Thoughts of Two Mothers

Illustration by Shirley Fields

I recently read two Persephone books back to back that portrayed mothers in England in the years between the two world wars: Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge (Persephone No. 41) first published in 1933, and The Squire by Enid Bagnold (Persephone No. 103) first published in 1938.
Hostages to Fortune chronicles the trials, dappled with happiness, of Catherine, her husband William, and their three children from 1917 to the mid-1930s, when England was struggling to recover from the losses of the First World War. Both William, a doctor, and Catherine are middle-class, living in an old, drafty home and keeping a large vegetable garden and fruit trees as an economic necessity. Catherine sews clothes, does the shopping,  teaches her children how to read and write, and wrestles with the servants--a cook and a nurse.

Hall at Shinnecock by William Merritt Chase, 1892

The Squire relates the unspoken thoughts of the lady of the house in the several days leading up to the birth of her fifth child and the month thereafter. As the title connotes, the Squire is a member of the upper middle class, living in the Manor House on the village green. The lady of the house is referred to throughout as the Squire, because her husband is away on a three-month business trip to Bombay. The Squire works on her flower garden, does sporadic hand sewing, keeps an eye on her imaginative and boisterous four children, and wrestles with the servants--a butler, a cook, a kitchen maid, a nurse, and a nursemaid, at least.

Both books are semi-autobiographical, both Cambridge and Bagnold were highly successful novelists, both had abiding marriages and several children. Delightful in both books are the distinct and expressive personalities of the children, portrayed in loving detail with snippets of fresh and lively dialogue. And in both books, the main character's primary concern is her children and her relationship with them.

The differences between these novels lie in the character and circumstances of the women. In Hostages to Fortune, we see the growth of a woman who has deep doubts about her ability to love her children enough, to teach and guide them, eventually comes to like and accept them, and have confidence in her own mothering. In the first third of the book, she is frustrated because her enormous workload in keeping her home and family going with very little money makes it impossible for her to pursue her youthful dream of becoming a writer; her children are her top priority and she does not want to hand over their care to other people. We hear Catherine's laments that the family never has money for the slightest luxury or vacation. Her husband is absorbed in his dedication as the doctor to the village and surrounding countryside and only learns to appreciate his children as they grow older.

The family has few leisure moments together when they are all relaxed--a rare jaunt to the countryside in an afternoon. They spend hours each week in the garden, working, playing, fighting. At the end of the book, Catherine and her husband are riding home in the car after a "last day" graduation party for her oldest daughter, and he puts his hand on her knee in gratitude for her years of effort for him and their children. Catherine is also thinking of the past 15 years of doubts and difficulties and recognizes that her children will soon be leaving and she must let loose her hold on them; she realizes that she cannot plan her children's future happiness.

The Squire's contemplations are far different. The birth of her fifth child, which she looks forward to in total confidence, prompts her to ponder the nature of time, the "naval line" between herself and her children, and how her children embody her own immortality. At the end of the book, "with a deep female pride, she felt herself an archway through which her children flowed; and cared less that the clock in the arch's crown ticked Time away." She considers her mother, herself, and her newborn daughter as one being progressing through time. She thinks of her children as extensions of herself. These thoughts of an existential nature may be prompted not only by the Squire's age--forty-four--but also by the horizons of 1937-1938 that threatened war, yet again. At the closing of the book, she writes her weekly letter to Bombay, but otherwise, her husband is in the outer orbits of her mind.

The Mirror by Mary Cassatt, 1905

Thus, although the subject of these books is the same, each produces very different impressions in the reader. With Hostages to Fortune we watch a woman who gropes her way to overcoming challenges posed by her economic circumstances, her desires, and her lack of experience. In the end the author evokes a  family bound by a strong though silent continuity of love, a family she holds together. In Enid Bagnold's novel, the Squire loves her children as herself and in the final analysis, is the master of the house but psychologically alone.

The Remarkable Character of George Washington

George Washington with the Marquis de Lafayette (center) and Lt. Col. Tench Tilghman, Washington's aide-de-camp, at Yorktown, by Charles Willson Peale, 1784. Washington looked upon Lafayette as a son, and the French republican was instrumental in convincing Washington that slavery was an injustice that was inimical to the principles of the new American republic.  

For about four months in 2013, I read books about George Washington and also biographies of Martha Washington. Most notable was Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow. Based on the release of thousands of papers of Washington's, Chernow's book is a realistic and detailed portrait of the Commander of the Continental Army that led a rag-tag army to victory in the War of Independence and became our first President.

In his 2006 book Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, historian Gordon S. Wood devotes an early chapter to Washington, titled "The Greatness of George Washington." Wood's assessment  is grounded on Washington's decision to resign from his army command at the end of the war--an action whose humility shocked the world. He also cites how Washington became increasingly repulsed by slavery and freed those slaves he owned upon his death, and praises Washington's ability to act as the first President with a vision of what he must bequeath to a future America, beyond the political demands of the moment.

Underlying the actions and vision, however, is a monumental strength of character that explains how he became the natural choice of his contemporaries to lead the Continental Army and to become the new republic's first President. As presented in the books that I read, Washington's character had these traits:

1. Extreme courage under fire. In battle he always acted without regard for his own personal safety.

2.  Extreme devotion to duty. In the course of the Revolutionary War, Washington wrote 140,000 letters and documents. Spending hour upon hour at his desk each day, he sent communications to Congress begging for supplies, wrote orders to his men and exhortations to his army, and maintained a vast correspondence with the leading supporters of the American fight for independence. His desk was the central command post for the war.

3. Consistent compassion in victory to those defeated.

4.  Discernment of the correct military strategy and adherence to the strategy against all odds. Washington led the Americans to victory against the world's most powerful military power with barely an army--a band of ill-clad, ill-fed men that was always in flux and leaving for lack of pay. His greatness and the greatness that he inspired in his generals is measured by their achievement with such meagerness of resources.

5. Willingness to change his ideas in light of new evidence. Although Washington was determined to retake New York City, when the opportunity to defeat the British in Yorktown, Virginia, emerged instead, he seized it with alacrity and redeployed his forces to seize the opening.

6. Ability and willingness to suffer personal hardship--a trait that rallied his men time and time again to stay in the army despite hardship and to wage hard-fought battles.

7. Extreme courtesy and respect toward all, but strength to exact punishment on deviants in the army that jeopardized discipline and army unity.

8. Devotion to family and love of his wife.

9.  Belief in a vision of America stretching across the continent. His dedication to this vision of America's future--the British had prohibited further western development--was the foundation of determination to win the war.

10.  Extreme determination, that brought out the same in his generals, most of whom had never had military training and acquired their military expertise by reading history and military manuals.

