Once a child, who looked to be missing half her face, noticed my lingering glance and held my gaze long enough to explain: she suffered from phossy jaw. I had no idea what she meant. I put my hand to her face, and she continued — with difficulty; her speech had been impacted — that her facial disfigurement was the product of her work in a matchstick factory, where she applied the yellow phosphorus that makes matchstick heads easier to light. Her fellow workers had mouth abscesses, she said. Some suffered facial disfigurements, others brain damage.
“Come see me at night,” she told me. “Me gums glow greenish in the dark.”
A migrant child, then. Fresh immigrants, around the age of eight, were considered the ideal workforce. Just the right size, the right level of desperate. New faces arriving weekly, in infinite supply, infinitely replaceable.
Some industries had special needs. Coal-mining companies employed children as young as five — small bodies still able to slip through tiny tunnels and fissures where men could not. Girls and boys were strapped to coal sledges, crawling on hands and knees. Textile factories packed women and children in together like colorful bobbins in a box, always with the windows and doors locked. The smallest of children were forced to crawl under blazing machines to collect fallen production materials.
When — or should I say if? — these children made it to adulthood, they arrived malformed. Hunched backs and bowed legs, crushed pelvises. Forever damaged vision. Loss of hearing.
Lost limbs.
Many machines sucked in a girl’s hair. Some tore off pieces of scalp.
Countless hands were lost. Arms, even faces, mangled. The sunk cost of mechanizing America, creating the fiction of freedom, included the slashing of woman and child bodies. The disconnected pieces fell to the ground, reaching for one another across brutalities and absence, until the wet gutters carried them away.
At a granite mill, twenty young girls, some as young as five, were killed in a fire. Burned alive. Suffocated. Killed while trying to leap to safety. Papers called for reform: Not a reduction in child labor, but an increase in fire-safety measures. The workplace must be made safer for children.
How in the world will we ever become whole from this?
I designed a different solution.
“Come with me,” I told the boy transfixed by my missing leg, the boy with one arm. And I led him through the corridors of my infamous establishment, past unparted curtains, to the largest room in the building — Room 8, a former theater space of some kind — where I lead the children I can. Here, safely behind a wall and sturdy door, beyond reach of the all-consuming bulge of monied men in my city, is the room where I conspire to bring children of every nationality and age and size to be educated, to be drawn away from industry toward intellect, toward economic autonomy.
In a thriving city, children make such plump targets. As much for capitalists as for kidnappers, slavers, and sociopaths.
If my city wants these children, it will have to come and get them.
Aurora’s Eye
The makeshift school behind the door of Room 8 in my building had desks made from the finest cherrywood to be found in the city. The chairs were equally exquisite, with velvet cushions and backs so that each small body might feel held in a way that had eluded them in life. Prosthetics were abundant throughout the room — some of the newest inventions, their works clicking surely into position, some even humming mechanically. All of it the bequest of a former client upon his death: his work impeccable, my secret safe.
People give up on children all the time. They hurt them, abuse them, abduct them, extract their labor to the point of exhaustion, then throw them out like trash. One weekend in 1874, a Philadelphia dry-goods purveyor named Christian Ross looked up to see his five-year-old son, Walter, approaching him with an object in his hand.
“Open your hand, my boy. What have you got there?” he asked in a fatherly way.
The boy opened his hand. The object held in the cup of his small pink skin was a candy. The father asked the boy where the candy had come from.
“From a man in a wagon,” the boy explained. “He gave one to Charley too.” Charley was the boy’s four-year-old brother.
Three days later, while washing dishes, a local woman looked through her kitchen window and saw a wagon pull up to the curb near the home. The driver and another man talked to the two boys; then the wagon drove away with the boys.
On his way to the police station, filled with terror, the father saw his son Walter coming back to him, in the company of a man who had found him lost and crying. The story his son told him cracked his heart. The man they’d met earlier in the week, the man who had given Walter and his brother candy, had drawn up to them in a wagon with another man. They asked the boys if they wanted to buy fireworks for the upcoming Fourth of July. What boy could say no to fireworks? The boys went with the men. Charley sat between the men and Walter sat on the second man’s knee. When they arrived at a cigar store, the men gave Walter twenty-five cents to go inside and purchase firecrackers.
When Walter came out of the cigar store, the wagon — with the men, with his brother — was gone.
The abduction became a sensation, of course. But what made its infamy linger was that the kidnapping of Charley Ross was the first recorded case in which a ransom was demanded. The four-year-old boy was never found. Two years later, the father wrote a book about the disappearance of his son. Soon, however, it was all forgotten.
So, you see, I do not believe that anyone is searching for these children in my care. My goal, in gathering them together, was to give them a chance to exist without violence or fear.
You may wonder about teachers.
You will question my judgment.
But I was certain of my methods.
In Room 8, the children were the teachers. Each was tasked with gathering a piece of information, of truth, and sharing it with the rest. I was present at times, but not often.
You see, their hunger to be full people in the world drives children to gather knowledge voraciously, to study, to share what they’ve found. What I could grant them was to see that they were fed and clothed and cared for in a beautiful house, where a child was free and safe to be a child. In place of a maternal embrace, I gave them the space to exist as full humans. Also: Books. Maps. Information. Drawings. Photographs. Paper and pencils and drawing pads and paints and canvas. All manner of small machines, including candy-making machinery — to study the mechanics. The new invention of sound reproduction — Mr. Edison’s phonograph, Mr. Bell’s graphophone — will soon give children the chance to capture their own voice. I wanted to give them the chance to invent their own world.
For years, the Raids had constantly replenished the workforce, a sinister kind of labor trafficking machine. Nightly roundups, perpetrated by unscrupulous men with clubs and ropes and nets. At first, they trained their sights on black children and Native American children and Asian and Mexican children, who rarely received pay, since their debt tethered them to their owners. Then, as demand increased, they expanded their reach to all children, to the endless supply that arrived in the city from the farmlands, from overseas, from anywhere. Debt bondage was common. The men who worked the Raid force may well have been victims of debt bondage themselves, or criminals seeking something besides a life behind bars or the poorhouse. Some, of course, were simply evil.