ORPHAN GIRL: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady
By Marie James, as told to James Hertenstein
Cornerstone Press Chicago, 222 pages, $12.96 paper
Marie James was an on-again, off-again visitor at the Jesus People’s soup kitchen in Chicago for a number of years until she died in 1996. Her visits there were made vivid by her outbursts of song and random greetings to strangers as ” ‘Brother, Brother, Sister, Sister,’ ” and her extravagant stories about the FBI or the children that were taken away from her. It seems she became something of a favorite with her spit and vinegar, the way such characters often do in the otherwise unrelieved misery of shelter life. And in the end, Jane Herten-stein, an editor at Cornerstone Press Chicago, was moved to record her story.
It begins with abandonment and poverty, and it never gets far from this dreary terrain. When she is 6, James is sent to a foster home more horri-ble than one can imagine. She is beaten senseless, demeaned, forced to refer to herself as “bastard” and to endure unwanted sexual advances. Her siblings are similarly scattered, never to meet up again, or not for long. Once she is old enough to run away, her life be-comes a series of set pieces, all of which entail a man-either criminally violent or impotent-and babies, who are taken from her with stun-ning regularity. Then, flight, into the next set of losses.
So much pain. It is hard to go on, impossible to stop. James drank and whored and fought in response to the violence done to her. She also ex-perienced deep shame and guilt. This amalgam is always volatile, but especially so when the task of forging coherence is so great. But is this a life, or a story we are being asked to consider?
Everything that happens to Marie James happens every day, to be sure. What begins to nag at the reader is the intensity and the range of happenings, the thickness of a plot that borrows the entire panoply of human horrors. Numerous tragedies are laced with the strange romance of adventure. There are sudden and inexplicable shifts in cir-cumstance. One minute her long-lost mother, found in California, is serving her tea in a beautiful back-yard garden, telling her to relax and not to worry; the next minute her husband is taking her 8-month-old child from her, then coming after her with a gun. One day she is living in a rich suburb, the next sleeping in a cheap hotel room overlooking the ocean. One day she has a fur coat and a piano, the next a single bottle of milk and a hot plate. Her tale is so vividly and dramatically recalled that one is not surprised to learn partway through that she had at-tempted to write fiction.
But given all this, the reader wonders what sort of critical detachment Hertenstein maintained, both in her listening and in her subsequent shaping of James’ story, which is as meticulously detailed and paced as fiction. Did she believe it? All of it? Does she consider this a cynical and demeaning question? Is “Orphan Girl” the story of James’ life, or the story of her story-and is there any reason for us to try to parse the distinctions?
I believe there is. Most people would dismiss James as crazy. Others-too many alas, kindly volunteers in shelters for homeless women-simply accept the exploits of women like her at face value. Only after concerted effort to corroborate such tales, to search for reliable witnesses and friends, do the chinks and the possible subtext begin to appear, as they do here, for instance, in the person of a Nebraska authority who tells a welfare worker in California: “Oh, we’ve had dealings with that woman before. We’re not going to send you a solitary penny for the fare or for the food.” What we then have is a very different and much deeper truth than the apparent narrative, one that is often being masked, desperately, by embel-lishment. The experiences of early childhood sexual abuse and of rape among homeless women are common, and so, too, are the defensive narrative strategies that they develop in response.
Our approach to helping these victims must be informed by this, as well as by the fact that they often fall into schizophrenia and borderline personality disorders. These diagnoses do not minimize the validity of the experience of a woman like James. Rather, they give us a sense of what she might need. I suspect that her story is much like the story told me, in similarly elaborate detail, by a homeless woman named Wendy: an attempt to assimilate violence and to justify sub-sequent ego disin-tegration. Much of James’ story, in other words, is metaphysically, if not literally, true, just as Wendy’s was. We must probe to the core of the pain that is being articulated by such women, and do so as skillfully and as attentively as we can.
Hertenstein artfully saves for the end of the story events foreshadowed early on. James knew sev-eral years of idyllic childhood happiness with a step-relative named Davis. He and Marie played end-lessly in the fields and streams, and as the book draws to a close we are not sur-prised to learn the darker aspects of the frolics. James told Hertenstein that she didn’t recall these events until she was 40, when she went into what she called “a shock,” cried for days on end and fi-nally conjured an in-cident in which she imagines that shortly after molesting her, Davis died.
Hertenstein met James a full quarter-century after her recall experience. One wonders what the intervening years were like for her. Near the end of the book, the (unnamed) editors present their own take on them, an oddly jarring fusion of psychology and evangelical Christianity: “(I)n the midst of the images of a false christ, of a betrayer came the true healer, the true lover-the Restorer.”
Marie’s tragedies occurred too soon for a society growing into the truth of sexual violence to see its way to the appropriate forms of healing. That she was accepted by the Jesus People was a gift. And insofar as Hertenstein’s narrative provides us with yet another reminder of the need to listen hard and look deep into the suffering of those who seem to us “crazy,” her story is a gift to us.
