Treacherous territory

DID the American West provide blacks with greater opportunity and greater freedom? Or did whites load all their prejudices into their wagons as they headed west, installing a familiar system of racial inequality as quickly as they built sod houses and dug irrigation ditches? In the history of the Rocky Mountain West, African Americans have made up a comparatively tiny percentage of the population. But does a small number equate to a small significance?

For a historian of Western America sitting down to read Rita Williams’ “If the Creek Don’t Rise: My Life Out West With the Last Black Widow of the Civil War,” these questions occupy center stage in the mind. But then, in an uncomfortable, increasingly rattled sequence of recognition, such a reader comes to realize that those nicely framed, historiographically well-conceived questions have little bearing on this memoir.

Initially, the story seems as if it will match and even illuminate the historian’s questions and themes.

Daisy, an African American woman raised in the very hard times of the post-Civil War South, married Robert Ball Anderson, a 79-year-old African American veteran of both the Civil War and the Western Indian wars. Daisy was nearly six decades younger than her husband. Joined by most members of her immediate family, she moved to her husband’s homestead in Nebraska in the early 1920s.

After Robert died in 1930, Daisy lost the ranch and moved farther west. She ended up at her sister Mae Williams’ creek-side inn and restaurant in Colorado’s Strawberry Park, near Steamboat Springs, a mountain landscape that still looks like the mirror image of paradise. When Mae died, Daisy took in 4-year-old Rita Ann, the youngest of Mae’s three daughters, raising her in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, Rita Williams lives in Los Angeles, where she has worked as “an actor, musician, professor, recovery counselor, and radio announcer, as well as a writer.”

Won’t her story give us a better understanding of the distinctive meanings and workings of race in Western America?

Maybe not.

In their conduct toward Daisy and Rita (“the only black family for nearly two hundred miles”), the white people of northwestern Colorado presented the usual puzzles of human nature: They were generally quite pleasant, but certain situations -- like an attractive African American girl reaching puberty and the accompanying escalation of tension over the prospect of interracial courtship -- could bring their pleasantness to a sudden halt.

An experienced working cowboy, Slim McCormack, gave Daisy and Rita a TV set and generally was a kind neighbor. But Dale, a boy in a prestigious private school in Steamboat Springs, tormented Rita with racial invective. With this mixture of behavior from its white residents, a spectrum of conduct ranging from tolerance and encouragement to cruelty and hatred, Steamboat Springs competes for the title of Every Town, U.S.A.

But here is where the story veers from conventional historical assumptions about relations between whites and blacks. The prime miseries in Rita’s life arise within her own family, and the questions most forcefully raised by this book are more matters of universal human nature than historically specific aspects of race and place or region. Why do some people immersed in tragedy during childhood manage to leave their afflictions behind and build better lives, when for others the agonies only propagate? When two people realize that they have become the occasion of each other’s unhappiness, why are they unable to change course and choose better conduct? Why do human beings, when they care very much about each other, wield such sharp and perfect instruments in each other’s torment?

Of course, one could argue -- as many pundits have -- that the oppression of African Americans has set up the circumstances and conditions for the lasting psychological injuries that have driven members of one generation to pass them on to the children they raise. Daisy had grown up “in a cabin in Tennessee, with little access to basic hygiene, medicine, education, information, or safety”; she was the eldest child and carried the burden of “raising seven brothers and sisters with almost no resources.” Her childhood experiences left her in fear of whites; she could not keep her mind off the more recent memory of being pushed off a sidewalk by a white woman. “They slaughtered us, Rita,” Daisy told her niece. “Just like you’d go out and butcher a steer.”

And yet, Williams writes, it never occurred to Daisy “to accord other black people more respect than history had generally allotted them.” As a young girl, she remembers, “I’d never heard the word ‘nigger’ outside of home, but inside I heard it every day.”

Williams also received astonishing doses of discouragement. “Don’t never take nobody else’s child to raise, Rita,” Daisy repeated endlessly. “You’ll be sorry if you do.” For all the episodes of corrosive dismissal she endured, Williams had to recognize the “conundrum” of Daisy’s parenting: Her aunt was doing everything she could to make her niece succeed. Yet the niece was nearly destroyed in the process.

Still, Daisy apparently achieved her goal, even though that route led through anguish and despair. She wanted to raise her niece to be a well-educated woman who could hold her own as a black woman in a nation with a most uneven record in delivering on its promise of human equality. Daisy said that she wanted Rita to learn to think for herself. And then, every time Rita thought for herself, Daisy landed on her like a ton of bricks. The outcome of this soul-wrenching training program? The author of “If the Creek Don’t Rise” proves to be remarkably independent.

Although it may be a great tribute to the resilience of human beings, this result does not qualify as a “happy ending.” In truth, the complimentary platitude “I couldn’t put it down” carries a different meaning for this book.

You can read the last page and officially “put the book down,” but its weight stays with you. Whatever bright and lively activities you attempt to pursue for the next few days, a heavy cloud looms between you and the sunlight. The sorrows of this girl’s life -- abandonment by her father when she was 2, her mother’s early death, her aunt’s campaign to uplift her even as she degraded her, the inconstant and sometimes treacherous help offered by other adults, her descent into despair and attempted suicide -- can seem more real than the pleasant friends and co-workers conducting their lives around you. It takes a while to recover from this book, which is the most important tribute I can pay it.

And is the Western setting irrelevant? The extraordinary landscape of the Colorado Rockies could not protect Rita from her troubles. But the mountains, forests, wildlife and weather mattered to this hard-pressed child, providing her with inspiration, targets for her scientific curiosity, tests of character and also a kind of refuge.

The upshot is this: Williams considers herself a Westerner. She is “still in sentimental love with the West, the romance of cowboy and horse, all those symbols of ennobled loneliness.” For Williams, as for many other people of every imaginable ethnic and racial background, becoming a Westerner has been both a consolation prize and a steady consolation for emotional and spiritual ordeals aplenty. The West, this author and her readers benefit equally from the intertwining of their destinies.