Two Girls in a Georgia Cotton Mill (poem)

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from the Detroit Institute of Arts which included this 1909 photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine. It's part of a new exhibit, “Photography—The First 100 Years: Photographs from the DIA’s Collection,” set to run through Jan. 3.

I love the DIA. I love taking my kids there. I think everyone should check out this exhibit, with or without kids, because it looks amazing. But that's not what today's blog is about.

I can't shake this photo.

An old photograph takes a reality that's unavailable and puts it in your face. A 90-year-old fist socks you in the gut. That's how this picture hits me. These girls are dead by now, as is the era of American child labor they were part of. But in the picture, they share a moment of happiness with each other, and with us as we look on. Meanwhile, the machinery of the cotton mill stretches behind them, promising the future that waits for them once the moment is over.

The girl on the left looks like one of my daughters' close friends, a first-grader. The girl on the right reminds me of my oldest. The familiarity is wrenching. Our kids could've been born to work in the cotton mills and coal mines of the mid-19th century. They could've been born to equally hopeless conditions in Sudan or Myanmar or Afghanistan or Haiti in the 21st. Instead they wound up with us, our relative affluence and privilege. Why? How then should we live?

Here's a better look at the photo, followed by a poem.

Two Girls in a Georgia Cotton Mill

I have such a crush. Girl on the left full of a laugh she can barely hold in, frumpy dress and braids be damned. I'm in love with the tattered jacket of the girl on the right, her chaos of hair, that smile like she's seen a dove hatch from a hand, pleased as if youth could shrug off the teeth of the machinery aligned behind her, eating up the frame, the promise of her life, six days dawn to dusk 'til never. The photo hides the stench and heat, freezes the light before afternoon thins into three feet of dark between brick and steel, leaves out the promise of beatings, pennies of pay to barely keep them eating. This lucky moment, the smiles despite, that's what ruins me about history, all that joy, all those sparks its falls over like a mute bell built to smother. Please, yank them free, pack knapsacks with sandwiches, shove them on a yellow bus. Keep their eyes from blurring to nothing like the ghost of the woman who rises behind them.

Scott Beal is a stay-at-home dad and Dzanc Writer-in-Residence for 2009-10 at Ann Arbor Open School.