The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  “Don’t want any little old jackknife. I want to go down to the store and buy me a six-inch hunting knife.”

  “You can’t shop today,” I said with some relief. “All the stores are closed.”

  He acted as if he didn’t believe me. He just stood there scuffing his toe in the gravel, his face a thundercloud.

  “What do you need a long-bladed hunting knife for?” Carl asked gently. “Aren’t you a bit young for that?”

  “Maybe I’ll decide to go hunting while I’m here. I ain’t too young. All the guys at the mission got hunting knives, real long sharp ones, too.”

  “I’ll give you a jackknife,” Carl said, “and we’ll see how you handle that, first.”

  “Wish I was back to the mission,” he griped, “where they let a guy do a few things without asking.”

  Little Beaver did quite a few things without asking, anyway. One day a good-sized box of apples disappeared from the pantry, and that night I had two big boys groaning with stomach-aches. The cores had been neatly stored between their Sunday shirts in the drawer. The next day I smelled smoke coming from the boys’ back-porch room, rushed in and found Little Beaver tearing pages out of Donny’s good books, lighting them with matches snitched from the kitchen. Both boys had holes burned through bed sheets and blankets. Another five minutes and they would have burnt the house down.

  The last straw was when the little children kept appearing with knives. I came around the corner of the house one day and found Timmy with a knife held experimentally across Alex’s throat. I snatched the knife from him.

  “Timmy!” I gasped. “What’s got into you?”

  “Li’l Beaver gived me the knife,” Timmy said innocently. “He telled me when I want something, stick it in the other guy’s neck and say, ‘Give it to me, or elst!’”

  Later that night, I confessed to Carl, “I give up. We’ll have to send him back right away. I wanted to give him a nice vacation—but I can’t take it, and it’s just too risky for the other children. I shudder to think what else he has up his sleeve.”

  “Tomorrow I’ll have a talk with him,” Carl said. “Let’s see if we can’t just keep a closer watch. As long as he’s here, we ought to see if he can’t have a summer to remember.”

  “For me, this will be a summer to remember,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

  “Just give him plenty of love while he’s here,” Carl said. “That’s what he needs more than anything in the world. Plenty of uncritical love.”

  Carl went out to make some church calls in Boonville and Philo. I tucked the children into bed, then climbed into my own bed with some books I’d been wanting to read. About an hour later I began to get a peculiar, uneasy feeling, and I couldn’t keep my mind on my book. To reassure myself, I threw on robe and slippers and tiptoed out for another look into the big boys’ room. The light was on and the room looked as if a tornado had whirled through it. The two bunks were empty. Little Beaver’s two suitcases were gone, some of Don’s clothes were missing, and a few of Little Beaver’s least-liked clothes, including his Sunday suit, were strewn about the floor.

  Running from the house, I called, “Donny! Donny, Little Beaver!” I tried to convince myself they were just playing some game. Had they decided to camp overnight in the tree-house? I climbed the swaying rope ship’s ladder hanging from the wide-branched madroña. When my flashlight swept over the rough boards of the tree-house floor, I felt a chill that was more than the night air; I knew they had run away.

  Where could they have gone, at that hour of the night? There was no police station to call. Boonville was little more than a wide place in the road, nothing but a few grocery stores, bars, and gas stations huddled on the highway which wound through the long, lonely valley. It was thirty miles by highway to Cloverdale, and nineteen miles over the rugged mountain road to Ukiah, with scarcely a house on either road—just barren hills and timbered mountains where deer and skunks roamed, and no telling what other wild life.

  I kept calling, praying that Carl would hurry home. I didn’t dare go far from the house and leave the other eight small children alone, yet with every passing minute my worry grew. While I shivered and called by the roadside, heavily loaded logging trucks went thundering past on night runs from the mills. If nothing else happened, what would keep the boys from getting run over on the narrow road? When our station wagon finally swung into the drive, I ran to it with relief.

  “Carl! Donny ran away with Little Beaver!”

