Grace's Pictures by Cindy Thomson Page B

you.”
    Mrs. Hawkins motioned for Grace to take the empty chair between them. In front, a makeshift platform had been erected for the speaker, just a series of crates nailed together so the audience would be able to see Mr. Riis with ease. Grace glanced at the program bill they had been handed when they came in. Mr. Jacob Riis was boldly inscribed at the top, along with the description “Author of How the Other Half Lives .”
    Mrs. Reilly leaned over to whisper. “He’s a very intelligent man, Grace.”
    “Who is the other half? Half of what?”
    “There’s the rich half and the poor half. You know.” The woman turned her head away.
    Grace thought surely there were more divisions in American society than that. She did not consider herself poor, not truly. She’d been poor. She’d gone to bed with gnawing hunger in her stomach. She’d lacked fresh water and combs for her hair. Now she had those things. She was . . . well . . . dependent. Whowould write a book on the dependent masses? Grace started to ask another question, but the woman hushed her as a man in a suit came to the podium.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Children’s Aid Society, I welcome you to tonight’s lecture.” He droned on about financial donations and the progress his charity was making until Grace had to cover her yawns with her palm.
    Finally the man of the hour gingerly picked his way along the crate slats and turned to address the crowd. When he spoke about tenement houses, Grace knew that those were the places she had been fortunate enough to avoid. The most misfortunate of the lowly lived there.
    Mr. Riis pulled on his coat lapels. “The poorest immigrant comes here with the purpose and ambition to better himself and, given half a chance, might be reasonably expected to make the most of it.”
    There! She’d heard it from someone who had been an immigrant and made something of himself. There was hope for her now, she supposed.
    He went on. “Yet high rents for squalid living conditions and low wages depress the immigrant and squash his resolve.”
    Oh, so it wasn’t so. Grace was confused, tired, and hearing her father’s voice in her head again as Mr. Riis elucidated eloquently about the tenements and the immigrants’ plight. “And these are the dungeons where crime springs forth, though it need not be. This, my friends, is where the line lies—that place that marks below it the dwelling of the ‘other half.’ My photographs will illustrate my contentions.”
    The words caught Grace’s attention. She wondered if this man’s photography was anything like Mr. Sherman’s on Ellis Island.
    An assistant dimmed the lights and turned on a tin box machine to project what he called lantern slides on the wall. Gigantic images. The crowd gasped. She was not the only one amazed. What a wondrous invention.
    Grace strained her neck to see around heads. Scene after scene of dingy buildings and glum-faced families living in cramped quarters sprang into view in black and white. Instead of the creative compositions she’d expected, these images captured sullen faces and filth. Perhaps if the photographs were in color . . . but no, all of New York was mostly gray, as she had observed. Why he wished to capture faces so like the ones Grace had lived with in Ireland, she could not imagine. Grace longed for beauty. That spark of hope. That’s what someone should capture. Mr. Riis had done that with Harold Hawkins’s portrait. He had not accomplished it with these lantern slides.
    She continued to stare at the images on the wall. As sad as it appeared, Grace couldn’t help but feel that those children were more fortunate than many in Ireland. At least the children in Mr. Riis’s photographs lived with their parents. In Ireland’s workhouses the children lived in the attic, separated from parents they rarely got so much as a glimpse of, if indeed they weren’t cared for in some far-off orphanage. She turned away, not able to