The city of Troy sits on the banks of the Hudson River less than 150 miles north of New York City. During the War of 1812, a local butcher named Sam Wilson marked barrels of his meat to be shipped to American troops with the label “U.S.” Soldiers joked that it stood for Uncle Sam, and Troy is still known as “The Home of Uncle Sam.” In the 1820s, Hannah Lord Montague invented the detachable shirt collar and spawned an industry that became the cornerstone of the regional economy, employing over 8,000 sewing-machine operators. During the Civil War, the city’s steel-processing plants made millions of dollars manufacturing horseshoes and figured prominently in the Union victory. Troy helped forge the American ideology and exemplified the possibilities of the nation’s future.
The proud accomplishments of the city’s beginnings stand in stark contrast to its present social conditions. In 2007, 16.3 percent of all children in Troy were living in households headed by a single female; 19.1 percent of the population was living below the US poverty line. The per capita median income was just $16,796. Most families in Troy survive on minimum-wage jobs with little or no benefits.
The photographs presented here are part of “Upstate Girls,” an ongoing project intended to document the nearly invisible service tier of working-class America through the microcosm of Troy. Labor historians have argued that Troy was the prototype for the industrialization of America and our “most important city during the Industrial Revolution.” But, after World War II, the model of sweeping economic growth that had set the standard for developing countries became America’s industrial undoing, and cities like Troy became casualties of the new global economy.
Since 1990, the only growing population in Troy has been that of inmates, mostly young men with brown skin and low incomes. Thus, the title refers not only to that rusted and ruined northern part of New York State but also what the region has come to stand for. In street culture—and now in the lyrics of countless hip-hop songs pulsing from car windows in my neighborhood in Brooklyn—“upstate” refers to the prison system; during the 1970s, prisons became increasingly important to post-industrial towns like Troy as manufacturing jobs were lost to globalization. This incarceration industry was a boon to local economies, but it was built on the backs of thousands of first-time convicts facing steep mandatory sentences under newly enacted Rockefeller drug laws.
A generation later, the fluid boundaries of the prison population have altered Troy’s domestic and social landscape. Local law enforcement’s reaction to the changing complexion of their predominately white community has been to make more arrests and adopt zero-tolerance policies. As a result, record numbers of males from Troy’s lower-income population are now incarcerated. The culture of incarceration, in turn, has disrupted traditional domestic gender roles among the poor, and familial bonds—between husbands and wives, mothers and sons—have suffered. Women, who have been forced to take on the financial burden for entire families, do so with minimum-wage service jobs that offer little opportunity for advancement beyond bottom-tier management positions. This criminalization of the poor has created a permanent underclass of girls who abandon high school to contribute to the family income. A first job at a local big-box store or fast-food chain is treated as a rite of passage into womanhood. And the items they sell, often to other young women just like them, are marketed to imply an inclusion in an American culture that they, in reality, have little access to.
My photography project, now nearly seven years in the making, weaves together the stories of several specific young women who have come of age in Troy’s service-sector economy. I met the first of them while on assignment for the New York Times Magazine in 2003. A friend and colleague, Adrian Nicole Leblanc, had written a book, Random Family, and the Times hired me to take pictures for an excerpt that they were running. It was supposed to be a single assignment, but afternoons spent photographing kids in rooms paneled with simulated wood grain, killing time until their mothers dragged in from work, brought back a flood of memories of my own upstate upbringing. Such lack of opportunity creates an emotional poverty among the young. It boosts the craving for intimate relationships. And it often leads to teen pregnancy.
I wanted to document this trap, but I also wanted to better understand it. I was twelve when I lost my virginity. He was much older. It was 1972 and age was just a number. He taught me about music and marijuana and rebellion. He saved my life. We had time after my days at Saint James School, when my mother was working her job as a telephone-exchange operator and studying to take the civil-service test. After my parents divorced, she got us a house in West Albany across from the meatpacking plant and the key was under the mat. He had long hair, a Volkswagen bus, Frank Zappa albums, Firesign Theater episodes, bongs, a draft card, a stereo with a separate receiver, blotter acid, Tolkien books, and Leather Nun Comics. For a boisterous girl with a dreamy heart, born into a stifling town, he aroused the suspicion that there could be something more. I became his disciple. I became pregnant.
They gave me a pill to relax me before administering the local anesthesia. Even in the early days of legalized abortion, terminating a pregnancy before twelve weeks was a speedy outpatient procedure. My mother had given birth to me in that very hospital after trying unsuccessfully to terminate her pregnancy by taking a pill given to her by some quack up north in Buffalo—the place where pregnant girls from downstate drove all night to get to and returned the next day, problem solved. My grandmother had pulled the Ford out of the drive under the cover of night and slid past the cracks in the neighbors’ curtains for the four-hour trip to un-ruin my mother’s life. And yet, here I was—fourteen years later, in her place, remaking her mistakes. They put me in a group home after my mother brought me before a judge to ask for help in controlling me.
Not long after, I hitchhiked away, drowned my badness in seventy-nine-cents-a-fifth Pagan Pink Ripple with a twist-off top—the best a teenager could shoplift from a mom-and-pop. Then came a twenty-year exile where I found photography and didn’t die and did my best to forget. But I never lost my outrage at the wrongheadedness of the notion that people who are financially and emotionally vulnerable and generally ignored by society at large can then be “controlled” by the penal system. And I had experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get beyond a legacy of disenfranchisement. When I began photographing the girls on Sixth Avenue in Troy the decades separating me from my own glassed-in front porch on Second Avenue, the key under the mat after school, collapsed. I saw all our lives. I am still an upstate girl.
Troy stands as a testament to the disconnect between American ideology and reality. Increasing legal assertion in the lives of the poor and its resulting shifts in family roles, the implausibility of upward mobility, poor health care, substandard nutrition, and an absence of access to higher education are the results of the self-perpetuating and ever-widening class divide in post-post-industrial America. Troy’s rich labor history reminds us of how progress in the United States has always been made possible by the toil of a forgotten working class. The technological advances that have been made since the Industrial Revolution imply that we, as a nation, have arrived, but they also have sealed the fate of many who still have far to go.
In Verse is supported by Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio. This project is made possible with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by a broadcast partnership with Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.
