Lucy grinned.
“Does she look like you?” Nico asked.
“I g-guess.”
“She’s beautiful, then,” Nico said.
Grace looked up from where she was cleaning Jenny’s short tusks. “Nico, you’re making a nuisance of yourself. Go on, get out of here. Lucy’s got work to do!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nico said.
“That boy is smitten,” Grace muttered when Nico had gone. “Bunk dared him to go one whole meal without mentioning your name. Couldn’t do it.”
Lucy smiled as she cleaned the elephant area, washed Jenny, and massaged ointment into Baby’s legs. It felt so good to be working with them again. She even found herself talking to them—well, whispering, anyway, so only they could hear. When the midday meal gong sounded, she slipped off her coveralls and sped to the costume shop, where Dilly had her head bent over a sewing machine and her hands working on something shiny and red.
“How’s it…going?” Lucy gasped, out of breath from the run.
Dilly’s head popped up. “Some of the liberty horse girls gain weight on the road. We have to make their costumes forgiving or by Minnesota they can’t get them on. The aerialist has skin allergies. She can only wear cotton. The band coats can’t be lined. The band pit gets warm in the summer and the trumpet player is prone to fainting. Oh yeah, and we worked out Diavolo’s vest problem.”
We. Dilly had said we.
“I like Betts….” Dilly dropped her voice to a whisper. “And I’m pretty sure she likes me. You found nice people, Lucy. I like it here.”
Lucy jumped on Dilly, hugging her tightly.
Dilly laughed. “Never thought I’d be sewing costumes for a monkey.” She held up a tiny red-spangled outfit. “What would Mama say?”
May 1, 1939
R&M Dresses
Chicago, Illinois
Dear Mrs. LaFinestre,
Thank you for holding my job, but I won’t need it anymore.
In this world that can be terribly hard & unkind, there are miracles, and one of them happened to me. I found my little sister, and the aching hole of missing her is gone.
I’m sorry I can’t return to machine #71 & prove how grateful I am. Please know I have thought real hard on this. And the plan I have come up with to thank you for what you did is to pass your kindness on to another girl. I will let her use the good machine, the black one where I work now at the costume shop of Saachi’s Circus. I will give her time off, when she needs it. And I will always leave the light on for her, like you did for me.
Yours truly,
Dilly Sauvé
P.S. Please tell the girl on #71 to oil the presser foot lift and change the bobbin thread before it runs out. #71 does not like being run with an empty bobbin.
May 5, 1939
Dear Mama,
The sky is big. I don’t know if you can see me from where you are, but I wave up at you every night.
I’ve been missing you a lot lately, so Dilly said I should write.
Dilly and I found each other, did you know that?
Dilly had been trying so hard to find me and I had been trying so hard to find her that when we finally found each other, we just sat and cried. Dilly’s hankie got so wet we had to wring it out in the sink.
Dilly is so much like you, Mama. The way she lines up her pins in her sleeve and holds the needle to the light to thread. The way she clicks her tongue when she’s adding numbers, puts vanilla on our pillowcases, and unpins her hair to brush it at night.
We work at Saachi’s Circus Spectacular. Dilly sews costumes and I take care of the elephants. This morning Dilly sewed matching tuxedos for Tiny, the Great Dane, and for the tramp clown’s Chihuahua. How we laughed watching the giant black-and-white dog and the itty-bitty brown one strut around in their coats and bow ties.
Yesterday, Grace let me help with Baby’s new act. Baby is dressed up as a housewife with lots of cleaning to do and a rag-doll baby who won’t stop crying. I wonder what you would say if you saw me teaching an elephant to vacuum.
Dilly has become friends with Betts the seamstress and Bernadette, who visits when she can. I’m best friends with Nico, Eugene, Jabo, Grace, and Bunk. I don’t know if I’m friends with Doris or not. She is good at making people laugh, but I don’t trust her and sometimes I don’t like her, though when she’s not around, I miss her a lot. Have you ever had a friend like that?
Every day, we work and do lessons at school. Our teacher is Jabo. He teaches us with riddles, puzzles, and tricks.
At night, we sleep on the train. Sometimes Dilly sleeps in the elephant car with Nico, Doris, Eugene, and me. Other times in the single-lady car, with stockings hanging from the berths, radios playing dance music, and girls gossiping about who dates who. (Dilly doesn’t date, but she turns pink and stares at her feet when a certain acrobat walks by.)
At meals, we sit together in the cook tent with Bunk, Rib, and Nevada. When Dilly first sat with us, she didn’t join in their kidding. But then Bunk discovered Dilly had a dimple in her left cheek and he simply had to see it. Now he makes her laugh every day.
I still have trouble speaking, and some days I don’t want to talk. Dilly is furious at Miss Holland and Mrs. Mackinac for how they treated me. She says she’s going to write letters to the newspapers about what they did. I’m angry too, though mostly at myself, for letting their meanness get up inside me. But every day with Dilly, the elephants, and my friends, it gets better.
I love having Dilly here. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But she is so much like you, she makes me miss you more.
