Lesson
43
Telling
a story from two different perspectives
“I saw him crying
often--he’d get so homesick,” my mother once said, recalling her family’s 1930s
hired man. “A boy forced out of his own home--he came to our farm from
England.”
My father, who worked as a teenage
hired man on the Prairies, also lived the experience more as a “boy” than a
man. But he had a different perspective. He saw the job as an adventure and
loved it. My parents’ hired-man stories framed my own thoughts of leaving home
with the balance that comes from two points of view.
They also gave me an image that
conflicted with the steady older man in W.O. Mitchell’s first Leacock Medal
book, Jake and the Kid. Their
recollections align better with Mitchell’s 1990 medal winner, which had a
slightly different take on Jake.
Like the first book, According to Jake and the Kid explores
the hired man’s bond with a boy on a prairie farm. Jake’s worldliness comforts
the Kid, and his skill with animals and machinery helps the boy’s mother manage
the farm after her husband joins the fighting in World War II.
In the first book, CBC radio hooks the
boy up with his father for a conversation that the Kid calls “the best
Christmas present Ma and me ever got.” The second book opens with, “my dad got
killed just a week after we talked to him . . . Maybe I haven’t got a father
any more, but I got Jake.”
Jake now seems, despite his years,
less like a father, though, and more like an older brother,
This book makes the boy within the
hired man clearer because it features a few stories told
Mitchell, the teacher and university
lecturer, surely told countless students, “That’s a good story, now rewrite it
from the perspective of another character,” and he may have been using the
exercise to breathe fresh air into his own work.
But this takes skill if you want to
maintain a tone while viewing events from different angles.
When the Kid talks, Jake becomes a
wise counsellor, and the stories are told with young-boy references: the colour
of the little colt is like “pull taffy,” and two fighting roosters remind the
Kid of “those toys you wind.” When Jake tells a story, he’s a guy who goofs
around with friends and compares things to barn doors, trucks, and combines.
Jake takes the Kid goose hunting against Ma’s orders, and he and his
rummy-playing friend Gate sound like bickering children when a storm forces
them to spend days together.
Yet the chapters, whether from the
perspective of the Kid or that of Jake, all share the same feel, and readers
recognized them simply as “Jake and the Kid” stories. The consistency comes in
part from the farm, the town of Crocus, and the locals[1]
common to all stories. But another reason they all have the same feel comes
from the core personality. Whether the stories are told by the boy or the man,
the central character really rests in the transition between the two. The Kid
inches toward it, and Jake reaches back.
That was the space and perspective
occupied by others, like Huckleberry Finn, Oliver Twist, and the hired men of
my parents’ memories, who helped me make sense of the world when I was the Kid.
From time to time, I can still use a
little support and inspiration to figure things out and to transition to
something new.
Maybe I haven’t got a Jake, my
parents, or the others that surrounded me as a Kid--but I got this book.
Writing Exercise
Describe a
1990 writing class taught by W.O. Mitchell from the perspective of a student.
Then describe it from the perspective of W.O. Mitchell.
[1] Characters in the Jake
stories include the town barber, Repeat Golightly, Old Man Sherry, and the
teacher Miss Henchbaw, as well as visitors like the poetess Belva Taskey, the
hypnotist The Great Doctor Suhzee, and a medicine man, Professor Noble
Winesinger. One story recounts the drive by female curlers for equality. A
story cited often by reviewers, “The Face is Familiar,” features a slander suit
against the editor of the newspaper, who compared a local with a goat. The goat
is brought to court as evidence.