Books on the Boat: Steadfast by Jennifer J. Merz

An early April reading note from Maine on Frances Perkins, the Biddeford mills, and the long road from witness to change

Spring appears different in different locales: here a look-back at a photo taken from a run on Cayman Brac, with a nod to what once was.

Early April

We’ve returned from our Cayman Brac/amateur radio adventure to find a misty Maine. Early April on Littlejohn Island is not pretty the way it shows up farther south. The grass is still flattened. The water is dark and cold. Mud gathers at the edge of the driveway, and the trees are just beginning to bud.

Although there is not much to look at from a distance, the softening of the island trails suggests that the ground is opening again.

It feels like the right time to read about work that takes years; work done mostly out of sight. Work that asks for patience.

What the Textile Mills Held

My father’s family knew that type of work. His French-speaking great-grandparents came from Canada looking for the opportunity to create better lives for themselves and their “someday” children. They found their opportunity in the Biddeford textile mills.

Like many New England mills, those in Biddeford offered a living. They also demanded a great deal from the people inside. Long hours. Machinery noise. Air thick with fiber. The constant bargain between earning your keep and what the work might take from you.

That family history is one reason I have long been drawn to the story of Maine-connected Frances Perkins, and to what set her on the professional path that would eventually lead her to become Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Frances was the first woman to hold a cabinet position in the United States.

Her journey began after witnessing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911. A total of 146 garment workers died that day in New York City as a result of unsafe working conditions. Many of them were recent immigrants, and most were young women.

Frances understood what happens when people are treated as expendable. When I think of the garment workers who died, it is hard to separate them from my own mill-working family. Labor safety was not a side issue in places like the Biddeford mills. It was a necessity of daily life, whether those who owned the mills chose to see it or not.

Frances Perkins chose to see it. Then she refused to look away.

Frances carried her memories of the Triangle Factory fire into the rest of her own working life. Into labor protections. Into Social Security. Into unemployment insurance. Into the forty-hour workweek. Into the question underneath all of it: what do we owe the people whose work keeps the country going?

“Frances was having tea with friends when fire trucks thundered past the window. She jumped from her seat, dashed outside, and peered up the street. The Triangle Factory was ablaze!”

Jennifer J. Merz’s Steadfast: Frances Perkins, Champion of Workers’ Rights is a clear-eyed picture book that brings a large life onto the page.

Finding Jenn, Finding the Book

I first “met” Jenn here on Substack. She has been a supportive and engaged friend on The Bountiful Path. After reading her comment on my post about Elizabeth McCracken and the long game, I was intrigued, looked her up, and bought her book.

Jenn knew that long game herself. She began the Frances Perkins book in 2011 and published it in 2020. Over nine years, the narrative changed, the art changed, the length changed, and the publication path changed. Hurdles and detours, she called them. “But I persevered,” she wrote. “Like Frances herself, I was Steadfast.”

Jenn used an image in her comment that fits this time of year. With seeds, we do not dig them up every few days to check whether they are doing their job. We tend the soil. We wait. Eventually something breaks through.

I have thought about that kind of waiting more than once since reading Jenn’s note. Especially now, with April just beginning. Especially in a season when so much still looks bare.

Working Port by Gary Akers

The Maine Thread

There is a Maine thread running through the Frances Perkins story.

A year ago, I spoke with Giovanna Gray Lockhart, Executive Director of the Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle, on Radio Maine. The Frances Perkins Center is the nonprofit partner at the Frances Perkins National Monument, one of only two national monuments in our state.

Frances Perkins is buried in Newcastle’s Glidden Cemetery.

Jenn’s book is listed on the Frances Perkins Center website as a learning resource.

When Jenn told me she had already found her way to my conversation with Giovanna, things folded in on themselves in that distinctly Maine way. Mainers are typically interconnected by far fewer than six degrees of separation.

Newcastle. Radio Maine. The Bountiful Path.

Now, Frances Perkins, shared through Jenn’s eyes.

Frances Perkins grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, but Maine had a lasting impact on her life. The homestead in Newcastle, where she first spent summers with her grandparents, and eventually lived intermittently as an adult, is important to this story. Not just as biography, but as context, setting, and scale.

A farmhouse by the river. The feel of weather. The pace of a place where not everything happens at once.

That part made sense to me immediately.

It also made sense to Jenn, who has both a Maine connection and a family connection to the textile industry.

As Jenn shared in Steadfast, Jenn’s grandfather and father worked in the New York City textile industry, as did Jenn, early in her career.

Her grandfather was living and working in Lower Manhattan at the time of the Triangle Factory fire.

Jenn brings Frances Perkins to life with her words, and with the collage illustrations created from cut papers, photographs, and the “laces, fabrics, and trims of the textile industry that is woven into the fabric of my family history.”

Jenn has said that her participation in an exhibit for the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire helped ignite her passion for the subject of the book I hold in my hands today.

Many Miles To Go by Catherine Breer.

Jenn, Frances Perkins and I have different connections to textile work, and to the Pine Tree State.

Frances visited Granny’s homestead often. She breathed in the sweet, clear, country air. It was the perfect place to stop and listen for answers to complex problems.

—Jennifer J. Merz, Steadfast

Biddeford and Newcastle are not the same Maine. Mill town and saltwater farm. Brick and fields. Shift bells and river light.

Still, they meet in this story. In work. In memory. In the question Frances Perkins kept pressing into public life.

Who is responsible for the people doing the work?

Boat Book

This is an early-season boat book for me. One you can read in a single sitting, then carry around for a while afterward. It is also a lovely book to read with an older child or grandchild.

Small enough for a tote bag. Substantial enough to return to.

Your turn:

What are you reading these early spring days? Does it connect to your past, or to seeds sown that may be a source of future joy?

To Jenn, and others who regularly take the time to be in touch, I offer my deep appreciation.

Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa