Borrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie, and Their Daughters

By Jeannine Atkins

As a child, Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled across the prairie in a covered wagon. Her daughter, Rose, thought those stories might make a good book, and the two created the beloved Little House series.

Sara Breedlove, the daughter of former slaves, wanted everything to be different for her own daughter, A'Lelia. Together they built a million-dollar beauty empire for women of color. Marie Curie became the first person in history to win two Nobel prizes in science. Inspired by her mother, Irène too became a scientist and Nobel prize winner.

Borrowed Names is the story of these extraordinary mothers and daughters.
Borrowed Names is a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9781429959407

Jeannine Atkins

Jeannine Atkins is the author of books for young readers featuring women in history, including Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie and their Daughters. She is an adjunct professor at Simmons College and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She welcomes readers to visit her online at www.jeannineatkins.com.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THREE EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN were born two years after the Civil War ended, a time filled with grief, hope, and creativity. In 1867, African Americans could vote in the Southern states for the first time. Petitions for suffrage and other rights for women were signed and fought. Novelists and poets wrote about heroism in lives that had previously been overlooked. Painters depicted common scenes, too, often using looser lines and brighter colors than artists had before them. Inventors made the world seem smaller with swifter forms of communication and transportation. The transcontinental railroad was being built across a nation that grew still bigger when Alaska was purchased in 1867. That was the year that Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, and Marie Curie were born.

Laura Ingalls Wilder would write books based on her childhood spent in log cabins, covered wagons, and on farms. A girl who planted and plowed cotton fields in Mississippi grew up to create a new name for herself—Madam C. J. Walker—and a wildly successful hair product business to go with it. Marie Curie left Poland to study chemistry and physics in Paris, and became the first person to earn two Nobel Prizes.

These three women not only shared a birth year but also a devotion to work and motherhood. They raised daughters who lived in a world that changed as quickly as theirs had, and who changed with it. The only child of Laura Ingalls Wilder inherited the family wanderlust and became a world-traveling journalist. Madam C. J. Walker’s daughter helped manage her mother’s business and supported the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Marie Curie’s older daughter carried on her mother’s investigations of radioactivity.

For this book, I first read about the names, lessons, and homes the mothers provided for their children. Some gifts were gladly accepted, while others were reshaped or given back as daughters found their own ways to face celebrity, heartbreak, and love. I borrowed names and old stories, taking a bit here, putting another impression aside, turning history into poems. What did each daughter see in her mother’s hands? I wondered: one pair worn by swinging hoes and holding back horses, another by scrubbing laundry and hair, and another by running scientific experiments. Details gathered meaning as I lingered over them, and I came to love what was small and tangible as much as the grand or public moments. I tried to be faithful to the known events and their chronology, but let my imagination fill in gaps the way we do when we look for truths hidden behind a face.

LAURA INGALLS WILDER

ROSE WILDER LANE

LAURA INGALLS WILDER

AND

ROSE WILDER LANE

CLEARING LAND

LAURA INGALLS was born in the big woods of Wisconsin, but within a few years called many other places home: the Kansas prairies, a dugout by Plum Creek in Minnesota, covered wagons rolling westward, and at last a little house near Silver Lake in the Dakota Territory. There her family survived many blizzards, but one long winter they almost starved before Almanzo Wilder drove horses through the deep snow to get wheat and saved them all.

Almanzo began courting Laura when she was fifteen years old. Her father didn’t object, though her mother believed Laura was more smitten with Almanzo’s half-wild horses. At eighteen, Laura stood before a preacher, who agreed that a bride should promise to honor and love but not obey, and changed her name to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Almanzo called his wife Bessie to distinguish her from his sister, who was also named Laura. Their daughter, Rose, who was born about a year after the wedding, would call her Mama Bess.

FIRE

Rose sees blood on the linen

before her grandmother plunges

the sheets in a tub. Pa scrubs dirt

from his hands. What ever happens,

fields must be tended.

Mama Bess goes back to bed. Again.

Won’t you get up?

Soon, Mama says, but Rose is hungry.

She puts a stick in the woodstove.

When the kindling, burning at one end,

turns too hot to hold,

she drops it.

Fire creeps

across the floor and laps the wall.

Air, once quiet and invisible,

spits sparks and orange flames.

