My Ántonia

by Willa Cather

There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

I had no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the most sacred of words.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me when I’m at work.”

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say.

He placed this book in my grandmother’s hands, looked at her entreatingly, and said, with an earnestness which I shall never forget, “Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Ántonia!”

Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

They kept him in their hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie-dogs and the brown owls house the rattlesnakes—because they did not know how to get rid of him.

The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

The great land had never looked to me so big and free.

All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good Christian people could forget they were their brothers’ keepers.

Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and his views about things.

As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. “The prayers of all good people are good,” he said quietly.

a body never knows what traits poverty might bring out in ’em. It makes a woman grasping to see her children want for things. Now read me a chapter in ‘The Prince of the House of David.’ Let’s forget the Bohemians.”

There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.

Grandmother had said, “Heavy field work’ll spoil that girl. She’ll lose all her nice ways and get rough ones.” She had lost them already.

She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. “If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.”

With me they had been like older brothers; had restrained their speech and manners out of care for me, and given me so much good comradeship. Now they got on the westbound train one morning, in their Sunday clothes, with their oilcloth valises—and I never saw them again.

Our own house looked down over the town, and from our upstairs windows we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two miles south of us. That river was to be my compensation for the lost freedom of the farming country.

Winter comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. The wind that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw closer together.

They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it.

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 country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.

The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.

Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she wished she had never let herself get fond of Ántonia.

It was just my point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew.

The first time I deceived my grandparents I felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to think about it.

I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who spoke for Dante: “I was famous on earth with the name which endures longest and honours most. The seeds of my ardour were the sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the ‘Aeneid,’ mother to me and nurse to me in poetry.”

It seemed to me wonderful that she should have got on so well in the world. Certainly she had no one but herself to thank for it.

I like to be lonesome. When I went to work for Mrs. Thomas I was nineteen years old, and I had never slept a night in my life when there weren’t three in the bed. I never had a minute to myself except when I was off with the cattle.”

She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away forever.

Poor Ántonia! Everyone would be saying that now, I thought bitterly.

You’ll always remember me when you think about old times, won’t you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.”

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

In the group about Ántonia I was conscious of a kind of physical harmony. They leaned this way and that, and were not afraid to touch each other. They contemplated the photographs with pleased recognition; looked at some admiringly, as if these characters in their mother’s girlhood had been remarkable people. The little children, who could not speak English, murmured comments to each other in their rich old language.

She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.

I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither.

For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.