Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/31

Rh after seeing all they could, they came to the conclusion that no almsgiving could reach these people ; for, if you give them money, food, or clothing, it was all pawned at the shops for drink. A gentleman also called on us, and not knowing I was a Southerner, began to converse on the hopeless degradation of some of the free blacks in this city. He said, he had been informed that many of them lived in boxes, without any bedding or any covering, and that they had to pay the landlords of this unique lodging a few cents every night. In the day, they followed the trade of ragging and. boning, that is, picking up the rags and the offal thrown out in the street, and selling them to some manufactory for a penny or two, which answered to defray the expense of the before-mentioned lodgings. Their food they obtained by begging and stealing.

This gentleman also said, "that not a half mile from Philadelphia, he understood there were three houses in which three hundred of the most degraded class of negroes lived. Their food, when they had any, was bread and grog; and in 1846, the ship-fever got in among them, and they died like dogs. Finally, the city authorities had to interfere, and break up these pestilential abodes." Another gentleman told me, that these said negroes sometimes hired for a cent a narrow cellar to sleep in, and as its architecture did not admit of their lying down, they fastened a rope under their arms, which was suspended from the wall (somewhat, I suppose, after the manner of a modern baby-jumper), and there swung themselves to sleep. But if their slumbers were continued after early dawn, the landlord of the cellar would cut the rope and let them fall into the pit below, to wake them up. Another gentleman told me that a man in Philadelphia hired a long house, and had shelves arranged the whole length of it, up to the top of the ceiling. These shelves were rented out for four cents each to the negroes; that is, each one could hire his own length on the shelf for the above sum. The shelves contained not a single bed or a single inch of covering. They gave the same landlord four more cents for their food, which was obtained by him in this way. He hired every morning some black people to go from door to door and beg for cold victuals. This food they threw into the bags brought for the purpose; so that fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables, and fruits were thrown in promiscuously together, and when it was carried home to the landlord, he spread out a table, without any expense, with this unique hash. These eight pennies were made by ragging and boning and prizing, and after some few years, the proceeds from this original mode