Stories of My Life

by Katherine Paterson

  “Age seventy (Chinese count [in China everyone becomes a year older on New Year’s Day]), temperature hovering around in the nineties 85.6 yesterday, hotter today. One of my former pupils, an orphan boy is living here and working in the Stadium, adapted as a soldiers’ hospital and full of the wounded, quite nearby. Another ‘child,’ pupil once, then teacher, goes to another hospital for night duty tonight. We are in the thick of it.”

  There was no mail going out in those days, so the letter begun in August is continued in September and is still being written in November.

  “September 6th. Pretty busy. Yesterday the temperature was 97.7 in the shade and plenty moist. Today about the same. In the meantime things are pretty lively, in and out . . . Today when the new land-lord, with his eviction bombs was serving his notice on the many years lord of the land, the Great Land Lord staged a thunderstorm. Such an afternoon—which was which? As I went my rounds, looking after [chores] and folks I found my silly brain saying over a rhyme that Mary Hunter used to say in the old days long ago:

  ‘Charlotte, when she saw his body

  Carried by her on a shutter,

  Like a well conducted person

  Went on cutting bread and butter.’

  “One has to ‘go on cutting bread and butter.’ I found myself seeing the old dining room at 85 State and the group around the table and smiling with them. . . . The food problem is not an easy one. Last week we were reduced to one egg. It was boiled for me for my breakfast, but I voted it to the nurse who was going out to be with the wounded soldiers . . .”

  As terrifying as the period of bombing was, the time of occupation was worse. St. Faith’s was located on Jessfield Road next door to Japanese headquarters. Maud did not dare let any of her girls out of the gate for fear that they might be raped and even killed. She related with horror stories of twenty-four young women who answered ads for office jobs only to be locked in and their clothes taken away. Twenty-three were never heard from again. The twenty-fourth managed to obtain clothes of a Japanese man and somehow made her way home. Her parents, overjoyed to see her, were nevertheless concerned for her haggard appearance and, of course, begged to know where she had been and what she had been doing. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve been a little unwell and could not come. Now please just let me go to bed.” She went into her room and wrote a note detailing the horrors she had endured and committed suicide. “I still pray,” Maud said, “for strength to carry on, until this tyranny is passed.”

  Marian Craighill, the wife of the Episcopal Bishop of Anking, told of visiting Maud in May of 1938. “Last Sunday afternoon Alma and I made an interesting call on Deaconess Henderson . . . I had heard a lot of how she lived absolutely like the Chinese around her and how she shared her bedroom with the babies and how she did everything for the orphans who came to her—your only credential seemed to be that of need. I went as far as the door with Pearl Buck in 1927 to see if she would take in her amah’s unborn child if it turned out to be a girl—and she had the only place that would, Pearl said. . . . With this introduction you can see my real curiosity as we pounded on the wooden gate in a narrow crowded alley off from Jessfield Road. At first we thought we would pound in vain, but finally we heard a voice and through the chinks we saw Miss Henderson, rattling with keys. As she opened the gate she asked us if we thought we could get in, for the courtyard was flooded and we had to crawl along benches. Right in front of us was the main room of the Chinese house she lives in, simply full of recumbent figures of young girls, taking their afternoon rest. They were covering every inch of space, and the wooden affairs they were lying on proved later to be their desks and benches, and still later their dining tables when they brought in a kind of orange peel tea as we were leaving. . . . They were all of them her old children, who had returned to her when the Japanese drove them out . . . [T]he thing that struck horror to my soul was that they are next door to Japanese headquarters, and she doesn’t dare let the Japanese know of the existence of these girls, so they literally never go out.”

  After describing Maud’s own crowded bedroom with its faded pictures of the Lee family on her wall, Mrs. Craighill described Maud as “71 years old, dressed in an ancient Chinese type garment, with the charm of manner and the lovely voice of a cultured gentlewoman of Virginia.” [The Craighills of China, Marian G. Craighill, Trinity Press, 1972, from pp. 221–223.]

  After Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there are no letters from Jessfield Road. As I said earlier, my parents told me a story they had heard from someone, that when at last the soldiers came to take Maud’s girls, she stood in the doorway and said they would have to kill her first. Whatever the truth of that account, it is true that she was somehow able to stay on at St. Faith’s long after most foreign nationals had been taken to detention camps. She was finally interned, sometime in 1944. Sadly, I do not know what became of her beloved children and grandchildren when she was no longer there to care for them and protect them.

  After the war ended, there was a flurry of correspondence among various persons in China and the United States, trying to figure out exactly what to do with Maud Henderson. St. Faith’s no longer existed and she was too old to start all over again. She was not the responsibility of the Episcopal Mission, having left its jurisdiction. She yearned to go “home” to Lexington, but the people who knew and loved her there were long dead, and their surviving children could not imagine what they would do if the elderly Maud should land on their doorsteps. Strangely, there are no letters from her half sister and her family. The only relative that stepped up was Thomas Hale, who was the husband of her cousin Elizabeth, the commodore’s daughter. In 1946, he arranged for her passage back to America and several stops along the way, though letters from her hosts seem less than gracious, asking, for example, that they be reimbursed for the cost of housing Maud for a couple of days. She had a visit to Lexington and was interviewed at length by the local newspaper. In the article she expressed her joy to be in the place that she so loved as a girl, but there was no permanent welcome there. It was finally agreed that she should have a place in the Episcopal Home in Richmond. It was from Richmond that she went to see her old friend in Hanover, New Hampshire, and later came to visit our family and revisit haunts of her childhood in Charles Town and Winchester.

