Fabric Faults[1]
By Anonymous
It was the third time that the woman returned with the guard when she finally told Catherine Carr, “You can leave now.” Relieved, Catherine thought of the other prisoners who must have stayed there longer. She had expected that they would let her out after a few days, knowing that Alder Man Elkington had written to Mrs. Townsend. Though it was only March 25th, time had passed with such a slowness that she had wondered what it was that brought her here in the first place.
***
When she was younger, Catherine’s mother sewed for the Arsenal. Her brittle hands moved slowly across the fabrics, carefully stitching her next piece for the soldiers. Sometimes the seams tore. In those moments, it was unclear how the product would turn out.
Her father made a living from the neighborhood grocer. In his rare moments of sobriety, William paid his dues, and then he fell back into his slumber. He slipped away from Catherine early on. In fact, she could not remember the days when liquor had not consumed him. The signs had pointed, but nobody noticed.
Who could have? Six months before she arrived at Eastern State, her mother died. To be honest, it surprised nobody. She was already weak after keeping up for Catherine, but between the sickness and the sewing and the huckstering from door to door, she finally collapsed. The neighbors nearly caught her when she fell, but the Doctor said it would have been too late.
And Jane had left for Brown Street after she married the confectioner on Market Street, Thomas Irvin. Something about the sweets captivated her. Or perhaps the little smiles he snuck to her when nobody else was watching. Whatever the case, she was gone.
To chance it was not typically what Catherine’s mother did to her little fabric faults. She was skilled enough to correct them with a quick spin of thread. However, beginners sometimes did the opposite. Frustration pent, they would give up. For other women, it varied. Some would give their work a little more time to see what they could salvage.
There was no reason for Jane to take her in. But when Catherine asked, neither was there a hard gamble. The sisters were never close, but neither did they conflict.
“Find some work,” Jane told her. Otherwise, it was much too difficult during these times to feed another mouth.
She tried. It was only a couple weeks at the mill when she could not keep going. She saw no daylight in that room. It was dark when she arrived and dark when she left. The other ladies tirelessly worked, which left her wondering why she could not do the same.
Her father looked different when he opened the door. Or might it have been the way he looked at Catherine: had he forgotten who she was? She had just been about to ask whether she could return, but another woman came into view, and it was lost.
If her mother had left some seams untied or unfinished in some fashion, little strings stuck out from the sides. With a little tug, Catherine pleasured their ripping. The more she pulled, the larger the rip grew. Her mother would scold her afterward, but they both knew that it would have happened, even if nobody had done anything.
Mrs. Carrigan did something. Catherine told her the whole truth when she showed up on her doorsteps at Shippen Street. About his drinking and how when he got so drunk, he pulled Mother out of bed by her hair. How the children hid next door from him.
Mrs. Carrigan was divorced but lived with a Doctor. They seemed foul, but the story and Catherine left her the impression. They took her in. In those few days, it looked like it was going to be better.
She enjoyed the time alone. Especially in the evenings when Mrs. Carrigan and the Doctor went to the Theatre. They went often, and in those nights, Catherine walked along the halls. It was a small house with not much to see but she still enjoyed looking around. She imagined that it was her house, pretending that she had lived here for decades. By the pair returned, she had retired to her room without a trace of movement from before.
It was during one of these nights when Catherine found a closet of Mrs. Carrigan’s dresses. How well it fit on her, she thought as she looked at the patterns. The clock had made its run by now, but she closed her door and left the house. The stores had closed by now, but she did not venture much that night.
A few nights later, she was walking along 6th near Cherry Street to see Mrs. Bankford, who owned the umbrella store. She had just passed by the Theatre when she saw another older girl across the street watching her. Catherine had seen her before a few days before. She had stopped by Mrs. Carrigan for an errand, but they had not spoken to each other. They stared at each other.
“You are not supposed to be here,” she said to Catherine. Startled, Catherine turned around and began to walk in the other direction. But as she walked away, the girl followed. She quickened her pace, but so too did she. She crossed towards Mulberry Street.[2] As she was walking, Catherine saw Alder Man Elkington in the street.
