excerpt from “Factory Girl,” by Aimée Baker

In the Silk City, seventeen-year-old Jennie Bosschieter makes ribbons inside a factory. Men work the vats of the neighboring dye houses, coloring so many miles of silk thread that they could connect Paterson, New Jersey, to the Netherlands, the country where Jennie was born, thousands of times and still leave enough to spare for the jacquard ribbon she watches over.

The first skein of American silk is produced here, in New Jersey. It takes only a few years until the mills in Paterson run against the length of the Passaic River, buildings for dyeing, weaving, machinery repair, and pattern storage pressing close along the banks, crowding out the light. They say you need good hands for this kind of labor, ones that know how to handle fabric with care, ones that know the feel of every silken thread.

A man on his way to work finds Jennie Bosschieter’s body down by the river the morning after she is murdered. She is a little more than a mile from her home. The night before, she had left her father and stepmother to go buy talcum powder at Kent’s drugstore and, though she didn’t return, they were not concerned. Perhaps, they reasoned, she spent the night at the home of Mrs. Klatte, a family friend who ran a confectionary shop.

The man finds Jennie in a place he thinks no woman should go. Here, River Road turns rough, and the grass is overgrown. Her head rests on a rock, and there is a small wound to the back of her neck. Otherwise, she looks undisturbed, except that she is missing her bloomers.

The Passaic River begins in Morris County, New Jersey. It is only eighty miles long but drops seventy-seven feet in one of the largest waterfalls in America at Paterson. This dizzying height is what Alexander Hamilton sees on a tour of the area, and he understands what others haven’t: the sheer force of the water as a potential for industrial development. In Paterson, Hamilton pushes for a series of raceways to be built as a way to harness this energy, power that will later be used to make cotton, continuous sheets of paper, the Colt revolver, and silk.

It is into the forceful tear of the Passaic that Jennie’s killers throw her bloomers after she is left on the roadside. The piece of white cotton swirling end to end until it is sucked into the polluted depths of the river. Jennie’s bloomers will never be found.

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