Before the Devil Breaks You is a work of fiction, and, as such, the reckless author has taken certain liberties to keep the story moving. What liberties, you might ask, being a curious sort? For one, the interior of the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane (sic) of this book is a fictional amalgam constructed from various New York State Kirkbride-model asylums of the time. (The Kirkbride plan was quite popular then.) This allowed me to shape-shift the interior to suit my needs. However, the Manhattan State Hospital did have a bowling alley, which was possibly my favorite detail, and if I could’ve worked in a ghost bowling scene… well, let’s just say it wasn’t for lack of trying. There are liberties and then there are liberties.
Mental illness/health is a topic near and dear to my heart. In reading reports from mental health workers of the 1920s, it was clear that they wanted the best for the people in their care. Efforts were taken to use art and music as therapy (the detail about the visiting opera singer is true!), restraints were mostly forbidden, and the hospital made frequent appeals to the state for more trained staff and funding. This stands in stark contrast to the horrors of the institution written about in journalist Nellie Bly’s 1887 expose, Ten Days in a Mad-House, when the asylum had been located on Blackwell’s Island (since renamed Roosevelt Island) and abuse was rampant. Nellie’s reporting brought about sweeping reform. Truth can do that.
The boys’ refuge where Conor would have spent time was also notorious for being punitive, if not downright abusive. Prisoners from the local penitentiary were also frequently used as unpaid labor on the grounds. And there are still thousands of unknown dead buried on Ward’s and Hart’s Islands, the marginalized victimized even in death.
While some aspects of this story are fictionalized, many are rooted firmly in historical record and fact, and yes, there are facts, they are not “alternative,” and they come with receipts. The KKK was alive and flourishing in the 1920s. So were Jim Crow laws and immigration bans and quotas. The Supreme Court decision handed down in Buck v. Bell (May 1927) allowed states to sterilize inmates of public institutions without their consent due to “hereditary defects” that included epilepsy, “feeblemindedness,” “moral degeneracy,” and mental illness, but which was often employed against the uneducated, the poor, people of color, and overwhelmingly for women rather than (white) men. This was an outgrowth of the American eugenics movement—racist pseudoscience that went on to influence public policy, segregation, anti-miscegenation and anti-immigration laws, and, arguably, the American mind-set for decades to come.
Jake Marlowe’s Hopeful Harbor was partially influenced by the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, which was at its height in the 1920s. Very wealthy Americans such as the Harrimans, Carnegies, and Rockefellers supported the eugenics-based institution and its promulgation of bigotry and racism disguised as science. (Real science, on the other hand, is awesome and the reason we have NASA and the polio vaccine.) But by giving eugenics the imprimatur of both medical science and law, including a law passed by the highest court in the land, America further sanctioned racism.
As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions about who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us American, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic “great” past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of “We the People.”
We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity.
We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and our present. The future is unwritten.
This is a book about ghosts.
For we live in a haunted house.