Burning tablecloths twist like memory.

Where are you?

Smoke stings her eyes. Someone grabs her arm

and a fistful of forks. They rush

from the crackling, tumbling house.

Outside, Rose breathes the stink of burning chairs,

bedding, sacks of flour, jars of plum preserves,

beans left soaking in a yellow bowl.

The house becomes an oven, ruining

broom and dustpan,

the sewing box with its tomato-shaped pincushion,

an embroidered needle case, pewter buttons,

scavenged ribbon,

spools of crimson and sky-blue thread.

Little is saved but old dresses, silverware,

and a platter decorated with a sheaf of wheat, bordered

with a prayer: Give us this day our daily bread.

Under a blackened cottonwood tree,

its slim shade useless now,

Pa leans on his cane. What happened?

Mama says, I shut the door to sweep,

so dust wouldn’t get in the kitchen.

A spark from the woodstove caught the floor.

Rose, three years old, cries, I’m sorry.

We built one house. We can build another,

Pa says. What matters is we’re safe and all together.

Mama nods. It was an accident.

She turns to sort through what might be saved.

A wilderness of cracked china, ashes,

days when safety

was as common as a roof. She folds her black

wedding dress and tells Rose, You did nothing wrong.

But then she whispers,

We won’t speak of this fire again.

THE SECOND SECRET

Rose’s grandparents welcome the

Reviews for Borrowed Names

[skstiles612 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Borrowed Names is a very unique book in many ways. First it is written in verse. I loved that. Many of my students have learned that they like books written in verse. There are three biographies of three women and their children. The first is of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter. The second is Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A’Lelia Walker. Finally we learn about Marie Curie and her daughter Irene Joliet-Curie. Each of these biographies shoes how their relationships with their daughters were formed and developed over time. I found in all three, there was usually one particular thing that drew them together. They inspired each other in so many ways. I loved learning so much about all of them and will definitely recommend this book to my students.

[satyridae · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I am wrestling with how to review this book. I think there is valuable information here, albeit presented in an inexplicably popular, but to my eye unnecessary, format. I think that I can't get past the format to accurately assess the merits of this book, but I can tell you that I hated it.

I think I hated it because poetry means so much to me, poetry is the beat of my heart and the solace of my days. Real poetry has power like no other words have power. It can topple governments, inspire impossible acts or just make one walk out into the ocean, never to return. Real poetry is made of gunpowder, it's made of dreams, and it is the sacred incense of my secular life. Real poetry has picked me up out of my quotidian life, spun me around and slammed me into the sand so hard my sternum ached for weeks and I was unable to turn around without my eyes filling with tears when I heard a loved one's voice.

When my heart is sore, I turn to poetry. When I am lost and bereft, there's a book of verse in my hand and another in my pocket. When everything is exquisitely right, there is a poem singing about that rightness just under my clavicle. Poetry moves in my blood and stiffens my bones. Poetry informs every breath I take.

Perhaps you might say I'm a little too close to the topic to be objective.

Novels in free verse are the Catholic Mass in English. Novels in free verse are Bowdler's Shakespeare for women and children. Novels in free verse are weak, puling things, neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, and the list of the ones that are not is very, very short.

Cynthia Rylant made it work, but she made it work by shoehorning real poetry into the form, rather than the opposite.

This book has a straightforward story to tell, or rather, three straightforward stories to tell. Casting them in free verse was gratuitous. There are three distinct books here, books that could be rich and nourishing, but what's served up instead is the thin broth of free verse, or of words

arranged on pages in

sort of a poetical looking fashion

which helps one speed through

and adds nothing to the story.

[abbylibrarian_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Prose poems bring to life three mother/daughter pairs and the work they did together. Three famous women were born in 1867 - Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam CJ Walker, and Marie Curie. This book is divided up into three parts, each part featuring one of these women and her daughter. These are fascinating snapshots into history and the verse format adds appeal for teens. These verses will likely inspire teens to look further into the lives of these women and the back matter provided (timeline and bibliography) is helpful in directing readers to additional material and information.

[ewyatt_16 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book is broken into three sections, each using poetry to explore the life events of a mother and daughter. I learned quite a bit as a read about the lives of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, and Marie Curie. The verse was more utilitarian than beautiful, but it was the content that interested me most.