A few weeks ago, Bret Stephens of the
New York Times columnist, compared the depiction of European immigrants in
Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918) to contemporary immigrants and the current controversy surrounding them. Under the headline,
The Perfect Antidote to Trump: Willa Cather Knew What Made America Great, Stephens described the central character, Antonia Shimerda, whose family had emigrated to the plains of Nebraska from what is now called the Czech Republic:
Ántonia’s family sets out to make the country, alongside immigrants named Pavel and Peter, Otto and Ole, Lena and Yulka. In 1888, the Nebraska State Journal noted that “the great west has received the largest share of the immigration which has poured into this country since the last census was taken,” roughly doubling populations in the Western states.
These were the people who made the Midwest great. Their English, on arrival, was generally poor or nonexistent. Their skills were often ill-suited to the needs of the places to which they came. Their religious beliefs were not those of their American neighbors. They were accused of being clannish, and they were not always grateful to be here.
“He not want to come, nev-er!” Ántonia says of her father, after the young American narrator in the story opines, “People who don’t like this country ought to stay at home.” That sounds familiar.
The immigrants came, for the most part, because they were fleeing hard circumstances, much as immigrants from Central America do today. But they also came because our borders were practically open until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was shamefully passed.
Stephens column prompted me to get out an excerpt I'd pulled from
My Antonia last summer, when I re-read it with my then 14-year-old son. I, too, was struck by Cather's depiction of the immigrants--and the attitudes toward immigrants of those who had been in the country longer--if only a relatively short time longer. Here I am quoting Chapter 9, which is so revealing about immigrants (yes, white ones, too), as both discriminated against and hyper-industrious--not unlike what we see today with immigrants, who now tend to be people of color. Black Hawk was the fictitious Nebraska country town where much of the story takes place. Jim Burden, the narrator, moved there from his family's nearby farm so he could go to school, and Jim's grandparents arranged for his childhood friend and neighbor, Antonia, to work for the family next door.
IX
There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the
young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set up country girls [immigrant girls] who had
come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father
struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the
family to go to school.
Those girls
had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling
themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters for whom they made such
sacrifices and who have had “advantages,” never seem to me, when I meet them
now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls, who helped to
break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their
mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia, been early awakened and
made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.
I can
remember a score of these country girls who were in service to Black Hawk
during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something unusual and
engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and
out-of-door work had given them a vigour which, when they got over their first
shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of
movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.
That was
before the day of high-school athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a
mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis-court in the town; physical
exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families.
Some of the high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in
winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced
with them, their bodies never moved their clothes; their muscle seemed to ask
but one thing-not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in
the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders
like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put
there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
The
daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, un-enquiring belief that they
were 'refined,' and that the country girls, who 'worked out,' were not. The
American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as their neighbours
from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with little capital and no
knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had borrowed money on their land.
But no matter in what straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he
would not let his daughters go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a
country school, they sat at home in poverty.
The Bohemian and Scandinavian
girls could not get positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity
to learn the language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the
homestead from debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of
them, after they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behaviour
as they had been when they ploughed and herded on their father's farm. Others,
like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth they had
lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and sent home those
hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping to pay for ploughs
and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.
One result of this family
solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become
prosperous. After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons
of neighbours — usually of like nationality — and the girls who once worked in
Black Hawk kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their
own; their children are better off than the children of the town women they
used to serve.
I thought the attitude of the
town people toward these girls very stupid. If I told my schoolmates that Lena
Lingard's grandfather was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked
at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who
couldn't speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the
intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Ántonia's
father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were
all Bohemians, all 'hired girls.'
I always knew I should live long
enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have. To-day the best
that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm
machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart
Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.
The Black Hawk boys looked
forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and living in a brand-new little house
with best chairs that must not be sat upon, and hand-painted china that must
not be used. But sometimes a young fellow would look up from his ledger, or out
through the grating of his father's bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard,
as she passed the window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball,
tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings.
The country girls were considered
a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a
conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They
mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger
than any desire in Black Hawk youth.
Our young man of position was
like the son of a royal house; the boy who swept out his office or drove his
delivery wagon might frolic with the jolly country girls, but he himself must
sit all evening in a plush parlour where conversation dragged so perceptibly
that the father often came in and made blundering efforts to warm up the
atmosphere. On his way home from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and
Lena, coming along the sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian
Marys in their long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity
that only made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the
hotel to see a travelling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her
shoulders at him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars,
there were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with
their white throats and their pink cheeks.
The three Marys were the heroines
of a cycle of scandalous stories, which the old men were fond of relating as
they sat about the cigar-stand in the drugstore. Mary Dusak had been
housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from Boston, and after several years in his
service she was forced to retire from the world for a short time. Later she
came back to town to take the place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was
similarly embarrassed. The three Marys were considered as dangerous as high
explosives to have about the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such
admirable housekeepers that they never had to look for a place.
The Vannis' tent brought the town
boys and the country girls together on neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who
was cashier in his father's bank, always found his way to the tent on Saturday
night. He took all the dances Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold
enough to walk home with her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be among
the onlookers on 'popular nights,' Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the
cottonwood trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression. Several
times I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him.
He reminded me of Ole Benson, who used to sit on the drawside and watch Lena
herd her cattle. Later in the summer, when Lena went home for a week to visit
her mother, I heard from Ántonia that young Lovett drove all the way out there
to see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness I hoped that
Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls a better
position in the town.
Sylvester dallied about Lena
until he began to make mistakes in his work; had to stay at the bank until
after dark to make his books balance. He was daft about her, and everyone knew
it. To escape from his predicament he ran away with a widow six years older
than himself, who owned a half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He
never looked at Lena again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his
hat when he happened to meet her on the sidewalk.
So that was what they were like,
I thought, these white-handed, high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to
glare at young Lovett from a distance and only wished I had some way of showing
my contempt for him.
* * *
Now, back to Bret Stephens' column, which summarized the big picture on immigrants then and now:
What hasn’t changed is that immigrants, on the whole, succeed. “Foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous,” Cather’s (grown-up) narrator notes. “After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors — usually of like nationality — and the girls who once worked in… kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own.” Yet many of the locals saw them as “ignorant people who couldn’t speak English.” That sounds familiar, too.
