New West Book Review
Hard Times: Rita Williams’ “If The Creek Don’t Rise”
By Jenny Shank, 1-21-08
 |
|
 | |
|
If The Creek Don’t Rise
By Rita Williams
Harvest/Harcourt
322 pages, $14
I’ve spent almost my whole life in Colorado, and I was beginning to think I knew the place, until I read Rita Williams‘ riveting, richly-detailed memoir, If The Creek Don’t Rise, which has added layers to my understanding of the state’s recent history through telling the personal story of one Colorado native. As Williams explains, “few people, black or white, seemed to remember that African American Westerners had existed at all.”
I was late to discover If The Creek Don’t Rise, which came out in paperback last year, but when I learned the details of Williams’ background, I couldn’t resist sharing it with NewWest readers. Williams grew up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado in the 1950’s and ‘60s. After her father abandoned her when she was a toddler and her mother died when she was four, her aunt Daisy stepped in to raise her—grudgingly.
According to Williams, Daisy was the “last surviving African American widow of a Civil War union solider,” and she is a complex, heartbreaking figure, a woman so scarred by the heinous treatment she received as an African-American in the South that she seems to have internalized the sentiment that Nanny expresses in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, that black women are “de mule uh de world.” Hurston’s Janie didn’t want to accept that fate, and Rita, born at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, doesn’t want to either.
Though Daisy insults her constantly, calling her “heifer” and worse, Rita dreams of an artistic, intellectual life that will carry her far away from becoming a cleaning woman like her aunt, haunted by “the fear that I would forever be attached to a rag, mopping up behind people who mysteriously thrived on some more luxurious plane than the one allotted me.”
When she was very young, Daisy had married Robert Ball Anderson, who was 69 years older than she. “Ex-slave, Union man, buffalo soldier, [Anderson had] also been the most prosperous black pioneer in Nebraska history.” Williams’ entire family gradually migrated west from Arkansas, ultimately landing in Colorado in the 1930’s after Anderson died and his businesses failed. For a time the family was prosperous, settling in an area called Strawberry Park, “a clearing in the midst of the Rocky Mountains” that yielded abundant crops of berries. The women hired out as hunting guides and the men worked in the mines, and the family even opened a restaurant that thrived for a time, on the strength of Wiliams’ mother’s cooking.
Rita was born during the family’s last stable years, and when everyone else had died or fled, she was left with a lonely, impoverished childhood and in Daisy, a caretaker who wasn’t willing to mother her. The contrasts between Rita’s life and those of her white classmates are stark, but despite their differences, classmates and townspeople seem to have treated Rita well, for the most part. There, amid the Rockies, Rita didn’t have enough money to ski, even if she could have gotten out of her heavy schedule of chores. They were “the only black family for nearly two hundred miles.”
Daisy’s stance toward Rita was paradoxical—on one hand, she wanted her to succeed, and arranged for piano and German lessons, but on the other hand, she kept cutting Rita low. “I’d never heard the word ‘nigger’ outside of home,” Wiliams writes, “but inside I heard it every day.”
Rita and Daisy ate whatever they could grow, shoot, and store up in their deep freezer, or goods that were donated by local charities. It reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s locavore farming experiment in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle—but Rita and Daisy were eating locally and seasonally way before it was trendy, because they were poor and didn’t have any other choice.
There are glimmers of hope in Rita’s life, such as when Daisy takes a job cleaning at Perry Mansfield, a summer arts camp filled with modern dancers and actors. “I had no idea that the people wandering in and out of the studios in their dirty jeans included the likes of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham and Dustin Hoffman, but I knew they were up to something magical.”
Rita learns by watching from the wings, and for a few blissful summers she’s even allowed to take classes. Just as Rita seems on the path to escaping the misery and isolation of her life, something always goes wrong—a clash with Daisy, poverty holding her back, or the repercussions of Rita acting out as any normal child does. But with Rita, the consequences are always severe.
She bounces around between several high schools, many of them elite institutions that Daisy gets her into in exchange for work. At one point Rita attends Mount Saint Scholastica, a high school run by nuns in Cañon City. She’s expected to stay there over the summer, but she learns from the nuns that she won’t be allowed to take swimming lessons at a motel pool because she’s black. I was so engrossed in the book that when the nun explains that the owner “can’t allow any Negro children to swim there,” I felt it physically, like a kick in the gut.
The young Rita then does something astonishingly brave: she walks for miles in the heat to confront the pool owner, who tries to make excuses for his policy. The nuns expel Rita for what they saw as temerity and what any modern reader will see as simple righteousness; this was a chapter that made me feel ashamed to be a Catholic.
Rita continues this one step forward, two steps back approach to her development throughout her high school years, which include further shocking developments. As the memoir ends, she’s been offered a scholarship to Western State in Gunnison, and the reader is left wondering what will happen next. Thankfully, Williams is working on a sequel.
In the beginning of If The Creek Don’t Rise, the adult Rita makes a long-delayed visit back to Steamboat Springs to visit Daisy, who was then in her nineties. At the airport, Rita takes in the newcomers, and becomes annoyed by a rude woman “wearing a nuclear yellow ski suit and lizard-skin cowboy boots.” Williams writes, “You had to earn the right to wear cowboy boots like that. You had to scrounge around for years in mud and shit up to your ankles in cheap ones lined with cardboard that you tried to dray out overnight by the coal stove. Of course you had to wear them out damp the next morning.” In her beautifully written, searing memoir, Williams has demonstrated that during her childhood, she more than earned the right to wear her Colorado cowboy boots for a lifetime.
Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.
Like to receive our print magazine, The New West? Click here for free subscription information.
Comments