Out of Mulberry Street.

By Jacob A. Riis

Book Overview

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE DUBOURQUES, FATHER AND SON IT must be nearly a quarter of a century since I first met the Dubourques. There are plenty of old New-Yorkers yet who will recall them as I saw them, plodding along Chatham street, swarthy, silent, meanly dressed, undersized, with their great tin signs covering front and back, like ill-favored gnomes turned sandwich-men to vent their spite against a gay world. Sunshine or rain, they went their way, Indian file, never apart, bearing their everlasting, unavailing protest. I demand, read the painted signs, the will and testament of my brother, who died in California, leaving a large property inheritance to Virgile Dubourque, which has never reached him. That was all any one was ever able to make out. At that point the story became rambling and unintelligible. Denunciation, hot and wrathful, of the thieves, whoever they were, of the government, of bishops, priests, and lawyers, alternated with protestations of innocence of heaven knows what crimes. If any one stopped them to ask what it was all about, they stared, shook their heads, and passed on. If money was offered, they took it without thanking the giver; indeed, without noticing him. They were never seen apart, yet never together in the sense of being apparently anything to each other. I doubt if they ever spoke, unless they were obliged to. Grim and lonely, they traveled the streets, parading their grievance before an unheeding day. What that grievance was, and what was their story, a whole generation had tried vainly to find out. Every young reporter tried his hand at it at least once, some many times, I among them. None of us ever found out anything tangible about them. Now and then we ran down a rumor in the region of Bleecker street, then the French quarter, ?I should have sa...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0839817584
• ISBN13: 9780839817581
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Irvington Pub
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"