—Fannie French Morse, First Superintendent, Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre. Excerpted from Proceedings of the First State Conference of Child Welfare Boards with The Board of Control, State Capitol, May 9 and 10, 1919, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1919
Morse Hall, Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, ca. 1939
And Her There Safely Keep
1.
Not bad for the pen, the sheriff jokes.
Through the window of the backseat, V takes in the Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre. A school that’s not a school; a home that’s not her home. Farmland and flat sky as far as V can see. The same stink of so much country she’s had to breathe these depressing hours in the car. Cows or pigs or corn, she doesn’t recognize the stench. She’s never spent a day out on a farm, and now she will be held here in these fields trapped in silence.
Shady clusters of dark trees. An immaculate green lawn. Leafy lilac shrubs. A scattering of clapboard houses standing lonely on the land. No house next to another. No one near to hear V scream. No alleys. No streetcar V can hop to Minneapolis when she’s ready to be done. No Olson’s Grocer on the corner. No Sears. No shops of any kind. No kids chasing down the street. No streets. No Cascade Club. No Mr. C. No Em. No mother. No older, doting sisters to spring V from this mess. A world so far from love and freedom V could crack.
No one who V loves will find her here.
Please don’t leave me here, V begs, choking back a sob. Her hand touching his right shoulder in case a girl’s small hand will help. I can’t stay at this school, I just can’t.
You’ll straighten out, the sheriff says, slowing to a stop. It’s a good place for a girl like you to land.
2.
Made to wait in the front parlor, V hears the sheriff’s engine disappear into the distance, feels the loss of that kind stranger tear at her young heart. The last hope she had to run for home, and now he’s gone. Wait, she calls, rushing toward the doorway—
3.
You take your seat now, missy. We follow rules here.
4.
First, there are the necessary formalities of commitment to complete. Questions every girl must answer: name, address, employer, occupation, school, grade, special talents (dancing/singing), venereal conditions, intimate relations, with whom, and when, and where, conception date and place, name of the father—
Here V is forced again to tell the tale of that relation: How she met a man named Sammy K at the Cascade Club. How she’d heard that he was sick. How she’d gone to see him at the Curtis with a bowl of onion soup she hoped might help. February. She can’t recall a date, but she’s certain there was snow. Yes, once. It wasn’t more than once. The hotel room at the Curtis? Second or third floor, V isn’t sure. In town on a visit from St. Louis? Is V certain he’s not local?
I’m sure, V lies again.
But a Jew, you’re sure of that?
I am, V says, doling out the one truth Mr. C wanted V to tell.
5.
Don’t start with the waterworks. The time for tears has passed.
6.
How shall we leave V on that first day?
Settled into the school’s Higbee Hospital? A receiving ward of fourteen rooms, a sun porch, where V will live in isolation, quarantined for two long weeks, alone.
Or shall we leave her giving up her own clothes for the single dress and underwear the Home School first provides?
Or on the table with her bare feet in the stirrups? A strange man’s hurried fingers tunneling through V. A delinquent girl about to be reformed.
[In a file built on fragments why pause at Sammy K ?
Or suspect it was a name Mr. C suggested,
or one young V invented on her own?
Sammy K,
V’s answer to the carnal knowledge question,
the man the county hoped to charge.
An adjudication of paternity
that came to a dead end.
Case opened and abandoned
in the years that V was held.
“Father can’t be found.”
Why imagine Mr. C—
V’s designated “special friend” —
when we have Sammy K?
A man who curiously mirrors Mr. C
in every way except St. Louis:
Nightclub manager, thirty-five, Jewish.
In a fiction built on fiction why doubt
V’s own account of June’s conception?
Intuition?
Or the caution against telling
I carry in my blood?]
Quarantine: Reception Wing
There is nothing V can give the other girls. No disease, no contraband. She only owns a regulation comb and toothbrush now. Still, she’s contained in isolation like a germ. Subjected to their interviews and tests: Mantoux, Wassermann, vaginal smear, psychological, educational, achievement. A thorough investigation to ensure V is classified correctly.
Bed, table, dresser, chair. This is all V has for comfort now. A land of green and girls outside her window. The distant hum of inmates just like V. Footsteps in the hallway. The sealed jar of Higbee Hospital closed tight around V’s brain.
At night, a lightning storm foreshadows Hell. V could die alone in these moist sheets. Die of want and terror. Die before this baby’s even born.
And where is Em right now? Her hand in Lu’s, two girls running from police like it’s a lark. Mr. C closing up the Cascade Club, wiping a damp towel across the bar, or fingering V’s button in the pocket of his pants. Mr. C dreaming of his V, his Little Fox, his Venus. His private, perfect dancer.
