Summary

Community summary are the opinions of contributing users. These summary do not represent the opinions of Port Moody Public Library.
Moth, part Gypsy and born into abject poverty in 1871 Manhattan, so her prospects are dim. Still, the 12-year-old, given her name by her capricious and since-decamped father, shares a lumpy straw mattress in a tenement with her fortune-telling Mama and dreams of a life she glimpses through windows in the neighbourhoods north of Houston. It’s not that Moth is blind to her fate – Mama hints broadly that their salvation hinges on Moth’s successful appointment as a maid to the wealthy – but Moth figures on 13. Thirteen, and she’ll find her own way. Mama, streetwise but self-indulgent, nursing a broken heart with bottles of Dr. Godfrey’s cordial, has other plans. One summer night, Moth is awakened and sold away. There’s more than a shading of Dickensian cruelty in Moth’s stay at the Wentworth household, and she endures it with heartbreaking resolve to support her mother. When she finally escapes, her discovery that her mother has deserted their home is all the more harrowing. As in all good fairy tales, the orphaning marks the beginning of the real story: Lower Manhattan is the heart of darkness for a motherless girl of no means. “Girls sold matches and pins, then flowers and hot corn, and then themselves,” she tells us. “The most valuable thing a girl possessed was hidden between her legs, waiting to be sold to the highest bidder.” On the mean streets, she sleeps on a rooftop in a barrel with mouldy burlap bags for warmth, begging pennies and fending off attacks from guttersnipes and lecherous men. You’ll feel the grime under your fingernails. Rats move inside Moth’s straw mattress, clods of horse dung fuel barrel fires, and she passes time guessing whether what’s squirming in garbage bins is rat, cat or baby. When the snow melts in spring, the streets of the slum run with “a vile slop of chicken innards, bits of wet newsprint and stale dung.” There are rag pickers, bloodsuckers, oyster stabbers and Dick the Ratter. McKay’s ability to make Moth’s slum experience visceral is testament to her meticulous research and storytelling prowess. But if Moth is vulnerable, she is also wily. “It was inevitable that I should part with my innocence,” she says, having been recruited as a prostitute-in-training within days, “but at least under Miss Everett’s roof I hoped I might get a chance to give it up for a fair price.” At the Infant School, Miss Everett is madam to a handful of girls whose maidenheads she will sell at a premium to wealthy men. It’s worth noting that 18th-century slang for female genitalia included “commodity” and “Eve’s custom house,” but what has been most prized through the centuries is the unbroken hymen, long linked (unreliably) to a young woman’s purity.