Narrating US v. Ingalls

For nearly 30 years Dora Jones worked without pay for Elizabeth Ingalls, who in 1904-1905 was a teacher at an Alabama missionary school. Like the Reconstruction generation, Elizabeth brought Dora North to be her maid. Impregnated by Elizabeth’s first husband in 1913, given an abortion arranged by Elizabeth, Dora followed Elizabeth from Washington D.C to Lynn Massachusetts when Elizabeth married Alfred Wesley Ingalls, a scion of an old New England family who became a conservative Republican legislator. When the Ingalls retired to San Diego California in 1946, their younger, then adult, daughter sought to free Dora from her parents. On a tip from this daughter’s husband, the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice, which was looking to expand use of the 13^th amendment against labor abuses, instigated a case. US Attorney Ernest A. Tolin crafted a modern-day slave narrative, while newspapers across the country sensationalized the story of New England bluebloods as enslavers. An all-white jury of ten men and three women convicted Elizabeth of keeping Dora in psychological bondage, not paying her, and trafficking her across the country. They deadlocked on Alfred.

In trying to make sense of a group of unreliable narrators, in a family drama that is more than that, I use this narrative to explore power between women, intimate labor within the household, and the boundaries between free and not so free labor. Ending Dora’s invisibility exposes the afterlife of slavery after WWII when psychology replaced religion as an explanation for human behavior. I read against the bias of the FBI interview, family letters, the trial transcript, and newspaper coverage to recover Dora’s voice not to retraumatize her but to suggest how she fought back and expose the centrality of household work to the making of race, gender, and class.