Читать книгу Criminal of Poverty - Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia - Страница 14

From as early on as I can remember my mother would tell me horrible stories of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, the neglect, starvation and torture she endured at the many foster homes she lived in as a child. My mother rarely cried and she never let anyone hug her; instead she would tell her horror stories like someone recanting a case study for their dissertation. Her eyes would become dark and her voice would drop, and she would return to the terrified place of a scared child while remaining the cogent adult in the retelling. Sometimes she would vow to pursue a lead on a torture victims’ support group or she’d declare her intention to write a book because she thought her experience was “like the case of Sybil,” a severely mentally ill woman whose story had been made famous by a best-selling book and movie.

But she never really did anything about all that pain except tell me the stories, her voice trailing off, going alone into a place where I couldn’t reach her. Sometimes, if she would let me, I’d hold her hand and try to comfort her, tell her everything would be okay. Most of the time I would just cry for her, my tears falling where hers could not. And I would vow to her and to myself that somehow, in some way, I would make as much as I could okay for my mom, no matter how long it took me.

The story that always began and ended one of these sessions was of her time at Marguerite Leland’s home, where she was placed when she was four years old.

“May we help you?” a towering female figure draped in a dark red and navy blue velvet dress inquired in a deep New England drawl.

“Are you Mrs. Marguerite Leland?” her mother didn’t wait for a reply as she continued breathlessly, “I need to leave my daughter with you. I can’t keep her anymore, I have to work. I have nowhere else to take her. I can pay five dollars a month as soon as I find a job—please.”

The large woman towered in front of them, huge green eyes glaring out of a wide white face,“What is your name?”

“Helen Josephine McMurphy, and this is little Mary Jo,” she answered, reaching deep into her throat for her best appropriated “King’s English” accent, masking her usual clipped, Liverpudlian Irish inflection.

“Irish, eh?” the tall woman threw back her thick silver hair, “Well, I’m not a charity, so if you can’t pay she’ll have to work. These are hard times, everyone is having trouble. Oh, and please call me Marguerite.”

Helen Jo had gone dress shopping to find the perfect dress to present little Mary Jo to this, her most recent foster home. In the last three years she had been sent to three different families—they always started out well but inevitably something would go wrong. The situation with the last family, Mary’s favorite, had seemed like it would last forever, until one day the eldest daughter, who was mentally disabled, decided she wanted to perform a sexual act on Mary, one she had experienced when she was raped herself. Little Mary, only three years old at the time, almost died of asphyxiation under the sheer weight of the massive girl, but before she was completely suffocated the mother came in and found them. Within days Mary Jo was gone from that beautiful farmhouse, which always remained in her memories, filled with the sounds of laughter and happiness.

In the first six months of her stay with Marguerite everything was wonderful. It turned out that the Lelands wanted to create a family and Mary Jo was to become the perfect little girl of Marguerite and Johnny Leland. To that end Marguerite used to dress her up in beautiful outfits and take her along on weekend trips to the Everglades, to the Rockies, to Niagara Falls. In every picture they appear as the idealized American family, little Mary Jo in Shirley Temple curls, Johnny Leland in a tan gabardine suit and Marguerite dressed in some flowing ’40s floral print dress, a scowl dancing at the corners of her dark red lips.

“Get down, GET DOWN!!” One morning as Mary Jo came downstairs for breakfast, Marguerite was hiding behind a couch to avoid the gunshots flying through the room. “Johnny’s shooting at me,” Marguerite whispered through clenched teeth as she grabbed Mary Jo by the hair, pulling her down so tightly, it almost hurt.

In twenty minutes it was over. The house fell into a deep silence. Johnny stood up, tucked his gun in his jacket, put on his hat and walked out the front door. Marguerite and Mary Jo watched him from the window as he strolled down the long walkway to the front gate. He opened and closed the small white door in the picket fence that marked the edge of Marguerite’s property without looking back or even turning his head.

Marguerite refused to leave her room for several weeks after Johnny left the house. There were no more dresses, Shirley Temple curls, trips or even report card reviews. The family was over as quickly as it had begun, and Mary Jo’s role as pretend daughter was no longer needed.

One dark, grey winter day a month or so later, Marguerite walked Mary Jo through the house and surrounding acres of land as if it was the first time Mary had ever seen it, telling her in a disembodied voice, “Your mother hasn’t sent any money for your board and I can’t afford to keep you for free, so you’ll have to earn your keep if you are to stay here anymore.” With that, Marguerite began to read off a list of chores, strenuous tasks far beyond the abilities of a five-year-old girl: the marble staircase must shine like glass, all hardwood floors need to be polished, pots, sinks, fine china and drawer after drawer of heavy silverware need to be washed, scrubbed, shined and polished. Flowers, trees, and all of the grass would need to be mowed, picked, pruned and weeded and Mary Jo was to start immediately.

