house in Shelby and often called in by transient theatrical troupes to take part in plays” (Letters, 81). Still later, in an autobiographical entry for Twentieth-Century Authors, she wrote of “a year of farm life with this or that aunt, life in small-town boarding houses, life with very prim strict relatives, to rougher life in the middle of little factory towns” (1123). Those nomadic years would prove to be happier than the ones that would follow, however, when, in August 1907, Dawn’s father married the wealthy but miserly and coldhearted Sabra Stearns. The family moved about ten miles southwest of Cleveland to Sabra’s large farmhouse in North Olmsted, then a small farming community.
An observant child who did well in school, young Dawn loved to read, especially the novels of Dickens, Dumas, and Hugo.6 From an early age, she developed a clear eye for the pretensions and airs of the adults she saw around her, filling notebook after notebook with sketches, poems, and stories of her observations. Dawn kept these books carefully hidden under the porch of the North Olmsted house, fearing her stepmother’s rage if she found out about her writing. When Dawn was thirteen, her stepmother did discover the notebooks and immediately burned them7—calling them Dawn’s “trash”—in an act so cruel that it prompted the girl to leave home a short time later, immediately following her graduation from the eighth grade (Diaries, 186). Later, in her most autobiographical novel, 1944’s My Home Is Far Away, Powell painted a harrowing picture of Sabra Stearns Powell, renamed Idah Hawkins Willard for the fictionalized portrait, although, according to biographer Page, Powell “seems actually to have understated Sabra’s cruelty” (Bio, 197). “Although I set out to do a complete job on my family, I . . . diluted it through a fear of embarrassing my fonder relatives” (Diaries, 222), Powell admitted.
The fictional stepmother’s way of bringing up the girls was to take a “stand,” yet
[her] “stand” was so elaborate, and involved so many contingencies, that her new family despaired of ever getting it straight. First, they were to stay out of the house except for sleeping and eating. Second, they were not to sit out on the lawn mooning where everybody could see them, nor were they to go visiting relatives or school friends or have them call. They were not to use their school paper for games, because it cost money, nor were they to keep reading in their school readers for fun after their lesson was learned. . . . They were not to go places where townspeople would talk about their ragged clothes, but they were not allowed to use their sewing boxes either, because needles and thread cost money. (My Home, 221)
Powell’s diary recounts almost word for word many of the same incidents that the novel relates, including Sabra’s “stand.” In the diary Powell wrote, “Stepmother’s greatest joy was in making us go downtown on errands with no hems in our ragged calico skirts (and forbidden needle and thread to sew them as Waste) so our schoolmates would sneer” (187). While such frugality might be understandable in a poor family, to begrudge shabby young children needle and thread makes no sense at all for a wealthy one; Sabra owned one of the most impressive houses in town. At any rate, the comments Powell wrote in her diary seem tame compared to what Page turned up in his research for the biography: he says that the “unbelievably vicious and sadistic” stepmother, who seemed to take an evil delight in her cruelty, would “beat the three girls regularly, almost, it seems, as a form of physical exercise” (Bio, 9). Powell reported both in her diaries and in her novel that She, as the girls referred to Sabra, would indeed keep her and her sisters locked out of the house until dark, prohibit them from entering the parlor, and forbid them to touch the books or the piano or anything else in the house not specifically theirs, but at the same time take from them any small item they might own. Once young Dawn with a quarter she had earned bought a silver-tasseled whip at a county fair; when the stepmother found it, she hung it in clear view in the kitchen and would regularly thrash the girls with it (Diaries, 187).8
In the same novel and in her diaries Powell painted a vivid portrait of her father as well, a man whom the girls adored but who had little practical sense. Debra Warstler, daughter-in-law of Powell’s niece, Carol Warstler, says, “While [other] family members refer to him as a ‘jerk,’ they also recall that his daughters loved him” (14).9 Painting a less forgiving portrait of the “selfish” Roy Powell, Debra Warstler writes that Phyllis Powell Cook (Powell’s younger sister) told her that Roy Powell had opened an ice cream parlor in 1905 but that it was not until he sold it a year later that the girls were ever treated to a cone there, and that the treat came not from their father but from the new owner (6).
Powell told of her father’s returning home from sales trips with such frills as a birdcage or a music box for his daughters while they remained ragged and shoeless, hungry and dirty. Even when he was not on the road he was ineffective in protecting his children from the harsh treatment of his new wife and generally seemed, at least to Dawn, almost as miserable in Sabra’s presence as she and her sisters were. In 1941, looking back on her childhood, Powell remembered that her stepmother had ultimately “made my father give up the road” he so loved to “work in the mill. . . . Papa sat at table over burnt oatmeal, scorched potatoes, soggy bread, lifeless chicken with lumpy gravy. He discoursed on this spoon which he had picked up at the Palmer House in Chicago” in happier days (Diaries, 187). The proud but unfortunate Roy Powell seemed rarely to get things right. He had thought that marrying Sabra would bring some stability and social position to his daughters, but in fact the marriage did just the opposite.
On discovering that her notebooks had been burned, an event that would anger her for the rest of her life, young Dawn boarded a train for her aunt Orpha May Sherman Steinbrueck’s home in small-town Shelby, Ohio, about an hour’s ride from North Olmsted10 and halfway between Cleveland and Columbus in Richland County.”11 Here she found refuge from the “psychopathic cruelty” (Letters, 132) she had faced in Sabra’s house and the neglect she had met with since her mother’s death. Clearly, the strong-minded Powell was never one to give up or to give in, and she was never one to lose her sense of humor. Despite the psychological injury that fleeing at such a young age the only home she knew must have caused, Powell would later write lightly of running away. In My Home Is Far Away, the portrait the author painted of young Marcia’s escaping her stepmother’s house resonates. Once safely on the train, Marcia is “still scared, but she felt lightheaded and gay, the way Papa did when he was going away from home. She thought she must be like Papa, the kind of person who was always glad going away instead of coming home. She looked out the window, feeling the other self inside her, the self that had no feelings and could never be hurt, coming out stronger and stronger” (318). Much like Marcia, Powell learned to separate her inner being from her outer, almost always presenting a gay face to friends and strangers alike. Very few others knew of her demons, her nightmares, her troubles.
Just two years before her death, in an essay entitled “What Are You Doing in My Dreams?” a determined-sounding Powell would again write of leaving home: “There’s something about farm life that gives you the strength to run anywhere in the world,” she reflected (221). “What you have to do is walk right on down the street, keeping your eyes straight ahead, pretending you’re on your way someplace a lot better. And that’s the way it turns out, too; wherever you land is sure to be better than the place you left” (219). After first landing in the “better place” that was Auntie May’s home in Shelby, Powell ultimately landed in the better place of her dreams, New York City.
Page writes that this successful flight from Sabra’s house was actually Dawn’s second attempt; after her first effort to leave she had been caught and forced to return (Bio, 13). One can only imagine the abuse she must have endured once she was brought back. This time she took better care to plan her escape so well that she would never have to return. Powell herself reported that she left home with thirty cents in her pocket (or ninety cents, as she later remembered in “What Are You Doing in My Dreams?”) that she had earned picking berries, but Page writes that she received financial assistance from her older sister, Mabel, who had already run away from home and settled in Shelby at her grandmother Sherman’s boardinghouse (Bio, 16). Powell’s
