the 20th century.
The horse in question was still attached to the vegetable seller’s cart. It was 1938 and I was five years old at the height of the Great Depression, living in the Bronx. I don’t know if the horse was dead or if it had just passed out from heat exhaustion. The peddler slapped the horse in the face, screaming and cursing the affected animal in a futile attempt to force it to stand up. My mother explained to me that the horses employed by the fruit and vegetable merchants did not belong to the men who used them; the hawkers hired them for the day. She told me that the man probably did not feed the animal (it cost money and a waste of time) or water it because he wanted to cover as much ground as possible and sell all his products as quickly as possible. The rented horse and cart and its investment in the vegetables themselves posed a great financial risk. He could either make a profit at the end of the day or lose money. Money, of course, represented food, shelter, and clothing for the middle-aged plant man and his family.
But my mom was just as appalled and angry as I was that the seller could treat a stupid animal with such cruelty.
Ironically, she thought the man should be whipped on horseback.
Of course, at the time, I had no idea how bad the economic conditions were. Looking back, I realize that we were luckier than many others around this time. My father worked at Lazar’s, a large dry goods store located in Harlem at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue.
Being an employee, I understand now, was not something that was taken for granted during the Depression. Much later I learned that before my father met my mother he had been unemployed for a while. It was a phase of his life when he had to decide whether to spend a penny on the metro to take him to town looking for work, or walk several miles to save the five pennies so that he could buy something to eat at. lunch time.
We lived in an apartment with three rooms: a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. I slept on a camp bed behind an upholstered chair in the living room. It didn’t seem strange to me that strangers came to our door on the second floor to beg for food.
My mother always gave them something. I detected that a look of sadness came over her when she was dealing with beggars. Also a look of fear. She kept the door chain attached and passed the food through the small gap between the edge of the door and the door jamb.
We had moved from Jersey City to the Bronx when I was 3, and my mom always felt like my birthplace (and hers) in New Jersey was inhabited by people who were totally trustworthy, while any part of New York was questionable. .
You couldn’t tell who you can trust or who might want to hurt you. It was a strange prejudice when you consider that Jersey City is right across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan. Once, as I was taking the Hudson Tubes train under the river from Jersey City to New York, a man stood up to give my mother a seat. She whispered to me, “He must be on our side of the river. A man from New York would not be such a gentleman.
At that time, many people on both sides of the Hudson shared mutual prejudices. My father’s eight sisters and brothers lived in the big city, where he too lived until his marriage. There was a certain sense of superiority among New Yorkers over the people of New Jersey. Some of my father’s siblings noticed that my mother was a “country girl.” This attitude betrays a certain provincialism, a certain lack of sophistication on their part. The irony of the situation is heavy.
At that time, it seemed quite normal to me that several times a week a man in the street would scream at the top of his lungs for his voice to reach everyone in the six-story building, “I cash in on clothes!” “
This meant he would pay for used clothes, which he would later sell for a small profit. Every now and then a man called the organ player would stand under the window and play a tune. People would wrap a piece of paper to keep the piece from rolling when it hit the sidewalk, and toss it at the musician who, when the tune was over, would bend down and pick up all the paper-covered pieces and move around. on the next building. At other times, someone on the sidewalk was playing tunes on an accordion, or harmonica, or ocarina, a small wind instrument popularly called the sweet potato, due to its brown color and shape. Sometimes a man would sing well-known songs through a megaphone. The usual rain of paper-wrapped coins would follow.
Next week: part two.
Clark Zlotchew is an author of fiction and non-fiction and emeritus professor of teaching Spanish at the State University of New York at Fredonia.
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