IT WAS 1989, AND MY CONSULTING FIRM WAS BIG ON BOONDOGGLES. Our department went on a boat cruise around Boston Harbor for “team building,” and as we sipped our Bloody Marys, our guide, home from college for the summer and casually steering the boat with his foot, gestured to Thompson Island as it came into view and mentioned that there used to be a “boys reform school” there.
As we disembarked on Thompson, where a pit of coals was already cooking our lobster (yes, stuff like this really did happen back then), I couldn’t stop thinking about that school, mostly about how it would be a great setting for a novel. Was it like Lord of the Flies? Or more like the workhouse from Oliver Twist? Were there Alcatraz-like attempts at escape, swimming to the mainland?
When we returned to Boston, I took a pamphlet about the Harbor Islands from the boat office and stuffed it in the pocket of my denim jacket, with vague plans to write that novel. But in the weeks that followed, I became pessimistic. When would I ever have time to do all that research? And even if I could somehow manage it, what if no publisher wanted it? The thought of completing a novel only to have it languish in a drawer was heartbreaking.
A month later, the denim jacket was undeniably in need of washing, and when I emptied out the pockets, I found the pamphlet. And I threw it away.
My friend threw a party for her mother who had just published a book through iUniverse. I stood off to the side as they cut a sheet cake with the image of the book cover printed on the frosting, and my friend’s husband asked me, “Did you ever think about writing a book?” And I told him about the Thompson Island idea, and how it just seemed too hard to do at the time. Soon he wandered off to chat with someone else, but I stood there, tumblers clicking into place in my mind. The Internet. Nontraditional publishing options. Even though now I had a husband, a house, small children, and a job, I could do all this at odd hours from the comfort of my desk chair—and I could see it published come hell or high water.
I started my research that weekend.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that the school wasn’t a reform school, at least not in its first one hundred years. The Boston Farm School was a rare good place, due to two evolved and kindly superintendents who served long back-to-back terms (the latter being Charles Bradley), and also due to the fact that they were funded privately rather than publicly and thus could cherry-pick their students. Frightening options abounded for the unlucky and the poor. For example, The New York Times had this to say in 1860 about the State Reform School in Westboro:
. . . boys 17 or 18 years of age have been kept confined in dark, impure cells—“black holes” the Committee term them—from eight to sixteen weeks, a portion of the time with their hands manacled behind them and with no food but bread and water.
The details about the Sweatbox at this school that Charles recounts to Aidan are, unfortunately, true.
There were also almshouses and workhouses, some on other islands in Boston Harbor, full of people who made a string of flawed decisions and people who had just one stroke of bad luck. So how wonderful that there was an option for young boys that wasn’t abusive or dangerous. And yet . . . should I really believe what I was finding on the Internet? How can you know for sure what it was like there more than a century ago? What I really wanted was to talk to someone who went there.
Enter Dave Haeger. Hilary Lucier from Outward Bound on Thompson Island put me in touch with Dave, who attended the Boston Farm and Trade School (renamed in 1907) from 1938 to 1943. While it wasn’t quite the era of my story, Dave was an incredible resource. And indeed, FTS (as Dave calls it) was a good place, a place he says “equipped me for life with skills and a work ethic that I most likely would never have developed elsewhere.” For more about Dave’s experiences at the school and photos (he happened to be the unofficial class photographer), go to www.conniemayo.com.
So my only challenge after that was: If the school was a good place, what’s the narrative tension of the story? And thus Charles and Aidan were born, two kids who are good on the inside but would not be considered good enough for the Boston Farm School. The more I wrote about them and researched what their lives would have been like, the more it struck me that life at this time, right before the start of the Progressive Era and the establishment of a separate juvenile court, was perilous in a way that is hard to really understand today. However you feel about our social safety nets in the United States, it’s hard to deny that life without them was a scarier and riskier proposition, especially for children. So I knew Charles and Aidan would be navigating some tough terrain, but in this story, what seems like very bad luck—accidently knifing a man—leads them on a journey that ends up saving their lives.
A note about the book cover: The photo used for the cover was dated 1890 and came from the school’s archives, which are housed at the University of Massachusetts. As you can see, it shows a scowling blond boy and a slightly taller, gentler-looking dark-haired boy, which one could imagine represent Charles and Aidan. However, I wrote the characters of Charles and Aidan and all their physical characteristics before I ever saw this photograph in the archives. So maybe Charles and Aidan did attend the school after all.