Singing Cather's Song

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what to say, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say and we were very strict family, no coffee, no tea, no meat. When the sun went down Friday night, you didn't do any work at all until the sun went down Saturday night, and they were not supposed to read fiction. Because as my father said that people that write fiction are the ones that are loving and making a lie, and that's against the Bible. This

is the story of a spiritual quest. A story of a young woman's painful break from a childhood dominated by a religion she found cold and intolerant. It's a story of searching for new values and the discovery of something in the literature of an American writer that inspired the work of a lifetime. The writer's name is Will a Cather, and something in her prose was so powerful that it changed the life of Mildred Bennett forever. Cather's got some very profound truths in her writing. Actually, she's a religious writer. But she's not a churchy writer. She had an awful problem with organized religion. Cather's interest in religion is clear, even in one of her earliest short stories. It was a great night at the Lone Star School House. O Lord to thee I will cry. A night when the spirit was present with power and when God was

very near to men. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen. My sister, if you're writing me letters, saying don't you know that your wicked and evil life is going to end any minute now and you're going to be lost eternally and I just hated to see the letters come. You are lost going down its sea but of the name of God and Jesus Christ is only son. I throw you the lifeline. Take hold. Oh, Mary God, my soul fails. Well, Cather, she had a terrible problem with organized religion, which can be very, very solidifying. But when it came down to living and loving other people, this is the thing that Cather is very aware of, the land and the weather and the people and their struggle to accomplish and she's always, there's always hope. The dawn in the east looked

like the light from some great fire that was burning under the edge of the world. The absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range. Why offenses might mark the end of a man's past year, but they could not shut in his thoughts as mountains and forests can. It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun of the dark sang and one's heart sang here too. This is the countryside surrounding the small Nebraska town of Red Cloud,

the childhood home of Pulitzer Prize -winning author Willi Cather. What Hannibal Missouri is to the work of Mark Twain and Oxford Mississippi to the work of William Faulkner, Red Cloud is to the fiction of Willi Cather. It is here in this small Midwestern town that she found the inspiration for her greatest works. Over the years, the town of Red Cloud and the land surrounding it have become a mecca for those people who want to see and experience the environment of such famous Cather novels as Opioneers, Mayantania and Song of the Lark. What these people experience wouldn't be possible if it were not for the lifelong dedication of Mildred Bennett. Over the past 50 years, until she died of cancer in the fall of 1989, she acquired and restored much of the childhood environment of Willi Cather, the furniture, the houses, the bank, the railroad station, and even some of the rolling

hillsides. Bennett brought them all together to create a living museum frequently called Catherland. Well, she was brilliant. She could envision things. A lot better than most people. She didn't live just today and yesterday. She was always living in tomorrow. That's the way I would explain that. And I think that that's the reason she was the guiding light for this whole Cather shootout. I think vision, vision above all, somewhat eccentric in the good sense, strong will. Guts, I think, guts, yes. An ability to take risks. Because of Mildred, we're here. Because of Mildred and the people around her, and the people of the friendships, and the relationship she developed over the years, we are inheriting that legacy by being here now. Mildred Bennett's work on Willi Cather began with the

writing and publication of The World of Willi Cather in 1951. Newsweek magazine said, makes Willi Cather a living personality. The New York Times said that Nebraska years have been vividly restored. And the New York Herald Tribune said, a fascinating record of a woman of genius. Mrs. Bennett's book will henceforth be indispensable for everyone interested in Willi Cather and her work. After my book came out in 1951, then people started coming here to see the places that I had mentioned in that book. And it became obvious these places should be preserved. And in March of 55, Heriobots came over and to the house and said, let's do something about this. And I said, well, sure, I want to, but I don't know what to do. He said, well, we incorporate. So we incorporated in March of 55. And there were eight of us. And we put in 20 bucks a piece. And then it took most of that money to print the notice of incorporation in the paper.

