Josephine Donovan's Black Soil -- ii

(continued from yesterday)

In a blizzard reminiscent of the famous Children’s Blizzard of 1888, a 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--his own home is in another direction. Sadly, he never gets there. His body is found once spring melts the snow that took him. The puppy he’d been given by one of the Conners kids earlier that morning was still wrapped in his jacket, and like the boy, dead. His grandparents leave Siouxland. Not everyone is made of tough enough stuff.

Benny Hurd is not the only one to go to his death on the prairie. Ms. Donovan gives a hundred pages to the story of Johann Hoepner, an aristocratic young man from Germany, who is escaping the military draft. Johann is just what Nell so desires more of—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 well 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 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 of the era. 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 in Sheila's life, the young adoptee decides otherwise.

Nell’s heart and will are broken. Her only comfort is that all of this is somehow, unthinkably, 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.

She needs, as all of us do, to tell herself what her catechism has taught her to believe, that in this as in all other things she must be reconciled to His indomitable will. Her fighting spirit is of no avail; she must accept fate. Her anger went out like the lightning as the storm abated. She gets up from her bed with a feeling akin to that she experienced after the birth of her children here in this room—she had been in the valley of the shadow for a while, but she rises to the heights again.

And again 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, Wild Goose, a Yankton of mixed blood from regions just west. 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 Omaha 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. Late in the story, her Nell and Tim discover that the child they left when she was abandoned is of mixed blood herself. Nell’s loss couldn’t be more profound, not because Sheila is Native, but because Sheila's going back to Massachusetts, to civilization, had been manna to Nell's hungry soul. When she meets Wild Goose, her future is determined.

What her daughter’s decision determines for Nell Connors is that a good life can be had here too, on the prairie, in a fledgling community of ethnics who fight at the drop of a hat, a stolen pitchfork, or some silly sleight.

And then there’s the railroad. It’s come to town for the first time, creating a celebration like none other. To Nell Connors, it's a kind of redeemer. Once upon a time, it had dropped them off at the far edge of civilization, dropped them off where the rails no longer lay. Once upon a time it had loosed them from the life they’d once lived, left them in an unwelcoming world, a sea of grass where as far you could see, there was nothing at all.

The railroad renews her, establishes a link with her childhood and an established community with good schools and endless opportunity. When the railroad comes to town, drawing together the old and the new, the story ends because Nell Connors finds herself ready to settle down.

Black Soil is not a great novel. Donovan’s powers of description occasionally shine 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. Black Soil brings us back to a time we do well to remember. Life wasn’t easy. Farming wasn’t always a business, blessings came few and far between.

That we don’t know our own history allows, even generates a certain a species of arrogance. To read Black Soil today, 150 years after white folks like the Collins came to Siouxland to seek a better life 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.