Uncle Martin's Sister

Martin came of age in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He lived past the mid-mark of the twentieth, an unmarried man who left no children to remember him and only a sketchy documentary trail as evidence that he'd ever lived at all. Here Martin is found in letters he received: farmer, friend, brother, would-be sweetheart, traveler, would-be Christian, sometime book reader and sometime tennis player, a letter writer himself, from whom not a single letter survives. Here the young women who wrote to him are also found-Anna J., Anna, Mag, and the irrepressible "Sister." Any one of them could have turned his life-and hers-in a different direction from the direction their lives did take. Here are the places where they lived: farms way out in the country; villages providing services and goods to those farms; small towns growing around railway depots; a side-look at a state capital where a race riot rages; colleges built in towns that had not even an elementary school before the colleges opened; county fairs and singing conventions; one-room country schools and one-room lofty sanctuaries where God was worshipped and souls were nourished. Martin's was a smaller world than ours, and more slowly paced, but it is possible to capture some of its bounds and some of its rhythms. That is what the writer attempts here.