In Hopes of a Better Future

I like Lauren Groff's writing, although I haven't read her short story collection 'Florida' (2018) or her latest novel 'Matrix' (2021). I gotta rectify that soon. Meanwhile, I was happy to read her short story 'To Sunland' published in The New Yorker on June 27, 2022. 

Set in 1957 in Florida, siblings Buddy and Joanie Greene are teenagers who just became young adults. Their mother has recently died. The story traced the aftermath of the death and we see the siblings embark on their new journeys. Their Aunt Maisie is incapable of taking them in or even supporting them when her meagre income couldn't even feed herself.

Buddy was supposed to be sent off to Sunland, a place for people with developmental disabilities. Sunland Hospital was a real place in Gainesville, in 1983, along with all its unkindly named and cruelly managed 'training centers' across the nation closed. Joanie wanted a new life for herself in a new city, to study at a women's college in Maine on a scholarship. In an interview, the author tells us how she came up with the two characters in this story.

This week’s story, “To Sunland,” is set in 1957 and is about two siblings, Buddy and Joanie. Their mother has recently died, and Buddy, who is twenty, has been living with his aunt. “Big like a man and twenty years old, but you’re just a little baby in your head, poor soul,” she says to him. Joanie, who is seventeen and bright and determined, has made the decision that they must leave the small town in Florida where they’ve grown up. When did these characters come to you?

Buddy came into my mind first, whole, sitting on a porch in the dark on a January morning in Florida. All I knew of him at that time was that he was grieving his mother, and was going to end up at a place called Sunland, in Gainesville, which was a real place that took care of people with developmental disabilities. I tried to understand what he was seeing on that porch, and what he was feeling. After I’d sat with Buddy for a little while, in walked his sister Joanie, who was pretty and tough and burned so badly by the place where they were from that all she longed for was to get away. The story hinges on these two powerful longings, Buddy’s for his mother, and Joanie’s for flight and reinvention.

There're so many prejudices against women in the 1950s, and a lack of education and total ignorance on people with learning disabilities. In those times, people who didn't have money for additional medical treatment or resources to support non-earning family members simply 'did the right thing', either by cutting short schooling to go work to support the family, or send them to institutions in the hope that they would be better cared for. These choices killed off many dreams. Nobody would also bargain for the fact that these 'training centers' are hellish places for the mentally disabled. 

There was nothing else Joanie could do. She was only seventeen years old. It wasn't Joanie's fault that she didn't want to work to support him and care for Buddy if she had the option of bettering herself with an education. How could we judge when we're not in her shoes? It was between the devil and the deep blue sea. 

Yes, I can see you’re dumping your brother at that Farm Colony up in Gainesville, and going on alone to Maine, ’cause you got you a job there. The lady squinted, looking at Joanie’s shoes, her hands, her hair, her straw hat, and said, I don’t know. Shopkeeper. No, no, I got it. Lady’s companion.

Something struggled in Joanie, but at last she said with a smile she tried to bite down, Almost. Women’s college.

College girl. Well, I’ll be, the lady said. I myself begged and begged to go to college, but my daddy said no, not even a Christian college, not even a Home Economics course. Ada, honey, no amount of book reading can make a woman a better housekeeper, he always said to me. But of course that was a different time, before the first Great War, before women even got to vote and then got all uppity and started yelling for things. Well, to tell you the truth, I’m mighty envious of you going off to college. I would have loved to learn about the old books and philosophers and such. Though I say, I always do say, a woman’s place is in the home. She said this with such vehemence, her chins wobbled.