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From the The Tenement Series of non-fiction essays by Harry Buschman
© by Harry Buschman
A Little After October 23, 1929
Me and Ernie were
eleven when it hit the fan, but like the first symptoms of a fatal disease,
the Depression hid its ugly face from us until the following spring. From then
on we saw things that I hope no child will ever see again. We saw poverty up
close, the kind that makes your hands sweat and your legs turn to jelly. I will
never forget, and I'm sure that wherever Ernie may be, he hasn't forgotten either.
There is a haunting
look in the eyes of a photographic portrait, a sharecropper lady from the thirties
by Walker Evans .... it's titled "Annie Mae Burrows." I can see my
mother's eyes in Annie's and the panic they both shared in living from day to
day. Children should not see such eyes. Once having seen them, they too will
fear what tomorrow may bring to them even in the best of times.
From a family of three wage earners we were down to one, and that one, my
father, was down to half pay. That's what they called it -- "half pay."
You worked the same hours, maybe more, but you were cut down to half pay --
take it or leave it. So my mother got an Annie Mae Burrows look in her eye,
a look I hadn't seen before. Ernie's family had it tougher. There were just
three of them and there was no pay at all. They got their food from St. Theresa's
church on Classon Avenue. The landlord let them stay in the tenement and his
father kept the building clean ... this way he could fire the janitor.
You could buy a new house for $3500, a new car for $500. It cost a nickel to
ride on the subway and a first class stamp was 2 cents .... the prices, ridiculous
as they seem today were beyond our means.
The cities were
the hardest hit. They were filled with immigrants who had come to the promised
land where the streets were paved with gold, where everyone could make a fortune
and where the poorest among them could be his own master. Me and Ernie could
not make sense of it. Each day our families grew older and sadder, many of our
friends disappeared from school and with few people working the streets were
empty, every day seemed like a Sunday -- a rainy Sunday.
No one who has lived through that awful time can write about it dispassionately
or find humor where there wasn't any. Whatever excitements and adventures me
and Ernie enjoyed in the past were over and we were older and sadder too. We
thought seriously about leaving home -- perhaps our folks would be better off
without us, maybe we could make it on our own. We knew we couldn't do it alone
.... but maybe the two of us .... Ernie was twelve now, I was still eleven,
but both of us were tall for our age, and from what we read in the paper in
the late summer of '30, kids were hired to pick peaches in Whitesbog, New Jersey.
With a little luck we thought we could bring home fifty, sixty dollars maybe
-- think of the smiles on their faces when we stacked that up on the kitchen
table! But the devil, as always, is in the
details and we didn't think much about how our families might feel when we didn't
show up for supper or how we could get to Whitesbog, New Jersey.
We got as far as Pennsylvania Station on the IRT -- we snuck under the turnstiles
at the Flatbush Avenue Station, nobody stopped us, many people did it daily
whether they were working or not. But there was no way to get to Whitesbog,
New Jersey without buying a ticket, so we sat on an old varnished bench in the
waiting room watching the people come and go. I was homesick already.
A guard came up to us from behind and asked us .... "Who you waitin' on
boys?"
In a timid voice, Ernie replied, "We ain't waitin,' we're leaving for New
Jersey .... pickin' peaches like it says here in the Daily News." It was
our undoing, he should have been more evasive, but honesty was the only policy
Ernie ever had.
Under his breath, but loud enough for us to hear, the guard said .... "For
Christ's sake! .... what's this country comin' to?" He cleared his throat,
came around to the front of the bench and sat down between us and asked Ernie,
"Where you kids from .... Brooklyn, Bronx, you got family? -- how'd you
get here?" With his right hand he signaled to a group of policemen lounging
near the coffee counter. I went to the bathroom -- no two ways about it -- right
then and there on the varnished oak bench. One of cops came over and got our
names and addresses and Ernie and me realized we weren't going anywhere, certainly
not to New Jersey and we would be lucky if they let us go home.
The guard and the policeman spoke for a moment while Ernie and me fidgeted.
"This here is Sergeant Flannerty boys, he's going to take you home. Don't
gimme no shit understand -- soon as your folks miss you there's gonna be hell
to pay."
The intimidation of a uniform is more powerful than manacles, and we followed
Sergeant Flannerty -- Ernie on his left, me on his right, back to the IRT. The
sergeant put a nickel in for each of us and back we went to Brooklyn. It seemed
I had been away for years, we couldn't have been away more than a couple of
hours but I thought the place had changed. It looked more run down than ever
after sitting in Pennsylvania Station.
About a hundred yards from the tenement Sergeant Flannerty stopped us .... "Now
look, you're Ernie right? You're in charge, Ernie. Now I'm gonna give you a
break, if I show up with the two of you your family's gonna beat the hell out
of you. I'm gonna stand here and watch you go up that stoop just like nothin'
ever happened. But if I ever catch either of you in Penn Station again Ill tan
your asses -- get me?"
I don't know what Ernie had for supper that night but we had meat loaf and boy
.... it was about the best meat loaf I ever had.
©Harry Buschman 1996
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