11. Consistent charity to the poor, indigent, and orphans. No one who came to Mount Vernon needing food or sustenance was ever turned away. Washington also took in, supported, and paid for the education of orphans in his and Martha Washington's extended family. He considered his stepchildren as his own. After he was President, anyone who showed up at the door of Mount Vernon--and everyone who was traveling in the vicinity did show up--received hospitality. The Washingtons entertained a total roster of 2,000 guests at their home, in their 13 years of married life before he became the Commander of the Continental Army.

12. Extreme sense of responsibility by which he always gave credit to others for victories and successful actions while taking responsibility himself for defeats and errors. The buck stopped with him.

13. Faith in God, a belief in Providence into whose hands he had trusted his life; this faith was the source of his courage.

14. His wariness of power, an ever-present fear that he might appear to desire power, combined with a deep humility and recognition of his own deficits.

Washington said that all he was came from his mother, a woman whom his boyhood friends said terrified them (she was tall and forbidding), even though "she was very kind."

This is not to say that George Washington did not have faults--he relied on his wife, his family, and those he trusted such as General Henry Knox, General Nathanael Greene, and his adjutant Alexander Hamilton, and within his trusted circle, he could be angry and impatient and take their devotion for granted. Although he lacked the eloquence of Jefferson, the lightning intelligence of Alexander Hamilton, the erudition and thoughtfulness of John Adams, the creativity and knowledge of Benjamin Franklin, and the rousing rhetoric of Thomas Paine, he stood physically and spiritually heads and shoulders above his countrymen. He engendered trust, he held that trust, he acted to live up to that trust at all times. He never let anyone down. For these reasons he was--as his eulogist Lightfoot Harry Lee, father of General Robert E. Lee, said--"first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countryman."

All Americans, especially the young, need to acquaint themselves with this man and learn from him.

Good Book in a Small Package: Lillian Smith's Memory of a Large Christmas

It won't take you but an evening to read Lillian Smith's Memory of a Large Christmas, but it will be a memorable one. A writer of the South, Smith penned this short memoir in 1962, six years before her death. It's about Christmases with her family--she was the seventh of nine children. What makes the book memorable are her hilarious stories--escapades and tricks she and her brothers and sisters played--and the character of her parents, particularly her father.

When the memoir begins, Mr. Smith is a prosperous owner of factories and farms and a prominent man of Smith's home town, Jasper, Florida. But in 1915 he suffered severe business losses and moved with his family to acreage he had previously bought in the mountains near Clayton, Georgia. Here he established a summer camp for children, which Smith later ran to bring in income for herself and her ill and widowed mother.

At the time of the "large Christmas" that Smith relates, the family in Georgia was never sure where it's next meal was coming from. But poverty did not hamper her father, or her mother from going along with him, to invite a chain gang that he seen down the road on Christmas Day for a Christmas dinner at the Smith home. Whether rich in Florida or poor in Georgia, as Smith recounts it, her father was as ebullient as ever--boosted in spirit by his devotion to Christianity and to his duty to other human beings. He had passed the chain gang on the side of the road --they needed a Christmas dinner,  and he offered it. Along with their guards, they gladly assented, and Smith and her mother and brothers and sisters found and cooked enough food to make it a delectable meal for all.

From reading Memory of a Large Christmas, it is not hard to understand why Lillian Smith became one of the earliest white Southern writers to speak out against racial segregation, writing Killers of the Dream, a series of essays against the laws of the Jim Crow South in 1949, before the civil rights movement burst into the national consciousness with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against school segregation and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and at a time when a white person would be scorned for disloyalty to Jim Crow. She continued to write about civil rights until her death in 1968.

As Good as Its Cover

I am happy to report that this book lived up to its cover, which is a relief  since that's why I bought it last February, and then I read it in December. A compendium of stories by writers such as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, John Cheever, Evelyn Waugh, and Willa Cather, among others, can't possibly go wrong. One of my favorites was Cather's "A Burglar's Christmas" with its ending that stands before our eyes like a bejeweled Christmas ornament. Cather writes about the threads that bind us to eternity like no other American writer I know.

Although I had read Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory," I found myself in near grief by the end of it--but his story reminds us that grief is rooted in love and celebration.

This collection gave me the opportunity to meet Grace Paley (1922-2007), a writer I not known of. Her "The Loudest Voice" (1959) of how a Jewish girl growing up in New York and her parents think about her participation in the school Christmas pageant was a perfect pointer to the survival of the Christmas spirit in our holiday season of today. For after all, as Paley's little girl thinks to herself on her way to sleep the night of the pageant, "I was happy. I fell asleep at once. I had prayed for everybody: my talking family, cousins far away, passersby, and all the lonesome Christians. I expected to be heard. My voice was certainly the loudest."

Grace Paley

Fine Arts Friday: From The Arts of the Beautiful by Etienne Gilson

The first moment of any art is the impulse to produce something.

Berthe Morisot Painting by Paul Gobillard

 On the part of the consumer, the enjoyment of beauty is a kind of contemplation, but on the part of the producer, art is action.

 

Suzanne and Another by Carl Larsson

 

There is no opposition between beauty and usefulness, for beauty may serve useful purposes (in a sense it always does), yet beauty is not made for in view of its possible utility--it is desirable for its own sake.

Cactus by Carl Larsson

There is or should be art in every doing and making, and where there is art, there certainly is knowledge, intelligence, and even invention.

 

Lise Sewing by Auguste Renoir

Infinitely precious because of the spirituality it imposes on its matter, and a moving witness to the primary creative fecundity which is God's alone, art and the precarious beauties with which it adorns the world and life still remain more a grace than a necessity.

 

Mrs. N.C. Wyeth by N.C. Wyeth

 

The American Blended Family: 1865

In Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, author Steven Mintz reports that the kinds of blended families we see today were common from the country's beginnings, up to the 1940s and 1950s. The reason for blending, though, was not divorce, but death. On the American frontier, for instance, 25 percent of women died in childbirth, often in isolation with no medical care. Without modern medical care and antibiotics, illness in an adult, especially one already exhausted by overwork, could easily leave a child without a father or mother, or both. Often the remaining parent would seek another mate, as a necessary for the survival of homestead and children. Then the new stepparent and children needed to get to know each other, and hopefully, a bond would grow between them, which, while not detracting from the bitter missing of a beloved parent, offered comfort and nourishment to the children.

Mother and Child by Mary Cassatt, 1880

The McNairs became such a blended family in The Able McLaughlins, and a more poignant story of blending could not be told. A widower, Mr. McNair had brought home a new wife, Barbara, from Scotland to help him care for his eight-year-old son, Dod, and his three-year-old daughter, Jeannie. No sooner had they arrived at the homestead than McNair took off for the fields with his son.

