Spring 1936
North Carolina Reformatory for Wayward Girls
Alice tried to run away. Cecily had no idea she was planning it. And maybe she hadn’t been planning it, exactly—rumor was that a group of high school boys lurking around the periphery of the grounds had been involved, perhaps as inspiration—but, either way, Alice ended up back at Rathbone, and all the girls were called in to the library to watch her be whipped.
Miss Peters pointed, then crooked her finger, at one uniformed girl after another, and each stepped forward for the job of holding Alice down. Alice was already lying facedown, spread-eagled, on the threadbare rug, dressed in only a thin cotton shift, and Miss Peters had the hickory switch in her hand. Cecily tried to hide behind Eleanor Kelly, who was a good six inches taller, but Miss Peters saw her and pointed, said, “Jacqueline. Come now.”
Cecily’s feet were lead, as she walked over to kneel beside Alice’s shoulder. Tommy was big enough now that kneeling was awkward, even painful. Other girls held each of Alice’s feet, her legs. The girl stationed across from Cecily, at Alice’s other shoulder, looked up at Cecily and grinned, scraggly hair falling over gleaming eyes.
Cecily put one hand on Alice’s upper arm. Alice’s skin was hot. She was already crying softly. Cecily, moving her body so that Miss Peters wouldn’t see, gripped Alice’s hand.
“This is Alice Beene’s fourth attempt at running away,” Miss Peters announced to the room. “So she will receive forty lashes. You all will count aloud with me.”
Miss Peters turned toward where Alice lay and looked at her a long moment, then raised her arm.
The switch flew, made contact. Alice cried out; Cecily flinched. “One!” said the room.
Switch, cry, flinch. “Two!”
By ten, Alice was writhing, sobbing. Tears streamed down Cecily’s face, too.
By twenty, stripes of blood showed through Alice’s gown.
The girls chanted on: “Twenty-one!”
Cecily cowered, feeling the intermittent breeze of the flying switch, holding Alice’s hand tight enough to crush the bones. She imagined herself on Prince’s back, cantering around the ring, her arms circled above her, the cheering of the crowd; Prince nuzzling her afterward, nibbling a carrot out of her hand. She thought of Lucky, running his hand sweetly over her hair. His body curled around hers, his strong arms holding her. Let be be finale of seem. Somewhere in this world, there was love. There was. There was.
That night, long after lights out, Cecily heard Alice sniffling. She’d been taken directly to the infirmary after the whipping—Eleanor Kelly and another of the taller girls had had to half carry, half drag her between them—and Cecily had been certain Miss Everett would keep her there at least a week. But no. She’d come limping back just before lights out, not meeting anyone’s eyes. She’d creaked her way down onto the bed, lying facedown, of course.
Cecily herself was still trembling, and she said nothing to her friend—they’d get in trouble if she did. She thought of her old friend Dolores at the orphanage, late at night in the next cot over. Something bad’s gonna happen; I don’t know yet just what.
Cecily cradled her growing belly. It was ten lashes for each attempt at running away.
Ten lashes had seemed pretty bad. To lie on her stomach and take it? Ten lashes would hurt Tommy, no question. Besides, there was the threat of the state prison.
Was she going to have to wait until she got to the Home, then figure out a way to escape?
Waiting seemed as impossible as not waiting—but she had to do one or the other.
It was a week before Alice would speak to Cecily again, and Cecily didn’t blame her one bit. Finally, though, with things seemingly back to normal, on a snow-coated morning in the hogpen, Cecily asked in a whisper, “Why do you do it, Alice? Why do you run?”
Alice shrugged, then winced from the motion. “Just can’t stop myself, sometimes.”
“But what are you running to?”
“Nothin’. Just running away. Been doing it all my life.”
“Is that why you were sent here?” It was a common reason girls ended up at Wayward: “incorrigible” running.
“Sure, I ran away from my daddy. Every time I could. He always caught me, too. And then my stepma caught him in my bed with me. That’s when I got sent here. He said he’d kill me if I didn’t get out of his sight. She like to kill me, too. Only I bet he’s been doing it to my little sister ever since I been gone. She was just gettin’ to the age he liked.” Her mouth worked for a moment, then she spat: “Seven.”
