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If the Creek Don't Rise: My Life Out West With the Last Black Widow of the Civil War
When Rita Williams was four, her mother died in a Denver boarding house. This death delivered Rita into the care of her aunt Daisy, the last surviving African American widow of a Union soldier and a maverick who had spirited her sharecropping family out of the lynching South and reinvented them as ranch hands and hunting guides out West. But one by one they slipped away, to death or to an easier existence elsewhere, leaving Rita as Daisy's last hope to right the racial wrongs of the past and to make good on a lifetime of thwarted ambition. If the Creek Don't Rise tells how Rita found her way out from under this crippling legacy and, instead of becoming "a perfect credit to her race," discovered how to become herself.
Set amid the harsh splendor of the Colorado Rockies, this is a gorgeous, ruthless, and unique account of the lies families live-and the moments of truth and beauty that save us.
Set amid the harsh splendor of the Colorado Rockies, this is a gorgeous, ruthless, and unique account of the lies families live-and the moments of truth and beauty that save us.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2006
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530 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
June 18, 2020
A simply beautiful and mind-boggling memoir by Rita Williams of her childhood and young girlhood--she had already lived several lives by the time she left home at 18. Orphaned at four when her mother died in a boarding house in Denver, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide, Williams was raised by the last black widow of the Civll War, Daisy Anderson, in a cabin without running water or heat, raising their own food, outside Steamboat Springs Colorado, nicknamed Ski Town USA. Black, poor, rural and yet pushed for greatness by the determined, bizarre Daisy, Rita Williams straddled worlds as a youngster and did her best not to go mad. Her aunt was a hunting guide, and Rita's great solace was in nature and animals, she crossed boundaries knowing and not knowing they applied to her. She attended Catholic school, where on a trip she was singled out and forbade to swim in the motel pool--as the only black child, causing her to lose her faith.
Daisy forced Rita to undertake the difficult--German not Spanish, piano--and Rita ended up playing piano for dance classes at the renowned Perry-Mansfield arts camp, attended by the likes of Dustin Hoffman and other aspiring artists. Daisy had a very conflicted relationship to blackness and lived haunted by lynchings in her early childhood in the south. She married a black Union veteran when he was quite old, who died under suspicious circumstances--she was a chilling and impossible parent figure. This portrait of an absolutely unique life, the story of a complex black girl has never been more timely,never been more compelling.
Daisy forced Rita to undertake the difficult--German not Spanish, piano--and Rita ended up playing piano for dance classes at the renowned Perry-Mansfield arts camp, attended by the likes of Dustin Hoffman and other aspiring artists. Daisy had a very conflicted relationship to blackness and lived haunted by lynchings in her early childhood in the south. She married a black Union veteran when he was quite old, who died under suspicious circumstances--she was a chilling and impossible parent figure. This portrait of an absolutely unique life, the story of a complex black girl has never been more timely,never been more compelling.
April 3, 2019
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."
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 'n-----' 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.
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 'n-----' 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.
March 8, 2008
Rita Williams was raised by her Aunt Daisy after her mother died when she was four. The book explores their contentious relationship, growing up Black in the middle of lily-white Colorado, their self-sufficiency and their extreme poverty. It was a very sad, yet fascinating story. I would love to find out what happened to Rita Williams after she left her Aunt's care.
December 16, 2010
This is a memoir of a very unusual childhood. The aunt does appear to love the author - she sacrifices so she gets a good education - but is not loving. I was left at the end wanting to know something about what the author, the grown child, is like as an adult.
February 29, 2024
What an unsatisfying book, in the end, after all the details and stories that Rita Williams told about her aunt Daisy and her life living in Strawberry Park. The adventures and hardships that Williams endured at the hands of Daisy, and just from living in such a rugged and isolated place for her formative years, should and could have been such a powerful memoir for Wiliams to tell, but she flubbed it, rushing through the important parts, offering no hindsight or moral clarity from years and decades away from the events she describes.
