Little Heathens

Some years ago the hometown of my grandmother and her sister was having their centennial and enlisted those who had grown up there to write some reminiscences to be collected in a book. Little Heathens, written by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, is like a book-length example of that kind of thing. Granted, Kalish, a former English teacher, is a much better writer than my grandmother, but it is the kind of book for those who like to sit and hear their elderly relatives' stories. You can almost taste the ribbon candy and feel the antimacassars on your chair.

Now, I was always one to enjoy the old folks' stories, and there's a lot to like in this book, but I must admit that it was an oddball choice to be included in the New York Times Book Review's ten best of 2007. It doesn't have a lot of oomph to it, even with statements like the one in the first chapter, in which Kalish mentions that her father was banished by her grandfather from the household when she five years old and was never heard from, or even mentioned again. True to that, Kalish never mentions him in the book again, but certainly that must make an impression on a child to grow up without a father in a society where that would have been considered strange, but this is not a book about psychology.

Instead it is an almost anthropological memoir, subtitled "Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression." My grandmother grew up in Addyston, Ohio, an itty-bitty town on the Ohio River, but there's a lot that is similar, and I smiled in recognition at a lot of it. Kalish spent half the year in town with her grandparents and the other half on their farm, and she shares a lot of great memories, some of which sounded familiar. I particularly liked her discussion of how the old folks behaved. They rarely showed affection, and only occasionally swore, but when they did it was vivid, such as her grandmother saying, when kids complained about not having something, "Well, wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one gets full the quickest!"

Kalish also is quite clear that children didn't live lives anything like modern American kids did. They worked, from almost the time they could walk. Lord, did they work. Kalish must describe hundreds of chores, and it's pretty clear that in an agricultural, self-sustaining society children were born to create workers as much as anything else. I got tired just reading what they had to do, whether it was the cooking, the cleaning, tending to the animals, the crops, etc. Kalish attributes her good character to the rigorous childhood she had, and mentions a lot of fun things they did, but at times she's a little arrogant about it, almost implying that anyone who grew up in a different environment must have a character defect.

There are a myriad of details about daily life. She shares many recipes, and some sound pretty good, especially since they grew, raised or foraged for almost everything they ate, with no processed foods or preservatives. They even made their own marshmallows. She also drives home how thrifty they were (they had to be), with nothing being thrown away until it completely outlived it's usefulness. Socks would be passed down from kid to kid, with holes in the tops snipped off and sewed up for smaller feet. Finally they would be cut up for cloth for shoeshining. These people almost always used home remedies for illnesses. Doctor visits were extravagant, and only for something potentially fatal. As Kalish puts it: "When one of us kids received a scratch, cut, or puncture, we didn't run to the house to be taken care of. Nobody would have been interested. We just went to the barn or the corncrib, found a spiderweb, and wrapped the stretchy filament around the wound. It stopped the bleeding and the pain, and was thought to have antiseptic qualities." She mentions more than once that she is amazed none of them got major infections or broke a bone. Of course, she also mentions that four of her grandparents eight children died in infancy.

I think Kalish has a lot of fun imaging young people reading this book, because surely her world on an Iowa farm would seem like the Amazon to a typical American kid of today, and she frequently guesses what her grandparents would have thought of what children do today--"Our folks would have been appalled to the point of apoplexy if we had asked to engage in what is now called 'hanging out.'" She grew up without electricity, without indoor plumbing, and a fifteen-mile trip was a major day's outing. She and her siblings and cousins were also beaten with buggy whips when they misbehaved, but she seems to have taken that in stride and makes no judgemental statements about it.

This book could have gone a lot further. In addition to avoiding the issue of her father, Kalish doesn't comment on the greater world at the time. She mentions that Joe Louis was a hero of her grandfather's, but makes no further comment about her family's attitudes about race, or politics, or tolerance of other religions (everyone was Christian in her community, and except for a few they were all Protestant). Instead she plays it safe, perhaps abiding to the common suggestion that politics and religion should be avoided in polite conversation. She does skirt into the territory of talking about sex, most especially when she remembers learning about it by watching the animals. They do say that farm kids know about it a lot earlier than most do.

For anyone who had relatives who grew up in similar circumstances this book is like a visit to your grandparent's house, and that can only be a good thing. Those who can remember the depression are fast disappearing, and Kalish has done a service in writing this memoir.