Counting on Grace (24 page)

Dear Mr. Hine
,

This is the notebook you wanted me and Arthur to fill up. 1 had to do all the writing. Arthur cut off two of his fingers when he caught them in a frame and he couldn't hold the pencil after that. He left town with his mother and Miss Lesley got fired and I'm the teacher for now. It's not easy, but it's better than the mill.

Thank you for the pictures.

Your friend
,

Grace Forcier

Photograph on pages 216-217:
All these children worked in the North Pownal Cotton Mill in 1910. Addie, the girl in the photograph on the book jacket, on the title page, and on page 222, is in the front row. She's leaning on the girl to her left, probably her older sister, Annie. Photograph by Lewis Hine.

Lewis Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. His father died the year he graduated from high school. To help support the family, Hine went to work in an upholstery factory thirteen hours a day, six days a week, for four dollars a week. After seven years of working at jobs that he hated, he met a professor of education who convinced him to take evening classes at the state Normal School. In 1901, Hine moved to New York City to teach at the Ethical Culture School, where he became the school photographer. His students there remembered him fondly as a mime and a trickster. These acting skills served him well in later years when he needed to talk his way inside the mills.

In 1904, Hine took his camera to Ellis Island to photograph the streams of immigrants eager to find a new life in America. Perhaps because of his own early experiences at dull, dead-end jobs, Hine was particularly horrified by the idea of child labor. So it was natural for this young photographer to follow the trail of those newly arrived families as they made their way into the city streets and factories and cotton fields of America looking for work. In 1907, Hine traveled to Pittsburgh to document the lives of laborers in
an industrial city. “We live underneath America,” a steel-worker said. “America goes on above our heads.”

In 1908, Hine left teaching to take a job as staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. He was paid one hundred dollars a month.

Hine did whatever he could to get the pictures of child workers. Sometimes he told the mill foreman he was selling postcards or Bibles. Other times he pretended that he had been ordered by someone in the head office to photograph the machinery. If he could not get into a mill, he photographed the workers walking home at the end of their thirteen-hour day. And everywhere he went, he took notes as well as pictures because he knew that without concrete evidence, the mill owners would denounce his photographs as fakes. Child labor was cheap and the owners needed children to work in their mills to keep their costs down and their shareholders happy. Superintendents, inspectors and often the parents, desperate for that extra bit of income, all pretended that the children were happy at their work and the conditions were healthy and safe.

But Hine knew better. He once said, “I have always been more interested in persons than in people.” With a kind word and a smile, he showed the children that they could trust him. He used the buttons on his vest to measure their approximate height. As he set up his equipment, he asked questions and listened to the children. Often the workers revealed their names and their real ages and stories about their lives. A seven-year-old boy in Wilmington, Delaware, told Hine that he hauled twenty-five-pound sacks of flour off the delivery wagon. An eight-year-old girl
in Alabama explained that she could shuck only two pots of oysters when she had to take care of the baby at the same time. A skilled stenographer, Hine kept notes in a small notebook hidden in his pocket, but only as a way to back up the information revealed in the photographs.

In a single year, Lewis Hine traveled as much as fifty thousand miles. He took pictures of children peddling fruit on city streets; picking cranberries, beets and cotton; shucking oysters; polishing glass in noisy factories; selling newspapers; rolling cigarettes; stringing milk tags; making paper flowers and pillow lace in dingy tenement buildings; working underground in coal mines; and doffing bobbins in textile mills.

By photographing his subjects at their own level, he forced the viewer to look directly into the eyes of the children whose health and education and futures had been sacrificed so that middle-class Americans could live their comfortable lives.

The children in a Hine picture stare out at us with a remarkable mixture of pride, sorrow and pluck. Because Hine sees each one of them as a separate human being, he forces us to do the same. That is why his pictures haunt us to this day.

I first saw the picture of the girl I came to know as Addie at the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont.

She leans on her spinning frame, staring out at the camera, dressed in a filthy smock. Her one pocket is stuffed full Her left arm rests easily on the frame, but bent at a strange angle, as if perhaps a bone had been broken and was never set properly. Her bare feet, planted firmly, are slick with grease. She looks directly at you, eyes wide open and solemn, her expression resigned, a little wary. She is beautiful.

Addie was just one in an exhibit of child labor photographs taken by Lewis Hine in northern New England. The note he scribbled in his pocket notebook reads “Anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill, 1910.” Once I saw Addie's face, I never forgot it. My character Grace Forcier was inspired by that face.

Even though I created Grace from my imagination and she grew to be her very own person, I always wondered about Addie. She appears in two group shots Hine took; in both she is pressed right up next to an older girl. The way Addie is leaning on this girl's shoulder makes you think they could be sisters.

But who was Addie? A note by a child labor investigator named E. F. Brown who visited the mill in February 1910 listed her as Addie Laird. In 1998 the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp showing Addie's picture to commemorate child labor laws in its “Celebrate the Century” series. At that time, researchers at the U.S. Department of Labor admitted they could find no trace of Addie Laird anywhere.

