The Power of Story

 

The boy on this picture is my grandfather, who lived with his immigrant parents on a farm in the middle of South Dakota Dutch settlement for a couple of years. His father and mother didn't stay out there long; there were hard years, and many who'd come, seeking a new life on cheap land, eventually pulled up stakes and departed back east. Successive droughts, hungry hoppers, and intense heat and cold successfully killed off the dreams that brought them there.

My grandfather graduated from high school in Parkersburg, Iowa, in 1898, then left for Michigan, where he graduated from the Theologische School of the Hollandsche Christielijke Gereformeerde Kerk in June, 1900 (his diploma is on the wall); and from seminary a few years later.

Somewhere along the line, he married a sweet woman--or so I've always heard--who was also a distinguished seminary professor's daughter.

They're all long gone now, of course, so I can only speculate; but I'm quite sure the homesteader's son "married up." After all, the distinguished professor was from Holland, from the old country.

After graduation, Grandpa's first church was, oddly enough, back in rural South Dakota--not Harrison, the place he'd left as a boy, but Bemis, farther east, but just as rural.

We have letters from the Professor to his son-in-law and daughter, telling them that he's doing all he can in Michigan to get them out of that place--and soon. The distinguished professor clearly assumed Bemis, South Dakota, to be the end of the world.

The Rev. John C. Schaap, my grandfather, and his wife stayed in South Dakota a bit less than two years before taking another church, this one safely back in Michigan, in civilization once more.

I would love to know what went on in Bemis, South Dakota, for those two years. Grandma was just a young girl--was she homesick? Was it tough for her to adjust to being married? Did she despise South Dakota? Did the professor so deeply miss his darling daughter?--did his wife miss her? Did they really believe their sweet little girl couldn't survive the west?

There's more. When the Rev. Schaap decided on Bemis for that first call, he knew he had a sister there because one of the women in the picture above had married earlier and moved, with her husband and family, to the neighborhood of the church. Thus, while South Dakota may have been endless prairieland, and massively rural, and maybe even (by his father-in-law's standards) somewhat backward, the young married Schaaps weren't going somewhere completely foreign.

My grandmother--the professor's wife--died during WWII, when she and my grandfather had five stars on their front window, five kids in the war effort. She was not healthy, my father used to tell me. But every single living child--and she'd born ten--used to talk about my grandma's grace, her loving nature, her goodness. I believe them in great part because they all had her grace herself. The Schaap family were warm and wonderful people.

Some time ago, at a dinner for scholarship donors and recipients, I sat beside a distant relative, a descendent of that sister of the preacher, one of the young women in the picture above, the one who lived in Bemis, South Dakota, when Grandpa Schaap and his new, young, city wife made their short stay at that rural church.

When I mentioned my grandfather, he smiled. "You mean the one with that uppity wife?" he said, chuckling.

More than a century has passed since the Rev. Schaap went to Bemis, SD, and then left, the horses hardly rested. But the spin that this distant relative puts on a story I know from an entirely different side makes me marvel and even rejoice at the sheer power of story and how they animate our lives.

Hardly anyone else in the entire world could have that conversation--most of my relatives know nothing about my grandpa's whirlwind first charge. Few relatives of this distant cousin of mine, sitting next to me at the table, know a thing--or care--about what their great-grandmother thought of her little brother's wife or their quickly aborted stay out on the frontier.

But the story--and the spin--still exist and will be told, as it is here, right now, at least one more time.

The powers of myth in Native culture and religion are substantial. But we don't have to look to Sitting Bull to understand the strength of shared stories. They're all around, even within. 

I should really tell my relatives this story. Others should know :).