If you like watching Andy Griffith reruns, you might enjoy living in a small town in the listening area of High Plains Public Radio. Those of us who call these little burgs home enjoy a quality of life that is generally slow-paced, friendly, and satisfying on many levels. Life wasn’t always so idyllic.
In the early settlement years, survival was a struggle for those adventurous or desperate enough to leave established homes in Europe or lands east of the Missouri River. Those who took advantage of the Homestead Act discovered they paid more than the price their land was worth in sweat equity or in blood. Nobody learned these truths faster than immigrant families that arrived with limited resources and communication skills.
Those of us who descend from these immigrant families grew up hearing our grandparents telling tales similar to those you’ll read in Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Our Swedish, Bohemian, German, Dutch, Norwegian, English and other foreign ancestors arrived by train or wagon to discover their first homes were dank, one room dugouts or simple soddies that barely sheltered the families that called them home. Cather details the harsh existence these newcomers faced through the experiences of the Shimerdas and other new arrivals to Black Hawk, Nebraska.
Through her pen, we learn about a first winter on the prairie with its accompanying dark memories and depression. We see teenage Antonia build unfeminine muscles and darken her complexion laboring like a grown man to help her family keep its farm. Through the narrator Jim’s eyes, we watch immigrant daughters sacrifice personal dreams to hire out to families and businesses in town where they clean, sew, scrub, iron, and cook their days into earnings to buy not feminine ribbons and frivolities but plows and seed for the family farm.
Through Cather’s words, we meet our great-grandmothers. We hear their laughter and feel their tears. We view a world these brave women changed one custom at a time as they learned a new language and traditions. Through the author’s descriptions, we see vivacious girls adopt new fashion and make foreign dance steps their own. We ache for them when social barriers prevent them from
achieving their goals.
By the end of the novel, we applaud Antonia and her friends when we recognize that their stories connect to ours. Society may have denied them options, but their sacrifices allowed us, their descendants, to live in air-conditioned homes bordered by green lawns in Mayberry-like villages. Our children’s laughter rings from school grounds and ballfields their distant grandmothers never imagined using. We are the bankers, teachers, and entrepreneurs they couldn’t be. Their stories remind us that nothing is impossible.