Iconography—Holy Mothers

Her name was Elizabeth Kauffman.

This is the only picture I have of her, my great-great-grandmother, and she is old. Diminutive. Covered neck to dull boots in plain black fabric, broken only by the two white bands of her head covering hanging past her chin. She’s perched on a front stoop, just enough room for her and her husband to stand side by side. Even then, there is a distance—between her and him and between her and me. Only the fabric of their sleeves touches each other. Only he looks at the camera. Elizabeth’s eyes cast down and to the side, her chin tucked, mouth a tight line, casting dark shadows under her cheekbones.

I try to picture her decades younger, fleeing to the arid plateaus of eastern Montana at the birth of the 20th century. I imagine the wind—the Northern Plains wind that races wildly all year, scattering topsoil and lonely people wherever it pleases—greeted her as she stepped off the train, catching the edges of her white cap and curious to see what secrets lie beneath. Perhaps Elizabeth held her head covering firmly in place, steadfast, assured. Perhaps, from the first meeting, that fierce Montana wind knew it would never be able to blow her away.

Was she afraid? As the railroad carried her away from Illinois, did she question her choice? Holding her fatherless child and her Mennonite faith tight as the train slowed into a little outpost, nearly lost in a sea of pale prairie grass, did she doubt God?

I ask these questions and more from my single photograph—not even mine but a scan from a so-many-times-removed cousin uploaded to a genealogy website. But Elizabeth never answers. Seven decades of life spanning two centuries, and all the while, she lived in a time that demanded silence.

But women have always been talking. And in Elizabeth’s downcast eyes, I hear a sorrow and a blessing.

Most first-wave homesteaders didn’t even take the time to pause in Montana. One glance at those crisped plains littered with petrified wood and rocks, sickly streams like tear tracks weeping down barren hills to narrow gullies, and those wagons kept rolling by. Not a land of plenty; rather, a land under a perpetual season of toil.

All human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied; eastern Montana was a hungry land.

But there are always the few foolish who have faith they can catch the wind. Those early migrants burrowed dugouts into the belly of the plains, wrestling a thin existence from the soil two handfuls of toil at a time. They thought life and liberty could be tilled and harvested, baked into bread, and served with milk and honey.

Elizabeth was part of the second wave of homesteaders, the not-so-foolish. I don’t know exactly when she arrived to claim her plot of land, but according to a scrawled census record, she was well established by 1910 on her farm some five miles west of nowhere. At the age of 35, Elizabeth was recorded as the head of the house, a farmer by occupation. She ran it on her own account, owned her home, could read and write, and had one dependent, little 11-year-old Edna Maude Kauffman—my great-grandmother, whom we called Maude. The household directly above Elizabeth’s on the census is the unmarried Mr. I. F. Kauffman. Family legend says this is Elizabeth’s younger brother, that it was he who convinced Elizabeth to come to Montana, to claim her own homestead adjacent to his, their houses built next to each other where the property lines met.

The census also calls Elizabeth a widow.

A good name is better than precious ointment. And starting a new life requires a small sin.

Mennonite women are as varied as the style of head covering (or cap) they wear. For many, when they bind up their hair and pin their covering into place (sometimes stiff and black, sometimes soft and white), they whisper words of scripture—holy revelation about dishonor, submission, meekness, headship, and the cursed Eve who, in her weakness, was both tempted and temptress. It is a symbol of the proper ordering of relationships—women under men who are under God—and a marker of shared identity.

Women are the weaker vessels, but they are weak together, a sisterhood that witnesses the world, in their quiet diligence and modesty, their collective rejection of worldly liberation. The covering is a shield. It gives comfort, for under its burden, women are reminded of and secure in their God-given role as wives, mothers, and those who pour out their lives in milk, sweat, blood, and tears to serve others.

Even more wonderful, the women say, is the divine protection. A woman covered is a woman guarded against the angels of darkness who visit in the shape of lustful, unstoppable men in those vulnerable, hidden places where there is no one to see her tears, no one to hear her prayers.

In the place of justice, wickedness was there.

Elizabeth’s dark angel was called Yoder. His first name has not been honored in the family story. It was 1898 in a rural Illinois county, and Yoder offered to give her a ride back home in his buggy after one of their church community gatherings. The other women warned her not to go alone. They had seen the way Yoder’s eyes followed her. But Elizabeth had a touch of rebellion, and she assured them she could handle one simple man. So, she got into the buggy, and nine months later, she delivered a wailing baby girl. Elizabeth called her Edna Maude Kauffman—her last name, not the father’s. This little girl would be under no headship but her mother’s.

