Leanna Petronella
Little Houses
Little House in the Big Woods was my first chapter book.
I was in first grade and I still remember my awe
that a book could be this long, that there could be so many words,
that the story could go on and on.
The controversy about the Little House books is,
who wrote what? The candidates: Laura Ingalls Wilder,
the protagonist, and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane,
who appears as a baby in the last book of the series.
Caroline Fraser’s biography argues that the division is clear:
Laura was the writer and Rose was the editor.
Laura, the butcher, knifed through her childhood’s meat,
while Rose trimmed the fat and batted the pig-bladder balloon.
Rose became a journalist who travelled the world.
She wrote salacious biographies, was one of the first libertarians,
and wrote articles and stories about Laura’s childhood,
dramatizing, embellishing. Going big. To Fraser,
Rose’s writing is purple, political, and over the top.
Unseemly, she implies. Laura’s writing, on the other hand,
is spare, wholesome, full of good values and details:
the rag doll in the puddle, brown braids in pink ribbons.
That buffalo wallow of violets.
Little House in the Big Woods ends with Laura thinking,
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and
Ma and the firelight and the music, were now.
They could not be forgotten, she thought,
because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
This passage doesn’t exist in any of Laura’s manuscripts.
Fraser claims that Rose probably wrote it.
It’s one of the most beautiful and strange passages in the series,
also one of the most understated. But Rose was the one
who was always too much. Her prose was darker than violets.
Rose wrote it?
*
In grad school, my professor Sam loved the Little House books.
Her field was the long nineteenth century: fascicles, women poets,
the American frontier. (I love that phrase, the long nineteenth century,
the century bursting from its corset.) You can see Sam’s childhood passion
in her work: women writers and place, domestic labor and poetics.
I think she ran a Little House Society at some point.
Sam was a member of my dissertation committee.
I had a terrible chair who was also head of the department,
who never showed up to meetings, never read my stuff,
and I wanted Sam to be angry for me, to defend me,
to march my story of wrongs straight to the most powerful dean.
(Never mind Sam’s years of scholarship and teaching,
scrabbling towards tenure, never mind that – I wanted Sam to gasp,
horrified, and then throw herself under the bus for me,
loudly denouncing my chair.)
I cried in Sam’s office occasionally, testing her reaction.
I was Rose, escalating to emotion, poking and poking
at the calm facade that I could not move.
She was my Laura, always dancing just out of my reach.
My mother was like that. I was always trying
to get something from her – I don’t know what.
When I was 22 and she was dying,
I kept peppering her with questions about her life.
She said to me, “Leanna, I’m not holding out on you.
You like to speak of the soul, to dive into its mysteries.
I’m not like that, is all. I don’t think that way.”
I thought that was beautiful. It is beautiful,
how she did and didn’t talk about the soul.
*
Also, I was right. Flaky chair shouldn’t have done me like that.
Why didn’t Sam ever do anything? She just kept saying
that I needed to work within the system, the system being
the enormous ego of my chair. I withered.
One spring, I took Sam’s Dickinson seminar.
Chad, in a different cohort, was in that class, too.
At a party, someone asked if he’d take another class with Sam.
Chad said, “No. I don’t want to ruin her life.”
Wait a minute. Let’s parse that:
If Chad took another class with Sam, he would ruin her life.
As in, she would not be able to resist him. As in,
she would cheat on her husband and sleep with a student
because Chad and his charms were so powerful.
But Chad would not ruin her. What a hero.
I can’t stress this enough: Sam never did a damn thing wrong.
But that was the story Chad told.
Chad liked to write about the white panties of his girlfriends.
He liked to scold me for writing poems that were too aggressive.
I got so tired of his fragile, sticky crotches.
(A professor once told me I should write children’s books
and not poetry. Another told me my poems were too loud.
Oh, sometimes I feel like the long nineteenth century,
leaking from my corset. A soggy, silly clown. I suppose
I could juggle pies to myself, but I’d rather throw them hard
and creamy, to whip pursed lips with lemon foam.)
My friends wrote a comic strip about Chad.
