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Black Soil
Nell and Tim Connors and their pioneer family attempt to carve out a life for themselves on the prairie frontier in northwest Iowa, circa 1880.
320 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1930
13 people want to read
About the author
Josephine Donovan
41 books20 followersJosephine Donovan is the author of twelve books of nonfiction and the editor of four. A complete list of her publications is available on her web site:
http://english.umaine.edu/people/jose.... Her fields of specialization include animal ethics, feminist criticism and theory, American women’s literature (especially nineteenth-century), and early modern women’s literature. Her work has been translated into seven languages (Japanese, French, Turkish, Swedish, Greek, German, and Chinese).
Her most recent books are: Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story (2022); The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America (2020), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Aware; and The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Recently published: a second, revised edition of Women and the Rise of the Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013) St. Martin’s, 1999; paperback, 2000). It was termed “a work of extraordinary significance” by the Choice reviewer, who wrote, “Donovan has defined the field clearly, forthrightly, often brilliantly. All future discussion of the subject begins here” (October 2000). Also recently published was European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champêtres (Bloomsbury, 2010), a work in comparative literature.
Donovan’s best-known book, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions, first published in 1985, is now in its fourth edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) Amazon.com notes, “this book has established itself as the classic survey and analysis of the roots and development of feminist theory.” A selection of other reviews of Donovan’s books may be found on her web site.
Two of her books, Sarah Orne Jewett and Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love have recently been reprinted in revised editions on-line and in “print-on-demand” form by Cybereditions.
Born in Manila in 1941, Donovan was evacuated from the Philippines with her mother a few months before Pearl Harbor. Her father, a Captain in the U. S. Army, remained in the Philippines where he was captured by the Japanese in 1942, remaining a P.O.W. for the duration. His memoirs, edited by his daughter, were recently published as P.O.W. in the Pacific: Memoirs of an American Doctor in World War II.
She graduated, cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1962 with a major in history, after spending her Junior Year in Europe. After graduation she worked as a Copy Desk clerk at The Washington Post and Time Magazine and as a general assignment reporter on a small newspaper in upstate New York. During this period she completed a course in Creative Writing at Columbia University.
She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967 and 1971, respectively. She has held academic positions at several universities and worked for a time as a Copy Editor for G. K. Hall in Boston. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Maine.
http://english.umaine.edu/people/jose.... Her fields of specialization include animal ethics, feminist criticism and theory, American women’s literature (especially nineteenth-century), and early modern women’s literature. Her work has been translated into seven languages (Japanese, French, Turkish, Swedish, Greek, German, and Chinese).
Her most recent books are: Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story (2022); The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America (2020), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Aware; and The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Recently published: a second, revised edition of Women and the Rise of the Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013) St. Martin’s, 1999; paperback, 2000). It was termed “a work of extraordinary significance” by the Choice reviewer, who wrote, “Donovan has defined the field clearly, forthrightly, often brilliantly. All future discussion of the subject begins here” (October 2000). Also recently published was European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champêtres (Bloomsbury, 2010), a work in comparative literature.
Donovan’s best-known book, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions, first published in 1985, is now in its fourth edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) Amazon.com notes, “this book has established itself as the classic survey and analysis of the roots and development of feminist theory.” A selection of other reviews of Donovan’s books may be found on her web site.
Two of her books, Sarah Orne Jewett and Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love have recently been reprinted in revised editions on-line and in “print-on-demand” form by Cybereditions.
Born in Manila in 1941, Donovan was evacuated from the Philippines with her mother a few months before Pearl Harbor. Her father, a Captain in the U. S. Army, remained in the Philippines where he was captured by the Japanese in 1942, remaining a P.O.W. for the duration. His memoirs, edited by his daughter, were recently published as P.O.W. in the Pacific: Memoirs of an American Doctor in World War II.
She graduated, cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1962 with a major in history, after spending her Junior Year in Europe. After graduation she worked as a Copy Desk clerk at The Washington Post and Time Magazine and as a general assignment reporter on a small newspaper in upstate New York. During this period she completed a course in Creative Writing at Columbia University.
She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967 and 1971, respectively. She has held academic positions at several universities and worked for a time as a Copy Editor for G. K. Hall in Boston. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Maine.
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May 29, 2014
You sometimes wonder—or at least I do—if there will come a time when Sioux County, Iowa, has enough hog confinements. Industry is the name of the game here; the descendants of all those Dutch Calvinists could write primers on how to work, how to farm, and how to make money.
