“I’m right behind you.”
Rose let go. And London didn’t wait to see her reach the ground but scrambled over the window ledge onto the ladder as soon as the man had begun to descend.
Her feet never touched the ground. She was snatched from the ladder rungs. London fought them off, shoving and kicking, but she was exhausted, and couldn’t stop coughing, and soon collapsed into their arms.
She could feel the cool air of the night and hear the roar of the flames traveling farther and farther away from her, or she from them. She was on her back, on some sort of stretcher. It stopped. Someone wiped the sweat from her face with a wet towel, and then poured water into her mouth. It scorched her throat, and made her choke, but she wanted more and more, clutching at the hands that held the pitcher to keep it to her mouth. After sucking in a lake full, she dropped her head and breathed in deeply for the first time since the fire had started.
“Rose!”
She grabbed at the person holding the pitcher. “Please, where is she?”
But now she was moving again. Across the lawn. She tried to sit, but hands pushed her down.
Up, up, up she went, toward electric lights. She knew the steps. The columns. The door. She was back at the dormitory. Home. Once inside, they turned right, into a room London had never been in before… the visiting room.
They placed the stretcher on the floor, and when London turned toward the couch, there Rose was. Sitting among the soft cushions. Grinning.
“I love you, London.”
London’s mouth jerked. Only one person had ever told her they loved her. Alby. That night. When he’d whispered it into her ear after the second time they’d done it. London had wondered if it were true, if he did love her. She’d been confused, and hadn’t known what to say back to him, so she’d said nothing.
“I love you too, Rose.”
Alice held Maxine’s hand, fearing Maxine might turn at any moment and bolt back to the institution. The first explosion happened as they reached Trapelo Road. Alice squeezed Maxine’s hand but kept them moving. The second and third blasts that followed only served to speed them up. It was dark, but even so, Alice didn’t trust the road, and the girls stumbled along a few feet inside the tree line, crunching through leaves and stumbling over rocks hidden beneath.
About a mile out, Maxine couldn’t keep going, and yanked Alice to a stop. They stood panting in the woods, watching the flames lighting up the night sky. The fire sounded like the loudest rainstorm Alice had ever heard.
“Rose,” Maxine whispered.
Just her name. But Alice understood it was Maxine’s heart breaking. And she stood close, knowing it was all she could do.
After a few minutes of shivering, Alice realized she had to move them.
“It was a summer day,” she said, still watching the flames over the tops of the trees. “My brother, he said, ‘Come on, Alice.’ That’s it. Just, ‘Come on,’ but I figured it was bad. I figured whatever happened next was going to change everything. He bought me candy. Bit-O-Honey, the ones Rose loves. I ate it because he’d paid for it. But I don’t remember tasting it. I was too scared for tasting things.”
The girls turned from the fire.
“Are you scared now?” Maxine asked.
Alice thought for a minute. Was she scared?
“No,” she said. “Not scared. Sad. Sad it isn’t just like you dreamed it.”
They began to walk away, from London and Rose and the institution. The leaves rustled under their feet and the fire roared at their backs, its intensity lessening in their ears with every step.
“Where were your mother and father?”
“My mother died when I was born. My father died of sickness when I was four or five. I remember him, though. He talked a lot. Ate a lot. Laughed a lot. My father was not a quiet man.”
“You’re like your mother, then,” Maxine said.
“Hm,” Alice said. “Maybe. Maybe I am.”
* * *
Alice talked them straight through the first three nights, the stories bobbing up like apples floating in a barrel. It was as if being released from the institution released the memories of everything that had come before, and as each memory bobbed to the surface, she’d tell it to Maxine, slowly, to match the pace of their stride.
Hungry all the time. Thirsty all the time. They buried tin after tin of milk until there were none left. Alice stole them eggs from a henhouse on the sixth night, which they ate raw.
Maxine cried herself through the long days hiding in the woods. For Rose.
Instead of worrying about the soft nut and the hard shell, Alice cried too. For Rose, for London, for Mary and Edwina and all of them. And also, for herself. For the little girl whose life had been a series of events directed by others, so much so that waking in the woods, she fully expected a whistle to blow over their heads from the tree branches. But what came next was up to her now. And she’d rouse Maxine, roll up their things, and climb back up onto her aching foot. She had been wrong. Loving didn’t make you weak. It made you strong.
When they finally entered Springfield on the morning of the tenth day, they used their first bit of money to buy a loaf of bread for nine cents and ate the whole thing before asking which way it was to Chicopee.
It was a three-mile hike north. They decided to walk through the day, and arrived before noon.
The town was bigger than the girls had imagined, and they wandered up and down its streets for two days with their chins in the air, looking for that open window, before they heard someone shouting from one street over. They quickly followed the sound and came upon two thin forearms jutting over a sill, a gray head of hair cropped short, and deep frown lines creasing a woman’s face.
Alice and Maxine clutched hands.
