Orphan Train (33 page)
Authors: Christina Baker Kline
At the same time that I was writing this book, my mother, Tina Baker, began teaching a course on Mount Desert Island in Maine called “Native American Women in Literature and Myth.” At the end of the course, she asked students to use the Indian concept of portaging to describe “their journeys along uncharted waters and what they chose to carry forward in portages to come,” as she writes in the compilation of their narratives,
Voices Yearning to be Heard: Acadia Senior College Students Pay Tribute to the Missing Voices of History
. The concept of portaging, I realized, was the missing strand I needed to weave my book together. Additional titles shaped my perspective:
Women of the Dawn
by Bunny McBride,
In the Shadow of the Eagle: A Tribal Representative in Maine
by Donna Loring (a member of the Penobscot Indian Nation and a former state legislator), and
Wabanakis of Maine and the Maritimes
by the Wabanaki Program of the American Friends Services Committee. The websites of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the Penobscot Indian Nation provided valuable material as well.
I relied on good friends and family for support, counsel, and advice: Cynthia Baker, William Baker, Catherine Baker-Pitts, Marina Budhos, Anne Burt, Deb Ellis, Alice Elliott Dark, Louise DeSalvo, Bonnie Friedman, Clara Baker Lester, Pamela Redmond Satran, and John Veague. My husband, David, read the manuscript with a keen eye and a generous heart. Penny Windle Kline briefed me on adoption protocols and provided crucial resources. Master Sergeant Jeffrey Bingham and his uncle Bruce Bingham, a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army, offered fact checking for the World War II sections of the novel. Bunny McBride, Donna Loring, Robyn Richardson, and Brian Nolan read sections relevant to their expertise. Hayden, Will, and Eli, my sons, gently corrected any errant teen-speak. My agent, Beth Vesel, was in her remarkable way both mentor and friend. And my editor at Morrow, Katherine Nintzel—in addition to her usual good sense and intelligent advice—suggested a structural change at the eleventh hour that transformed the narrative.
This book would not exist without the train riders themselves. Having been privileged to meet six of them (all between the ages of ninety and one hundred) and read hundreds of their first-person narratives, I am filled with admiration for their courage, fortitude, and perspective on this strange and little-known episode in our nation’s history.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .
Meet Christina Baker Kline
Christina Baker Kline Talks with Roxana Robinson
A Short History of the Real Orphan Trains
Reading Group Guide
Karin Diana
CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE
is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor. In addition to
Orphan Train,
her novels include
Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines,
and
Sweet Water.
Kline also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children,
Child of Mine
and
Room to Grow.
She coauthored a book on feminist mothers and daughters,
The Conversation Begins,
with her mother, Christina L. Baker, and she coedited
About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror
with Anne Burt.
Kline grew up in Maine, England, and Tennessee, and has spent a lot of time in Minnesota and North Dakota, where her husband grew up. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. She has taught creative writing and literature at Fordham and Yale, among other places, and is a recent recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation fellowship. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her family.
Christina Baker Kline Talks with Roxana Robinson
ROXANA ROBINSON is the author of
Cost—
named by the
Washington Post
as one of the five best fiction books of 2008—as well as three earlier novels, three short story collections, and the biography
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.
Four of these publications were
New York Times
Notable Books. Robinson’s work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories
, the
New York Times,
and elsewhere. She was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Her novel
Sparta
is forthcoming.
RR:
Could you talk about how this book started? What gave you the idea for it?
CBK:
About a decade ago, while visiting my in-laws in North Dakota, I came across a nonfiction book printed by the Fort Seward Historical Society called
Century of Stories: Jamestown and Stutsman County, 1883–1983
. In it was an article titled “They called it ‘Orphan Train’—and it proved there was a home for many children on the prairie.” My husband’s grandfather Frank Robertson and his siblings featured prominently in the story. This was news to me—I’d never heard of the orphan trains. In the course of researching this family lore, I found out that although orphan trains did, in fact, stop in Jamestown, North Dakota, and orphans from those trains were adopted there, the Robertson clan came from Missouri. But my interest was piqued, and I knew I wanted to learn more about this little-known period in American history.
RR:
What was it that was most compelling to you about the idea of an orphan train?
CBK:
I think I was drawn to the orphan train story in part because two of my own grandparents were orphans who spoke little about their early lives. As a novelist, I’ve always been fascinated with how people tell the stories of their lives and what those stories reveal—intentionally or not—about who they are. I’m intrigued by the spaces between words, the silences that conceal long-kept secrets, the elisions that belie surface appearance.
