Woman Born in 1849 Talks About Surviving the Winter When Half the Town Starved

Описание: Woman Born in 1849 Talks About Surviving the Winter When Half the Town Starved

Edna Hooper (née Calloway) (1849–1934) was born in the river-bottom country of the Dakota Territory, the daughter of a farming family that broke ground in the northern valley before the territory had proper roads or reliable supply. She married at twenty-one, raised two children on a homestead claim one section west of her father's land, outlived her husband by thirty years, and has lived in the years since in a house four miles from the farm where her children were small. In this account, given in her eighty-third year, Mrs. Hooper describes the community and the land as they were before the winter of 1874: the harvest rotations, the neighbors by name and particular habit, the ordinary rhythms of a place that was hard in ordinary years and believed itself adequate to harder ones. She describes the Vanek family — Josef with his hat turning in his hands, Marta with her steady face and her good rye bread, the boy Pavel and the watching girl Anežka and the small solid weight of an infant named Tomáš — and the autumn that preceded the worst of it: the grasshopper year, the first shortages, the community meetings at which people were still, just barely, at their best. She describes the cellar, the fifty-pound sack of flour in the corner, and a smaller sack moved to the back behind the lard crock on an evening in January when a decision was made quickly and covered over with burlap and not spoken of again. She describes the winter as it deepened: the neighbor who came across the field to ask for salt, the child's cough that did not clear, the small stone in the churchyard she has passed every Sunday for sixty years. And she sets down, plainly and for the first time, what she did and what she has decided about it — not absolution, not self-destruction, but the accounting a woman of eighty-three makes when she has finally run out of reasons to keep the thing unnamed. The flour sack, the covered corner, and the distance between survival and what survival required are set down here together.

#1800s #19thcentury