“All I ever wanted was to be a reporter,” I told him. “I’ll do whatever it takes. Just tell me what you want.”
“I want the special—meatloaf with brown gravy, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Give me an assignment. Let me cover something. Let me write something. Anything. You’ll see. I’m good.”
“Kid, unless you somehow single-handedly stumbled on the story of the century and beat every other reporter on every other newspaper in the city to the punch on it, I don’t think there’s a thing you can do. I don’t hire girls. I certainly don’t hire wet-behind-the-ears girls. Now get me my lunch, or I’ll have to call the manager.”
I got his food. I was tempted to spit on it as I carried it to his table. I slammed it down in front of him. He didn’t even look at me. He picked up his knife and fork and set to work, his eyes barely straying from his newspaper.
Was I discouraged yet again? You bet I was. I dragged myself back to my room after work and cleaned up. I was tired. My feet hurt. And so far I wasn’t getting any closer to my goal. I reached for my suitcase to get my book. It was pure luck that I had stumbled across it. I’d bought it the previous year. I’d gone into town—actually, I’d snuck into town—and, after making sure that there were no town kids around to make fun of me, slipped into the thrift store run by the church ladies. It was a small place but clean. At the back there were a couple of shelves of donated books that you could buy for a nickel if they were paperback or a dime if they had hard covers. I was always looking for something interesting to read, which excluded the books in the home’s so-called library. I wanted adult books. The only adult books on the shelf at the Home were what Mrs. Hazelton called classics—Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and lots and lots of Shakespeare. Poetry too, which I sort of like, depending on what it’s about. They were all books that were supposed to be good for us. Uplifting books. You can’t believe how many of us had read Jane Eyre—and how many of us at one time or another hoped that we would one day meet our very own Mr. Rochester.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Dickens or Shakespeare. But I wanted something different. I wanted the kind of book that the rest of the world was reading, like, say, Peyton Place, which turned out not to be nearly as good as I thought it would be, considering that it was strictly off-limits. (I know because Johnny’s mother had a copy, and he borrowed it for me without telling her.) To satisfy my craving for reading material, I went to the thrift store once a week, after Mr. Travers paid me, and bought myself one book. That’s where I found the one on Nellie Bly—and when I decided what I wanted to do with my life.
Nellie Bly, in case you don’t know, was born during the American Civil War. Her real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, and one day she opened the newspaper, just like I did every time I could get my hands on one, and read an editorial that said that girls didn’t need an education and they shouldn’t aspire to an honest-to-goodness real career because their place was in the home. Their job was to get married, raise children and keep house. You didn’t need an education to do that. That got twenty-one-year-old Lizzie’s dander up. She wrote a blazing response, which she signed Little Orphan Girl. It was so well written and well argued that she was invited to the newspaper office and offered a job.
You have to understand that, at that time, there were very few women newspaper reporters, and they were almost always confined to the women’s pages, where they wrote about gardening and fashion and society. But not Nellie. Nellie wrote stories about the poor and the oppressed. She went to Mexico and wrote about the corrupt Mexican government. She got herself committed to a notorious lunatic asylum, as they called them at the time, to write an exposé of how the patients were treated. She wrote about the plight of unwanted babies. She wrote about women who toiled in crowded factories. At a time when women rarely, if ever, traveled the world, she circled it alone in seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes.
She was my hero. I wanted to be just like her, only more modern, of course. I wanted to write stories that would turn heads and get people talking. I wanted to step out of my everyday world and into worlds that I’d never visited before, and I wanted to describe them to other people who were as unfamiliar with them as I had been. I wanted to make my living by the pen—or the typewriter. But first I had to find a way in.
When I opened my suitcase to get my book, the brown envelope that Mrs. Hazelton had given me was sitting on top of it. I stared at it. A few days earlier, seven of us, the oldest of the girls at the Home, had been going about our business pretty much as usual. Then our lives had literally gone up in smoke. We Seven, who had spent more time together than a lot of sisters, had dispersed, each with information about our origins, each subsequently stepping out into the world we had largely been protected from, each trying to decide how much and how badly we wanted to know where we had come from and why we had been abandoned.
That’s when I got an idea. Nellie Bly got famous by writing about things that no one else had written about. She didn’t report on the doings of society matrons. She dug into the lives of working women, poor women who slaved in the sweatshops, earning money by the piece instead of by the hour so that they could keep a roof over their children’s heads and put food on their tables. She wrote about women who were locked up in mental institutions. She broke new ground. I decided to do what Nellie had done. That would get Mr. Carter’s attention.
I decided to write about us, the seven orphan girls, each on her own adventure. A tingle went through me. It might just work. Most newspaper readers, like most people, were part of a family. Maybe they lived at home with their parents. Maybe they were parents themselves. Maybe their children had grown up and gone off on their own. But as sure as the Rocky Mountains were high, most people were not orphans and knew next to nothing about what it was like to be without parents or a single relative. They might be interested to get the inside story. They might also be interested in following the paths of seven poor orphan girls and their quests for their real identities. But since I had no idea where the other six were at that exact moment, I would start with myself.
