Evidence of V
Advance Praise
“Written in compelling, creative, and near poetic prose, O’Connor vividly introduces the reader to V—a promising 15-year-old singer in 1930s Minnesota sentenced to a reformatory for sexual delinquency. O’Connor uses a mix of fiction with historical case file information to illustrate the myriad ways such facilities exploited, misunderstood, silenced, and traumatized young women who were deemed insolent, damaged, and mendacious. Kin to Girl, Interrupted, Evidence of V gives a keen sense of how we have punished (and continue to punish) girls for non-criminal violations, often in a misguided effort to ‘rescue and save.’”
—Lisa Pasko, author of The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime
“With grace and aplomb, Sheila O’Connor’s Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions shines a bright literary light on a dark page of American history. To every “tuff” girl, to every girl who ran wild or got in trouble, to every girl who had to make her own way or raise herself, and to every adult who ever knew such a girl, O’Connor’s new novel is for you. O’Connor tells the story of her grandmother V, institutionalized for her sexuality. When our power is too great, when shaming doesn’t work, when they don’t know what else to do, they lock us up. V is our grandmother, our auntie, our long-ago sister, and our defiant best friend. V is us.”
—Maureen Gibbon, author of Paris Red
“Evidence of V is unlike anything I have ever read. Exhilarating, heart-breaking, and haunting, the experience of V’s life and times scintillates and sears long afterward. Part mystery novel, poem cycle, police report, ethnographic study, noir screenplay, historical account, existential spreadsheet, medical report, legal history, hometown newspaper article, meta-feminist account, writer’s diary, literary collage, psychological assessment, family memoir, social criticism, and several other forms that are uncategorizable, by the end, the reader realizes, through Sheila O’Connor’s masterful artistry, that at the heart of the ‘lie’ of this fiction, lurk deeper truths—that our ancestors and their traumas can never fully be known to us and each of our family histories is a complicated mix of truth and lore and absence.”
—Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night
Copyright © 2019 by Sheila O’Connor
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations within critical articles and reviews. Please direct inquiries to:
Rose Metal Press, Inc.
P.O. Box 1956, Brookline, MA 02446
[email protected]
www.rosemetalpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O’Connor, Sheila, author.
Title: Evidence of V : a novel in fragments, facts, and fictions / by
Sheila O’Connor.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019025830 (print) | LCCN 2019025831 (ebook) | ISBN
9781941628195 (paperback) | ISBN 9781941628201 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Teenage girls--Fiction. | Juvenile detention
homes--Fiction. | Exploitation--Fiction. | Family secrets--Fiction. |
Reformatories for women--United States--Fiction. | Singers--Fiction. |
Nightclubs--United States--History--20th century--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3565.C645 E95 2019 (print) | LCC PS3565.C645
(ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025830
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025831
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
The author would like to thank the editor of Slag Glass City, Volume 3, 2017, wherein earlier versions of some sections of this book have appeared.
Photo and artwork credits, as well as permissions and bibliographical material, can be found on pages 257–264.
Cover and interior design by Heather Butterfield.
Cover image: “Mother and Child at Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre.” Used with permission of Sauk Centre History Museum and Research Center.
For my children,
Mikaela and Dylan,
and
for the mothers,
Marilyn, Dorothy, and V,
remarkable spirits, all.
Table of Contents
Evidence of V
I. A BOOK OF PSEUDONYMS AND LIES
How It Starts: Minneapolis, 1935
The Proposition
Debut at the Cascade Club
The Men of Minneapolis
Jefferson Junior High: December 1935
The Stepfather
And Now Among the Men
Business
After Hours
Generosity: January 1936
Generosity Revised
Pinned
The Evidence of Love
You Stay Safe?