Cecily felt this settling into her bones. Seven. Like she’d been when Tebow had come and bought her from the orphanage. “Oh, Alice,” was all she could say.
Alice grimaced, shrugged, scratched hard at her head, then went back to shoveling manure, drawing in a sharp breath with each motion.
And whatever part of Cecily had still been considering running settled down, like a coin falling into a slot. Things were not as they had been for her before. She wasn’t alone in the world now. She was loved; if she ran, she would be running to find Lucky, not just running away. That meant she had to be smart. Keep herself and Tommy safe, first and foremost. It was just her fate to be here now. She didn’t have to like it. But she would wait it out, for Tommy.
The McNaughton Children’s Home was on a tree-shrouded lot in the city of Wilmington. (Cecily, who’d assumed she’d be sent somewhere near Wayward, had been surprised to be told she was being taken on the train by Miss Peters; the rattling and clanking that were the sounds of home had lulled her to sleep so instantly and thoroughly that she’d had no time to plot escape. Anyway, she figured, better to wait till Miss Peters was long gone, back to Wayward.) The Home had a wide front porch with wicker furniture, where the girls—there were five others, all just as pregnant as Cecily—were not allowed to sit, because they were not to be seen. But they were allowed to go into the back garden and wander the winding brick paths. There was a bench among the shrubbery where Cecily could sit and read, and, when she arrived, the dogwoods were in bloom.
“Your only concern now is to grow a healthy baby,” said Mrs. Oglethorpe, the house matron, looking over the thick file that Miss Peters had brought from Wayward. After a moment, Mrs. Oglethorpe slapped the file shut, locked it into her desk drawer, and smiled up at Cecily, as if she’d decided to pay it no mind. Cecily was wearing a white dress, which Miss Peters had given her, and Mrs. Oglethorpe had said Cecily would be provided with more pretty clothing, with everything she could possibly need. “You need not tell anyone that you’ve come to us from Wayward,” she said. “In fact, it’s best if you don’t.”
Dr. Addington, who came twice a week to check on the girls and who’d examined Cecily immediately upon her arrival, said the same things, plus, “What a pretty little momma you’ll make.” He had sparkling blue eyes and a thick white mustache. “Miss Peters did not exaggerate your charms. We’ll just hope you don’t have any trouble on account of being so small.”
Cecily blinked nervously at that. The part she’d read in Miss Everett’s book about how the baby was actually born had struck her as literally impossible. She had been too afraid even to ask Miss Everett to explain.
“And you won’t give us any trouble, will you?” the doctor added, with a slight frown. “We don’t take many scholarship girls, you understand. It’s a considerable risk for us.”
“No, sir, I won’t be any trouble,” Cecily promised. She wished she could get a look at Miss Peters’s file, so she’d know for sure what all they really thought of her.
Meals were served at a long table in a formal dining room, where Mrs. Oglethorpe enforced manners that Evelyn Danner, who was from Virginia, swore were stricter than what she’d learned at finishing school. Cecily tried her best, at first, but soon—not wanting to stand out as a scholarship girl—joined the others in rolling her eyes about the extended instruction in the finer points of finger bowls, melon spoons, butter knives. Mrs. Oglethorpe remained undiscouraged. “You girls are going to make lives for yourselves after this, I promise you,” she would say, and she was not unkind about it. “That’s why we don’t let you out to be seen within the community. So that you’ll have some prayer of leaving here and building a new life afterward, with no one the wiser of the way your reputations have been compromised.”
To such statements, the other girls nodded mutely, gave little smiles. Cecily just put her hands over her belly. She was still trying to get the lay of the land; some days it felt like that was all she’d ever done, all her life, wherever in the world she was, and that she’d never once fully comprehended it.
For one example, right now it was hard times all over the country—desperate times, really. But Louise Gibson had asked Cecily where her father had gotten the two hundred dollars a month it cost to keep her at the Home. “Mine writes me every month with the tally of what he’s spent, and it’ll be a thousand by the end. He’s making me marry his biggest business rival when I get back, because he says he’s not spending another dime on me and my bad decisions after this, and it’ll serve Henry right for being a thorn in his side the last twenty years.” She laughed. “They’ve told him I’m on a six-month European tour, and I’m supposed to be studying, so, if he asks me about it later, I’ll be able to describe the Parthenon, the Louvre, all of that. Train trips across the glorious countryside, and the one time my trunks got lost, I guess. My father has my aunt mailing poor old Henry postcards from her travels, pretending they’re from me.”
