Читать книгу New Harmony, Indiana - Jane Blaffer Owen - Страница 19

But since everything living strives for wholeness, the inevitable one-sidedness of our conscious life is continually being corrected and compensated by the universal human being in us, whose goal is the ultimate integration of conscious and unconscious, or better, the assimilation of the ego to a wider personality.

—Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche

CHAPTER 3

The Sixth Generation

Our first daughter, Jane Dale, arrived prematurely on September 30, 1942, at Toronto General Hospital. Had she come on schedule, in late October, my delighted father would have not been able to hold her in his arms or bring a crib to my hospital room filled with convalescent port for me and champagne for his granddaughter’s christening. Daddy had brought his gifts to my hospital room himself. The exertion had taken its toll, for he had not fully recovered from a prostate operation earlier that summer.

After resting awhile in the armchair near my bed, he rose and declared with his old exuberance, “Jane, you’re not returning to Houston in an ordinary way. I am going to the train station to exchange our return tickets for a private Pullman car to take us all home.”

He embraced his granddaughter and me with tenderness, then took up his cane and gray felt hat. I never saw him again. He died of a blood clot to his great heart on the sidewalk outside the train station. The loss of my father on October 22, 1942, was my first experience of grief, a profound and prolonged mourning for the kindest man I would ever know.

The joy of caring for and nursing my firstborn gradually comforted me, and my thoughts returned to Indian Mound. My mother believed that I was captive to a lost cause. She could not fathom why anyone would trade “boom town” for “doom town,” but added, “If you are still determined to pursue your damn foolish dreams in New Harmony, Jane, you will need the help of George and Annie Rawlings.” Wiser advice was never given.

Robert Lee Blaffer, 1941.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

When I first met George, he was a master gardener on a Canadian estate that I had visited before my parents acquired our summerhouse Ste. Anne in 1939.¹ My days at Hamilton House were spent more happily at the Rawlingses’ cottage than at the manor house, where no laughter was permitted from the kitchen wing.

George’s wife, Annie, was an ornithologist without knowing the meaning of the word; she would recognize native birds by their calls before sighting them “in the feather.” I can still see her clearly, the delicacy of her features and her luxuriant red-brown hair neatly gathered in a knot at the nape of her neck. She and George, both Yorkshire-born, had immigrated to Canada after successive crop failures in that land of bleak moors. “Speak Yorkshire for me, Annie Rawlings,” I would beg. Her sharp brown eyes softened as she gave me a few words of caution: “Don’t fall in a slap-hole and get in a blather”—Yorkshire for falling in a puddle and getting wet and muddy. Several years would elapse before George and Annie came to my aid in New Harmony.

On July 22, 1944, Kenneth and I were blessed with the arrival of a second daughter, Caroline Campbell. She was born six weeks prematurely, almost in the car that rushed me to the small hospital in Cobourg near my parents’ Ontario farm, which we visited annually in summertime. Thanks to prayer and the wits of a country doctor, Carol, fragile and exquisitely formed, won her battle for life. She became for her family (and for all who define love as the total giving of self without expectation of reward) the embodiment of love and concern for others.

Carol’s first love was for Janie. We owe the closeness that our daughters enjoyed throughout their years together to the wisdom of their English nurse, Joyce Isabella Mann, who came to assist me in December 1943. “Ninny” (never “Nanny” to rebellious Texans) charged Janie with the responsibility of introducing her sister to all worshipers at the egg-shaped crib that had rocked their father. The pride and pleasure this assignment gave an elder sister left no room in her heart for jealousy or fear of replacement in parental affection.

When Janie turned seven and Carol five, we remained in New Harmony for the fall of 1949, rather than returning to Houston. We were reluctant to leave New Harmony’s golden yellow maples, the scarlet oaks, and the campfires that warmed the hands and coffeepots of my husband, his posthole diggers, and fence builders. We enrolled Janie and Carol in the K–12 school across Church Street from David Dale’s Laboratory.

Jane Blaffer Owen with Janie and Carol, 1946.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

Our daughters would be taught, although briefly, in New Harmony, though not in the same building where Kenneth and his contemporaries received their first schooling. That fine brick 1874 Harmonist building was demolished to make way for an undistinguished structure in 1913 (9 on town map). While we mourned the loss of a building of good architecture and Harmonist origin, we could rejoice that sixth-generation Owens would be classmates of children whose ancestors had arrived in the early nineteenth century.

Their first playmate would be Albert Hodge, whose ancestor was the renowned Pestalozzian teacher Madame Marie Duclos Fretageot. Other young friends or classmates included Claudia Elliott and Tommy Mumford Jr., whose forebears had come in 1825 and 1828, as well as Johnsons, Fords, Stallings, six Wilson boys, and an Alsop, who, with several Hardys, were descendants of late nineteenth-century colonists.

Eugene Bishop “Bish” Mumford, Tommy’s grandfather, had left New Harmony to pursue a successful medical career in Indianapolis, but he would bring his only son, Thomas Frenzel, on holidays to stay in the log cabin built by the first Mumford to leave England for Indiana. Young Tom, enamored of fertile ancestral land, dreamed of restoring the log cabin and raising a family there. Toward that end, he took his agricultural degree from Purdue and brought his beautiful, vivacious wife, Letitia Sinclair, from Indianapolis to New Harmony. His most constant refrain, “I am the luckiest guy in the world to have a city girl share a life on the farm with me,” evolved as he became a father: “Tish has provided us with six children—one daughter and five sons for farmhands.” Their only daughter, Liz, is a nationally respected painter and watercolorist on Cape Cod. A younger son, another Bish, manages the family farm on the hills above the small town of Griffin. History and families sometimes move in orderly procession.

John Elliott, a fifth-generation New Harmonist, earned a degree in archaeology at the University of Chicago, where he met his brilliant wife, Josephine Mirabella, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in Romance languages and education. John taught at the University of Kentucky until called back to New Harmony by an aging father who could no longer manage the family farms. Their only child, Claudia, a classmate of Janie’s, became a lifelong friend of hers and mine. Josephine later earned certificates in library science from the University of Evansville and Indiana State University. She became not only the pillar of our Working Men’s Institute and the editor of the Maclure and Lesueur papers but also a living encyclopedia of the history of New Harmony (10 on town map).

But these events lay in the future; suffice it to say that few towns in America can claim a similar unbroken human chain of being and becoming.