Dilly says when we talk about you, you stay alive inside us, and when we wave up at you, you wave down. Jabo says that your love is in the air we breathe. Bunk says to close my eyes and you will come.
I hope you and Papa can see us. I hope you’re proud of Dilly and me.
Love,
Lucy
I fancy myself an elephant whisperer. In another life, I was a pachyderm.
In 2017, I traveled to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to visit four elephant sanctuaries and get up close and personal with elephants. It was the trip of a lifetime, and some of the descriptions of Jenny and Baby came directly from my journals of that trip. A portion of the proceeds of this book will be donated to savetheelephants.org. I believe this organization is among those doing the most to protect these incredible animals.
In 2018, I attended the annual Circus Historical Society Convention in Baraboo, Wisconsin. I’m obsessed with circus history. I read everything I can get my hands on about it. Getting to rub elbows with luminaries in the circus historical field was an incredible experience.
Saachi’s Circus Spectacular is fictional, though I worked hard to create an authentic 1939 circus feel for this book. That said, I did take creative license. Jabo’s apprenticeship system and his OOFO organization are complete fabrications. Also, in the circus of 1939, people with dwarfism would probably have been called midgets. Since today this is a derogatory term, I used the term “dwarf,” or on occasion “little person.” Both are acceptable names for people of short stature, according to the Little Persons Association.*1 Though the term “little person” is more contemporary, it also is an obvious description, which could easily have been used in 1939.
Many people who did not fit into the narrow constraints of 1939 America became a part of the circus family. Women certainly had more agency in the circus than they did in ordinary society. Many female circus stars like Lillian Leitzel, Bird Millman, and May Wirth wielded considerable power. And there were definitely women animal trainers like Mabel Stark, the renowned tiger trainer, and Barbara Woodcock, who trained elephants. Though I did embellish the strong woman act, the way Jabo describes Grace was influenced by the PBS special The Circus,*2 which I got to preview at the C
ircus Historical Society Convention.
All towns and cities are fictional except Chicago. The Chicago diner is fictional, as is Karaboo—though Karaboo was influenced by Baraboo, Wisconsin, where the Ringling Brothers Circus had its winter quarters until 1919.
The stories about Baby are also mostly true.*3 The Elephantoff act is almost entirely true, and Nico’s save in that scene—announcing that Baby had a headache and was off to the pharmacy for aspirin—also comes from a true account, though it was an adult who invented this clever excuse, not a child.
The tired tropes we think of when we say “circus” don’t do justice to the performances of the late 1930s. In its heyday, the circus was an amazingly vibrant creative enterprise. The variety of routines was incredible, with each performer striving to create his or her own unique act. And many performers had multiple roles in the ring and behind the scenes. As one performer recalled, “Honey, no one does one thing in the circus.”*4
The circus glossary is accurate, though I’ve taken creative license with the definition of “John Robinson.” Most sources say the term means to cut an act short because trouble is brewing. That said, specific circuses sometimes put their own spin on established words or coined their own expressions.
The Home for Friendless Children is fictional, but I did pull significant facts about the orphanage from the Davenport Main Library records of the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home.
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Great Depression had taken its toll on Iowa, and the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home census grew from the previous average of five hundred children to seven hundred. (Children were not always “true” orphans. Many had been brought to the home by families who no longer had the means to care for them.)
At the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, boys and girls were kept separate. Matrons sat at the doors of the dorms until the orphans fell asleep. Parents were sometimes told, “Do not contact your children. It only makes them sad.” Relatives were allowed only one visit per month. They often sent stamps so the children could mail letters, but it isn’t clear how often these stamps reached the orphans.*5
I was especially interested in what happened when orphans misbehaved. Some were punished by being hit with straps, belts, or yardsticks. “Most kids [were] slapped around and paddled often.”*6 This is horrifying but not surprising. In 1939, corporal punishment was fairly commonplace. If a child ran away from a place like the Home for Friendless Children, he or she might have been beaten. Or if it was the second offense, a child’s head might have been shaved. Other punishments included being made to scrub floors and bathrooms or to sit in a chair for hours with feet flat on the floor. At the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, children who misbehaved were threatened with being sent to reform school.
“Every Monday the superintendent would come out at breakfast when everybody was eating, and he would have two lists, one was the boys that were going to Eldora and one was the girls that were going to Mitchellville. So if you were out of line, your name appeared on that list. And I remember every time he came out with that list that I would shrink down in my chair just praying my name wasn’t called.”*7
Though some resilient children thrived at the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, it was a grim existence for many. “The only thing that kept me going was I knew on Monday I would go to school.”*8 And unfortunately, there were cruel matrons. One matron the children particularly disliked showed up in many of the oral histories I read. Another matron told the kids: “All you are is an expense to the taxpayers of Iowa.”*9 But some matrons were kind. Erma Dalton, for example, wrote that she stopped working at the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home because it was “so painful to see the children who said their parents were coming and to see them all dressed up & waiting & the parents never came!”*10
I began this novel seven years ago with two characters: Lucy and Nico. I knew that Nico was a con man’s apprentice and Lucy had selective mutism, but I couldn’t figure out why Lucy refused to speak. I tried all kinds of backstories. None of them fit. The answer finally came when I happened on a book called Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America.