Confinements sit on every available hill, more than any other adjacent county, but then agriculture is a huge business here, empowering everything, keeping life afloat and a culture intact. It’s difficult to imagine the region in its wild, pristine state, almost impossible to the natural world as an antagonist. There’s hail and even a tornado or two; there are still almost unendurable winters, like the last one; and torrid summers still create hot winds that once upon a time laid standing corn to waste in just a few days.
But to think of this world outside my window itself as some untamed wilderness, as a powerful force to somehow be conquered is simply not possible in day when the best cabbed tractors are steered through the fields by satellite technology. In many ways, we’ve subdued the earth.
Maybe that’s why it took me half a novel to determine the central conflict when I started into reading Josephine Donovan’s Black Soil, her engaging rendition of the perilous settlement of this corner of the region Fred Manfred named “Siouxland.” It’s just hard, 150 years later, to think of what she calls “the prairie” as a bleak and pitiless enemy.
But once upon a time, it was. Once upon a time, grasshoppers darkened the sky and devoured just about every living thing, engorging whole sections, mile after mile of farmland, making the earth seem to crawl. Once upon a time, the devastation they created brutal poverty no descendant can begin to imagine. Once upon a time, prairie fires ritually consumed the region. Once upon a time, life-and-death drama occurred on October stages all over the region. Once upon a time, white folks were scared to death of the Native people their own new homesteads unkindly dispossessed.
If you’ve read Giants in the Earth, the Rolvaag classic, nothing in Donovan’s Black Soil is going to be new or visionary. The gender differences are classic in what some call “Middle Border Lit”: men like Per Hansa and Tim Collins loved the adventure, loved opening the earth and making it abundant with row crops.
Meanwhile, in a whole series of novels about homesteading, women feel abandoned beneath the eyes of a gargantuan sky on a land so bare there seemed no place to hide. What’s more, frontier life required abandoning families back home, meant endless sweat and none of the blessings of life in established communities back east.
Nell Connors, the woman at the heart of this 1930s novel, is just such a pioneer woman. She’s neither Dutch or Luxembourgian, traditional Sioux County ethnics, but, oddly enough, Irish Catholic and a Yankee. Her roots are back east in Massachusetts, where she remembers visiting the most honorable Dickinson family in Amherst, including the spirit-like Emily, whom she remembers as a poet.
Nell Connors is married to Tim, a wonderful man with a huge heart, but a man perhaps not well suited to build a life at the edge of the frontier. He doesn’t lack ambition, but he’s not dedicated to making the farm grow—or farming as a profession. His eye is elsewhere. More than once I’ve heard old Iowa men talk about brothers who were sent off to school for the ministry or education once it became obvious to Ma and Pa that they didn’t have the wherewithal to farm. Tim Connors doesn’t either.
But it’s not her husband’s skewed predilections that brings Nell Connors grief; it’s the unspeakable realization that her children are walking off to school in bare feet and, once there, receiving a third-rate education, at best, in a world where its far more important to milk than read poems.
It’s the sheer force of “the prairie” that she fights, that makes her wonder if Siouxland can ever be home. When she sees a boy who once showed real artistic talent return from working cattle “out west,” swaggering as if he were little more than a chaw-spewing cowhand, she feels and fears the overwhelming power of open spaces. “A sadness came over Nell Connor as she walked back to the house,” Donovan writes. “Does the country make the man, or the man make the country?”
Nell Connors’s fear is for what her children won’t have, what they’ll never experience, what they’ll miss out here on the hard-hearted Siouxland prairie.
The Dutch fare well in Black Soil. The novel is set somewhere near Primghar, where the locals watch immigrant Hollanders arriving in waves at the western reaches of the county (“the Dutch are coming in thicker than hops!” someone reports).
The Dutch, Nell says, are exceptionally clannish, more so that the Germans and the Luxembourgians; but they keep their towns and themselves clean and tidy, just like their farms. They work hard, and, in the novel at least, the occasional Hollander who wanders away from the colony and into foreign Siouxland regions always makes a good neighbor.
In a blizzard reminiscent of the famous Children’s Blizzard of 1888, a little Dutch boy dies when the kids are sent home as the snow begins to fall. Then, when the blizzard unfurls its anger, Little Benny Hurd leaves the Connors kids because his home is in another direction.
