Dear Rose,
I like you. In many ways, I think you’re fabulous. You’re so much fun to be around—a tremendous storyteller, always good for a joke (and not always a clean one!). I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone with such a delightful combination of worldliness and down-home simplicity. And I’m so impressed with everything you’ve accomplished in your life … your writings, your travels, your caretaking (though the Turner boys …well, all’s well that ends well I suppose), and most importantly your maintenance of spirit. People only think they have convictions until they meet Rose Wilder Lane.
But that book? On the Way Home? Published after your mother’s death? I have only one question.
What were you thinking?
Don’t misunderstand me. I think it was lovely that you decided to publish this very early writing of your mother’s. What a wonderful piece of history to have, a record of her family’s final move, the journey across the Midwest to the place they’d live the rest of their lives. And yes, it was thoughtful of you to bookend the journal with settings beginning in De Smet and ending in Mansfield.
But I repeat: what were you thinking?
Really, the beginning is all right, though it gives me a strange feeling to read your reaction to your mother’s attempt at brightening a dreary situation when she said living in the big house in De Smet was like camping. She was just a mother trying to make sure her daughter didn’t worry, wasn’t she? Not to mention the way you talked about her and your father’s diff-theer-i-a. Not that your phrasing wouldn’t fit in perfectly in a piece of fiction. Your observations were always so severely pointed. But it was the wrong place, I think.
Still, neither of those issues is so important in the grand scheme.
I’m really talking about the ending. Rose, I don’t get it. You spend more than half the amount of pages as your mother’s entire record on your epilogue. This is useful, of course—how nice to have your mother’s story put in context. And some of it I dearly love. Such a way with words you have. Your description of your mother’s preparation to head to the bank to sign the papers buying the piece of land she and your father finally found in Mansfield is exquisite, and so exciting to a Little House reader: putting on her black wedding dress, brushing and plaiting her beautiful long hair that extended to her heels, fluffing her bangs, whistling “Oh Susanna,” perching her black sailor hat atop her head.
But putting things in context isn’t all you do. Essentially, you use these pages to tell your own stories.
The first story is about your parents’ missing $100 bill. It’s all the money they have in the world, and they were going to use it as a deposit on the land they found. And it’s misplaced. Your parents are understandably upset. This is what you write:
Suddenly [Laura] thought, hoped, asked, Had I taken it myself, to play with?
NO! I felt scalded. She asked, Was I sure? I hadn’t just opened the desk sometime, for fun? My throat swelled shut; I shook my head, no. “Don’t cry,” she said automatically. I wouldn’t cry, I never cried, I was angry, insulted, miserable, I was not a baby who’d play with money or open that desk for fun, I was going on eight years old. I was little, alone, and scared. My father and mother sat there, still. In the long stillness I sank slowly into nothing but terror, pure terror without cause or object, a nightmare terror.
I’m not saying what you wrote isn’t true. You were there; you know what happened. (Or at least you know what you remember.) You just seemed to make some interesting choices. I can’t quite figure out why you said what you did—and left out what you left out.
Later on, you detail how your father cuts a slab of salt pork to give to a needy man with a hungry family, and you quote your mother crying out at the gesture: “Manly, no! We’ve got Rose.” “He paid no attention,” you write.
While the reader is still left wondering why you included this information about your father, making us think, well, not very highly of him, you move on. Even though the money is thankfully found and the land purchased, your family is still destitute so your father tries to sell some lumber he has cut. He comes home, finally, very late on the day he went out to sell it. He’s exhausted, and you meet him at the wagon and find out he sold it. You run in to tell your mother (whom you say “snaps” at you that of course she’s glad! when you ask her, isn’t she glad?) and then run out again to your father.
I pranced out, to tell my father how glad she was. And he said, with a sound of crying in his voice, “Oh, why did you tell her? I wanted to surprise her.”
You say such things, little things, horrible, cruel, without thinking, not meaning to. You have done it; nothing can undo it. This is a thing you can never forget.
Rose. Why? Why on earth would you include such words about your parents who have passed away? Why do you have the desire to tarnish them both in print through the eyes of a seven-year-old? Particularly your mother, who is loved and cherished the world over as the little girl who grew up on the prairie. Are you really that bitter in your 70s? About something that happened over half a century ago?
And why do it in her book? It’s almost like you were capitalizing on the wide audience of Little House readers to present your mother not as Laura, but as the person you saw and wanted everyone else to see, the person you didn’t always agree with, who wasn’t always “Laura Ingalls,” the Little House character. But in what was essentially a companion Little House book, all I was left with was an overwhelming sense of disrespect.
I can’t help but wonder: What good did writing that do you? Moreover, what good did publishing it do? It seems to me you had a chip on your shoulder that you could never quite get rid of. Your portrayal of your parents feels like … well, it feels like payback.
Payback for what, I couldn’t say.
But you do write so well, Rose. In a manner completely different from your mother. You truly were one of the country’s great writers of the 20th century. No one can ever take that away from you, not even the angelic legacy of your mother.
Sincerely,
A fan, reader, and friend