  He was poised for action, yet calm, as he always was in an emergency. “How long have they been gone?”

  “At least an hour by now. Maybe more.”

  “Now stop worrying,” he said. “I’ll go look. They can’t have gone far. Perhaps they were intrigued by one of the bars downtown. Those places always have people and jazz and light spilling out. It might look good to a couple of lost boys, after wandering in the dark.”

  His car backed out in a spurt of gravel, then I saw his lights go slowly down the street toward town. Every hundred yards he stopped, put his head out of the window, and called. Finally his car was lost in the night. I paced up and down again, trying to probe the molasses dark with my flashlight, shouting the boys’ names over and over until my throat hurt. The minutes crept by, each seeming like an hour, and a half hour like a whole night. Suddenly there was a noise down the drive.

  “Mama?” It was Donny’s familiar, high soprano. “Mama, Mama!”

  My flashlight beam picked up two boys trudging toward the house, each dragging a bulging suitcase. I ran to them, gathering them both into my arms. “I’m so glad you came back. We missed you.”

  “I missed you,” Donny said, hugging me. He was trying to act very grown-up and brave, but I could feel that his cheeks were wet, and he was trembling. “Little Beaver wanted me to go back to the mission with him, and so I said I’d go—just for a visit. We were going to take a short cut over the mountains, but we couldn’t see, and there were all kinds of scary noises, and I was afraid there might be bears and lions!” He gave me a big kiss. “So I decided I’d rather stay home with you.”

  The phone was ringing, so we all hurried back to the house. As I picked up the receiver, I heard Carl’s voice. “Helen? I’m going to call the county sheriff’s office, then I’ll—”

  “Carl, Carl!” I cried, “they’re here! Hurry home.”

  We all had hot cocoa to warm us before going to bed, and Carl talked to Little Beaver about running away.

  “You don’t need to run off in the night,” Carl said. “If you decide you want to go back before your vacation is up, just come tell me. I’ll buy you a plane ticket, or take you back myself, and that’s a promise.” With a resigned look at Donny and me, he turned to the boy kindly. “We even thought that if you liked it here with us, you might be able to come back next year—to stay.”

  Little Beaver squirmed and mumbled. He admitted he liked Carl and me, and Donny was okay, but he definitely didn’t like anything else. California was too hot, and he’d rather live where it snowed. He hated going to church on Sundays, and he didn’t want to be part of any old preacher’s family. Neither did he like all the “little ole kids always hanging around,” and he definitely didn’t want to be in any family where he was the oldest.

  “Up to the mission, I’m the youngest, and I get to do everything the big guys do,” he informed us belligerently. “Carry knives, and everything.”

  However, he did have a compromise in mind that might work. Carl could give up being an old preacher, give the little kids away, and go up to the Pacific Northwest where Little Beaver had an uncle who was a chief. Carl could join the tribe and be a chief, too, and I could be his squaw. We’d live in a tepee and have free salmon-fishing rights on the Columbia, and he’d teach Donny how to be a good Indian.

  I wasn’t even tempted.

  The rest of the month might have been a vacation for our problem-child visitor, but for me it had the nervous suspense of living beside an erratic time
bomb. Finally it was time for Little Beaver to go back. Carl was elected delegate to the Methodist Town and Country Conference back in Iowa; he planned his train trip so he could detour north and drop the Indian boy off at the mission.

  Little Beaver had actually learned how to smile, by the time he left. Waving good-by to the rest of us, he grinned and said, “You all come up and visit me, sometime, at the mission!”

  Carl mailed me a letter while on the train.

  “I’m having the dickens of a time trying to keep track of Little Beaver,” he wrote. “He keeps trying to elude me. Every time he does, I find him at some souvenir counter in a train station, about to buy a couple of wicked-looking knives. So far, I think I’ve succeeded in getting him to save his money until he gets back.”

  A week later I had a letter from the superintendent at the mission.

