A Survival Story
Here’s another story of a strong competent woman in a day that saw them as frail creatures who could not make it on their own. Tosca Lee is new to writing and her books are amazingly different from most. Tosca is going to share a family story and then an excerpt of her second book, Havah.
Tosca begins: Lyn, the following is the story of my great, great, great grandmother on my mother’s side.
“In 1883, the newly-widowed Azuba Moncrief packed up her possessions. Prompted by the urging of a cousin and further intrigued by an issue of the Ottawa Republican advertising homes in Nebraska on lands of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, Azuba planned to take her four children west to start a new life. But when she returned home from securing a team to haul her family’s things to the train depot, she soon discovered that her oldest son had fallen ill with measles. She would have to delay their departure until the illness had runs its course—through all four of her children. During those weeks, Azuba nursed her children toward health and contemplated the future. Little in Azuba’s life had ever gone as planned.
Born in1841, in Hebron, New York, Azuba was raised under the religious guidance of her self-educated preacher father, who believed wholeheartedly in the benefits of education. In 1865, she followed her two older sisters and entered Oberlin College in Ohio as a sophomore. Oberlin had already pioneered the “joint education of the sexes” in 1833, educating men and women alongside one another, and had just graduated its first African American woman in 1862.
College life, however, was not good to her; her second year she came down with typhoid. She was not the only one to become ill; Azuba’s sisters had both contracted tuberculosis while in college. That year, Azuba’s oldest sister died. The following year her second sister died, by which time Azuba’s father had dramatically changed his opinion of college education. After a drawn-out struggle with his daughter, who wanted to remain in school, he brought Azuba home, “fully satisfied not to invade these dangerous institutions any more.”
Home from college and bereft of both her sisters, Azuba married a childhood friend named William from nearby Rupert, Vermont. Almost four years her junior, William was a handsome Civil War veteran with a seemingly promising future—and 40 acres of land. William, however, was not cut out for farming life. He suffered from piles and a lame back, making hard manual labor impossible. Disappointed, Azuba went home to live on a farm in Rupert, Vermont that her father bought for her. William, in the meantime, went steadily bankrupt.
Giving up on farming life, William decided in 1875 to move to Ottawa, Illinois where he had found work as a lock tender on the thriving Illinois and Michigan Canal. Fortunately, he was a better lock tender than farmer. Azuba came out to join him and the couple, along with their growing family, lived near lock 11, west of town. Eight years later, William—only 38 years old—was found dead in the canal near his home. Despite a strong suspicion of murder, a local jury brought in a verdict of death by lightning. Azuba buried her husband in a quiet cemetery near the Illinois river where two of her babies were already at rest.
Having to provide for herself and her four living children, Azuba petitioned the U.S. Government for a widow’s pension based on William’s Civil War service. The government granted her a small pension of eight dollars a month—but it wasn’t enough. Her solution came by way of the same newspaper that had run her husband’s obituary just two weeks prior: an advertisement offering homesteads and timber claims in Gosper County, Nebraska.
Azuba had a cousin in Waterloo, Nebraska who encouraged her to make the trip. She could stay with his family while she found her land. Excited at the prospect of returning to farming on her own terms, Azuba could wait no longer. Three of her four children had recovered from the measles—leaving only Charlie, who had been the first to contract the sickness. She wrapped Charlie in a blanket and made him a place to lay down in the train. Her neighbors criticized her, saying Charlie—who had been sickly all his life and was still too weak to sit up—would die. But by the next morning, he was sitting up to look out the car window and quickly improved after that.
Azuba stayed on with her cousin for about three months in Waterloo, Nebraska while making preparations to stake a claim 230 miles west. At last, she took a train to Lexington. Once she arrived, she faced the question of how to get another 17 miles west to Gosper County to find her land. The local liveryman’s price was an exorbitant seven dollars—to which Azuba replied there was no easier way she could earn seven dollars than by going the 35 miles on foot. She found her homestead, walked back to Lexington, returned on the train to Omaha… and then walked back to her cousin’s house in Waterloo—another 35 miles.