Almost a century later, I was born with a head covered in strawberry blonde fuzz. The nurse asked my parents if we had any the family, since both my parents had shades of brown. My mom said no, but my dad thought of his grandmother Maude. He’d never met her—she died at 32 after bearing six living children and burying two more—but whenever a child was born with a rosy shine to their hair, the name Yoder was murmured.

We’d erased his given name, but we couldn’t blot out the mark of his red hair.

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

Dear Mother,
Faith is not merely praying
Upon your knees at night;
Faith is not merely straying
Through darkness into light.
                             Your Daughter

Edith died at 41 from breast cancer at her home in eastern Montana. One of her seven daughters, Bessie, married one of Maude’s sons, David LeRoy. They were my grandparents.

Bessie had to convert to the Mennonite church to marry David LeRoy. It was not a smooth transition. By the 1940s, many Mennonite women no longer needed to dress like Elizabeth did in my picture of her. Still, Bessie pushed her limits. The older ladies took her down to the church basement once and gave her a talking to about the scandal of her too-short hair and black-painted nails.

My grandma always told me that story with a smile while we worked in the kitchen, her hair short and gray, aprons keeping flour off our pants.

My grandma never commented on the red in my hair, not that I remember. But she must have met Elizabeth, must have known the origins of the woman who had given birth to her husband, must have known the dangers of plain clothes and submission. But Bessie kept silent, only telling me stories of how she kept painting her nails before holding my hand to say our daily prayers.

For everything there is a season…a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

I heard pieces of Elizabeth’s story first from my dad and his brothers. But it was the women in my family—my dad’s cousins, Karen and Gladine—who finally told me the whole story, carried across generations with tender hands by all the women who went before me.

My dad, one of Elizabeth’s many grandchildren, grew up only a few country miles away from her homestead. He has taken me to visit that wind-scarred land of my holy mothers several times.

The Red Top Mennonite Church, formally chartered in 1917 out of a collection of home churches, is still active. It started in the red-roofed schoolhouse, and when they dedicated their own building in 1935, they painted the new roof red, too. Now, the roof is gray, its red covering done away with, just like so many Mennonite women’s head coverings during the progressive wave of the 1960s and ’70s.

I’ve never worn a cap, black or white. But in sunlight, my hair glows red—a burning covering each time I bow my head in prayer. Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Unlike the church, I can’t hide the evil deeds of the past with a change of doctrine and gray paint.

Round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. The righteous are called wicked and the wicked righteous; the church walkway is made crooked; all is vanity, absurdity, incongruity.

Elizabeth married in 1911. Already 35, yet she would have three more children. She lived through the eastern Montana drought of 1917 with its ferocious dust storms and searing summer temperatures. It took more than some blowing dust to make her bow her faithfully covered head in submission. I imagine her on her farm, strong arms hidden under black cloth, hair pinned under a white cap, heart turning over scripture as she turned over the land. In the morning sow your seed, and at evening do not let your hands be idle; for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.

Elizabeth remained covered until her death in 1965 at the age of 90. She outlived her daughter Maude by over 30 years and her husband by eight. She survived not only the physical brutalities of eastern Montana homesteading but also the sexual assault that her plain dress, meek posture, acceptance of male headship, and her head covering—the holy symbol of God’s protection—were intended to preserve her from.

While I stand over Maude’s modest grave marker, a flat stone memorial surrounded by endless fields of hard, red wheat and ranging cattle, the wind pulls at my reddish hair, begs me to see all that has been under the sun. Among the ghosts of my mothers, I pray.

It’s absurd, this chasing after wind. The mother adjusts her white head covering—even here, she can’t outrun God—observes her land. Well, it’s no Canaan. Wind blows across the plateau, red dust painting her sun-tinged cheeks. She looks down at her frowning daughter clinging to her dress. “Don’t be afraid, daughter,” says the mother. “Here, you’ll be with me always.” Her daughter’s frown is predictably stubborn—an inherited trait, like daughter, like mother. Or maybe like mother, like daughter. How else could she have run? What’s crooked cannot be made straight. The community’s voices —shaming. Condeming eyes piercing the unwed mother—worse, the unwed, plain, Mennonite mother. And him with his red hair, and him with his cold grin. And him, a good man, unpunished. If only she’d been strong enough. If only she’d screamed loud enough; if only he’d never seen her; if only if only if only if only—

Wind catches her dress, spins up a tiny dust devil. Her daughter releases her, flings chubby arms wide, reaching for dancing dust—laughs. And then, the mother is laughing, too. Maybe they were chasing after wind, and maybe crooked couldn’t be straightened—

But whoever said they needed straightening?