Another girl is dancing for him now.
In the morning, Higbee Hospital glares bright and disinfectant clean, and V can hear her mother’s voice whisper from the walls.
Case Study
1.
V blinks out of isolation, startled by a sky suddenly silver; the solitary weeks a wool hood over her head. She has a face, a footprint, which means she must be real. She can still recite the streets of Minneapolis: Aldrich Avenue through Zenith. The states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, etc. “The Raven.” Once upon a midnight dreary. Her times tables through twelve. One-hundred-twenty-seven songs from start to finish. (A secret tally on the white page in her brain).
Two-thousand-thirty-six: the days that she has left to play their prisoner.
Two-thousand-thirty-six.
In four more weeks, classified, case-studied, assigned the proper cottage, V will learn exactly who she is.
2.
Freed from quarantine, the fundamentals of V’s training—homemaking and domestic service—must begin at once. Thus, V is on her knees waxing the glassy halls of Higbee Hospital; a daily exercise the school doctor recommends for pregnant girls.
3.
Evenings, V works the kitchen sink with loud Louise and Dixie from St. Paul, sweet Patrice from Minneapolis—Washburn High. Younger girls: Tough Toots who just turned twelve. Little Hazel only nine. Little Hazel with her frizzy pearl-white curls and pink-rimmed eyes, the tiny elfin girl who begs to sort the flatware. The best job in the kitchen and the big girls let her have it. Little Hazel who let her uncle touch her where he shouldn’t. She knows better now, but can’t go home. Her uncle plows her family’s fields; Hazel doesn’t.
You can be our Shirley Temple, V offers, to be kind. Our own Baby Burlesk. Once V wished to be that cute. That petulant and pouty. A Glad-Rags-to-Riches girl like charming Shirley.
If Shirley Temple let her uncle dirty her, Dixie says, disgusted. But a rich girl in the pictures wouldn’t do that.
[Here I turn to other fragments:
The white space of statistics, of facts and forms,
of incomplete reports
the school submitted to the state.
Of some yea
rs that weren’t V’s years, but still—
a handwritten school ledger of minutia.
Tiny clues to V’s lost story,
June’s lost story,
suddenly the stories of thousands of lost girls.]
Statistics for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1936
Offense Against Society
Bigamy
Drunkenness
Disorderly Conduct1
Vagrancy
Incorrigibility10
Truancy 3
Immorality 79
All others in this class1
Age
8 years
9 years1
10 years1
11 years
12 years
13 years2
14 years 13
15 years21
16 years22
17 years32
18 years9
19 years1
—Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, “Report to Minnesota State Board of Control,” June 30, 1936
Girls in Institution on June 30, 1937 by Race:
White 247
Negro7
Mexican 1
Indian 25
Other 1
Total281
—Handbook of American Institutions for Delinquent Juveniles, Vol. 1: West North Central States, 1938
[And this in the context of the 1930 and 1940 censuses, where 99.2% of the Minnesota population was identified as white.]
“The proportion committed until 21 years old was exceptionally large for males committed for delinquency and females committed for sex offenses immorality and sex delinquency—”
—Juvenile Delinquents in Public Institutions, 1933
“Because such a large proportion of the girls are sex delinquents. . . ”
—Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, “Report to Minnesota State Board of Control,” June 30, 1936
[HOW TO BECOME A SEX DELINQUENT
This is difficult to accomplish on your own. An ordinary girl may need some help. Particularly young. Most frequently a sex delinquent girl will need a boy, an older neighbor who can rape her when she’s twelve. Or a cousin who can take her in the closet, gag her mouth, make her hold his thing. A brother visiting her bed is helpful, too. Beyond these boys, perhaps a lucky girl will have a man. A father, uncle, stranger, a man who knows a secret game that they can play. First, the sex delinquent girl sits on his lap. This can start as young as one or two. That game isn’t really fun, but the sex delinquent girl will never say so. Or maybe she’s fifteen and never touched, but she wants to be in pictures. She’s a girl who sings in choir, a girl who dances with her sisters and her friends. That girl must learn burlesque. Burlesque is where the money is right now. Men like to see a nearly naked young girl dance. Men like to imagine. The sex delinquent girl knows how to help a man imagine, the more a man imagines the more money she can make. Money feeds a sex delinquent girl. A sex delinquent girl is often hungry. Or her family’s going hungry. Or she needs a place to sleep. Kind men can sell these sex delinquent girls. A sex delinquent girl must love adventure. A sex delinquent girl is sick. A sex delinquent girl puts all our men at risk. Boys and men. We must remove that girl. A sex delinquent girl can be reformed through housework. Do you wish to be a nanny or a maid? Answer yes. A sex delinquent girl will always answer yes.]
