Chapter 2
Behind Closed Doors
The little Indian girl, Annie, made her way to the far end of the classroom and stood against the windows with her shoulders straight and her chin held strong, almost in a matter of someone standing against a firing squad. It was disturbing in its own way. Then again, Corina had already seen plenty in this school today that disturbed her.
“Hello, Annie,” Corina’s father began, trying to ease the tension on the room. “My name is Mr. Payton. My daughter and I have come here to talk to you about school.”
You already said that, Corina thought to herself, though she kept silent, her hands behind her, and once again began tugging at the uncomfortable material of her dress.
The little girl curtseyed once again, almost as though it were a reflex to do so before speaking. “Yes, Mr. Payton. Thank you, Mr. Payton.”
Once she stood steady back on her feet, Annie began to pace along the window sill, her tight-looking shoes making a scuffling squeak with her every motion. It was clear that the young child was no more at ease with the two strangers than she had been with her stern teachers, even though Corina had been hoping the girl might open up a bit more once she knew Miss. Deem was not there to hear anything she said. Corina’s father tried to give the stiff conversation a more relaxed tone. “How long have you been speaking English, Annie?”
“Three years,” the girl replied as she trailed her fingertips along that same window sill. “The people from the school came to my village when I was six, and they brought me back with them.”
Corina’s father than resorted to a very old and very effective means of communication: flattery. “Well, you speak the language very well.”
Annie did not curtsey this time. “I’m pleased you find it so.”
Corina stopped pulling at her dress, completely taken aback by the sudden and abrupt rudeness on the Indian girl’s part. Back when the teachers were around, the little girl seemed to be doing everything possible to be as stiffly polite as possible. Maybe it would have been a good idea to allow the school matron to stay. It wasn’t as though they couldn’t Obliviate her afterwards.
“Don’t you mean ‘thank you’?” Corina prompted.
“No,” Annie responded quite assertively. “If I meant ‘thank you’, I would have said ‘thank you’.”
Corina was suddenly overcome with an overwhelming desire to box the mouthy child’s ears. Whatever manners or forms of civility this school had tried to instill in their students had clearly not taken with Annie Two-Moons. Certainly, the girl had done her best to fake it when she was in the presence of her teachers, who were capable of administering physical discipline, but as soon as they were out of earshot, Annie’s true personality took over, and it was clearly not a pleasant one.
Glancing to her left, Corina could see that her father was greatly shocked and confused by the Indian girl’s sudden change in demeanor. Although, from his expression, it seemed as though he believed it was somehow his fault; it was as though he had unintentionally done something to offend her. Corina felt sorry for her father. He was the sort of man who always tried his very hardest to see the best in the children who would become his students. This type of attitude, however, always ensured that he would be the victim of many manipulative brats. It was one of the reasons why Corina had recently chosen to start accompanying her father on his travels.
“Learning to speak the white man’s words is not something I feel I should be proud of.”
Now, Corina was paying much closer attention to the little child’s expression. She appeared almost affronted, as though the idea of being a competent speaker of the English language was an insult.
“The people at your school must think you are clever,” Corina’s father said in a soothing voice. “They chose to bring you here so you could have an education.”
“They take all Indian children for these schools,” Annie replied tartly. “Being clever has nothing to do with it. You learn English because you have no other choice.”
Didn’t this girl think they already knew this? Here, Corina’s poor father was doing his very best to make this girl feel at ease so he could tell her about the Bell Academy, but this little Indian child seemed to be doing everything possible to keep the two visitors at a distance.
“Children get punished for speaking to one another in their native tongues,” the girl continued on without any invitation to do so. “If you don’t learn white man’s language, you just don’t talk at all. A few children here have not spoken in more than a year.”
“How are children punished here?” Corina heard her father ask.
“For speaking?” Annie question, as though trying to get clarification. “Writing a hundred lines, washing their mouths out with soap, the switch…”
“You don’t have any marks on you.”
“I am a very clever girl, just as your father has said,” she answered Corina as she began to turn her eyes on those uncomfortable shoes of hers. “But in many ways, I am also a very foolish girl.”
Then, without a word of warning, Annie lifted the back hem of her dress to better illustrate exactly what she meant. In her peripheral vision, Corina could see her father’s expression of utter horror, but in her clear line of vision, she could see exactly what was causing her father’s reaction. Above her stockings, all along her upper legs, her skin was a solid mass of bruises, growing darker as they went further up. The very worst of it, as well as the beginning of old welts, were hidden by her undergarments. The bruises were faint and yellow, so they were clearly old, but there was just such a mass of them, Corina could only imagine what a horrible beating from which they must have come from.
