Kathryn Stockett’s New Novel Inspired by History

• Bestselling author Kathryn Stockett’s latest book, “The Calamity Club,” was sparked by a photograph featuring a girl shucking oysters.
• The story follows Meg, an 11-year-old orphan from Mississippi, as older girls are sent to work in a Biloxi cannery.
• Stockett explores Mississippi’s troubling past, including its sterilization practices targeting women.

Kathryn Stockett found herself confronting a question while crafting a novel set during the Great Depression in Mississippi. She was curious about what happened to children when families were divided in 1933.

Her research led her to an orphanage, and from there, to a cannery along the Gulf Coast, where older orphan girls were sent to shuck oysters that couldn’t be adopted.

Notably, Lewis Hine captured images of these girls, and Stockett dedicated significant time to studying his work. It was during this inquiry that a particular photo caught her attention.

A seven-year-old girl named Rosie, holding an oyster, gazes into the camera with clear blue eyes that seem to pierce through the lens.

“I found Meg, the narrator, in Rosie’s picture,” Stockett recalled in an interview.

Meg is the lead character in Stockett’s new book, which is set to release on May 5. She is an 11-year-old confined in a rundown orphanage in Oxford, where the volunteer women tend to the infants but pay little attention to the older girls.

Once Meg is too old for easy adoption, she is moved to a cannery in Biloxi, a place where cheap child labor was seen as economically viable, despite child labor laws attempting to limit its use.

Birdie Calhoun, a 24-year-old man who grapples with the embarrassment of relying on his more refined sister, becomes a surprising ally for Meg when he starts volunteering at the orphanage. Together, they challenge a community that has already determined which women hold value and which do not.

“The Calamity Club” marks Stockett’s first novel since her hugely successful “The Help,” which spent more than 100 weeks on bestseller lists and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film.

In her research, Stockett delved into some of Mississippi’s darker historical chapters. By 1928, the state had instituted a sterilization law that ostensibly targeted individuals labeled as “idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded, or epileptic,” but, in truth, it predominantly affected women, especially those considered promiscuous.

In her novel, Miss Garnett, the orphanage director, exploits this law against a woman named Charlie, confining her in a state asylum and forcing sterilization due to her being born out of wedlock and talking to a Black man at a train station.

“These so-called undesirables were mostly women,” Stockett pointed out. “Mississippi was behind the times. Nearly 30 states had already passed their sterilization laws.”

As Meg grows up, she starts to suspect that the same label may have been placed on her mother, which is why she ended up in the orphanage—and that it could one day apply to her as well.

“You can’t get rid of this filth, Meg, it’s in your blood,” Miss Garnet tells her. “For you were born in a state of idolatry.”

Each morning, Meg reads the orphanage’s sign that lists the children it will not accept, a glaring display of prejudice that feels almost satirical. “Dr. Garnet likes rules more than she likes people,” Meg reflects, capturing the sharp realization built over time.

This hypocrisy isn’t exclusive to the orphanage. Stockett, who hails from Jackson, Michigan, reminisces about stories from her childhood. A man who worked for her grandfather walked with a pronounced limp due to drinking shoe polish during Prohibition, a time when people resorted to desperate measures for alcohol.

An estimated 100,000 Americans faced similar fates. This theme seeped into the cultural narrative through blues music of the era, often enjoyed by white Mississippians who enforced strict racial segregation.

“Mississippi musician Ishmon Bracey wrote a song called, ‘Jake Legg, Jake Legg, what the hell are you trying to do? Looks like everyone in town got messed up by drinking you,'” Stockett shared. Despite enjoying these tunes, many white listeners endorsed racial division—an endless cycle of hypocrisy.

Such contradictions permeate the novel. Unmarried women struggled to access contraception, often resorting to disinfectants like Lysol. Women dressed in revealing clothing could find themselves arrested and subjected to tests for sexually transmitted diseases. The story opens with Birdie attempting to procure preventive medication from a scandalous drugstore clerk, asserting they aren’t for her, though the truth is more complex.

The orphanage itself, as depicted in the story, emerged from a singular contemplation. Stockett explained: “After the Great Flood of 1927, which left over 700,000 people homeless, I wondered: Where would the children go if their families couldn’t care for them?”

She portrayed a nightmarish yet respectable Southern setting, complete with a neat rhododendron bush, a boarded-up window in the room, and a space for the older girls to gather.

While fictional, the backdrop and overall sentiment of the book are distinctly influenced by Stockett’s own upbringing.

She remarked, “When I was young, I was worried that I would be sent there too.”