The first building that we got was the city hall there where the Gather Center is now. And Helen Roberts and I went down and we bought that from the city for $1 ,000. She put up 500 and I put up 500 of our husbands' money. Then another day, this woman called me up and she said, are you the one that acquires property for the memorial? And I said, yes, but wouldn't have any money. She said, I don't want any money. We want to give you the Catholic Church. Well, let's see, the next thing that happened, I think was probably the depot. A railroad depot like this was the first thing that little catharsis saw when she moved to Red Cloud from our native Virginia in 1883 when she was nine years old. In fact, her first vision of the prairie was from the window of the train. The experience was so powerful, years later, it helped inspire a scene

in the song of a Lark where Thia Cronberg, catharsis most autobiographical character, is on her first trip home after studying music in Chicago. Thia was glad that this was her country. She had the sense of going back to a friendly soil whose friendship was somehow going to strengthen her, a naive, generous country that gave one its joyous force. It's large -hearted, childlike power to love. Just as it gave one its course, brilliant flowers. The thing about Cather that really struck me was how well she put this country into words more than the plot or the story or anything else was the description of the countryside and you wouldn't see the beauty of it until Cather showed it to you. During a hard winter in the country, the Cather family decided to move to town in

1884. They rented a small frame house on Cedar Street. For visitors who don't know Cather's works well, the house still captures the atmosphere of domestic life as it might have been at the turn of the century in a small midwestern town. But for those who know and love Cather's writings, each room evokes its own characters and moods. The kitchen, the kitchen was hot and empty, full of the untempered afternoon sun. A door stood open into the next room, a cluttered hideous room, yet somehow homely, furnished with a rocking horse, sewing machine, and empty baby buggy.

Upstairs was a story in itself, a secret romance. No collar on neighbor had ever been allowed to go up there. All the children loved it. It was their very own world, where there were no older people poking about the spoiled things. Of all mildred Bennett's restoration work, this house is the most important. And of all the rooms in the house, the most valued is Willow Catherine's bedroom. I suppose that Mrs. Cather was very aware that Willow was an exceptional child, and well, I needed a room of room where she was getting to be a teenager, a place where she could be herself, and not have to conform. She hated to conform, but she had to conform a little to live with the family. But there she could be herself. I think everybody should have a room of their own as Virginia Woolf said.

There was only one window, but it was a double one and went to the floor. Thea bought a brown cotton carpet, and her big brother Gus put it down for her one Sunday. She made white cheesecloth curtains and hung them on a tape, and she had her own dumpy walnut single bed, and a blue wash bowl and pitcher, which she had drawn at a church fair lottery. In October, while the days were still warm, Thea and Tilly papered the room, walls and ceilings in the same paper, small red and brown roses on a yellowish ground. Willow Catherine and her friend papered the room for the first time in the 1880s. Mildred Bennett's

meticulous supervision of the stripping away of layers of wallpaper to uncover Catherine's original is typical of her 40 years of preservation work. The Smithsonian used the term amazing to characterize the careful restoration in this small town that has become, in part, a Cather Museum. Mildred Bennett and Willow Catherine never met. When Cather died in 1947, Bennett was just beginning her research. But Bennett did get to know Cather through the characters in her novels. Bennett identified with Cather heroines like Antonea Shmerda in my Antonea, Alexandra Bergson in Opineas, and especially Thea Cronberg in Song of the Lark. In the Preface to Song of the Lark, Cather wrote, the story set out to tell a vanartists' awakening and struggle, her floundering escape from a smug, domestic, self -satisfied, provincial world.