My own background is partly Irish, and so I decided that I wanted to write about an Irish girl who has kept silent about the circumstances that led her to the orphan train. I wanted to write about how traumatic events beyond our control can shape and define our lives. “People who cross the threshold between the known world and that place where the impossible does happen discover the problem of how to convey that experience,” Kathryn Harrison writes. Over the course of this novel, my central character, Vivian, moves from shame about her past to acceptance, eventually coming to terms with what she’s been through. In the process, she learns about the regenerative power of reclaiming—and telling—her own life story.
Like my four previous novels,
Orphan Train
wrestles with questions of cultural identity and family history. But I knew right away that this was a bigger story and would require extensive research. The vast canvas appealed to me immensely. I was eager to broaden my scope.
RR:
Did you go to the Midwest to see any of the sites you describe here?
CBK:
I’ve been going to Minnesota and North Dakota for decades. I know Minneapolis fairly well and feel a great affinity for the region. My husband’s family has a lake home near Park Rapids, Minnesota, and I’ve spent a lot of time there. Several of the small towns I describe in this novel are invented, as is Spruce Harbor, Maine, the setting for the present-day story. (Spruce Harbor is also the setting for another of my novels,
The Way Life Should Be
.) Planting an imaginary town in a real landscape gives me freedom as a writer to invent as I go.
RR:
What sort of research did you do for the book, and did you interview people who were connected to the train? What was that like?
CBK:
After finding articles online from the
New York Times
and other newspapers, I read hundreds of first-person testimonials from train riders, orphan-train reunion groups, and historical archives. That research led me to the New York Public Library, where I found a trove of original contemporaneous materials. I devoured nonfiction histories, children’s novels, and picture books, and conducted research at the New York Tenement Museum and Ellis Island. I also traveled to County Galway in Ireland to research my character’s Irish background.
In the course of writing this book I attended train riders’ reunions in New York and Minnesota, and interviewed train riders and their descendants. There aren’t many train riders left; those who remain are all over ninety years old. I was struck by how eager they were to tell their stories, to each other and to me. In talking to them and reading their oral histories, I found that they tended not to dwell on the considerable hardships they’d faced; instead, they focused on how grateful they were for their children, grandchildren, and communities—for lives that wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t been on those trains. I realized that in fiction I could do something that is difficult to do in real life: I could dwell on the stark details of the experience without needing to create a narrative of redemption.
RR:
What was the most surprising thing that came out of the research? What was it that you hadn’t expected?
CBK:
For decades, many train riders believed that the train they rode on was the only one. They didn’t know that they were part of a massive seventy-five-year social experiment. It wasn’t until their own children and grandchildren got involved and started asking questions (there are more than two million descendants, according to some estimates) that they met other train riders and began sharing their stories.
RR:
You have two teenage girls as main characters, and though they are widely separated by time and circumstances, they share some things. Could you talk about that?
CBK:
When you write novels, you go on instinct much of the time. As I began writing about Molly, a seventeen-year-old Penobscot Indian foster child, believe it or not, I didn’t immediately notice parallels to Vivian, a wealthy ninety-one-year-old widow. But as I wrote my way into the narrative I could see that in addition to some biographical parallels—both characters have dead fathers and institutionalized mothers, both were passed from home to home and encountered prejudice because of cultural stereotypes, both held on to talismanic keepsakes from family members—they are psychologically similar. For both of them, change has been a defining principle; from a young age, they both had to learn to adapt, to inhabit new identities. They’ve spent much of their lives minimizing risk, avoiding complicated entanglements, and keeping silent about the past. It’s not until Vivian—in answer to Molly’s pointed questions—begins to face the truth about what happened long ago that both of them have the courage to make changes in their lives.
RR:
Can you talk about your own feelings of connection to Maine, a place you use often in your work?
CBK:
Though both of my parents are Southern, we moved to Maine when I was six years old and never looked back. I’m not naïve enough to consider myself a Mainer—though two of my younger sisters might be able to, having been born in-state (Mainers tend to be inconsistent on this subject)—but I did spend my formative years in Bangor, a mid-Maine town of thirty-five thousand on the Penobscot River. About a decade ago my parents retired to Bass Harbor, a tiny coastal village on Mount Desert Island. My three sisters have houses within two miles of my parents’ home, and one lives there with her family year-round. I am lucky enough to spend summers and other vacations on the island; my three boys consider it their homeland. For me, it’s as simple as this: Maine is a part of who I am.
