JAMES MICHAEL STARR
8. I Escape the Shadow
Above: “Children in Midland, Pennsylvania” (1940) by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Library of Congress
MY MOTHER WAS TEN YEARS OLD in the winter of 1940 when photographer Jack Delano came to town. Employed by the Farm Security Administration component of FDR’s WPA, Delano’s job was to document the living and working conditions of those Americans most sorely affected by the Great Depression.
Midland, at the other end of the state from his home in Philadelphia, offered Delano a convenient set for his tableau vivants of grimy, blue-collar life. It was a company town, its first houses erected earlier that century by Pittsburgh Crucible Steel Company with the goal of providing an ongoing workforce for their profitable new mill. The company house in which my mother lived, at 314 Midland Avenue, stood in the shadow of its smokestacks, possibly among those seen in Delano’s street scene from that winter.
The Library of Congress archives contain more than a hundred photos made in Midland during those years, and in so many of them, Pittsburgh Crucible Steel Company’s hundred-foot stacks loom over every soul, a constant reminder that, were it not for steel, this little hairpin turn in the Ohio River might remain a collection of small farms.
Other WPA photographers came there, too, and captured sobering images of tarpaper shacks and slum tenements in which the sole source of running water was an iron pump.
The stark documentary of these mostly black-and-white photos made my mother’s claims of a difficult childhood hard to dismiss. One, shot by Delano around the same time in the nearby town of New Brighton, shows a basement with an open toilet much like the one she described to me.
Marie Schioppo, protagonist of my first novel and loosely based on my mother, is a young singer living in Lindera, Pennsylvania, fictional counterpart to Midland. And just as my mother likely did, she feels caged in by the long shadows of those smoke stacks and is determined to escape.
Marie’s beloved priest confronts her with a metaphysical explanation of the fear that fuels that fear, but she denies it. “I’m not afraid of that place, Father. It’s just a bunch of grimy buildings.” But he presses her on it. “You want to escape
the ugliness. Because you’ve seen the opposite. In fact it was the last thing you saw in that moment before you were born. Your soul made a great passage, so you’ve forgotten.” She asks what it was she saw, and he says, “The face of God. In all its beauty. We’re all searching to find our way back. When you see beauty, you sense you’re drawing near. But when you see ugliness, you know you’re moving farther away, and all you see is shadow. So that’s what you fear. What we all fear. We fear the shadow.”
Both my mother and Marie had reason to run from the shadows that chased them. And writing their stories led me on my own journey, but in the opposite direction – to find my way back. That journey continues as I work toward the conclusion of my five-novel series, The Butterfly Myths.
The series begins with On the Wing, the story of Marie. Check it out here.