She bought a team of four and five year-old mares, made two trips with a wagon from Waterloo to her new homestead to get her family moved, and hired a neighbor to build her a sturdy sod house. Next, she needed a barn. Azuba enlisted her children and together they dug out the side of a canyon bank, covering it with brush, sod and dirt. Azuba and her children settled in to homestead life just in time for winter and proved up on the claim in 1886.
Three years later, she went 150 miles west and got preemption of 160 acres and an additional timber claim of 160 acres. She built houses on both claims as well.
In 1894, the tuberculosis that had taken both her sisters and her youngest brother struck Azuba. By the time she died in March of 1895, she had left a farming legacy to all of her children. Her original homestead went to Charlie, the preemption claim in a neighboring county to her younger son, and the timber claim to her daughter, Lizzie. To her youngest daughter, Edna, Azuba left $1,000 which Edna used to purchase 160 acres of her own. She also left a farm in Gage County.
Of her mother’s productivity and success, Lizzie writes: “I do not believe there was ever another woman who performed such a task. She plowed, planted, and harvested, milked cows, made cheese, took in washing, and nursed sick neighbors—always on the go from daylight ‘till near midnight. This was a job for a woman alone with four children between three and 14 years.”
{Source: Moncrief: From the Scottish Highlands to the Nebraska Prairie, Laura Moncrief Lee, 1980}
What a fantastic story! I think Azuba and my greatgrandmother Sadie would have been happy to be neighbors. Now more about Tosca herself and her newest book, Havah.
Havah: The Story of Eve
Tosca Lee
Myth and legend shroud her in mystery. Now hear her story.
From paradise to exile, from immortality to the death of Adam. Visit the dawn of mankind through the eyes of Eve—the woman first known as…
Havah
“A passionate and riveting story of the Bible’s first woman and her remarkable journey after being cast from paradise. Lee’s superior storytelling will have readers weeping for all that Havah forfeited by a single damning choice.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Once every few years, I come across a book of such scope, such beauty, that it defies description. Havah bridges mankind’s beginnings with the restless state of our present age. . . . Havah is a novel with boundless imagination.”
— Eric Wilson, author of Field of Blood and Fireproof
Prologue
I have seen paradise and ruin. I have known bliss and terror.
I have walked with God.
And I know that God made the heart the most fragile and resilient of organs, that a lifetime of joy and pain might be encased in one mortal chamber. I still recall my first moment of consciousness—an awareness I’ve never seen in the eyes of any of my own children at birth: the sheer ignorance and genius of consciousness, when we know nothing and accept everything.
Of course, the memory of that waking moment is fainter now, like the smell of the soil of that garden, like the leaves of the fig tree in Eden after dawn—dew and leaf green. It fades with that sense of something once tasted on the tip of the tongue, savored now in memory, replaced by the taste of something similar but never quite the same.
His breath a lost sough, the scent of earth and leaf mold that was his sweaty skin has faded too quickly. So like an Eden dawn—dew on fig leaves.
His eyes were blue, my Adam’s.
How I celebrated that color, shrouded now in shriveled eyelids—he who was never intended to have even a wrinkle! But even as I bend to smooth his cheek, my hair has become a white waterfall upon his Eden—flesh and loins that gave life to so many.
I think for a moment that I hear the One and that he is weeping. It is the first time I have heard him in so long, and my heart cries out: He is dead! My father, my brother, my love!
I envy the earth that envelopes him. I envy the dust that comes of him and my children who sow and eat of it.
This language of Adam’s—the word that meant merely “man” before it was his name—given him by God himself, is now mine. And this is my love song. I will craft these words into the likeness of the man before I, too, return to the earth of Adam’s bosom.
My story has been told in only the barest of terms. It is time you heard it all. It is my testament to the strength of the heart, which has such capacity for joy, such space for sorrow, like a vessel that fills and fills without bursting.
My seasons are nearly as many as a thousand. So now listen, sons, and hear me, daughters. I, Havah, fashioned by God of Adam say this:
In the beginning, there was God . . .
But for me, there was Adam.
Tosca Lee is the author of the critically acclaimed Demon: A Memoir (2007), a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Silver Award winner, American Christian Fiction Writers Book of the Year nominee, and Christy award finalist. Visit Tosca at her site: www.toscalee.com.