  “I thought you might be interested to know,” he wrote, “that the Indian boy who spent his summer with you is making a wonderful adjustment since his return. His vacation has given him a new self-confidence and something to talk about with the other boys. He has begun to make real friends for the first time in his life. In view of his excellent adjustment now, I wonder if he is as much in need of adoption as we first thought? At his age, and being so selfconsciously Indian, he might be better off to finish his teens here with us, where he can continue in an Indian atmosphere.”

  A postscript was added across the bottom. “You will be surprised and amused to know that his suitcases were found loaded with knives. We had to confiscate these weapons, since we have always had a rule here that our boys may not carry knives.”

  In the same mail I received a letter from a German woman doctor. I had written an article about our “International Family” in 1949, when we had only six children; it had appeared in the Reader’s Digest, and had been reprinted in a number of the foreign editions of the Digest. The doctor had just run across one of these copies, and the Reader’s Digest had forwarded her letter telling of her hopes that we might like to adopt a part-Negro war orphan.

  “The child is pretty,” she wrote, “with a medium-dark skin color, and wavy dark hair, not kinky. I think it is in America she should grow up, where there are other people of dark skins, like I read are children in your family. Over here, so different she is, people stare, and that is not good.”

  The child’s mother had been German, blond and blue-eyed; the father was a Negro American soldier, who at one time had been stationed in the area. The child was being cared for by the orphanage which this doctor served.

  Already, at four, little Gretchen knew she was different from the fair-complexioned children in the orphanage, and it worried her. “Wash me clean, so I will be white like you,” she often pleaded with the nurses when they bathed her.

  This last Christmas, the matron had asked Gretchen what she wanted most for Christmas, and the little girl had replied, “White stockings. White, not black ones, so my legs will look white.”

  When Carl returned from his conference, I showed him the letter. I was caught off guard, with an armload of unused arguments, when he surprisingly agreed we should take her.

  I threw my arms around him. “You darling! With you, I never know what to expect! I thought this would be another knockdown, drag-out fight.”

  Carl admitted, “I’ve had a secret hankering to adopt a child with Negro blood.” He laughed, and added, “See, I know better, but I get in a rut with the same old unscientific terms. As if blood could be Negro, or white, or any such nonsense.”

  “It never particularly mattered to me what race or color our children were,” I said. “After we got them, they always seemed like Dosses.”

  “The same with me. On the other hand, I’ve been getting sick and tired of people saying, ‘But you wouldn’t take a child of Negro blood!’ You know, in all kinds of tones, according to whether they’re conservative, or radical, or just curious.”

  “I know,” I said. “Some people act very noble about our Oriental mixtures, but they draw the line there. So they exclaim in pure horror, ‘Of course you wouldn’t take a child of Negro blood?’”

  “Yes, and then there are the liberal fanatics who act as if we had just gathered this family together as a cold-blooded social experiment, a sort of laboratory of racial relations. So they say accusingly, ‘But I notice you haven’t taken a child of Negro blood.’”

  “Oh well, pooh,” I said. “Let people talk. Somebody will object, no matter what we do.”

  “There’s just one thing—” Carl began.

  “What?”

  “We’re stopping with ten, after we bring Gretchen home. If you sprout one of those perennial ideas about adopting any more, we will have that knockdown, drag-out fight you were looking for.”

  A friend of ours, nicknamed “Mrs. Pickles” by the children, sometimes drove up to Boonville for a visit. We told her about our plans to adopt Gretchen, and proudly showed the snapshots which the doctor sent in her second letter.

  “Isn’t she a darling?” I said. “We are anxious to get her over here as soon as possible, so she can start learning English.”

  Mrs. Pickles looked at the photos suspiciously. “How do you know she’s not part nigger? She looks pretty dark to me.”

  “She is half Negro,” Carl said. “But she’s also half white. So she ought to fit as well into our home as in any.”

  “Really, Carl, you can’t be serious!” she exclaimed. “A nigger child? The good Lord made them to be slaves, and not on the same level with us.”

