The struggle intensifies

Excerpt 5        -from De Treastfugel by Hylke Speerstra

 

In the chapter “Like King Hezekiah,” Hizkia and Ytsje encounter a series of setbacks after initial progress from much hard work.  The economic recession of 1879 shows no mercy. Ytsje keeps pushing for emigration, but Hizkia drags his feet.

 

By 1881 the recession slashes so deep that more than 700 residents from the municipalities of East- and Westdongeradeel, It Bilt, Ferwerdereel, Barradeel, and Wunseradeel decide to emigrate.  Between 1880 and the onset of WWI in 1914, some 10.000 people from the North-Frisian agricultural region eventually risk the big step.  (Annemieke Galema: Frisians to America, 1880-1914.) Meanwhile Ytsje runs out of patience.  She approaches her oldest son Sibbele who lives away from home as a farmhand: “Son, it’s time, we sail under Jesus’ protection to America.  That is the land of deliverance for people like us.  I want you to take the boat to America as our forerunner.”

   “I’m not ready for that,” is Sibbele’s response.  Sibbele Namminga doesn’t want to waste any words on the subject; he wants to go his own way.  For his mother there’s no solution but to peddle bakery goods for a local baker.

   And so Hizkia’s Ytsje trudges from door to door with two baskets on a yoke, from Bolsward to Burgwerd, from Wommels to Witmarsum.  The yoke of the recession and the discipline of the free market weigh heavily on her shoulders; in one year the number of bread peddlers has more than doubled.  Besides, it seems as if there are only Dutch Reformed bakery goods in her basket.  Her honey bread may be the best, but the more conservative Reformed, the Mennonites, and the Catholics stick to their own taste.

   But Ytsje is not easily defeated.  She decides to take a chance on the Reformed farmer with the large family in the hamlet of Pankoeken near Witmarsum.   After an hour and a half of slogging underneath the heavy yoke, she hears: “We stick to our own town; the widow Zylstra has already been here.”  When she comes home, she finds a husband who’s struggling with depression.

Nearly a decade later there’s some improvement.  But Ytsje will not let go of her dream.

 

“I have good news,” Hizkia says.  “The heifer has calved, so we added a nice little heifer calf today.”

   It is the “golden calf.”  She doesn’t come up with this herself, no, it just comes to her.  “The golden calf that will lead you and me finally to the land of justice, Hizkia.”  She wakes her husband up in the middle of the night and tells him that she was shaken awake just now.  “Through Him I was shown a moment ago the path to a world without troubles.  I have to take Sibbele aside again and present my vision of this night; this time I’ll get him to go as our pioneer to America, like the oldest son of King Hezekiah who was sent ahead to the other side of the ocean as quartermaster.” She looks at her husband, counting on his bible ignorance not to catch her fib in her run-away imagination.

   “The ocean.”  Hizkia is cruelly disturbed out of his sleep. “The ocean, you say it just like that is nothing, but you don’t know how much I dread it, those newfangled steamboats forged out of iron that will sink like a brick.”

   “You have to trust me and the Lord, Hizkia.”

   “But my dear, the times will get better here too.”  Hizkia, anxious now, sits up: “We just got a heifer calf, and now this.”

   Do the times improve?  …it’s a matter of what one wants to believe or not believe:  Ytsje heard that Jetse Feenstra from Allingawier says farewell in a newspaper notice to all his family, friends, and acquaintances with this announcement: “We’re going to America.”