By Kohinoor Dasgupta
My Ántonia was published in 1918.
A kid loses both his parents within the year and, one pitch-dark Plains night in circa 1880, gets off at the train station of Black Hawk, Nebraska. An immigrant family gets off the same train. They set off on separate farm-wagons,"in the faint starlight", and cover a distance of twenty miles. At daybreak the kid, Jim Burden, reaches his grandfather’s farm and falls asleep, only waking in the afternoon. There's no homey welcome or clean beds for the Shimerdas at their destination, a "homestead” that they’d purchased sight unseen from a compatriot, a man called Krajiek. It dawns on Mr. Shimerda that he has uprooted his family from their native Bohemia, where he used to earn a living as a skilled weaver of tapestries and carpets, and where he played the violin at weddings, only to bring them to a "badger-hole” in the middle of nowhere, with no working farm to provide an income. The Shimerdas have four children, the eldest a boy of nineteen, Ambrosch. Ántonia is their elder daughter, and fourteen years old. Jim thus first sees Ántonia that night at the train station, when he is ten years old. The story follows the two till they are in their early twenties. Then twenty years fly by in less than three days, in Book V.
“Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Án-tonia!” Mr. Shimerda begs Jim’s kindly grandmother when he meets her, and she does so. Ántonia has English lessons with Jim. She is quick-witted and eager to learn. She is devoted to her father, whom she calls "Tatinek”, and he to her, perhaps because she is sensitive as well as intelligent and optimistic. Ántonia’s love for her father is mixed with her memories of a happy childhood in the beautiful "old country”.
My Ántonia, the title, mainly is the older Jim’s acknowledgement, after twenty years of not bothering to catch up with Ántonia, that the prairie years irrevocably bind her to him. Poignantly, the title also harks back to Mr. Shimerda’s urgent appeal to Jim’s grandmother. Even as a kid, Jim had an awareness of Mr. Shimerda's constitutional inability to be a pioneer. Mr. Shimerda was a creature of an old civilization. Life may not have been peachy in the "old country", but some elements of it, such as conversation and conviviality, and breadwinner status, were taken for granted. Long dead, Mr. Shimerda continues to unite Ántonia and Jim in a way no one else can understand, and this makes Jim even more precious to her. Here's an excerpt from a conversation between them after Jim delivered his oration at his high school's Commencement exercises:
"Oh I just sat there and wished my papa could her you! Jim" - Ántonia took hold of my coat lapels - "there was something in your speech that made me think so about my papa!"
"I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony," I said. "I dedicated it to him."
"Optima dies… prima fugit.” Jim, then a sophomore at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, translates this "melancholy reflection” from Virgil as: "in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee.”
Just as Ántonia’s good memories of her dad are blended with a different time and place, the older Jim, writing down what he remembers about Ántonia, recalls other people, and revisits his grandfather’s well-run farm and his grandmother’s cozy kitchen. Once again, with Ántonia and little Yulia, he runs in the tall red grass and admires the gold-top cottonwoods. He sees red hillocks, draws, sunflowers, a particular rattlesnake, and the snow of one heartbreaking new year. He remembers meeting Ántonia again after he moved with his grandparents to Black Hawk town. He was finishing high school, and Ántonia was a "hired girl”, one among a group of immigrant daughters working in town as cooks, laundresses, and housekeepers.
In this beloved American classic, Willa Cather (1873 -1947) has recorded, unsentimentally, but with that particular truth of fiction that comes from feeling, scenes from frontier life at the turn of the twentieth century and over the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Cather herself moved with her family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1882. She lived in the village of Red Cloud, north of the Kansas state line and 35 miles south of Hastings. Red Cloud is the Black Hawk of My Ántonia. Cather grew up among European immigrants. A woman called Anna Pavelka was the inspiration for the memorable Ántonia. Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud is a tourist attraction. The Pavelka Homestead is part of the Willa Cather Thematic District. It was hard work for Ántonia to hold on to her dreams, but she did build a real homestead, such a one as Mr. Shimerda may have hoped for when he stepped off the train at Black Hawk.
Not only Ántonia, but many other characters stand out sharply, rather like the plough of a distant upland farm made "heroic in size" by the sun setting behind it, that Jim and the "hired girls” see after they go berry-picking to make "elderblow wine”.
Jim’s quiet grandmother, whom we met while she was crying soundlessly because little Jim’s face fetched back memories of her dead son, pulls out another timeless emotion when she has doubts about whether she, a grandmother, not Jim’s mother, has done a good enough job of bringing him up.
"I noticed one afternoon that grandmother had been crying. Her feet seemed to drag as she moved about the house, and I got up from the table where I was studying and went to her, asking if she didn’t feel well, and if I couldn’t help her with her work.
…
"What are you fretting about, grandmother? Has grandfather lost money?”
"No, it ain’t money. I wish it was. But I’ve heard things. You must ’a’ known it would come back to me sometime.” She dropped into a chair, and covering her face with her apron, began to cry. "Jim,” she said, "I was never one that claimed old folks could bring up their grandchildren. But it came about so; there wasn’t any other way for you, it seemed like.”
I put my arms around her. I couldn’t bear to see her cry.
"What is it, grandmother? Is it the Firemen’s dances?”
She nodded.”
*
The website https://www.willacather.org/ has more information on Cather and Red Cloud.
*
My copy of My Ántonia, published by Houghton Mifflin Company Boston in 1954, has illustrations by W.T. Benda.
Comments