And what if you’re left handed so you can’t work as fast as your older sister? If you drop something or slice a thread, the whole machine goes down and it takes hours to get it running again. So she’s yelling at you all day long to hurry up. And every extra minute you take to “doff” those bobbins, your mother doesn’t get paid. Imagine if at the age of 12, you had to get up every morning to go to the mill with your mother and take the bobbins off the six spinning frames she runs. What’s the most interesting relationship in the book?Ī: The connection between Grace and her mother.
What might he and Grace have said to one another? How might each have changed the other’s life? And finally, I imagined what might have happened the day Hine walked into that mill. Then I researched mills and Lewis Hine and photography and living conditions in Vermont towns and French Canadian music. I named the girl Grace Forcier, I made her French-Canadian as so many of the mill families in New England came down from Canada. Q: So you decided to write a book about Addie?Ī: No, I didn’t know anything about Addie herself. I felt that she was begging me to tell her story.
The 12 year old mill girl’s name was Addie I found out later, but Hine’s caption read simply: “Anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill, 1910.” For once the words meant little to me. Q: What inspired you to write COUNTING ON GRACE?Ī: It all started with a simple black and white photograph taken by Lewis Hine, the great child labor photographer.
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