old friends meet on a train, They grew up together in the same town, and lived in the same city, New York, although they hardly ever saw each other there, They decided to do an unusual thing, They would write down their memories of one particular girl, In a community filled with the good, the bad and the unbelievable, she unknowingly became the primary color in many people's pictures of their lives on the remote prairies of Nebraska.
She simply refused to fade away in anyone's memories,
Middleaged James Quayle Burden Jim Burden, a successful lawyer for one of the big Western railways, delivered his memoir in an envelope on which he first wrote 'Antonia', but then changed it to 'My Antonia' to reflect his own memories of a girl who had the fire of life in her eyes.
She was like the wind dancing in waves over the prairie grass, leaving the impression that the world was constantly running, She was pretty, vivacious, generous, She was Mother Earth personified with a positive, energetic ambiance all around her, like lost warm rays of the sun spreading over the cold snowy landscape.
She was laughter, and kindness, and the epitome of joie de vivre, while the harsh treatment of her neurotic, cruel mother and her jealous brother who made her work in the fields on neighboring farms like a man, never seemed to stop her from being who she was.
In her heart she kept the memory of her educated father alive, He was a respected violinist and philosopher in his own country, He was her muse. Who would not want to remember a childhood friend like Antonia Shimerda
The memoir that Jim left on his friend's table, began when he was a tenyearold orphan from Virginia.
He was on his way by train to live with his grandparents, Josiah and Emmeline Burden, in the remote outskirts of Nebraska, At the train station in Black Hawk, he encountered the Shimerdas, a Bohemian immigrant family, who were heading into the same unknown dark night, They would become his grandparents' neighbors,
The cold journey by wagon through the nocturnal landscape becomes the metaphor for what lay ahead for himself in life,
"I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long days journey through Nebraska, Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them, The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska", . .Jim was a peripheral onlooker into the lives of the people around him, He had a keen eye for detail,
"The immigrants rumbled off into the empty darkness, and we followed them, . . "
"I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over, When the straw settled down I had a hard bed, Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon, There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields, If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight, There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made, No, there was nothing but landslightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.
I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside mans jurisdiction.
I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it, But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it,
I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there they would still be looking for me at the sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures.
I had left even their spirits behind me, The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither, I dont think I was homesick, If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter, Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out, I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be, "
The warmth and color, splashed out over the gray landscape of his life with his eldery grandparents, came from the unique characters he would meet during his three years on the farm, and then a short stay in town where his grandparents retired before he left for college.
"In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I couldnt see anything but the road in front of me but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me.Where the natural landscape around him turned gray and stale in winter, another source of color would come from the church's stainedglass windows, the lights bursting from the homes at night, and the warm merry sounds of music lingering everywhere in the hearts of the inhabitants.
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautifyit was like the light of truth itself,
When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: “This is reality, whether you like it or not.
All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath.
This is the truth. ” It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer, pg
Their neighbor in town, Mrs, Harling and her five children, all played the piano, Mrs. Harling herself played the old operas, such as “Martha,” “Norma,” and “Rigoletto”, Sally, the tomboy in the family, drummed out the plantation melodies of the negro minstrel troupes who visited town, Nina loved the Swedish wedding Marches,
Mr. Samson DArnault from the Far South, a Blind former slave and pianist, spread himself out over the piano down at Kirkpatrick's hotel, The Boys Home was the best hotel on Jimmy's branch of the Burlington, DArnault crashed out waltzes and dance music and old plantation songs, while the boys gathered around him and sang along,
Anson Kirkpatrick, the dapper, homely as a monkey Irishman, played airs from musical comedies,
All would change when the dancing pavillion of the cheerfullooking Italian couple, Mr, and Mrs. Vanni, came into town during a long hot summer season,
"First the deep purring of Mr, Vannis harp came in silvery ripples through the blackness of the dustysmelling night then the violins fell inone of them was almost like a flute, They called so archly, so seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of themselves, Why hadnt we had a tent before pgIt would become the great equalizer in town, where the whitehanded, highcollared clerks and bookkeepers allowed themselves to dance with the 'hired girls', who were generally regarded as dangerous as high explosives by the townsfolk.
Those dangerous girls included the Bohemian Marys, Lena Lingard and Tiny Soderball, They were all Jimmy's childhood friends out on the farms, and enjoyed pivotal roles in his decisions,
Life played itself out on the prairies, where the soil was tilled and planted, the winds raged over the fields, and girls worked as hard as their families to celebrate prosperity when it finally came.
They were the color blotches against a monotonous, dreary background, They were always singing. And they made time to dance, The music, always the music, turned their tales into reallife operettas, or even a musical, depending on the music scores playing out in their minds,
It probably was more like a Black Hawk operetta, with elements of a happy musical added, for not everything was doom and
gloom, but it did harbor a sense of tragedy here and there.
Jim Burden could have been the music conductor of the orchestra, the 'hired girls' the chorus, and Antonia the star of the performance, according to his memoir.
There was lots to share with the audience, such as the immigrant families finding themselves huddled into dugouts and mud houses while the cruel winter winds were blowing viciously over the plains of Nebraska.
Melancholic larghettos could represent their longing for their homelands such as Bohemia now the Czech Republic, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, A selection of allegros could symbolize their hope and dreams for a new life in America, where opportunities were bountiful and greater marriage proposals awaited their beautiful daughters.
Instead, they were greeted by a language barrier in the first place, and a small town zeitgeist which danced ferocious rhythms on their naivety.
Members of the ruling upper class seduced them into fastmoving loanwaltzes that could not be paid back in any which way whatsoever, A jubilant foxtrot of social class distinction lured their precious, healthy looking, physically strong daughters into maid services where they were exploited in unimaginable ways, The grand finale turns out to be a boisterous polka, confirming their lowclass status as their dreams lay trampled and destroyed on the streets of Black Hawk.
As the curtain draw close, some players lay spread out on the floor suicide others gave up and flee back to their countries,
In the aftermath though, there were highly successful survivors, living happily on their financially successful farms, Their hard work paid off, while the American families who looked down on them, were still poor and cottonedup in their deluded sense of superiority and their respect for respectability.
Jim Burden was furious with 'these snobs'! Oh how he despised them for what they did to his friends! And what their actions did to his Antonia, the prettiest, the most hardworking and most beautiful soul of them farm girls.
. .
Antonia was bright as a new dollar, and her friends not very much behind, Life would change for all of them, Alaska's gold, San Francisco's decadence and New York's opulence were waiting and Jimmy had to tell their stories in his memoir, because everything evolved around Antonia.
And he wanted to write her story down, He had to explain his role in the outcome of their lives,
How ironic it was that he once believed that his grandfather's farm on the vast prairies of Nebraska, was the actual end of the world.
Twenty years later Jim returned on the same railway track, following the same old road, It was now hardly visible, He reached the end of the world, . . where it all began.
Two new roads intersected at the crossroads where old Mr, Shimerda lay buried at the far corner of his land, He lay beneath a sturdy, strong wooden cross, which were blessed by all travelers on their way to new destinations,
He metaphorically stood at the crossroads, finally realizing that everything made sense when and where it was expected the least, Antonia was there, with the fire in her eyes, alive and well, However, it is not what you think!
A magnificent read!,