The Harmon Center for girls was more than a century old. They rode in a brown and tan van the nearly two hundred miles from Aniston. Marianne stared out the window at the gray and sometimes black clouds. Indiana is tornado country and Marianne briefly wondered if she could run away if a tornado hit. They were shackled in hand and ankle cuffs the whole way there and Marianne wriggled in her seat when her legs began to throb. They only stopped once to go to a restroom. People stared at the long line of shackled girls in their white and orange uniforms. When they arrived, they shuffled along beside a mannish looking matron in a brown and tan uniform. As they walked, a large brown shingled building came into view. A huge, dark, forbidding structure. They got there just before lunch time and Marianne was taken to a dining room where about 65 girls of all ages sat at long tables. “Marianne,” the matron said, “You’ll learn that you do not talk at the table. If you want anything, raise your hand.”
At her first meal they were served black-eyed peas and rice. “I don’t like black-eyed peas,” she told the matron. She was so hungry her stomach had growled all the way there, but she hated peas of any kind and most especially black eyed peas.
“You’ll learn to like them,” the matron told her. “You won’t leave the table until they are eaten.”
Marianne was determined that no black-eyed peas would go down her throat. She sat and sat. But she didn’t touch the peas.
“Marianne, eat your peas,” the matron reminded. She didn’t answer but she didn’t eat. Finally the other children were dismissed. Marianne still sat. At mid-afternoon the matron took away her chair.
Eventually the other children came in for dinner. Marianne was given nothing, since she had not eaten her peas, which were now cold and grey. When the other children finished their dinner, they left. Marianne sat until 9:00 PM. Then they took away her chair. She stood, but didn’t eat the peas. She thought she was winning, but a matron soon came with a long, thin paddle and gave her a beating she knew would not soon forget.
Finally, she was marched upstairs and shown the dressing room. Each child had a cubby hole with a hook for clothes and a shelf above for bath towels. Shoes were placed beneath. The other children were already in bed, so Marianne dressed alone in the white nightgown they gave her. The matron pointed out her cot, one of twenty lining the room. There were no rugs, just a long gray runner down the center aisle covering the gray cement floor. It began to dawn on Marianne that this was not going to be a fun experience.
“Will my mother come to see me?” she asked.
“Oh, she can only come here on visiting day,” the matron said, giving no definite answer.
That first night Marianne did something that she repeated every night for the next several years; she cried herself to sleep.
At first she was a loner. She spent her free time sitting on a long, slat bench, rocking back and forth, wondering how she could get out. Her feet dangled to the floor. She tucked her feet under the bench.
Children asked her to play with them, but she refused. Rex said I won’t be here long, she reassured herself. This is only temporary. I’ll be leaving here any day now. She stacked her meager possessions carefully so that, if necessary she could leave in a hurry. In those early days, she kept expecting to wake up and find it was all a bad dream.
Days and weeks passed, and her mother did not come to visit. Aunt Helen, the neighbor lady did come to visit one time walking slowly on a walker. Max wanted to stay in the car, she said. The sadness on her face reflected her concern. Secretly Marianne hoped she would visit again but she never did. Reluctantly, Marianne accepted the fact that she might be there to stay. In fact, they could keep her there the rest of her life. Slowly she began to adjust to the routine. If I can be tough, I can survive, she figured. She bullied other children. She was never subtle. She pushed and shoved, she hit. If another child would not let her play with a toy, she would grab it. The others didn’t hurt her, but she hit them and felt good about it. She was bigger and stronger than the others and she tried to look tough.
The daily schedule was monotonous. The morning bell got them out of bed, and they lined up for breakfast. Every day they had gray lumpy, sticky, cooked oatmeal. Marianne devised a plan to avoid swallowing the slime. She stuffed it into her mouth, making her cheeks fat. Then she raised her hand to go to the restroom where she spit it into the sink. She did that every morning.
