The Blue Orchard:
Author Illuminated a Troubled Chapter in Harrisburg's History
by Jackson Taylor (Touchstone, $16, 390 pages, Paperback)
BY HARVEY FREEDENBERG
In his first novel, 10 years in the making, Jackson Taylor explores troubling issues of race, gender and class, while spinning out a memorable tale filled with human struggle, political intrigue and genuine emotional depth. Recounting the story of Charles Crampton, a highly-regarded African-American doctor who performed some 5,000 abortions in a period of 15 years as he helped to fuel the dominance of a rapacious political machine, Taylor’s book illuminates a troubled chapter in Harrisburg’s history.
The Blue Orchard is based on the life of the author’s grandmother, Verna Krone, the novel’s plainspoken narrator. Born in a cabin in Perry County, she leaves school at age 14, forced to help support the family after her father becomes disabled. From chores on a Cumberland County farm where she’s sexually assaulted by the owner, she migrates through a series of menial jobs until, after volunteering at Harrisburg Hospital during the 1936 flood, she obtains her degree as a practical nurse. Soon, she’s assisting Dr. Crampton in his office at 600 Forster Street, and then taking his patients to her home on North Third Street, where she monitors the women until the injection he administers does its work.
It’s little surprise that the Verna Krone who comes to life in the novel’s pages is sympathetic, but she’s not free of blemishes. Throughout her years with Dr. Crampton, Verna is ambivalent about her role. She has a house, a car, fine clothes and the security that money brings. “In the face of such an avalanche of cash, even if it is only imagined,” she concedes, “my moral objections grow faint.” In similar fashion, when she begins assisting Dr. Crampton, she struggles to overcome her own less-than-enlightened attitude about working for this “colored” doctor. And as the novel unfolds, Taylor movingly portrays Verna’s evolution from a victim to a strong and independent woman, capable of working her will against powerful men determined to dominate her.
Equally compelling is the story of Charles Crampton. Admired and respected in the African-American community for his benevolence (he was a founder and prodigious fundraiser for the segregated YMCA and generously donated his time to the sports teams at William Penn High School), Crampton strikes a Faustian bargain with the Republican machine. In exchange for the freedom to practice (including abortions for the wives and daughters of the powerful) and perform his good works while living in middle-class comfort, he is expected to funnel ever-increasing sums into the coffers of politicians and reliably deliver the votes of his followers on Election Day.
When Senator M. Harvey Taylor decides, in the early 1950s, that the Capitol Complex must expand into the heart of Crampton’s Seventh Ward; the homes and businesses leveled in the path of that development are ones occupied overwhelmingly by poor African-Americans. Crampton’s prestige plummets as he fails to withstand the wrecking ball’s onslaught. His downfall, redolent of Greek tragedy, culminates in a prosecution for “performing an illegal operation,” the term “abortion” stricken from the charge in a small display of deference to the vestiges of his political influence. “He found out, like so many before him, that money and power are only temporary things, and when they go, they don’t guarantee that people will stick with you,” one of his close friends laments.
The novel is populated with real characters, whose names will be instantly recognizable to Harrisburgers of an older generation. Carl Shelley is the district attorney (later judge) whose attitude toward Crampton’s activities can best be described charitably as one of benign neglect, while his successor, Huette Dowling, appears as a zealot determined to bring them to an end. Numerous others make cameo appearances.
Whether it’s the story’s early scenes in Perry County or its descriptions of Harrisburg in the post-World War II era, when the city’s population peaked, a vivid sense of place permeates the novel. There are visits to Mary Sachs’ elegant clothing store on Third Street and dinners at the Penn Harris Hotel. Despite an occasional stumble, Taylor demonstrates a sure-handed grasp of the details that will bring the book to life for Central Pennsylvania readers.
However one views the abortion issue, The Blue Orchard’s depiction of the practice, in the days before Roe v. Wade, is frank and nonjudgmental. For many women within a reasonable driving distance of Harrisburg, Crampton seemingly was the only alternative to abortions performed by anyone with tools that could be adapted, however disastrously, to the task. In the generation that followed the novel’s close, America would undergo nothing less than a revolution in its attitudes toward gender and race. Jackson Taylor’s vivid and empathetic portrait of the era before those twin dams broke makes for a moving and deeply satisfying story. HBG
