Girl at the Atlas Gates

Let me tell you what I couldn’t find. I couldn’t find a Black woman before the wars. Her silence is like the buzzing of a generator on the phone. But she found me.

Found on one of Mitchell and Kenyon’s staged factory gate films 1901, Sheffield. This was John Brown and Co’s or Brown Atlas Works, who went on to be a part of Sheffield’s Forgemaster’s. If you look carefully there is at least one Black man striding through the crowd.

I saw that as I kept looking at her, I was willing myself to be. If we let her disappear isn’t that what awaits all Black girls? She has nothing else to give. And I think I’m lying to myself if I think I have. Can we allow her, her sadness? Was she there to give her father his lunch? Was she from a workhouse or orphanage? But she seems so alone. Black men stride across the screen. Are any of them her father? Was she there on an outing? All of these kids are not there by accident.

Archivists took out ordinance maps for me. No school or workhouse near there. And so, she slips through my fingers and I resist the urge to name her but she hovers to point out the others I might’ve missed. As with all these finds, someone knew she was here. A BFI player Mitchell and Kenyon film, 1901, depicts workers leaving a factory. It’s a curious bit of film. They seem to be directed by the top-hatted factory owner, who wants all the workers to walk in front of the camera. And then there are the children. A group of children appear, laughing, smiling. They stand grinning at the machine. And to the bottom right, there she is.

She doesn’t smile, she hardly moves, except to look around her. She stood with all those above her. The girl with the glasses, looking as if she’s keeping her back with her arm. The boy next to her picks his nose and wipes it on his jacket. She glares up at them. She doesn’t smile because she doesn’t want to. And that is enough. Trapped behind a wall made up of bodies, she looks as if she has already decided that this is all a farce.

“She doesn’t smile”.

She is moved from here and made to run over there. She’s pushed along like it doesn’t matter where her feet would like to go. She’s left to look up at others who don’t look like her.

Her smile will be her own.

You would like her to be happy that she’s there because she wants to be, but everything about her shows she’s not.

“Smile, why don’t you?”

Maybe her face isn’t used to it.

She’s clean. A comb won’t go through her hair.

I remember watching Silence of the Lambs on TV with my parents and the black FBI agent gets chosen to take flowers to the house where the detectives think the killer is. And my parents said, please let him not die, let him get away, like there was a special kind of danger that only exists for Black people and you are too young to formulate words about it, but you already know.

That’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it? For a young Black girl to know there are special - special in a bad way - dangers that await you. You know. You know that in the way adult men would sometimes look at you and talk to you. You learn to keep your head down and out of the way. No matter how big you are, you can always make yourself smaller.

As small as a Black girl’s absent smile.