WAS (46 page)

Outside her door is a town. An electric light shines on her porch. Somewhere in the night she hears the creak of wagon wheels, the protest of an ox under a yoke. Creeping out of the darkness toward her and into the electric light come the tired faces of those long gone, men and women in plain dress, standing amid the new, not surprised, not confused or outraged. Simply standing.

It's always best to begin at the beginning.
-The Good Witch

There were chickens at Rose Lawn and china soldiers. The hens were brown and white with feathers cleaner than sheets. They were alive. The soldiers were tiny and perfect, and for Frank they were alive as well.

Frank liked the soldiers' pink cheeks, their tiny perfect eyes and the feel of their china faces under his fingers, smooth but slightly rough at the same time. The soldiers were French because their arms moved loosely under their uniforms. Their arms were held by threads. Frank lay one of them down very carefully next to him on the stone steps. Things got lost. Things got broken.

Was that snow glinting on the grass? Was it water? Did grass cry? Eagles flew. Frank looked up. It was as though he could leap up into the sky. Clouds sighed overhead, across the face of the sun.

Frank was running away. Frank was always running away to secret places and Rose Lawn was full of them. Frank was running away now. But he knew he had been found, sitting on two stone steps between cedars.

He heard the crunch of his mother's boots behind him on the gravel walk. He did not look up. His mother began to speak. The words fell, as individual as stars.

"Where's Nanny?" she asked.

Frank shrugged. He heard the rustle of cloth as his mother knelt down beside him. He could smell soap and scent. Frank rubbed his eyes.

"I don't like her," Frank said. Nanny smelled of sweat and washed his face with her own spit daubed on a handkerchief. Frank looked at his mother's green dress with what seemed to him like thick green ropes embedded in the fabric. He wondered vaguely if they were for hanging things on. Or hanging up the dress? Hanging up his mother, from the walls?

"Nanny doesn't always understand," said his mother.

That was not Frank's problem. He felt his mother stroking his hair. He looked up at her face. The eyes were full on his.

"She doesn't remember what it is like to be a child," his mother explained.

"Why not?" Frank asked. It seemed to him to be a simple enough thing to do. Overhead, the clouds had faces, and they smiled.

"Because it was such a long time ago," said his mother. She whispered, in case the trees were listening.

Frank looked at the clipped hedges and the white fences, the water snaking its way from the fountain's mouth. He looked at the china soldiers and his wooden duck with the wheels on the stone steps. The steps glinted in the sun as if blinking. The hens, feathers billowing in the slight breeze, looked like clouds with legs. They kept kissing the ground.

"I'll remember," promised Frank.

I am a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism. Because I am a fantasy writer, I am particularly aware that every work of fiction, however realistic, is a fantasy. It happens in a world that is an alternative to this one.

There is a town called Manhattan, Kansas, that is very like the one in this novel. It was settled by people called Purcell and Higinbotham and Pillsbury. There was a Professor Mudge, an Etta Parkerson and her Mr. Reynolds. There even was a Dr. Lyman. To my knowledge, however, he was not related to Lyman Frank Baum, nor did Baum visit the town, though he was in Kansas in the 1880s.

To my knowledge, no Chinese people lived in Manhattan in the 1870s. There was, however, a Mr. Win Tsue who lived in Deadwood, South Dakota, and who invited local women to meet his wife on New Year's Day.

There was a Blue Earth village on the Manhattan side of the two great rivers. At one time, it consisted of 128 lodges, each sixty feet long. The marks in the ground were visible for many years afterward, still remembered by people writing in the 1920s.

There is a Zeandale; there is a Pillsbury's Crossing. The Aiken family still lives in the area. There were indeed two Sunflower Schools, one of which has disappeared, leaving only a clearing in a small hump of woodland where a lane meets the main road. That lane does lead to a smooth, ziggurat-shaped hill.

There is a farm rather like the one my Dorothy lived on, except that the people who lived there, the St. Johns, the Eakins, have been moved over by about a mile to make room for the Branscomb Estate. My Zeandale is a much bigger place.

The real one did have buffalo wallows which are remembered as having swallowed one child whole. If memory serves, the last buffalo in Zeandale was seen at Pillsbury's Crossing, by a member of the Aiken family, in 1882.

There were many other sources in reality of this fantasy.

Mr. and Mrs. Aiken spoke to me and showed me where the first Sunflower School had been. They told me the story of the buffalo wallow and another story of lilacs planted on the hills to commemorate another child who had died.

The interior of Mrs. Baker's farmhouse is rather like that of Mrs. Marjorie Sand's, who in two interviews told me much about Riley County and life in the old days. It was Mrs. Sand who managed to produce for me one of the last available copies of Pioneers of the Blue Stem Prairie, an exhaustive and invaluable work tracing the family history of all the original settlers of a huge area of Kansas.

I am indebted to Charlotte Shawver of the Registry Office in Manhattan and to Nancy Gorman and Dala Suther, who provided enthusiastic help during my brief visit there.

