Grown Upstate: The Legacy of Love in the Collar City, 2013-2023
Brenda Ann Kenneally
I was ten years into photographing what became our first book about Troy, New York; Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City 2004-2013, when one of the few professional peers I had managed to form a relationship with asked if I had considered that I might be “hiding out” in the work by staying so long with the same people and place. NO! My heart, mind and gut knew that when I was in Deb Stocklas’s kitchen I was at the center of the universe as a human and as a journalist. My intuition that every story in America could be told through life lived on the block of Sixth Avenue in North Troy has proved true. For the many pieces of domestic reporting that eventually made their way into The New York Times, the sprawling New Yorker essay or NPR newsfeed, I have seen connections as they unfolded in real time over years spent in somebody’s living room in this post-industrial neighborhood.
I met the families who would compel me to remain with them for twenty years in 2004, when I was invited to photograph 14-year-old Kayla Stocklas in labor and delivering her first child. Kayla lived in Troy, about ten minutes from where I was born, and where thirty years earlier I had gotten pregnant at fourteen and had an abortion. The birth of Kayla’s son, D’Anthony Stocklas, established the Stocklas family’s foothold into a generation further away from the possibility of upward mobility, and one generation closer to being cemented into the class inequity of their Victorian era counterparts who powered Troy’s factories in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Over the years I would come to know and document the Stocklas’s neighborhood family and support network as they extended along the historically low-wealth block of Sixth Avenue in North Troy. The Stocklas homestead, a dilapidated two-story wood frame with a pair of makeshift apartments on the top, meant homes for their children when they became parents and is a way to generate a bit of extra income for the grandparents who collect token amounts of monthly rent from their grown children. On hundreds of mornings I followed Deb Stocklas, the strong matriarch of the house that has been the center of our Upstate Girls extended family. I marveled at her strength as she dragged herself through long silent rooms full of a dozen sleeping bodies to muster a cup of Mr. Coffee resistance against the thick grey dawn that she pushes through on her way to work as a bus driver for students with special needs. Deb’s seven children and an array of grandchildren have come of age under this roof owned by her common-law husband who everyone calls Poppa Stocklas.
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Deb’s wages are low and her family is large, and she knows that if she did not live with her long-term boyfriend, her family’s standard of living would not be as good and their chances for becoming homeless would greatly increase. Deb has patchy memories of being raised between her mother and her grandmother, both single mothers, both doing sewing and factory work to support their kids. Deb can never remember a time when there was money in her family or a family member flush with enough cash who she could ask for financial help if she needed it. Deb’s struggles have made her sensitive to the endless needs of her extended family and her neighbors.
High poverty, low wealth, high violence, high incarceration, high special needs, crowded living conditions and extra mouths to feed can be found in every house next door. In a zip code dictated by affordability and characterized by scarcity, the Stocklas home under Deb’s management has absorbed decades of community trauma. Her basement has been a safe haven for three generations. It has been a nursery when a relative has a newborn and needs a steady address to keep child welfare officers at bay, or when a baby daddy is locked up and his baby mom can’t make the rent on her own, and again when dad needs an address to get parole and come home.
It is the space where teenagers have become adults and where young adults plotted their next move. The babies in the basement literally spill over into the kitchen sink. The threadbare utilities, waterlogged ceilings, cracked drywall, and one often leaky shower and toilet regularly service a dozen adult bodies and assorted little ones It is an invaluable community resource.
In this America, families know that the social systems intended as support are really arms of law enforcement, and they themselves must make their own social safety net. Kids that struggle with mental health and issues of addiction are often left untreated, prompted by parental fear of making all of their children vulnerable to the scrutiny of a child welfare system that they have seen backfire horribly, breaking apart the families it is entrusted to preserve. Social and educational programs in vulnerable communities are experienced as introductions to incarceration, disempowerment, and dissipation of the essential family collective.
I have been a dedicated witness to these intersections as I have remained in solidarity across three generations in the Stocklas extended family. I believed the documentary part of our relationship had finished with the publication of our book in 2018. We had moved on to trying to change the narrative that we lived and shared through that publication. Long before the term “solutions-based journalism” was in circulation, we started a non-profit organization that used art and creative exploration as pathways to wider social and economic possibilities. We took trips to New York City and stretched our physical and social horizons. We felt like we were healing and using what we learned while making the Upstate Girls book to forge different futures. The trajectory of possibility felt secure, until a text message from one of the families who was our “happy ending” revealed an unthinkable family trespass and I began to understand that I had underestimated the depths of psychological and physical damage forged by childhood trauma. The families and I felt a duty to link the conditions presented in our first book as they became manifest in the next generation. We were well on our journey to recovery. We began to use the making of the second book, Grown Upstate: The Legacy of Love in Collar City 2013-2023, as part of our healing journey and a platform to empower the women who suffered at the hands of those childhoods that had dissolved the lines between love, violence, power and fear.
My own work has devastated me and I too have grown old in these rooms, I never feel more at home than when I am in Deb’s kitchen. That I have stayed twenty years may be the most undeniable testament to how impossible it is to truly leave behind the trauma we are born into.
Brenda Ann Kenneally
