The Awakening Land is the name given to a trilogy of novels written by Richter, The Trees, The Fields, and The Town. The Town won the Pulitzer Prize for 1951.
The novels follow Sayward Luckett and her family as settlers in the then wilderness of the Ohio valley, an area of deep, immense forest. In the first novel, The Trees, the Lucketts build themselves a cabin in a forest so dense and tall that the forest floor rarely gets any direct sunlight. They survive mainly on the game that abounds in the area. The forest is filled with giant trees, trees that have never been logged or known the effects of forest fires. These huge trees become the enemy of the people trying to settle there, trying to clear them away to make room for fields and pastures.
Worth, the patriarch of the family, isn't really a farmer. He's a hunter, a woodsman and loves to be out on the prowl, exploring new territory. After his wife dies and after his young daughter Sulie is lost forever in the forest, he becomes tired of the responsibility of taking care of his children and he just walks off into the forest, leaving his kids to be raised by his daughter, Sayward.
She does the best she can, but her brothers and sisters often don't acknowledge her authority and the family suffers for it. Her brother Wyitt follows in his father's footsteps into the wilderness. Her sister Genny marries a lowlife and her other sister Achsa runs off with him.
Through it all, Sayward stays strong. She hopes for the best for her siblings but accepts the fact that they have to live their own lives and make their own mistakes.
In The Fields, Sayward is married and has a family of her own. She and her husband, Portius Wheeler, live in the Luckett family's original cabin. With their own two hands, they cut the big trees and cleared fields to grow crops and raise livestock. Portius is an educated man and a lawyer and their children are taught to read and write. However, most of the money earned is produced through Sayward's farm and from her land. Life is still very hard and requires massive amounts of sheer labor just to survive.
The last book, The Town switches focus from Sayward to her youngest child, an ailing boy named Chancey. A town has grown up on Sayward's land and as the largest landowner in the area, Sayward has become wealthy. Portius even insisted on building them a large, new house although Sayward wanted to stay in the little Luckett cabin that she had lived in for so many years.
Chancey suffered from a rheumatic fever as a tot and had a weak heart as a result. In their fear for his health, his parents restricted his activity severely and he spent most of his days just quietly sitting and dreaming. When a doctor recommends to Sayward that Chancey start to take some exercise, Chancey finds his quiet world turned upside down, much to his displeasure. He has become so accustomed to think of himself as an invalid that his mother's insistence that he get off his stool convinces him that she doesn't care about him. He decides that Sayward and Portius are not his real parents and he invents a long lost family for himself, a family who will love and pamper and cater to him.
These three books are a wonderful look back at an era that is hard to envision now. What suffering they endured and what back-breaking labor! These books are almost as good as a trip back in time. They really immerse the reader in the culture and life of the people of that time and place and their language where cougars are called "painters" and wolves are "night dogs." It is hard, though, to read of the destruction of that grand old forest that used to cover so much of the eastern United States and of the destruction of the wildlife that dwelt in those shaded, ferny depths.
When I first started to read The Trees I immediately recognized the name Sayward Luckett. I remembered her from the miniseries starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Sayward and Hal Holbrook as Portius which aired in 1978. It must have made quite an impression on me that I could still remember the name and I can picture Elizabeth's face even now. I remember at the end of the show, when Sayward was an old woman, the people going and getting little trees from the forest to plant in their town at Sayward's instigation. For by then she had stopped hating the trees and had begun to appreciate how much trees add to the landscape. Ain't it the truth, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."
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