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Stranger in the Street

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Lee walked the sweltering streets of the Bowery. Raw garbage covered every available corner and spilled into and out of the alleyways. Sound, like the garbage, permeated the thick air, and the smell of rotting vegetables and dirt mixed with laughter from the street urchins and dogs barking filled his ears and eyes and nose as he tried in vain to justify his reasons for being here. He hadn’t given himself access to this part of the city until now, and he was amazed at the cacophony of voices raised in every language. The world had landed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and he could feel his senses overload from the beauty of the experience and the pain of the poverty.
The streets, hard-packed with dirt a few years ago, were now white cement stained a grayish brown from traffic and the outdoor life of the poor. The summer months were unbearable indoors, and as Lee saw it, the less fortunate could move their entire lives outside to the city streets and courtyards and be far more comfortable.
From the fifth floor, an Italian immigrant, her ample frame filling the open window, a visual that what she offered would be worth the hours spent in the heat of an inadequate kitchen to prepare it, in heavy accent called out to her children on the street below, “Time for dinnah, Angelo! Get ya’ brotha!”
The German girls in the tenement across the courtyard took to the fire escapes to reel in the laundry, hardly considered clean, flapping in the wind off the East River, a catch-all for the gray dust from the street. It was not without logic. Spin the rope on the pulley, take down the pins and the tattered clothing a piece at a time by drawing the rope monotonously and, in the process, celebrate yet another day of poverty.
The aroma of garlic and fresh tomatoes hand pressed through a cheesecloth sieve temporarily overpowered the stench of garbage, visions of a full stomach for some, and the streets began to empty for the dinner hour when body and soul were replenished for the time being. And afterwards, the young ones played and romped till midnight when they vied for the fire escape landings, the little waifs bent on being the first to call dibs on a cool place to sleep the night away.
Tomorrow would bring them to the streets again, barefoot boys with unbridled energy and a lust for life, where they would learn to be men or devils, depending on whether or not they had parents who cared.
Lee smiled as he thought of his own childhood under the hot Mississippi sun, wide-open spaces, hills and hollows, a deep cistern well into which he had dropped the oaken bucket a thousand times for cold, clear water. He suddenly longed for the musty fragrance and coolness of the shade of the sweet gum trees on McGill Creek, and he was aware once again of his shirt clinging tightly to his chest and the drag of his sweaty pant legs pulling against him as he walked the streets of the Lower East Side. He envisioned the pile of ragged overalls and hand-sewn flower-sack shirts on the hill above the cool waters of McGill and the adventure of scurrying down the soapstone to the bottom. Just Lee and his uncle Samuel who was only two years older than he.



Jane Bennett Gaddy
September, 2018


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