The home within and without was her specialty. Anna always had a covered glass dish of white peppermints on her serving side table, served boned chicken, made doughnuts, tins and tins of Christmas cookies, jellies and jams, shoofly, crumb cakes, cherry pies, coffee boiled stiff with an egg in the grounds, and conversation of all those things she loved and grew up with as she communicated the essence of her vision to her children, all distinguished in themselves, after their mother. The last time I saw her my hair was partly as long as hers. She looked up at me from her wheelchair as I peered down at her, neither comprehending the other. But she remedied this a little later after her death when she appeared to me to say that I had been given all the blessings and gifts of that family and beyond.
Those Hereford Mennonists of pastors, teachers, hymnists, musicians, artisans and scholars produced these three feminists, Anna, Elizabeth and Flo. Pressures weighed heavily upon the girl "Annie," surrounded by religious figures, the only daughter in a family of four brothers and a deceased mother, allowed only a sixth grade education before she had to work the farm. The nearest obstacle was her stepmother, who for Anna at least showed the least desirable characteristics of a Pennsylvania Dutch farm wife. Her father Henry, still shell shocked from the loss of his first love Elisabeth, with three small children added to by two more, may have been as inwardly desperate as Anna, but both had a long way to go. For Henry, the most peaceful part of his life perhaps came when he lived with Anna and her Elizabeth for eight years at the end of his life, three peas in a pod, people born June 19, 20 and 21. For Anna the time of freedom came sooner. At 21, in 1901, she left the farm to become a tailor in the city. The issues for her were freedom to create and freedom to be what she chose.
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| ABM-Anna Bechtel Mack. Silver Napkin Ring. |
My grandmother Anna fought against domination all her life and was nothing if not determined. She had reason to resist the ties, first of the farm, then the near loss of her first daughter, Elizabeth, then the loss of her husband, borderline poverty and a difficult father-in-law. In the midst she struck an original path in folk art and religion.
Best Foot ForwardWe are helped to understand the farm years by a memoir written by her daughter Elizabeth in 1982, who herself reached the age of 93. “Best Foot Forward,” was presented to me patchwork. Years before this aunt Elizabeth had showed me Henry Mack’s Ledger from 1870 forward. I style her elsewhere as a Pennsylvania Dutch Rimbaud. She said I should rewrite 'Best Foot", which was impossible, but the facts are good, based on Anna’s countless retellings and deep impressions. The conversations of Anna and Elizabeth, who lived together most of their lives, are described there in the third person, “It was Anna who for sixty years painted word pictures for her daughter about her childhood, girlhood, adult life, who expounded on marriage, child rearing, family life, who at ninety, with a terminal illness, said, ‘I just can’t believe I’m so old! I don’t feel old.’” (2)
Farm life to Anna implicated the Old Mennonite way, first because farm and faith wore a negative face in her stepmother. Die mem had none of the light and air of the Bechtels or Macks. Uncomfortable with English, her views of custom, right and wrong enforced on her step daughter came with a territory that spoke no encouraging words to “Annie,” like “your hair is pretty,” or “you look nice in that dress.”
Necessarily however she communicated her household skills. Administering a farm and a family of four sons, husband Henry was the diplomat, judge and arbiter of disputes, gave a little here, a little there, the most celebrated case being the dress Anna made that die mem felt not plain enough. “Anna’s father was called to arbitrate loud discussion over Annie’s worldly notions as demonstrated by her fancy dress.” Henry’s decision, saving the appearances, was that she could wear it, but not to church. This was still the 19th century. It was.
Habermann’s Prayer
A lot of old books in that attic keep telling tales. A dual language German-English translation of Habermann’s Prayers (1873) is initialed in pencil on the free endpaper, “AM,” Anna Mack. If we assume the inscribed date of another book found there, 1897, Christian Spiritual Conversation, at the time Anna was 17, and also reading these Prayers, that is the year she also joined the church. One page is especially dog eared (103). Pages only get worn this way from incessant use. She would have been half way through her sentence of eight years with four to go by this time, before leaving home. On this dog eared page, “prayer of a child,” a girl wrestles with her stepmother to subdue herself to the good:
“Give me an obedient heart" the prayer says, "that I many patiently obey, serve and show myself obliging and ready to do every thing which they desire, that is not contrary to the will of God, nor at variance with my soul’s salvation, so that I may receive their blessing and live a long and pleasant life. Protect me against sin and evil society, so that I may not provoke and grieve my parents with hatred, sadness, unfriendliness, contempt, disobedience and stubbornness, so that I may not bring upon myself here on earth both their and thy curse….”
