Content Background
Although the five books seem dissimilar at first glance, they are linked by their ties to the American landscape and thehard-won struggle to keep the land bought or taken by the familiesfeatured in them. In the case of Geronimo, that chieftain lost his battle to maintain an Apache homeland. All the books I chose reflect the importance of land as a central focus of these people's lives. I also selected the books as in introduction to post- Civil War life in the United States. The books are also connected through their themes of rebirth, gaining a second chance at life and freedom, establishing true citizenship, and paying the penalty for securing or hanging on to a piece of American soil. These issues united some and became hugely divisive for others amongst our population.
The Land is the story of a mixed race young man, Paul Edward Logan, who is able to pass as white but is considered African-American. His father is the owner of the plantation that his mother worked on as a former slave. Paul's father also has three children by his white wife, a situation that adds to the story's complexity. Paul eats with them, plays with them, and is educated as his brothers are. This saga is Mildred Taylor's family story. Her great-grandfather leaves Georgia as an angry teenager after the Civil War and moves to Mississippi, where he buys the land that will become so big a part of Taylor's life and the material for her novels. The story's setting is the time period known as Reconstruction, the so-called rebuilding of the South after its defeat in 1865. Paul wants to succeed in this post-war world on his own terms. His life is more difficult than he ever imagined, especially as a man of mixed race in the South. In Mississippi he is accepted neither by whites or blacks. All of Mildred Taylor's books touch on very sensitive racial issues. Some have criticized her use of racist language in her novels,but most agree it is not for drama or effect but rather to reflect the actual sentiment of that era. She writes the events exactly as they occurred. The journey Paul Edward undertakes helps him to find his place in the New South and purchase the land that will become the homestead for the Logan family for generations. Life lessons taught to Paul by his father earlier in the novel come full circle at the end, as he reconciles with him at the conclusion of the story. The very advice his father gives him, "to use his head" and find solutions to problems by himself, allows Paul Edward to buy that land and make it his own. Paul's sacrifices make his family's dreams come true in a time when dreams of "40 acres and a mule" were rarely realized.
Students will start their books before I actually cover Reconstruction. They will read on their own at home, or on their free time before class starts. I usually give five weeks for reading. By the time they have finished the book,I will be well on my way to delving into post-Civil War America and all the changes that resulted. Students will have a good historical frame of reference for their reading. Speaking directly to The Land and the Reconstruction era before the turn of the century, I will have given them what they need to fully understand the books. Scenes in The Land about the racist Digger Wallace and other KKK characters will be discussed in tandem with the class exchanging ideas about these newly-formed race hate groups and new laws instituted to keep African-Americans from voting.
A whole class project completed earlier in the year on The Bill of Rights will be recalled as we look at the 14 th and 15 th Amendments. Citizenship and voting rights were "guaranteed" with the passage of these amendments in 1868 and 1870 respectively. The 14 th Amendment prevented Congress from making laws to prevent these equal rights from being realized. The 15 th Amendment did not include women at the time; that would come in 1920. The 15 th Amendment also had sections within it that prevented laws from taking effect which would diminish voting rights for African-Americans. Once Reconstruction ended, so did the "power" of the 15 th Amendment. A variety of new laws in the South found their way into the fabric of the act of voting. The literacy test prevented African-Americans and poor whites in the South from voting by instituting little "reading" tests at the polls. Can't read? Can't vote. Oops, you can read a bit? Let me have you interpret this article! African Americans were legally denied the right to have an education in most pre-Civil War southern states. The lack of reading abilities could only be rectified over time. The Freedman's Bureau set up schools throughout the South, only to have many of them burned down or teachers threatened by the night riders in white. Another law was called the "grand pappy" law. This specified that if your grandfather voted in the 1860 election, you could vote. No African-Americans in the South could vote in 1860, hence none in 1870. The last straw was the poll tax. If you wanted to vote you had to pay a tax. This made it difficult for any African-American to vote. Money was hard to come by. Promises of labor were often fulfilled by creating labor camps with guards, as Paul and his friend, Mitchell, experienced. Money would be earned and then taken away for food and a mat to sleep on. Many had to choose between feeding their families or voting. If you did vote, Knights of the White Camellia or KKK paid your home a visit, threatening violence, destruction of farm equipment and animals (making it difficult for you to keep your job), and finally, lynching. Lynching or hanging was not uncommon in the South and continued into the 1960's. It was often used as a threat or done to serve as an example for the rest of the black community. The passage of the 24 th Amendment end poll taxes, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 legally ended all barriers to voting, but only went into effect 100 years after the Civil War ended. Reconstruction ended in 1876 and left very few people interested in safe guarding the 14 th and 15 th Amendments in the 19 th century, so voting in many communities in the South fell by the wayside. It was not because of lack of interest, but rather a fear quickly instilled in African-Americans by the old ruling party Democrats of the South.
