Today’s post is an excerpt taken from Ruth Suckow’s novel Country People, first published in 1924, and reissued this centenary year. Country People was Suckow’s first novel in a long and distinguished list of published books. She was a well-known writer in her time. But she often wrote of rural characters in a rural setting, so she was tagged a “regionalist” and soon forgotten.
Her novels capture an important period in U.S. agricultural history—the settlement of Iowa and the Midwest with its influx of white European immigrants who, with the aid of government policy, took over Indigenous land. The settlers farmed small, diverse operations, growing both livestock and grains, a pattern that would continue until post WW II days with the dawning of the age of agricultural chemicals. Ironically, many of the descendants of these early settlement immigrants would themselves be displaced and driven off the land through consolidation and the industrialization of agriculture.
Suckow’s fiction also depicts the social and cultural structures of immigrant families in the Midwest. Hard-working thrifty people saved money to buy and farm the land, dividing up their work through traditional gender roles. Their lives were grounded in capitalism and spirituality, the churches providing a sense of security and a social life. Children were educated in one-room schools. Young people looked for mates who were healthy and sturdy enough for a life of constant care, chores and manual labor.
A hundred years after the publication of Country People, we can now look back on this piece of historical fiction, and think about all that we learned from these settlers, and all that has been left out of this story. For better or worse, the threads of these immigrant lives still wind through our own.
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August liked the new community. He saw that in some respects it was ahead of Turkey Creek. For one thing, there was a railroad, a main line of the Illinois Central that connected Richland directly with Chicago. It would be easier to market crops here. There would not be so much hauling to do. It was only eleven miles from “Wapsie,” the county seat, and that was an advantage. And, then, he liked the looks of the country. There was not so much timber, more prairieland; and after all the clearing that he had had to do about Turkey Creek, August was not fond of timber. He said little, but he made up his mind before very long that he wanted to get hold of some land about here and settle down. Someone would be wanting to sell and move out. He had been saving ever since he started working for other people and was putting away some all the time. When he saw a good piece of land he was going to try to get it, paying for it gradually as he could. And he had his eyes open for some girl who looked as if she would make him a good wife.
There were not so many Germans here as around Turkey Creek, and there were some Lutherans among them, so that they had no German Methodist Church. Those who were close enough drove over to the Turkey Creek church when the weather was good. Most of them began “going in town.” They drove to the Richland church, four of them together, two girls and two boys, in a two-seated buggy. The old people did not care to go there because the services were in English. They thought that it meant, too, that the young people were getting away from them.
There were more good times not connected with the church than there had been at Turkey Creek. Socials at the country schools, bob-rides, and big country parties where they played the old country games and kissing-games until the whole thing ended in a general spooning,” with the lights out. August was bashful. Herman Klaus urged him to get a girl and come on. But he did not go to these parties very much until he began keeping company with Emma Stille.
That was in the first summer after he came to Richland. Henry Baumgartner let him go over to help the Stilles at threshing-time. The Stille boys had come over to help the Baumgartners. The Stille farm was about two miles from where August was working.
Old Wilheim Stille was the one who used to preach in the Turkey Creek church. He was a gentle, dreamy kind of man. His threshing was always left until the last. But old lady Stille saw to it that he did not get too far behind. People spoke of her as “someone to watch out for.” She was short, squat, heavy. She had a round, wrinkled, crafty face with narrow, suspicious eyes. She parted her hair smoothly in the middle and wore round ear-rings. When they drove into town, she never wore a hat, but a dark scarf tied around her head. Her dark, thick, shapeless clothes, her shawls, her scarf, her soft felt slippers, all added to the feeling of craft, of slyness, that she gave. People were afraid of her. She was stingy, too, as stingy as the Baumgartners; but the girls saw to it that the threshers were well fed.
There were two of the Stille girls at home, Emma and Mollie. Herman Klaus liked Mollie Stille pretty well. Everyone liked the Stille girls. They said that they were just nice girls, not so queer as their father and without their mother’s meanness. They waited on the table when the threshers came. The men all knew them and joked with them. August had nothing to say, but he knew every move that Emma Stille made as she hurried around the long table bringing in more stewed chicken and coffee. She was not very large, but she looked like a good worker. Her black hair curled a little from the heat, and her face was flushed. Her lips, full German lips, curved, dark red, were slightly parted. The men teased her. “Hurry up there, Emma! Emma, you’re too slow!” August sat eating industriously, without looking up; but when Emma came near him and put out her hand to take his coffee cup, he caught the faint scent of heat that came from her, saw the little beads of perspiration about the roots of her shiny black hair.
