Little Heathens
by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Summary
Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a “hearty-handshake Methodist” family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish’s memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a romp.”
Excerpt
Chapter One
Foreground
My childhood came to a virtual halt when I was around five years old. That was when my grandfather banished my father from our lives forever for some transgression that was not to be disclosed to us children, though we overheard whispered references to bankruptcy, bootlegging, and jail time. His name was never again spoken in our presence; he just abruptly disappeared from our lives. The shame and disgrace that enveloped our family as a result of these events, along with the ensuing divorce, just about destroyed my mother. Is it possible today to make anyone understand the harsh judgment of such failures in the late 1920’s? Throughout my entire life, whenever I was asked about my father, I always said that he was dead. When he actually died I never knew.
So it was that Grandma and Grandpa chose to make our family of five--Mama, my ten-year-old brother Jack, my eight-year-old brother John, my one-year-old sister Avis, and me--their responsibility. They decided to settle us on the smallest of Grandpa’s four farms, which was located about three miles from the village of Garrison, where they had retired after a lifetime of farming. However, because the fierce blizzards and subzero temperatures of Iowa winters made it hazardous to walk to the one-room rural school we would be attending, it had been arranged that we would live with Grandma and Grandpa in Garrison and attend school there from January until the school year ended in mid-May. At that time our family would move out to the farm. Each year from then on, we went to school in the country from September until Christmas, then moved back to Garrison and finished the school year in town.
Our new life began when we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa’s on a cold winter day in February. The house we moved into that day was a large, substantial structure. It was located about seven miles from Vinton, the seat of Benton County. Grandpa was born, raised, married, and buried all within an eight-mile radius of Garrison and Yankee Grove, the wooded area where his parents had settled as pioneers.
Though the house we shared boasted eight large rooms, suggesting that we had lots of space and privacy, in fact, all seven of us spent most of our waking hours confined to the living room and the kitchen because they were the only rooms that were heated. The frigid upstairs bedrooms were rarely used except for sleeping. The conditions under which we lived were a perfect demonstration of the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran’s observation: “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.”
Grandpa and Grandma must have had some unspoken, perhaps even unrecognized, resentment at having toiled all their lives raising their own family, only to be confronted with the inescapable fact that now, retired at last, they had to do the whole thing all over again and raise their daughter’s “spawn,” as Grandma often referred to us. And all of this was happening at the worst possible time, during the Depression.
All three generations suffered….
Excerpted from Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Copyright © 2007 by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Excerpted by permission of The Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Reviews
"Unpretentious yet deeply intelligent ... [Little Heathens] radiates the joy of a vanished way of life....” Booklist
“It is a very good book, indeed. In fact, it’s averyveryverygoodbook"—Elizabeth Gilbert, The New York Times Book Review
"Little Heathens made me ache for my own Depression-era Grandma.... This is a book to awaken your family’s own half-remembered stories”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
Author's Biography
Mildred Kalish is a retired professor of English who grew up in Garrison, Iowa, and taught at several colleges, including the University of Iowa, Adelphi University, and Suffolk Community College. She now lives with her husband in northern California.