It was decided. I had a new plan B.
Chapter Five
I PUT MY NEW PLAN INTO ACTION
I PICKED UP the envelope Mrs. Hazelton had given me—the one I had told her I didn’t care about—and ripped it open.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a picture of my mother. Maybe a letter from her, telling me why she’d given me up. But that isn’t what I found. The envelope held a single yellowed newspaper clipping. I double-checked, but that’s all there was. It wasn’t even a whole article. It was just a photograph with a caption underneath. The paper under the caption was ragged, as if someone had torn off the accompanying article—assuming there had been an article.
I looked at the photo. It showed a tombstone in what looked like a small cemetery. The stone in the center of the picture, the one the photographer had focused on, had fallen over. It lay on the ground. Beside it was a piece of stone that had broken off one corner. The photographer had taken the picture so that the engraving on the stone was legible:
Thomas Jefferson
August 10, 1923—June 30, 1948
Mrs. Hazelton had told me the clipping was at the bottom of a basket when I was delivered to the Home. What was it supposed to mean? Did it have something to do with me? Was Thomas Jefferson my father? If so, what had happened to him? How had he died? And at such a young age. He had been just short of his twenty-fifth birthday.
I skipped down to the caption. It started with the name of a town—Orrenstown, Indiana. Jefferson grave vandalized, it read. Sheriff denies Klan involvement.
Why would anyone vandalize a grave? What had this Thomas Jefferson done? Presumably, someone had thought the Ku Klux Klan was responsible. Why else would the sheriff deny its involvement? But if the Klan hadn’t done it, who had? And why?
If I had truly cared about my past, I suppose I would have been disappointed b
y such meager information. But what a story it made! A vandalized gravestone and rumors of Ku Klux Klan activity was bound to grab people’s attention. I could imagine the headline: Orphan Girl Seeks Parents, Stumbles on KKK Conspiracy. Or Orphan Girl Discovers Father Was Grand Dragon of the KKK. People would definitely want to read about that.
That’s how I ended up in the Toronto bus station, buying a ticket to Orrenstown, Indiana. It took a while for the clerk at the ticket counter to find the right bus line and the right connections, because it turned out that Orrenstown wasn’t a regular stop. There wasn’t even a bench with a sign, like the one in Hope. Orrenstown was just one of the places where a bus going somewhere else would drop you if asked, or where you could flag a bus down if you wanted to go anywhere up or down the line.
One more thing you should know. I stepped off the bus in Orrenstown a couple of days after three students—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney—vanished after being released from jail in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Their crime? They’d gone down there to register black voters. The police in Neshoba County claimed the disappearance was a publicity stunt to make Mississippians look bad and insisted that the three had gone back home. A lot of white Mississippians thought that if something unfortunate had actually befallen the trio, well, they’d gotten what they deserved. It never occurred to me that what was happening hundreds of miles away in Mississippi would have any effect on me.
I was wrong.
Orrenstown looked a lot like Hope, except that it was hotter. I took a good look around. To my left were a gas station, a diner, a bank and a hardware store. To my right, a grocery store, a hair salon, a bar, a hotel and a farm-equipment dealership. Other stores and businesses were strung out along the main street, which melted into a two-lane blacktop highway at either end. It was midafternoon, and the sun was high in the sky. I was as stiff as an old lady with arthritis and as thirsty as a suburban lawn in a drought, so I trudged to the diner with its cheery Come in, we’re air-conditioned sign in the window. The blast of cold air that hit me when I opened the door raised goose bumps on my arms and legs and set me to shivering. It felt delicious. I took a seat at the counter and ordered iced tea. I gulped down half of it as soon as the waitress set the frosted glass in front of me. It was unsweetened, which was a surprise. It was more of a surprise that I liked it that way.
I glanced around. Apart from the waitress and the cook, whom I could see through the service window, there was a grand total of three other people in the diner, all old men, all sitting at the counter, and all wearing straw hats and short-sleeved shirts. All three checked me out. Maybe they didn’t get many strangers in town. Or maybe they were dirty old men, the kind Mrs. Hazelton was always warning us about. I paid them no mind. I was too preoccupied with my own thoughts. Was I crazy coming down here and thinking I could discover enough to write a job-winning story? Where would I even start? How hard was it going to be to find out what the picture meant? Did I even want to know? Did I have enough money to cover my expenses here and still get back home? And, most important, was I as intrepid as I hoped I was?
I finished my iced tea and wiped my lips with a paper napkin. The best place to start, I decided, was with the photo. It was all I had to go on. If I found the grave site, I might also find someone who could tell me about the man buried there. My heart raced—I admit it, I was nervous—but I managed to ask the waitress for directions to the local cemetery.
“Which cemetery do you mean?” she asked.
“There’s more than one?” That surprised me. From the highway, the town looked tiny. But you know what they say: looks can be deceiving.
The three old men turned to look at me as if their heads were all attached to the same neck.
“There are three,” the waitress said. “Oak Grove, Maple Hill and Rolling Meadows.”
“Then I guess I need directions to all three.”
