I smiled so big my lips hurt. I leaned up against Doctor Cat's shoulder, but I could not sleep. I was so happy, it was like music in my head.
"Edgar Allan Poe," I heard her say.
Puzzled, I looked up at her in the dim gaslight.
"Poe," she said again. "He was an orphan and a successful poet. Also the novelist Leo Tolstoy. He was an orphan too. I'm sure I can think of others if I put my mind to it."
"That won't be necessary, Doctor Cat," I said. "Two examples will do." Two orphans, two writers, and one of them a poet. And I had a family and was going to high school. Perhaps not all orphans turn out badly after all.
Early in the morning, the conductor woke us. "We're almost to Oakland station, pretty miss," he said to me.
Pretty? I turned to look at my reflection in the window of the train. No, I wasn't really pretty. I was better than pretty. I looked like my papa.
It was raining. "Just wait," the conductor said. "A California rain is like an old woman's dance. It doesn't last very long."
And he was right. By the time we arrived at the Oakland station, the rain had stopped. And we stepped off the train into blazing California sunshine.
Pronunciation Guide
This is roughly how these Polish words in the story are pronounced and what they mean:
chuligan hoo-lee-gan hoodlum
kapusta ka-poos-ta cabbage
kiełbasa kew-ba-sa sausage
klops klops meatloaf, meatballs
kopciuszek kop-choo-shek slavey, drudge
kopytka ko-pit-ka potato dumpling
łajdak wy-dock villain
osioł o-sho donkey
pączki pone-chkee doughnuts
pan pahn lord, mister, master
panna pahn-na miss
psiakrew sha-kref dog's blood! (an oath)
rodzina ro-dzhee-na family
sto lat stoh lat a hundred years
świnia shvee-nva pig
złoty zwo-tih a unit of currency
Author's Note
THERE REALLY WERE orphan trains. Between 1850 and 1929, nearly 250,000 poor urban children were sent west from the slums of the east and, toward the end of the century, from the midwest. The children had been living on the streets or in overcrowded orphanages. Most of them were orphans; the rest were abandoned, neglected, or sent away by desperate parents. It was thought that hard work in the clean air of the west would offer children a better chance to lead happy and productive lives.
The most famous of the "placing-out" agencies was New York's Children's Aid Society, established in 1853 by a young minister named Charles Loring Brace. He was dissatisfied with the existing options for homeless children. Children could be bound over, or indentured, to local families in exchange for their labor, a system that led to many abuses. Orphanages, a fairly recent idea, were few. Some were strict but fair, demanding much of the children but offering them food, beds, and sometimes work training. Many were unhappy places where children were lonely, frightened, and abused. Workhouses offered lodging and food to children and adults in return for work in factories or laundries. There were not enough of these institutions to house all the homeless children, and young people were put in jails merely for the crime of being homeless.
Brace developed a plan that would provide self-sufficiency and a home life to homeless children. A published summary of the work of the Children's Aid Society written in 1853 stated that "homeless waifs [found] themselves in comfortable homes, with all the boundless advantages and opportunities of the Western farmer's life about them." This was true, perhaps, for some children. Not all were so fortunate.
The Children's Aid Society was funded by private donations, churches, and charitable organizations, which paid for clothing, food, and transportation for the children as well as salaries for those who accompanied them west. The selected children—infants to adolescents of fourteen or so—were found on the streets or in institutions or were surrendered by their parents. They were scrubbed, dressed in new clothes, and put on trains headed west. There were no disabled children and none suffering from contagious or disfiguring diseases. Almost all were white and Christian, as these were thought most likely to find homes in the west.
The trip was difficult for the children, who were leaving their families, friends, and whatever homes they had known and heading to an unknown future. They were travel weary and confused. Train cars were filled with the sounds of weeping children, although many said later they were too frightened or too angry to cry.
At predetermined stops the children were lined up to be looked over. Many orphan-train riders remember feeling like cattle as prospective parents looked at their teeth and felt their limbs to make sure they were strong enough for work.
Some children were welcomed by their new families and new towns. Others were beaten, mistreated, taunted, or ignored. People were suspicious of these skinny young people with strange accents, fearing they carried "bad blood" from their unsuitable or unlucky parents. Some children drifted from home to home in an attempt to find someone who wanted them. Many ran away. Some reappeared on the streets or in the institutions they had started from.