I could not have written the book in such detail without the days of personal help given to me by Cheryl Collins and Jeanne Mithen of the Riley County Historical Museum. They found and allowed me to photocopy unpublished memoirs, census records, historical books, photographs and plat books. These memoirs provided the basis for those of Aunty Em. In particular, the memoir of Anna Biasing was a source of much of the material. Aunty Em's description of the burning of Lawrence in 1856 was based on that of Sara T. L. Robinson in her book of 1856,
Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life.

The Manhattan Public Library is to be thanked for preserving their store of local newspapers from the nineteenth century. Wilbur F. Jewell got his name from them-he was a thirteen-year-old boy who committed suicide. The description of the celebration of the Congregationalist church came from those microfilms, as did the text of Aunty Em's poem. It was in fact recited at the banquet. The Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka also keeps a very large store of such material, from which information about Professor Mudge was derived.

Descriptions of life in Wichita in Dorothy's dream and elsewhere are derived in part from
Wichita: The Early Years, 1865-80
by H. Craig Miner (University of Nebraska Press).

Thanks are also due to the Lancaster, California, Public Library. Special attention is reserved for the person who stole the microfilm of the Lancaster local newspaper for the year 1927. It was the only publicly available copy of the microfilm, and the newspapers from which it was made have disintegrated.

The chapters on the childhood of Frances Gumm and the life of her mother, Ethel Milne, owe a great debt to
Young Judy
by David Dahl and Barry Kehoe.

I must acknowledge a great debt, too, to
The Making of the Wizard ofOz
by Aljean Harmetz. It is extremely difficult to retrieve the amount of in-depth detail that this author managed to find.

The real film was made in a slightly different way to mine. For example, Judy Garland's makeup would have been done by a man. Millie Haugaard did not exist. At first I called her Millie Shroeder; I then found that by coincidence Millie Shroeder was the name of Bert Lahr's wife.

I couldn't find out where MGM staff parked their cars, so I have Millie take the bus. There were many things I could not find out about MGM during my short stays in Los Angeles. Most of what is available is old publicity material. A lot of the MGM archives were used as landfill under the freeway system. In one hundred years' time we will know more about Manhattan, Kansas, in the 1870s (the high-school newspaper is preserved) than we will about the working lives of MGM staff. But we will still have the films.

There was a Corndale, Ontario, Canada, under another name. There was a very similar house to Jonathan's, long ago, in Was.

The chapter set in Manhattan High School owes an enormous debt to an unpublished manuscript entitled "A Teacher Learns" by Major John Hawkins. He is in part a model for the character of Baum as portrayed in this chapter, and the particular incidents described in it are drawn from his experiences as a teacher. Dorothy's singing death is also inspired by a Hawkins family story. Thanks also to John Clute for reinforcing the idea of Jonathan's disappearance. Johanna Firbank has been a continual inspiration in long discussions on such subjects as childhood conditioning and the nature of literature.

My greatest debt is to L. Frank Baum and
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
.

Books make authors, not the other way around. Books come out of their own accord, authors just write them. Books can be written without authors. They can come, like epic poetry, out of many different mouths.

Oz was first visited upon a kindly man who wanted to set children free from fear. Oz grew out of Alice in Wonderland, and out of Kansas and the people who settled there, and Baum's own life.

It also kept on growing. It grew out of improved Technicolor cameras and out of the MGM studio system, which meant the first footage directed by Richard Thorpe could be thrown out. It grew out of Herman Mankiewicz and Ogden Nash and Noel Langley; Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, and Ben Hecht's secretary, John Lee Mahin. Can a script with this many writers be said to have an author? Oz grew out of Arlen and Harburg, who wrote the songs. It grew out of the singers, who knew how to sing them. It kept on growing, because of television; it kept on gaining meaning with each repeat. Oz came swimming to us out of history, because we needed it, because it needed to be. A book, a film, a television ritual, a thousand icons scattered through advertising, journalism, political cartoons, music, poetry. Had Oz been blocked, it would have taken another form in the world. It could have come as a cyclone.

That doesn't make it true.

I fell in love with realism because it deflates the myths, the unexamined ideas of fantasy. It confronts them with forgotten facts. It uses past truth-history.

I love fantasy because it reminds us how far short our lives fall from their full potential. Fantasy reminds us how wonderful the world is. In fantasy, we can imagine a better life, a better future. In fantasy, we can free ourselves from history and outworn realism.

Oz is, after all, only a place with flowers and birds and rivers and hills. Everything is alive there, as it is here if we care to see it. Tomorrow, we could all decide to live in a place not much different from Oz. We don't. We continue to make the world an ugly, even murderous place, for reasons we do not understand.

Those reasons lie in both fantasy and history. Where we are gripped by history-our own personal history, our country's history. Where we are deluded by fantasy-our own fantasy, our country's fantasy. It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible.

And then use them against each other.