Month: November 2023

Who Are These People? Willa Cather Wanted to Know Them

Adele Fasick2 Comments

We live in a world full of problems—as if climate change and the difficulties it brings weren’t enough to worry about, people continue to manufacture problems of their own. Listening to the speeches of some of our politicians, it would seem that one of the biggest ones for the U.S. is integrating strangers into our country. Donald Trump often rails that “immigrants are poisoning our country” and some of his followers echo those words.

But over the years many of our greatest writers have recognized that almost all Americans can trace their family history to other countries. Immigration is what has built the society that we know today. Willa Cather, one of our most important authors, wrote many of her books about people who had left their homes and chosen to settle in America. Cather herself moved from one part of the country to another and was interested in how the moving and resettling affected her and her neighbors.

Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 although as she grew older, she sometimes did not acknowledge her correct age and claimed to be a year or two younger than she was. She moved with her family to Nebraska when she was nine years old. The family first settled in a rural area where their neighbors were mostly immigrants from Northern Europe, but they soon moved to the city of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Cather thrived in school where she learned quickly and enjoyed her classes. She quickly discovered that writing was what she did best. While she was still a student, several of her articles were published in local papers. After attending the University of Nebraska, she moved to Pittsburgh to work as a journalist and teacher, but as her writing success grew, she realized that New York City was the place to be. She moved there in 1906 and for the rest of her life that city was her home base.

One of Cather’s greatest strengths was her ability to see life from different points of view.  A.S. Byatt, the British novelist who died earlier this year, once wrote that Cather “reinvented the novel with every book she wrote”. Cather’s best-known novel, the one that often appears on high school reading lists today, is My Antonia, whose title character is part of a family that came to America from Bohemia. These immigrants from Northern Europe were similar to the people Cather knew when she was growing up in Red Cloud. The characters and the hardships they endured give a vivid picture of life among some of the immigrants who settled the northern plains where Cather’s family lived.

Unlike some regional writers who continue to focus on a particular group throughout their careers, Cather had a much wider vision. She was a traveler as well as a writer, and when she travelled, she immersed herself in the lives of the people she met and the history of the places she visited. After visiting the Southwest In 1927, she wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop a novel exploring the life of a priest who settled in New Mexico.

In a somewhat less known work, Cather wrote Shadows on the Rock about the French people who had settled in Quebec. Although Cather did not write directly about immigration as an issue, the people in her books were examples of groups who had moved to America and built new lives there. Some of her books may seem old-fashioned now, but they give vivid accounts of the various people who integrated their cultures into American life. At this time, when we are seeing a new wave of immigrants entering the country, looking back at some of Cather’s work gives a reassuring picture of how different people from many parts of the world have become part of western life.

Many good biographies of Willa Cather have been published. One of the most recent is Chasing Bright Medusa: A Biography of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor (2023 Random House).

Nurse, Comforter, and Businesswoman—Mary Seacole

Adele Fasick2 Comments

Today we are accustomed to wars that enter our living rooms and pervade our lives. We can turn on the TV or gaze at our phones to see scenes of destruction and fighting around the world. A century ago, the Crimean War of the 1850s was the first war that had a day-to-day impact not only on those who participated but also on the society that supported them. For the first time journalists could send rapid dispatches to the people back home who wondered what was going on. And for the first time, scientific advances that had been made in peacetime could be applied on the battlefields of war. It was also one of the first wars in which women leaders played an important role as nurses and organizers in the care of the men who did the fighting. One of those leaders was Mary Seacole.

Mary Seacole was born in Jamaica in 1805 in the prosperous and attractive city of Kingston, the base of British operations in the West Indies. British troops stationed in Jamaica controlled the island while most Jamaicans of African descent were slaves. But there was a great deal of mingling and intermarriage. Mary’s mother was apparently of mixed-blood and was free, as were many children whose fathers were white. Mary herself writes in her autobiography “I am a Creole and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins. My father was a soldier, of an old Scotch family.”

Over the years, the Jamaicans had learned how to cope with some of the difficulties of living in a tropical climate. Many of the women became nurses or “doctoresses”. They had skills that the military doctors had never mastered in Europe and were able to offer remedies that were unknown and highly valued.

Mary Seacole was a healer and a traveler. She grew up in Jamaica where she was trained by her mother, and she also spent time in Panama where she learned how to treat people suffering from cholera as well as other dangerous diseases that became epidemics there. But Mary Seacole was a traveler as well as a healer. After learning and practicing her medical skills in Jamaica and Panama, she decided to go to England, the “mother country” of the Caribbean. She was not the only person from the British colonies to decide to do this and, so there was a large presence of people from the colonies in London. After working in with Army men for years, Mary knew many of the officers who were glad to welcome another person from the colonies.

When the Crimean War started in 1853, pitting Russia against most of the other European countries, Mary Seacole wanted to get involved. She heard that Florence Nightingale was trying to set up a corps of nurses, she thought she could help. She wanted to set up an inn where she could offer food and drinks to support herself and also offer healing for those who needed it.

Unfortunately, when Seacole tried to offer her help to Florence Nightingale, she was rebuffed. Nightingale, who came from an aristocratic family and had never needed money, was appalled by the idea of serving alcohol to soldiers and also the idea of making money. Nightingale never accepted Seacole as a healer worthy of working with her nurses.

We’ll never know how much of Nightingale’s attitude was due to a knowledge of Seacole’s history of medical care. Perhaps she was influenced by her feeling that a native Jamaican woman without any formal medical training could not possibly be as effective as her carefully trained white nurses. What we do know is that Nightingale won the battle and her name went down in history as the greatest nurse of the 19th century.

After being rejected by Nightingale, Mary Seacole still had to earn a living so that she could provide medical care. She continued to operate an inn where she offered drinks and food to officers as well as medical care to soldiers. Her medical facility soon became well known and popular with soldiers of all ranks.

After the Crimean War ended, Seacole returned to London, but she found it difficult to make a living there. Eventually she returned to Jamaica where she was treated as a hero by many of the soldiers she had known over the years. She wrote an autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands”.  Unfortunately, she left out many facts about her life.

A new biography of Mary Seacole has now been published which offers more detailed information about her life. Helen Rappaport’s In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian. (Pegasus 2022) gives more details about Mary’s life and family. Finally this heroic woman seems to be getting the honors that she deserves.