But that all had to be a joke. Didn’t it? (Two hundred dollars a month?)
Cecily was also dismayed to learn that the other girls were all planning to give up their babies for adoption. “It’s in the best interest of the child,” Mrs. Oglethorpe said, to which the girls gave their small smiles and nods and even echoed her—some sadly, some with relief (and Louise Gibson seemingly with relish). One girl, Harriet, chattered on about how she’d been promised that the McNaughton Home only adopted babies out to families that had an indoor toilet, plus a bathtub with faucets and running water. She was seventeen, and—maybe she hadn’t had as easy a life as Louise and Evelyn had—to her, indoor plumbing seemed to be all that mattered. “He’ll grow up in the lap of luxury. He’ll take as many baths as he likes! Maybe even every day!”
When Cecily said there was no way she was giving up her baby, indoor plumbing or not, she was called into Mrs. Oglethorpe’s office. She told Mrs. Oglethorpe that the baby was the only family she’d ever had, that her own mother had given her up and she would never, ever do that to her child, because she knew exactly how it felt.
Mrs. Oglethorpe frowned, folding her hands atop her desk. “Jacqueline, you’re fifteen years old, and, though we’ve been doing our best not to mention this point, you’ve been sentenced to stay at Wayward until you’re twenty-one.”
Cecily pointed her chin, not about to say that she had no plans whatsoever of seeing that sentence through. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love my baby.”
Mrs. Oglethorpe looked surprised at first, then just sat back and smiled slightly. “Well. You have some time to think about it,” she said.
A woman named Millie came in to cook; another (Josephine) to clean and do laundry; an old, silent man to work in the garden. The sheets on Cecily’s bed were crisp and clean, and she had a private room. It took her some time to believe it, but the girls honestly only had to do light work: make their beds each morning; keep their rooms tidy and themselves clean and well dressed; dry and put away the dishes (Millie always washed) after meals.
A handwritten, framed placard next to a portrait of Susanna McNaughton in the front foyer explained that the old, childless widow, upon her death in 1925, had bequeathed not just her house to the cause of “unfortunate girls,” but also a large sum of money. So maybe that (not to mention, if it was really true, the two hundred dollars per month the other girls were paying) could explain why and how the girls were being so lavishly cared for. Mrs. Oglethorpe, at every meal when she said grace, always thanked the late Mrs. McNaughton for her “unparalleled generosity.”
Still, Cecily just plain had a bad feeling about things—a sense that it would take just one wrong move to get in the bad graces of the doctor and Mrs. Oglethorpe, and that the punishment would be swift, severe.
Though—all appearances were to the contrary! Whenever the doctor came to look in on the girls, he was nothing but cheerful and kind, exclaiming over how well they were doing, almost fatherly in his pride, as if they were accomplishing notable things. The girls were good-hearted, for the most part, so there was only the occasional squabble, nothing like the fight Cecily’d had with Fern, and so no cause to get on Mrs. Oglethorpe’s bad side (assuming the lady had a bad side, which, in Cecily’s experience, everybody did).
Cecily had deduced that she could probably walk straight out the front door and down the street to the train station any time she wanted, at least if she knew just where the train station was. The pull was intense, unquestionably. She figured she could find it. And she had started to hear Isabelle: Do you know what they’ll do to you down here, if you have a baby that looks like him?
Yet, she had also begun to think: What would it be like out on the road? What would she find to eat? Would people try to hurt her? Where would she end up giving birth? Would there be a doctor, much less one as seemingly kind as Dr. Addington? And how would she pay for it? While it probably wouldn’t cost her two hundred dollars (a month!) to have this baby out in the world, anything at all would be more than she had. Her cash had been left behind when she was taken by the police; all she’d managed to save were the snapshot of Lucky and the Saint Jude card, because they’d been tucked inside the copy of Sense and Sensibility that she’d had in her pocket that morning. She’d kept the book, the snapshot, and the card all carefully hidden ever since. (At Wayward, it was behind a loose board in the hog barn, and, no matter how much she’d wanted to, she’d never once taken them out, not until it was time to leave for the Home, when she’d kept them from being detected by Miss Peters by stashing them down the front of her underwear.)
