Cleo F. Matthews
Orphan Train
Excerpt
Red and blue, a memory that lives not in the mind but the body, something in the muscle. Not a scene, not a condensed red and blue story, but the kinds of colors that tint life later on. It was a house in Montana, one of them. I can’t picture finding the baby but I can feel the colors, blue and red. It was an accident, the death. Crib death, they said, before anyone knew how little there was to know about it. It was an accident that I was not at my foster home that afternoon, but down the street playing at another. The last accident was that I was the one that found the baby.
The night after we were taken away from my mother for the first time, officers roaming through our filthy house in Montana in search of two little girls, I sat on the floor in front of a baby jumper pushing my infant sister back and forth. My new foster mother, sitting in a chair across the room, fingers laced across her large body, eyes closed, snapped at me to stop shaking my sister, that it could hurt her brain. I stopped pushing my sister’s body back and forth, the body of the child I’d fed and diapered and protected since she was born. I peered suspiciously at Mary from across the room, the TV blaring. Her eyes closed. I stuck my tongue out in her direction. I jumped when she said, “Careful. Your face might freeze like that.”
During the time staying at Mary’s I had my own room. During visitations in some government offices my mother brought me a floral bag filled with gifts. I can feel the blooming of that bag in my body today. During visitation hours, many of which she missed, my mother tried to be a mother for an audience. There was an eyelash in my eye once, and my mother spent the hour prodding and scooping at my eye without care while I cried, and then she would cry, and we would sit there unable to comfort one another. At night in Mary’s house I would get stomachaches, unable to sleep, and sneak out of bed to pull out the mini watercolor paint pallets my mother had bought me, the kind I liked when it was just me and her. I didn’t paint with them, I just wanted to touch the things in the bag. I wanted to be close to those objects, objects from my mother. Mary caught me one night and took the bag from my mother out of my room. I lay in the dark. The period of time after lying down, before sleep would come, was unbearable to me all my childhood. I couldn’t bear the hours. I needed something outside of myself to soothe me.
Mary wasn’t a bad mother. Mary and her sister owned a cake-making business. Castles of cake would appear on the island in the kitchen. One night while they were cleaning up the kitchen, putting away the clear bowls stained with different colors of frosting, a foster child ran into a chair next to the counter and all seven tiers of a yellow cake fell sideways from the counter to the floor. It was layered on the floor like devastating rubble. Mary’s husband, a laborer who always came home covered in grease and dirt, wasn’t bad either. We called him Papa. He ate steak and sliced potatoes cooked in a pot only for him in front of the television. From his chair in the living room, he would sometimes give me a spiced potato if I asked. When my half-brother, busy with high school successes and his own version of orphanhood, finally decided he was ready to see me again, Mary tried to be extra nice to me before the visit. She told another child in the foster home that it was my special day and to be kind to me. She put a bologna and cheese sandwich in front of me for lunch. It tasted like cardboard. I chewed it slowly, but I didn’t want to upset Mary on my special day. We ate bologna and cheese sandwiches a lot, that or peanut butter and jelly, the revolving skeletal menu of working-class families.
There are five hundred thousand children in the foster care system in the US. Half of them have chronic health conditions. These children will grow up to experience higher rates of incarceration, homelessness, and poverty. The foster care system was born in the United States out of the social reform efforts of the 1800s. The orphan train, which shipped homeless children out to homes across the country, was to replace the orphanage. A train is an appropriate metaphor. They put a child today on the train of government assistance and organization and then send them away from the violence of their home to the violence of other houses, then upward into the violent rooms of their adult lives. In many houses, but never of them.
Casey Family Programs conducted research on children who grow up in the foster care system; Casey Family Programs which provides scholarships to college for these children, scholarships like mine. They found that there is a higher percentage of post foster care children than post combat veterans, with post traumatic stress disorder. They have found that children who grow up in the foster care system are more vulnerable to death by suicide, drug addiction, eating disorders, self-harm, further physical and sexual abuse, and that only three percent of these children obtain a bachelor’s degree.
I have a friend who is an artist and her painting is colored by her dual identity, which screams across the canvas, as a Russian-born US citizen. Her work contains the technical realism of the United States and the conceptual surrealism of Russian myth. She talked to me recently about Soviet Russia, about feeling it sometimes, how she’ll open the fridge and look at whatever is in there, considering whether or not she has earned it. She said it’s the thing that makes her alone. Because she wouldn’t even know how to talk about it, about the time before her father moved her and her brother, mother, dog, and cat to the United States with $500. She said, “It’s like your orphan thing.”
The old land that makes us alone and silent in the new. Unable to commit to this land or that one. In our alone-ness, we pull up chairs and have conversation. I remember the ambulance, more red and blue, and Mary’s tears afterward for weeks, sitting at the kitchen table at night as the house darkened. I would sit beside her, a table corner between us, quiet and watching. She would pull her wide arms in, bringing her hands to her tired face. When the tears came, she would put her face inside her shirt. It seemed like she was trying to wipe away the skin as she dragged her fingers across the space beneath her eyes. I remember the play of children, kitchen appliances in plasticine miniature, and the light that poured through the windows while firemen filled the room and the screams of the foster mother filled the air. I remember standing there, forgotten about, blood and a baby’s mouth.
Traumatic memory, though, post-battle, exists as a block, and history is unseeable when we turn around to examine it. There is research to suggest that a memory is different every time we recall it and that the part of the brain that stores memories is also the creative part. To remember something is ultimately to decide what happened. But certain memories remain locked up with indecision, an inability to decide, until years later you still see red and blue all the time.
About the Author
Cleo F. Matthews is a traumatic stress studies scholar and writer. She is working on a book about her experiences growing up in the foster care system.