  It makes me sad to know that there were not many happy times after that. She began to decline physically and mentally and finally died in 1956 at the age of eighty-five.

  The newspaper accounts of her return after forty-three years in China tell of the old lady I remember, recalling her special relation to General Lee and his family, bragging that she got respect from the commander of the Japanese detention camp when she told him that her uncle had sailed into Tokyo Bay with Commodore Perry.

  “After her fruitless search for General Lee’s portrait in Commodore Henderson’s old sea chest,” a Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter relates, “Miss Henderson walked over to her bedroom mirror. Dozens of snapshots of members of her Chinese family are stuck around the edges of the mirror.

  “She identified some of them. This one married a minister. That one became a Red Cross worker. Another lost the sight of one eye, but the doctors saved the sight of the other.

  “‘Sometimes I get homesick for China,’ Miss Henderson confessed.”

  When the reporter asked her to point to her most satisfying memory of those years, she recalled a time when anti-foreign feeling was running high in Shanghai. A Chinese boy approached her outside her door, pointed, and yelled: “She is a foreigner! She is a foreigner!”

  But her own children shouted back: “She is no foreigner. She is the grandmother who belongs here.”

  And there is a letter she kept. It is undated, but was probably received in 1950.

  My dearest Friend,

  As I am urging our students to write a note to their mothers away from Shanghai, I think of you as a mother to so many of our Chinese girls. The greatne
ss and depth of your love only God knows how to measure and reward you. Thinking of you has always been an inspiration to me. I love you.

  Lovingly yours,

  Tszo-Sing Chen

  She was proud to have been kissed by Robert E. Lee. I am proud to have been kissed by Maud Henderson.

  I can’t resist adding a family story here. After my mother died, my father insisted on moving to a retirement home despite the fact that we had bought a house with a first-floor room and bath so he could live with us. “Then you’d want to go somewhere, and you’d say, ‘What will we do with poor old Pop?’” At the retirement home was a woman who took a great shine to Daddy, but whose dementia made her a bit intimidating to the rest of the residents. So when he died, everyone was afraid to break the news to her. But when someone finally did, she said: “Oh, that Mr. Womeldorf. He was such a gentleman. He’d make Robert E. Lee look like a hobo.” My regret when I heard that story was that I couldn’t share it with my father. He would have gotten such a laugh from it.

  Note: Many of Maud Henderson’s letters from China can be found in the Archives of the Library of the University of North Carolina. I am also indebted to The Episcopal Historical Society for other correspondence.

  Suzy, Clava, and me at the Lovettsville reunion.

  The Teaching Life

  The year after that visit from Maud Henderson, I graduated from high school and went on to spend four years getting my degree in English literature from King College in Bristol, Tennessee. I decided during my last year of college to take a year out from studying. I would teach school, thought I. I’d taken an education course or two and done a stint of practice teaching to have something to go with my English major that even then, no one considered practical, but which for me was life changing, thanks to the brilliant, caring professors who introduced me to great ideas and great writers. Gilly Hopkins, more than incidentally, takes her surname from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the subject of my senior thesis.

  There were some requests for teachers posted on the bulletin board that were in school districts fairly close to where my parents were living, so I made inquiries. One school in Lovettsville, Virginia, noted that their long-time principal was named Womeldorph. Although Mr. Womeldorph was retiring and spelled his name with a ph rather than an f, it seemed like a sign of sorts, so I applied to become the sixth-grade teacher for the enormous salary of five thousand dollars a year.

  The population of Lovettsville was 340 (according to the sign on the edge of town), but students were bused into the elementary school from the rural areas of upper Loudon County. This part of Loudon County became famous a few years later because it was featured in a documentary on hunger in America. The southern part of the county was mostly horse farms for millionaires. Several of the Kennedys owned property there. But people in lower Loudon County didn’t send their children to public schools, and there was no appetite for taxing the rich county southerners to help the less fortunate northerners.

  The Lovettsville Elementary School was an old brick building from another era. There was an auditorium of sorts, but no library in the school, no lunchroom, and no gym. Everything except outdoor recess would take place in my classroom. There was no music teacher, no art teacher, no playground aid. I would be in charge of everything those children would get in the way of schooling, indoors or out.

  Single teachers, I was told, always boarded with a couple who lived a short distance down the street from the school. The second-grade teacher, who was also just out of college, and I roomed there together. Our landlady was a kind person that both of us got along with. Her husband was another matter. For the only time in my life I would be living with a chain-smoking semi-invalid whose chief point of pride in life was his membership in the Ku Klux Clan. Fortunately, I escaped every weekend and went to Winchester to stay with my folks. Sometimes I would take Eleanor along, just to give her a break from the boarding house environment.

