A Shelter for Maggie

 Stephen Crane was a large proponent of the American realistic fiction movement. He explored the true, gritty and dirty life of the inhabitants of New York City in the late 19^th century. Even though he was a well-to-do child from New Jersey, he was compelled to depict the real lives of immigrants. I spent this past January interning at a child/adolescent shelter in my hometown. The vivid description of Maggie’s life once ousted from her family made me think of the many children today that find themselves defenseless and alone.

                       

Founded in 1978, Kids in Crisis was only a shelter for the teens of Greenwich, Connecticut. Over the last thirty-three years the organization has grown immensely. Now the shelter provides free, round-the-clock help for Fairfield County children, teens and parents. They also have a counselor on staff at all hours to help with interventions, family therapy, and short-term counseling for the children and teens at the shelters. In 1998 the shelter expanded to serve children newborn to age 12 with the Crisis Nursery located on the same property. This was an irreplaceable addition because now teen mothers can live right next to their children and siblings of mixed ages do not need to be separated.   These homes, complete with a fully staffed, professional medical clinic, provide therapeutic care for up to twenty children at any one time. In just last year alone, Kids in Crisis served 6,400 children last year.

Instead of having an opportunity to restart her life in a shelter like Kids in Crisis, Maggie was left to die. Alone she wanders the street and in her final appearance in the novel Crane describes a man following her in the night. “ Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions. At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue… The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, cam faintly and died away to a silence” (65).  Whether this man kills Maggie or she commits suicide out of despair is unclear, but either way there were not the support systems that there are today.

This text only reiterates the same conclusion I gathered after my experience at Kids in Crisis – shelters and other safe outlets are necessary for children without stable home environments and without these organizations many more children would be lost like Maggie was in this novella.