There were attempts to keep track of orphans and their new families. Detailed records were kept of the number of children sent, their ages, where they were from, and where they were placed. No notation was kept of how successful a placement was: Were the new parents satisfied with their choices? Were the children happy? Were they ill fed or abused? Did they remain where they were placed? Only the children knew for sure. The reality of the great distances involved and the small number of agents made the Society and other placing-out agencies dependent on the benevolence of the adopting families.
The orphan trains ceased with the beginnings of the Great Depression. There were new doubts about the value of hard work for children, a decreased need for farm labor, and fewer families who could afford more mouths to feed. New social programs emphasized temporary foster care or the use of public money to allow poor families to stay together.
Some members of the last generation of orphan-train riders are now in their seventies and eighties. Their firsthand accounts of riding the trains, and lots of other information, can be found on the website of the Orphan Train Heritage Society, www.orphantrainriders.com, and many other websites. Search under "orphan trains."
The Children's Aid Society did not invent the idea of "placing out" large groups of children. In 1618 two hundred English boys, most of them orphans, were sent to Richmond, Virginia, to work on plantations there. The boys needed homes and provided cheap labor for the colony. Hundreds more followed.
In the mid-nineteenth century Britain established a system for transporting homeless children as "child migrants" to other parts of the British Empire. British policy declared that these children would prosper by learning how to farm and that hard work would build character. During the next eighty years, 100,000 "home children" were sent to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the West Indies. Some even made it to the United States: in 1869 twenty-one boys were sent to Wakefield, Kansas.
In the United States, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, official policies designed to "civilize" the vanquished Native Americans included assimilating the children into white society by forcibly taking them away from the influence of their parents and sending them to boarding schools hundreds of miles—or farther—away. They suffered from homesickness, culture shock, and despair. Many of the children died at school, from diseases they had no natural immunity to.
During the years leading up to World War II, the placing-out system was used to save some children from Hitler. In 1934 Jews in Germany began the Youth Aliyah movement to rescue Jewish children. By 1948 over 30,000 young people—half of them Holocaust survivors—had been sent to Palestine from Europe and the Balkans.
From December 1938 to August 1939 the British government opened the country's borders to 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. This Kindertransport, or
child transport, placed children in foster homes and institutions, with the intention of returning them to their families after the war. The horrors of the Holocaust prevented that. Very few ever saw their parents again. A website called www.kindertransport.com can give you more information and lead you to other sources, including an award-winning documentary called Into the Arms of Strangers.
After England entered the conflict in 1939, transportation for children from Nazi-occupied countries into England ceased. More than a million children—both British and refugees—were sent away from British cities deemed most vulnerable to Nazi bombs or invasion. Some were sent into the countryside, away from the heaviest bombing, where they were taken in by foster families, sent to orphanages, or worked on farms (the same was true in France and, later, Germany).
Thousands of children were sent to other parts of the British Commonwealth: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. In the chaos of war and its aftermath, the children's records were often incomplete, falsified, or lost. Children landed in foreign countries with no passports or histories. Parents sometimes could not find their children; children were informed their parents were dead. Some of the youngest never knew they had had a life before exile.
These various efforts were responsible for saving thousands of lives and offered new hope, opportunities, and families to children in real danger. Many survivors of the orphan trains and other movements feel fortunate. Others consider themselves abused and damaged. For most, however, it was a mixed experience. Siblings were often separated, and contact between them was discouraged. City children had to perform hard farm labor for which they were neither emotionally nor physically prepared. The children were "different" and sometimes unwelcome. They had to contend with jealousy and competition in their new families. Often they grew up feeling they didn't really belong anywhere. They suffered divided loyalties, wondering about their original families as they grew away from them. To survive, they had to be content with life among strangers.
Today there is much debate about what makes a family. Children do not seem to care about definitions; they just want to belong to someone.
If you wish to know more about the orphan trains, here are some places to start:
Eve Bunting. Train to Somewhere
Annette R. Fry. The Orphan Trains
Isabelle Holland. Journey Home
Marilyn Irvin Holt. The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America
Joan Lowery Nixon. The Orphan Train series
Stephen O'Connor. Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed
Orphan Train Heritage Society of America. Orphan Train Riders: Their Own Stories
Michael Patrick, Evelyn Sheets, and Evelyn Trickel. We Are a Part of History: The Story of the Orphan Trains
Michael Patrick and Evelyn Trickel. Orphan Trains to Missouri
PBS Television. "The American Experience: The Orphan Trains"
Charlene Joy Talbot. An Orphan for Nebraska
Martha Nelson Vogt and Christine Vogt. Searching for Home: Three Families from the Orphan Train
Andrea Warren. Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story
Andrea Warren. We Rode the Orphan Trains
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