Sadly, he never gets there. His body is found a few days later, the puppy he’d been given by one of the Conners kids earlier that morning still wrapped adoringly in his jacket. His grandparents leave Siouxland. Not everyone is made of tough stuff.
People die on the prairie, Benny Hurd among them. Ms. Donovan gives a number of chapters to the story of Johann Hoepner, an aristocratic young man from Germany, a boy escaping the military draft. Johann is just what Nell so desires—he’s upper class, well-educated, and can speak seven languages. A sweetheart back in Germany awaits his signal that a new home awaits her in a new land.
But things don’t work out for Johann Hoepner. The land is a stern taskmaster, time passes and he doesn’t appear able to escape the mud soddie people helped him build when he came. Finally, when the woman he loves stops writing, Johann takes out a rope and ends his life beneath a cottonwood.
Nell is heartbroken, not only because the community lost one of its own, but also because his death kindles once more her grievous fear that this place can kill, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.
If there were a church fight or two, the novel could well have been written by a Dutch Calvinist. There isn’t. The Connors are Roman Catholic, and Nell is bountifully religious, close to God, constantly in prayer.
For years, Nell insisted that when their foster child, Sheila, was of age, she’d be sent back east for the kind of education her children were sadly missing. It’s her dream. It’s the vision that allows her to live out here at the edge of the frontier. But when that time comes, Sheila decides otherwise.
Nell’s heart and will are broken. Her only comfort is that all of this is somehow, unthinkably, in God’s will. She goes alone to her bedroom, bearing the burden of what she believes to be her failure, then lies their quietly, admitting no one, seeing no one.
In her calm she realized that in this as in all other things she must be reconciled to His indomitable will. Her spirit of fight was of no avail; she must accept fate. Her recent flash of anger went out like the lightning of a storm. She got up from her bed with a feeling akin to that experienced after the birth of her children here in this room—she had been down in the valley for a while, but she was up in the heights again.
And then she says, “It’s God’s will.” And with that, “Nell bathed her face, combed her hair, changed her wrapper, and rattled up some custard pies for the men’s dinner.”
Sheila’s decision is to follow a man who loves her, a Native, a Yankton Sioux from just on the other side of the Big Sioux River. There’s a racial story here too, a complicated little mystery that opens up at the end of the novel.
But the novel’s heart has less to do with race than it does with place. Wild Goose, the Lakota man who loves Sheila, may well be more of a symbol than a human being, because when Sheila leaves with him for the west, for deeper and even less “civilized” frontier, Nell’s loss couldn’t be more profound.
But what her daughter’s decision determines is that, for Nell Connors, life is here too, on the prairie, in a community of tough ethnics that fight at the drop of a hat or a stolen pitchfork.
And then there’s the railroad. It’s come to town for the first time, creating a celebration like none other this little fledgling community has ever seen. What’s more, it is, to Nell Connors, a kind of redeemer. Once upon a time at the end of its line, it had dumped them unfeelingly into an unwelcoming world where as far you could see, there seemed to be nothing at all.
It’s the railroad that saves her, a link with her own childhood and the blessings of an established community with good schools and endless opportunities. When the railroad comes to town, linking old and new, Nell Connors finds herself ready to settle down.
Black Soil is not a great novel. Donovan’s power of description occasionally shines in glorious portraits of the prairie beauty that belie Nell’s great fears; but she wanders through several characters’ perceptions with an annoying omniscience, and the perils of the prairie—grasshoppers, prairie fires--are what one might expect.
Still, for those of us who live here, Black Soil is a great read, even if it’s not great literature. It’s a great read because it brings us back to a time those of us with roots here need to remember. It wasn’t always easy, farming wasn’t always a business, and opportunity was not as abundant as a bin-busting harvest.
That we don’t know our history better allows, even generates a certain kind of arrogance. To read Black Soil today, 150 years after white folks like the Collins came to Siouxland to seek a better life, is humbling, something to think about when you pass some huge, tech-savvy John Deere this spring, something to consider when you look up and down endless rows of corn and beans stretching into a horizon that never ends.
Confinements sit on every available hill, more than any other adjacent county, but then agriculture is a huge business here, empowering everything, keeping life afloat and a culture intact. It’s difficult to imagine the region in its wild, pristine state, almost impossible to the natural world as an antagonist. There’s hail and even a tornado or two; there are still almost unendurable winters, like the last one; and torrid summers still create hot winds that once upon a time laid standing corn to waste in just a few days.
