"Aunt Jane," Little Phoebe & 1880's Kansas

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"AUNT JANE," LITTLE PHOEBE & 1880'S KANSAS
Monday
May 7, 2007

Today's Quotation:

"They don't hold themselves responsible for anything; that's the whole trouble with them!"

-- from THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON by Jane Smiley (1998; page 91).

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Dear Jay,

Hello again. And thanks for getting back to me. In the process of recommending Smiley's novel about Lidie Newton in 1850's "Bleeding Kansas," to you recently, I seem to have talked myself into re-reading it myself. Hence, the above quotation, one which carries almost universal applicability -- as I imagine you'd agree. As with McCullough's TRUMAN, each reading of Smiley's LIDIE NEWTON triggers a fresh stream of helpful memories.

While I understand perfectly well the value of tribal stories, oral tradition, cultural history, etc., my own experience while growing up was that neither the oldsters in my Green Family nor in my McCall Family had much of that sort of substance to offer either Kevin or me. Nevertheless, I was recently put in mind of one cloudy item of family lore which I suppose is worth preserving and passing along to your own daughter.
Let me take you back now to that afternoon in the mid-1960's when I was riding in the backseat of my parents' car (probably that big old '56 Packard) next to an aging Phoebe who was being treated to one last leisurely drive through the ghostscape of her girlhood, with particular focus on the Peoria, Kansas cemetery (where both her parents are evidently buried, along with [and I may have this all wrong] her sister Mozell [sp?] who died in her 20's, when Phoebe was a little girl in the 1880's). Because I never dreamed that things would turn out anything like they've turned out (assuming it's not still too early to apply the notion of things having "turned out" either this way or that . . . ), I neglected to take as careful notes on that distant afternoon as I would have otherwise. Never imagining that this day would ever arrive when I'd be quizzed over all that I saw and all that the oldsters said that afternoon, I let my mind wonder to such matters
as which girls I might have been able to date in the upcoming schoolyear.

Anyway, I remember that we were riding in that car together on that afternoon along an unpaved country road through a dense grove of trees which evidently had once surrounded a fairly extensive farmstead. And I remember that the minute we drew near to this haunted grove, Phoebe started talking to me about an old Negro woman whose only name she'd ever known was "Aunt Jane." This old woman was a former slave who took care of Phoebe and her younger siblings, May & Foster & Bess, when they were very small children on the Evans farm, back in the 1880's & 90's. (She may also have served as nanny to Lydia and other of Phoebe's siblings, whose names now escape me. We all know what the situation was back then with infant mortality, as well as with scarlet fever, typhoid, smallpox, influenza, etc.)

In point of fact, Phoebe didn't drag in any of this sociological garbage that I've just subjected you to, when she talked to me that afternoon about the kindly former slave woman she'd known only as "Aunt Jane." I suspect that she had very little conscious memory of her. And yet, I can't help imagining that it was Aunt Jane who kindled in Phoebe that spirit of inclusiveness she handed down to us.

BUT I COULD BE WRONG,

Galen


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