“H-how,” Corina’s father’s stammered, “how did this happen?”
Annie lowered her skirt back down and turned around to face the two visitors. “A Lakota girl who slept in the bed next to mine became very ill,” she began. “We begged the teachers to send for a doctor, but none ever came. When the girl could not even get out of bed any longer, I decided to go looking for medicine myself.
“They keep medicine locked up in a cabinet, but I knew where it was. One night, after everyone went to sleep, I snuck out of my dormitory and snuck into the room. They didn’t even bother to keep them locked because they didn’t think we would know what they were for. I did not know what medicine would help the Lakota, so I just took every bottle I could reach. In the end, it didn’t matter; I was caught.”
This was the part of the story where the more gruesome details would be told, but Annie’s tone and demeanor did not change in the slightest to reflect the situation. She just continued her slow pacing and her even speech as though she were describing the weather or something equally mundane.
“Miss Deem loves her hickory stick,” Annie drawled. “She loves it very much indeed. When she decided she was finished, she and the other teachers decided because my disobedience came from being with other children, time away from them would improve my behavior. I was made to sleep in a closet with no light for many days. Most of those days, I was not even allowed out to attend school.”
“When I was finally allowed to sleep in the dormitory, a new girl, an Apache, slept in the bed next to mine. No one speaks about the Lakota girl anymore.”
Annie must have noticed the looked of pity reflecting back at her, because she then attempted to deflect the feeling away from her.
“Do not waste sorrow on me. I am actually quite fortunate,” she assured them. “So many students have been punished so much worse.”
Annie fell to her knees and began using her index fingernail to dig between the floorboards. Eventually, she retrieved a tiny white object from between the wood and held it up as though it were some piece of damning evidence.
“See this?” she held the tiny grain up closer for them to see. “It’s a grit grain; it’s somewhat like rice.”
“They make students kneel on them,” she explained to the Paytons. “It doesn’t hurt very much at first, but eventually, the grains dig into your skin and you start to bleed. Sometimes, they make the students kneel there all day. I think a few students have actually had their skin heal over the grains. They have these bumps all along their knees that stick out more than just an ordinary scar would.”
Annie flicked the white grain across the room as though it were a dead insect. “And when they kneel for evening prayers, they are in pain all over again….Even worse than the first time.”
Corina began to feel tiny, stinging pains over the skin of her own knees from hearing about the punishment. She couldn’t even begin to imagine skin actually growing back over those dozens of tiny grains. The children who were subjected to the punishment must have been forced to kneel for incredibly long periods of time.
Ar her side, Corina could see her father. The deep lines in his forehead and along the corners of his eyes and mouth contorted into a pained expression. He constantly ran his hand over his features, as though trying to smooth out the creases. Corina was quite certain she had never seen her father so distressed. In fact, she was quite convinced she had ever seen her father appear distressed at all. It was certainly disconcerting to say the least. Connor Payton was one of the most lighthearted men people would ever meet. Even when Corina had gotten into trouble as a child, she had never seen her father upset. He was the sort of man who approached every obstacle in life with a calm grace. Though, when confronted with a story the likes of which Annie had just shared, Corina doubted that anyone would have been unaffected.
All the same, it was disturbing for Corina to see her father to be the one who was feeling these things.
But Connor Payton did not appear content with the story as Annie had left it. “What else?” her father probed further. “What else have the teachers done to you and your classmates?”
Annie leaned back against the window sill, her eyes going wide with wary surprise. “I’ve already told you about the sorts of things they do to the students here,” she answered curtly. “What kind of person are you that you are so interested in hearing about children being tortured?”
Any other adult would have been instantly put off by the girl’s seemly rude attitude, thinking it might be better to just leave the girl here to live in her misery. But fortunately for this little Indian child, Connor Payton had a plethora of experience in working with bratty children, even worse than Annie. He might not have been able to hold his own against manipulation, but he had a true gift for being able to reach out to those who did not want to share their stories and feelings with him.
Just as it had so many times before, this talent came through for him once again. Annie didn’t resist any further, and continued on telling what she had witness. Although, with some of the things that Annie had decided were better to keep to herself, it might have been better if she had remained secretive.