Truancy
The First Day V Suspects
First Offense
Reformed
The Last Good Day
Luck
Life Science
What V Knows from Her Clippings
Consolation Mr. C
Finding of Facts
Guardianship
The Last Gift That He Gives Her
Were
II. AND HER THERE SAFELY KEEP
And Her There Safely Keep
Quarantine: Reception Wing
Case Study
Assignment
The Weight of Fairview Colony
Early Days Fairview Colony: First Cottage
Maintenance
Recreation Hour
The First to Go
Transfer One
Correspondence
The Letter V Can’t Write or Send, and So She Doesn’t
The Wives and Mothers of Tomorrow
The First Escape
Third Trimester
Compliance
Visitation Sunday, September 1936
A Difficult Labor
Postpartum Dream One
Postpartum Dream Two
How They Bond
After Birth
Nursery Magic
First Christmas June
Collect
Attachment Theory: One
Losing June
Early Lessons Cottage Six
Beyond Motherhood
Every Two Weeks
Interview Board of Control
Escape
State School Pastoral
August 12, 1937
Run
Reformation
February Death
The Third Summer
What V Owns When She Leaves
Release
III. PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE
A Good Woman
Housewarming
Motherly Interest
Home Making and Home Management
For What We Are about to Receive
Fa La La La La La La La La
Christmas Morning 1938
Personal Interest
Dr. Taft Imagines France
The First Time V Considers
Mrs. Taft’s Assessment
Ladies’ Aid
A Lucky Star
Letter
What V Hears from Mr. C
Depleted
Hide and Seek
Wic
ked
Minneapolis
Homecoming
Attachment Theory: Two
Minor Honor
Heaven
Exile
First the Facts, Then the Consequences of the Facts
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Permissions
Acknowledgments
About the Author
“And now I don’t know
What in all that was real.”
—Czeslaw Milosz, “So Little”
“One of the main faults of the girls, who are of a healthy lot, and with few social diseases, is that of lying.”
—“Broken Homes Main Cause of Child Failure,” St. Cloud Daily Times and Daily Journal-Press, May 4, 1937
[Where to start V’s story?
V at fifteen in 1935?
V sentenced until twenty-one, for what?
V the family secret I discovered at sixteen.
My mother’s missing mother never mentioned to me once.
Shhh. The sound of V is silence.
Girl of sealed history like all those other girls.
Sealed; therefore buried.
State documents I now excavate for answers.
An official file of facts that read like fiction.
V a fiction built of fragments, as girls so often are.]
I.
A BOOK OF PSEUDONYMS AND LIES
“First the facts, next the proof of facts, then the consequences of the facts.”
—Henry Clay Trumbull, Teaching and Teachers, 1884
WHO:
V, mother of my mother. Absent and erased. V, maternal grandmother. Both missing and maternal?
Mr. C, maternal grandfather?
June, born of V and Mr. C.
June, my mother not maternally inclined.
WHAT:
The mystery: My mother’s lost beginning. V unknown. A fifteen-year-old girl.
Files unsealed by the county with permission from the court. Buried family facts unearthed.
Making sense of fact with fiction. Always fiction.
WHEN:
The Research: 2001 to present day.
The Story: 1935 to ad infinitum.
The length of time V’s cells transmit her trauma to us all:
June’s children, and our children, and—
As in today: Call sibling in the psych ward.
WHERE:
Hennepin, Nicollet, LaSalle: Minneapolis streets named for explorers. (The men always explorers.)
The Cascade Club. The Belvedere Hotel.
Minnesota Home School for Girls, Sauk Centre, Minnesota.
Probation placement: Possibly Duluth?
WHY:
Because the truth was always missing. Because there is no truth.
Because June could not bond with her children.
Because V was erased, a secret.
Because I need her to be gone.
Because I need to find her.
Because V leapt into traffic, a shock on someone’s windshield.
Because June lost V, lost her family’s story.
Because we are living in V’s white space
where very little can be known.
How It Starts: Minneapolis, 1935
V floats like a feather far from school. Late November loose. A pain in her back tooth that can’t be fixed. Hunger acid in her belly. Her best friend Em beside her, a tether to this world.
Always V and Em end up downtown. V performing on the streets, singing for the men who still have money for young girls.
A dime a dance, Em calls. A nickel for a song. Em, the stubborn banker, holds the sailor cap for coins. Money they will save for a picture show and popcorn, or a quick stop at the Lolly Jar on Sixth.
V cancans and she shimmies, sings, “Ain’t We Got Fun,” then lands hard for a laugh. One week into fifteen, V’s a red-haired Ruby Keeler, a Ziegfeld Follies hopeful sure she’ll be discovered. V has what it takes to be a star.
You’ve got talent, one man says, his face as clean as a fresh page, his hands as smooth as snow, his thumb under her chin like a good father. (V’s good father has been dead for five hard years.) You shouldn’t waste it on the street. I could put you on the stage.
The stage? V says, her heart falling to his hands.
How much? Em asks. Em is the accountant; Em always knows exactly what V’s worth.
More than this, he says, pulling a quarter from his pocket and slipping it in V’s. More than you earn now.