“You looking for a relation?” one of the old men asked. “Are you one of those folks that’s interested in…what do they call it now…generology?”
“Genealogy,” the old man beside him said. “It’s called genealogy, Earl.” He looked around his friend to me. “Is that it? Are you researching your relations?”
“Something like that.” Boy, small towns are all alike. Everybody is keen to stick his nose into everyone else’s business.
The second old man grabbed a paper napkin from the dispenser on the counter and took a pen out of his breast pocket. He drew a little map.
“Now see here,” he said, slipping onto the vacant stool between me and the first old man. “Here’s where we are now. You leave here, turn right, then turn left again at the next block and walk, oh, ten minutes, and that’ll take you to Oak Grove. From there…”
He walked me through his neat hand-drawn map, giving me directions to all three of the town’s final resting places. I thanked him and put some coins on the counter—including a tip for the waitress. I headed for the door, suitcase in hand.
The old man who had drawn the map called after me, “You never did say who you were looking for.”
He was right. I never did.
The air above the asphalt rippled like the surface of a lake on a breezy day. The oven-like heat that rose from the pavement engulfed my ankles and calves like thick woollen leggings. I wished I had a hat to protect me from the sun and shield my eyes. A pair of sunglasses would have come in handy too. But I had neither of those things. All I could do was trudge grimly on, following the directions on the napkin and doing my best to ignore the river of sweat that trickled down my back and prickled my underarms.
Once I turned off the main street, I was relieved to discover that Orrenstown’s residential avenues were lined with mature trees that formed a protective canopy against the sun’s rays. I was able to make faster progress in the cool shade of the elms, maples and oaks that rose from front lawns and dwarfed the two-story brick, stone and clapboard houses. After a few blocks, fenced-in yards gave way to empty lots and meadows. It wasn’t long before I spotted a small chapel standing elbow-to-elbow with a low stone wall that enclosed neat rows of gravestones and markers. I had reached my first destination: Oak Grove.
As I got closer, I saw a man in overalls and a short-sleeved plaid shirt, his face ruddy under his straw hat. He was tinkering with the underside of a gas-powered lawn mower that had been flipped upside down on the grass. He glanced up when my shadow fell across him. His knees snapped like kindling when he straightened up. He doffed his straw hat, revealing a forehead as white as milk.
“Can I help you, young lady?”
“I’m looking for a grave.”
“Well, I’ve been tending this place for the better part of half a century. If the grave you’re looking for is here, I’ll know it.” He puffed up, proud of his knowledge.
“This one was vandalized,” I told him. “Not recently. A long time ago. Maybe fifteen years.”
“Vandalized?” The man scratched his head and plopped his hat back onto his head. “We’ve never had any vandalism around here. Folks in this town are decent. They bring their kids up right. You must be thinking of some other town.”
“Or maybe some other cemetery,” I said.
The man was shaking his head before I’d finished speaking. “I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but people ’round here don’t desecrate graves. Never has happened. Never will happen.”
He was wrong, and I had the picture to prove it. I opened my suitcase and pulled out the envelope and the clipping. The man squinted at the picture and then dug in his pocket for a pair of glasses, which he wore low on his nose. He studied the picture again.
“Oh, that.” His lips turned down as if he were about to spit out something bitter. “That’s different.”
“That stone was vandalized,” I said. “And the caption says it happened right here in Orrenstown.”
“It may say Orrenstown, but it ain’t. That cemetery is over in Freemount. Ain’t much of anything else
there these days. Never really was.”
I wondered what he meant.
“Why are you interested in that grave?” he asked. “It can’t be because you have any people in there.” There was a new look in his eyes now, a harder one, a look of suspicion. “Where are you from? Who are your people? What do you want with a grave in Freemount—’specially that one?”
I didn’t care for all the questions. I didn’t care for his tone either. He sounded angry, as if I had done something wrong or was about to. He reminded me of Mr. Williams at the five-and-dime back in Hope. He never liked it when I or any of the necessitous girls went into his store. He watched us every second we were there. If we went to the back of the store, he got Mrs. Williams to take over the cash up front while he followed us, keeping a sharp eye on us and being blatant about it. He wanted us to know that he was watching us. He made me so angry that I once stole two cheap rings and some nail polish from his store, just out of spite. I didn’t even want them. I threw them in a trash can on my way home.
Instead of answering the man’s questions, I said, “Is Freemount far from here?”
“Far enough, I guess.” He glared at me. “You one of them college students?”
“What college students?”
“The ones that are heading south, stirring up trouble in other people’s backyards when they should be minding what’s going on in theirs.”
He was talking about the students doing voter registration down in Mississippi.
“No, sir,” I said. “If you could point me in the right direction…”
The man stooped to his lawn mower and began tinkering again. “Go back down to the highway and make a right. It’s four miles as the crow flies.”
I thanked him, flashed a smile—don’t spit in the well, etcetera—and headed back to the road. When I reached the gate and glanced over my shoulder, the lawn mower was still on its back like an overturned turtle, but the man wasn’t bent over it. Instead, he was unlocking the side door to the chapel. I watched him disappear inside.
My Life Before Me Page 3