Alone in her room now, she would pull them out and consider them. The book, mud-stained now. Inside its pages, the snapshot of handsome Lucky. The card showing the bearded saint. Where are you? she would ask them. What am I supposed to do?
They never answered.
She knew Harlem was a long, long way away. And, even if she could manage to find Lucky, what if that, rather than marking the end of her troubles, was just the start of a whole new kind? Where could they go to get married? Would she get him killed, just by loving him?
What if he didn’t actually love her back?
In the months since he’d been gone, she’d seen a lot of the world, and seen it much more clearly than she’d ever had cause to before. Nothing she’d seen had left her optimistic.
It wasn’t that she was thinking of giving up. She would always love Lucky. But she was seven months pregnant, penniless, and being cared for in fine style—for no reason at all, that she could see. And she thought maybe it wasn’t wise to question her good fortune in this, even if she did still fear that somehow she would get on the bad side of the doctor and Mrs. Oglethorpe, and they would make her pay.
Then, one night, Harriet began screaming. Dr. Addington was called and quickly came, squealing to a halt at the curb in his Lincoln, running inside with his black bag in hand, his wife trailing behind. (Mrs. Addington, Louise whispered to Cecily, was a trained nurse who came to the Home only for births.) There was a room downstairs off the kitchen—a former pantry—where all the babies were born. It was kept very, very clean, and the doctor had all the equipment he needed in there, lined up in the glass-fronted cupboards and on the shelves.
Still, Harriet had a hard time. Her screams could be heard for twenty-four hours straight. The doctor and his wife came out for only the briefest breaks and didn’t say a word to anyone, or even smile, which was very unlike the doctor. The girls exchanged nervous looks at the breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. “Buck up, girls,” Mrs. Oglethorpe said. “You probably won’t have this hard a time, and, even if you do, Dr. Addington will take good care of you.”
Finally—finally!—they heard the sound of a baby’s cry. It was past 9 p.m. on the second day, and the girls, waiting nervously in the parlor, hugged each other and laughed, pregnant bellies bumping.
After breakfast the following morning, a shiny black car pulled into the rear driveway, and an older couple in expensive-looking hats and coats—the woman’s was the most beautiful royal blue, with a mink collar—stepped out. They came to the back door, and the girls watched as Dr. Addington handed over Harriet’s baby, swaddled tightly in a blue blanket, to the lady, who looked stunned in a happy kind of way. Her husband handed the doctor a thick yellow envelope, then laid his hand gently atop the baby’s tiny head and smiled.
Harriet limped out some hours later, and the girls helped her upstairs to her room. She was pale, her face tearstained. She said the baby had been breech. Thank God for Dr. Addington, she said, or she and the baby both would’ve died. “The couple who came for him—did they look like they had indoor plumbing?”
“Oh, yes! Yes, yes!” the girls assured her, telling her about the shiny car, the woman’s royal-blue coat, and Harriet dissolved into fresh tears, as she crawled back into her freshly made-up bed.
Late that night in her room, Cecily cried, too, flat on her back in her own bed. For the first time, she was frightened, so frightened that the hair on her arms was standing on end, because she had realized finally that she was out of options. She was not going anywhere, not running away, not finding Lucky. She was going to give birth to Tommy right here, where Dr. Addington was, because she had to be sure that Tommy was going to live. As his mother, that was her first and most important job, and Dr. Addington had already said she might have a hard time on account of being so small.
So, no, she had no options. None at all. And if they tried to punish her more on account of the baby looking like Lucky, she would stand up to them. She would bear whatever came—and protect Tommy at any cost.
But how was she going to keep them from taking him away? From actually giving him away—and sending Cecily back to Wayward to finish out her six-year sentence?
Even today, Mrs. Oglethorpe had asked her again if she wouldn’t follow Harriet’s excellent example and consider that her baby would be much better off with the wealthy family the Home had already found for him. “No,” Cecily had said. “I will not consider it.”
Mrs. Oglethorpe had looked so gravely disappointed at this that Cecily started to tremble, even as she said again, “No. My baby is mine. I am not giving my baby up.”