HERE ARE SOME pictures of Minerva, Minnesota, in the early twenties, when my mother was a young woman. This aerial shot shows the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railway that ran through town, parallel to Main Street, bringing in commercial travelers, hoboes and migrant workers, even the occasional jazz piano player. Here's a photograph of the Minerva skyline. The tallest building isn't the water tower or the grain elevator but the steeple of Saint Anne's Catholic Church, followed by that of Mount Olive Lutheran, and First Presbyterian. Here is a hand-tinted postcard of the Hamilton Creamery and Pop Factory, the biggest employer in town. Before Prohibition it had been Vietzke's Brewery, but in January 1920, Mr. Hamilton, Presbyterian that he was, moved his creamery business in from its old location and started up the soda-pop factory. "If there's no beer, people will just have to drink pop" was one of his more famous quotes.
Although it's not as easy to find their pictures, Minerva also had its bad women. Some of them merely slept with the wrong person or had a child or two out of wedlock. Then there were those whose crimes were truly shocking. More than one woman in my mother's town committed the unthinkable and then disappeared. Minerva earned its notoriety for producing the rarest of creatures—a female outlaw.
Only a handful of people ever found out the true story concerning Penelope Niebeck. Here is a photograph of her, taken before she vanished from Minerva and embarked on her long journey. In the snapshot she is fifteen, her long dark braid pinned around her head. Her eyes are large, her nose and cheeks dusted with freckles. In those days most people looked solemn and slightly bewildered in front of a camera, but this girl is beaming with an outlandish happiness that completely transforms her face. She is holding a baby.
This photograph hung over the mantelpiece of my childhood home in the small Mexican town where my mother and I were the only foreigners. Penny Niebeck's image is woven into my earliest memories. When, as a seven-year-old, I asked my mother about my guardian angel, she pointed to the photograph and said, "She's your angel. She saved us both."