Mrs. McNair "stood contemplating. The rain continued blowing about in imprisoning drab veils. Finally she turned away, and sat down weakly. From where she sat, she saw the dripping cows shivering. She sat huddled down. She seemed trying to cuddle up against herself. Her hands, folded in her lap, seemed the only sight not terrifying that her eyes might consider.

"Presently the silence of the room was broken with a little sob. She looked up. Christie's little sister, standing near the window, was just turning away from it.... She felt deserted. Big tears were running slowly down her face. She looked like a neglected, ragged, little heartbroken waif.

"Barbara started from her chair. That moment her face showed she had forgotten the surrounding desolations. She ran and gathered the child into her arms. She sat down with her in her lap. The little Jeannie, finding herself caressed, began crying lustily. The new mother kissed her. She caressed her. She soothed her, coaxing her into quietness. She told her little stories. She sang little songs, examining thoughtfully the poor little garments she wore. Dusk came upon them as they sat consoling each other. Barbara demanded help then of the child. Jeannie must show her where all the things were kept which were needed for the supper. They would make some little cakes together. Jeannie grew important and happy.

"Dod's eyes fairly bulged with amazement when he saw that supper table. Nothing of the sort had been set before him in that kitchen. His new mother made no apologies.... " Her husband protested, "We don't have cake every day."

"I do," she said placidly. "I like a wee cake with my tea."

Perhaps Barbara McNair made Scottish rock cakes. Given the meagre contents of the pantry, theycould not have been too fancy.

How Peony Will Travel

 

Before I read The Able McLaughlins, I never knew the tremendous efforts of women who pioneered the west to bring with them precious flowering bushes and plants to grow in their new homesteads on the prairie.

I learned about it through a story of one of my favorite characters in The Able McLaughlins, Barbara McNair, the second wife of a homesteading Scot. Mr. McNair had left his first wife and children to return to Scotland to settle a land dispute, but his wife, wrung out with frontier life, died before he could return. Learning of her death, he wedded a woman in Scotland and brought her back to the Iowa prairie with him. She was bitterly disappointed to see her new abode, as it seems Mr. McNair may have been guilty of false advertising. One day, she accompanied her husband to town, and while he was buying supplies, she stalked up and down the streets until she finally found a house with a garden. She asked the owner where she had gotten the flowers, and the owner took her to an older home in town. The lady of this house came out to greet them in her garden and then fetched her spade to give Mrs. McNair a peony plant to grow at the McNair homestead out on the prairie.

Mrs. McNair asked the women where she had gotten the peony, and here is the answer:

"The peony her mother had brought from eastern to western Ohio many years ago, and when she had died, her daughter had chosen the peony for her share of the estate. Her mother had got it from her mother, who came a bride to Ohio from western New York, clasping it against her noisy heart, out of the way of the high waters her husband had led her horse through, across unbridged streams, cherishing it more resolutely than the household stuffs which had to be abandoned in pathless woods. Her great-grandfather had brought it west in New York in his saddle bag, soon after Washington's inauguration as he returned from New York City. She supposed before that the Dutch had maybe brought it from Holland to Long Island. There had been tulips, too, but the pigs had eaten them in Ohio. She had wondered sometimes if it was the fate of the peony to be carried clear to the Pacific by lonely women. At least, if she gave a bit of it to Mrs. McNair, it would be that much farther west on its way to its destination, which she, for one, hoped it might soon reach, so that there would be some rest for women."

The Able McLaughlins by an Able Writer

 

The Iowa prairie as it might have looked when the Able McLaughlins farmed it in the mid-19th century.

Margaret Wilson won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize with her novel The Able McLaughlins, about a Scottish group of families who had transplanted themselves to the Iowa prairie from Scotland and carved farms out of the prairie. When we meet them, their children, born in the United States, are nearing adulthood, the boys who survived just coming home from service for the North in the Civil War.

The story is fairly simple. The young man Wullie McLaughlin comes home wounded from the war and suddenly sees his childhood friend, Chirstie McNair, whom he remembered as a wee lass, in an altogether different light. He intends to marry her and, her behavior conveys, she would agree. He goes back to battlefield, but when he returns at war's end, the girl will have nothing to do with him. The plot revolves around the resolution to this conumdrum. 

But the book is called The Able McLaughlins, and the story of Wullie and Chirstie functions as the heightened surfaces of a bas-relief parade of figures and scenes, as Wilson brings to life the type of Scottish community in Iowa into which she was born in 1882. At various points, she suddenly shifts the narrative for a brief second to that of the memoirist writing a tale of her grandparents--like a quick lifting and shutting of a curtain.

 

As with so many American families in the 19th century, the McLaughlins and their fellow Scot Presbyterians built their farms from scratch, and Wilson portrays them as competent and successful over the span of just one generation. The families are all of a community, bound together not only by their momentous and risky undertaking, but even more tightly by their devotion to their religion, the Covenant, and their reliance on the Bible as the practical guide for every aspect of life.

Wilson gives this community a voice of its own in the book, but we hear it as if we were in the room with them, sitting at the big table spread with remains of a community meal, as children are ushered into their beds, and the adults are all chewing on the events of the day, seeing if their points of view match, groping in relaxed chatter to a community consensus.

As with Conrad Richter's The Trees, Wilson writes her novel in lyrical imitation of the language of her characters, the talk she must have heard as a child and young girl. The rhythm of the language--moving through descriptions of work and prairie and house, to the inner most thoughts of the characters, to the gatherings and interactions of the wider community--creates a current that keeps the reader swiftly coarsing through the pages, until... much too soon... it's over.

Confession

I bought this book for its cover: Christmas Stories, Everyman's Library.  Happy though that it begins  with Charles Dickens.

A Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff

Calm Morning by Frank Weston Benson, 1904

This book published by Persephone Post (No. 67) is a snapshot taken of a family on their annual two-week vacation to the southern coastal town of Bognor Regis, England, where they have holidayed for the past 20 years. As the book opens, we see Mr. and Mrs. Stevens beginning their mental and physical preparations for the grand excursion with their three children: Mary and Dick, both of whom are now out of high school and working, and younger, busy, and enthusiastic Ernie.  This may be their last vacation as a family, as Mr. Stevens notes at the outset: "How splendid it all was!--the whole family going away together again, after those dark, half-thrown hints from Dick and Mary about separate holidays with their friends. Thank God they had come to nothing!"

Sherriff evokes that delicious savoring of every moment of a happy vacation, and shows that their yearly carefree two weeks at the seaside have built up a monument of memories in the minds of each family member that binds them together.

With attention to domestic detail and the thoughts of especially Mr. Stevens and his two older children, A Fortnight in September is a snapshot of middle-middle-class life in Britain between the two wars. Money is tight, hopes have been disappointed, the future is uncertain. In this frame, the Stevens family shows loyalty, determination, prudence, and forebearance.

