Orphaned Children 26 comments

By Caroline Langston

We were a little more than halfway through our two-week August vacation when our six-year-old son said that he did not want to read any more Harry Potter.

We had just returned from a driving odyssey of some 2700 miles in our 1999 Volvo. Ten days with two children shouting in the back of the car for fast food as we descended through the Appalachians, rounded Lookout Mountain with its Confederate ghosts, passed the old steel towns of Birmingham, then westward through rich earthen fields and forests into Mississippi.

We let up on the nightly reading while we were gone. The vacation itself was enough of a literary adventure. (This was Mississippi, after all.). When we got back home, and tried to settle back down to our chapter-a-night routine, he would have nothing more to do with Anglo wizards.

At first we were surprised. Isn’t the reason for the Harry Potter series’ stupendous popularity its tendency to get active little boys, who might otherwise be presumed to be playing video games, to read? We had no problem with the books as fantasy literature, figuring that any theological inconsistencies could be folded into the handy Christian metanarrative that we’d provide, something we’d been doing for years with the crypto-Zoroastrianism of Star Wars.

But Alex was insistent. The book scared him. So arose the need to scout around for another chapter book to read before bed.

All the time I thought about it, the trip home was in the back of my mind: the Illinois Central train tracks that ran straight through the center of my hometown; the Beaux Arts Ricks Memorial library where I’d spent hours reading children’s books from the 30s and 40s.

And thus I hit upon it: The Boxcar Children. If you’ve never read it, it’s the 1940s story by Gertrude Chandler Warner of four orphaned children in rural New England who make a new home and life for themselves in the abandoned boxcar they have found in the woods.

As a child, I had loved it, but hadn’t read it in some thirty years.

I was curious to see how I’d feel about it upon re-reading it now: “That book is terrible,” I recalled somebody saying once at some 90s cocktail party, referring to what they’d viewed as the story’s saccharine moral and flat characters.

I was even more curious about what my son, the Star Wars fan, would have to say about it. I had that parent’s desire—both tentative and desperate—for my child to love something I had also loved, and the attendant fear that what I’d loved would be rejected in favor of CGI animation and bigger, faster blasters.

For The Boxcar Children is a relic of another era: The four children—Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny—speak gently and formally with one another, in complete sentences without contractions. (“Oh yes,” said Henry. “We must have some bread, and cake is not good for Benny and Violet,” reads one of the book’s first lines.) The oldest children Henry and Jessie model the roles of surrogate parents with authority. There is no irony or sarcasm anywhere in the book. (But of course, there are no “real” parents to smart off to, either.)

The story is simple from its very beginning: “One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from.” We learn that the children’s parents have died, but not why they are on the run, or why they are convinced that their grandfather (who lives in “Greenfield”) is a bad man who does not love them.

The subsequent chapters detail, in spare, evocative prose, the older children carrying the smaller ones through the night until they discover the boxcar. The balance of the book painstakingly illustrates the ways that these children make their humble boxcar into home, and how they care for one another: Henry ventures into town to hire out as a handyman for the local doctor, so he can bring home bread, milk, and meat. Jessie makes beds of pine straw for each of them. The youngest children help scour a dump for cracked china cups that they carefully clean, then set on a scavenged board that becomes a “shelf.”

The children also build a fire pit, adopt a dog, and dam a stream to create a swimming hole in which they can bathe. The plainest meals of stew and bread are delicious to them (one chapter is titled “A Big Meal from Little Onions”).

As our family read the book out loud, I watched amazement and wonder rise on my son’s face, as these children took on real-life tasks. Over the next few days, it seemed that he stood up straighter, and was less likely to complain if he did not get something that he wanted.

It occurs to me now that the book can be read in a far more sophisticated way than it initially appears. What do these children, mysteriously orphaned, from nowhere with nowhere to go, represent other than our condition of “thrownness” into the world that Heidegger described in Being and Time?

Then there’s the grandfather they’d written off as distant and disapproving. It turns out that all the time that the children have been building their life in the woods, he has been searching for them. They are not orphans; he has loved them after all. The book concludes with his rescue of the children, and his bringing them into his rich, abundant home. What is this other than the mysterious way that God loves us?

And yet the grandfather must arrange to bring to his mansion the life they’ve left behind, for how they miss it: the boxcar, and the straw beds, and the row of cracked cups upon the shelf.

Thus is it with us, isn’t it? The way we treasure the artifacts of memory; the objects and works we’ve forged, in our passage in this wilderness.