Wickedness

on risk-taking, stories, and community

Do you know the story of the Children’s Blizzard? On January 12, 1888, after a short patch of unseasonably warm weather, a mass of cold air moved across the Great Plains, dropping feet of snow and plunging temperatures as much as 100 degrees—at the storm’s worst, it was 40 below across much of North Dakota. Few were prepared, because the Army Signal Corps failed to send out a warning, because the day started warm and fair, and also because the storm struck so suddenly in the mid-afternoon. An estimated 235 people, many of them children walking home from one-room schoolhouses, died in the storm.

I first learned about the blizzard when I read the Ron Hansen story “Wickedness” in a college creative writing class. Hansen’s story is fictional, but based on historical accounts, and told in a kind of open frame-flashback. The story begins years after the storm, when a schoolteacher on her way to a post in Nebraska sees a double amputee heaved up the aisle of a passenger train like a “heavy package” of farm machinery. She’s told by a licorice-breathed doctor seated next to her that the man was in fact a carpenter caught out in the great blizzard of 1888, and that she’d better look out. “Weather in Nebraska,” he says, “could be the wickedest thing she ever saw.”

In this way the story seems to be one of weather—the terrible, unexpected snowstorm that catches so many unaware, leaving some frozen where they stand, others miraculously unscathed. Hansen moves from vignette to vignette, using a combination of intimate and reportorial details to tell the near-deaths, escapes, and cruel fates of dozens of farmers, schoolteachers, children, and homesteaders. For years, when I would teach this story, I’d focus on its list-like structure or the way Hansen’s evocative language—wind that hits the body “hard as furniture,” “horizontal snow” that “dashed and seethed over everything”—modernized a historical story.

But the story is trickier and more timeless than that. Read it closely, and you’ll see that the miraculous escapes mostly happen to people of means. The Schusters greet their child’s snow-covered Shetland pony, delivering a rolled-up note from the teacher that says their only child is safe, with attention that includes an ivory comb (to remove the ice from his shag) and sugar served in a Dresden bowl. This story contrasts with the one that follows it, of the seven Aachen children who are killed by a father who despairs over his inability to provide for them. A schoolteacher survives, just barely, while the children she shelters with inside a haystack freeze to death—their father builds their coffins from ripped-down kitchen cupboards. The story ends on the image of an English girl in a sable coat who leaves a party with champagne and dancing and coconut macaroons to walk across alone across a train trestle in the blizzard.

I thought of this story while driving home with Mamie late Friday night. We’d been to see a production of Porgy and Bess at the Greensboro Opera, and it started snowing before intermission. Nothing like a blizzard, and not unexpected at all. We knew it would snow, about as much as it did—three inches here in Pittsboro. Like Addie, the English girl on the high trestle, we decided not to stay the night, even though we could have. We plowed ahead! Though we were listening to another snow story, Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” as we drove (my friend Wilton texted a joking reference to this one, and I happened to have it on my phone), I thought of “Wickedness” as I gripped the steering wheel, plowing past accidents at fifteen or twenty miles an hour.

We’d also plowed ahead by keeping our tickets, which we bought long before Omicron. Cases are high in North Carolina right now—probably too high, as a friend said, for live theater to be safe. But my friend Sylvester is in this production, which had been postponed by more than a year and which also included Rhiannon Giddens in the title role of Bess. We’d looked forward to it for so long. We weren’t going to miss it.

Mamie and I researched masks and wore them tight across our faces. The theater was full of people like us, mask-wearing but privileged people who, like Addie, seemed to believe that “accidents and dying seemed a government you could vote against, a mother you could ignore.” We were all in high spirits, happy to be out of the house, betting our masks and vaccines would keep us safe.

It was a magnificent, unforgettable production. I think that beyond the star power of Rhiannon Giddens, the show’s impact rests on its ensemble cast and the community they portray—flawed, like all communities, but close-knit and reliant on one another for protection against cops, hunger, loneliness.

It was my first time seeing Porgy and Bess, which also hinges on a weather event—a hurricane that takes the lives of two beloved members of the Catfish Row community. But while the European immigrants and white settlers in Hansen’s story each move through their losses alone, the Black residents of Catfish Row pool their money for a burial. Bess, then Serena, take care of Clara’s baby. Even Crown is let into the shelter during the storm.

I think both stories are right about America. We can live in self-defeating solitude, or we can live in community. And we can believe in self-determination as the key to our survival, but a lot of it (most of it?) is luck and privilege.

We made it home to Bea, Harriet, and Richard after two and a half hours—even all the way up my crazy driveway! Lucky us.

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More on Porgy and Bess:

Rhiannon Giddens hosts Aria Code with guests Golda Schultz, Naomi André, Victoria Smalls, and Eric Owens. They talk about the show’s history and challenges regarding race and representation, focusing specifically on “Summertime” and “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin.” (Aria Code is Giddens’s podcast about specific arias in opera history.)

“The Complex History and Uneasy Present of ‘Porgy and Bess’” from the New York Times

And this wonderful poem by Nabila Lovelace, “The S in ‘I Loves You, Porgy’”