If any of these tasks was not finished or accomplished to Marguerite’s satisfaction, Mary Jo was beaten with a board. Most days it seemed there was some task not done “just right,” and so most days the whoosh-whack of a wooden board smacking against flesh and the subsequent sound of a small child crying could be heard in the large house.

A few days after the tour of the property, food simply stopped being available. No plate was ever set again for Mary Jo, though elaborate meals were served for Marguerite’s many guests. Breakfasts with sausage, rolls and toast, lunches with sandwiches piled high with meat, cheese and lettuce, dinners of pasta, chicken, pot roast, vegetables and salad, but nothing for Mary. To stay alive she stole the cat’s food when she could.

Eventually Mary learned it wasn’t safe to ask for things, to hope that life would change or even to think much at all. In fact, the only safe thing to do after she finished the chores and got her beating was to sit for hours in one place and rock back and forth.

Four years passed filled with days spent just sitting alone on the back step all afternoon and into the night. It was easier to stay there quietly without moving or thinking. Way after dark, the elderly woman who rented a room at the top of the stairs would open the back door and whisper out to Mary Jo, “Come to bed,” sometimes slipping her a piece of bread.

My mother stayed in that house with Marguerite for five years altogether, until she was nine years old. Years later, with the help of therapy she realized how those years had left her in a constant state of anxiety and that she had suffered most of her life from post-traumatic stress syndrome. There were also physical repercussions from the starvation and the resulting malnutrition, which had long-term effects on her body, including a mouth full of bad teeth and a heart condition that eventually led to her premature death.

After a social worker finally intervened, Helen Jo came to pick my mother up, and when they arrived at my grandmother’s tiny room in the basement of a brownstone in North Philadelphia, neighbors and friends clicked their teeth at the emaciated girl for many days,“She looks like she’s been starved! What’s wrong with that woman, not feeding the child?”

Although my mother’s suffering was obvious, there was never any intention on my grandmother’s part to keep her at home. Later in life, my mother would understand that there was really no way she could have, being an undocumented immigrant with no child care and working two full time jobs just to scrape by, but my grandmother’s constant rejection caused her a deep and lasting pain. But the thing that she always said hurt the most was the fact that instead of registering horror at my mother’s condition, Helen Jo actually took Marguerite’s side, blaming my mother and accusing her of being incorrigible and a “great inconvenience.”

“It will be five dollars a month, paid on the first. Don’t ever be late Miss McMurphy, otherwise we’ll have to turn your child back over to the State. Do you understand?”

Mary Jo gazed up at her mother’s tired face as she pulled up the corners of her mouth, taking special care with all of her consonants. “Yes, of course, I understand dear, I will never be late. I have two jobs now and I’m also working for the landlord to keep the rent down. You’re all wonderful people to take in my little girl and I won’t let you down.” She continued with an endless string of promises about her integrity and praise for the wealthy benefactors who were so kind as to run this orphanage and take in poor girls like Mary Jo.

As Helen Jo sat with the director of the Philadelphia Home for Needy Girls she knew that this fine upstanding woman could not think badly of her for being a poor Irish immigrant woman with a bastard child and no family, because after all she didn’t speak like a poor Irish girl. She spoke as the nuns had taught her to, enunciating her words properly. My grandmother never lost hope in the illusion of respectability. She believed that if you acted like you had “class” people would believe that you did, and you could thus attain respectability in their eyes. This ability to use elocution and vocabulary to move between worlds, to attempt to reach beyond one’s class status of poverty and crisis, was practiced by my grandmother, passed down to my mother and also, eventually, to me, as a crucial survival mechanism.

After her mother finished the appointment with the director, she buttoned Mary Jo’s coat saying,“I’ll see you as soon as I can.” She left her 9-year-old daughter on the street in front of the Home and walked quickly into the afternoon sunset.

Mary Jo watched with terror as her mother scurried away into the darkening afternoon sky. After she left, a group of children from the neighborhood found her, “Hey little girl, are you the new orphan? Are you the new orphan?” “Hey little girl! Cat’s got your tongue? Can’t you talk?”“I think she’s deaf. She sure is funny lookin’, like a little nigger!” “Nigger lips! Nigger lips! Can’t you talk?” “Can you fight? C’mon, stand up, poor little deaf and dumb orphan girl can’t talk, can’t move,” and they circled around her until one of the boys stepped forward and proclaimed,“I think we need to help her ’cause she can’t move herself!”

Mary Jo, catatonic with fear and with too many silent screams in her head from the years of abuse mouthed the words,“Please don’t,” but no one could hear.