“Thelma Dumas?” Maxine called up to the window.
“What the hell do you two grubby little loo loos want?”
Maxine looked at Alice and smiled.
They’d found her.
EPILOGUE
Thelma Dumas let the two filthy, exhausted girls in. She fixed her room for them, told them she slept in the chair every night. The white one believed her. The black one didn’t.
Since she was no liar, she slept in the chair every night, and it became true.
They said London would soon follow. When no one was watching, she’d leap out a window with another girl named Rose, and they would make their way here. Again, the white one believed this, and again, the black one did not.
Neither did the old woman.
She remembered the day the agency had dropped London off. Angry and dirty. Often when the orphanage had a wild one, they’d dump the girl on the old lady. She never minded the wild ones. Thelma knew that kind of wild. The kind the world didn’t have any use for—girls who bit and scratched at life. And somehow they all seemed to disappear. Like her girl had.
These two weren’t wild, but Thelma kept them. Just as London had known she would. Six months later, in October of 1929, the stock market crashed and everything went to shit, exactly as the old lady had always said it would. But all the better for them. Everyone was kept busy scraping for a bit of bread, and not out searching for two missing degenerates.
Historical Note
The early twentieth century saw the emergence of a powerful union between science and social policy, called eugenics—the pseudoscience of human improvement through human breeding. The initial idea of eugenics was to use the budding science of heredity to eradicate human disease and vice. What it quickly became was a social system that rounded up the usual historical suspects—the poor, the disabled, and the marginalized (including people of color, indigenous people, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community)—and institutionalized them for life.
During the 1800s, educators in the United States began schools for children with disabilities. These institutions were founded with good intentions. However, by 1900 the country was beginning to change. Industrialization, immigration, urbanization,
labor unrest, capitalism, racial tension, and changes in social morality all gave rise to great uncertainty. The paranoia generated by these factors was directed into the creation of a category of people to scapegoat for society’s ills: the feebleminded—children and adults who might reproduce their “kind.”
To rid the gene pool of “unworthy” human traits, and thereby “unworthy” humans, there began a collection of people with physical, mental, intellectual, and moral differences, through massive standardized intelligence testing, the court system, the culling of orphanage populations, and the finger-pointing of neighbors. The United States gathered its “others,” segregating them into institutions. All of this was done in the name of human betterment using the “science” of eugenics.
As if segregation were not enough, a campaign of sterilization followed. A policy begun in 1907 in Indiana and confirmed by the 1927 Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell stated that any man or woman deemed unworthy to procreate by any doctor could legally be sterilized against the person’s will. It is estimated that seventy thousand people were compulsorily sterilized between 1907 and 1980.
Eugenics in the United States took the idea of human betterment and defined “better” as middle- to upper-class white, straight, able-bodied men, along with middle- to upper-class white, straight, able-bodied women who conformed to the social and moral standards of the day. Anyone who fell outside these boundaries was in danger of being institutionalized and/or sterilized.
The United States was not alone in its eugenics programs. From Latin America to Europe to Asia, the eugenics movement flourished. Adolf Hitler, using the “science” of eugenics and its ideas on “better” humans, murdered six million people deemed to not be “better” humans.
The word “eugenics” may have been relegated to the trash bin of history; however, the movement’s ideas are still alive and well. What makes a better human? An able body, an intellectual mind, the color of one’s skin, the sex one is assigned at birth, conforming to a certain gender or to the idea that sexuality is binary, falling in love with the societally accepted gender, the possession of neurotypical functioning, the contents of one’s bank account, the numbers in one’s zip code? In the United States all of these criteria have been used, and are still being used, to determine who matters and who doesn’t.
The Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth (which later became known as the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, and then the Walter E. Fernald School after the death of Dr. Walter Fernald) began in 1848, and continued well past the time of London, Rose, Alice, and Maxine, not closing its doors until 2014. The structure, patterns, and routines of this institution, along with many others like it across the United States, would change little in these 166 years. The world would go on… forgetting about the people inside these institutions. Unfortunately, today we are still undoing the damage created by the idea that diversity should be punished rather than celebrated.
Author’s Note
All of the discriminatory statements made by doctors and nurses in this novel were actually written by doctors and nurses in real life. I lifted their exact words and phrases from documents and reports, changed pronouns or verb tenses as needed, and dropped the statements into the story whole. Today we are astounded by ideas like Dr. Fernald’s about Maxine’s criminality being biological, and diagnoses using words such as “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” would be ridiculous. It can be easy to look back at the past and wonder how anyone believed such absurd things. A much harder task is to look around ourselves right now and wonder what words and ideas we absolutely believe to be true that will later turn out to be ridiculous.
