The "Real" Antonia's Home

On one of our early visits to Red Cloud, Nebraska, we drove north of town to visit the Pavelka farm home in which Annie Sadilek Pavelka and her husband had raised their large family.  Of course, if you read last week's blog you know that Annie was the inspiration for Willa Cather's fictionalized Antonia in My Antonia.

This year, in celebration of the Centennial year of My Antonia's publication in 1918, the Willa Cather Foundation focused on that novel for its annual spring conference.  One of the events available to those scholars and Cather fans attending the conference was a pilgrimage to the Pavelka Farmstead.

 Last week's blog shared a picture of the young Anna.  The image at left shows Anna later in her life, still with eyes "big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood," but with the sunken cheeks about which Antonia told Jim Burden, "I haven't got many [teeth] left.  But I feel just as young as I used to, and I can do as much work."

Having recently acquired the farmstead, the Cather Foundation has plans to make needed repairs to the house, which has declined in recent years since the time the above photograph of the house was taken.  In addition, the Foundation plans to plant the orchard that was once part of the farm.

"At some distance behind the house were an ash grove and two orchards:  a cherry orchard, with gooseberry and currant bushes between the rows, and an apple orchard, sheltered by a high hedge from the hot winds."  

During the visit to the farm we were able to tour the interior of the farmhouse, and as I saw the sinks in the kitchen, I could only think of Antonia's daughter Anna telling her mother, "Now, mother, sit down and talk to Mr. Burden.  We'll finish the dishes quietly and not disturb you."

I climbed the stairs to the second level, imagining Antonia/Anna's large family living in this house.  My imagination was further stimulated as I watched one of Anna Pavelka's great grandsons looking with curiosity into the attic.  

Although the plantings are no longer the same as they were when Anna Pavelka and her family lived in the house, as I wandered off by myself I discovered beautiful peony bushes in bloom and captured my own image reflected in the glass of a window for a photographic remembrance of myself visiting the farmhouse.

I was also lucky to capture a photograph of four of Anna Pavelka's great granddaughters walking together along one side of the house.  It was easy for me to imagine Antonia's daughters walking by the house instead.

I cannot help but look forward to future visits to the Pavelka farm when the orchards and the "grape arbor, with seats built along the sides and a warped plank table" where Antonia and Jim paused to visit have been recreated for future visitors to the farm.

My Antonia Belongs to Many of Us

Anna Pavelka

My Antonia was first published in 1918, and this is the year of its centennial.  As I often have done after our return from the annual Cather Conference in Red Cloud, Nebraska, I share some of our experiences on my blog.  This year is no exception, especially because it is the centennial year of many people's favorite Cather book.

Those of you familiar with Willa Cather know that many of her characters are based on real people, and the settings for many of her stories are actually Red Cloud, Nebraska given different names.  Antonia Shimerda was inspired by a real person named Anna Pavelka, who is pictured at right.  Cather's admiration and respect for Anna is obvious from the quote accompanying the photograph, for she describes the character she plans to create from Anna as being "like a rare object in the middle of a table which one may examine from all sides."  (Image from display in the Red Cloud Opera House, Cather Foundation.)

I first read My Antonia one summer when I would have been about the same age Antonia was when she arrived in Red Cloud with her family, immigrants from Bohemia.  My older brother had read My Antonia in a college class and had brought the book home with him when he retuned for the summer.  Willa Cather became one of my favorite authors that summer and remains so today.

I recall that I struggled with the idea that when Jim Burden returned to Red Cloud and visited Antonia at the close of the novel, she was the mother of a large family, "a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled," lacking most of her teeth.  I wanted her to be the pretty girl Jim had loved as a boy, but Jim taught me a lesson about beauty.  "I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded.  Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life."  As he lay awake that night, sleeping in the haymow with two of Antonia's boys sleeping nearby, Jim realized, "She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.  ...All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions."

How amazing that this fictional character that had so impressed me when I was such a young girl was so closely based upon a real person.

Willa Cather, born on December 7, 1873 arrived in Webster County, Nebraska in 1883, a ten-year-old from the South adjusting to life on the prairie, just as the fictional Jim Burden arrives in the novel from the South as a ten year old.  Most of the Cathers' neighbors are European immigrants, just as Jim Burden's neighbors were.  When Cather enrolls in Red Cloud High School in 1884, she meets Annie Sadilek Pavelka, the girl that she transforms into the fictional Antonia.  In 1915, while on a visit to her old hometown of Red Cloud, Cather visits her childhood friend, Annie Pavelka, and in 1917 she writes My Antonia.

When I read a fine novel, the characters often come alive for me, and in the case of My Antonia, Cather truly placed her childhood friend, "a rare object," at the heart of her novel for us to appreciate "from all sides."