Lewis Hine\/ Public Domaine<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe research led her to orphanages, and then to the Gulf Coast canneries where older orphan girls were sent to shuck oysters once they were no longer considered adoptable.<\/p>\n
Photographer Lewis Hine documented these girls. Stockett spent days going through his images. Then one stopped her.<\/p>\n
A 7-year-old named Rosie, two years into the job, stares directly into the camera, oyster in hand, her crystal clear blue eyes piercing straight through the lens.<\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\n\u201cIt was in Rosie\u2019s photograph that I found my narrator, Meg,\u201d Stockett said in an exclusive interview with The Post.<\/p>\n
Meg is the central figure in Stockett\u2019s new novel\u00a0\u201cThe Calamity Club\u201d\u00a0(Spiegel & Grau; May 5). The 11-year-old is trapped in a rundown Oxford orphanage where the volunteer ladies dote on babies and largely ignore the older girls. <\/p>\n
Once a girl ages past the point of easy adoption, the orphanage ships her to the Biloxi canneries, where cheap and sometimes free young labor has its own economic logic that no child-labor law ever quite managed to stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Birdie Calhoun, 24, god-fearing and freshly humiliated by having to ask her polished younger sister for money, becomes Meg\u2019s unlikely ally when she begins volunteering at the orphanage. The two of them are up against a town that has already decided which females matter and which do not.<\/p>\nThe central figure in \u201cThe Calamity Club\u201d is Meg, an 11-year-old trapped in a rundown Oxford orphanage where the volunteer ladies dote on babies and largely ignore the older girls.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cThe Calamity Club\u201d\u00a0is Stockett\u2019s first novel since\u00a0\u201cThe Help,\u201d her 2009 debut that spent more than 100 weeks on the bestseller list and was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film. <\/p>\n
Researching the new book, Stockett dove into some of Mississippi\u2019s bleakest history. By 1928, the state had passed a sterilization law targeting people labeled with \u201cidiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness or epilepsy,\u201d a category that in practice was aimed overwhelmingly at women, including those deemed promiscuous. <\/p>\n
In the novel, the orphanage chairlady Miss Garnett has already weaponized the law against a woman named Charlie, having her committed to the state asylum at Ellisville and forcibly sterilized, her offenses being an out-of-wedlock child and a conversation with a black man at a train station.\u00a0<\/p>\nIn Depression-eta Mississippi, older orphan girls were sent to shuck oysters once they were no longer considered adoptable. Lewis Wickes Hine\/ LoC<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cThese so-called undesirables were mostly women,\u201d Stockett said. \u201cIf anything, Mississippi was behind the times. Almost three dozen states had already passed their own sterilization laws.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meg slowly comes to understand that the label may have been pinned to her own mother, which is why she was left at the orphanage, and that it could one day be pinned to her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis filth can\u2019t be cleaned, Meg, it\u2019s in your blood,\u201d Miss Garnett tells her. \u201cBecause you were born in a state of idolatry.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nLewis Hine (not pictured), a muckraker photographer and sociologist, documented the oyster girls with images such as this one. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe orphanage sign Meg reads every morning lists the children the institution will not accept, a catalog of prejudice so specific it reads like satire. \u201cMiss Garnett likes rules more than she likes people,\u201d Meg observes, with the patient ferocity of someone who\u2019s had a great deal of time to reach that conclusion.<\/p>\n
The hypocrisy behind all of it was not unique to the orphanage. Stockett, a Jackson, Miss., native, vividly recalls the stories she was told growing up. A man who worked for her grandfather walked with a terrible limp, the result of drinking shoe polish during Prohibition, when desperate people consumed whatever had alcohol in it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
An estimated hundred thousand Americans suffered the same fate. The condition entered the culture through the blues songs of the period, the so-called race records that white Mississippians bought and danced to while simultaneously enforcing the separation of races.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cIt was in Rosie\u2019s photograph that I found my narrator, Meg,\u201d Kathryn Stockett said in an exclusive interview with The Post.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cIshmon Bracey, a Mississippi musician, wrote a song that goes, \u2018Jake leg, jake leg, what in the world you trying to do? Seems like everybody in the city\u2019s mess up on account of drinking you,\u2019 \u201d Stockett said. \u201cPlenty of white folks listened to these race records, purchased them, danced to them. And yet these same white folks mandated the separation of races. I could go on and on about the saturation of hypocrisy.\u201d<\/p>\n
That saturation touches everything in the novel. Women used Lysol disinfectant as a contraceptive because birth control was effectively illegal for unmarried women. A woman dressed too revealingly could be arrested and tested for venereal disease. The novel opens with Birdie attempting to purchase prophylactics from a scandalized drugstore clerk. She insists they\u2019re not for herself, but the truth is complicated.<\/p>\n
The orphanage itself was Stockett\u2019s biggest invention, built around a single question. As Stockett explained, \u201cAfter the Great Flood of 1927, which left over 700,000 people homeless, and as the Great Depression set in, I asked myself: where did children go if their families couldn\u2019t take care of them?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nStockett\u2019s last book was 2009\u2019s \u201cThe Help.\u201d It was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Emma Stone (from left), Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis. \u00a9Walt Disney Co.\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nShe constructed a place with tidy azalea bushes out front and a boarded-up window in the room where the older girls sit, hellish and respectable at the same time, which is to say Southern.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Though fictional, the setting, and the book as a whole, is infused with a true emotional charge from Stockett\u2019s own upbringing. <\/p>\n
She told The Post, \u201cIt\u2019s just like [where] I feared I could be sent when I was a little girl.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bestselling author Kathryn Stockett\u2019s new novel, \u201cThe Calamity Club,\u201d was inspired by a photo of an oyster shucker girl. The novel centers on 11-year-old Meg, an orphan at a Mississippi orphanage where the older girls are shipped off to work in Biloxi canneries. Stockett\u2019s book delves into Mississippi\u2019s bleak history, including sterilization laws targeting women. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2399338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25174],"tags":[21994,468424,21741,345130,359120],"class_list":["post-2399337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gossip","tag-books","tag-child-welfare","tag-entertainment","tag-mississippi","tag-postscript"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/The-Help-author-Kathryn-Stocketts-new-novel-inspired-by-photograph.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2399337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2399339,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399337\/revisions\/2399339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2399338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2399337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2399337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2399337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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