Thrust: A Novel

Despite the new labor laws, child workers were everywhere. I’d see them emerging from factories and mills at all hours, day and night. Children were of high value to industry — and there were so many of them. The manufacturers knew they needn’t pay them anywhere near as much as adults. In fact, adults often sold their children’s labor to the factories and mills. Even today, my reformer friends tell me, the changes they seek are vehemently opposed by parents, industry — even by children who live in their own care, and who remain steadily in need of employment and food. As sentiment hardened against the work mills and factories, a desperate backlash evolved; owners began to speed up the machines and overpack the rooms laborers worked in, you see. The children were of even higher value now, due to the smallness of their hands, but often the children were unable to keep up with the whir and bite of the machines, and the runaway technology tore through their body parts.

What is the worth of a child in this era of industrial multiplication? It’s a question I think about often, as a childless woman with a womb so barren that if one were to peek between my legs you might find yourself looking up a long vacant tunnel straight to my brains. Every day that I walk my own city streets, I see plainly that the machines and their product are valued infinitely more than the battered, dirty, often maimed, always hungry children I see departing their shifts, day and night — like small ghosts, really. Their mechanization as valuable workers erases them as humans. They become the same as the commodities being produced — no, maybe less, the same as the raw materials used to make the products. The child body at the cannery is worth less than the tin can she stamps.

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