When John Dewey Frevert married Selina Adams in 1920 in Nebraska, he had little to his name: a 3rd grade education, some farming skills, and the plough horse his dad gave them as a wedding present. He landed a job as a sharecropper on South Dakota's Rosebud Indian Reservation, working for a Native American landowner, while Selina cooked meals for all the farmhands. They received no wages: only room, board, and a small plot of land to grow vegetables in their free time. Selina, a former teacher, taught him to read and write. I'm pretty sure their photo appeared in the dictionary next to "hardscrabble."
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| Great-Grandma Selina was the inspiration for Princess Leia's hairdo |
Fourteen weeks. What occupied John's mind during those long, quiet days? No Spotify. No podcasts. No in-flight entertainment. I don't think the alphabet game had been invented, and I sort of doubt he did much reading atop Ol' Gus.
Maybe, at the end of this life chapter, he mused on his 30-ish years in farm communities, the only life he'd ever known. Maybe he looked ahead hopefully, or apprehensively, to life near a big city. Maybe he forged a mystical connection with Gus, stumbling onto brilliant insights about equine hopes and fears. Maybe he composed tall tales for his children's bedtime stories, or imagined himself on a quest with King Arthur. Maybe he wasn't much of a deep thinker, and spent most of his time humming folk songs and observing the landscape for food and weather cues.
How would I spend that fourteen weeks in transit? In eleven days, I'll have just 24 hours to switch between worlds, and in a (small!) way, I envy my great-grandpa. I was hoping I'd have the external freedom, and/or the internal discipline, to do more thinking while back in the US. But it takes more than time away from my day job for my brain to slow down, and I had plenty of responsibilities and opportunities to keep me around people. I'm grateful for all the interactions I've had here, one-on-one or in front of a crowd, and even the bits of work I've done long-distance while here. I've enjoyed catching up on my favorite TV show, buying things I can't get in Cambodia, traveling, playing with my favorite kids. I've fought to save this last week before my return for some focused reading and reflection. My time has been full of many good things. But "quiet" hasn't been a defining feature.
When Great-Grandpa John arrived in the stockyards of Chicago, he sold his horse to a glue factory. (Was this the ultimate ingratitude, or the kindest possible action? The world may never know.) Then he used the proceeds to buy a tram ticket to the suburbs, where he raised chickens and worked for a bus company but never earned his driver's license. My maternal grandmother Naomi, the oldest of their nine kids, recalled moving nine times in her childhood, including to a barn somewhat rigged up as a house. John's horseback days were over, but his hardscrabble days were not.
It was the Great Depression. Whose life wasn't hard? I never met Naomi, who passed away before I was born. But I've heard stories from and about my other three grandparents and the struggles they endured in childhood. Still, all of them had access to education. Naomi went on to become a nurse during World War II, not because she had the slightest interest in medicine but because it was a government-funded career path available to women.
My parents and I sat down earlier this month with my great-uncle Lee, Naomi's youngest brother, whom she helped raise. I'd never met him, as he's been in Florida since the 1970's. I sampled grits and eggs Benedict and listened to Frevert family stories I'd never heard. Twenty-one years her junior, Lee remembers better days than Naomi. Having raised his kids in Florida, he's now returning to Chicago to rejoin his daughter, his Whole Foods manager son-in-law, and his only grandchild. Lee's Facebook page shows them wining and dining all over the city during his many previous visits. How do you get from sharecropper to Whole Foods, from horseback rider to frequent flyer, in just two generations?
As I listened to Lee's stories about his father, John's life sounded so much closer to a rural Cambodian's than to mine. Could my great-grandfather have imagined that one hundred years after his wedding, he'd have a descendant on the other side of the world, not due to warfare or apocalypse but her own choice? Could he imagine me having a black thumb, a masters degree, and no animals? What would that farm boy make of the black piece of plastic sitting on my lap, recording some outlandish version of his life story with nary a pen in sight? And what are the myriad of forces that gave one illiterate farmer's family wealth and options aplenty, while others watch their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in the same homes and farms and constraints that their family has known for half a millennium?
What a difference a century makes... in some places.