After a few more minutes of yelling, squealing and circling they picked her up, carried her onto the playground and put her into an empty trashcan. Later that night the janitor found her there, afraid to move a muscle in case someone would hear her.

“A mixed-race child”—that’s how each sentence began when the social workers at the orphanage described my mother in their reports. A mixed-race child, Mary Jo is always hungry, she could be anemic. Mary Jo, a mixed-race child, was asking for shoes again today. When her mother, Helen Josephine, visits she doesn’t display very much affection toward her daughter.

The Philadelphia Home for Needy Girls was a study in early philanthropy. It sat on hundreds of acres of beautiful, fertile farm land in the Pennsylvania countryside which had originally belonged to a trolley magnate who endowed the estate to run an orphanage for white “parentless” girls (perhaps this was the reason for the constant reminder about my mother’s “mixed-race” status). The institution was known for its supposed “progressive education” practices, run by a former settlement worker who trained under Maria Montessori herself. They purported to connect school and home in a way never done before by any educational institution. In fact, what was most significant was the amount of the work required from each child who lived in the home.

Each day at the orphanage began with a rooster, a bell and chores. There were everyday chores: washing, dusting, polishing, scrubbing and shining; once a week chores: egg collecting, cow milking, butter churning and baking everything from cakes to bread; and then there were seasonal chores.

Winters and anything close to the holidays were filled with every imaginable type of roasting, toasting, baking and broasting. While one pie would bake, another crust would be rolled out. One group of girls would be mixing and whipping chiffon and fresh cream to top the bread pudding and apple crisps, while another group would be skinning, dicing and washing all the fruit and piling it into big pots for the pie maker. Apples would be pressed and boiled into cider, cinnamon sticks boiled and crushed for fresh spice.

The desperately hot summer months were filled with hours and hours of sweat-filled canning. Peaches, pears, apricots, apples, blueberries, strawberries, rhubarb, and then there was jam and ice cream to be made.

All in all, the home produced almost everything its residents consumed, wore and slept on by converting the large student body into a highly productive, well-organized machine.

Nativity plays, Easter services, church choirs, dancing around the Maypole, parties and holidays that would rival the best Bing Crosby movies, all of this was meant to prepare the girls for living out the perfect American dream. These candy-coated dreams were planted in the developing minds of poor parentless girls without the means to achieve them, and they would both propel and haunt my mother for the rest of her life.

My mother lasted four years in the orphanage, a four years that she remembered fondly, notwithstanding the intense labor required and the ongoing discrimination she endured from three racist staff members. She remained an advocate for life of well-run non-punitive institutions for kids, rather than what she saw as the other option: unchecked abusive foster homes.

After the orphanage she bounced around to a few more foster homes, and then ended up for a while with her mother again in Helen Jo’s tiny apartment in North Philadelphia, where she fueled her love of Hollywood movies. After pretending to go to school every day, my mom would hop on the streetcar to go see a movie, reveling in the fantasyland of MGM musicals. One day, one of the neighborhood pedophiles almost whisked my mom away, but she was saved by the watchful eye of the “village,” the African American, Irish, Puerto Rican and Polish families who all took part in raising the neighborhood kids. They interceded by physically grabbing my mom and taking her home and severely beating up the pedophile who had almost successfully lured my mom to his apartment with promises of candy and comic books.

After that incident she was shipped off to more foster homes and more abuse until she ran away for good. She landed back on my grandmother’s doorstep where she began to hang out with a group of “bad” kids, who spent their days sitting in a broken-down car and drinking. It was this last foray into trouble that made my grandmother decide to send her out west to live with her eldest daughter, who had recently “found” Helen Jo again after her own journey of struggle as a teenaged single mother of two.

Although she lived on the outskirts of Pasadena, my mother’s half-sister was determined to enroll my mother in the extremely white, wealthy Pasadena school system, sharing the belief that the key to success in moving beyond your class position was to surround yourself with “better” people. My mother proved to be quite adept at “fitting in,” and she appropriated her classmates’ realities, clothes, lifestyles and attitudes so well, in fact, that six months after leaving Philadelphia as a mixed-race bastard with a thick accent and the demeanor of a tough, street-smart “rocker chick,” she had metamorphosed into a preppie who hung out with all the beautiful people. It was then that she became “Debbie,” shedding the poor, Irish-immigrant moniker of Mary Jo and birthing what she envisioned as a new, white, middle-class self. With nary a trace of her Philly accent left on her tongue, she wholeheartedly believed in her new identity, and that’s when my father entered the picture, a “respectable” boyfriend whose romantic attention was another part of the American dream that looked like it was coming “Debbie’s” way at last.