HomeHomeAmerican Legacy
On a hazy, warm morning early last September, when America seemed a more innocent place, I went back to a small village in eastern South Dakota. I was searching for someone I never knew, but he couldn’t tell me anything. There are only a few details that are known about his life, but I felt a need to go home and find him once again. His story is but one of millions of American stories, and it is directly related to mine.
He came to America hoping for a better life. He was an immigrant, an orphan, born in an English mining town in Yorkshire, a miner himself, a husband and father of 12, part owner of a mine in Wisconsin, and, at the end of his journey, the owner of a small farm in Dakota. Through rows and rows I walked in this quiet peaceful place in farm country, until I found him--or rather, his grave site. He was my maternal grandmother’s grandfather, my great-great grandfather, Reuben Woodward.
He died in the mid1880’s, at the age of 55, never having fully recovered from his experiences as a Civil War soldier. There were family rumors that he had spent time in a prison camp, and was never the same again. What tales could he tell? How did he feel when he came to the United States? Was he frightened? Was he excited? What were his dreams, if he had any at all? What did being an American mean to him? What was life like for his wife, Mary Ann, an Irish immigrant? Following Reuben’s death she was left to handle the farm alone with her twelve children--her youngest was only two years old.
I had visited this place nearly twenty five years earlier, when Alex Hailey’s book, Roots, made researching one’s genealogy a national obsession. It was the third cemetery I had visited during a carefree summer of reconnection with the past, and with relatives both living and dead. A few weeks before, during a sweltering heat wave, I had escaped to a small town in northwest Minnesota, and visited the graves of my father’s parents.
My grandfather, Fred Schultz, had been an railroad engineer who had traveled through Minnesota and North Dakota. He was a veteran of World War I, a German-American who fought against his parents’ people. How did he feel, having survived the War to End All Wars, to see his own son serve in a Second World War? A few miles away in another small town, my great-aunt lies buried. Like both sets of grandparents, and my parents, she survived the Great Depression, a time when a quarter of the American population was unemployed, and millions of people went to bed hungry each night.
Growing up, I had heard the stories of hardship and deprivation, and of times when sacrificing material pleasures for the public good, and when "making do" with what one already had was considered a natural part of American life and citizenship. In those same tales I understood something else--that there was a profound sense of gratitude for having survived to see a better days and better times. There was a fierce desire to provide a better and more comfortable life for those who would follow my various family members down the family tree. By the time I was growing up, the option, the dream, the hope of having a college education, a career, a home, and a middle class life was something that was assumed to be fully possible--a virtual certainty.
My efforts to "go home again" led me to a simple truth: namely, that my ancestors were from a long line of poor, hungry people who came here because they wanted a chance for a better life. There wasn’t a duke, earl or princess in the bunch. They were strictly working class, and they were part of the fabric of a young nation--their lives formed a beautiful tapestry that is the America that I have the privilege of living in today.
If I could talk to them today, and ask them if they knew the reasons why our forefathers insisted on a separation of church and state in the U.S. or what specific articles were in the Bill of Rights, would they be able to explain? Could they articulate the political, social, or economic reasons behind the founding of this country? I doubt it.
Last fall, as I wandered through that tiny SD cemetery, I found the grave site of Reuben’s son James, my grandmother’s father, who died during the Swine Flu epidemic in 1918. He lies next to my great-grandmother, May, who was also from one of the early English pioneer families in Dakota. While mulling over their lives and stories at their gravesides, a pinecone landed at my feet, with such force that it seemed as if someone had thrown at me. I looked around, but the only other person in the cemetery that day was a caretaker and he was at the opposite end. "Well, I’ll be damned!" I thought. "The ancestors are welcoming me home!"
Somewhere deep within, I carry the memory of ancestors like Reuben Woodward, who came from all over Europe--and the knowledge that I came from a long line of poor people who just needed a second chance, a new hope for a better life, if not for themselves, then for their children. I know, too, that I am not that different from the newer Americans - the immigrants from all over the world who have arrived on our shores. The dream of my ancestors is alive in them, alive in me. The dream of political and economic and personal freedom is strong in all of us. It is the song of America.
Teresa Callies
March 2002I HEAR AMERICA SINGING
By Walt Whitman
from
Leaves of GrassI hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
Copyright © 1995-2007 Gary Johnson Communications. All rights reserved. BraveNewWorkWorld, NewWork, NewWork News, Careers in the NewWork World, WITNE, and WITNE: Women in the New Economy are trademarks of Gary Johnson Communications.