Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
An Apache woman's memoir recalls a brutal year in an Indian orphanage.
Oct 15, 1997 | Introduction by Kate Moses
"The old people were right about photographs," Sharon Skolnick writes in the introductory notes to her first book, "Where Courage is Like a Wild Horse." "They do steal a little bit of your soul. I say that because there's one part of my life that was never photographed, and it's the time that lives most vividly in my mind."
That time was the year 9-year-old Skolnick (then named Linda Lakoe) lived at the Murrow Indian Orphanage in Muskogee, Okla. It was 1953; Skolnick had washed up on the gloomy, arid shoals of Murrow with her younger sister Jackie after the breakup of their family and five years at the mercy of the state Indian child welfare system. Already brutalized by a parade of foster homes and temporary caregivers, Skolnick and her sister faced at Murrow the further alienation of being the only Apache children in an institution populated by the tribes of Northeastern Oklahoma. "Not only were we friendless and isolated from the moment we stepped through the massive wooden doors of the three-story red brick dormitory," Skolnick writes, "we were also the distrusted and despised daughters of a tribe that inspired fear even in this outpost of Indian country."
Skolnick survived the terror, loneliness and petty humiliations of her childhood and became an artist; her acute perceptions of life at the orphanage are captured, like still photography, in the light and shadow of her visual memory. There is the small, thin girl -- herself -- sitting with her face to the cafeteria wall, her skin marked by running sores no worse than the cruelty of the other children; there is a first (covert) trip to a drive-in movie, where the dark rows of huddled cars look to Skolnick like the pupae of Monarch butterflies. There are the absurd potential parents, red-faced farm couples who bring picnics and never come again; there is the "intricate green net" of the grassy horse pasture, where Skolnick hides to play with a handful of tiny blue porcelain ponies, her only legacy from her real mother. In the discreet snapshots of her life at Murrow, Skolnick assembles a portrait of a tough little girl, a fair and unsentimental observer who kept a tenacious grip on her soul.
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EXCERPT
The Bacone Clothes Line
To begin at the beginning: Sunrise. A line of girls in a long gray corridor. It may be a trick of the light, but each, dressed only in a slip or frayed undershirt, appears thin. The light streams in, golden, through the high, small window above and behind the vast oak cabinet. Our closet is framed in the fire of sunrise; it seems that the door opens into a brilliant tunnel. A crisp, bracing smell of soaps and cleansers issues from the cabinet, as if the bright passage led into a pine wood in morning.
I am first in line because I've struggled out of the embrace of sleep with the first crow of cocks this morning. I have an ambition, a hope that animates me. There is a dress I want to wear. It's pink. It arrived only two weeks ago, making it the newest item in the wardrobe of the second-floor girls. It has ruffles and a bow; to me it is Cinderella's ball dress, as wonderful as that. So far, Mrs. Alice B. Joseph, who dispenses our clothes in the morning, our meals three times a day, our discipline and medicine when she deems it necessary, has given the dress only to her special favorites. I am not one of those. Phyllis, who is my enemy, has worn it twice. But today I am first in line. And I have reason to hope that Mrs. Joseph is a fair woman. She's told me more times than I can count, "Linda, just meet me halfway. You'll find that I'm a fair woman." Well, here I am, first in line.
Mrs. Joseph looms above, as wooden as the clothes closet. Sunrise surrounds her in a nimbus of light; it could be that she's a Baptist angel, a cigar-store angel presiding over a lineup of cigar-store Indians, although that thought won't come to me for many years. All I know this day is that Mrs. Joseph does not appreciate fidgeting. And most often that's no problem; at sunrise it takes all our energy simply to maintain the vertical. But today my anticipation of the pink dress has me supercharged. I shift from left foot to right; I clasp my hands in front, behind, in front again. Joseph fixes me with her steel gray eyes. I summon all my self-control to hold myself at attention. But she senses that she can outwait me. The silence in that corridor becomes so intense that it seems you can hear the sun rising high in the clear blue Oklahoma sky. The line of girls scarcely breathes. A rooster crows, and the sheer unexpectedness of it makes me jump half out of my flimsy little shift. Mrs. Joseph's lips turn in just the barest suggestion of a smile. "Linda, you know I won't tolerate that fidgitin'. To the back of the line with you, girl."
"Oh, but Mrs. Joseph, please. I got up so early." I feel I must plead my case, though I know from experience that it can only make things worse.
"Another word from you, and you will get no clothes at all today, little missy." I can hardly credit that; it isn't Mrs. Joseph's style. But there's no doubt that the woman is not pleased.