On social media, he liked every strip! Laughed at its cleverness!
He left comments showing no awareness whatsoever
that the strip was about him, barely disguised.
Chad, you forced yourself into Sam’s story,
or at least the story you made up.
Then you couldn’t find yourself in your story,
at least as told by other people.
Many stories build a house
and Chad, you and I were friends once.
You once texted me about a poem I wrote:
Brava brava, you rockstar. I’m crying as I read this.
A few years ago, Sam had a terrible accident.
She fell down the stairs and broke her jaw, knocked out teeth,
had her mouth wired shut. Countless surgeries and infections.
Now, she seems mostly okay. But in photos on Facebook,
there is the clear marker of pain in her eyes. It reminds me
of women after childbirth, or people after loss,
something peeled away or added. A certain slant of light.
Sam – you helped me and you hurt me.
How am I to read you? I keep revisiting this story.
Perhaps I’m wrong about your eyes.
*
Rose’s sole heir was her lawyer, Roger.
She liked to mentor young men, and he was one of her projects,
the son of her editor, a teenager when he met her.
Roger called himself Rose’s “honorary grandson”
and wrote a series about her, Little House: The Rose Years.
Supposedly it’s libertarian propaganda for third-graders,
but I didn’t notice. Roger died halfway through the project,
and then I think the publisher took over, ghostwriting the rest.
Rose, the ghost in Laura’s books; Roger, the ghost in Rose’s.
Then, a publishing house, probably nameless assistants,
ghosts in the ghost in the ghost. So many thin veils of paper.
The First Four Years is the last book in Laura’s series.
In a major plot point, Laura and Almanzo’s house burns down.
Laura grabs toddler Rose and runs. For the rest of her life,
Rose insists that she caused that fire by accident.
Laura’s writing never blames her. But that was the story Rose told.
The story Fraser tells is that Rose moved around her whole life,
ceaselessly, unhappily, from one place to another,
because of the destruction of that first little house.
I’m not sure how Rose’s nomadic life curls up from the ashes,
but I like the smoothness of Fraser’s argument,
how everything comes back to little houses.
*
Laura’s first try at her book was a biography for adults.
Rose sent Pioneer Girl to her agent, who scoffed it seemed written
by a “fine old lady [who] was sitting in her rocking chair.”
Rude. Next, Laura revised it into a picture book,
When Grandma Was a Little Girl. Then, finally, the transformation
into the chapter book, Little House in the Big Woods.
“Have to finish my mother’s goddamn juvenile,”
Rose wrote in her journal in 1936.
“I am going to insist that the story starts as I started it,”
wrote Laura to Rose a few years later.
Who wrote what? Is it the chicken or the egg?
I say chicken. Laura started her career as a poultry columnist.
Her chickens were known for their abundant egg laying,
so many white little houses for their almost-chicken children.
For the hens, the shells were empty.
For Laura, they brimmed with food, juicy suns
gone faceless. Who lives in a little house is the same
and also different, depending on your needs.
Maybe I don’t want to separate mother from daughter,
lifting yolk from egg white. Maybe I want to see the ghosts mix,
to make something of my own from haunted batter.
*
My friend, a children’s librarian, says that these days,
children don’t really read the Little House books. Instead,
they read Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark series, written fifty years later.
The protagonist is Omakayas, an Ojibwa girl. Little Frog.
Her little brother, Quill, has a pet porcupine
that sleeps on his head! And drinks tea just like people!
Every morning, he holds the cup in his fat little paws.
Omakayas befriends a white girl. She calls her Break-Apart Girl
because of her corset, which seems to slice her in half.
Omakayas is puzzled by the girl’s odd ways,
but only gently, a little patronizingly,
a stark contrast to the attitudes in Little House,
blatant in their racism. Now, some parents ban the series altogether.
Others take a different approach: read and talk about it,
teasing out history, context, language.
My friend tells me that she lets the market of her readers decide:
The less that kids check out the Little House books,
the more likely it is that she won’t restock them.
Laura once screamed for a papoose and didn’t get one.
Omakayas, on the other hand, won the “game of silence,”
where of all the children, she was quietest the longest.