It’s an odd sort of memoir, and it’s a shame that was I grew less and less interested in the book as it went on, mostly because of the portrayals of all the characters in it. Williams says everything here is as she remembers it, although of course we know memory changes over the years. But for some reason she even portrays herself as ungrateful, shallow, stuck in a particular mindset, not forward-thinking at all—and then she offers no redemption or future or even clarity on what happened later in her life after she survived her childhood and teenage years. And you could argue that is the point of the memoir, both specifically here and as a writing form in general: that it’s supposed to be a snapshot of a person’s life and the emotions they felt in that moment. And yet Rita the character, written from Rita the author’s memory, doesn’t come across as a real person to me, and her telling of her own story somehow diminishes it for me.
So much happens in Williams’ life with her aunt Daisy that she could have talked so much more about—not just the race issues or sexual understanding that she barely mentions—and she just lets it go. With ten pages left in the book, too, she writes about some pretty cataclysmic things happening to her and then offers no way to resolve them or to explain what happened or how she got to where she is today. She never even connected the book back to the scene at the beginning when she is visiting her elderly aunt again for probably the last time! If you start a book in media res, you have to finish it! That was probably the most disappointing part! I can’t predict anything about Rita Williams’ life as she grew up and became an adult, but it was disappointing for her to not write a little bit about her own story in that sense, finally escaping Rita and forming her own life. It ended on way too abrupt a note.
It’s an odd sort of memoir, and it’s a shame that was I grew less and less interested in the book as it went on, mostly because of the portrayals of all the characters in it. Williams says everything here is as she remembers it, although of course we know memory changes over the years. But for some reason she even portrays herself as ungrateful, shallow, stuck in a particular mindset, not forward-thinking at all—and then she offers no redemption or future or even clarity on what happened later in her life after she survived her childhood and teenage years. And you could argue that is the point of the memoir, both specifically here and as a writing form in general: that it’s supposed to be a snapshot of a person’s life and the emotions they felt in that moment. And yet Rita the character, written from Rita the author’s memory, doesn’t come across as a real person to me, and her telling of her own story somehow diminishes it for me.
So much happens in Williams’ life with her aunt Daisy that she could have talked so much more about—not just the race issues or sexual understanding that she barely mentions—and she just lets it go. With ten pages left in the book, too, she writes about some pretty cataclysmic things happening to her and then offers no way to resolve them or to explain what happened or how she got to where she is today. She never even connected the book back to the scene at the beginning when she is visiting her elderly aunt again for probably the last time! If you start a book in media res, you have to finish it! That was probably the most disappointing part! I can’t predict anything about Rita Williams’ life as she grew up and became an adult, but it was disappointing for her to not write a little bit about her own story in that sense, finally escaping Rita and forming her own life. It ended on way too abrupt a note.
February 26, 2018
Sad memoir of black girl growing up in the Colorado mountains. The lasting effects of slavery, racism, and southern roots combine with Rita's current life situation to convince her that she has no worth.
August 30, 2020
This memoir is super painful to read. So much unnecessary unkindness in a family making a hard life into a hellish life. And the book starts at the end of her aunt's life leaving you to wonder at the cleft between them and how she escaped. And it's not going to answer either of those questions.
November 8, 2023
Couldn't finish this one. I thought this book would be an interesting memoir related to the widow who experience the aftermath of the civil war. It was not. The story it told was uninspiring and not interesting at all.
August 23, 2019
A memoir from a black woman who grew up in Steamboat Springs with her strange aunt.
June 22, 2021
Interesting biography of being raised by semi-abusive older aunt in Colorado and impacts of racism and discrimination.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 2, 2024
Set in Steamboat, gripping and infuriating.
I'd hoped for an ending with much more happiness and success for Rita, I hope it's come since then.
I'd hoped for an ending with much more happiness and success for Rita, I hope it's come since then.
March 29, 2022
Memoir of the author's impoverished and unusual upbringing by her Aunt Daisy, one of few African Americans in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Williams shows us how, and why, she lives in fear of her aunt, but also the lengths to which Daisy goes in order to offer her niece opportunities in education, in dance, and more. It is an almost incredible story of ambition and resilience.
