Marching for Annie
Annie my sister lands in Detroit on Friday morning. I’ll pick her up and we’ll head south, through flat Ohio and mountainous Pennsylvania. Playlists and snacks will get us to Virginia and a family’s warm guest room. Saturday, we’ll board the Metro early to join the other marchers. I have never done anything like this before.
I’ve seen a lot of protests and celebrations in my half-century. Chants against wars and Wall Street, linked arms in front of clinics, dancing or screaming in jammed city centers: I’ve admired the causes, written supportive checks and letters, watched it all on TV or Twitter. But, I’ve never changed my plans, called my boss, or worn out my shoes for any of it.
On Saturday, though, I’m marching with Annie, for Annie.
There’s another Annie, a woman my sister and I never could have known even if she had lived to see old age. She did not; she died a few days before Christmas 1896 in the front room of the family farmhouse. In the kitchen, on the other side of a closed door, her father and two brothers were already dead. And, after he shot her in the head, Annie’s murderer reloaded his revolver, lay across her body, and shot himself too.
The crime made the papers all over Minnesota. I sit at my computer and look at the ancient headlines written at a pitch so close to the contemporary style, breathless and inflammatory. “Crime’s Carnival,” screams the St. James Plaindealer of December 22, 1896; “John Kable and His Deadly Gun Do Fearful Work.” “MURDER!” counters the rival St. James Journal, “A HORRIBLE SIGHT!” The New Ulm Review trumpets “The Deed of a Maniac.” Even the state capitol takes notice of the small-town tragedy with nearly a full column on the front page of the St. Paul Globe:
“A MANIAC ASSASSIN — SOUTH BRANCH THE SCENE — CRAZED OVER A LOVE AFFAIR— Hot Words and the Bloody Tragedy Followed When Its Current Was Interrupted.”
There are small discrepancies, but the papers tell the same basic story. John Kabel or Kable or Cable was a hired hand on the farm of Henry Joblinski or Jablinske or Goblinsky in South Branch, named for the arm of the Watonwan River that snakes nearby. He wanted to marry Henry’s daughter, Annie. Henry objected because Annie was too young. One day, Henry and his wife went into nearby St. James for several hours, and Annie and John locked themselves in a bedroom. The following morning, Henry threatened to beat Annie for her behavior and to fire John, and the fight began that led to the murder-suicide.
Two of Annie’s surviving brothers, who were upstairs when the shooting began and so became the main source of information for the papers, told reporters that “things were not as they should have been” between Annie and John for about a year.
On the day Annie Joblinski died, she was thirteen years old. Her murderer John Kabel was twenty-eight.
I’m looking at Annie’s name in an 1895 Minnesota State Census report. She’s the fifth out of ten children. Ahead of her in the list, her four older brothers and parents all have dark pencil lines by their names marking them as immigrants. Nearly all such marked names in Watonwan County of 1895 belong to Germans. Annie was the first American born child in the Joblinski family, with five quickly following. There they are, in the year before everything changes, twelve people in one house. The parents are in their mid-forties, the children range from four to eighteen. There’s no mention of the man who, by all later accounts, also lives in their house and helps Henry work the threshing machine.
What am I looking for in these documents? Annie, where are you?
The census report is like stone: letters and numbers, thick pencil lines, old style script defying connection with modern eyes and minds. I stare at the scrawls and the marks and try to see a small house in large fields, crowded with people. I try to imagine parents’ mouths thickly struggling with the outlines and sounds of a language their children have mastered. I try to find the mystery man.
Did he speak English? Did they rely on him? Annie, did you trust him?
The newspapers, by contrast, are full of terrible detail, but the story grows ever more respectable as it travels away from St. James. In the gracious state capitol, John Kabel is “crazed over a love affair.” In closer New Ulm, the impetus is “infatuation with a young girl.”. But in the St. James Plaindealer, where the writers may have known the dead farmer and his neighbors: “The case is a terrible one in its every aspect — the debauching of the little girl, the brutal murders and suicide.”
There, for just a moment: I can see her.
Annie. Your crowded house, and the isolation of the prairie. One language at home, and another at school. The stranger moving in. The weak and faded remnant sentences that limn your short, unprotected life.
Annie, I find myself wishing I could save you.