“…I don’t like to sleep.” Annie’s voice finally took on a more solemn tone. “Bad things happen to the students in the night.”
It was at that point the room came into a notably potent silence. But again, Annie was either oblivious to the fact or just indifferent. She swirled her skirt in tiny circles as she waited for someone to speak, and this motion did truly expose Annie as a young child who really was not as wise in the ways of the world as one would expect from hearing about her difficult life.
“The…adults,” Corina’s father cringed as he spoke, as though it hurt to even contemplate the words, “take students out of their rooms in the middle of the night?”
“Sometimes,” Annie replied, showing she did not quite understand what happened to these students who were taken, but that it couldn’t be for anything good. “They won’t take children who are already awake, but they’ll take students who are still asleep and lead them out of the room while they are still not yet awake. When they come back, they are always alone and they are always crying.”
Corina found her eyes shifting downward and her fingers moved to fidget with the material of her dress once again. She did not want to hear what she knew was coming. Why did her father even have to make the girl rake all this up? It was what any truly decent human being would have done, to finding out just what was being done to these children, but all the same, Corina wanted wanted than to be far, far away from this place.
Annie, however, remained glib as ever as she continued to speak. “It has never happened in my room, but I hear the other students talk about it.”
Corina shrank further and further into as much of a ball as she could. Things weren’t supposed to be like this! The job she and her father had was to find Muggle-born children and invite them to a magical school far, far away, and the children were supposed to be happy and excited and say thank you, thank you, thank you. They weren’t supposed to put all these awful thoughts and pictures into her head!
When Corina finally did manage to bring herself to look up at Annie, she could see that the little girl wasn’t at all touched by the heavy emotions felt by Corina and her father. In fact, the expression on her face was one of puzzlement. It was almost as though she were confused by all the emotions echoing throughout the room.
“You didn’t come here just because you care about children’s suffering,” Annie noted dryly, “and why do you care so much about me?”
By the time Annie finished her question, Corina startled into remembering why they had come here to speak with the little girl in the first place. They had been caught so off guard by Annie’s revelation of what had happened and all her stories of what had happened to the other children here, Corina had nearly forgotten to mention a word about the Wizarding world or the Bell Academy, and she could tell that her father had too.
Corina’s father looked up from behind his hands with an expression that showed that he had suddenly remembered too. He quickly composed himself and began the speech he had prepared for every child he and his daughter came to visit. “Annie, you are a very special little girl…just the sort that the school that I work for would love to have among its pupils.”
Annie groaned and rolled her head in the manner of someone thoroughly annoyed with a hopeless human being.
“You tried that already, remember?” she reminded him in a bored sort of tone. “I told you: no one here is special. They bring all Indian children to schools like these. How is one school different from any other?”
As hard as it was not to instantly hate the little brat for her rude and callous remark, Corina tried her best to see the answer from the little girl’s point of view. Annie had probably thought she was being invited to another Indian school just like the one she was already attending.
Of course, Corina’s father was quick to disarm that sort of thinking. “Well, Annie, you aren’t being invited to this school because of the color of your skin. It is not an Indian school. My daughter, Corina, will be attending this fall as well,” he said slowly and carefully. “It’s a school for witches; children with…magical talents.”
Annie stared up at him.
“Do you understand?” Mr. Payton finally asked her.
Annie didn’t shake her head, but it was quite clear from her expression that she certainly did not understand. This was hardly spectacular, though. Corina had seen this reaction dozens of times, in many different forms. Where to take the discussion next was so rehearsed that even Corina knew what was coming.
“Have you ever had anything happen to you when you were angry or scared?” Mr. Payton asked. “Something that you weren’t able to explain?”
Annie’s gaze drifted up to the ceiling and her lower lip jutted out as she began pondering.
“I don’t get hit with the hickory stick anymore,” she finally admitted. “After I was allowed out of the closet, Miss Deem tried to hit me with it again, and it just flew out the window like an arrow…through the glass and everything.
“Now she mostly just doesn’t bother with me,” Annie went on to say. “She never asks me to give an answer in class, and during vocational exercises, she just ignores me.”
Still, while describing it, Annie’s tone remained flat and almost bored. It was impossible to tell if she truly understood where the conversation was going.
Mr. Payton made sure to make his point very quickly. “The school I work for is the Bell Academy of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and it is my job as a recruiter to go around the country inviting children just like you to attend.
