Reminiscences: Victorious Life, Olive Schreiner

94 the minnesota review Géraldine C. Little Reminiscences: Victorious Life, Olive Schreiner 1. My father had little formal learning but great knowledge of God, a simple man called to his mission in South Africa out of the plain food of German peasantry. He taught me how the heart must be wide as the world, how loving is the song everyone needs. My mother moved on her fine English bones from the Lake District, all watery light and birdsong. In middle life I married an Englishman but I thought and think of myself as a child of the Great Karoo, that shelf so like the sea, always, yet never, the same, full of laughter, cruel, coldly inhuman, beautiful under fierce suns, frozen stars, land of passionate extremes. Like Charlotte Brontë, at twenty I flew out of the nest into the world as governess for a Karoo farmer. Even in a primitive land my quarters were primeval. I slept, lived, wrote in a miniscule mud-floored outhouse. I tried to be steely, to remember my father's faith about loving, but the boisterous, headlong children. . .1 left for a better post, still in the Karoo, where all spoke Afrikaans. There was a pinch of comfort, no less loneliness. Before it was fashionable I talked to small succulent plants struggling for life near stones on the dry plain. I meditated UtUe 95 beside a clump of prickly pears lifing thorny arms towards the moon reflected in broad fleshy leaves. I wandered sheep kraals, Kaffir huts in search of myself, slipped into an ostrich camp and down a plume to safe darkness before wrestling back to the moon-flushed desk where I scribbled to murder black seizures of asthma rattling one rib against another, multiple hands on my throat stricturing speech, stealing air, devils out of my father's Book. Is it stifling makes us form other worlds? Out of what gasping dream did Lyndall and Waldo move across the plain of my life like the flowered loveliness of "bloem-tyd," springing my spirit, revealing raw unwithering roots? 2. You imagine after the hard writing my African Farm stepped into print easily as a lamb drops from its mother's womb. You imagine I flew to England on Fame's realized wings. Listen, the manuscript spun round publishing houses until I was dizzy, battered ill by vultures of rejection. Listen, I had to take the name "Ralph Iron" to sell the length of cloth woven in the shadow of milk trees cutting out sky. By accident, out of my choking need, I tumbled from my time into yours when women's voices sing out of darkness, vibrant, strong, when in my continent links of long chains break in necessary angers, littering the land I sprung from, I understanding the free life is the life that must be lived. It is well "to see darkness breaking and the day coming. . .to see 96 the minnesota review the new time breaking. . . " The dream rises from thorn-pod to flower, and strongly holds light, leaf after leaf after leaf, light above bloodied veldt and Karoo, the kicked bones of becoming all that is written in the seed's code, the fulfillment, the important greening. ...