  Mr. Myers, the new principal, showed me my classroom. It was in the basement—the only room down there besides the bathrooms and the furnace room. There were windows along one side and, in the hall, a door that opened onto the playground. The classroom was crowded with battered, carved-up desks because there would be thirty-six sixth graders in the class, and they ranged from one who was the age of ten, to three who were sixteen. The long-time third-grade teacher was famous for holding children back for multiple reappearances in her class.

  I didn’t know what to expect of such an assortment of kids. It didn’t help that the first introduction I had was a paper listing their IQ scores. I was appalled. How was I with no real experience supposed to teach children with such a difference in their ages, a frightening number of whom had IQ scores in the low 70s? I stopped reading and just stuck the records out of sight in a bottom drawer of my desk, and never thought of them again until the end of the year when I was throwing away the accumulation of papers in my desk. I was furious with those scores. My kids were not dumb! I’ve never trusted standardized tests since.

  School opened and they came, the real children, not the ones on paper. By the end of the first week or so I was in love with them all, even Junior, who heartily hated school and was absent as often as he was present, and Godfrey, who was such a creative misbehaviorist, no one could have disliked him.

  I don’t know what any of them gained academically from being in that basement room. I know I wasn’t much of a teacher, but we had some great times. What I lacked in pedagogical skill, I made up for by reading aloud—everything from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Huckleberry Finn to Shakespeare. Macbeth was a class favorite—all that gore. I’m sure I skipped and explained our way through several pages of the play, but they had a taste of greatness, anyhow.

  On rainy days, we’d push back all the desks and do broad jumping in the cleared space. Mr. Myers poked his head in one day, but just grinned and went on back upstairs.

  Even though they lived just over an hour from Washington, DC, most of the class had never visited the capital. I racked my brain to figure out a curriculum-related excuse to take them all there. We were doing ancient world history, which hardly qualified, but then I realized our nation’s capital held a re-creation of early Roman catacombs as well as a European-style cathedral. They would be the educational excuse. My hidden agenda was the National Zoo.

  “This is your life, Miss Womeldorf.” Lovettsville School, 1955.

  The Lovettsville class reunion crowd.

  This was the spring of 1955. Today, not only would such a trip be impossible, any teacher who tried to do what I did that day would be fired on the spot. Other than the bus driver, I was the single adult on the trip. Junior was playing hooky again, so there were thirty-five children. We all hung out the windows staring at the monuments as we crossed the bridge into the city, but there was no time to stop and see them. We visited the fake catacombs and hurried through the cathedral, but by the time we got to the zoo, there was less than an hour left before we’d have to leave. The bus driver had to get back to drive his afternoon route. He told me more than once that the bus was leaving at two p.m. Anyone not on it would be left behind.

  There were more wonderful creatures to see in the zoo than there were children to see them. Everyone was excited and eager to head off. How could I make them walk around in lockstep like little Madeleine schoolgirls for fifty minutes? They’d explode. We were standing near a sign with arrows indicating all the various exhibits. There was a large clock nearby. I pointed to it. “You can take your lunch and follow the arrows to anything you want to see, but at ten minutes before two, you have got to be lined up right here, ready to get back on the bus. If you’re late, the driver says he’ll leave you behind.”

  I stood there and watched thirty-five children disappear in almost as many different directions and was suddenly horrified by what I’d done. What if someone got lost or hurt? Suppose they didn’t come back on
time? What would I do then? For fifty minutes I simply sat on a bench near the clock becoming more anxious by the minute. Every now and then in the distance I’d hear a happy shout from a voice I recognized. The children were having fun, but I certainly wasn’t. I must have been out of my mind. Then, miraculously, just before 2:50, I saw them come running from every direction. They lined up before me two by two and at exactly 2:50, I counted heads. I had thirty-four happy children standing exactly where they should. I was one short.

  “Has anyone seen Godfrey?” I asked, trying hard not to panic. At that moment, a grinning Godfrey stepped out from behind a large tree and took his place at the end of the line. Everyone was on time, except the bus driver, that is. He didn’t appear until five after two. But we got back to school on time. No one told on their irresponsible teacher. All was well.

  Some years ago I had a phone call from out of the blue. It was Clara Washington, one of my Lovettsville sixth graders of years before. She was a grandmother now. She had read my books to her children and was now reading them to her grandchildren. Curious about the author, she went to my website and learned to her delight that I had been Miss Womeldorf, her sixth-grade teacher. Clara wanted to arrange a reunion of the class. If she did, would I come? “Name the day,” I said. Eleven of the thirty-six came with various spouses and children. And those there gave me news of several of the others who weren’t. Junior was now the owner of a successful trash-hauling business. Godfrey had come back from Vietnam but not really home. He spent most of his time in the woods alone. Someone had seen him in town and told him about the reunion. He had said he might come, but to my sorrow, he didn’t.

  I’d taken the little album into which I’d pasted their school pictures and pictures of the surprise farewell party they’d given me at the end of the year.