“You actually won’t be old enough to attend until you are eleven,” Corina’s father continued on, “but it is school policy to contact students from non-Wizarding families earlier than those who grew up with wizards.”
At the end of the rather long-winded speech, Corina’s father looked down to analyze Annie’s expression, but there was still very little to go off. Her arms hung loosely at her sides and her eyes were blank. It was a far cry from the wild, nearly manic reactions Corina had come to expect from the Bell recruits that they had visited.
“Oh, I believe I understand,” Corina’s father said with a twinkle in his eye. “You want some proof, I think.”
Without waiting for an answer, Corina’s father extracted his hidden wand from his pocket. Taking a quick glance around the room, he quickly found his target: a teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom. For the first time since meeting the child, she showed some emotion beside apathy and cynicism. She actually seemed to be behaving like the nine-year-old that she was.
One quick flick of his wand and a wordless spell, however, the desk was suddenly Transfigured into a black and white dairy cow; complete with a bell around it’s neckTransfigured into a black and white dairy cow; complete with a bell around its neck.
The little girl jumped slightly and squeaked behind her hands which were covering her mouth. Even this reaction, though, seemed muted compared to all the children Corina had seen while accompanying her father. Her father must have noticed this as well, judging from the expression on his face after he turned the Transfigured desk back into a desk. From traveling with her father all this while, though, Corina had come to know the explanation for this sort of reaction as well.
“You don’t have anyone in your family who is a witch or a wizard, do you?” he finally asked Annie, as the back towards her. “No one who could do unusual things the way you can?”
Annie’s eyes shifted upward momentarily. “My family, no,” she answered. “But I think I remember some people from either my village or another being able to do things like what you did. I understand what you mean.”
Corina breathed an internal sign of relief now that she and her father’s message had finally been brought across. Maybe Annie did not have what could be called a complete understanding of the concept of the Wizarding world, but she had, at least, a very basic one. And that would certainly be enough for the Paytons to work off.
“Well?” Mr. Payton finally said. “Do you think you would like to go to Bell?”
Annie began to chew on her bottom lip as her eyes flicked slowly over the room. She had to have been thinking about everything she had just shared with the Paytons and about everything she had seen and suffered through while attending school here. A different white man offering a different boarding school couldn’t have seemed like much of an escape compared to how other Muggle-born children saw it.
Right then, Corina’s father surprised his daughter by reaching out to the Indian child more than she had ever seen him do with any other child he had come to visit. He sank down to his knees so he could meet Annie at her eye level, and brought his voice down to a very low and calming tone.
“It won’t be like this place,” he said in as sincere a manner as he could possibly manage.
Instead of being comforted, though, Annie took cautious steps back as though the closer vicinity was terrifying to her.
“The teachers aren’t allowed to beat the students,” Mr. Payton told Annie. “They can’t lock you in dark rooms, everybody gets fed every day, and it is, more than anything, a very safe place to be.”
Annie looked up into the man’s eyes, regarding Corina’s father with a great deal of skepticism; in a manner of someone being sold snake oil.
“Annie, I promise you.” Corina watched her father put his hands on the little girl’s shoulders. “No one will ever hurt you if you go to the Bell Academy. If a teacher does attempt to discipline you the way your teachers have, it’s them who will be in trouble, not you.”
Finally, Mr. Payton’s words seemed to truly interest the little girl. Her face took on an expression of interest and even curiosity. Corina was even certain she saw a bit of a devious nature to it.
“What if they did?” the little girl asked. “What would happen to them?”
“From what you told me, they would be dismissed from the school so fast, their heads would spin. They would never be able to work in another school ever again, knowing that they treated children in such a brutal manner.”
Somehow, Annie didn’t seem quite satisfied with the answer. Then again, having to be the one who had been forced to live through such punishment, Corina imagined that nothing would have been seen as harsh enough retribution in Annie Two-Moon’s mind. Maybe even being exposed to such punishment had left the girl with something of a sadistic nature, leaving her wanting to know more details of the hypothetical punishment for these hypothetical teachers.
But Corina’s father either didn’t notice this or chose to look past it because he moved on from the subject of discipline towards anyone, and shifted the conversation to a more personal level.
“You spoke of the different tribes the children her come from,” he said. “Which one are you from?”
Annie shook the sadistic expression from her face and took on the role of the sweet, little, suffering child, as though she too were playing a role.
“Cheyenne,” she answered. “My name isn’t really Annie, you know?”