Daughter Elizabeth picks up the thread. "Annie had to fight her way. Her mother died when she was five. Her new mother objected to too much trimming on the dress. Too worldly. But when stepmother had a cyst removed from her back on the kitchen table on the farm by the doctor, it was Anna who assisted, participated in the whole operation.” She was taken out of such school as there was at the end of 6th grade. “The terms were short, often the teacher of the two room school was a farmer who could teach only in winter and early summer when spring planting was finished and harvests not yet begun” (7). Anna milked the cows, did the dishes, but “wanted to discover the world that lay outside her own narrow environment, inhabited by people who always wore beautiful clothes, lived in elegant warm homes and never milked cows, emptied chamber pots or cleaned the chimneys of kerosene lamps." At an early age Anna decided that she wanted to “find people of more culture and education,” but the schafige frau impeded this search for refinement.
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| The Dress |
Retelling
In its telling over years daughter Elizabeth was indignant at the difficulties of her mother. Die mem became “sour faced, narrow minded, rigid, very plain.” Elizabeth, who never lived one day on a farm, harbored these feelings against her mother's oppression for a long time. It has much to do with rejections of Dutch customs that she who went to art school herself never suffered.
“This picture of Pennsylvania Dutch farm life in the 1890’s was probably common to many other parts of the rural United States. There was one important difference. In New England, women were realizing the need to be educated; the woman suffrage movement was gaining ground. Among the plain people, there was only one sphere for women, ‘Kinder, Kich un Karich’ – children, kitchen and church…at twelve Anna finished her formal education and the part of her life she enjoyed most.”
It's important not to miss the link between the farm and more general peasant injustices reported by her mother, which, even if they were not reported exactly, held clear implications that you could not do what you wanted, you had to do what you were told. This produced in Elizabeth a most fiercely independent mind in a family of independent minds anyway.
“For the next nine years Annie spent six days of the week in a round of tasks that today would seem like mindless drudgery. First the cows must be milked, and this Annie hated. Getting out of a warm bed and dressing in an unheated room in the dark was bad enough, but going to the barn and sitting on a milking stool was even worse. Worst of all were the rare occasions when she dozed and the cow became restive and kicked over the milk bucket. This would bring a reprimand from her father and a tirade in Pennsylvania Dutch from her step mother.” Annie would “carry the ‘zehn uhr stuck,’ [to the workers in the field], just like the modern coffee break, though maybe only a pail of cold water and some rather dry crumb cake.” From these tales of repeated outrage and drudgery Elizabeth’s image of the Pennsylvania Dutch impacted her idea of the language itself, so that her facetious jokes about her people were just about what Ben Franklin had said, the Brutes. But admittedly, by the time she was dialoguing this it was done with high facetiousness and wit, as evident in This Meing, Mooing, Mewingmuling Song (elimae. 2006.05). These considerations about the English and the German languages preoccupy Andrew Mack and his biography by son Noah also, as well as the speculative prose of Anna's grandson.
The Romantic
While all this occupied Anna outwardly, inside she was an incurable optimist and romantic. Later in life she regretted not getting an engagement ring, but when her suitor, husband-to-be Howard, skidded his horse to a stop at her door she was thrilled. At that time, “one summer, Annie carried a pail of milk to a neighboring farm every day. Barefooted, as befitted a teen age girl, she was always ashamed lest a prince in disguise, riding past on a white horse should see her without shoes.” This admission of the intellectual daughter - would-be physician, non-folk, folk artist is just as telling, for romanticism is hard for realism to take: “it never occurred to me to ask my mother where she had heard about princes on white horses, but it was probably a story remembered from one of the precious school readers." But just as romantic, if it skips a generation, was her nephew's bride who turned up one day about 1989 as a full fledged board-certified sole practitioner family practice Doc, a wife utterly fulfilling Elizabeth's best version of her own self.
