A little Western tour--#1

 

I suppose if Red Cloud, Nebraska, has anything to do with it, the town's most favored daughter, Willa Cather, will never pass away. She's long gone, died already in 1947, but she remains a novelist of world stature, having won the Pulitzer, in 1922, for her novel One of Ours, a novel about the loss of single soldier in "the war to end all wars." 

Had she not won that Pulitzer, I can't help but think the town would still celebrate her and her writing anyway because it wasn't winning the Pulitzer that created her prominence and mjany millions of beloved readers; it was her subject matter, what she wrote about. Look at this:

The sign identifies this little brick church on an unpaved street in town (they're just about all unpaved down toward the tracks) as St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church. Willa Cather never attended there, but if you take the tour the beautifully designed new Willa Cather Center advises, you'll note the place when you pass by, not because any Cathers ever attended (they were Baptist, then Episcopal), but because, as the sign explains, Anna Pavelka did.

And who is Anna Pavelka, you ask? No, Willa Cather never married. Anna wasn't a daughter. In fact, Ms. Cather's sexual orientation remains something of a mystery. But if any writers could be said to have "mothered" or "fathered" a live human being, Cather would most certainly be among them. Anna Pavelka is the prototype for Tony Shimerda, Antonia Shimerda, whose immigrant family homesteaded alongside the Cathers out north and west of town, a woman who married a local farmer, and lived out her life in the harsh world of the American Great Plains.

So let's get this straight. You go to Red Cloud, NE, just across the Republican River from Kansas, down in south-central Nebraska, you pick up to town tour guide from the Willa Cather Center (there's a country tour guide too--grab one while you're at it), and you follow directions. Soon enough you find this little brick church, kept up nicely, where, the sign says, ". . .Anna Pavelka, the Antonia of Cather's well-loved novel My Antonia, was married and here her first child was baptized." 

So what you're visiting is a site that has, well, nothing to do personally with Willa Cather, but much to do with the life of the prototype for a character in a novel, a beloved novel and a beloved character. The place is kept up for what some might consider a reason only tangential to the famous novelist herself, but then, if you know My Antonia, Tony Shimerda is not just a random character but the American pioneer woman, an earth-mother figure who suffers through all kinds of trials and difficulties but never quite stops smiling. 

When Willa Cather was a long-time resident out east and rarely made it back to Red Cloud, she sent Anna Pavelka money because her xx-large pioneer family--here she is with husband and kids--

needed a washing machine, which is what Anna (seated) bought with Willa's Christmas gift. 

Once again, Cather never married, never had children. But in some odd literary and imaginative sense of the word, she had something of a child in a woman she watched grow up into a powerhouse pioneer. Don't know which of the three boys in the back row is the eldest, but no matter. Choose any one of them--maybe the one directly behind Anna, and simply assume that one to be the one baptized in St. Juliana Falconieri, that little brick church on a bumpy, unpaved street in a part of town that is no more really, the only well-kept place anywhere near. 

All because of Willa. No, all because of Tony the Beloved. I took students through My Antonia for ten years maybe, as long as I taught a course in American novels. I don't think I ever had a student that didn't enjoy the novel.

And love Tony Shimerda.