Active/Passive
Comparison
By
Dakota Balmore
At 4:00 that afternoon, dressed in my familiar old raggedy togs, I
stood at the front gate of the
The windows, and there
were many them, were all set in even rows. They were dirty and of ordinary
design like those of a prison. There was a large space between the uppermost
row of windows on the third floor of the towers and the top of the building. In
that space every twenty feet round the tower and across the connecting
structure were carved wooden circles, the likenesses of which were the cycles
of the moon in quarters. A simple raised circle painted in black represented
the new moon. The other three phases had the visible part of the moon in white,
and in all the white areas were the gray markings as seen on the real moon.
There were only four phases but they repeated all round the building. It all
looked rather eerie, like something out of a horror story.
Walking across the huge
open courtyard area to the ground floor arches, I was certain the mood created
by the design of the place was right for what I was about to find behind the
scary, cracked, and well-worn oak doors inside the centermost archway. It was
odd, but all my life I lived close to this house of suffering and never once
had I gone inside. But who could blame a young girl after hearing the horrid
things that happened inside those walls of loneliness.
Wofford was a place
where our society hid away its dirty little secret of modern civilization. It
hid away a world in which women were running round getting carelessly pregnant
and dumping their unwanted children off so they could go out and do it again.
It hid the world of the poor, who, up to a point, were barely able to care for
their children, and, falling on hard times by a society that pushed them to
succeed or starve, forced them to abandon their children in a tradeoff for
their survival. And whilst in wealthy
I went up to the doors,
pushed them open, took a deep breath, and went inside.
At
four in the afternoon, dressed in my familiar raggedy
housedress, I stood at the front gate of the Wofford Foundling Hospital on
Guilford Street staring up at the eerie, three-story, wooden structure.
One giant, peaked roof
in the center of it connected two wings that charged out at me on either side
daring me to approach. Across its width ran two huge rows of arches one atop
the other. The ground floor archways allowed people to walk through to the
doors that lay inside some of them. The arches on the upper floors appeared to
exist solely for the purpose of decoration, but they could very well have been
put there architecturally to represent the arches of Hell. Each wing bulged
with short, block-shaped towers sprouting from their corners with a small
peaked roof crowning each tower.
The even rows of the
many windows defined the personality of the structure as rigid. Dirty and
blandly designed, they appeared more like those of a prison with their dark
interiors crying out, commanding you to flee or surrender your freedom for eternity.
A wide area between the uppermost row of windows and the top of the building
bulged with carved wooden circles like warts on a haggard old beggar woman.
Spaced every twenty feet across the connecting structure between the towers,
the likenesses of the cycles of the moon in quarters warned of evil wizards
within. Perhaps if Merlin the Magician from Camelot had lived today, he would
have chosen such a dwelling for his residence.
A simple raised circle
painted in black represented the new moon. On the other three phases, the
visible part of the moon shone white, and in all the white areas gray markings
as seen on the real moon grew like an invading mold. Four phases repeated round
the building, and their magical, foreboding qualities hinted at sinister goings
on within—perhaps something as bizarre as the mutilation of human corpses like
in a Mary Shelley horror story.
Trudging across the huge
open courtyard to the ground floor arches, the mood created by the design of
the place conjured up an atmosphere of spirits and ghosts even in the daylight.
All my life I had lived
near this house of suffering, and never once had I stepped inside. Who could
blame a young girl after hearing the horrid transgressions that haunted those
walls of harrowing devastation?
Wofford existed as a
place where our society hid away its dirty little secret of modern
civilization. It kept in clandestine seclusion a world in which promiscuous
women ran round getting pregnant and dumped their unwanted children so they
could go out and commit irresponsibility again. It hid the world of the poor,
who were hardly able to care for their children. Falling on hard times, the
society pushed the poorest to succeed or starve and forced them to abandon
their children in a tradeoff for their survival.
Whilst in wealthy
I trudged up to the
doors, pushed them open, drew in a deep breath, and lumbered inside.