As with many little-known pieces of history, finding out the true story of the Fluency Study was challenging. Here’s the truth so far as I can tell: The Fluency Study began with a man named Wendell Johnson, who struggled with stuttering his entire life. Wendell Johnson wanted to know why a child became a stutterer and how one might alleviate the problem. As he put it, “I became a speech pathologist because I needed one.”*11 As a professor at the University of Iowa, he became a leader in the then relatively new field of speech pathology. It was his thesis that “Stuttering begins in the ear of the listener, not in the mouth of the child.”*12 In other words, “The affliction is caused by the diagnosis.”*13
Johnson developed the Fluency Study to prove his thesis. The study subjects were orphans at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home. “The perfect test site was just an hour’s drive from the campus: the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home…they used that orphanage as a laboratory rat colony.”*14
Johnson designed the study; a graduate student named Mary Tudor helped him implement it. After going through files and examining “the speech of 256 orphans, she [Mary Tudor] and the other speech pathologists culled 22 subjects: 10 stutterers and 12 normal speakers. They paired the children based on similarities in age, sex, IQ, and fluency. Then they randomly assigned one from each pair to the control group and the other to the experimental group.”*15
The children in the experimental group were given constant negative reinforcement for their speech. “They were told that their speech was not normal at all, that they were beginning to stutter and that they must correct this immediately.”*16 The children in the “control group” were given encouragement and positive reinforcement.
“Initially, children at the orphanage were delighted to receive this extra attention.”*17 One of the student subjects, Mary Korlaske, remembered that “she had thought her sessions with Tudor were sponsored by the university to help her speak better.”*18
But soon that feeling changed dramatically. The children in the experimental group became deeply inhibited about their speech.
For “Case Number 11,” a five-year-old who had no speaking issues initially but had been declared a “stutterer” by Johnson’s team, the sessions were stressful from day one…additional “negative therapy” sessions with the girl worsened her speaking ability. The problem grew to the point where the little girl refused to speak…I [Mary Tudor] asked her if she was afraid of something…after some time she said, “Afraid I might stutter.”*19
According to the New York Times,*20 the experiment “failed completely” in actually creating stutterers. The Mercury News account, on the other hand, states that the orphans in the experimental group began to have an increase in speech interruptions.
Her (Mary Korlaske’s) speech became jerky and hesitant, and she covered her face and slid down in her chair….She stuttered on words like “hand” and “got,” and when she read “The Three Bears” she stuttered on “porridge,” although months earlier she had little trouble reading the story….Over the course of four months, they [Mary Korlaske’s speech interruptions] had more than doubled. The other children who were in the same experimental group as Mary Korlaske showed similar effects….Nine-year-old Elizabeth Ostert and twelve-year-old Phillip Spieker saw their grades plummet because they became afraid to talk in class…[Hazel Potter] developed mannerisms characteristic of some stutterers, such as snapping her fingers to get a word out.*21
I have surmised that a child like Mary Korlaske would have become extremely important to Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor, as she proved his theory. In any case, Johnson continued to believe in his thesis, and so, apparently, did many others. According to the New York Times article, “Johnson’s theory dominated until the 1970s, when speech pathologis
ts began to reexamine its premise.”*22 And though researchers who analyze the study now strongly disagree with his conclusion, he thought the experiment proved he was right.
Since I am writing fiction, I elected to have Lucy develop mutism from being in the experimental group. All the accounts I read stated that partial mutism occurred in some of the children in the experimental group as a result of being exposed to the constant barrage of criticism. I have her hesitate and stutter slightly once she musters the courage to begin speaking again. And I didn’t have her hesitate or stutter at all when reading aloud or singing. It is my understanding that some kids stutter when reading out loud. Others do not. And many stutterers do not stutter when they sing. In any case, it didn’t seem like there was a cookie-cutter response to being in the experimental group. So I imagined the way my character might have handled this situation.
By the time the experiment was complete, the parallels between the Fluency Study and experiments on human subjects in Nazi Germany were all too obvious, and the study results were buried.
During the war years, some of [Johnson’s] graduate students, concerned about the ethics of the orphan study, had begun calling it the “Monster Experiment” or the “Monster Study.” They warned him that although the experiment was hardly unique in having used orphans as subjects, it was a particularly sensitive time: In the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career.*23
The results of the Fluency Study were never published.
Though Matron Mackinac and Matron Grundy are entirely fictional, it is true that Mary Tudor asked the teachers and matrons at the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home to continue criticism of children in the experimental group between her sessions. For the kids in this group, the torment was unrelenting.
I don’t know why the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home offered up orphans for experimentation. The increase in the census had spread resources quite thin, and I surmised that monetary gifts from the university might have made them willing to allow the university to experiment on the children, but this is pure speculation on my part.
Orphan Eleven Page 19