All my life I’ve played a what-if game—relocating myself to other moments in history. What if I had been born in a hunter-gatherer society? As a woman, I’d have been a gatherer. This always makes me happy because I think I would have made a good one. I love being outside, and I’m great at finding things. What if I had been born during the Great Depression in the United States? Like so many other readers of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, I wonder if I could have been as strong as Rose of Sharon in the shocking but strangely hopeful ending of that novel. (No spoilers here. You have to read it.) I began writing The Degenerates by playing this very game. What if I had been born during the height of the eugenics movement in the United States? As someone born with a spinal disorder causing extreme body difference, I might have been institutionalized for life along with Alice, Maxine, Rose, and London.
In playing this game, I am understanding history by understanding my place in it—the privileges I garner from being born white, the disadvantages of being born in a disabled female body, and so on. Playing it brings me closer to understanding others. As humans, there are so many experiences that we share. But there are also so many experiences that we don’t. Understanding these differences with an empathetic heart and an open mind is truly the beginning to understanding not just history but what it means to be a better human.
Finally, just as I lifted the words of doctors and nurses from documents to use in this novel, I also lifted my characters from those same documents. Where only the notes of medical professionals and researchers remain, I attempted to see the people. London and Alice and Maxine and Rose (and all the other characters that populate this novel) may be fictional, but many people lived the lives found in these pages. In an effort to respect difference and disability, I’ve attempted to give the diagnoses of each character where it’s possible.
London—London was pregnant. She was also unmarried, which gave her a diagnosis of being morally feebleminded.
Maxine—Maxine most likely would have identified as homosexual, because in 1928 this would have been her only choice in vocabulary. In modern medical history, homosexuality was considered a medical diagnosis and could be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The medical community viewed homosexuality as a sign of a defect. This diagnosis was not removed from the manual as a mental disorder until 1973.
Alice—Alice most likely would have identified as homosexual (for the same reasons Maxine would have). Alice was also born with congenital talipes equinovarus (often called clubfoot). The affected foot appears rotated internally at the ankle. It has a variety of causes, although we don’t know what caused Alice’s talipes equinovarus. Today talipes equinovarus can be corrected by placing the foot into multiple casts over the course of several weeks, or by surgery.
Rose—Rose was born with Down syndrome. Down syndrome occurs when an individual has a full or partial extra copy of chromosome number twenty-one. (Most individuals have forty-six chromosomes; in Down syndrome, there are usually forty-seven.) This full or partial extra copy of a chromosome causes physical growth delays, mild to moderate intellectual disability, and characteristic facial features. In the novel, Rose is referred to as a Mongoloid. This reference was brought into use by Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down, a nineteenth-century physician. (The syndrome is also named for him.) While working with the self-advocate population (a contemporary name chosen by people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities to represent themselves—it signifies having a voice of one’s own), Dr. Down came to the (very wrong) conclusion that these individuals had regressed to an earlier state of humanity that he (once again, very wrongly) believed was the state of being Mongolian. He eventually abandoned these beliefs, yet the term continued for more than a century.
Lizzie—Lizzie was born with hydrocephalus, the state in which someone has excess amounts of cerebrospinal fluid (the liquid that surrounds and protects the brain), resulting in pressure on the brain. This can lead to an enlarged head, slowing of mental capacity, cognitive deterioration, headaches, vomiting, blurred vision, difficulty in walking, and drowsiness. Today we can often help people born with hydrocephalus with a medical device called a ventriculoperitoneal shunt.
Frances—At some time in Frances’s life, she contracted rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever is an inflammatory disease tha
t can develop as a complication of strep throat or scarlet fever. It causes painful and tender joints—most often in the knees, ankles, elbows, and wrists. It can also cause uncontrollable body movements and outbursts of unusual behavior. Rheumatic fever still exists, although it is more common in underdeveloped countries, and linked to poverty.
Sarah—Sarah might have been diagnosed today with autism spectrum disorder. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that impacts a person’s communication and behavior. While doctors and scientists do not know the exact causes of ASD, research has suggested that genes may act together with influences from the environment to affect development in ways that lead to ASD.
Neddie—Like Rose, Neddie was born with Down syndrome.
Edwina—Edwina had mutism, which could have occurred for several different reasons. Elective mutism is when psychological issues, including trauma, cause a person to not speak. Selective mutism is when a person wants to speak but in certain circumstances finds that they cannot (often caused by anxiety). Total mutism is when a person doesn’t speak under any circumstance. Physical damage to the brain or speech muscles can also cause mutism.
Miriam—Miriam was born with an unknown congenital malformation, as well as perhaps hydrocephalus (which may have led to her seizures). “Congenital malformation” is another word for “birth defect.” Birth defects can be caused by genetic or environmental factors, or a combination of the two. In many cases, doctors and scientists do not know the cause.
Louie, Edwin, Wally, Doris, William, Shirley, and Lois (and all the other babies in the Sick Ward)—Unfortunately, there were (and are) many causes of infant mortality. There could have been any number of medical reasons why the babies were placed in this room, with some babies undoubtedly having more than one condition.
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