Mari Sandoz
Gravesite
Sheridan County, Nebraska
By C.J. Janovy
It’s not easy to get to the final resting place of Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz, whose books, I’ll go ahead and argue, evoke one region of America as powerfully as William Faulkner’s portray another.
Paying respects to Sandoz in the traditional way of visiting her gravesite requires a pilgrimage far from the interstate, through Sandhills counties so thinly populated one can drive 20 minutes (it feels longer) without seeing another moving vehicle, on a two-lane highway dipping and rising through a forbidding grass-covered Sahara. Finally, about 27 miles north of unincorporated Ellsworth, a historical marker affirms that this is Sandoz country. A faded sign across from the Deer Meadows hunting outfitters confirms she is buried three miles farther back in the hills.
Getting to this point requires first knowing who Mari Sandoz was. I never encountered her name on any syllabus despite graduating from the Lincoln Public Schools and earning two fancy English degrees (I hope syllabi have changed). I made this pilgrimage only after reconciling a childhood mystery.
When I was a kid, Mari Sandoz’s name stared back at me from the bookshelves above the fireplace at my grandparents’ house in Oklahoma City. The book’s yellow spine sang out like a meadowlark, while tall red letters spelled two simple words: Old Jules. Below that was the author’s name in simple yet elegant black. The dramatic block letters told me the subject of this book was important. But what kind of name was “Jules”? It must be a man (tall red letters were for men). He was “old,” like the grandfather I loved, whose fireplace was where Santa delivered gifts, but this book was on high shelves where only the adults could reach it. The writer had a strange name, too. Was “Mari” a boy or a girl? How was I supposed to pronounce it in my mind? Decades later, after my folks cleaned out my grandparents’ midcentury modern house, this book was the only thing I wanted. And I finally read it.
The Swiss immigrant Jules Sandoz was an awful human, literally filthy and abusive but also educated enough to deliver breech babies on the frontier in the 1880s. Once the United States government had murdered or moved the region’s Indians, Old Jules helped colonize his part of the country through cussedness, luck, marksmanship and the help of obedient women, one of whom wound up in the insane asylum. I don’t know how often Mari uses the word “pounded” in this portrait of her father, but it’s a lot.
Generations of readers have put up with this man for 424 pages of what is now considered Mari Sandoz’s masterpiece. In this way, Mari’s accomplishment is far greater than her father’s legacy of towns and services in western Nebraska. Given the difficulties of making a life in this harsh place and time, one might wonder: Why bother? I think it was so his daughter could write such a beautiful book. “In Jules,” she observed, “as in every man, there lurks something ready to destroy the finest in him as the frosts of the earth destroy her flowers.”
Mari Sandoz Memorial Drive is a sand road that winds past a clanking windmill and ends in a patch of grass on a hill. Farther up is a plot surrounded by barbed wire, with a white gate. The plum-colored headstone reads simply “Mari Sandoz 1896-1966.” A metal glider allows visitors to sit and contemplate the view.
Near the gate is a mailbox; inside is a spiral bound notebook whose messages reveal it hasn’t been long since someone else was here.
“She was an admirable person & wonderful writer!” wrote one visitor from Windsor, Colorado. “I heard her speak at Kearney State College in 1965, approx. 1 yr. before she died. I can still hear her exclaim, ‘read my books.’”
Dan Kusek, vice president of the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society, had started a fresh notebook six weeks before my most recent visit.
“When they were bringing Mari’s casket here for burial, the hearse could climb no further,” Kusek wrote at the top of the first page. “Mari’s wish was to be buried at the TOP of the hill but they could get no further. A hawk came over us here while we were cutting grass & weeds. I have no doubt it was Mari’s spirit!!”
The only spirit I felt was the unnamed woman in Old Jules who tried to walk home to her one-year-old baby in a blizzard. “When the sun shone warm again over the glistening, drifted plains,” Sandoz wrote, “she was found curled up in a blanket in the slat-bottomed cart, a mile from home, frozen.”
Sitting in the sun on the metal glider, pondering the hills where Mari and Jules last lived, it was tempting to imagine her voice in the wind-stirring grasses. But even with a breeze, the place was so profoundly silent that all of my own thoughts were too loud.
Journalist C.J. Janovy grew up in Nebraska and lived on both coasts before settling in Kansas City. Her book No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas won the 2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize. Follow her on Twitter @cjjanovy.