The book reminded me of the film, This Happy Breed, which tells the story of a similar family in the same time period. But whereas the family in "the happy breed" is actually happy, often joking with one another, and socialable with neighbors and relatives, the Stevens family seems more isolated and far more nervous about their station in life and of maintaining proprieties. For instance, the train trip to Bognor Regis is described in detail from the standpoint of Mr. Stevens, who is extremely anxious about getting seats, getting tickets, getting the train connection, getting everyone on board. All travelers are nervous, but I found myself irritated that I had to read about Mr. Stevens' anxiety, which was all for naught anyway. But this nervousness permeates his thoughts, and although I respected him for his stalwartness and care for his family, I didn't enjoy him; he seems encased in his logistical and social fears.

Mrs. Stevens, we learn in the first chapter, does not actually savor these vacations like the rest of the family because she does not like the sea. Good woman that she is, she never complains or tries to persuade her husband of an alternative. She goes enjoys the holiday as best she can. The author effectively dispenses with Mrs. Stevens as an emotional pole for her family--she is a loving and devoted caretaker, but throughout the rest of the book we never hear much of her inner thoughts. This imbalance weakens the book considerably.

Overall, the book was a disappointment, not because I was looking for a more robust plot, but because I felt that the author had painted a portrait that diminished the quality of the people portrayed by focusing on what was on their minds, rather than in their hearts.

Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker

Golden Afternoon by Thomas George Sotter, 1935

Recently a friend asked me which country I would most like to visit and I answered Montana. Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker gave me a chance to go. Written in 1944, the book tells the story of a young woman and her experiences in love and work. She is the daughter of a rancher transplanted from Vermont after marrying a Russian peasant girl he had met when wounded in Archangel, Russia, at the end of World War I. His New England family did not take kindly to Anna and to escape the wounds of disapproval and unkindness, the two took up an offer of free land and moved to Montana to try a living as dry land wheat farmers.

Written in the first person by the couple's young daughter and only child, Ellen, Winter Wheat is a medley of love stories: the young love between Ellen and her fiance Gil, whom she meets in her first year at college; the subterranean love of her parents for each other; her parents' love for Ellen; and the love of a young widower for his young son, a family that Ellen comes to know when she spends a half year teaching in a one-room schoolhouse far out in the prairie.

The other love that fills the book is Ellen's love of the sky and land of Montana. Walker's descriptions of the terrain are the constant frame of the story and give an Easterner like me a sense of what it must be like to see such a big sky and open land. Walker herself was, like me, raised in Philadelphia. She moved out West with her husband, a medical doctor. Perhaps it takes an Easterner to appreciate the gigantic vistas of the West, since for the most part we are hemmed in by hills and trees.

Mrs. Walker also makes us acutely aware of the way in which the extreme hard work and isolation--the lack of leisure or luxury--for those who eeked out a living on the prairie could lead to a kind of de-culturation, in comparison to life in the East--a fact of life that many Western wives, mothers, and teachers such as Ellen fought to overcome.

This is the first book I have ever read of Mildred Walker's, and I intend to read more. I found that she examined real life, described the real work of ranching and school-teaching. Nothing was tied up in a neat and facile bow; the story bears a greater resemblance to the uncertainties, confusions, and discoveries of real life, and with the miracle of the land and its fruit.

The Pattern of Perfection by Nancy Hale

Nancy Hale

The Pattern of Perfection by Nancy Hale (1908-1988), a collection of thirteen short stories, definitely falls into that genre disdainfully labeled by some as domestic fiction. There's even a recipe tucked into the prose.

Domestic, but not sentimental. Mostly written in the 1950s, the stories hover on  love, marriage, divorce, children, grandchildren, changes in place, and the succession of the generations. Hale's language is brisk and almost airy. Reading them is like taking a walk on a breezy warm day in March. But movement is driven not by plot; a mother returns her child to boarding school, in "Slow Boat to China"; a grandmother in New England takes her grandson for a boat ride in "Flotsam"; a young widow takes her five-year-old son to the graduation at her late husband's college. On a Halloween evening in "The Haunting," a widowed grandmother watches her daughter, newly separated from her husband and now back home with her two children, go trick or treating. Contemplation, memory, self-revelation are the themes.

Some stories center on displaced northerners in the South, as Hale was herself, moving from New York to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1936, where she lived for the rest of her life. In the story "A Pattern of Perfection," Hale touches on disparities between the northern and southern way of life and the longing for home. "A New Place" tells of the frustration and discoveries of a northern woman recently moved to Virginia  as she attempts to meet the doyen who lives next door.

I liked all these stories by Nancy Hale, whom I encountered thanks to Frisbee: A Book Journal. Hale was born in Boston and was the daughter of two painters, Philip L. Hale and Lilian Westcott Hale. Although her parents were artists, she grew up in the environment of proper Boston society and then shifted her venue to New York City in 1928, where she worked as an editorial assistant and part-time model for Vogue and then as a reporter and fiction writer.

The Crochet Lesson by Mary Cassatt, 1913. Hale wrote a biography of Mary Cassatt in 1975.

With her work at Vogue, Hale was conversant with the world of fashion, as she displays in her story "A Curious Lapse," in which a chic New York woman comes to Virginia to visit with her old friend and former employer. Just for fun, here is a snippet of the New Yorker's thoughts as she strolls through the little Virginia town:

"Then she passed on to Miss Holly's Dress Shop, next door. There were four dresses in the shop window. One was coin-dotted pink organdy; one striped blue-and-white chambray; the third navy linen. But it was the red print, with its little jacket displayed half off the shoulder, on which Vera's gaze seemed to focus with fatal intensity. The little dress--its price was on it, $16.95--stood out from its surroundings as if speaking to her.

"She knew exactly what should be done to it. First, of course, she would rip the white flower off the lapel of the jacket. Then the bits of machine smocking below the shoulder yoke, on the dress, would have to be ripped out and replaced with hand smocking; it would take the whole evening, but the effect gained, of excellence and quality, would be worth it. The belt of the dress would be improved by changing its buckle to a better one; she would be sure to find something on an old dress. On the lapel, in place of the flower, she would wear a good pin. The pearl circlet her mother had given her on her graduation from high school leaped to mind.

"And with the costume she would wear plain white kid pumps. There were some in Howard's, for $5.50. Plain white cotton gloves. Plain white envelope purse, like the one for $3.95 in Howard's. As for a hat--far smarter than any hat she could afford to buy would be a wreath of red and white flowers from Woolworth's, set straight on top of her head like a little crown, with a bit of red veil. The flowers would, of course, be shoddy stuff; the whole style of them would lie in their being fresh. After two or three wearings she would buy new ones.