March 31, 2011
Rita Williams' aunt Daisy is a hard character to like and, initially, a hard character to understand. The back of the book makes it sound like she's a classic striver who pushes the niece she's stuck raising to be the same. But she's also an unrefined country woman who cuts Rita down at every turn, calling her the N-word even more often than Rita's racist white classmates. As Rita struggles to make sense of Daisy's contradictions, so does the reader, and eventually we both see that Daisy--whose life of suffering has left her will battered but not broken--could be no other way. Literature is full of stories of triumph over adversity; this is a refreshing and intense story of how a difficult past haunts even the strongest survivors.
January 10, 2010
The subtitle is a teeny bit misleading, I felt, though technically accurate. The widow, Daisy, was 21 when she married 79-year-old Mr. Anderson in 1922. The war, in which Mr. Anderson had fought, ended about 35 years before Daisy was born. If you're looking for something specifically about the Civil War, this is not it. However, this memoir is a very moving look at a poor black girl's encounters with different family groups and racial identities in the Civil Rights era, colored by her aunt's direct experiences with sharecropping and the KKK. Daisy is a hard woman, but as details of her past come to light, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for her, even if you can't really like her.
July 11, 2012
The one star that I gave this book is only JUST above an abandonment. The historical part of the memoir was definitely interesting, and I almost always like a setting in the rough and tumble West, but, goodness, did I ever get sick of the author's inability to just give her grandma a break, already, and get beyond the troubles that she had with her as a child. I understand that trauma is trauma, and it can permanently maim some psyches, but I guess that I don't want to read about it over and over again.
July 10, 2016
I found this book in a second hand shop in the exact town where it is set. That brought me through it with some enthusiasm but ... I found the time terribly whiny. The old aunt character felt flat to me, as though the redeeming aspects of herself could not be divulged without losing the author's chosen scapegoat. By the end, the whole thing felt contrived and unlikely. Still, the thrill of reading it in Steamboat during a full week of family ski (I don't ski), lent me the generosity to grant it three stars.
Want to read
July 24, 2009I'm interested in first hand accounts of the death throes of the wild west, as it stumbled into modernity. My grandfather was there, and he remains the greatest influence in my life. Now even the mythology of cowboys and Indians is a vanishing smoke ribbon, seen only in a few slivers of the last light of the day. I'll let you know.....
September 5, 2013
I absolutely loved this book. It depicted life in the 50's to 60's in Colorado for a young woman orphaned by her mother (she died) and father (he abandoned her). Her and her Aunt Daisy were the only black family in the Mountains for 200 miles. I could see the scenery depicted. I could see the picture of her childhood while reading this. Easily one of my favorite books.
May 5, 2015
One of the best books I have read in a long time. You can see and feel Rita throughout the years as she comes of age in this book. Well written with so many interesting stories. Her triumphs and tragedies are all there. I did not want this book to end. Thank you for sharing some of your life with us.
April 24, 2010
Good historical tale of Steamboat from the point of view of a young black girl. Sometimes difficult to read of her experiences, but liked being to associate with places we know here. A very different view of the mountain west than we often get.
August 17, 2008
Awesome story! I met the author at a book club meeting and was impressed with all she did with her life after her incredible childhood.
December 29, 2008
Denver setting unusual for African American coming of age story.
December 30, 2008
Wonderful non-fiction memoir about the author's formative years in predominantly white Steamboat Springs, CO. An amazing book, but hard to read.
December 12, 2009
Great book to read if live in Steamboat. Get's a little long sometimes and repetitious, but is a story of an amazing woman and an amazing family in an amazing area.
January 25, 2015
I'll agree with Mama and say that this was a little hard to read in places, but I'm so glad that I did. Wonderful book!
December 2, 2010
I like memoirs, and reading this one my porch in Rocky Mountain National Park was a good way to get acquainted with part of the region.
March 16, 2011
Puzzling, moving, amazing psychological portrait of the last Black Widow of the Civil War. Wow.
July 15, 2012
I would have enjoyed this more if they went into the life of the last Buffalo soldier. Just another story about abuse of an unwanted child.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews