MARILYN'S LATEST BOOK
A work-in-progress by Marilyn Coffey
I’m currently marketing Mail-Order Kid, a completed manuscript, to publishers. The book is based on America’s orphan-train movement, the largest mass migration of children in the history of the world.
Taking orphans by train to new homes began in 1854 when a Protestant minister sent forty-seven boys from New York to Michigan. The agent found homes for the motley lot, mostly hoodlums who had scratched a living from the city’s mean streets. From 1854 to 1929, New York and other big city orphanages shipped half-a-million children to rural areas all over the United States, but particularly to the Midwest and the Great Plains.
I’d been lecturing about this movement for several years in Nebraska and Kansas when I received a small letter written in a somewhat shaky hand.
“How can you talk about the orphan trains,” the writer asked, “if you haven’t heard my story?”
Curious, I visited Teresa Martin’s apartment and found a treasure: Teresa, a bright articulate woman who rode the orphan train from New York City to Kansas in 1910 as a three-year-old. She had piles of papers to show me, stories that she and others had written about her experience. A retired medical librarian, Teresa had amassed an archive.
As we worked together, I learned how Teresa had stepped off the orphan train and tumbled into a living nightmare. Although born Jewish, she was placed in a farm village of fifty Catholics who spoke only Volga German. There her ‘mother’ frequently whipped her; her ‘father' sexually molested her; and school children taunted her: 'Your own mother didn’t want you.’
When Teresa became an adult, she concealed her background whenever she could. Like many orphan train riders, she was ashamed of her past. But forces larger that herself – the orphan-train movement and supportive relatives – helped her come to terms with her past as a mail-order kid. My book chronicles Teresa’s remarkable survival and her subsequent rebirth.
Mail-Order Kid is the only book-length life story of an orphan train rider written for adults. Crafted as a memoir with Teresa's biography nestled in the middle like a cherry in a bonbon, the 90,000-word manuscript is an unsentimental account of Teresa’s attempts to rise above her marginal position in society.
Most orphan-train stories focus on the drama of being taken from a big city street or orphanage to what was usually a farm, but Mail-Order Kid is a bit different. It asks, “What happened next?” How do children deal with being shipped half-way across the country and left with strangers? What impact does it have on their adult life?"
This bittersweet story of one woman’s unending desire to better herself demonstrates that even if a childhood is forfeited, a life can be reclaimed.
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The following excerpt from Mail-Order Kid shows Teresa’s 1910 arrival in Kansas when she was nearly four.
When the Sisters ushered the children inside the depot, a huge crowd surged forward. Teresa's heart leaped. So many people! So many smiling faces. The depot seemed as full as Grand Central Station. No sooner had she stepped inside than hands reached to pick her up. Perfect strangers lifted her and fussed over her. Frightened, she glanced at Sister Ursula who nodded her head and smiled. Teresa then promptly kissed the cheek of the stranger who held her. Maybe this is my mother. She kissed the woman again. Soon this person and that one held her, cuddled her, and carried her around the crowded waiting room.
One man said he was Mr. Funk.
“Wouldn’t you like to come home with me?” he asked. She noticed that Mr. Funk’s clean cheek smelled almost like perfume when she kissed him. Maybe he will be my father. When she saw Mr. Funk’s handsome wife, her hopes rose.
Then a big man with bushy eyebrows claimed her. "Oh, aren't you cute," he said when she kissed his cheek. She liked the way his strong arms secured her. I want this one for my father. She snuggled closer; he was her favorite among all the people who carried her.
“Attention please! Attention please!” She heard the nuns calling and clapping. "Will people receiving children come forward please?”
The crowd shifted and quieted. About a dozen adults moved toward the nuns; the rest of the crowd held back. The man with the bushy eyebrows stood at the front of the crowd, still holding Teresa. “Let’s see your number.” He looked at her bodice. "Four.”
“As we call out your number,” Sister Ursula said, "Please step forward to claim your child. Examine the child we selected for you. If it's satisfactory, take it to your home and treat it as you would your own flesh and blood."
The sister called out number one. A man and a woman broke out of the crowd to take a boy about Teresa’s age, Albert. Then a two-year-old, Gertrude, was swept up in the eager arms of a waiting woman. Next, Mary Childs who had sat beside Teresa all the way from New York stepped forward to leave with the Schumachers. Afraid she’d never see Mary again, Teresa held out her arms to her seatmate, but Mary walked away. Finally the nun called, “Four.” The bushy eyed man set Teresa down, and she walked to meet Conrad and Elizabeth Bieker, her new caretakers.
They looked awful to Teresa, all shriveled up and old and so much coarser than the Funks or the man with the bushy eyebrows. How could they be her parents? They weren’t even good looking. Mr. Bieker, a short man with a mustache, was mostly bald and his few hairs were gray. Heavyset Mrs. Bieker had thin wisps of black hair pulled tightly away from her face. How drab she looked! Both Biekers stooped, especially Mrs. Bieker, whose long black dress dragged on the ground. They appeared ancient to Teresa. She didn’t hold up her arms to them, and neither of the Biekers touched her.
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