It could have been the Preface for Mildred Bennett's own personal story. When I was 11, we moved to Nevada, Iowa, and my father took us to the library, and he said, now, these are my daughters, and they may read history and geography and adventure stories, but they may not have any fiction or fairy tales. Well, while he was telling that, I had wandered over to the corner, where the little kid's corner was, and got a book of fairy tales and real fast went through it before. You know, while he was talking, we read the Bible every day, and we had a Pilgrim's Progress in words of one syllable that had read very early, and then there were certain books that church put out every year. They were missionary. We had lots of things about missionaries and explorers and history. I had to space my own behind a piano. The piano

set across the corner of the room and I could crawl in there. That was the only privacy that I had was behind that piano, but I made the most of it. I couldn't hear anything, and I could read this stuff. They wouldn't have let me read otherwise, like the tales of the Alombra by Washington Irving. Oh, you know, this was so different from reading the Bible and all these missionary books. I thought it was great, but I didn't tell anybody what I was reading. I knew better than that. Mildred Bennett's father was a preacher and later church administrator. As she was growing up, their evenings and weekends were filled with prayer meetings and revivals. Oh, my brothers. I feel coming. The blessed we have prayed for, I tell you, the spirit is coming and just a little more prayer. Just a little more, see. Eric Kermonson, on his way to play his fiddle of dance,

attends a revival with his mother who hopes the preacher will convince him to give up his violin. The violin is an object of particular importance to the free gospelist. The fiddle they regard is the very incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly pleasures and inseparably associated with all forbidden things. Lazarus. Come forth. Eric, come and send you aloft. Go and down and see. Put in the name of God, and Jesus Christ is only son. I throw you the lifeline, take hold. Oh, my God, my soul for here. I've been to weeks of prayer when I was a kid, and I can understand Eric Kermonson feeling absolute desperation because those evangelists would drive you to that. They would push you into complete

insanity. In 1926, Mildred Bennett went to Union College, a church -affiliated school. The more she studied, the more she began to question the beliefs of her childhood. And I was asking too many questions. Things didn't add up. Now, in the psychology class, they teach us, well, you're the product of your environment and your heredity. Well, if we are, then where's God come into this? Well, I said that, and that was not the right thing to say. You know, this is pretty horrible. You're saying that the psychology is teaching you that there's no God. And I was just asking the question. But this one Bible teacher, and he talked with me and answered my questions and he gave me some books that were not church -published, you know, like Harry Emerson Phosdick, which was supposed to be real wild. Well, somebody put out the word that he was letting people read books that were not written by Mrs. White, who founded the church.

This wasn't stuff that she had approved and that she didn't write it. So, 39 preachers came in there in summer of 1931, and they kicked him out. And he lived 10 days. He died. And then when they preached, he was funerals. They said, the dear Lord has taken our brother away. And I said, you murderers. You did it yourself. Don't blame it on God. You did it to him. They broke his heart. He had been born into that church and brought up. And he had devoted his whole life to it. He had been a missionary in South America. He was a wonderful person. And that didn't make a bit of difference to them. If he didn't follow the letter of the law, according to the church, he was out. That's not right. I don't care if I go to hell. It can't be worse than this, so I just left. In the

early 30s, Mildred Bennett left Union College. She took a teaching position at a public high school in Innavail, Nebraska. Although she had broken away from the church, breaking away from a family she cared deeply about wasn't as easy. Her father was still a church educator. Her brother, a preacher. Her sister, a missionary in China. My sister in the Orient. She kept writing me letters saying, don't you know that your wicked and evil life is going to end any minute now and you're going to be lost eternally. And I just hated to see the letters come. Well, later on, when she did come back and we talked, she said, I was wrong. I was absolutely wrong to do that. So I didn't know what was happening. Well, I'm not sure. I'm not too emotional about it yet. Because when your whole family turns against you, I had one brother -in -law that stuck up for me though, bless his heart. He was an Australian brother -in -law. And he never,

ever said any unkind thing to me. In fact, he'd encouraged me and my questioning and my reading and everything. He was terrific. In Innavail, Mildred found another strong supporter. Wilbur Bennett. He too encouraged her in her questioning. They were married in 1931. After their marriage, Mildred continued to teach in schools in Lincoln and Omaha while Wilbur completed medical school and began his practice. They started a family and found some measure of happiness. But as the years went by, Mildred still struggled with her spiritual life. Then she began studying the writings of Willa Cather. What I had in my mind was this is something I can do to use my mind on while I find out what I can believe. So Cather was secondary to the desire to find what I could believe in. You can't just let your mind go stale and stagnate. I mean, what would I do

