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Necklace from Willa Cather keeps 'Antonia' legacy alive
McCOOK, Neb. — The granddaughter of the woman who Willa Cather used as the main character in the acclaimed “My Antonia” turned 101 this week and still keeping her grandmother’s legacy alive.
Cather wrote “My Antonia,” based on her real childhood friend on the Nebraska prairie, Anna Sadilek Pavelka. Anna’s granddaughter, Antonette “Toni” Willa Skupa Turner, was born in 1920 and in honor of her birth, the author sent her mother a coral necklace.
Turner grew up in Bladen, Neb., and has been living at Kinship Point assisted living in McCook for the past two years, to be closer to her daughter, Alana (Ron) Hoyt of Culbertson, Neb., Recently, she bestowed the coral necklace to her granddaughter, Anna Taylor, as Anna will now be presenting scholarships in Turner’s name through the Willa Cather Foundation. “They were surprised that I was still doing it in my 90s,” Turner said.
Turner still remembers finding the necklace in a Saks Fifth Avenue box as a child, hidden among other things in an upstairs room and not being allowed to wear it.
But that didn’t stop her from secretly trying it on now and then. “I can still remember the cellophane around the box it came in,” she said.
Turner has been protecting and promoting her grandmothers’ and Willa Cather’s legacy for years. She was still giving presentations about “My Antonia” and her grandmother’s role in it up until her mid-90s for the Nebraska Humanities, at colleges, classrooms and for organizations. She grew up hearing stories from her grandmother and then later, during World War II, Turner took care of her for a while. That’s where she heard many stories from Anna about growing up in the Nebraska prairie near Red Cloud, Neb., and the friendship with Willa Cather.
The book, published in 1918, chronicles the friendship between “Jim,” an orphan who comes to Nebraska to live with his grandparents and “Antonia,” a recent immigrant whose family came from the Bohemia capital of Prague, Czechoslovakia, now known as the Czech Republic.
It was quite the culture shock for Anna’s father, Turner said, as he left a career as a concert violinist in the Prague Symphony Orchestra to be a Nebraska homesteader. The move, upon his wife’s insistence, was made as they feared their sons would be conscripted into the army, Turner said.
But the home they expected turned out to be only a dugout. “They were so disappointed, to come to over here and just see a pipe sticking out of the ground,” Turner said.
Like Antonia in the book, Anna and her family didn’t know how to speak English and had to learn the language, as well as how to navigate the unsettled Nebraska prairie. A literary and commercial success as well as a Pulitizer prize contender (Cather later won the Pulitzer for the 1923 “One of Ours”), “My Antonia” celebrated the immigrant and pioneer experience, the Nebraska landscape and how friendships change and shift throughout the years.
In real life, after going their separate ways, Cather and her grandmother reconnected years later. They continued to correspond for years, with Cather visiting the family from time to time. “She became fascinated with her,” Turner said of Cather’s visits to Anna. Her grandmother never suspected Cather was writing a book based upon her life, finding out only after it was published.
Considered a masterpiece in regional literature, Cather depicted the vast Nebraska landscape almost as a character of its own. And although it rocketed Cather to literary prominence, the book didn’t faze her grandmother at all, Turner said. In fact, she claimed her grandmother was ridiculed by the town folk after the book was published, maybe out of jealousy or ignorance.
Everything in “My Antonia” lined up with what life was really like on the Nebraska prairie, Turner said her grandmother confirmed, except for the fact that Cather “really preferred the city life.” Turner said unlike Jim in the book, who kills a rattlesnake, Cather “didn’t like the country life at all” and would have never killed a snake as she was deathly afraid of them.
Talkative and still active, Turner said she resembles her grandmother in that she takes everything in stride without complaining. “She made the best of what she had and I’m doing the same thing,” she said. Anna Sadilek Pavelka dealt with what life handed her and kept moving forward, Turner said. “The Lord has really blessed me. I’ve had my trials and heartbreaks but I still enjoy life and look forward to the next day.”