The Proposition
Inside the empty Cascade Club, tiny V contemplates Mr. C’s sweet proposition: Seven dollars every week, plus tips. Can’t your family use the money? Aren’t times tough for a kid?
Yes, V nods, trying to mask the thrill trapped in her throat. His offer so much better than the solo prize she won at Powderhorn last year. Nine thousand people at the park to hear her sing. V’s name printed in the paper. Page 23. Her own single column clipping pressed into her scrapbook full of famous stars. Picture shows or Broadway, V dreams of either one.
Except V’s not in a dream right now, she’s real. Mr. C is real. This squat brick bar on Nicollet is real. Watery block windows. No bright lights marquee, but floor show posters plastered on the door. DANCING. DRINKS. HOT NIGHTS AND HAPPY GIRLS. .75 FOR FUN. No stage, he lied about the stage. The smell of last night’s party wafting from the walls. Beer and whiskey. Cigarettes. Cigars. Rickety round tables with chairs stacked on the tops. A nightclub like those nightclubs where so many stars began. V knows that from the newspaper, the rags-to-riches stories of so many girls like her. Houston. Chicago. Kansas City. V’s story will begin in Minneapolis.
And what about your folks? he asks, pouring V a Coca-Cola to close the deal. I can’t risk any trouble, even for a little thing like you. They going to want their pretty daughter working here?
Sure, V lies, the heat of that last pretty burning her young skin. And anyway, I mostly sleep at Em’s.
Spider bites and pinups in Em’s attic, no radiator heat, but V would rather freeze than go home to that man her mother married last July. Her mother’s good Norwegian-Lutheran God, gone now from their house.
You like licorice ropes and picture shows? he asks. Dark-eyed Mr. C, the handsome heartbreaker on every starlet’s arm. Silk stockings? Streetcar fare? You’ll never have to walk downtown again.
You bet, V says, but she would sing without the licorice. The streetcar fare. Her body like a radio, a steady thrum of music yearning to be heard. All the dances that she’s learned without a lesson longing to be seen.
V discovered at fifteen.
And so she takes the job.
Inmate’s Name: V_______________
Occupation: Entertainer
[Does entertainer equal
showgirl?
B-girl?
Dancer?
Singer?
Or
none of the above?
And was that V in my lost brother
with his heroin and blues?
Brother singing on the stage in Amsterdam, Munich, Paris.
Brother an entertainer at fifteen
performing on the streets of San Francisco.
Brother dead on Christmas Day.
A startling young talent
no one could account for
because no one in the family could account.]
Debut at the Cascade Club
She enters the tunnel a little fox. Little Fox is what he ca
lls her, and she wears that clever nickname like a mask. Little Fox led to the light. Little Fox half-glued together with rouge, and paint, and powder. Red lips pressed to paper like a kiss.
Little Fox, he whispers, soon you’ll be my star.
In the next room, men stripe along the bar, crowd the steamy darkness, wait for the girl to sashay into the spotlight, the girl to offer them a song. Her skin.
You’ll still have your fur, he says, draping the fox stole on her shoulders, brushing his hand between her legs. Just dance, he says. A dance is all they want.
The Men of Minneapolis
Teamsters, doctors, gangsters, Nash salesmen from Harmon, reporters from the Star, the brakeman and the banker, the florist, the courthouse guard, the judge, the Catholics and the Jews, sullen silent Swedes, college boys with cash, Sears clerks, the candy man from Sixth, the tailor from Young-Quinlan, the doorman from the Nicollet Hotel, men who still tend horses, men who beg, men who pass a bottle at the park, the hoboes and the lawyers, the janitor from Jefferson, the Germans and the Finns, all of them pay the price to watch V sing, pay to watch her wave the sheer chiffon, flash her sequined breasts, lift her bare young legs, pay to see the glittered young girl dance. The men of Minneapolis, all hungry for V now.
Jefferson Junior High: December 1935
How little V belongs here. Orphaned mitten left in Lost and Found. Girls trade their ninth-grade gossip, while V floats off on a river, a swan that no one sees. She only comes for heat, a warm room this December. Her mother’s husband drunk at home again.
Algebra and Civics, English and Life Science, steam inside V’s brain, then disappear.
D and C and B and D because she’s bright.
A dumb girl would be failing. A dumb girl would be caught.
Plaid skirt and schoolgirl socks, V’s a master at pretending. But fifteen is a costume V can’t bear.
Evidence of V Page 1