“I thought so,” Corina’s father replied thoughtfully. “What is your real name then?”
“Eše'heo'ôhnéšese,” Annie told him, breathing the difficult sounding name quite naturally. “Will I be able to use my real name if I go to this Bell Academy?”
Corina had a great many doubts about that! She could not even begin to imagine how such a name would be spelled on the girl’s assignments. There probably wasn’t even a way to spell it; Indians didn’t even have alphabets, Corina was fairly certain. And if the teachers learned there was an easier name to call her by”such as Annie Two-Moons”they would, of course, leap at the chance to use that instead.
“That certainly seems like a possibility,” Corina’s father assured Annie otherwise. “You might have to train your teachers a bit in the correct pronunciation, but I’m sure they would eventually take to calling you that.”
Annie turned to face Corina’s father, her expression becoming somewhat softer than it had been before that moment. It seemed that Connor Payton had truly gained the little girl’s trust. “Do you think you would want to go to the Bell Academy when you are old enough?”
Annie Two-Moons nodded slowly, but purposefully. Though, it seemed as if there were something else nagging at her mind.
“I have a sister too. She is fifteen.”
When Mr. Payton heard this, his gaze momentarily shifted back to Corina before returning to Annie’s face. It was understandable. Fifteen would make Annie’s older sister just a little bit younger than Corina was.
“Will she be able to come to the Bell Academy as well?” Annie finished.
This was a difficult part of visiting any Muggle-born child; explaining to them that a close older sibling would not be able to attend their new school with them. The older sibling would feel angry and left out, while the younger would feel even more alone than ever.
Corina watched as her father fielded the question carefully. “If your sister was a witch, she would have been visited already. I’m afraid your sister is very much a Muggle.”
Corina worried for a moment that Annie might turn into one of those children who launched into a tremendous tantrum when they received this news. Though, a very small part of her almost wished the little girl would throw a fit, so Corina would have a physical reason for the subconscious dislike she felt for the child.
But instead, Annie held up her hand in an attempt to stop Mr. Payton from going into an unnecessarily long explanation, while the other hand went up to cover her eyes so the Paytons would not see whatever emotions she was feeling.
“It…it’s alright,” she insisted. “Actually, I don’t think you would even be able to find her if she could go.”
This puzzled Corina slightly. Were the two girls close or weren’t they? Not having any idea of your sibling’s whereabouts was not the sign of a close bond.
“They rent older children out as hired help to wealthy families in the city,” she told them. “I don’t even know if my sister is still here. I don’t think I have even seen her in many months.”
This time, Corina felt monumentally less shock in hearing this than she had when she had heard everything else Annie had told her. Beatings with sticks, food deprivation, and little children being taken from their rooms in the dead of night made Indian children being used as semi-slave labor was not a very difficult concept to grasp. Were the students even paid, or did the people hire them just pay the school for the students’ work as though the hired children were nothing more than rented cattle? The girls who she had seen in the front entryway likely received no money for all the work they did.
For as much as Corina couldn’t help but dislike Annie, she couldn’t stop herself from feeling pity for all the other Indian children she and her father would leave here.
A knock at the door suddenly brought Annie to stiff attention, almost like a soldier. The door opened just a crack to reveal an older girl with her hair worn up in an unattractive style and a larger, dirtier version of Annie’s ugly school uniform. As soon as she saw the two white faces in the room, she became notably more anxious. She had been sent to speak to the Paytons, but she did everything she could to keep from making eye contact with them.
“I’m sorry, but Annie really has missed enough class for one day,” she told them, her voice soft and almost scared-sounding. “I was sent here to escort her to vocational exercises.”
The girl shut the door, but the Paytons could still see her silhouette from behind the frosted glass window pane in the door. Now that there was an audience once again, Annie Two-Moons went back to playing the part of the ridged, yet polite Indian child. She took a few steps before stopping to face Corina and her father, and curtsied to them once again.
“Mr. Payton, Miss Corina, it was very nice to meet both of you,” she said, the hem of her shapeless white dress spreading out like a droopy flower.
And with that, she went back to being that quiet, ridged little girl who they had first seen in the classroom with the dozens of other little Indian children. Then she followed the older girl out into the hallway so she could become one of those Indian school children.
Dawes & Carlise by OliveOil_Med
Chapter Notes: When the Paytons receive an in-depth lesson in just how the Indian students are 'civilized', they learn far more than they would have wish to.
Thank you, MorganRay!