The Four Winds

by Kristin Hannah

“Men wear masks because they’re ashamed of what they’re doing,” Jack said through the megaphone. “They know this is wrong.”

Today, they were part of a new group: people who stood up, used their voices to say No more. They’d woken in the middle of the night, hungry, to stand up for their rights, and now it was Elsa’s time to show her children what her grandfather had taught her long ago.

“We came to find a better life, to feed our children. We aren’t lazy or shiftless. We don’t want to live the way we do. It’s time,” she said. “Time to say, No more. No more company store cheating us and keeping us poor. No more lowering wages. No more using us up and spitting us out and pitting us against each other. We deserve better. No more

Someone shouted, “They’re throwing tear-gas bombs!”

Elsa lifted the megaphone. “Run into the fields, not away,” she cried out, coughing hard. She wiped her eyes but it didn’t help. “Don’t give up!”

She reached up slowly, every movement hurting, and untied the necklace at her throat. She took the velvet pouch in shaking hands and placed it in her daughter’s palm. “Keep … believing in … us.”

“You live, Loreda,” she whispered. “And know … every single second … how much I loved you.” Find your voice and use it … take chances … never give up. Elsa couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. There was so much more to say, a lifetime’s worth of love and advice to bestow on her children, but there was no more time … Be brave, she might have said, or maybe she only thought it.

I look like any other girl my age, but I am different from most. A survivor. There is no way to forget what we went through in the Great Depression or to unlearn the lessons of hardship. Even though I am only eighteen, I remember my childhood as a time of loss. Her.

I hold tightly to her journal. The few words she wrote will have to last me a lifetime. I hear the

This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It’s how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my head, my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes.

Her story—which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people—is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again. Love is what remains.