By the 1890's, a new set of laws governed the South. These Jim Crow laws, (mentioned in The Land) were put into place by the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson 1896. Similar to the Black Codes that followed the Civil War, these Jim Crow laws operated as a separate but equal philosophy. Everything – birth to death, school to church – operated on a separate but equal double standard. It was all supposed to be equal in its separation of the races, but very soon descended into another example of second-class citizenship. Schools, medical facilities, town services, and legal avenues all became divided by color and were inferior, but supposedly "equal," for blacks. Marriage between races was forbidden and not allowed until 1967. These prohibitions affected not just the African-Americans of the South (and in many instances nation-wide) but also other races. A Chinese-American girl in Lum, Mississippi (1927) was denied the right to an education because of her ethnicity. Other ethnic groups including Native Americans, Japanese-Americans (in WW II internment camps), and native Latinos also faced the same set of second class citizenship barriers. Brown v. Board (1954) supposedly ended segregation in US schools, but many communities had to be taken back to the Supreme Court once again as late as 1970 (Swann v. CMS) in order to "desegregate with all deliberate speed," as the Brown v. Board case dictated originally in 1954. My class discusses Charlotte's journey to desegregate in the Swann v. CMS case. It took sixteen plus years (after Brown v Board) to finally desegregate the schools of Charlotte, North Carolina.
My Antonia by Willa Cather was published first in 1918, with the "harsh" ending revised in 1926. The book may be best summarized by the epigraph – "the best days are the first to flee." The universal themes of time, youth, death, and friendship are ever present. The narrator is an adult, Jim Burden. He recalls his childhood through the memories of a friend, Antonia Shimerda, who is a newly-arrived immigrant from Bohemia (present day Czech). Cather models her character, Jim, on herself. She came from Virginia as a ten year old. Although not orphaned herself, Jim arrives in the barren prairie of the Nebraska Divide after his parents' deaths. The novel is carried out in five sections. Each chapter contains thematic contrasts, such as exploration during a beautiful and idyllic autumn that the children experience in contrast with a bitter winter of death and loss of innocence. As the children grow into adulthood, they gradually lose their innocence. So does the land itself. It becomes productive but eventually fenced in. Not only are the children "tamed," but so is the land. In the love affair between the people and the land they came to conquer, the land conquers them in the end.
The characters are modeled on the people Cather lived amongst herself. Many of the great novels of the time focused on the privileged classes, but Cather featured hard working, earthy immigrant girls who often fell into disgrace. Poverty is the harsh reality of these prairie settlers. They came because of whispered rumors that America's streets were paved with gold and the rivers flowed with milk and honey. European industrialization undermined age old traditions of farming the land. Others, especially Russians came hoping for religious and political freedoms. America offered openness. Immigration policy preferences for northern and western Europe were obvious, but many came from eastern and southern Europe. Laws such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act squashed non-European immigration very quickly. Although there were many success stories there were thousands more living in dirt or sod hovels through plagues of locusts, unproductive harvests, miserable loneliness that could drive a soul mad, and families split apart by the harshness of the land that could be so life giving. It was not the sort of thing these immigrants wrote home about, so the flow of immigrants continued on for years.
What brought these immigrants to the Great Plains? In 1862, the US Congress passed the Homestead Act. The act gave the head of the household 160 acres for a minimal fee. This is similar to the headright system that Virginia implemented in the mid 1600's. Who could resist this wonderful offer? Included in the onslaught of immigrants were former slaves, single women, and people displaced by the Civil War. They had to live on the land for five years, make some sort of improvement, such as cultivating a farm and building a house of some sort, and the land was theirs. Immigrants only had to have applied for citizenship to take advantage of this deal, butConfederate soldiers could not apply.
Land agents for the railroads traveled to Europe with pamphlets proclaiming the glories of this land for the landless. Railroad companies also sold land around their railroad to the settlers so that these settlers would have access to transportation for their goods. If you were the only railroad in town, you could raise prices as high as you wanted – you had a captive audience. European immigrants felt the Great Plains and free land would offer them an opportunity to escape an oppressive aristocracy; there was no aristocracy in America. But homesteading had a dark side. Native Americans were driven off their land. Games of land fraud became common very quickly. Non-English-speaking families, like the Shimerdas, tried to negotiate with established Americans. Huge companies made applications for many homesteads and one company representative might sign as a "single" homesteader. Huge amounts of acreage would be amassed and large-scale cattle ranches and farms became the norm across the Plains. Settlers soon learned that 160 acres in the old country was a wonder, but in the dry prairies it was not enough. Years of draining water from the deep reserves of the Ogallala Aquifer would create incredible problems in the 1930's as the Dust Bowl encroached. Not all the settlers to the west were good farmers, as Mr. Shimerda finds out. Cather's own father did not do as well as he had planned. Dreams were dashed as the sun beat down on their crops and locusts carried off the rest. More than 60% of the homestead applicants failed to remain on their land for the necessary five years. Eventually the land grants were expanded to 640 acres. The residency qualification was dropped from five to three years. By 1900, over 500,000 homesteading farmers claimed more than 80 million acres of American prairie land.
