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Wednesday
Red states appear to be in a vigorous race to the bottom when it comes to human rights. After writing last week about Florida book bans, and yesterday about Tennessee drag show bans, today I turn my attention to Arkansas loosening child labor protections. According to The Washington Post, the new law eliminates requirements for the state to verify the age of children younger than 16 before they can take a job. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) apparently believes the provision has been “burdensome and obsolete.”
This, of course, is from the same party that wants to eliminate free lunches for poor kids and food stamps for impoverished families.
I’ve been recently alerted to the issue of child labor by Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperfield, where the protagonist finds himself, at 10, harvesting and stripping tobacco in his foster home. Before turning to the novel and to an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem, however, let’s first look at why current protection laws remain important.
According to the Post article, regulators have discovered hundreds of violations of existing laws in the country’s meatpacking plants. For instance, the Labor Department fined Packers Sanitation Services, a subcontractor for meatpacking plants, $1.5 million in February “for illegally hiring children, some of whom sustained chemical burns after working with caustic cleaning agents.” Yet despite such stories, the article observes, other red states are following suit. Currently Iowa is considering a bill that “would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work certain jobs in meatpacking plants and would shield businesses from civil liability if a youth worker is sickened, injured or killed on the job.”
Kingsolver’s feisty protagonist doesn’t hold back in describing Crickson, the tobacco farmer that gets both state money and free labor for taking in foster kids. As in the meat packing plants during the Trump administration, existing child protection laws can be flaunted because the system lacks oversight. Demon tries to alert his social worker, but she is only concerned with whether he is being physically abused:
Had Crickson ever hit me, she asked. Answer: no, I myself had not been struck. [The other kids have been.] And that was that. Miss Barks was sorry, but Tommy and Swap-Out weren’t on her. Usually all kids in a home are from one foster company, but Crickson was an emergency-type place, and Tommy and Swap-Out belonged to a different foster company that Miss Barks didn’t work with. So fostering was done by companies, and we, as [Demon’s abusive stepfather] would say, were Product. Rotating and merchandising foster boys at more than fifty customer accounts. Live and learn.
We get an in-depth look at the hardships involved with tobacco farming. Demon says that now, whenever he sees a picturesque tobacco crop, he thinks, “There lies a field that eats men and children alive.” If you are a kid on a farm, he adds, the real dog days occur not in August but
in September and October. Tobacco work: suckering, topping, cutting, hanging, stripping. All my life I’d heard farm kids talking about this, even in the lower grades, missing school at cutting time. Some got to work on farms other than their own, and get paid for it….Now I would be one of the working kids.
For a while, Demon keeps his head by thinking about his soon-to-be-born sibling (Demon’s mother is in rehab, which is why he has been stashed on the farm). But that lasts for only so long:
I had a list going in my head that fall, of what all I would tell my little brother one day. But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back.
What follows is an excruciating description of tending a tobacco crop, which of course is even worse if you’re a 10-year-old boy doing what is effectively slave labor for a stranger. Demon Copperfield echoes David Copperfield, and one thinks of David working in the bottle factory. But David at least gets paid, and a closer parallel would be Oliver Twist, who is apprenticed out to an undertaker. Nor was Dickens the only author to excoriate child labor.
In “The Cry of the Children,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning asks, “Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,” comparing the children to young lambs bleating in the meadows, young birds chirping in the nest, young fawns playing with the shadows and young flowers blowing toward the west. They are weeping, she writes, “in the playtime of the others,/ In the country of the free.”
You can read the poem in its entirety here. The final two stanzas sum up Browning’s horror and indignation. “The child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence,” she writes, “than the strong man in his wrath”:
And well may the children weep before you;
They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun:
They know the grief of man, without its wisdom
They sink in the despair, without its calm —
Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom, —
Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm, —
Are worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly
No dear remembrance keep,—
Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly:
Let them weep! let them weep!
They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see
For they think you see their angels in their places,
With eyes meant for Deity;—
“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart, —
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O our tyrants,
And your purple shews your path;
But the child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence
Than the strong man in his wrath!”
It took a lot of hard work, from activists, lawmakers, and others, to insure that children get a childhood, with literature playing an important role. Now forces in the GOP want to return us to “the good old days.”
We should all be weeping. And standing strong in opposition.