The Sheila Variations

The Books: Further Chronicles of Avonlea: 'Tannis of the Flats' (L.M. Montgomery)

Next book on my young adult fiction bookshelves:

Further Chronicles of Avonlea - "Tannis of the Flats" - by L.M. Montgomery

This story is really interesting, I think, because of the racial aspect. Lucy Maud doesn't really deal with racial issues - at least not overtly - and this is the only story I can think of where she does. It doesn't take place on Price Edward Island, either - although one of the main characters is visiting FROM PEI - it takes place out on the wild west of the Canadian prairies - at a small settlement where a telegraph office has been set up. It's not as domesticated as Avonlea (or - it's not domesticated at all, let's say that) - and surrounding the town, in huddled teepees, are Indians - Indians who do odd jobs, or who just hang on the outskirts of what used to be their land, doing not much at all. Lucy Maud does not have a very high opinion of these people, you can tell that - and yet ... then there's Tannis ... a young Indian woman ... and while she has limitations (limitations ONLY due to her race - which Lucy Maud appears to believe is in the blood: Indians are lazy, sullen, and can't really go very far in life. Not just because the opportunities are not there, but because it is not in their BLOOD to be otherwise) ... but anyway, while Tannis has personal limitations (she is humorless, she has no sense of irony - which turns out to be a huge defect in this case, she doesn't do things for "fun", she is LITERAL) - she also, at the end of the story, does something so selfless, and so sacrificial that it takes your breath away. She gives up her chance at happiness - in order to get the man she loves what he needs (which, in this case, is another woman). Tannis is the heroine of the day. Tannis rises to a height unknown in the more polite and genteel white world. She is the one. So ... even though there are parts of the story where you realize the racist attitudes of pretty much everyone at that time towards the Indians ... Tannis is not a generalized stereotype. She is a real person, a real girl. It's a VERY interesting story - and one of my favorites that Lucy Maud has written. I can't really LOVE Tannis, because the way Lucy Maud writes her - she is not very lovable. But she is a heroine nonetheless.

Tannis ends up having a "flirtation" (although Tannis couldn't be a good flirt if you paid her) with a young man named Jerome Carey (a white man) who has come to work at the telegraph office. It is a temporary position for him - so he decides: what the hey, I'll hang out with Tannis to pass the time while I'm here, no big deal. Well, to Tannis everything is a big deal. Carey is playing with fire by flirting with this Indian girl. She takes nothing lightly. Uhm ... maybe I see myself in Tannis. I'm a horrible flirt as well. Or - it's hard for me to "just" flirt. When I flirt, I mean business. I prefer it that way. But Tannis isn't a light-hearted person, a coquette, a domesticated white girl ... she is a girl of the prairies ... and Jerome Carey ends up paying dearly for messing with her heart.

Anyway, here's the excerpt where Tannis is first described. You'll see the racist attitude towards mixed blood (oh, and Tannis is a half-breed - which many saw, including Cher, as being even WORSE than being an Indian. If you were a half-breed, that's all you ever heard. If you were a half-breed, how you loved to hate the word. And etc.) Interesting, though: even with Lucy Maud's attitude towards race and blood: you can tell that, on another level, she is criticizing the snobbery of the white world, the assumptioins of the white world. You must ADJUST your assumptions with different people ... you cannot assume that every woman is the same (this is for Jerome Carey) ... you have to learn how to read the signs ... do not treat everybody as though they are cutouts of each other. That way disaster lies. Tannis is NOT like other women. Jerome Carey doesn't read the signs.

I can think of one man in my life (*cough* doppelganger *cough*) who flirted outrageously with me one night - it wasn't even really flirting - he DECLARED himself to me - and yet ... he was not free ... not free to be with me ... yet he declared himself anyway, causing me to basically (no, not basically - literally) run off into the night away from him, away from the situation - and the repercussions of that night, for me, were disastrous. This began the long dark period of 2002 for me. Doppelganger flirted with the wrong girl. He knows it NOW - but in that moment he thought his overwhelming declaration would be welcome. He also couldn't help himself (his words.) Maybe he thought I was shallow, and uncommitted, and fabulously okay with myself ... like I appeared, and also like most girls in New York are, or appear to be. He didn't read the signs. Which were THERE. But man, did he mess with the wrong girl. It was horrible for him, it certainly was, to know how much he hurt me - it's years later and we're still SO AWKWARD when we run into each other - that declaration from 2002 still sits between us, screaming at us ... but it was more horrible for me. So I guess I relate to Tannis. Even though all the half-breed, racial blood characteristics, and yadda yadda talk is from another time altogether, and I certainly have more of a sense of humor than Tannis does. But still, I feel for her. I know what she goes through here.