But to think of this world outside my window itself as some untamed wilderness, as a powerful force to somehow be conquered is simply not possible in day when the best cabbed tractors are steered through the fields by satellite technology. In many ways, we’ve subdued the earth.
Maybe that’s why it took me half a novel to determine the central conflict when I started into reading Josephine Donovan’s Black Soil, her engaging rendition of the perilous settlement of this corner of the region Fred Manfred named “Siouxland.” It’s just hard, 150 years later, to think of what she calls “the prairie” as a bleak and pitiless enemy.
But once upon a time, it was. Once upon a time, grasshoppers darkened the sky and devoured just about every living thing, engorging whole sections, mile after mile of farmland, making the earth seem to crawl. Once upon a time, the devastation they created brutal poverty no descendant can begin to imagine. Once upon a time, prairie fires ritually consumed the region. Once upon a time, life-and-death drama occurred on October stages all over the region. Once upon a time, white folks were scared to death of the Native people their own new homesteads unkindly dispossessed.
If you’ve read Giants in the Earth, the Rolvaag classic, nothing in Donovan’s Black Soil is going to be new or visionary. The gender differences are classic in what some call “Middle Border Lit”: men like Per Hansa and Tim Collins loved the adventure, loved opening the earth and making it abundant with row crops.
Meanwhile, in a whole series of novels about homesteading, women feel abandoned beneath the eyes of a gargantuan sky on a land so bare there seemed no place to hide. What’s more, frontier life required abandoning families back home, meant endless sweat and none of the blessings of life in established communities back east.
Nell Connors, the woman at the heart of this 1930s novel, is just such a pioneer woman. She’s neither Dutch or Luxembourgian, traditional Sioux County ethnics, but, oddly enough, Irish Catholic and a Yankee. Her roots are back east in Massachusetts, where she remembers visiting the most honorable Dickinson family in Amherst, including the spirit-like Emily, whom she remembers as a poet.
Nell Connors is married to Tim, a wonderful man with a huge heart, but a man perhaps not well suited to build a life at the edge of the frontier. He doesn’t lack ambition, but he’s not dedicated to making the farm grow—or farming as a profession. His eye is elsewhere. More than once I’ve heard old Iowa men talk about brothers who were sent off to school for the ministry or education once it became obvious to Ma and Pa that they didn’t have the wherewithal to farm. Tim Connors doesn’t either.
But it’s not her husband’s skewed predilections that brings Nell Connors grief; it’s the unspeakable realization that her children are walking off to school in bare feet and, once there, receiving a third-rate education, at best, in a world where its far more important to milk than read poems.
It’s the sheer force of “the prairie” that she fights, that makes her wonder if Siouxland can ever be home. When she sees a boy who once showed real artistic talent return from working cattle “out west,” swaggering as if he were little more than a chaw-spewing cowhand, she feels and fears the overwhelming power of open spaces. “A sadness came over Nell Connor as she walked back to the house,” Donovan writes. “Does the country make the man, or the man make the country?”
Nell Connors’s fear is for what her children won’t have, what they’ll never experience, what they’ll miss out here on the hard-hearted Siouxland prairie.
The Dutch fare well in Black Soil. The novel is set somewhere near Primghar, where the locals watch immigrant Hollanders arriving in waves at the western reaches of the county (“the Dutch are coming in thicker than hops!” someone reports).
The Dutch, Nell says, are exceptionally clannish, more so that the Germans and the Luxembourgians; but they keep their towns and themselves clean and tidy, just like their farms. They work hard, and, in the novel at least, the occasional Hollander who wanders away from the colony and into foreign Siouxland regions always makes a good neighbor.
In a blizzard reminiscent of the famous Children’s Blizzard of 1888, a little Dutch boy dies when the kids are sent home as the snow begins to fall. Then, when the blizzard unfurls its anger, Little Benny Hurd leaves the Connors kids because his home is in another direction.
Sadly, he never gets there. His body is found a few days later, the puppy he’d been given by one of the Conners kids earlier that morning still wrapped adoringly in his jacket. His grandparents leave Siouxland. Not everyone is made of tough stuff.