Last year I read a few selections out loud to my students from David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard. Laskin's expertise is in the area of cataclysmic history and weather. I view this non-fiction book as a companion piece to My Antonia and also The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. Egan's book served as a basis for the PBS special The Dust Bowl, produced by Ken Burns. All three books delve into the immigrant experience in the prairies. As I said earlier, a lot of the mistakes made by farmers in the late 1800's had devastating consequences during the Depression. The Children's Blizzard recounts the early to mid-January 1888 blizzard that dropped temperatures as much as 50 degrees in a matter of a few hours. The Weather Bureau, such as it was at the time, indicated that a cold wave was heading for the Dakotas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. This giant Arctic cold front collided with warm, moisture bearing air from the Gulf of Mexico. With this came high winds and very heavy snow. The storm was made even more deadly by its timing: people were at work and children at school. It hit suddenly, giving new meaning to "out of nowhere." A couple of days of unseasonably warm weather sent people into town to shop and enjoy meetings with friends and relatives. Thousands of people were caught in this unexpected storm, including children. The death toll, mostly children, reached 250. Students were trapped at schools, whichquickly ran out of fuel. One teacher, Lois Royce, attempted to reach the warmth and safety of her boarding house, only 82 yards away. Visibility was so incredibly poor that three of the smaller children got lost and died. Lois' feet were frostbitten and had to be amputated. Others took shelter in haystacks. Men hitched themselves to multiple ropes in hopes of reaching the schoolhouses and guiding the children back to safety. Songs like "Nebraska's Fearless Maid" were written and recorded about Minnie Freeman, who brought all thirteen of her students to safety in a terror filled half mile journey.
I believe this book continues to illustrate the dangers of living on this "free" land. We have the benefit of hindsight today and can say maybe this land should not have been settled so carelessly. Water to run the acreage was in short supply, and it took deep digging to access the great water aquifers. Lumber was scarce, which meant housing could be nothing more than an earthen or sod house, whose residents became known by the derogatory name of "soddies" in town. People could smell you coming! Earth that, during the days of the Great Plains tribes, had been guarded by grasses with 36-inch long earth-grabbing roots and sunflowers were haphazardly ripped up to make room for corn and wheat. These shallow-rooted crops, when rain became scarce, would dry out and blow away, taking not just the money-making crop but also the life-giving earth with it. Red Oklahoma soil ending up in London in 1935 was not unusual at all. The prairie grasses with their claw-like roots anchored the soil, kept it attached to the ground itself. In a matter of a few decades these settlers destroyed an intricate and complex ecosystem. The locusts, the droughts, and the freezing temperature just added insult to injury for these settlers.Cities, with a myriad of dangers, offered somesort of protection from the elements. This new frontier did not.
The last two books are Geronimo by Joseph Bruchac and Little Woman Warrior Who Came Home by Evangeline Parsons-Yazzie and illustrated by Toddy Irving. I was introduced to the Yazzie children's book by my fellow in the seminar, LeAndrea James, a Diné (Navajo) Language Arts teacher. As with the other books, I believe it is important to give my students choices and to make those choices in books written by authors who have a personal connection to the culture they are writing about. Author Joseph Bruchac's heritage is Abenaki (Algonquian language family from Northeastern US and Quebec) and I felt he could speak to the children through his experiences as a Native American. My YNI colleague, LeAndrea James teaches reading to her Navajo students. Very few Native American cultures throughout both North and South America had a written language before Columbus arrived; the Aztecs were one of those groups. The Cherokee created a written language after the arrival of white settlers. The Navajos' journey to a written language took place much later in their history, shortly after the advent of World War Two. So, while she teaches reading in English, she also teaches her students to translate text into Navajo.