  “The good Lord didn’t make them slaves,” Carl corrected. “He created all men in His own image.”

  “They still come from slave stock.”

  “Here in America, many of them did,” Carl said. “And that’s probably where that inferiority myth started. Back in the Roman days, slaves were of all colors and races, according to the fortunes of war. The American slave owners had more sensitive consciences than the old Romans, and they sensed that slavery was morally wrong. Something had to be said to answer their critics—and their own uneasy consciences as well. So it was rationalized that it wasn’t a sin to buy and sell blacks for work horses, since they were an inferior race, a sort of subhuman group, and therefore couldn’t be considered as fellow human beings. This nonsense was repeated so constantly that people came to believe it. In fact many still do today, in spite of scientific proof that it is not true.”

  “Well, are you quite out of breath?” Mrs. Pickles yanked her knitting out of her bag. “When I want to be preached at, I’ll go to church.”

  Carl shrugged, smiling. He was used to these verbal fencing matches; the two of them often went round and round on their differing interpretations of the Bible. “We Americans can’t keep one tenth of our population in an inferior position, just because their ancestors were once enslaved,” he reminded her, “and still be a healthy democracy. It isn’t Christian and it isn’t democratic, and most of us claim to be both.”

  “That’s radical talk.” She jabbed into her yarn with her knitting needle. “Real radical talk.”

  “But the whole idea of Christianity is radical,” Carl said, looking at her earnestly. “And the whole idea of democracy is radical. Think how really radical it is to say that all men are created equal, and that all men are brothers—and that the individual is important! Everyone goes around crying about the dangers of Communism, but every time one of us steps on someone because of his color, we do as much harm to our country as if we were Communist saboteurs.”

  “You’re wasting your breath,” she sniffed. “I’m old enough to know what I know, and I’ll believe what I want to believe. A person with honest convictions has to draw the line somewhere.” She shook her knitting needle at Carl. “I’m not coming to visit with any pickaninnies. So if you bring the colored child into your family circle, you’ll never see me back. And that’s thatl”

  About that time we began to break the news to both our families.

  “Just don’t be bringing her vis
iting to my house,” Carl’s mother said. “No nigger will call me Grandma!”

  My middle sister Lynn wrote, “If you think she’ll fit happily in your family, I hope it works out. You’d better think of some way to break it to Mom and Dad gently.”

  My younger sister Jane wrote, “Why don’t you wait until you actually get this German child into your home, before you write back to Illinois about this? If it doesn’t work out for some reason, you can save the folks from possible grief. P.S. Your new daughter is welcome to call me Auntie!”

  We had filled out the releases and affidavits and forms which the doctor sent us, and they had been air-mailed back to Germany, where they were approved and signed by the village magistrate. When we started writing to American authorities to get Gretchen a quota number, the red tape began to coil around our project and choke the life out of it. We tried to find an American agency which would act as the necessary intermediary in the adoption, but we got absolutely nowhere. The proceedings bogged down under the snarl of immigration quotas and visas and passports, as well as the continued lack of necessary approvals from American officials and agencies.

  One day we showed some friends the snapshots of Gretchen.

  “You know,” one said, “this child doesn’t look too strikingly Negro, if you weren’t thinking of that. Why not try to pass her off for a dark Spanish girl, or Moorish, or something?”

  “Why?” we asked.

  “While I don’t have prejudice myself,” the friend said, “you’ll have to admit that many do. Most white communities wouldn’t accept a girl of Negro blood into the heart of their social doings, especially after she gets to be in her teens and close to marrying age. There isn’t any Negro social group in this town, either. And even if you lived where there were Negroes, how do you know they’d accept her, white bringing-up and all?”

  “It’s a real problem,” Carl admitted. “She might avoid some discrimination, if we labeled her as something else. But secrets have a way of leaking out. If we lied about that one thing, could our daughter trust us about anything else? And what feelings would that give her about her own ancestry? We’re teaching our other children to be proud of their whole heritage. Have we the right to make her ashamed to be what she is?”