Assignment
After six weeks at Higbee Hospital, six weeks of inquisition while V kept the building clean, kept the oak floors gleaming with buffed wax, her case study is complete.
Classification: Expectant Mother.
Assignment: First Cottage, Fairview Colony. A cluster of five cottages for the pregnant, and the feeble-minded girls.
A place where troubled V will learn to find contentment in the home. Will learn to create a home for others. An aptitude that V and every other sentenced girl still lacks.
[Did you create a home at fifteen?]
V should pack her comb and toothbrush. Strip her bed. Leave the hospital without a long good-bye. It’s best for girls to go without a fuss. The friends that she made here—Little Hazel, Sweet Patrice, Tough Toots—V may never know those girls again. Once assigned, communication between cottages is banned.
The girls in First Cottage, Fairview Colony—V shouldn’t discount the feeble-minded—those girls will be her family unit now.
You’ve performed well in reception, Mrs. Lawson says. The advisor finds you bright enough, but quite naïve. Star-struck like so many troubled girls. Claiming entertainment skills for which you haven’t trained. Talents you clearly don’t possess.
I won the city solo contest, V would like to say, but she sits silent. Nine thousand people heard me sing in Minneapolis. Before my father died, he cleaned Lyndale Dance studio on Sundays for my lessons. Later, I had to learn routines by watching through the window, or I memorized dance numbers from movies, but at least I learned to dance.
But bright V doesn’t speak. The little that she owns she isn’t giving to this woman. The As she earned in elementary. The sixth-grade school operetta where they cast V as the lead. The selected soloist on Flag Day. V able to earn money for a song. So talented, she was discovered on the street and transformed into a star. Mr. C always proud of Little Fox. V, the shining star he knew she would be. That stole across her shoulders, the tips, the gifts from grateful customers, the thrill of their applause. Her dreams of Hollywood or Broadway.
Okay. V manages a shrug to show she doesn’t care what Mrs. Lawson or the other staff might think. I’ll pack my toothbrush for First Cottage.
First Cottage, where she’ll train to clean and sew and launder for proper families when paroled.
The Weight of Fairview Colony
The weight of girls. The weight of babies, secrets, shame. Amniotic fluid. The weight of want. The weight of rage. The weight of fieldwork and laundry. The weight of shovels, hoes, and spades. The weight of homesick, lovesick, lifesick, rising in V’s gut. The weight of safe. The weight of fog through which the feeble-minded wander. Lost? Insane? No one ever says.
The dim girls bleed and bleed. The pregnant girls swell with salt and milk.
At night the fat girls lumber up the stairs, bears, bearing the weight of what they’ve done, and all they must do next.
[Does V vomit day and night as I once did,
from conception through delivery?
Vomit ceaselessly as June did with her first child?
My mother’s mother always silent on the subject.
Never a single story of her pregnancy with June.
Of newborn June.
What she said to all our questions: I really don’t remember.
And she didn’t.
Family amnesia of adoption.
Of maternity. Of birth.
Amnesia of our history, and so I must invent.]
Early Days Fairview Colony: First Cottage
This is how V’s days are measured here.
Hot nights of fitful sleep. On one close wall of V’s cramped room, the movie of her dancing at the Cascade. On the other, a filthy sweat-soaked girl shovels dirt out in the sun.
Beyond this night-locked cottage, V is trapped by lake and pine and field with only one road for escape. That much V has learned already—how the brave girls try to run, how hard it is to hide among the ordinary now. A pregnant girl hitching in a homely state school dress. Regulation ankle boots with an X carved into each sole so girls are found. Men will hunt for V and bring her back.
V needs her child skin to harden here, needs another layer between what was and is—the six years still ahead she has to serve. Instead she lies here open as a peach soft in the center. The dark pit of her heart a small, black stone.
None of this will ever leave V’s room—her 5:00 a.m. remorse, the silent movies she watches on her walls.
Among the matron, the officers, and staff in V’s first cottage, she already has to be their street-tough tramp. The city girl who traded songs for fame and money. The star-struck girl who chased the nightlife and got what she deserved.
What all the girls deserve.
It’s too late to beg God’s mercy, too late to change the version of a life already lost.
Her day begins at 6:00 a.m., and so she goes—
Evidence of V Page 5
