bowls to use as a sink. We set the two treadle sewing machines along the wall. Upstairs we put two mattresses, with Mamma and Brian on one side of the room and Samantha and me on the other. I always hated these arrangements because Brian stared at us while we undressed, and he would dress and undress in the middle of the room so there was no chance we could miss it.
That spring, Brian and Mamma bought many animals: pigs, chickens, rabbits and calves. The work was endless, and Samantha and I could hardly crawl out of bed each morning when the alarm rang at 5:00 a.m. My sister and I were rotated on a weekly basis. One of us would do all of the work inside of the house, while the other would do all the work outside. We were still not allowed to talk to each other, and we were still not fast enough at our work, no matter how hard we tried. Every day, we were beaten for being too slow.
When Brian read the story Uncle Tom’s Cabin aloud, I could relate to Uncle Tom. I felt I was a slave who had been sold down the river to the cotton fields. But instead of cotton fields, I was trapped on an often-freezing mountain with Brian, a man who could be every bit as cruel as Uncle Tom’s master, Simon Legree.
Gradually our farm grew, and we started a farmers’ market route. On the weekends, Samantha and I took turns going with Mamma to sell our crafts and produce from the farm. This was the one part of the week we looked forward to. However, when it was Samantha’s turn to go to the market with Mamma, my day at home was spent mostly upstairs with Brian. Many times, when Samantha would wave goodbye, I seriously considered ending my life. That is how bad it was.
As the farm grew, we started an egg route as well. Soon, we had five hundred laying hens at once, and every night before the outside girl was allowed in the house, she had to collect and clean the eggs and put them in cartons to sell in town.
Occasionally, a neighbor would visit with Mamma and Brian, but Samantha and I were usually sent outside or somewhere out of sight.
The only times Samantha and I came off the mountain was to help sell alongside the road. Once or twice a year, we would be invited to one of the Mennonites’ houses for dinner. There was a small community in the valley below the mountain that had noticed us right away when we had moved in. Brian would usually lecture us for hours on why the Mennonites were going to hell. They wore flowers on their dresses and were worldly. On these rare occasions, Samantha and I would stand in the kitchen of the Mennonite house and not say anything. We would quietly help put the dinner on the table and then do the dishes afterwards.
Sometimes, we would go upstairs with some of the Mennonite girls, but we always knew to keep quiet about our home life and we never stayed long. Brian would watch us from the side of the room where he would be arguing with some of the men. I think the only reason he agreed to these visits was so the Mennonites would think we were halfway normal plain people. We never stayed long, but these visits left Samantha and me feeling sadder and more bewildered. We could glimpse a world beyond our grasp. But we did not belong to that world. It seemed we did not belong anywhere but on the mountain. How often had there been a chance for someone to help us? Our withdrawn behavior and lack of conversation skills were abnormal.
One day, a neighbor who lived on the county road in a nice cottage asked me if I liked to read. I think she pitied me. I was a teenaged girl in a dirty gray dress, a long black apron and a white cap on my head. I was exhausted and sad and wished she could have seen the green and purple bruises that covered my body beneath the clothes. I smiled at her, though, and told her I loved traveling away when I read. Mamma frowned at me, but I did not care what she thought.
“Well, that is great,” the neighbor lady smiled at me. “I have a lot of National Geographic magazines and history books.”
Brian walked up in time to hear the conversation. He got upset that I was talking to a neighbor and told me to get back to work. As I walked away, I could hear him telling her that he did not want us exposed to outside culture through her books and magazines. I turned around in time to see an angry look on her face.
After that, the neighbor would occasionally leave a box of books and magazines at the end of the drive for Samantha and me. Whenever Brian would see it, he would yell at us to burn them, but most of the time we were able to hide them under the house. We would read them any time we were sure Mamma and Brian were gone, or in the moonlight when we were supposed to be sleeping. Afterwards, we burned them in the trash barrel or buried them on the mountainside so Brian would not find them.
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.
—C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
My fifteenth summer was a turning point for Samantha and me. One morning, Mamma announced that she had a half-sister we didn’t know about. As her story unfolded, it sounded strangely familiar. Our grandmother had had a child at the age of fifteen and the child was taken away from her to be raised by the child’s paternal grandmother. The father lived out the rest of his days in a psychiatric facility in Mississippi. Mamma said she had always known about her older sister, but they had only met once when she was a teenager.
The only memory she had of Aunt Fanny was that she was short with a sort of smashed-looking face, and that she did not say a word the entire day they were together. She went on to say that she had been contacted by a government agency in Prescott, Arizona, informing her that Aunt Fanny was at a facility that housed people with special needs. Aunt Fanny was in Prescott at that time because her grandmother had died, and she had been brought to Arizona to live with our grandmother, Fanny’s biological mother.
Because of Fanny’s severe mental impairment, our grandmother had been unable to care for her. Doctors had diagnosed Aunt Fanny with schizophrenia, partially caused by the rape she suffered at age nine.
Aunt Fanny constantly walked along the road, believing it would take her home to Mississippi and to her grandmother. The facility where she was currently living had decided they could no longer care for her. She was always trying to escape.
Samantha and I did not know what schizophrenia was, and neither did Mamma and Brian. When Mamma told us that our forty-year-old Aunt Fanny was coming to live with us, Samantha and I were so excited. We imagined that Mamma and Brian would have to watch their behavior with someone else in the house. This was the best news we had had in many years.
Mamma told us that she would have to fly to Arizona in two weeks to pick up our aunt. I wondered at the time why Mamma cared about her sister’s living arrangements when she was constantly cracking jokes about how dumb her sister had seemed when she had met her. I learned the truth when I heard Mamma and Brian discussing how to spend the extra $550 a month they would receive for her care.
Two weeks later, Samantha and I ran out in the dark to greet the truck when it arrived from the airport. When Aunt Fanny got out, I went to her and she hugged me, but her face was vacant and she was silent. I remember my surprise at her appearance. She seemed innocent and looked like a large five-year-old child. She was about four-foot-nine and weighed approximately 210 pounds. She had blue eyes and porcelain white skin. Her face drooped a little but was chubby and sweet. She had short brown hair and was wearing a flowing green summer dress. As she stared vacantly into the empty night sky, I could tell she was confused.
Mamma and Brian were arguing again, and Aunt Fanny grabbed my hand. Samantha took her other hand, and we walked into the house. Before her arrival, Samantha and I had fixed another bed next to ours and we had made a divider enclosing our sleeping area. We had been told that she often tried to escape at night. I had taken two cowbells from the shed and tied them on the makeshift doors so she could not leave without our hearing her.
We took her upstairs and showed her the bed. Aunt Fanny stared vacantly at the room while squeezing my hand tightly. Looking back, I realize the kind of world she was accustomed to. I can imagine her shock on arriving at a farm in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of strangely dressed people. There was no electricity, bathroom, television, or couch for her to sit on.