I’d looked for a stepladder, but so far I hadn’t found anything taller than a kitchen stool. No way to reach the glass box.
Finally I’d tiptoed into the closet and started at the bottom instead, with a shoe box–size container covered in a faded brocade fabric and decorated with bits of colored lace that had faded to pale shades of lilac and peach. The corners were smudged and worn. Now, with the first letter resting on the wedding ring quilt, I touched the box, thought of Iola’s small hands holding it close to her body, opening and closing the lid, hiding her letters to her father inside.
Had she ever sent them to him? If so, how had they ended up back in her box, neatly stacked?
They make me come stay here cause of my look. I ain’t stupid. I know it.
Could her father have been dead already when she wrote the letters? Maybe that was why she was sent away from her family —because she was a reminder of him, because she looked like him?
Maybe her mother had remarried, and her stepfather didn’t want her around? I knew how that would feel. All my life, it had seemed like Mama and Daddy didn’t really want Gina and me cluttering up their lives. They didn’t want us, but they didn’t want to give us up to Pap-pap and Meemaw for good either. We’d run from CPS more times than I could count too. As a child, I mistook those wild flights for evidence of love, but as I got older, I didn’t know what to call it. Possession isn’t the same as love.
Maybe Iola’s family simply couldn’t afford to feed and take care of her —1933 was the Depression. People were starving, standing in bread lines. Kids were sent away. During my ill-fated freshman year of college, a history teacher had shown us photos of destitute families fleeing the dust bowl. The vacant, weary expressions on the women’s faces brought back memories of my mama when she woke up hungover and worn-out.
Could Iola and her sister have been in an orphanage when Iola wrote the letter? Maybe it was the only choice her family had.
Who was Aurelia, and why did Iola want to look like her? Why did she believe that would make things better? Was it a child’s unrealistic fantasy, like all the times I’d convinced myself that if I could just be a better girl —smarter, prettier, quieter, more helpful with the house, less trouble to have around —my parents would stop fighting, my daddy would come home every night, and my mama would be like the other moms at school, up and dressed each morning, waving good-bye to the school bus?
My heart ached for Iola, alone in a strange place in 1933. She must’ve been only about ten.
In a few years, she would realize that there was nothing she could do to change the world around her, to repair the people she needed most. The missing pieces were out of reach of her tiny hands, the broken places not hers to mend. In my adult mind I understood that, but deep inside me there would always be the girl who wondered if she could have fixed things.
Iola’s letter reached into that little girl in a way nothing else ever had. I found myself spinning a web that intertwined Iola’s story and mine, my thoughts running over the silky threads on nimble spider legs, creating intricate patterns.
A little girl trapped and helpless. Afraid. Waking each day to find her prayers unanswered . . .
I’d prayed the most desperate prayers of my life here on Hatteras. For a while, they’d seemed to be working. Finally after so many chaotic, uncertain years, God had heard me and repaired my family, patching up all the broken places with sun and sand, ready construction jobs, easy money, the magic of this place, and Pap-pap and Meemaw nearby. They’d promised to help my parents out, give them part of the farm to build a house on if Daddy would keep himself sober and take on construction work and Mama would stay home to take proper care of Gina and me. Pap-pap’s job as an insurance adjuster gave him an in for lining up all the work my daddy could handle. It could be a new start for all of us. Life would finally be good. Stable day after day.
And then the post-storm construction boom was over, the repair work done, the tourists returning to grab up the available spaces, the rental prices rising. It was time to move to the farm across the sound on the mainland and start building our house. But Daddy missed Texas. He was tired of having to live by someone else’s rules. He missed rodeos and horse auctions and trying to turn a quick buck so he wouldn’t have to take as many construction jobs. The night he came home with a bottle in a paper bag, I knew my prayers hadn’t been answered after all. The lopsided carousel of our lives had only been stopped for a while, and now it would resume its cockeyed motion —up, down, around. High and low. On and off.
Iola’s prayers wouldn’t be answered either —at ten, she probably had no way of realizing that. Sooner or later, she would figure out that she was never going to wake up looking like Aurelia.
I reached for the pile, slid my fingers over the next letter, lifted it free without disturbing the rest.
The cat, sitting on the far corner of the bed, twitched an ear, then stretched lazily against a pillow sham latticed with blue granny circles and tatted lace. His raspy pink tongue curled as he yawned and blinked, seeming to already know the stories in these boxes.
The half ear twitched again, reacting to the sound of old paper, as I unfolded another letter.
January 20, 1933
Dear Father,
Mama Tee say prayers only a dust of words that blow away. Her maman had the voodoo. She come from Haiti Isle on a tobacco ship, Mama Tee say, a slave woman to the tobacco man up in Caroline. He tell her not to do no voodoo. He tell her she gotta be a Christian now. Mama Tee, she born a farm slave, but she don’t remember that. She live her life mostly in the Quarter here in New Orlean, not in no tobacco field.
But she still believe in the voodoo.
Mama Tee say don’t speak bout none of that. Monsieur, he don’t like that kind of talk, Mama Tee say to me. His family got a bad history with the voodoo from long time ago, before Mama Tee come to work for Monsieur’s folk and live in they big house by the Quarter. My own Maman just a little girl then, and I ain’t even a dust speck yet.
Benoit family give us everythin. Always have. House to live, food to eat. They pay Mama Tee good, and then they pay Maman, when she old enough. Treat us good. They love us like family, let me learn my numbers and letters with Isabelle. Let me learn that big piano, jus like Isabelle.
I wonder, do Isabelle miss me now? Do she ask Monsieur, “Papa, why you send Iola Anne away?”
Did Isabelle hear Madame say, “Just look at her! I won’t have it. I won’t have her here, do you understand me? There are places a child like her can be sent. Places where she will be educated, taken care of, given her catechism properly. It isn’t cruel. She’ll be better off, and so will Isabelle.”
Everythin different since Monsieur marry again and bring Madame to the big house. Everythin shiny and proper and careful. Isabelle don like it neither.
Do she pray that I gon come home? Do we say the same prayer when we up in our beds at night, hers so far apart from mine now?
Maybe her prayers better than mine. Maybe she do it right.
Maybe you mad about the voodoo, Father. But I don’t never do it. I don’t believe it none, neither.
Sister Marguerite say you gon answer all prayers in they own time. I keep prayin my same prayer, gon keep writin it too, keep putting it in my prayer box Sister Marguerite give me. Keep waitin on you to answer. Keep wonderin if you been hearin these prayers.
You gon bring me home soon?
Can you find me in this place where they got so many?
Your lovin daughter,
Iola Anne
A mist of tears crowded my eyes. I knew how Iola felt, what she was thinking, what she was feeling. She was trapped in an orphanage or a school, some sort of warehouse for children whose families didn’t want them around. Sister Marguerite wasn’t her sister, but a nun —a teacher or a caretaker.
The letters were Iola’s prayers, her private thoughts. That’s why they’d never been mailed. These letters weren’t meant for earth, but for heaven. Not for her biological father, but for God.
Iola’s mother had sent her away . . . to please an employer? What kind of mother would do that? What kind of mother would abandon her little girl to make someone else happy?
There are places a child like her can be sent. . . . It isn’t cruel. . . . What did that mean, a child like her? Was Iola handicapped? Deformed? I hadn’t noticed anything when I’d found her body, but back in the day, there were superstitions about problems like that. I’d seen a little girl on the news who’d been nearly starved to death in an African orphanage because a mutated gene had caused her to have mottled skin. A couple from New Jersey had adopted her and saved her life.