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

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

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 (it’s not domesticated at all, let’s say that) – and surrounding the town, in huddled teepees, are “Indians”, Indians who do odd jobs, 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, and yet … then there’s Tannis … a young Indian woman. She has limitations ONLY due to her race, which Lucy Maud appears to believe is in the blood: Indians are lazy, sullen, 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. Tannis 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 selfless and sacrificial. 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 see 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.

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. If you were a half-breed, that’s all you ever heard.) 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.

Excerpt from Further Chronicles of Avonlea – “Tannis of the Flats” – by L.M. Montgomery

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.