I decided to go looking for her myself. And here's what I found. Starting in 1790 and every decade thereafter, the United States has conducted a census of its citizens. Microfiche copies of these records can be read at the Northeast Office of the National Archives and Record Administration in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. But when I typed “Addie, North Pownal, Vermont, 1910” into the office's computer program, nothing came up. I tried Adeline. No luck. Adelaide. Bingo! The computer screen directed me to one Adalaid Harris, Bennington County, Vermont, roll 1612, page 111, sheet 12B. On the microfiche reader I scrolled through page after page of names penned in a flowery cursive.

There she was. In Pownal, Vermont, Mr. George E. Corey on the fourth day of May, 1910, recorded the two Card sisters: Anna, Female, White, 14 years of age, Single, and Addie, Female, White, 12 years of age, Single. Both were living with their grandmother, a Mrs. Adalaid Harris.

I had found Addie. Her name wasn't Laird; it was Card.

Back in 1910, some shyster sold watered-down ink to the U.S. Department of Labor and Commerce, which was charged with taking the census, so most of the critical information on sheet 12B has simply faded away. But this much I
could make out: Anna and Addie were born in Vermont, they spoke English, and they were spinners in the cotton factory. Five other people were also living in the household of Mrs. Adalaid Harris, four of them orphaned or abandoned grandchildren.

Now that I had the correct name, I found Addie again in the 1900 census, living with her widowed father, still in the household of her maternal grandmother. So Addie's mother, Susan Harris, had already died by the time Addie turned two, and by 1910, her father, Emmet D. Card, had disappeared. When I turned to the 1920 census, I could find no Addie Card in the entire country with the correct birth year. This meant one of three things: Addie had either died by the 1920 census, or she had married and her name had been changed, or she had simply slipped through the cracks—as often happens, especially with poorer, rural families.

At this point, I went to the Pownal Town Office, where records of marriages, births, and deaths are kept in a bank vault. The clerks cheerfully dragged out dusty tomes and laid them before me.

I started with the cemetery records, as I was convinced that this frail girl could not have lasted long, considering her twelve-hour days in the mill. I found many Cards in the Pownal graveyards, but no Addie. I scanned burial permits and death records. No Addie.

Just as I was ready to give up, someone offered to look through one more book in the vault. I was halfway out the door when she rushed after me, calling my name. “The book fell open at this page,” she said. “I think Addie pushed it off the shelf.”

It was Addie Card's marriage certificate.

On February 23, 1915, Addie married Edward Hatch, another spinner in the mill. They were both seventeen.

Now I had her new last name. In the 1920 census, I found her living with the Hatch family and still in the mill, working as a spooler. By that time, her husband, Edward, had joined the navy.

But Addie did not appear in the 1930 census. And because census records are closed for seventy years after they are taken, we won't be able to check the 1940 census until 2010.

At this point, I hired Joe Manning, a friend and fellow writer, to pursue what few leads I had left.

At the end of the trail, we located two of Addie's adoptive descendants. We sat down with them and, in a matter of hours, pieced together the arc of one girl's life. We learned that Addie was sent into the mill when she was eight years old and had to stand on a soapbox to reach the bobbins. She had a nervous collapse at the age of thirteen, just one year after Lewis Hine took her picture. She was tied into her bed while her relatives went to work in the mill. (Could Addie have been “speaking” to me when I imagined Pépé, Grace's grandfather, tied to his bed to keep him from wandering?) We learned that Addie had changed her name to Pat, and that she never knew her own birthday. I handed over a photocopy of the Pownal document that recorded the birth of a baby girl to Susan Harris and Emmet D. Card on December 6, 1898.

Addie never told her descendants about the day Lewis Hine took her picture. She never knew that her face ended
up in a Reebok advertisement or on a postage stamp issued a hundred years after her birth or that Hine's original glass-plate negative resides in the Library of Congress. Addie Card never knew that she had become a symbol of the need for child labor reform, and neither did her descendants.

Addie lived the dark side of the American dream. She was married twice, both times unhappily. Months after she lost custody of her biological daughter in 1925, she adopted another girl. They moved often from the mill towns of upstate New York to the big city itself, where Addie and friends were captured in a studio photograph celebrating Victory in Europe Day. By the time Addie died, at ninety-four, she was living in a housing project, surviving on a Social Security check and rent subsidies. But she was rich in the love of her adoptive family. “She didn't have anything to give, but she gave it,” her great-granddaughter told us. “I could not imagine my life without Gramma Pat's guidance.”

In this novel, history and fiction are pieced together the way Grace twisted the ends of cotton thread to keep her frame running.

We return to the photograph of Addie again and again because Hine saw her not just as a symbol, but also as a person, with a life beyond the mill. For that reason, the “anemic little spinner” remains burned into our national memory as she was etched into the glass of Lewis Hine's negative almost a hundred years ago.

That's why I wrote
Counting on Grace.
And that's why, in the end, I went looking for Addie.