Margaret Cardinal- Herded Off to the Showers

I just want to talk about the hair thing again, and how it was very hard to… I can still feel the hair being cut on my head, on my head… and my head being shaved and having to be herded off to the showers and being scrubbed.

When I got older, I was also forced to scrub a little girl, that was the hardest part, because they gave us these wooden scrub brushes, and I scrub this little girl under the shower and both her and I are crying because I didn’t want to do it, and she was crying, and we, and we could not leave the shower until the nun okayed, you know that we could go and dress up. And three times I had to go back and re scrub her as she cried and I cried.

About a year ago I met a young girl, and I’m talking to her, and I said you know, it bothered me that I had to scrub her as hard as I did, and she said, you know what, she said “I don’t remember that.” And I said, “well it bothered me,” and I told her that, “you know that, that I felt bad all these years,” and that I’d never seen her and I always wanted to hunt her out, to see, just to talk to her.

And she was glad that she came, that I got to see her, and I was too because I found that was very hard and that I told her that I was very sorry, and she said likewise, and she said, “I always thought I was the one that was scrubbing you, you know,” and I remember then that we were taking turns scrubbing, scrubbing each other, because we knew we had to try to get out of that shower because otherwise we would have been there for a long time. Which I know some girls had to stay there a long time.