Both books handle the story of loss of land and culture in the mid to last days of the 19 th century. The Navajo story is called the Long Walk and echoes a similar walk taken by the Cherokee in the late 1830's, called the Trail of Tears. The Navajo were deported and attempts at ethnic cleansing were made starting in 1864. The book focuses on Dzánibaa and her family's tale of survival. Much like the Cherokee 25 years earlier, 9,000 Navajo were rounded up at gunpoint from their homelands in eastern Arizona and forced in January to walk over 450 miles in 18 days. Their journey ended at Bosque Redondo. Over 200 died on the journey. Their destination was an area that contained about 40 square miles. It was cold in winter, burning hot in the summer. Mescalero Apache (long time rivals) already had been moved there, there was a lack of water and firewood, and infestations like army worms devastated what little food they had. Dzánibaa's journey gives her a profound sense of herself as a Navajo woman and of the culture she struggles so hard to keep. In 1868, after many failures and overspending on a losing idea, the experiment was finally abandoned. Union General W.T. Sherman, creator of an American version of total war and the long march to the sea over Confederate territory, signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo, which allowed the Diné (Navajo) to now return to their homelands. This was about 3.5 million acres held within their four sacred mountains. Unlike many other tribes across the West, the Diné were able to increase their reservation to 16 million acres. The Long Walk also made the Diné a more cohesive group, something unintended but definitely important for their future survival. This book is written for second graders. I think I will probably use it for the majority of my little resource group, based on what my EC liaison has shared with me in regards to their reading abilities. Last year the teaching assistant that travels with them took 10 minutes a day and read the book to them at the end of their Language Arts self-contained class. We will work on activities for them and I will probably put them into groups of four each. I will also use the book with my other students when discussing Native American culture during the mid to late 19 thcentury. The fact that the book is also written in Navajo (above the English paragraphs) will be interesting for many of my students to further delve into.
The last book is Geronimo by Joseph Bruchac. The book recounts the life of Geronimo after his capture in 1886 and his journey as a captive through Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, and finally to Ft. Sill in Oklahoma. At one time, 5,000 American soldiers chased Geronimo through the Southwest landscape. The story is told through the eyes of his adopted grandson, Little Foot. The Apaches had long been thought of as the most brutish, terrifying, and semi-human of all the North American tribes. They were amongst the last to surrender to the US Army. Perhaps the fact that the women were responsible for constructing and maintaining the wickiups, native homes, gave White Eyes (Americans) a bit of a disconcerting chill! Like many of their brethren, the Apache held a mystical and religious view of the land they were given to care for. They were a loose grouping of tribes who came together in the end to fight off white encroachment upon their land. For a short while they even worked with the US Army against their common enemy, the Mexican Army. The Mexicans had been responsible for massacring Geronimo's mother, first wife (he had at least eight), and first three children. He is said to have undergone a rebirth after this event. At the end of his life, Geronimo said that he regretted his surrender. Perhaps, as he watched the assimilation of his people, he had a change of heart. Geronimo had over twenty years of captivity to watch the slow Americanization of many of his people, especially the children.
The author begins each chapter with little fragments of newspaper articles, biographies, and interviews, which seem to "anchor the book in a more emotional first person narrative within a bigger picture." Bruchac shows Geronimo as shrewd capitalist, media star, brilliant storyteller, and fierce soldier. Sad is the recounting of how some of the Apaches hoped to align themselves with the Americans in order to help the Americans capture Geronimo, only to be stripped of their weapons and dumped in the same surrender train with Geronimo.
Two photos that have always stunned me come from the Library of Congress. They are a before and after of Geronimo's tribe. One shows the young teens in their tribal dress while the other sepia-tone photo is of the same group, now assimilated/Americanized and civilized. Their hair is cut and styled to look like that of little Jim Burden from My Antonia, and they wear suits and drab uniforms more suited to a big city private school. Various education programs were started in the late 19 th century to "re-educate" Native American children to the white ways. Children were removed from their native homes and tribal influences and sent away to government-run boarding schools. The goal was to make these children productive and patriotic American citizens. Only English was spoken, native names disregarded for new American names, and military-like schedules were instituted. Farming was hailed as the great occupation to be taken up when they were returned to their native lands in late teenage years. This education was mandatory. Complaints about the costs and poor teaching practices ended the program in the mid-1920s, but the damage had been done. Young adults were returned home with American ways and no knowledge of how to even speak their old native languages. In this way, many Native American languages were lost by the 1920's. There was no one the elders could charge with keeping the language alive.
For Geronimo's people, things improved a little. In 1912, 183 Apache returned not to Arizona but to the dwindling population of the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico. They had to pay for their voyage back "home." They sold their 6,000 head of cattle to pay for the journey. They were allowed to bring their horses but not the great spotted dogs that had been part of their ancestors' lives for generations and had served as pack animals before the discovery of the Conquistadors' horses. Once the train stopped in New Mexico, the doors opened, and out bounced their beloved dogs and three parrots! Not all rules were meant to be followed, after all.In Arizona, the old homeland of the Apache, it is said the mountains, pinon- trees, wild turkeys, and coyotes still wait for Geronimo to return.
I hope that students will question what they read, think about what the author of their book wants to take away from this reading, and compare and contrast these readings with primary sources. Asking questions about what they read for this unit will require a careful examination of the writer's thoughts and claims, as well as the quality of the writer's supporting evidence. What might be missing? What might not be inferable in their reading once they compare it to other sources and class discussion?
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