Someone saved your sisters: your mother. She was called Annie, too.
According to what your two hidden brothers told the papers, your mother “begged the red-handed fiend” to spare her. He allowed her “and the little children” to leave as he led you to the front room. The St. Paul paper specifies that Annie your mother left the house with two of her children as John Kabel took you by the hand. When John shot you through the head, your nine-year-old sister Ella was on her way to safety.
Did your mother try to save you too, Annie? She saved Ella, which why I’m writing this. It’s why I can write this.
The first time I heard about Annie was in 1979, the year of our big family reunion. My mom was involved in typing up a huge history of her branches of the family, mostly Swedes. The history bug had bitten me a few years before in junior high, when the bicentennial coincided with the hundredth anniversary of my hometown’s great celebrity crime, the James gang’s raid on our bank. I wrote down as much of the family tree information as I could. At some point, my grandmother began telling me about her first husband, my mom’s father who died when my mom was a toddler. It had never occurred to me to ask about him. Listening to my grandmother talk about him was the first time I remember actively trying to imagine a life other than my own.
One of the things she mentioned was a sad story in her young husband’s family, a farm hand sweet on one of the aunts. I remembered that “sweet on,” so old-fashioned and courtly. The farm hand had killed the woman and himself out of grief, said grandma, when they weren’t allowed to marry. The story didn’t stick with me; it was no match for the tragically brief romance of my grandparents and the short marriage that produced my mom. That fired my imagination, since it ultimately led to me and my siblings.
I didn’t see how the other story did. But years later, poring over searches while doing my family tree online, I found the census reports and the newspaper stories. Several weeks went by before I realized that Annie Joblinski was the girl in my grandmother’s tale. My romatically vague recollection of a prairie Romeo and Juliet crumbled before the maddeningly vague evidence of a brutalized girl.
The Joblinskis who survived that awful day in 1896 regrouped under the care of their mother and a new stepfather. Annie’s little sister Ella grew up, married, and raised a family not far from St. James. Her son George was my mom’s lost father.
My mom’s kids, we four, were all on earth within seventy-four years after the murders. In that much time, just one human lifespan, the lives of people in our extended family tree gained unimagineably in ease and opportunity. Like every family, we’ve knit our story from those shifts: the path from poverty to college, the miracles of travel, the possibilites of technology, the triumphant return journeys to the lands where our ancestors were born.
But we also forgot, as people forget, the things we didn’t talk about. I wish I could tell you Annie’s story for real, but I can’t. She’s lost to me; I can never know more than what a few thin papers only hint at. And like any true believer, I hang on to those documents like the grail. What there is of her, I can only see in them.
Of course I’m dazzled by the story’s drama, who wouldn’t be? There but for the grace of one woman’s tearful plea go I, there goes the whole circle of my family. Annie saved Ella in 1896, so my grandfather lived, my mother lives, Annie my sister and I and our sister and brother and all their children live.
But the darker outlines of it? I and mine know them, deep in our bones. I feel them as I read Annie’s story, as I see “debauching” bleached to “infatuation,” to “love affair,” to “sweet on her,” as the truth on the other side of the door slowly and surely bleeds away. I and mine know what it’s like to have our own reality taken from us, again and again, in every generation. Annie’s story spoken, unhidden, may have saved us. Instead, everyone from the townsfolk of St. James to her own family slowly and surely buried that story. We didn’t hear it, we didn’t know.
So like Annie’s mother, Annie, we learned how to survive instead.
Packing a warm sweatshirt and comfortable shoes. I think of Annie the mother on a freezing December day on the Minnesota prairie, walking away from her dying husband and sons, from her first American daughter, her namesake, as she leads Ella into the snow. Downloading music to play in my car, I think of Annie the daughter beaten by her father, her murderer shutting the parlor door behind her. Making plans with Annie my sister, I think of a crowded immigrant house, people working too hard, dependant on whoever can and will help them.
I think of how quickly we forget the most terrible things, and the small knowing and unknowing ways in which we work to forget them. I think of how we hide that from each other. It is a fatal, unforgiveable mistake, because it leaves us isolated from each other’s stories. It leaves us with the lie that we suffer alone. And so, stumbling forward, forced to be strong, we imagine our strength lies in that isolation.
I’m marching for Annie.