“Stop her,” the other girl shouted at Alder Man Elkington. Doctor Elkington turned around, and Catherine began running. “She’s taken something,” the girl told Doctor Elkington. A few minutes later, they had caught up to her.
Although Spring had already arrived, the night was frigid enough that she could almost imagine that the coldness from the Station House walls seeped from outside. Catherine had pleaded with Doctor Elkington. “There must me a misunderstanding,” she told him. She had been chased. She did not know the girl. She had taken nothing. But skepticism took him over, and even the Station House men laughed at her when she retold them the story.
She must have dozed off because she did not hear his quiet footsteps. When she stirred, she saw it was one of the Station Men. Jingling his keys, he tried opening her cell. At that point, they both knew what he was trying to do. She screamed. Quickly the keys turned again, locking her, and he ran. She never closed her eyes for the rest of the night.
***
After Catherine’s mother died, the clothing she sewed remained unfinished for some time. When they came to straighten her house, they took the fabrics away for someone else to complete.
Catherine Carr’s story did not surprise Mrs. Townsend. While her life was not as immoral as some of the others, she knew Catherine could fit at the Rosina Home. Dr. Elkington wrote about the girl from Cherry Street, the accusation of larceny, the Station House man who tried to get into her cell, and the time she spent at Eastern State. Some reformation, employment, and instruction would do fine.[3]
Author’s Note: I do not typically choose creative pieces for assignments that have an analytical paper option, but I felt compelled because the nature of this assignment suggested that contextualization of Carr’s life both provided a healthy exercise for historical analysis as well as personalization that, I hope, painted her with more dignity. This dignity is important, given that these Rosine Association archival pieces serve as the remaining records of these women; their incarceration underpins their historical significance. Yet how we present them can give their lives more meaning than just that of their time behind bars. Specifically, I modeled this piece off Sarah Haley’s “Speculative Accounting,” which describes the process of filling in archival gaps with a researcher’s historical and creative ideas. I sought to apply our conversations about the presentation of individuals as neither “inherently deviant” nor as martyrs to my creative process.[4] I also focused on the importance of context towards Carr’s background, especially highlighting her father’s treatment and family conditions. Additionally, I piece put the piece in conversation to her mother’s occupation as a sewer, playing with ideas of dependence and work—two themes that have surfaced throughout the class. Finally, how we understand time can alter our understanding of an event. I chose to alter the structure by have the piece open with the end of Carr’s case file and afterwards explained how she ended at Rosine: in doing so, the piece prods the reader to question the historical forces and lifestyle conditions that brought Carr to prison in the first place. While this project took considerable more time to write than an analytical piece would for me, I felt this was a more exciting exercise that applied some of the similar questions that we engage within class.
Bibliography
Emilie S. Troth and Edward D. Lorimer. “MIRA SHARPLESS TOWNSEND 1798–1859.” In Notable Women of Pennsylvania, edited by Gertrude Bosler Biddle and Sarah Dickinson Lowrie, 129–30. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv4v336k.86.
J.C. Sidney. “Map of the City of Philadelphia Together with All the Surrounding Districts.” Smith & Wistar, n.d. http://www.philageohistory.org/rdic-images/view-image.cfm/HSF.D2G8.
Rosine Association. “Rosine Association Casebooks.” Philadelphia, PA, June 21, 2021. Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. https://github.com/swat-ds/datasets/tree/main/rosine.
Sarah Haley. “Convict Leasing, (Re)Production, and Gendered Racial Terror.” In No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. University of North Carolina Press, n.d. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469627601_haley.6.
[1] “Fabric Faults” is based on a archival materials from the Rosine Association. Rosine Association, “Rosine Association Casebooks.”
[2] J.C. Sidney, “Map of the City of Philadelphia Together with All the Surrounding Districts.”
[3] Emilie S. Troth and Edward D. Lorimer, “MIRA SHARPLESS TOWNSEND 1798–1859,” 129–30.
[4] Sarah Haley, “Convict Leasing, (Re)Production, and Gendered Racial Terror,” 62–63.