Leaving the Farm
The rough manuscript of Anna's life gives many other details of the farm, food, going to the plain church, “no organ or piano, no decoration of any kind,” the plain wooden bench, long visits after church and abbreviated social life, but at age 21 you were free. The summer of 1901 Anna inherited some money from Grandmother Mary Longacre Bechtel and moved to Philadelphia to apprentice herself as a tailor. “Anna and several other girls were taught women’s clothing construction…there were no zippers, no miracle fabrics, each seam had to be pressed, each tiny hook and eye carefully placed and sewn with small but firm stitches. The sewing machine was operated by a treadle, and there probably was not even a ceiling fan in that day.”
But the farm did not last long after Anna left. Her stepmother was not in good health. Anna returned at some point to help out at her father’s plea, but by 1906 the farm had been sold and the entire family moved to the city. Anna married 20 December of that year.
Anna and Elizabeth
Anna’s mother's family, Bechtels, Longacres and Stauffers, with the Macks, were pastors, teachers, hymnists, musicians, artisans and scholars, that is they were folk intellectuals. Her mother's death had diminished these influences in the short term in Anna’s life. The loss of her mother echoed and reechoed, substituted as it was in Anna’s mind with the unattractive Pennsylvania Dutch traits of her step mother.
Hence Anna’s personal literary remains are sparse. She had few books growing up. Henry’s Ledger mentions a few schoolbooks, but no fairy tales for the born romantic. Aside from the catechisms there is only an Appletons Third Reader, dated Oct 28, 1889. But Anna expressed her hunger for the life of the mind in the books she got her daughters, which tell the story of what she missed. She could not have been more proud when she complained she had lost her little girl at age two when Elizabeth began to read constantly, nor done any more to have fostered imaginative delight in her. New books were added to the home, ones Anna never had. Inscriptions show that at age 5, December, 1915, Cinderella came. According to Elizabeth this was the single most important metaphor in Anna’s imagination. Also at Christmas, age 7, came Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but children will take another path from parents so Anna’s attempts to nurture a romantic in Elizabeth were thwarted by the mind of a daughter who prefered William Osler (d. 1919), one of the founders of John Hopkins Hospital, but whose great grandfather was a pirate. In later years Elizabeth read autobiographies, Tolstoy, Dickens galore. I gave her The Fixer, a new translation of the Aeneid. Her mother was satisfied she had done her part by then, so Wahren Christenthum and Die Wandelnde Seele were bedded down in that attic to wait their collection at the settling of the estate and its transplantation here.
Prayer for Strength
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| Anna's Handmade Holiday apron |
“The doctor came to the house every day, but after a week the baby had not improved. Anna saw him looking into his black bag at the rows of medicine bottles as though he could not decide which one to open. She realized that the young doctor had reached the limit of his professional expertise. That night Anna prayed for strength to give up this child whom she loved so dearly. Next morning, the doctor returned with a new medicine. Slowly the baby improved though she was now thin and pale. By summer’s end she was once again the plump happy child she had been. The rest of Anna’s long life was a witness to the faith that came through that experience” (17-18), and that baby lived to age 94 and do not doubt of her memory.
This sounds awfully like those stories of people who surrender in the face of insurmountable obstacles, praying for strength to give up a child, but why did the doc come back in the morning with a cure and why does the baby recover with or without the cure? We say it is luck or medicine or piety cooked up for the occasion, but when your daughter or son is saved from death you don’t go around mumbling, you praise God and rejoice. It doesn’t do to cite all the children who died just to refute one that lived. Life trumps death. Life is such a partisan issue as to be the muse of a work about itself, which in turn sees its own sacrifice, its own surrender.
