'Quintille Firman grew up dirt-poor on a Texas Panhandle homestead
during the Dust Bowl era. In l931, she and a dozen friends
experienced a special Christmas pageant at their schoolhouse in
Tascosa that included a frightening blizzard. While the story,
retold by her daughter Casandra, centers around one memorable
incident, readers will feel the stunning strength and firm resolve
these children of the Great Depression exhibited every day. Into
this novella seeps hints of fathers who deserted, grim-faced
mothers who stayed and children who could afford only one pencil
for the school year. There are crumbling adobe shacks called home,
threadbare clothing, schoolgirl crushes and unrequited puppy love.
Kids and even adults will read this one twice' - ""True West"".
'Quintilles story, so poignantly retold by her daughter Casandra,
speaks volumes about the human condition on the High Plains in
1931. It is hard to imagine that anything so simple as a lead
pencil could break a budget, or that using two in one school year
could constitute extravagance. Yet children in Old Tascosa at the
end of the Depression and on the cusp of even more desperate times
were, like their counterparts elsewhere on the Plains, accustomed
to hardship and well used to shouldering their share of the familys
burden. They had no reason to know that life anywhere, or what
constituted luxury, could be different. Not knowing they were
deprived, they found joy as children will in friendships and games,
and in the wonders of the school room. And in the simplest of
Christmas pageants they found the prospect of bliss' - Red
Steagall, from the Foreword. It was Christmas time in Old Tascosa.
The year was 1931, well into the Great Depression and on the brink
of the worst days of the Dust Bowl. Tascosa, once a booming Wild
West town, complete with outlaws, cowboys, and gamblers, was all
but deserted. Its only resident was Frenchie McCormick, a famous
dance-hall girl from Tascosas glory days. In 1931 she was a frail
and lonely woman in her eighties, living in a tumble-down adobe
shack and waiting for Tascosa to rise again. This story is about
Tascosa, the Christmas pageant of 1931, and how twelve children,
stranded in a one-room school house by an untimely blizzard, met
Frenchie. Casandra Firman lives in Port Orchard, Washington.
Quintille Speck-Firman Garmany lives in Pensacola, Florida.
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