The small, naked figure reclines on the arabesque sofa. 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. Everyone has a different story to share. 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. A newspaper article confuses one girl with another, gets her name wrong. 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. 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. The photograph taken of her in the attic studio is the one that is most familiar; it is how the world still remembers her.
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. Had the photographer or one of the young men assisting him in the studio recorded her name, I might have been able to find her in the 1900 census, or discover if she ever resided at the Shelter for Colored Orphans, or danced on the stage of the Lafayette Theatre, or if she ended up at the Magdalene House when there was nowhere else to go. Instead, I have pressed at the limits of case files and documents, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible.
No one knew how the girl arrived at the studio of Thomas Eakins that afternoon. Eakins, a realist painter, striving to create a “visual lexicon” of the human body, produced a series of photographs of the nude, including académies (traditional poses of naked figures) and anatomical and motion studies. But the photograph of this girl was not like the images taken of young white women or of other children. She was the only one forced to assume the pose of courtesan and concubine.