I can't take any more chances today because today the couple is coming. That's what my sister Jackie and I were told in the dread privacy of Mrs. Joseph's office, where we, trembling miscreants, expected at the very least to taste lye soap for some real or imagined indiscretion whispered behind her back but overheard. Instead we were greeted with, "Well, girls, this is very good. We've found a couple that has a definite interest in two little Indian girls." She paused dramatically. "I even said the dread word, Apache, and that didn't discourage them. If you can make yourselves lovable -- yes, lovable, Linda -- we may be rid of you."
Well, lovable -- that will be a challenge. But surely a pink dress with bows and ribbons, Cinderella's dress, would go a long way. Even Mrs. Joseph must be able to see that. So why is she torturing me with a prolonged tease this morning? One by one the little Indian girls ahead of me receive their day's ration of clothing, and still the pink dress stays in the closet. Is she putting me through some sort of test to see if I'm worthy? Will the dress, so much desired because so long withheld, be my reward after all?
Phyllis had not received her clothes yet. That would answer the question. My eyes burned into her back until it seemed that the birthmark directly between her shoulder blades must ignite. I would have fused her spine into an iron rod with the heat of my eyes if I could, and watched the jelly of her thin flesh quiver and shake on the immobile column of her back; I hated her that much. She was Kiowa, for one thing, an approved tribe at Murrow and at Bacone College, which surrounded our little orphanage.
I was Apache. People looked scared when they heard that. Even here, at the Murrow Indian Orphanage. I'm talking about the Indian staff at the Indian orphanage. They bought the whole Geronimo story, the crazed terror of the frontier. The thing was, there weren't many Apaches in northeastern Oklahoma. My people come from Anadarko, three hundred miles south and west. So at Murrow all they knew of Apaches was Geronimo, my sister, and me. And I guess my sister and I didn't give them much reason to discount the Geronimo legacy. By that I mean that we met expectations; at least I did.
With a look deep into my eyes, past my eyes, Mrs. Joseph hands the pink dress to Phyllis. "Take it, honey," I hear her say, "it's the Kiowa dress." I'm quite sure I didn't make a sound, but in my head there was a thunder of rage. I didn't hear what she said when she handed me the well-worn navy blue sailor suit that had once been the prized outfit belonging to the second-floor girls. Later Jackie told me she'd said something like, "We don't want to fool the people, honey. That never works out. You're not a pink, frilly dress kind of girl. You're Apache."
I don't remember the couple who came to visit Jackie and me. I didn't really pay them much attention. I knew with an absolute certainty that it wouldn't work out. And, of course, it didn't. That pink dress was my only chance; without it, the whole exercise was doomed. I withdrew into the deep, brooding funk that was the commonest weather of my soul. The couple made a fuss over little Jackie, who had perfected her "adorable" act, but they shied away from me. They knew my secret; I could see it in their eyes. Without the pink dress to distract them, they could just discern the rash that lurked under my skin ready to erupt into weepy, running sores. They would have adopted Jackie in a minute if I hadn't been part of the package. But who wanted a sullen, sore-faced Apache in a worn-out old sailor suit? Not this couple; that was certain.
I thought about jumping Phyllis in her pink dress. The idea tasted good on my tongue. But I knew from bitter experience that such an indulgence would only earn me a beating from the ruling clique and the further punishment of a lonely night in the infirmary without dinner. So I mastered my anger until dark of night. Then I crept out of my bed, past the lone chair in the cell of solitude and silence where I slept, through the curtain that served as a door, down the damp, shadowy corridor, to the towering oak cabinet, now bathed in the thin silver of moonlight. Mrs. Joseph didn't bother to lock the clothes closet since no useful purpose could ever be served by one of us raiding it. On this night I served a useless purpose. I took the pink dress, the Kiowa dress, and slipped into the enclosed dark of a broom closet. I cut the dress into a tangle of pink ribbons and then left it in a neat pile, scissors placed prominently on top, in front of Phyllis's door. Then I returned to bed to sleep the sleep of the justified.
I know Mrs. Joseph never believed that Phyllis had done the deed, not even for a minute. I'm quite sure that she did suspect me. For many days afterward she looked at me with a new expression in her eyes. She never questioned me about it; indeed, she never so much as mentioned the pink Kiowa dress to any of the girls on the second floor. Of course, it's true that we didn't get any new dresses for a long time. But I like to think that the chief motive for her silence was this: she knew in her heart that I'd had the right to do what I had done.
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