People die on the prairie, Benny Hurd among them. Ms. Donovan gives a number of chapters to the story of Johann Hoepner, an aristocratic young man from Germany, a boy escaping the military draft. Johann is just what Nell so desires—he’s upper class, well-educated, and can speak seven languages. A sweetheart back in Germany awaits his signal that a new home awaits her in a new land.
But things don’t work out for Johann Hoepner. The land is a stern taskmaster, time passes and he doesn’t appear able to escape the mud soddie people helped him build when he came. Finally, when the woman he loves stops writing, Johann takes out a rope and ends his life beneath a cottonwood.
Nell is heartbroken, not only because the community lost one of its own, but also because his death kindles once more her grievous fear that this place can kill, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.
If there were a church fight or two, the novel could well have been written by a Dutch Calvinist. There isn’t. The Connors are Roman Catholic, and Nell is bountifully religious, close to God, constantly in prayer.
For years, Nell insisted that when their foster child, Sheila, was of age, she’d be sent back east for the kind of education her children were sadly missing. It’s her dream. It’s the vision that allows her to live out here at the edge of the frontier. But when that time comes, Sheila decides otherwise.
Nell’s heart and will are broken. Her only comfort is that all of this is somehow, unthinkably, in God’s will. She goes alone to her bedroom, bearing the burden of what she believes to be her failure, then lies their quietly, admitting no one, seeing no one.
In her calm she realized that in this as in all other things she must be reconciled to His indomitable will. Her spirit of fight was of no avail; she must accept fate. Her recent flash of anger went out like the lightning of a storm. She got up from her bed with a feeling akin to that experienced after the birth of her children here in this room—she had been down in the valley for a while, but she was up in the heights again.
And then she says, “It’s God’s will.” And with that, “Nell bathed her face, combed her hair, changed her wrapper, and rattled up some custard pies for the men’s dinner.”
Sheila’s decision is to follow a man who loves her, a Native, a Yankton Sioux from just on the other side of the Big Sioux River. There’s a racial story here too, a complicated little mystery that opens up at the end of the novel.
But the novel’s heart has less to do with race than it does with place. Wild Goose, the Lakota man who loves Sheila, may well be more of a symbol than a human being, because when Sheila leaves with him for the west, for deeper and even less “civilized” frontier, Nell’s loss couldn’t be more profound.
But what her daughter’s decision determines is that, for Nell Connors, life is here too, on the prairie, in a community of tough ethnics that fight at the drop of a hat or a stolen pitchfork.
And then there’s the railroad. It’s come to town for the first time, creating a celebration like none other this little fledgling community has ever seen. What’s more, it is, to Nell Connors, a kind of redeemer. Once upon a time at the end of its line, it had dumped them unfeelingly into an unwelcoming world where as far you could see, there seemed to be nothing at all.
It’s the railroad that saves her, a link with her own childhood and the blessings of an established community with good schools and endless opportunities. When the railroad comes to town, linking old and new, Nell Connors finds herself ready to settle down.
Black Soil is not a great novel. Donovan’s power of description occasionally shines in glorious portraits of the prairie beauty that belie Nell’s great fears; but she wanders through several characters’ perceptions with an annoying omniscience, and the perils of the prairie—grasshoppers, prairie fires--are what one might expect.
Still, for those of us who live here, Black Soil is a great read, even if it’s not great literature. It’s a great read because it brings us back to a time those of us with roots here need to remember. It wasn’t always easy, farming wasn’t always a business, and opportunity was not as abundant as a bin-busting harvest.
That we don’t know our history better allows, even generates a certain kind of arrogance. To read Black Soil today, 150 years after white folks like the Collins came to Siouxland to seek a better life, is humbling, something to think about when you pass some huge, tech-savvy John Deere this spring, something to consider when you look up and down endless rows of corn and beans stretching into a horizon that never ends.
January 22, 2023
While not an expertly structured novel, Donovan’s descriptions of and stories from the early settlement of Northwest Iowa are captivating. Having roots in Northwest Iowa and living here for the past 10 years, I found it interesting to hear stories of our land before it became developed.
I am amazed by the toughness and reliance on God the Conners family exhibited. This book was enjoyable and gave me a greater appreciation for the land I live in.
I am amazed by the toughness and reliance on God the Conners family exhibited. This book was enjoyable and gave me a greater appreciation for the land I live in.
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September 14, 2018i was thinking to get the reference or books easily yeah
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