On one such trip to the bathroom, she felt the matron’s strong hand on the nape of her neck. “Come here, Marianne,” she commanded, causing every head in the dining room to turn in her direction. She was marched to the wash area, and she spit the lumpy oatmeal into the sink aiming for the drain hole. The matron took a bar of soap and coated her mouth with it. The next day the oatmeal seemed to taste better and from then on she ate it.
Every Tuesday and Thursday they had buttermilk. Marianne hated that thick, sour tasting stuff, so she forced the other girls to drink hers. Although they hated it too, they drank theirs quickly to get it over with. When the matron was not looking, Marianne switched glasses. “If you don’t drink it, I’ll get you in the yard,” she threatened. Her reputation for meanness made them obey.
The matron’s name was Mrs. Fruhling, a German woman in her late forties, who wore her jet black hair tightly attached to the back of her head. The kids dubbed her “Fraulein,” and clicked their heels and muttered “Heil Hitler,” behind her back. She controlled them with the discipline of an army corporal. She had small, coal black eyes that reflected no emotion. “I can see clean through you,” she would assure them, staring at them without blinking. They believed her but after she left they burst into giggles, goose stepping, saluting and shouting “Achtung.”
Marianne was in trouble often enough for her misbehavior. Even if she was punished unjustly, the other girls were unsympathetic. She’d done enough mean things to deserve it. One morning when they were lined up for instructions, one of the girls stuck out her tongue at Mrs. Fruhling. The fraulein impulsively swung her arm in the direction of the girl’s head. The girl ducked, and Marianne was standing directly behind her. Her face stung from the blow.
“But, Mrs. Fruhling, I didn’t do anything,” she wailed, louder than was necessary.
“I know, but you’ll do something to deserve it in a few days,” Mrs. Fruhling assured her. She didn’t apologize.
Marianne was plagued by recurrent flashbacks, recurrent weepiness, insomnia and nightmares. That night Mrs. Fruhling found her crying before she fell asleep. “Not you again, Marianne,” she muttered; then she gave her a whipping. After that, Marianne learned to cry silently, her head tucked under the covers.
A job that was given her was to help the younger children get dressed in the morning. One little girl wet her bed. She would deliberately sit on her bed and wet it. Marianne had to change her sheets and she got disgusted. One morning after Mrs. Fruhling had gone, she took the little girl by the hair and rubbed her nose in the sheets. The little girl never wet the bed again.
Although, she had a reputation for being tough, she eventually wanted to play with the others. At first she hung at the outskirts, watching. “We don’t want you,” they told her. She had to learn to be friendly. “Please, can I play,” she begged. “I promise I won’t hit you.” As she learned not to be so mean they included her.
Many of the girls were suicidal or had other mental health problems. When she was fourteen she became friends with Esther, a friendly, blond girl whose bed was close to hers. Then one day Esther disappeared. Marianne asked everyone where she was but no one seemed to know. Then one day, Sarah a tall, thin brown haired girl told her that Esther had hanged herself with her own long hair. Afterwards they made all the girls cut their hair very short.
Following Esther’s death, The Youth Law Center conducted an investigation of the juvenile facility. Reports of routine use of shockingly harsh methods of discipline and restraint at the facility surfaced. In response to these allegations, and subsequently a federal class-action lawsuit was filed to protect the children confined in the facility. Through the litigation, the center was able to obtain video footage shot by certain staff at the facility after the Governor had ordered them to videotape all incidents of "use of force" by staff on young people at the facility. A sampling of the videotaped footage obtained in the lawsuit, dramatically demonstrated that staff regularly used excessive and abusive force on young people. It showed staff forcing girls into strait jackets and metal handcuff restraints, spraying them with pepper spray for minor misbehavior, leading them around the facility on a leash in front of the others and attaching them to a large "restraint board."
Everything got better afterward. Even the food. Mrs. Fruhling was fired, along with several others of the mean matrons. They even brought in a TV and video movies for Saturday nights.