He liked her. He wondered if she was pretty strong. She seemed to be able to get through with a lot of work. She did not look in the least like her mother. She was a giggler; she and Mollie both seem to giggle by the hour, but just the same she was pretty sensible. She taught country school in the Benning Township schoolhouse, but she knew how to wait on threshers.
Excerpt from Country People by Ruth Suckow, a centenary edition, edited by Julie Husband and Jim O’Loughin, originally published in 1924 in New York by Alfred A. Knopf, reissued in 2024 by Final Thursday Press, pp 16-18.
http://www.finalthursdaypress.com/
Listen to James Schaap read from Country People:
James Calvin Schaap
Jim Schaap’s “Small Wonders” are broadcast weekly on Siouxland Public Media, KWIT – the National Public Radio station in Sioux City. His blog is Stuff in the Basement. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Alton, Iowa.
Centennial Celebration: Country People, 1924-2024
Mary Swander will give the keynote address for the public Centennial Celebration of the publication of Country People, Iowa writer Ruth Suckow’s first novel, at 1 p.m. on Saturday, September 14 at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls. Her talk and other afternoon celebratory activities (including cake) are free and open to the public.
First published in 1924, Country People follows four generations of the Iowa German American settler family, the Kaetterhenrys, from the 1870s to the early 1920s.
“Mary Swander is the ideal writer to launch the 100-year celebration of Country People, for she has written with beauty and depth of the Iowa landscape and people,” says Barbara Lounsberry, President of the Ruth Suckow Association. “We are eager to hear her thoughts on this 1924 novel.”
In the 1920s, H. L. Mencken wrote: “I regard Ruth Suckow as the most promising young writer of fiction, man or woman, now visibly at work in America.” In nine novels and 43 short stories — most set in Iowa — Suckow captured the lives, passions, and struggles of ordinary people in their small towns and farms. Her works include Iowa Interiors (short stories) and the novels Odyssey of a Nice Girl, The Folks (a Literary Guild selection and bestseller in 1934), A Part of the Institution (based on Grinnell College), and The John Wood Case (which draws on an actual northwest Iowa embezzlement tragedy).
A Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibit will be on display in various Iowa locations in 2024 and 2025.
For more information on Ruth Suckow, on the free Centennial Celebration activities, on hosting the traveling exhibit, or on becoming a Ruth Suckow Memorial Association member or supporter, email lounsberry@gmail.com or see ruthsuckow.org.
Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibit Schedule
January 1 – 28, 2024: Hawarden Public Library
February 4 – March 3: Burt Public Library
March 10 – April 7: Orange City Public Library
April 14 – May 12: Bettendorf Public Library
May 19 – June 16: Urbandale Public Library
June 23 – August 4: Cedar Falls Public Library
August 11– September 8: Polk City Public Library
September 15 – October 13: Robey Memorial Library, Waukon
October 20 – December 1: Ruth Suckow Public Library, Earlville
December 8, 2024 – January 5, 2025: Kendall Young Library, Webster City
January 12 – February 9, 2025: Drake Community Library, Grinnell
February 16 – March 16, 2025: Manchester Public Library
Mary Swander has published scores of books of poetry, non-fiction and drama. Currently, she is touring her latest play Squatters on Red Earth, a winner of the Anon was a Woman Environmental Award in 2023. Read more about Swander on her website:
http://www.maryswander.com
I am pleased to be part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Check out our work every week on the Sunday Round-Up, edited by Julie Gammack:
Thank you for this post, Mary. I'm looking forward to meeting you later this year at the RSMA meeting. My then boyfriend took me to a Ruth Suckow Annual Meeting as a hot date 25 years ago and I was astonished to learn about this wonderful writer--I was an English teacher at Hawkeye Community College. I'd taken classes at ISU and Buena Vista and had numerous literature courses, but I'd never heard of Suckow. I began using one of her short stories ("A Rural Community") in my Intro to Literature class and students liked her and "got" her.
What a vivid picture of a time and place. Thanks again for your introduction to Ruth Suckow's work and for your introduction today to the excerpt from her novel.