When I was a boy growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s, I went to school with orphans. Streets away from where I lived was a “children’s home” run by Methodists—a large impoundment of meandering, low bunker-like buildings (dormitories, I suspect), with a white, official-looking administrative structure fronting the busy street running past. There were some shade trees, but mostly it was bare field stretching down to the Illinois Central yards. Not a neighborhood setting; more an industrial one.
Each school-day morning a bus would arrive, and the orphans would alight. There were fewer than twenty—boys and girls, just children—walking to the school building in a reluctant, regimented way; mealy-skinned, unsmiling, unassimilated white kids in faded, hand-me-down clothes. The boys with crudely-cut hair and stony faces, the girls, thin or fat, unanimated, indifferently dressed, proceeding inside as if they’d been warned to expect not to be a part of anything. Only to attend, as the law required.
Inside school, the orphans were rarely heard to speak. I myself do not remember ever speaking to one of them or knowing their names—though I must’ve, since I was a disruptive, over-talkative boy and viewed everything as a chance to be hilarious and provoke comment. I can’t say how I regarded them—these children from “the home.” It seemed unusual to me that they should be there with us. But unusual was not a word I knew yet. My mother, as always, cast a small-town, Ozark gimlet eye onto anyone she considered “transient” (even though we were transients). Possibly I considered the orphans, who were not transients—only unsecured—to be like transients; which is to say, from elsewhere, bound for elsewhere. Likely, though, I regarded them not much at all, as if by being un-parented, they were only partly there and could be treated in partial ways. The teachers, of course, knew who they were, knew their names, possibly knew more than that, but did not single them out, conspired in their anonymity, as if that was a kindness.
I know I harbored a feeling that the orphans were tough kids—the girls included—made tough and watchful by the experience of being orphans. There were never fights, any more than there were friendships sealed. But I felt they were all unhappy and hostile (toward me) since they were so unlucky, and I apparently was not. Doubtless they learned little of their school work; but by being there as they were, they learned other things. And yet. It’s just as possible I’m wrong; possible that they all enjoyed leaving the orphanage each day, getting on their bus and riding, no matter for how long or to where or who was there with them when they arrived. Away was away. They were all just waiting for someone to come claim them. Nothing, though, as far as I could tell, seemed dependent on what they liked.
Still, I must’ve had some suppositions about their lives, lives that had eventuated in their being relegated. (How but against their wills?) After seventy years, I have only snippets of memory—of the infrequent arguments my own parents waged—after drinking, with shouting, sometimes physical struggle, and later tears. I might have thought this was how it had been for the orphans. Late-night breaches of the peace, violence in someone’s front yard in dim early mornings. Fear, suddenly, inside a fast-moving automobile. Life cut loose from its moorings until everything became too much, ending with a child being taken away.
Again, I doubt I thought overmuch about what might’ve happened to them to land them where they were—all the things I now know can happen: abandonment, rupture, estrangement, misunderstandings over money. Flight. Death. “Orphan” seems like a Victorian remnant to me now. I cannot recollect anyone ever telling me what an orphan was or how lucky I was not to be one. Possibly, though, orphan was a human condition you understood the moment you saw the children.
Something about separation is at heart what this memory signifies to me. How we see others incompletely and then ever-so-glidingly distance ourselves—rather than do what we might do better. And how it all starts in childhood.
Richard Ford is a novelist and short story writer. His many books include The Sportswriter, Canada, Sorry for Your Trouble, and the memoir Between Them.