"The whole would give a smart effect. Unusual. Clever. Striking to wear to a dessert bridge, or for an evening date at Lake Pearl.

"It was all such an art: keeping canvas shoes startlingly white by using a cake of Bon Ami; and wearing white ten-cent-store jewelry chosen for its plainness when everybody else was buying the fancy pieces; and making a hat out of a a black velvet clip and two real pink carnations; and ripping the machine tucks out of the bosom of a blouse to put them all back with a fine needle and one-fifty thread; and making pale blue batiste underclothes in the evening..."

Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Rawlings: A Florida Friendship

Zora Neale Hurston: a great lady.

Two Florida writers, bent on translating their Florida environs for the outside world--Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Rawlings--were friends, I was delighted to discover when I heard about the book Crossing the Creek: The Literary Friendship of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings by Anna Lillios.  Hurston (1891-1960) grew up in Florida, while Rawlings (1896-1953) moved to Cross Creek, Florida, in 1928.

Cast out of her family home in her teens, Hurston was an African-American of fortitude who fought  hard to attain an education and became an artist of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Rawlings was a white woman from Washington, D.C., who bought her Florida farm with inheritance money from her father. Despite the gaping differences in background, these two women were natural friends joined by their shared interests in writing and their love of Florida and their communities.

By the time these women met in 1940, both had already written their most famous works. Rawlings won the Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling in 1939, and Hurston had written Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937.

Rawlings was friends with writers such as Marcia Davenport (Valley of Decision), Ellen Glasgow (In This Our Life, Pulitzer Prize 1942), and Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind) and was associated with Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel), Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings at her farm gate.

Hurston had forged friendships and collaborations with such Harlem literati as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson (The Book of American Spirituals), and Wallace Thurman (The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life). She was also a lifelong friend of the writer Fanny Hurst (Imitation of Life). However, Hurston's achingly beautiful Their Eyes Were Watching God came under fire from such famous African-American writers as Richard Wright (Native Son), because it lacked the protest themes that Wright thought literature should carry for the fight for justice for African Americans.

At the point that Hurston and Rawlings met, Hurston was already being shoved out of the Harlem Renaissance milieu. Despite this political pressure, she stuck to her belief that African Americans had to maintain their independence and concentrate on their own education and work, an outlook that resonates the view of George Washington Carver, first president of Tuskegee University.

While it is unclear how or when the two Florida writers met, Idella Parker, author of the memoir Idella: Marjorie Rawlings' "Perfect Maid", gives an account of Hurston's first visit to Rawlings' farm. Parker writes that she was surprised to see that the expected visitor was black and "here was Mrs. Rawlings, inviting her in and sitting her down on the porch like she was the queen of England!" The two spent all afternoon together, drinking and talking, and it became clear that Ms. Hurston was in no shape to drive home. Rawlings then directed that Hurston stay with Parker in the servants' house, even though Rawlings had two empty bedrooms in the farmhouse.

Marjorie Rawlings' farmhouse in Cross Creek, Florida. She wrote at a desk on the screened porch.

In 1942, Rawlings invited Hurston to speak to her class at Florida Normal, and then to tea at her husband's segregated hotel in Saint Augustine. This caused Rawlings some internal consternation as she intimated to her friend, Edith Pope, she felt like a coward bringing Hurston into the hotel through the back stairs, since she considered Hurston "a most ingratiating personality, a brilliant mind, and [with a] fundamental wisdom that shames most whites."

Later that year Hurston wrote a letter to Rawlings in praise of Cross Creek: "You turned your inside light on their community life, and it broke like day..." and invited Rawlings to join her on her houseboat. Although encouraged by her editor Maxwell Perkins to do so, Rawlings declined, pleading involvement in a new book under difficult conditions, since Mrs. Parker had left her employ and her husband, Norman Baskins, was away at the war.

In response, Hurston wrote back that "I would be so glad to come and take everything off your hands until you are through with yours [book]. I know just what you need.... Really now, Miss Rawlings, if you find yourself losing your stride, let me help you out. I know so tragically what it means to be trying to concentrate and being nagged by the necessity of living."

Upon receipt of this letter, Marjorie Rawlings' views on race shifted dramatically. She wrote to her husband that the "Negro writer Zora Neale Hurston has done one of the most beautiful things I have ever known.... I shed tears over this woman's offer. She is an artist in her own right... She and Dr. Carver seem monumental to me. To transcend the humiliation of their position and being at the peak themselves, to have such graciousness.--Such bigness.... Her offer settles in my mind all doubts I have had about throwing myself into the fight for an honest chance for the Negro."

According to Lillios, "over the course of the decade, Rawlings would write and act in support of these rights."

Zora Neale Hurston's last home, in Fort Pierce, Florida.

When Hurston soon thereafter arrived at Rawlings' doorstep to help, they had a free-wheeling long discussion, which touched on racial issues, as reported in Rawlings' letters. This time Hurston slept in the farmhouse, "and I have never in my life been so glad that I was not a coward," Rawlings wrote her husband. "I had to hurdle an awfully wide ditch [Rawlings was involved in a local law suit at the time]. I was amazed to find that my own prejudices were so deep. It has always surprised me that my thinking is so Southern. But I felt that if I ever was to prove my humanitarian and moral beliefs, even it if it cost me the lawsuit, I must do it then."

From then on, Rawlings argued with friends and Florida public figures against racial segregation and in 1948 spoke at the African American Fisk University, staying with the university president. Over the next years, the friendship between these two women was suspended, as Hurston moved north again, and then renewed in the early 1950s, when Hurston was back in Florida. In 1952, Rawlings responded to a letter from Hurston:

Now you are at Belle Glade and I am at Cross Creek and we are both working like Lucifer trying to keep from getting kicked out of heaven, and I shall not be going South in the State, but if you happen to come prowling further North, do stop by at least for overnight or even longer. It might do us both good to compare notes from hell. I have so much to tell you. With love, Marjorie Rawlings

Zora Neale Hurston's hand-painted Christmas card to Rawlings and her husband in 1948.

But Hurston was unable to make the trip and was distraught when she learned that Rawlings had died suddenly on December 14, 1953. Writing to her friend Mary Holland, Hurston reported that she "was so depressed by the death of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings."

Lillios' account of the Hurston-Rawlings friendship is marred by superimposition of modern political correctness on both parties, although she gives Rawlings credit for changing her views and behavior toward African Americans. Rawlings was a product of her time, and we can be thankful that many people combined, via all kinds of pathways, to end segregation. But to me, Lillios' racial binoculars miss the point. Both Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Rawlings were women writers who had sought out community, loved their communities, and wrote about them in celebration. For both women, connection with and extension to others was paramount, the mother lode of human existence and therefore art. Their friendship was a natural, and we can be grateful that the pathways of these two Floridians crossed and that they drew sustenance from each other.