Between Laura and Omakayas: Who is louder?
What story survives, and do we listen to both,
or is it one or the other?
*
At a book fair, when she was older, Laura said,
All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.
There were some stories I wanted to tell but would not
be responsible for putting in a book for children,
even though I knew them as a child.
These days, I guess we’d call her books auto-fiction. By fiction,
maybe we sometimes mean craft, because there is always craft,
unvarnished truth doesn’t exist, there’s always a perspective,
as any poet knows. But still critics like to tremble over
what’s true and what’s not, especially in women’s writing.
I didn’t much like PhD school.
The writing papers part, or at least writing papers
in the way they wanted me to write them.
I didn’t understand why the critical and the creative
had to be so separate. Criticism was suffocated
into neat anthills of prose, every damn sugar grain plucked out.
The creative, on the other hand, was an anteater,
snouty and slothy. That long tongue,
horrifying and almost sexual when it darted out.
I needed both: the regular beads of black ants
but digested through my skunky folds.
Let me make my bolus: nutrient rich, masticated,
prey and predator united.
The giant anteater is sometimes called an ant bear.
I try to imagine an ant that looks like a bear
and can’t see it. But I like that,
how it doesn’t decide. I like stomping on some ant piles
and pouring sugar grains on others. I think something can be said
by nibbling down the edges, to grab the story with your teeth
and be serious with sweetness.
Laura and her sisters loved Christmas candy.
They could lick it every day for a week, barely tasting,
or gobble it down in a blizzard like Pa, lost in a den of snow.
That Pa. He was always looking for the next best thing,
fording a flooded river until they almost died,
planting crops in failing fields, going to town over the long winter,
where they nearly starved and almost died again.
Laura included some of Pa’s stories in her books:
the pig riding a sled, the owl screaming like a woman,
a bear that was actually a tree. A lot of one thing
looking like another. But what were Ma’s stories?
Did she tell any?
Laura told Rose about her childhood, over and over.
Locusts marching over the baby, Nellie crying over leeches,
the pig’s crispy tail and the fight over who would eat it.
Green hickory chips and brindled bulldogs,
fever ‘n ague ruining the watermelon’s pink heart.
My mother wouldn’t tell me about her childhood.
I nudged and prodded, thinking that her stories about herself
might tell me something about myself. She gave me only scraps,
which I reuse over and over, scrawling and erasing.
“It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob,”
said Laura about her doll. Funny child-Laura.
And funny-writer Laura, or maybe funny-writer Rose,
but in any case – it’s no person’s fault what they’re made of,
what gold atoms cobble them together.
*
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.”
So wrote Emily Dickinson. Reverie is needed, too, she adds,
but if bees are scarce, “revery alone will do.”
Yes, make a prairie with the gorgeous bee-nest of your brain.
Every female yellowjacket has the ability to sting.
Cousin Charley knows, he danced upon their nest,
screaming until Pa and Uncle Henry dragged him off
and sent him home to all the women.
The women plastered Charley’s body in mud,
wrapped him up in sheets, then sent him off to bed.
Only his nose and mouth poked out. He took tea for rising fever.
Amusing, this next sentence: “Laura and Mary and the cousins
stood around for some time, looking at him.” Just staring!
Ruthless little Ingalls. And how long did they stand there?
What did they see in that stung mummy, in need of preservation?
Yellowjackets look like bees but have smaller waists,
as if they’re wearing corsets. They chew cellulose to make their nests,
which look remarkably like paper. Each nest is started by a queen.
The queen is called the foundress.
The word foundress makes me think of the word poetess.
I called myself that in the sixth grade until my teacher said,
just say poet. Okay. But I liked the ess sound,
the sharp slash of something extra, a flourish
curling from the stinger. And I like the buzz our thinking makes,
in our little houses made from paper.
Leanna Petronella’s debut poetry collection, The Imaginary Age, won the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, CutBank, Quarterly West, and other publications. Her nonfiction appears in Brevity and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and her fiction appears in Drunken Boat. She lives in Austin, Texas.