Surrender for surrender, how does it proceed? So from one point of view the one year old sacrificed her own life at 30 because she loved her mother and maybe a way of life or a level of being more than herself. So she lived with and cared for her mother. A shocking statement, everybody giving up all the time. Life surrenders to life and to death. That’s the folk way of honoring. Who cares about justice? What we care about is love. Anna’s love reached out in surrender and her daughter was healed.
Dolls
It tends to come back to you if you didn’t do it for yourself, but the very motive may make the act transcendent, any mother knows this. All folk know it. A lot of Anna’s work only gets remembered because it summons implications of other things. “Underwear, blouses, dresses, even coats when the children were small, all came from the busy hands and sewing machine of our mother.” But not just children's clothes, but doll clothes, especially in the dolls made to give her daughter to satisfy her own longing too, that evoke a kind of memory and remembered her own mother “...as a rather large woman with beautiful auburn hair. She remembered the doll and cradle that had been a birthday or Christmas gift” ( 6). And that was all the memory she had at age 5 of her mother who died.
Not many of Anna’s creations remain and would not have been noticed but for a chance remark when Elizabeth was being provoked into examining the development of her own intuition. She had begun to relate how she could perceive feelings at an early age, practically from birth, and offered evidence from what she called “the worst Christmas” of her life, age 4. Mother Anna had only had one doll: “she remembered the doll and cradle that had been a birthday or Christmas gift,” but the family lived in more than a little poverty, and she never had another. “Perhaps this year she would get a doll for Christmas! But no, it was only an orange, a couple of clear toy candies and a much needed pair of shoes.” Anna of course purposed to remedy this with her daughter, so Elizabeth had dozens of dolls. The “realist” then interrupted her narrative to point out that as a four year old her view was that "dolls were dolls, not real children." No maternal transference there! But then Anna went to work and made the kind of folk doll that would stop an auction today.
Mother Of All Dolls
Neighbor Jenny worked in Strawbridge's fur department and had access to scraps of fur. She and Anna made the grand doll life size out of other doll wardrobes, dressed her up and sat her in a little rocker with a black velveteen coat, a hat and scarf with white fur trimming and a little white muff with two black tails; the mother of all folk dolls, today worth thousands. The muff and scarf were so large they had to be wrapped separately. When the child opened the wrapping she mistook the muff as though it were for her and because she couldn’t "get my chubby fist in that little muff!" began to wail. Do you hear the Dutch prejudice in “chubby?” She was slender and beautiful all her life. Imagine competing with your own Christmas present? But the wail induced the mother's tears and Anna began to cry. The daughter at ninety four remembers that at four she thought that it wasn’t right to make your mother cry and stopped. Anna never knew her daughter had this epiphany, not that she was ignorant of her prodigy who went ot college at 16. Had she become the first female surgeon at Women’s Medical Center Elizabeth would no doubt have boasted that she was a peasant surgeon.
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| 1923 Flo's dolls |
Gardens
Anna was honored in 1970 at a Woman’s meeting for her life long efforts at gardening: “she has always had special results in whatever she was growing – whether children, African Violets for her window sills, begonias for porch boxes, or forcing hyacinths in the winter from January until Easter…she would give us leaves from her finest African Violets…one can remember the dolls she dressed and the aprons…another project was the shoulderettes – thirty of them for Presbyterian Hospital and dresses for T. M. Thomas center." She made quilts for each child and for herself, kept and doled out in the breakup of the house. Quilts, dolls, clothes, food, preserves, gardens outside, African violets in full bloom on every window sill were Anna’s works.
Leaving the Old
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| Teapot, coffee urn from Anna's old wood stove c. 1906 |
Head Coverings
The Hat
The most important letter Anna ever received was from Uncle Andrew in 1914. Bishop Mack, no doubt in German, wrote to the effect that if she came to take the yearly communion at Bally (Hereford) she must wear a bonnet. It must be remembered how warm an attachment Anna had for her uncle Andrew and aunt “Lisbet.” “Anna felt closer to this uncle and aunt than to the rest of her relatives” (6). But in 1897 when “Anna joined the church, local custom did not require the wearing of the prayer covering and bonnet. A plain, untrimmed hat was acceptable, and the prayer covering could be put on just for Sunday worship." However there were back and forth views of this for the Mennonite division of 1847, the Oberholtzer controversy, involved a protest of the dress code. Chief proponent there, Oberholtzer, believed in freedom, but the Old Mennonites believed in the “doctrine of simplicity and separation.” People had individual takes. Oberholtzer would not wear his coat and thought he had a right not to wear the plain coat (Ruth, Maintaining, 245), although it is not quite as simple as that. His choice became a symbol of liberty against the Mennonite high doctrine of mutual submission.
Noah Mack says, considering the whole spectrum from 1847 to 1914. “Hats were banished, not altogether without the loss of some members…. During the years since then some of those who had refrained from taking communion because of this restriction have been reconciled to the church again. Just lately a few have come back to the joy of the church in general. Joy…because the church has been spared from breaking away from her doctrine of simplicity and separation” (ms. of Noah H. Mack, His Life and Times, 1861-1948, 7). The doctrine of simplicity and separation was the main thing.
The Spanish Example
Similar peculiarities occurred of course with the cut capes and outlawed Hats of 1766 near Madrid in the Esquilache Mutiny, or the Hat and Cloak Revolt which tried to impose public order by banning long capes and broad-brimmed hats, for the cloak could disguise a sword and the hat a face, so only short capes and three cornered hats were dictated. Tables were set up in public where officials would trim garments to proper length and arrest offenders on the spot. Palm Sunday 1766 crowds broke open jails and misbehaved until this law was rescinded for the more savvy penalty that thereafter only public executioners would be clothed in long capes and broad hats.
By 1909-1911 definite decisions had been made in the evolution of Mennonite custom. “At every conference session the question of the woman’s covering was belabored. Fancy hats were more and more common among the younger women” (Ruth, Maintaining, 425). So Anna, who had been attending the “new” First Mennonite in the city anyway, which was a lot closer to home, conferred with her husband and decided not to go to the Hereford communion. Not to go to communion is a big deal among Mennonites. Held once a year, the Sunday prior to the communion is much more elaborate than other Protestant services, very personal, where everyone in the congregation attempts to reconcile themselves with everyone else. It is a little formulaic, to paraphrase, “So far as I know I am at peace with everyone and everyone is with me and if not please come and tell me,” but it includes a public confession of sins. Refusing the bonnet might make that vow impossible. While she loved her uncle, who was speaking for the community that chose the hat!
But this is not a trivial matter. Dress behavior had determined the life of her grandfather John Bechtel, who took over as pastor at Old Mennonite Hereford in 1847 when the ruling pastor went with the Oberholtzers. That is, his name was chosen out of a hat. It could not have been lost on Anna how he was engrafted to fill the gap left by the previous Pastor Clemmer’s release in the Oberholtzer affair. Maybe Anna too thought the coat/bonnet laws a “human commandment” (Ruth, 247). But we hear in this insistence a repeated desire for personal liberty that is not materially different from the claim Mittelberger had made 150 years before about people making their own decisions in Pennsylvania.
Caught between the irresistible force of her Uncle and the past vs. the force of modernity and her own choice, “there were a few, as might be expected, who revolted against the tyranny of the farm, as they were pleased to call it, even before the eighteen-nineties, but they were exceptions. "Now fully half of the young folks, boys and girls alike, are gone to town…” (Weygandt, 1929, The Red Hills, 7). Anna left in 1901 over issues that for Old Mennonites impacted worldliness. Noah Mack says, “he had no compromise on separation from the world tho even sixty and more years ago hats were worn by some of the young sisters in various parts of the church in the conference district where he labored. This was true in his own congregation” (7). So the bonnet vs. the hat was a sticking point.
It adds poignancy to Anna’s apprenticeship as a tailor that she left the Old Mennonites precisely over the issues of dress that caused the Mennonite division of 1848, significant because in the end she made the decision for subsequent generations too. Whether farmer, plebeian or Mennonite, she led her children into either open conflict or conformity between the war of truth and the world, why the giants had been left in the promised land in the first place, to prove the law of God in their hearts. So they slipped and were rescued, slipped up, stood up.
Death of a Husband
Anna want
ed to be free, but when her husband Howard died, financial constraints left her dependent to a large extent upon her father-in-law, Jacob, who was her husband's business partner. Howard had a large investment in Heister and Reiff that his father owned. One of the reasons Anna chose his son for a husband was because he was not a farmer, severing ties forever with that world. Old Jacob had been a storekeeper in the world of Hereford and Clayton and Reading before 1900. See David H. Latshaw (VI). But he had a reputation as a dealer, with implications that he couldn’t keep a location too long. In at least one of these alleged cases he was proved innocent.Over time the attempt to understand Jake produced a realization in Anna that she didn’t like him any more than he liked her, but she showed it in more pleasant ways, inviting him and his wives to family events (he had several marriages). Secretly in her bed she thought her husband, his son Howard, was dominated. The party line given to me was that Jake, as he is listed in Elizabeth's notes, was a “big shot
, unfeeling, dominating, jealous, sharp trader, cheap skate, cigar smoker, reprobate in early life.” A “bad influence” could have been added, since son Howard, like Jake, began to smoke a cigar a day at age 40! Howard’s early death is attributed to the father, who either worked him to death or caused his heartburn: “in later years, Howard attributed his chronic indigestion to those hasty and interrupted meals which were a way of life when the family lived behind the store” (4). But now we say it was hardening of the arteries. It was always said that I resembled this grandfather in physical form, and perhaps in temperment (?) which contributed to the notion many men have that they will did at 30. But the psalm intervenes that says, "with long life will I satisfy him and show him my salvation."Lack of economic freedom bloomed all around. Howard died at 46 without life insurance. Old Mennonites, Elizabeth says, didn’t believe in life insurance the same way 18th century fire companies didn’t believe in putting out fires, since obviously the fire was a signal identifying evildoers. The fire company was there to protect the neighbors! Hose down the properties adjacent, separate the just from the unjust. Howard did take out a life insurance policy after his first two children were born, a $7000 policy on the quiet. Just in time.
Elizabeth's mother chose her father chiefly on the basis that he had left the proletariat just at the time Anna left the farm. Then she sought him as a husband, but this mattered even more to the next generation. Elizabeth’s brother graduated from Penn State and went up the executive beanstalk. Maverick sister Florence took an M.A. and published the first text for minority slow learners. Elizabeth studied art and longed to be a doctor. They all escaped the farm.
Elizabeth knew the mind of her father. She could talk to him and was proud that he could add columns with both hands while talking on two different phones, that he sent left-handed postcards. She hugely understates the pain of his loss when she was 17. He was a vigorous looking man, somebody other men took seriously, piercing eyes, but he was just sitting down to read his own philosophy when he was stricken.
Old Jake
If you offer a sympathetic ear and a disembodied presence, as I do by phone to Aunt Elizabeth at 90, you eventually wish you had the power to forgive sins, for it is much like the confessional. Elizabeth had been thinking that she shouldn’t have hated grandfather Jake, even though he had a domineering disposition, but of course she did not hate him. He was youngest, she says, and the youngest often feel like they “don’t quite make the grade.” Widower-hood had taken Jake much as it had Henry Mack, except that it kept on taking Jake. From Jake’s point of view when he got married at 21 everything was rosy. He had a son, but his wife got TB and died. He married again but a second son died as an infant, followed later by the death of his wife. He remarried a third time and again an infant died. Out of this connections Elizabeth realizes than that what Jake said to his grandson Howard about his mother remarrying when her husband Howard had just died was only a replay of his own experience and hence expectations in life. He’d lost his wives and remarried, not too extraordinary that he’d think Anna would too. This understanding comes late however comes very late but it tells us the understanding of ourselves was there the whole timed we avoided it and blamed someone else. Oyez. Oyez.
Of course Elizabeth admits her mother was independent and had all along wanted time without Howard’s father present, even if she invited him to all the family dinners. Grandfather Henry and stepmother Sarah Ann joined Jake and wife Willomena. The two middle of these people were not Anna’s favorites.
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Grandson JH in the Buick |
Continuing her saga, Elizabeth says that Jake couldn’t grasp his first and only surviving son’s sudden death in 1927. Filled with grief he wanted to “kick the cat,” i.e., lash out in grief at something or someone. That turned out to be Anna. Jake went a little wild in his fantasies, thought he was going to have his grandson J. Howard would run his business. But instead his grandson gave him the business, which story occurs in J. Howard's dunning letters from Penn State to his grandfather.
I’m wondering how to pay for all this insight at the current rates when Elizabeth says that "it was the time and the place of his saying Anna would remarry that angered Howard."
"When I needed money (at the College of Design,' she says, "I went to see Jake. He would show me some of the things he had, he gave me some old pottery.” But there are contradictions suddenly pop up ironically when she herself commits to that old institution of life, the rest home, and gives it all up in toto, except for a chair, a bookcase and a testament of acceptance. I expect Billy Budd to come leaping from the foyer. Mennonites either fight to the death or give up the ghost.
I Cried With Her
Anna had reverted to the girl on the farm at the demise of the misanthropic diabetic Jacob in 1929, by solving problems. She brought the bed down the stairs, wept with the wife at his condition, did the dirty work: “He sat in the rocker with his foot on the table and he had sat there all day unable to move, suffering agony with that leg, sleeping most of the time from dope which the doctor gave to relieve him, moaning with pain as soon as he was awake. Grandma cried and for a bit I cried with her as the enormity of the situation dawned upon me. I tell you I never missed Dad more, so I pulled off my coat and hat and decided to stay till we got him to bed, but alas, he could not get upstairs, so I and the housekeeper took the bed apart and brought it down (took the table apart). We even had to pull him into the front room in his rocker till we put up the bed.”
No particular examples of Jake’s dominance of his son were ever given, unless it was the interruption at dinner. It was just assumed, like the question of Jake’s second wife, Wilhelmina, “how did she cope with her husband’s domineering nature?” (5), along with the anecdote that Wilhelmina died of pneumonia after scrubbing the cellar floor on her knees in winter. This was sarcasm uncompared with Faulkner’s character, “worn out by the crass violence of an underbred outlander” (Knight’s Gambit, 6). Jake found the army, navy and air force against him. Elizabeth from a photograph that he was
“serious, with his full lower lip thrust out aggressively, and rimmed with a scraggly beard.” But she also admits, “my personal memories from childhood and early youth are colored by my mother’s stories and analysis of his character in later years.” In adulthood the daughter also remembers that her uncle was crude, her father dominated and the grandfather worse! I tiptoe around.Forgiveness in Faith
At the end of his life, my old dad, grandson J. Howard, had told the story of Jake’s peccadillo about Anna's remarriage so often I long knew it by heart, so always listened for nuances of expression. One evening in 1993, the first time I took the trip to Philadelphia with son Aeyrie, then seven, all light and joy, Dad told it for the last time. The day after his father had died he and the grandfather were in the garage. Jake was just leaving, but turned at the last moment and said, “don’t worry, your mother will be remarried soon.” The nineteen year old ordered him off the property! At the time of this last retelling we were standing in the middle upstairs bedroom looking at Jake and Kate’s framed wedding certificate. Dad was 85, his voice was raised and he was sputtering. I put my arm around his shoulders. “Dad, what do you say you forgive this man? Can you do that? Can you forgive him in faith?”
“Yes.”
6827
Works CitedAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “To Elizabeth / From Mother / Dec. 25, 1917.”
Christian Spiritual Conversation…with an Appendix. Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1892.
Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper. And other Stories. NY: A.L. Burt. “Dec. 1915. Elizabeth Reiff.”
William Faulkner. Knight’s Gambit. London: Chatto & Windus. 1951
MORNING AND EVENING / PRAYERS / FOR EVERYDAY OF THE WEEK/BY / /DR JOHN HABERMANN. Philadelphia: IG. Kohler, 1873.
The Life of Noah Mack.
Gerhard Roosen. Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach. Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1869.
John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.
Elizabeth Young. Best Foot Forward. Manuscript biography of Anna. Winter, 1982