The Small Town as a Greek Chorus

New England Interior by Edmund Charles Tarbell, 1906. I wonder if the interior that is the actual subject of this painting is the private conversation these two women are having, which, one gets the feeling, is not meant to be overheard.

I enjoy novels that are situated in small towns, where the town itself becomes a kind of Greek chorus--a veritable player in the plot, through its commentary on the real or imagined behaviors and thoughts of the town's residents and the story's main characters. Sometimes, this Greek chorus steers the action to tragedy, as in William Maxwell's Time Will Darken It. To me, the presence of the small town enables us to see the characters in context--much like a photograph of a person surrounded by their particular milieu gives us unique clues about the subject.

In his 1947 short novel Always Young and Fair, Conrad Richter explains how the small town weaves a cloak of talk around its residents. The story concerns a beautiful and well-to-do young woman, Miss Lucy Markle, who refuses to marry but remains faithful to her fiance, Tom Grail, who had been killed in battle in the Philippines two years earlier. As Conrad explains the workings of the small town of Pine Mills, Pennsylvania:

So far as I know, very little of consequence was ever kept strictly secret in Pine Mills, not even in the brick confines of the big Markle House. Cousins, callers, and maids all dripped like leaky taps to the thirsty town. In those days Pine Mills followed its own dramas passionately, the actors appearing on the stage in person on its stage. Today we are addicted to the same stories as then, but we take them at second and third hand through the radio and moving picture, and the actors are seldom seen except in bloodless images, much less passed in flesh and blood and bade good morning to on the street.

Everyone in Pine Mills, I am sure, must have known Lucy Markle's story and followed it intensely as a serial. The reader did not have to wait a week or month to know the next installment. It was always imminent, might possibly come today, and meantime, additions, missing passages, and revealing phases were constantly being filled in by friends and passers-by. There was not one editor of commentator, but many. Most of the town, I think, approved and respected Lucy for her stand.... Death and dignity were taken rather seriously then, and a girl of character stood fast. Lucy was showing her Markle and Grandmother Mattson blood, they said. It would wear off in time, and meanwhile a year or two out of respect for Tom Grail would not hurt her. It was respect to Company G, to the town which was Company G, and to the U.S.A. After all, Tom Grail hadn't given just a year or two but the rest of his young and lighthearted life.

Such is the town commentary in the beginning of the novel. Although many stories have been written about people's strong drive to get out of the small town they found stifling precisely because of its Greek chorus effect, it may be difficult to escape the human need to be part of some kind of community through church and other institutions or band of mutual friends, all of which invites talk and commentary on the doings of each of its members.

"Society," for instance, plays the same role as the small town in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. In The Late George Appley by J.P. Marquand, Prodigal Women by Nancy Hale (1942), and Joy Street by Frances Parkinson Keyes, the word "Boston" conjures up not a place but the explicitly understood views and opinions emanating from Beacon Hill, which seems to serve as some kind of lighthouse shining its value-laden light on the behavior of all Bostonians.

In the 1970s American society sought to cast off fear of castigation for any type of behavior, but today both sides in the social issues debate have their puritanical and intolerant streaks that disparage the attitudes of others with a vituperation that would rival that of any small town biddy. Facebook, Twitter, and online commentary also seem to answer a need for immediate human connection--ironic in a world in which people fought to exchange small town prurience for the relative anonymity of the cities and the suburbs. And today, instead of nodding our heads about "Markle and Grandmother Mattson blood," we would note, significantly, Markle and Mattson genes.

Maybe you can take the human being out of the small town, but you can't take the small town out of the human being. We re-create it wherever we are.

"When There Was Nothing to Preserve, She Began to Pickle"

Pioneer ladies before a sod house on the Great Plains.

In her O Pioneers! Willa Cather captured the efforts to create real homes of the women who with their husbands first came to the harsh landscape of the Great Plains. Cather describes the mother of her Norwegian heroine Alexandra Bergson like this:

John Bergson [Alexandra's father] had married beneath him, but he had married a good wife. Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortable about her; perhaps it was her own love of comfort. For eleven years she had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of household order amid conditions that made order very difficult. Habit was very strong with Bergson, and her unremitting efforts to repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done a great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally and getting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had a log house, for instance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.

She missed the fish diet of her own country, and twice every summer she sent the boys to the river, twenty miles to the southward, to fish for channel cat. When the children were little she used to load them all into the wagon, the baby in its crib, and go fishing herself. Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve.  

Preserving was almost a mania with Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head and murmuring "What a pity!" When there was nothing to preserve, she began to pickle. The amount of sugar she used in these processes was sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources.

She was a good mother, but she was glad when her children were old enough not to be in her way in the kitchen. She had never quite forgiven John Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, now that she was there, she wanted to be left alone to reconstruct her old life in so far as that was possible. She could still take some comfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave, glass jars on the shelves, and sheets in the press. She disapproved of all her neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women thought her very proud. Once when Mrs. Bergson, on her way to Norway Creek, stopped to see old Mrs. Lee, the old woman hid in the haymow "for fear Mis' Bergson would catch her barefoot."

O Pioneers! is wonderful in many ways. Willa Cather is an American treasure.

Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant and Her Chickens

The farmyard by Beatrix Potter for The Tale of Mrs. Jemima Puddle-Duck

One last animal story from Mrs. Grant from the days when she was a "splendid farmer's wife."

"Ulys brought me all the new breeds of chickens: the Shanghais, the Brahmas, and the pretty little Bantams. The two little boys [the first two Grant children] and I used to greatly enjoy throwing handfuls of wheat and other grain to this beautiful feathery portion of our family. Of course, each of these distinguished foreigners had appropriate names: for instance, my large, beautiful silver-gray, with her proud, haughty step, I called 'Celeste' from the Celestial Empire, and her lord, 'The Great Mogul,' and I remember how a magnificent domestic cock with gorgeous plumage used to lord it over these clumsy foreigners, with only size to boast of. I noticed the same little tricks of gallantry in these foreign birds that could be noticed in ours. For instance, they would pretend to find some choice tidbit and would call loudly for the poor, innocent hens to come and share it, and every time these lords of the barnyards were fooling them and would quickly eat it up themselves.

"I must tell you of one instance which made me believe that chickens really understand the English language. Once after a heavy snowstorm, one of my women came in and asked if Jeff had not better put the chickens which were out in[to] the chickenhouse, 'as dem Chinese chickens did not know how to take care of themselves.' Very soon, I was informed that one of my pullets could not stand on her feet. I at once went out to the hennery to examine for myself. After giving the necessary directions for the poor thing's relief, I told Phyllis to bring out a bowl of cornmeal mixed with water. She had hardly started when the old cocks on the roosts aloft passed the word by a softly murmured cackle to their numerous families, and at once they all descended and surrounded me, looking wistfully and expectantly up at me. Of course, they were sent to bed well fed and were never again neglected in stormy weather."