with copian recipes and playing cards? And I mean, I would die with, I'd have to use my mind. In reading Cather, Mildred began to identify with characters like Thea Cronberg in Song of the Lark. Thea, like Mildred, had a preacher for a father. And both Thea and Mildred wanted desperately to love their families and still find their own truth. They wrote that they were coming for Christmas. I think it was Christmas vacation. So my husband wrote and said, told him that if you can't accept your daughter for what she is, just don't come. Just don't come to see us. Because if you, if that's the way you feel, you're not welcome here. They said, you don't really mean that. Well, they, they came and I was teaching a school for Thea. And they had, they were having a dance on Friday night. Now, you don't know what a dance on Friday night means. That's the worst sin you, in the first place you wouldn't.

You wouldn't do anything that read the Bible or sing hymns on Friday night. And you wouldn't ever go to a dance. So I dressed up in my long dress. And I went out to the school for the deaf. And I went to the dance with the deaf kids. I came home. Didn't say a word. I had to do it. I mean, I could have stayed home. But I had to do that. Thea and Mildred went to the Friday night dance. Thea and Mildred went to the Friday night dance. So thea and Mildred went to the Friday night dance. After which she sings a serenade. It was an adventure, and it was another world. Another world. Imagine having a methodist preacher for your father and all these solid brothers and sisters that were so concerned with appearances. And then you could get away to a Mexican fiesta. It was great. I'm so great. The day after

the Mexican dance, Fia sets down to dinner with the family. They think she's disgraced herself. Do you really like to associate with those people, you know, and there's a lot of racism there. Say this in Jesus Christ, Amen. Mother, would you pass your plea, please? With the Acronberg, it was a struggle to free yourself from her family. You know, the rest of them are kind of jealous and unhappy, and the mother would stand up for her. But the brothers and sisters, you know, they didn't particularly approve of her. And sometimes that disapproval makes the individual more determined than ever to be what they're going to be. You know, it's another challenge. She has to retreat to pull herself back together again and to restore her own individual identity. And that's the blessing of having a room to retreat to.

This place had always been her refuge, but this would be her last summer in that room. Its services were over. Its time was done. She was not ready to leave her little shell. She was being pulled out too soon. She would never be able to think anywhere else as well as here. She would never sleep so well, or have such dreams in any other bed. Even last night, such sweet, restless dreams. Here were the sand hills, the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flatlands.

There was home in it too, first memories, first mornings long ago, the amazement of a new soul and a new world. A soul new and yet old, that had dreamed something despairing, something glorious, and the dark before it was born. A soul obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a pest, it could not recall. Now finally, I actually believe that there is a God in the hereafter, and that I have been guided all this time without knowing it, that probably leaving the church was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it gave me a broader view, and God has not confined to any church, or any set of beliefs, much bigger than that. And the interpretation of God that people put out, that is there making God in their image, they're not living up to being in God's image, they're just making

God over in their image. When they want to go out to war and kill somebody off, there's a different color or different belief, that's not God, that's their own limited ignorance. So I come to that conclusion, so I'm a world citizen now, which is fine with me, and happier than ever was in my life. Like a friend of mine in Omaha said, you should not take any man's song away from him, and that's right, you don't have a right to take anybody's song away from him, you should sing it with him, and the whole world should sing it together, but I'm getting real serenizing, I think. I'm

getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, I'm getting real serenizing, who would guess that this is the picture of a rebel? Now, finally, I

actually believe that there's a God in here after, and that I've been guided all this time without knowing it, that probably leaving the church was the best thing that ever happened to me. The stories of author Willa Cather changed the life of Mildred Bennett. See how, watch Singing Cather's Song.