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Rating: 
Summary: "The strange song of the mother of Abraham Lincoln"
Review: "Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road" by Meridel Le Sueur is, as the subtitle indicates, "A Story of Abraham Lincoln's Mother." Nancy Hanks died when Lincoln was a child living in the wilderness of Indiana. Relatively little is known of Lincoln's family: there is one photograph of his step-mother taken after he was assassinated and another that may or may not be of his father, while Nancy Hanks lies buried in a long forgotten grave somewhere in Indiana. This tale has a real feel for life in the wilderness and there is a poignancy to it as Le Sueur crafts the story of a woman who died young and who could never have imagined that she was setting her little boy on the path to greatness by teaching him to read, write and cipher.
The story is told as something of an argument between the narrator's grandmother and Dennis Hanks, Nancy's cousin. Dennis might have been blood kin, but when Abraham Lincoln was born he inspected the baby and announced he would never amount to much; consequently, anything he has to say on the matter of the life of Nancy Hanks is inherently suspect. It is the grandmother who has always been outraged by the fact that while tales area always told about famous men "no one sings of the women." The Lincolns are their kin are folk that the populist and worker groups Le Sueur wrote about in the 1930's could have understood. This story is not as powerful as Le Sueur's "The River Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln," but it is not intended to be. This is a "the strange song of the mother of Abraham Lincoln, the young, the deathless Nancy Hanks"; the other tale tells of the crucible of Lincoln's journey down the Mississippi on a raft to New Orleans. This volume in Le Sueur's Wilderness series was originally published in 1949 and has been reprinted by Holy Cow! Press with 1990 illustrations by Dina Redman. Final note: the photograph of Le Sueur by Judy Olausen on the back cover is one of the more impressive pictures of an author I have seen.
Rating:
Summary: "The strange song of the mother of Abraham Lincoln"
Review: "Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road" by Meridel Le Sueur is, as the subtitle indicates, "A Story of Abraham Lincoln's Mother." Nancy Hanks died when Lincoln was a child living in the wilderness of Indiana. Relatively little is known of Lincoln's family: there is one photograph of his step-mother taken after he was assassinated and another that may or may not be of his father, while Nancy Hanks lies buried in a long forgotten grave somewhere in Indiana. This tale has a real feel for life in the wilderness and there is a poignancy to it as Le Sueur crafts the story of a woman who died young and who could never have imagined that she was setting her little boy on the path to greatness by teaching him to read, write and cipher.
The story is told as something of an argument between the narrator's grandmother and Dennis Hanks, Nancy's cousin. Dennis might have been blood kin, but when Abraham Lincoln was born he inspected the baby and announced he would never amount to much; consequently, anything he has to say on the matter of the life of Nancy Hanks is inherently suspect. It is the grandmother who has always been outraged by the fact that while tales area always told about famous men "no one sings of the women." The Lincolns are their kin are folk that the populist and worker groups Le Sueur wrote about in the 1930's could have understood. This story is not as powerful as Le Sueur's "The River Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln," but it is not intended to be. This is a "the strange song of the mother of Abraham Lincoln, the young, the deathless Nancy Hanks"; the other tale tells of the crucible of Lincoln's journey down the Mississippi on a raft to New Orleans. This volume in Le Sueur's Wilderness series was originally published in 1949 and has been reprinted by Holy Cow! Press with 1990 illustrations by Dina Redman. Final note: the photograph of Le Sueur by Judy Olausen on the back cover is one of the more impressive pictures of an author I have seen.
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