Excerpt from Further Chronicles of Avonlea - "Tannis of the Flats" - by L.M. Montgomery

Tannis was the daughter of old Auguste Dumont, who kept the one small store at the Flats, lived in the one frame house that the place boasted, and was reputed to worth an amount of money which, in half-breed eyes, was a colossal fortune. Old Auguste was black and ugly and notoriously bad-tempered. But Tannis was a beauty.

Tannis' great-grandmother had been a Cree squaw who married a French trapper. The son of this union because, in due time, the father of Auguste Dumont. Auguste married a woman whose mother was a French half-breed and whose father was a pure-bred Highland Scotchman. The result of this atrocious mixture was its justification - Tannis of the Flats - who looked as if all the blood of all the Howards might be running in her veins.

But, after all, the dominant current in those same veins was from the race of plain and prairie. The practiced eye detected it in the slender stateliness of carriage, in the graceful, yet voluptuous, curves of the lithe body, in the smallness and delicacy of hand and foot, in the purple sheen on straight-falling masses of blue-black hair, and, more than all else, in the long, dark eye, full and soft, yet alight with a slumbering fire. France, too, was responsible for somewhat in Tannis. It gave her a light step in place of the stealthy half-breed shuffle, it arched her red upper liip into a more tremulous bow, it lent a note of laughter to her voice and a sprightlier wit to her tongue. As for her red-headed Scotch grandfather, he had bequeathed her a somewhat whiter skin and ruddier bloom than is usually found in the breeds.

Old Auguste was mightily proud of Tannis. He sent her to school for four years in Prince Albert, bound that his girl should have the best. A High School course and considerable mingling in the social life of the town - for old Auguste was a man to be conciliated by astute politicians, since he controlled some two or three hundred half-breed votes - sent Tannis home to the Flats with a very thin, but very deceptive, veneer of culture and civilization overlying the primitive passions and ideas of her nature.

Carey saw only the beauty and the veneer. he made the mistake of thinking that Tannis was what she seemed to be - a fairly well-educated, up-to-date young woman with whom a friendly flirtation was just what it was with white womankind - the pleasant amusement of an hour or season. It was a mistake - a very big mistake. Tannis understood something of piano playing, something less of grammar and Latin, and something less still of social prevarications. But she understood absolutely nothing of flirtation. You can never get an Indian to see the sense of Platonics.

Carey found the Flats quite tolerable after the homecoming of Tannis. He soon fell into the habit of dropping into the Dumont house to spend the evening, talking with Tannis in the parlor - which apartment was amazingly well-done for a place like the Flats - Tannis had not studied Prince Albert parlors four years for nothing - or playing violin and piano duets with her. When music and conversation palled, they went for long gallops over the prairies together. Tannis rode to perfection, and managed her bad-tempered brute of a pony with a skill and grace that made Carey applaud her. She was glorious on horseback.

Sometimes he grew tired of the prairies, and then he and Tannis paddled themselves over the river in Nitchie Joe's dugout, and landed on the old trail that struck straight into the wooded belt of the Saskatchewan valley, leading north to trading posts on the frontier of civilization. There they rambled under huge pines, hoary with the age of centuries, and Carey talked to Tannis about England and quoted poetry to her. Tannis liked poetry; she had studied it at school, and understood it fairly well. But once she told Carey that she thought it a long, round-about way of saying what you could say just as well in about a dozen plain words. Carey laughed. He liked to evoke those little speeches of hers. They sounded very clever, dropping from such arched, ripely-tinted lips.

If you had told Carey that he was playing with fire, he would have laughed at you. In the first place, he was not in the slightest degree in love with Tannis - he merely admired and liked her. In the second place, it never occurred to him that Tannis might be in love with him. Why, he had never attempted any love-making with her! And, above all, he was obsessed with that aforesaid fatal idea that Tannis was like the women he had associated with all his life, in reality as well as in appearance. He did not know enough of the racial characteristics to understand.

But, if Carey thought that his relationship with Tannis was that of friendship merely, he was the only one at the Flats who did think so. All the half-breeds and quarter-breeds and any-fractional breeds there believed that he meant to marry Tannis. There would have been nothing surprising to them in that. They did not know that Carey's second cousin was a baronet, and they would not have understood that it need make any difference, if they had. They thought that rich old Auguste's heiress, who had been to school for four years in Prince Albert, was a catch for anybody.

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