SUSANNA’S BALLAD, Volume 8 in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, tells the story of an abandoned child: Susanna. She was a “foundling,” an infant left on a porch by a destitute single mother, who hoped that whosoever found the tiny and sickly baby girl would have mercy, accept her as a gift, love her and raise her as their own. Susanna’s story is a “ballad,” because, as Webster’s says, it is “a slow or romantic dance song,” with a happy ending.
In 1932, during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, Susanna was abandoned by her mother on the back porch of the owners of a dairy farm along Route 66 in the Texas Panhandle. But her tale begins in 1910, with a detailed flashback, telling the story of the diverse extended family that found her. Her adoptive paternal grandparents were farmers and ranchers who were not who they said they were. When they came down from Iowa to the Texas Panhandle, they were “passing,” that is, both were white-looking, but the grandmother was actually Sioux Native American from South Dakota, and the grandfather was African American from Canada. And the adoptive maternal grandparents were of Mexican mestizo heritage. Susanna herself was “Okie,” white mixed with Cherokee from Oklahoma, and she looked nothing like any of the members of her adoptive family. Thus, as Susanna was growing up and learned who her adoptive grandparents and parents were, while knowing almost nothing of her own biological parents, she began to ask herself, “Who am I?”
By accident, Susanna’s biological family in California discovered her existence. They assumed she had died like her ailing mother had, on their Grapes-of-Wrath trek to California. But a university professor doing research on the Dust Bowl had interviewed her adoptive family and included in his book the note that the mother had sorrowfully pinned to the blanket of her abandoned child. When Susanna’s biological aunt who was a student at UCLA discovered the interview and note while doing research for a class, she came to Texas looking for her long-lost niece, who was now almost six. So began a series of contacts between Susanna and her biological family, including an uncle who came to Texas to work for Susanna’s adoptive family.
As she grew up, Susanna’s adoptive grandfather applied to her a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” because already as an adolescent, she mediated the frequent disputes that emerged between the dozen diverse families of the farming cooperative that her grandfather had founded. This multigenerational family saga follows Susanna from the time she was found on the porch step, through her infancy, childhood, teenage years, courtship, marriage, and birth of her first child. The story ends in 1954, when Susanna is in her early twenties. Her adoptive grandfather has died and to everyone’s surprise has bequeathed to her his leadership of the co-op, knowing that she alone would be able to keep the ever-quarrelsome families together.
Susanna’s story is similar to that of Sunja in Min Jin Lee’s multigenerational family saga, Pachinko about a Korean family making its way in Japan. Coincidentally, that saga also begins in 1910. Asked about the themes she gravitated toward as a writer, Lee replied: “My subjects are history, war, economics, class, sex, gender, and religion. My themes are forgiveness, loss, desire, aspiration, failure, duty, and faith.” Precisely my own subjects and themes in Susanna’s Ballad.