“THESE ‘SLAVES OF THE HARP’”
IN JUNE 1873, a groundskeeper in Central Park made a startling discovery. Huddled in a secluded corner of the park he found a famished twelve-year-old boy, “with scarcely a rag on him.” The boy could speak no English, but his hunger was evident, so the park worker shared his lunch with the unfortunate lad, who ravenously devoured the food. Before the park worker could decide what to do with the poor child, he ran off. The groundskeeper found the boy again the next day, however, and after feeding him again, took him to one of the park’s shanty-like huts, where many impoverished New Yorkers lived. There, a Mrs. McMonegal cleaned the boy up, fed him, and found him some decent clothes. During the two weeks that the boy remained with Mrs. McMonegal, he was able, bit by bit, to explain how he had ended up in Central Park alone and famished.
His name was Joseph, and he had been born in Calvello, a desolate, windswept village about ninety miles southeast of Naples in the mountainous Italian region of Basilicata. Joseph had lived with his parents, who were peasant farmers, until age nine, when they handed him over to a stranger who took him aboard a ship with eight other boys from the same region. The man was a “padrone,” a labor contractor who had bought the right to the children’s labor from their parents. After weeks at sea, they arrived in New York, where the padrone sent Joseph onto the streets to play a triangle and beg for money. He slept on a pile of straw on a cellar floor and was fed only small rations of black bread twice a day. Soon he was taught the violin and told not to return each night to his basement home on Crosby Street until he had collected one dollar from passing pedestrians. The padrone beat him when he failed to bring home the requisite sum and bound him by his wrists at night so he could not run away. But after living in such conditions for more than two years, Joseph did escape. A few days later, he was found in Central Park and his story, as told to the Times, became the talk of the town.1
New Yorkers were appalled by Joseph’s saga. Explaining the outpouring of sympathy, an editorial noted that “it seemed impossible that the world had given up stealing men from the African coast, only to kidnap children from Italy, and that the auction-block for negroes had been overturned in the Southern States, only to be set up again for white infants in New-York.” No slave, the Times asserted, “ever narrated cruelties more brutal than has this wretched boy.”2
Aside from his escape, Joseph’s story was not unique. Tiny Italian minstrels, generally ranging in age from six to twelve, had first become fixtures on the thoroughfares of Paris and London. Brought to those capitals in the late 1850s and early 1860s, the children played small harps, violins, and triangles while soliciting donations from passersby. When officials in France and England announced that they would no longer allow padroni to victimize the helpless waifs in this manner, many of them brought their tiny charges to New York. In some cases, an entrepreneur purchased the right to a youngster’s labor in Italy and accompanied him all the way to the United States. In other instances, a child might be traded two or three times in different countries—once in Italy, another time in France (usually Marseilles), and a third time in the United States—before he began performing on the sidewalks of New York. By the early 1870s there were about a thousand child street musicians, almost all boys, living in the city.3
Like Joseph, these children were mostly natives of Basilicata. Residents of this isolated and impoverished southern province had for centuries learned mestiere per partire, jobs specifically designed to help them escape Basilicata and earn a living in more prosperous areas—either within Italy or abroad. Learning to play a musical instrument was a mestiere per partire especially popular in Basilicata. Yet it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that children began leaving Basilicata to work as musicians. Parents who sold their offspring might appear cruel or heartless, but they often had the youngsters’ best interests at heart. By turning their children over to padroni, these parents felt they were giving them a chance of escape the crushing poverty of life in Basilicata. Besides, each padrone promised to train his charges to become skilled musicians, a trade that in theory would guarantee them a far better income than had ever been within the reach of their parents.4
Whatever the parents’ motivations, New York’s child street musicians lived and worked in appalling circumstances. “Without father or mother, or any relative who might be in the least interested in their welfare,” complained the Times, “these ‘slaves of the harp’ have been torn from their homes in Italy, and compelled to support, by the hardest of hard work, a lazy lot of ‘padrones’ whose only care is to make as much out of the poor children as possible. Half-starved and ragged they are sent into the streets, and should they return at night without a certain sum of money which they have been ordered to make, the poor children are severely punished, and sent to their filthy couches without their supper.” Charles Loring Brace, who was intimately familiar with the musicians’ circumstances through his work with the Children’s Aid Society, noted that the colder the weather, the more likely the padrone would force his charges out onto the streets, playing the harp “to excite the compassion of our citizens. . . . I used to meet these boys sometimes on winter-nights half-frozen and stiff with cold.” One Times reporter encountered a boy just five years old, who “trudged along, bearing his cross, in the form of a harp, twice the size of himself” and was crying “dove mia Mama,” where’s my mother?5
An Italian street musician and his padrone. Harper’s Weekly (September 13, 1873): 801. Collection of the author.
After publishing Joseph’s tale, the Times sent a reporter to uncover the stories of other Italian street musicians. He soon found a small band of the waifs rummaging through some garbage barrels looking for food. The youngest “was regaling himself upon a semi-petrified beef bone. In the other hand he held a piece of bread begrimed with filth. His triangle lay on the ground forgotten.” At first, the children refused to talk with the journalist, but they grew more forthcoming after he fed them a meal of meat, bread, and strawberries at his home. The youngest, a six-year-old called Frances-chito (“little Francis”), was the triangle player. His padrone required him to bring home at least eighty cents each day. A second boy, Rocco, a twelve-year-old from Laurenzano (a small village about five miles west of Calvello), had been in New York for six months. A third youngster, Pietrocito (“little Peter”), also a Laurenzano native, had arrived in New York just six days earlier via Naples and Marseilles. “Their clothing is such as a beggar would scorn,” commented the outraged Times correspondent. “. . . They are only washed once a month, and in the meantime they never have their clothes off. At the end of the month they receive a clean shirt.”
The padrone kept his charges in tatters not merely to save money but to elicit the most sympathy from passersby and thus increase the youngsters’ income. Aside from an hour of music practice each morning at dawn, the children spent all day and much of the evening on the streets, rain or shine, performing and begging. “Hundreds of . . . young Italian children,” the Times lamented, “are now suffering the greatest cruelties at the hands of task-masters, or owners, who have purchased them in New-York City, and who cruelly and maliciously beat and ill-treat them daily should they not bring home enough money every night to satisfy their greed.”6
The extent to which these child street musicians lived in Five Points is unclear. Most of the children described by the Times resided on Crosby Street a mile or so north of the notorious neighborhood. Yet little Joseph told the Times reporter that many of his fellow musicians lived on Mulberry Street. In 1881, Harper’s Weekly published an image of a Baxter Street padrone whipping a child musician, further evidence that some of these children lived in Five Points. Other accounts of the neighborhood’s tenements noted the presence of small violins and harps, indicating that the children inhabiting them probably performed on the streets.7
After the Times published Joseph’s story in mid-1873, an outraged public demanded an end to the virtual enslavement of these poor children. Initial efforts to arrest the padroni proved fruitless because prosecutors discovered that the Italians were not violating any laws. That changed in 1874, as the New York legislature enacted a statute making it a crime to receive children under the age of sixteen for the purpose of performing on the street. By the end of the year, the Children’s Aid Society could proudly report that the new law had virtually eliminated the sight “of boys of tender age staggering under the weight of the harp, or begging for the harpist.” Thus came to an end one of the most cruel forms of child labor New York has ever known.8