“The arrival of a new doll at Murrow [Indian Orphanage] was disturbingly like a fresh kill on the Serengeti. Predators gathered, waited for their moment, and moved in….It wasn’t that they were tougher–I was Apache, after all–but they were bigger. And when it came to me, they always struck in packs. However careful I was, they would find a way to corner me out on the grounds, away from whatever protection Mrs. Joseph might offer, clutching the doll, which, however shabby she might be, was still mine….
Childhood is another country. Few of us remember exactly what it was like to live there. In the late 1940s George Orwell, then a middle-aged widower with an adopted son to raise, reflected on his own days as an eight-year-old in an English boarding school. The headmaster there beat him with a riding crop for wetting the bed repeatedly–and then, when Orwell let it be known that the first beating hadn’t hurt, beat him again, breaking the crop in the process.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Looking back, Orwell realized that he’d taken for granted two things about this episode long after his adult mind knew better. “One is that the second beating seemed to me a just and reasonable punishment. To get one beating, and then to get another and far fiercer one on top of it, for being so unwise as to show that the first had not hurt–that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and when you have good fortune you should conceal it. The other is that I accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet–the feeling of having done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object….This acceptance of guilt lay unnoted in my memory for twenty or thirty years.”
The principal telephoned Mrs. Joseph, the head of the orphanage. Mrs. Joseph drove Linda back to Murrow and explained that the townspeople didn’t want the Indian orphans in their school at all. In order to be allowed to stay there and have a chance in life, she would have to obey their rules.
Death was never far away. One Sunday a local preacher terrified the children with his description of hell as a place where every beautiful yellow butterfly turned into sulfurous flames when you touched it. That afternoon Rachel, the orphanage bully and Linda’s nemesis, made it worse by explaining that Osages (her tribe) were the only Indians who went to heaven: “It’s because the only way to get to heaven is in a car. The rainbow is the road to heaven. And you got to get yourself a big old Chevy or, even better, a Caddy and drive on up to heaven when your time is come. The only ones who can afford cars like that is rich white folks and us Osages. That’s because of the oil money.”
It’s not because those past events have become tinged with a false nostalgic glow either. Skolnick describes her book as a series of mental photographs. And yet when she comes across the only real photographs that survive from that time–group shots of children with close-cropped hair lined up in uniforms–she’s only too happy to burn them.
“But no, that didn’t seem right. That wasn’t what I felt when I lay here, in their place, in the dead zone. I felt peace, even joy….These children weren’t angry anymore; they’d gotten past their anger or forgotten it somehow….They couldn’t help me with my revenge; I’d have to work that out some other place, some other way.” Somehow like them, or what they might have been, Skolnick has taken material as harsh and unforgiving as Oklahoma weather and fashioned it into a triumph song.