P.S. Sadly, Beatrix Potter started publishing her stories in 1902, the year Mrs. Grant died. I think Mrs. Grant would have enjoyed them.

Mrs. Julia Dent Grant's Elephant Tales

For you, Gab.

In her memoirs Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant records two stories about elephants, and here they are.

The Tale of Mr. and Mrs. Elephant


Elephant by Rembrandt

"I remember once when walking with some friends in Paris we passed a cage which contained a pair of elephants which had just been fed. The male had already finished his portion and was looking sullenly at his mate, who quietly and generously gathered large bundles of hers and threw them to her lord without even turning her eyes in his direction. He quietly munched the largest part of Mrs. Elephant's dinner without once nodding his thanks, thus showing he was from the East."

How Very Smart Elephants Are


Elephant Head by Laura H

"I can only recall our visit to the woodyards of Moulmein [Burma] and the wonderful sagacity of the elephants, who were the chief workmen at these yards. These brutes seemed to have human intelligence. A great chain was fastened to one of their feet. They would walk past a great huge log of teakwoood, let the chain drag not quite past the log, then, with one tusk for a lever, hoist the log on the chain, fasten it securely, and walk off with their loads to the pile of logs. Taking one end, they would hoist it up and place it securely, then take the other end of the log and do likewise. They would then walk off and look to see if it were placed straight, turning their heads first to one side and then to the other, and if it were not in line they would (and did) walk up to the end of the pile and push the log they had carried further on and a trifle back. Their intelligence is wonderful!"

The Indomitable and Fun-Loving Julia Dent Grant

Monument to Mrs. Julia Dent Grant in Galena, Illinois.

This statue of Julia Dent Grant, I believe, shows the vitality of the beloved wife of President and General Ulysses S. Grant. Because she was afflicted with strabismus (lazy eye), she never permitted her picture to be taken head-on, but always turned her head to the side. The sharp features of her profile and the 19th-century propensity to put on a serious face for the photographer have combined to leave us no photograph that captures the spirit of Mrs. Grant, a woman who was known then and ever since as the necessary source of strength for the great military commander.

Some may think that a man who was prone to alcoholism, who left home for long periods of time for Army duty, who was practically incapable of earning a living when not on active military duty would not a good husband make. But Julia, according to her own telling in The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant and as confirmed by her children, never had any problem with or criticism of General Grant, and they led a full married life, raising four children, moving from home to home over the course of decades, and achieving what was by all accounts an enduring and affectionate relationship that was a joy to them both. Grant, says her children, was never happier than to be at home with his wife and their offspring. Mrs. Grant dictated these memoirs for her grandchildren, and it was only in 1975, 73 years after her death, that they were published.

Despite her dour photographic poses, her book shows Mrs. Grant was a very lively person, embracing both life and people. She, as her husband, loved company and the occasion of having company. But in contrast to Grant, who she said was generally a quiet man in social gatherings, she appears to have been quite a talker, and one gets the impression that during their world tour after Grant left the White House, she kept up a running narrative of their adventures as they were happening. She may have been a "plain Jane," as she says of herself, and quite small in stature, but her personality was ashimmer with warmth, vibrance, and enthusiasm.


The Dent plantation, White Haven, where Julia was born and spent many months when her husband was away.

Julia Dent was born in 1826, the fifth child of a slave-owning family in Missouri. According to her memoirs (and of course we may hesitate to believe everything she says), she never knew a harsh word from her parents, was indulged in terribly, and enjoyed a childhood of bliss that anyone would envy. She recalls playing with her sisters and children of slaves in the woods all day and encountering all kinds of wild and domesticated animals. Her descriptions of the antebellum life at the Dent home, White Haven, are so charming, that the antebellum sections of Gone with the Wind seem social realism in comparison. Everyone was happy in this household, including the slaves--although their prompt departure from the Dent plantation upon the Emancipation Proclamation puts this somewhat in doubt.

Julia met Ulysses Grant, a friend of her brother's, in 1844, and they swiftly became friends thanks to Grant's continual efforts to be by her side. They went for long walks and horseback rides together, as Grant opened up in the warmth of her sunny soul. When he proposed, she was startled, she says, because she had never thought of him in that way and declined. But when he went away after his proposal, she missed him, and upon his return they became engaged, marrying in August 1848, after Grant returned from the Mexican War.

Julia Dent had pluck. She recalls one childhood day when she and her little sister wanted to pick some wild clematis that grew in a meadow on the other side of a flooded creek. At the time, Mrs. Grant relates, she had echoing in her mind the words of her preacher: "If ye have faith even as a grain of mustard seed, ye may move mountains and walk on the waters."

I informed Nell of my determination to make the crossing on the deepest and smoothest place, reminding her of what the preacher said about faith. She was much alarmed and timidly asked, "What is faith, sister?" In great superiority, I replied: "Little goose, believe that you can and you can."... I stepped out on the water and plunged in up to my armpits. I was surprised and looked back at Nell with a frightened smile. I went on, however, to the other side and scrambled up the bank--crushed flowers, dead butterflies, and wet little girl.

Wet or not, Miss Dent's can-do spirit must have surely struck a chord in Ulysses S. Grant.


Hardscrabble, one of the many domiciles in which Mrs. Grant lived during the iterant years of her married life.

From the genteel life of White Haven, Mrs. Grant found herself living with her husband and young children in a log-and-mud soddered home, which Grant built in Missouri as a homestead. This house was "so crude and homely I did not like it at all, but I did not say so. I got out all my pretty covers, baskets, books, etc., and tried to make it look home-like and comfortable, but this was hard to do. The little house looked so unattractive that we facetiously decided to call it Hardscrabble.”

She showed the same domestic spirit when she arrived at the White House in March 1869:

"I found the White House in utter confusion. I felt greatly discouraged, but after a few weeks things began to assume an appearance of order, ... and by autumn the house was in beautiful condition. After much thought and fatigue, I at last had the furniture arranged in suites, so that each room would have its own set. I found it scattered widely in the upper chambers. Chairs and lounges were recovered; the hall carpets, which were much worn and so ugly, I could not bear to look at them, were replaced."

Under her direction, the White House not only became a domicile suitable for the President of the United States, but also the social center of Washington, as Julia hosted constant dinners and other events during her eight years there. She sobbed all afternon the day she and her husband left the White House--I think not only because she would miss her life there but because she had lived there the longest with Grant. She thought of it as her real home and opened it up for grand hospitality to all Americans, including, she was emphatic, to African Americans.

Ulysses S. Grant is one of the military leaders I admire the most. As I was reading about him recently and about the strength he took from his wife, I decided to find out what kind of person she was. Her memoirs give us a glimpse of Grant in home life and of her devotion to him. Mrs. Grant of course comes under attack from today's feminists because she made no attempt to break through the boundaries in which society and her marriage had placed her--although she was her husband's confidante and wanted to be informed. With her sharp nose for danger, she saved Grant's life when he was targeted as part of the assassination plot against Lincoln.

There is no doubt that Ulysses Grant thoroughly enjoyed her. Here she relates a story of the final leg of their trip round the world:

We had a delightful sail up the coast of Portland; that is, we had a pleasant party, but the sea was rather rough. I remember how the ship tossed and pitched. I said to the Captain: "I fear you have not placed your ballast as it ought to be. You should have it distributed more widely." The General [Grant] was surprised at this speech and said: "Really, Mrs. Grant, I was not aware that you know how to ballast a ship." "Nor do I," I replied, "but if you will remember, when we were coasting along the Spanish shore, the ship behaved exactly like this one. It careened over and returned with a thud. Well, I heard two Englishmen talking about it and they said the ballast was too much in the center of the ship and it was very dangerous." The Captain said: "There is a great deal in what you say, Madam, and as soon as we get into port I will see that all is made right."

Julia Dent Grant (fourth from left) and Ulysses S. Grant (fifth from left) after a descent into a mine in Virginia City, Nevada. "The General made a wager with Mr. Mackay that I would not venture down the shaft. I came out all equipped for a descent into its gloomy depths and was just about to reconsider when Mr. Mackay said to me in a low tone, 'Don't give up going. The General has bet money that you would back out.' I calmly stepped on the platform. The General looked surprised and said: 'We descend one thousand seven hundred feet. Are you going?' 'Yes,' I said, with a look of reproach and triumph. So the General lost his wager when he bet against me."

Conrad Richter's Early Americana

A wagon train wends its way west along the Santa Fe Trail.

In 1928 the American author Conrad Richter and his family pulled up stakes and moved from eastern Pennsylvania to New Mexico in the hopes of improving his wife's health. Transplanted to totally unfamiliar territory, he set about to unearth the stories of the families who had settled there, digested old diaries and letters, and gleaned all he could from the local library on the history of the region and how the lives of its settlers and their descendants had changed over time. The most famous result of this work is his Sea of Grass, published in 1937, which centers on the conflict between cattle ranchers and homesteaders and the characters of both. But his first output from his yarn gathering was his collection of nine short stories, Early Americana.

Many of these stories revolve around the coming together of a young man and woman in marriage carve their place in the vast prairies west of Saint Louis, but the romance is always understated, if made explicit at all. Lives travel tracks that bring them together and the rest is assumed--except that the land and the difficulties of settling it present nearly insurmountable obstacles that are unimaginable today but that come to life under Richter's pen: gunfights on a betrothal night, drought that kills the cattle herd a young man had built up so he could marry, Indian attacks that destroy a young man's family.


Cowboy in 1888. Mutual respect and partnership in hard work were the basis of a marriage, rather than romance.

So in "New Home" we wait with a young wife while her husband goes off to settle the ownership of the land and is gone far longer than either had anticipated. Her waiting is palpable, and we are in pain with our sympathy for her, hoping against hope that he returns. In "Frontier Woman," a Southern belle makes the arduous journey west after the Civil War to lead a new life, where her nearest neighbor will be 80 miles off, and contemplates her future:

Farther, much farther back, she felt the ravaged gardens of the South, the Confederate exodus through the piny woods, the vast watery fissure of the Mississippi, and the black trail across the illimitable prairie. And now in a kind of mirage she saw herself out on the desolate cap rock,...giving birth to Craig Weatherill's children, herself their teacher in a rambling adobe ranch house, nursing them without hope of a doctor, keeping lonely vigils, helping in times of attack to load the guns for the men, trying to teach indifferent hands some of the declicate recipes of the South, inevitably homesick, never entirely forgiving the hard land of her husband--a frontier woman.

In one of the most dramatic stories, "Smoke on the Prairie," Richter explores both the upheaval that came with the railroad and its replacement of the long wagon trains that has first brought people from the east along the Santa Fe Trail.

As always, Richter shows his deep respect for women and their work. Women waiting for their husbands to return from a haul to the market or from a sojourn to find a lost cow kept themselves busy as a way of stopping up their floodtide of anxiety.

Her hands kept eternally busy. She washed and ironed, heating the heavy smoothing iron by setting it upright on the hearth before the coals. She sat daily over winter socks for Pleas and the baby, one foot moving the cradle as she knitted. Morning or afternoon she let the sheep from the high corral and followed on foot over the range, resting with her baby on the grass in cedar shade.

Pleas had set up a hopper for the oak ash. In the big copper kettle brought from Arkansas she boiled wood ashes. When the lye dissolved the end of a feather, she added accumulated greases and tallow and boiled a small batch of soap, cut the cooling mixture into yellow-gray bars and piled them on the mantel to dry. She soaked a flint-dry deerskin in strong suds of lye soap, water, and a spoonful of lard; scraped off the hair with an old corn knife; let it remain by the warm hearth all night; wrung, pulled, and stretched it next day until perfectly dry, when it becomes soft and pliable as cloth and waited only her shears and thread for gloves or clothes.

Richter never lets us forget for a second the land that his characters inhabit. We imbibe it through their eyes and his lyrical voice:

They rode slowly on, while the luminous purple began to appear like violet mist on the hills. It spread to the plains, bathing them in color. The home ranch in the wide mouth of Monica Canyon ahead became an island of buildings, corrals, and windmill swimming in a bright velvet sea. The color seemed to float in the air about them. They breathed it, road through it.

Delta Wedding Celebration Fare

In Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, on the night before the wedding, all the family has gathered at the Fairchild house for a family celebratory meal. Here's what Ellen Fairchild served:

"They had been eating chicken and ham and dressing and gravy, and good, black snap beans, greens, butter beans, okra, corn on the cob, all kinds of relish, and watermelon rind preserves, and that good bread--their plates were loaded with corncobs and little piles of bones, and their glasses drained down to blackened leaves of mint, and the silver bread baskets lined with crumbs.... Then Roxie was putting a large plate of whole peaches in syrup and a slice of coconut cake" on the table."

The wedding dinner featured chicken salad--"two or three tubs and we've got it covered on ice"--along with cold lobster aspic, champagne, and of course, the cake. There was always cake, at all meals, it seems, served with fruit, and for all snacks and for tea when the aunts or anyone else came to visit.

Shown here is my favorite southern cookbook: The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock.