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And there it was: "Pine Breeze. "
The file was thicker than I'd expected, and the old sticker label was peeling its slow way free of the folder. I pulled the whole thing out with both hands and closed the cabinet with a shove of my hip.
The first page was a mounted newspaper clipping dated March of 1930. "Tuberculosis Hospital to Close, Reopen," the headline read. I scanned it hastily, picking out the phrases that looked important and ignoring everything else. Established 1913. Staffed by Red Cross, Salvation Army nurses. Bought by private investors—a local family. To be converted to a health spa. Interesting, but well before the time period relevant to me. I lifted the sheet out and prepared to put it aside, but not before a passage had time to leap off the page—"where some two thousand people perished during the TB epidemic . . . "
Two thousand people? That sounded like an awful lot.
I reached for the next item in the folder.
1946. A neat diagram of the campus compound, laid out on yellowing paper. I counted nine buildings, including a nurse's station set away from the main grouping. I concentrated hard, trying to decipher the tiny writing on the key at the right of the page.
Building 1: Administration headquarters. Former infirmary.
Building 2: Auditorium / gymnasium.
Building 3: Furnace house (for disposal of contaminated corpses).
Contaminated corpses? Then they burned the bodies of the tuberculosis victims, and they needed an entire building to do so. Maybe that two thousand estimate wasn't so high after all.
Building 4: Doctors' offices.
Building 5: Outpatient services.
Building 6: Cafeteria / food service facilities.
Building 7: Inpatient therapy.
Building 8: Rehabilitation dormitories.
Building 9: Nurse's station.
This was helpful. I made a mental note to hit the copy machine before leaving.
Next was a series of yellowed articles bearing headlines like, "Health Facility Seeks Federal Aid," and "Pine Breeze Sanatorium Investigated for Racial Inequality. " The rest of the loose papers seemed to be articles about money problems, so I flipped past them in search of something more recent.
1968: Ah. There it was. "Federal Grant to Fund Hospital for Adolescents in North Chattanooga. " Operated by Marion Finley. Would serve up to eighty patients, primarily substance-addicted and behaviorally problematic teenagers. Hmm. If Dave was right and the school was only serving fifteen or twenty kids back when it closed, then it really had fallen shy of projections.
Next page: A poor-quality black-and-white photocopy of another clipping. The words were hard to make out, but the photograph had transferred well enough. Eight girls, perhaps my own age, were sitting around a long table with sewing cards strung with yarn. All their round, pale faces were turned towards the camera, cards poised over the table. Each girl wore the same stoned, automaton stare, as if she knew her picture was being taken but wasn't sure what it should mean to her. "New drugs to modify behavior . . . activities provided . . . once-troubled girls into ladylike young women . . . Finley claims high success rate, but says more funding still badly needed. "
I put the picture away and began to flip down through another series of headlines, these too suggesting ongoing money problems. I idly wondered if the place had ever been solvent at all.
One wealthy family had withdrawn its support, though its members had previously contributed enough to have the dormitories named after them. Despite Ms. Finley's constant begging, the government couldn't be bothered to lend a hand. Enrollment was down. Pine Breeze was operating at cost.
1978: My mother.
I stopped. A giant picture of my mother stared out at me from the manila folder, buttressed by the caption: "Pine Breeze Patient Dead. " I knew it was her, even though I only had the one old picture to guess by—and even before I caught her name beneath the photo. That spooky family likeness stared me in the face, and it chilled me a tiny bit.
I picked up the article. It crackled between my fingers as I read.
"Leslie Eve Moore, sixteen-year-old patient at the Pine Breeze adolescent facility, died sometime yesterday morning, apparently as a result of a difficult childbirth. Officials at Pine Breeze are withholding comment at this time except to say that the girl received the best medical care they could offer, and that they are deeply sorrowful. A spokesperson for the girl's family insists that they were unaware she was pregnant when she was committed to the institution. A lawyer from the NAACP has demanded an investigation, claiming that the family was never told of the pregnancy and that Leslie was not given proper medical attention, possibly because she was of mixed race. No details are available regarding the infant at this time. "
My mother.
And me, now the same age as she'd been then. The picture was an old studio portrait in 1970s sepia tone, one she hadn't been happy to have taken. She wasn't frowning, but her smile was forced, and her hands were clenched in her lap, smashed hard across her thighs rather than folded there. The yellow dress she wore had a butterfly collar that made her neck seem too long and thin. She looked awfully fragile for a juvenile delinquent, but there was a certain stubbornness around the set of her eyes and the full line of her mouth. I'd have been lying if I said I didn't recognize it.
I looked quickly over each of my shoulders and, seeing no one, I folded the paper with my mother's face and stuck it in my pocket. Perhaps I should have made a photocopy, but I wasn't thinking. I'd only ever seen that one other picture of her, the one of the three sisters taken before their mother had sent my mother away. Lulu kept that picture to herself, stuck in the top corner of her dresser mirror.
Now I had one of my own.
