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About Applegater. (Jacksonville, OR) 2008-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 1, 2018)
4 Winter 2018 Applegater BOOK REVIEW The Secret Diary of Emily A C. Ellen Watts (2017) C. Ellen Watts of Nampa, Idaho, has published her mother’s story under the title, The Secret Diary of Emily A: Gold Miner’s Daughter. Although Watts changed a few names, this book is a true capsule of pioneer life in Oregon. The book begins in 1903 when Grandmother Lee gave ten-year-old Uvena “Emily” Arnold a notebook for writing down things she wanted to remember. Emily chronicles matter-of- factly her life and family relations while growing up in Oregon in the Jacksonville area: Squaw Lakes, Elliot Creek, French Gulch, Watkins School, Jacksonville, and later the Table Rock area. The diary covers a seven-year period of Emily’s life and ends in 1910. Emily’s father often spent time away from home while he mined for gold on Elliot Creek, copper at the Blue Ledge Mine, etc. Emily helped her mother raise her siblings and care for the household—a big job in those days with no electricity, running water, refrigeration, or highways and cars. She clearly describes the severe challenges pioneers overcame in order to survive. Although Emily’s mother taught her children at home, Emily longed to go to school, as she valued reading and education. She cherished her loving parents and appreciated the simple joys of special events and treats but longed for broader horizons. The lessons she learned from her mother and books allowed her to dream and prepare for opportunities and experiences awaiting her. Margaret Myers myersmaggie74@gmail.com Poetry Corner Gift of the Magus by John Sack cyberscribe2@gmail.com Eckhart sat cross-legged on a blanket in the snow— “Homeless. Need help.” scrawled on cardboard propped beneath a storefront window where robotic elves feigned labor in a Disney sweatshop, while over his head the speakers brayed of angels they had heard on high. I took him to a diner where the waitress, miffed at working Christmas, brought him chowder and a side of bread. “Thank you for your gift of gold,” he said. Then with starry eyes afire he spoke of the new infant swaddled in the manger once again, of shepherds kneeling and the cattles’ low, “All to no point, you know, if he’s not born in you, in you to daily grow. “Seek him with the wise men, friend. Pay him homage in the secret cave. Give him your Body with its wealth, the incense of your Mind, and myrrh, the balm of ever-suffering Souls. “Home is where we start and where we end,” he sighed with a slight smile, “And heart is where the home is.” My homeless heart burned at his words and snowdrifts banked around my vacant stable wanted so to melt in floods of recognition. While through the silent night the wing-whirs whispered “Gloria in excelsis Deo.” Essay Stories from South Africa BY MARGARET PERROW DELLA SANTINA Kgomotso and I sat on upturned plastic crates in the concrete yard outside his mother’s house in Soweto, South Africa. Squinting into the thin winter sunlight, Kgomotso thought back to the 1980s and ’90s: “There was the struggle, and the elections. But did we or didn’t we achieve freedom?” It was August 2018. I met Kgomotso 20 years ago in 1998, four years after the first democratic elections in South Africa. He’d joined an employment-skills project in a youth-development organization where I was doing research. In 2018 I returned to South Africa for four months of follow-up research, spending time with Kgomotso and others who were part of that 1998 project. Top photo: Margaret with some Soweto friends. Now in their 40s, they have Bottom photo: Kgomotso and his mother--with a jar experienced some changes in of Applegate River blackberry jam. the past two decades: most are employed, two have bought their own homes, they all live on paved bury himself in his studies and emerge streets, most have indoor toilets, some with an engineering scholarship to have built additions to their four-room the UK, unaware of the full impact of houses. But they are all disappointed that apartheid. The black-empowerment change has come slowly, that they still movement and the anti-apartheid struggle to make ends meet and support struggle were still far off in the future their children, that their lives are not as when he left South Africa in 1951— it would be my cousins, children of different as they’d hoped. Twenty-four years after its first my generation, who became African democratic elections, South Africa National Congress members and activists remains a severely inequitable country in the 1960s and ’70s. I knew my father as quiet, brilliant, that is plagued by racialized poverty, crime, and unemployment. Yet stories and reserved—a man who engaged of ordinary South Africans, neither reluctantly with politics or social issues. destitute nor part of the new black elite, He died in 1982. He didn’t live to see remain largely hidden. My friends from Mandela’s release from prison, South Soweto welcomed me into their homes, Africa’s 1994 transition to democracy… neighborhoods, and churches to tell me or my 2002 Soweto wedding. Today, I nurture relationships in some of those humbling and inspiring South Africa that span decades and stories. But traveling and living in other races. I try to forgive my father for what countries also reveal one’s own story. I am he didn’t see, know, or do. I want to the daughter of a white English-speaking create a different reality. This quest is man who left South Africa in 1951. My partly hopeful, partly impossible. I am privilege today owes much to the wrongs constantly reminded of privileges that correlate with my skin color and native done to black people in South Africa. So this journey was also an attempt language. But what feels like the greatest to find my own South Africa, one that might somehow forgive me, my privilege, one my father would have father, my ancestors—including my found unfamiliar and curious, is the love grandfather, one Captain Perrow. In and caring of my black township friends the early 1900s he wrote a newspaper and mamkhulus (grannies) who make article about his solo trip by motorcar me feel like a whole person, not merely from Cape Town to Johannesburg. a white person, when I’m in Soweto. I In this charming but somewhat self- like to think my dad would have seen his congratulatory account, he complained South Africa differently, through mine. Kgomotso is one of those friends; about “the number of gates encountered” so is Sipho. Their mothers are some that made his journey challenging. Of course, we all encounter “gates” of those mamkhulus. Sipho recently along our journeys, but challenge is married after securing the approval of his long-dead ancestors through traditional relative to privilege. I have tacitly blamed my father for rituals and ceremonies. There are times not being critical of apartheid, but this I wish I could communicate with my is an unfair blame afforded by hindsight. ancestors directly, the way Sipho does After his mother died when he was eight, with his. Maybe together, as they watch he was sent to boarding school in then- our friendships unfolding, our ancestors Rhodesia, where he would have been can lend support to real social change. Margaret Perrow della Santina given no tools to critique the legacy of mperrow@sonic.net colonialism. Later at the University of Cape Town, his white privilege would See more photos and track the journey on have seemed unproblematic. He could Facebook (margaret.perrow). Essays are limited to one per issue and 700 words. Submit your essay and high-resolution photos to gater@applegater.com.
