Josephine Donovan's Black Soil

(continued from yesterday)

In a blizzard reminiscent of the famous Children’s Blizzard of 1888, a little Dutch boy dies when the kids are sent home as the snow begins to fall. Then, when the blizzard unfurls its anger, Little Benny Hurd leaves the Connors kids for home is in another direction. Sadly, he never gets there. His body is found a few days later. The puppy he’d been given by one of the Conners kids earlier that morning was still wrapped in his jacket. His grandparents leave Siouxland. Not everyone is made of tough enough stuff.

People die on the prairie, Benny Hurd among them. Ms. Donovan gives the number of chapters to the story of Johann Hoepner, an aristocratic young man from Germany, a boy escaping the military draft. Johann is just what Nell so desires—he’s upper class, well-educated, and can speak seven languages. A sweetheart back in Germany awaits his signal that a new home awaits her in a new land.

But things don’t work out for Johann Hoepner. The land is a stern taskmaster, time passes and he doesn’t appear able to escape the mud soddie people helped him build when he came. Finally, when the woman he loves stop writing, Johann takes out a rope and ends his life beneath a cottonwood.

Nell is heartbroken, not only because the community lost one of its own, but also because his death kindles once more her grievous fear that this place can kill, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

If there were a church fight or two, the novel could well have been written by a Dutch Calvinist. There isn’t. The Connors are Roman Catholic, and Nell is bountifully religious, close to God, constantly in prayer. For years, Nell insisted that when their foster child, Sheila, was of age, she’d be sent back east for the kind of education her children were sadly missing. It’s her dream. It’s the vision that allows her to live out here at the edge of the frontier. But when that time comes, Sheila decides otherwise.

Nell’s heart and will are broken. Her only comfort is that all of this is somehow, unthinkably, in God’s will. She goes alone to her bedroom, bearing the burden of what she believes to be her failure, then lies their quietly, admitting no one, seeing no one.

In her calm she realized that in this as in all other things she must be reconciled to His indomitable will. Her spirit of fight was of no avail; she must accept fate. Her recent flash of anger went out like the lightning of a storm. She got up from her bed with a feeling akin to that experienced after the birth of her children here in this room—she had been down in the valley for a while, but she was up in the heights again.

And then she says, “It’s God’s will.” And with that, “Nell bathed her face, combed her hair, changed her wrapper, and rattled up some custard pies for the men’s dinner.”

Sheila’s decision is to follow a man who loves her, a Native, a Yankton Sioux from just on the other side of the Big Sioux River. There’s a racial story here too, a complicated little mystery that opens up at the end of the novel.

But the novel’s heart has less to do with race than it does with place. Wild Goose, the Lakota man who loves Sheila, may well be more of a symbol than a human being, because when Sheila leaves with him for the west, for deeper and even less “civilized” frontier, Nell’s loss couldn’t be more profound.

But what her daughter’s decision determines is that, for Nell Connors, life is here too, on the prairie, in a community of tough ethnics that fight at the drop of a hat or a stolen pitchfork.

And then there’s the railroad. It’s come to town for the first time, creating a celebration like none other this little fledgling community has ever seen. What’s more, it is, to Nell Connors, a kind of redeemer. Once upon a time, it had dropped them off at the far edge of any community. Once upon a time it had loosed them from the life they’d once lived, dumped them unfeelingly into an unwelcoming world, a sea of grass where as far you could see, there seemed to be nothing at all.

It’s the railroad that saves her, a link with her own childhood and the blessings of an established community with good schools and endless opportunities. When the railroad comes to town, linking old and new, Nell Connors finds herself ready to settle down.

Black Soil is not a great novel. Donovan’s power of description occasionally shines in glorious portraits of the prairie beauty that belie Nell’s great fears; but Donovan wanders through several characters’ perceptions with an annoying omniscience, and the perils of the prairie—grasshoppers, prairie fires--are what one might expect.

Still, for those of us who live here, Black Soil is a great read, even if it’s not great literature. It’s a great read because it brings us back to a time when those of us with roots here need to remember. It wasn’t always easy. Farming wasn’t always a business, and opportunity was as abundant as a bin-busting harvest.

That we don’t know our history better allows, even generates a certain kind of arrogance. To read Black Soil today, 150 years after white folks like the Collins came to Siouxland to seek a better life, no matter where they came from, is humbling, something to think about when you pass a tractor and a planter this spring, something to consider when you look up and down endless rows of corn and beans stretching into a horizon that never ends.