Had her name been scribbled on the back of the albumen print, there would be at least one fact I could convey with a measure of certainty, one detail that I would not have to guess, one less obstacle in retracing the girl’s path through the streets of the city. The photograph taken of her in the attic studio is the one that is most familiar it is how the world still remembers her. The captions make no mention of her, noting only the moral hazard of the one-room kitchenette, the foul condition of the toilets, and the noise of the airshaft. Photographs of the tenement where she lives appear in a police brief and a charity report, but you can barely see her, peering out of the third-floor window. A newspaper article confuses one girl with another, gets her name wrong. Fragments of her life can be gleaned from the stories of girls resembling her and girls who are nothing like her, stories held together by longing, betrayal, lies, and disappointment.
Looking at the photograph, it is easy to mistake her for some other Negress, lump her with all the delinquent girls working Lombard Street and Middle Alley, lose sight of her among the surplus colored women in Philadelphia, condemn and pity the child whore.
The small, naked figure reclines on the arabesque sofa. (This image has been cropped from the original.) Photograph by Thomas Eakins / Courtesy Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts The girl’s gaze says everything about the kind of female property she is-one not in the class of those deserving protection.
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