The Divide

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Beautifully illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully, a Caldecott Medal
winner, The Divide tells the story of the move to Nebraska made by Willa
Cather’s family in 1885, when Willa was 9.

In lyrical, highly evocative prose, Michael Bedard sketches Willa’s
sense of loss at leaving the family farm in the eastern United States,
the novel ride across the continent on an immigrant train bound for the
Divide, and the harshness of the flat Nebraska plains. The few trees are
“sad,” the old farmhouse is a “tall, gaunt thing of weather-beaten
boards, huddled in a hollow from the wind.” Willa feels that the land
does not want them there: “It wanted to be left alone.”

When spring comes, everything is new and different. Willa helps her
grandmother with a vegetable garden and rides the open fields on a pony.
The trail followed by the family is marked by sunflowers sprung from
seeds dropped by the first settlers to mark the way for those who
followed. Willa becomes friendly with neighbors who tell her stories of
the Old World across the sea.

McCully’s full-page illustrations capture “the weight of
darkness” as the train crosses the continent, the feeling of wind in
the copper-colored grass, the beauty of birds and wildflowers, and the
value of neighbors. The old women whose mail Emily fetches from the post
office are like her treasured shells, plain without and pearled within.
Many of Cather’s novels set on the Divide would depict the women who
taught her strength and courage. Highly recommended.