February 26, 2020 |

The Instruction and Edification of Children at Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes’s Utopian Commune, in 1850

schoharie county new york

Just after breakfast, we received word that Mr. Noyes and Mrs. Cragin had arrived and that they wished to meet with all the girls, so the other nurses and I gathered up the lot of them, ran combs through their hair, and arranged them in a semicircle on the damp lawn near where Mr. Noyes and Mrs. Cragin already stood waiting.

When Mrs. Cragin walked over and sat down among the girls, Mr. Noyes stayed where he was. I thought he might drift over to exchange pleasantries with the other nurses and me, but he didn’t. He appeared to be cross. Most probably with Mrs. Cragin, I figured, but then I worried that his apparent anger might involve me and the other nurses somehow. Perhaps even the girls. I don’t know why I worried this.

Mrs. Cragin asked the girls to raise their hands if they loved their dolls. All the girls raised their hands. Of course they did. One girl raised both her hands to show just how much love, and she offered to go wake her doll from her nap and bring her outside so Mrs. Cragin could see how precious, but Mrs. Cragin smiled and told the girl she should let her doll rest. The girls proceeded to tell Mrs. Cragin their dolls’ names, ages, and favorite games. They described for her the clothes they had made for their dolls, and what each of their dolls liked to eat and didn’t like to eat, and what songs each liked having sung to them, and what songs each did not care for. They told Mrs. Cragin that the younger boys were often enlisted into their doll play, but the older boys never played along even though they seemed sometimes like they wanted to. One girl assured Mrs. Cragin that even though the dolls sometimes grew fussy and were difficult to manage, they all loved living in the nursery. Mrs. Cragin laughed at this, and her laughing made the girls laugh, and the girls’ laughter drew a smile from Mr. Noyes.

One of the older girls told me later how she thought at that moment Mrs. Cragin was going to announce that the Children’s Department was receiving a collection of new dolls. She thought this was why Mrs. Cragin was encouraging the girls to talk about their dolls. To set the mood for the surprise.

The girls’ happy chatter seemed to relax Mr. Noyes. As they continued talking with Mrs. Cragin, he drifted toward them and began walking slow circles around the group with his thumbs under his arms. The Community had been blessed with a wonderful group of girls. I thought perhaps Mr. Noyes was thinking something along these lines as he listened. I was proud of the girls as they conversed with Mrs. Cragin. Proud of their bright spirits. Proud of how, even in their excitement, they tried to take turns and not speak over one another. Proud of how straight they sat and how well they listened and how they didn’t allow themselves to be distracted by the desire to capture ladybugs or braid dandelions or drill holes in the dirt with their fingers. I couldn’t imagine what a better group of girls might have looked like.

I think the pride I felt for the girls distracted me. It kept me from anticipating Mr. Noyes’s and Mrs. Cragin’s mission. It allowed me to be taken by surprise.

To read the rest of this story, please purchase a print copy of Story #7, Spring 2020. Photo courtesy of Doug Kerr; view more of his work on Flickr.

author tom noyes

Tom Noyes is the author of The Substance of Things Hoped For: A Novel, published in 2021 from Slant Books. He has published three story collections. His most recent, Come by Here: A Novella and Stories, won the Autumn House Fiction Prize and the Gold Medal in Short Fiction from the Independent Press Publisher Awards. …

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