My mother, 18, the summer before she married,
lounges belly-down in the sun,
books and grass all around, her head on her hands
propped at a jaunty angle.
She smiles in a way I’ve never seen
at something beyond the camera.
This photograph I come back to again and again
invites me to re-write her life.
I keep resisting, certain
I’d have no part in it, her first born
though not exactly. A boy first,
two months premature, my brother
who lived three days, was buried in a coffin
my father carried. “The size of a shoe box,”
he said, the one time he spoke of it.
And my mother, too, offered only once
that she was pregnant and so they married.
Drawn to this saw-edged snapshot,
I’m almost convinced to put her in art school.
Single, she’d have a job in the city,
wouldn’t marry. There’d be no children
if that would make her this happy.
But I’m not that unselfish, or stupid.
And what then, too, of my beloved sister,
her son I adore?
So let me just move her honeymoon
from the Wisconsin Dells to the Caribbean.
Let the occasional vacation in a Saugatuck cabin
be exactly what she wanted. The house
she so loved she won’t have to sell.
Winters, there’s enough money to pay the bills.
There are no cigarettes, no stroke, no paralysis.
Her right hand lifts a spoon from a bowl
as easily as if it were a sable-hair brush
to an empty canvas.
And the grass that summer day
on the cusp of another life
is thick, newly mown, fragrant.
“Another Life” by Deborah Cummins from Counting the Waves. © Word Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of the general and aristocrat the Marquis de Lafayette, born in Chavaniac, France (1757). He was a 19-year-old captain in the French army when he sailed to America (1777) and offered to help the revolutionary cause. He was appreciated for his powerful court connections, and George Washington made him a major general. He led six light infantry battalions (1780), and a Light Corps (1781), and in the closing days of the war helped confine General Cornwallis’s army to the coast of Virginia.
British aviator Beryl Markham flew alone across the Atlantic from east to west on this date in 1936. She was the second person, and the first woman, to cross the Atlantic in that direction; flying east to west meant flying into the wind, which took longer, used more fuel, and was more dangerous. She made the journey in a blue monoplane dubbed the Messenger.
Markham took off from Abingdon airfield in England, intending to fly to New York. She lost her chart half an hour into the flight, when a gust of wind took it out the window. She had no radio. She ran into bad weather on the crossing, with periods of low visibility, and used more fuel than she had planned on, but she made it across the Atlantic before the fuel ran out. She managed to bring her plane down in a bog in Nova Scotia, within 10 miles of the spot from which Charles Lindbergh had taken off to make the crossing in the other direction. She suffered only minor injuries, walked three miles to the nearest farmhouse, and later hitched a ride on another plane to New York City, where 5,000 people greeted her.
A blond, athletic wife and mother described at the time as a “society matron,” Markham was no stranger to adventure. She grew up in Kenya, still a British colony at that time. Her father was a well-known trainer of racehorses, and when she was a young woman, she became the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya. She later became a bush pilot. After she gave up flying, she returned to Kenya and spent the rest of her life training horses.
Markham wrote a memoir of her adventures, West with the Night (1942). Ernest Hemingway was a fan of the book, writing in a letter, “I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers.”
Today is the birthday of American social reformer Jane Addams (1860), who co-founded the Chicago settlement house, Hull-House, in 1889 when she was 29 years old. Addams was born into an affluent Quaker family in Cedarville, Illinois. Her father was a state senator and Addams led a life of privilege, but her childhood was beset by health problems at an early age: at four, she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, known as Pott’s disease, which caused a curvature in her spine that lasted throughout her life. She walked with a limp and thought herself ugly. She turned to literature to find her place in the world, especially the works of Charles Dickens.
She attended medical school in Philadelphia for only a year before spinal surgery and a nervous breakdown curtailed her studies. It was during a visit to London with her friend Ellen Gates Starr that she found her true calling. They visited Toynbee Hall, a facility established to help the poor of London, and decided to do the same for the poor immigrants of Chicago’s 19th Ward. They took over a run-down mansion built by Charles Hull, a real estate magnate, named it Hull-House, and, with a number of wealthy women as their donors, began offering services to the needy in the neighborhood. Eventually, Hull-House expanded to 10 buildings and offered a night school for adults, a public kitchen, gym, girls club, bathhouse, and music school. It was the first settlement house in Chicago and at its peak, served more than 2,000 people a week.
Addams believed that it was women’s duty to be “civic housekeepers.” She said: “America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence, we must watch what we teach, and how we live.”
Jane Addams is responsible for the advent of social work as a profession in the United States, as well as the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union. She compiled her lectures on peace and pacifism into the book, Newer Ideas of Peace (1907), and became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1931).