Always Got the Hind Tit

BOOK REVIEW
Little Heathens




Just when this blog was aching for some white and WASPy subject matter, here comes Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, a memoir penned by my new imaginary grandma, Mildred Armstrong Kalish.

Little Heathens is deeply cute. And when I say something is cute, by no means am I calling it trivial or cloying. I take my cuteness quite seriously. This book is cute as in wholesome, heart-warming and earnest. It made me feel like I was curled up beside a fire eating fresh-baked cookies in a fuzzy bathrobe with a kitten in my lap.

Speaking of kittens, here's how Kalish and her younger sister bundled up on cold winter nights:

After placing a thick featherbed on the mattress, we covered it with a heavy flannel double-length blanket, which we tucked in at the foot of the bed, creating a snug sack...After donning our heavy wool nighties, we hopped into bed and pulled the blankets and quilts completely over our heads, then snuggled together like two spoons. We were permitted one or two kittens, which would find us on their own and snuggle at our feet near the warm stones.

Permitted one or two kittens. To think, I permit myself one or two kittens regularly.

Harsh Iowa winters are only the beginning. Kalish and her siblings and cousins--the "little heathens" of the title--survive endless chores, lash-enforced rules, a scarcity of modern medicine and mind-boggling levels of thrift. (Scrape insides of eggshells with your finger so as not to miss any precious egg whites.) Kalish's family leaps high hurdles to fulfill basic needs. Just to get dinner on the table, the pig has to be slaughtered, the water pumped, the wood gathered, the fire started, the eggs collected, the vegetables picked, the bread baked.

Oh yeah, and it's the Great Depression.

But the book is written from a child's perspective, and it's really about the best kind of kid stuff: running ecstatically through a rainstorm, picking sun-warmed strawberries, inhaling the sweet smell of a lamb's fur, and tagging along after the Big Kids. The Little Kids, among whom eighty-four year-old Kalish counts herself, are always "getting the hind tit." (Among barnyard litters, the runts settle for the less milky, rearward mammary glands.)

The country pleasures in this book are made all the sweeter by the fact that you get to read with curiosity about the frigid outhouses and entire tedious days spent on laundry without having to experience either.

After one Iowa winter too many, Kalish eventually moved to California. "I prefer to sit by an open fire and listen to Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sing songs about the ice and the cold and the snow," she writes, "rather than experiencing them firsthand."

Likewise, Little Heathens is the best way to experience, secondhand, childhood on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression.

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