My mom and I had been at it for the better part of the afternoon. By it, I mean going through several trunks she had inherited when my grandmother passed away years ago. The purpose of our search was to find my grandmother’s copy of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women. As a kid, I used to spend summers with my grandparents and I always read this book before returning home. As we continued our hunt, we found many treasures - samplers, trinkets, pictures, old newspaper clippings and the like, but no book.
As our search began to wind down, one old trunk in particular caught my attention. It was wooden and white paint was flaking off the sides like snowflakes being brushed from the shoulders of a winter coat. As I sat cross-legged in the middle of my mom’s living room floor, I reached inside the trunk and carefully lifted out a large, crinkled brown paper bag, expecting to find more pictures of my grandmother and her family from South Carolina. Instead, I pulled out an original hand-written essay entitled Southern Literature by Quinnie Shuler, held together by a single paperclip. Gently, I lifted the cover page to reveal perfect penmanship and flowing sentences, several of which caught my eye right away: “Let us put forth an effort to arouse an interest in Southern literature. Some of us are inclined to look over the rich treasures near at hand for something in the distance. It is all well and good to read Shakespeare, Scott, Burns, Tennyson, Longfellow, Wittier, Hawthorne and others . . . but let us not entirely overlook writers of this fair South . . . for if we, their countrymen do not honor them, who can be expected to do so.”
As I read these words, I could barely contain my excitement. My mother, sensing my giddiness, glanced over at me for half a second and asked, “What are you reading?” I handed her the paper and after looking at the cover sheet, she confirmed the author, Quinnie Shuler was my great-grandmother and that she was a school teacher before she married my great-grandfather. When I told my mom the essay was coming home with me, she shrugged her shoulders and went back to fussing about Alcott’s missing masterpiece.
I left my mom’s house that day with samplers, trinkets, pictures, old newspaper clippings and the like. We never found Ms. Alcott’s award winning book, but I did leave with a thought-provoking essay, written by a strong southern woman who read and admired the same classic writers as her great-granddaughter. Without moaning or belittling, Quinnie urged her readers to “wake up and look around to see what could be accomplished in the line of literature” and to invest in Southern literature and writers as a way to advance pride, honor, and “literary progress” in a land in which so many had lost so much in the years before. And although the essay was titled and written in the interest of Southern literature, to me, it speaks of so much more.
