Family : a century of blood and tears

Family : a century of blood and tears

Families -- Fiction

Historical fiction, American

Force, Dolly Charmaine

2005

Boyer, Rick

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Family: A Century of Blood and Tears is a full-length novel which fits in the historical fiction genre and explores a number of themes including religious conflict, ethnic immigration/assimilation, parent-child relationships, repeated patterns of behavior through family generations, issues of responsibility and maturity, and cultural change with sub-themes involving entertainment and pop culture. Without realizing it, the research for this work began fifty some years ago when as a child I would listen to the adults talking and I absorbed the stories, the complaints, the heated discussions, the jokes, and the gossip that filled the rooms while I, as all well-behaved children of the time, remained quietly seen but not heard. My research culminated as I avidly read through archived microfilms of newspapers from the first two-thirds of this century in the university library but most of the history I relate herein has either been witnessed first hand by me or gathered from my elders and their experiences. This remains, however, a work of fiction and is not intended to be taken as autobiographical. While settings and public events are historically accurate, the characters are not intended to be specific depictions of actual individuals, alive or dead. The setting of the story is contained within the Midwest and predominantly centered in Wisconsin, a state that prides itself in its educational standards and innovation, (Wisconsin opened the first kindergartens in the mid-nineteenth century and was the first state to paint white guidelines at the shoulder of its public highways). It is also known for its cleanliness and beauty, its dairy products, fishing, and its fierce, bone-chilling, mind-numbing, gale-blowing winters. I have tried to capture the sense of community in a pre-welfare, pre-social services society where people watch out for each other, gather around the local hardware store stove to wile away the winter, and demonstrate an admirable sense of self-reliance. As I continue to travel around our country today, it is hard sometimes to believe that there are still places where graffiti is unknown, litter does not exist, carelessly tossed cigarette butts are swept up daily, and people leave their doors and windows open without fear or concern. Language plays an important role in presenting fully fleshed-out characters. The Wisconsin accent, still heard within the state's small towns, farmlands, and the blue-collar neighborhoods of its cities, is most distinguished by the addition of a hard Germanic ""T"" sound to words ending in ""d."" In these areas still heavily populated by the descendants of the original German and Scandinavian immigrants, one continues to hear unique colloquialisms and the steady flow of ""andt,"" '''Richardt,'� and ""lizardt,"" is hard to miss. The almost explosive Wisconsin ""ain't"" and gutteral fracturing of grammar is not to be confused with the slower, softer, and pitch-sustaining drawl of the South. To re-create the flavor of this dialect, I had only to recall the familiar voices and speech patterns from my childhood, and imagine my own aunts and uncles talking in my ear. Time is an important motif in this work. The novel itself is structured into nine parts, each part centering on one day. Each day correlates to the calendar date which repeats itself in four digits, i.e., 1/1/11; 2/2/22; 3/3/33; 4/4/44; and so on. The seed for this idea actually planted itself in my brain the morning of May 5 in 1955 as I sat staring at the date, written out in its numeric symbols by our teacher, in the space on the corner of the blackboard customarily reserved for it. In an epiphanous moment of childhood, I realized how unusual it was to have the date expressed with only one digit repeating itself four times. How often does that happen in a person's lifetime? I asked myself, and realized, even at that tender age, it was not very often. At that moment, I would never have dreamed that more than four decades later, the idea would pop back into my mind as I considered a structure for a creative thesis. Because of the historical nature of this work, however, I have chosen to soften the original high-tech digital shorthand symbolizing the dates for a more traditional appearance. Part One begins on January L 1911, at exactly 12:01 AM, in the snow-buried farmland of northern Wisconsin where a Grange Hall of German families are celebrating the arrival of the New Year with food and music. From there, the story spans across the Twentieth Century in nine leaps of eleven years each to conclude on September 9, 1999. Time continues to lend structure as hours and minutes replace chapter titles and continua1ly return the reader to a grounding, so to speak, in the present action of that particular day, while also serving as a constant reminder of how quickly our time to ""strut"" upon the world's stage passes. Choosing to structure a novel in this unique manner presented its own challenges in story telling. Eleven years brings many changes. To assist the reader's understanding of what has happened to the characters in the interlude, and why he now finds them as they are on the next date, I have generously employed the use of flashbacks, and admit to having been influenced in this by the novels of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. In the most traditional form of the flashback, popularized by the first person voice as demonstrated in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, or a host of other Gothic tales, the ""I"" speaks out to the reader and launches into an account that is all flashback, but the story is still told in a very linier, sequential chronology. In contrast, I have patterned the flashbacks in Family after the way we all actually remember things, in bits and pieces and mixed into the ongoing action of our present day life which triggers those memories. Hearing a golden oldie on the radio can instantly transport us back to the high school sox hop when the nerdy guy stepped on our toe and spilled punch on our favorite skirt. An argument breaks out between our children and we find ourselves reliving the very same type of fight we had with our own sibling in our own childhood. A familiar phrase, positive or negative, is uttered and we can respond in a knee-jerk reaction with emotions whose origin really belong to another time and place. And often, depending on circumstances and state of mind, we can selectively forget or repress some memories to dwell only on those more fitting to our mood. In each of the novel's nine days, I utilize abbreviated stream of consciousness and some outside stimulation to trigger memories or flashbacks that continue to reveal key aspects of the past and the character's make-up. Since each of us is the complex sum of our experiences, it can be argued that we can never really know a person unless we know all that they have experienced. By not telling this story in a completely chronological, sequential manner, the use of flashback has enabled me to create and maintain a little mystery regarding some of the characters and their motives just as we experience in real life. The reader sees the character act or react but doesn't always understand exactly why. Things are referred to but the reader may need a few more pages of information to put together what the character really means. Bit by bit, layers are peeled from a character's past and the reader continually gains insight. And, is this not a type of how we all relate, or fail to relate, to each other every day?

2014-04-28

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