Collins Cabin Quotes

O Canada I have not forgotten you, as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision of a bookcase. You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines. You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall. You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp. You are the dust that coats the roadside berries. But not only that, you are the two boys with pails walking along that road.

A woman’s voice came wailing on the wind. Norman looked up and spotted Sandra high up on an even steeper funnel of snow and ice. She was crying: ‘Your father is dead. What are we going to do?’ One of her shoulders was hanging weirdly. There was a bloody wound on her forehead, matted with hair. Then he saw his dad, still in his seat but slumped awkwardly forward. Norman turned around on the steep slope and inched over towards him, sneakers pathetically trying to hold an edge. He slipped and almost plummeted like a bobsleigh down the mountain. He caught a hold. Then he started crawling back up. It took him thirty minutes to climb 6 m (20 ft). His dad was doubled over. ‘DAD!’ No response. Snow was falling on his father’s curly hair. Above him, Sandra sounded delirious. By the time he was four, Norman had skied every black run at Mammoth. On his first birthday, his dad had him strapped to his back in a canvas papoose and took him surfing. Reckless, perhaps, but it had given the boy an indomitable spirit. Eleven-year-old Norman hugged his dad for the last time then tracked back across the slope to see what he could salvage from the wreckage. There were no ice axes or tools, but he did find a rug. He took it and scrabbled back to Sandra. She couldn’t move. Somehow he got her under the ragged remains of the plane’s wing and they wrapped themselves in the rug and fell into an exhausted sleep. Norman was woken around noon by a helicopter. He leapt up, trying to catch the crew’s attention. They came very, very close but somehow didn’t see him. They were going to have to get off this mountain themselves. A brief lull in the storm gave them a sudden view. The slope continued beneath their feet, sickeningly sheer, for hundreds of feet. Then lower down there were woods and the gully levelled a little before a massive ridgeline rose again. Beyond that lay a flatter meadow of snow and, at the edge of the world, a cabin. Sandra wanted to stay put. She was ranting about waiting for the rescuers. For a moment Norman nearly lay down beside her and drifted off to sleep. The

Calmer again, he looked out to see he was sandwiched below the cloud and above the fog. There was no way the helicopter would see him here. The cabin was nearer, but he was still too far above it and night was getting closer. He had to keep going. He plucked another couple of limbs from a tree. The pine scent thrilled his senses. He was alive. Norman half walked, half skidded down the slope until eventually it began to widen and the gradient relaxed. He found Sandra a little further down, tall spruces surrounding the patch of snow where she lay. Norman’s seat from the plane was just above her. Her eyes were open but she was stiff and dead. He covered her body with twigs then moved on. Now that the slope was shallow enough for him to control his descent, he slid on his bottom down the apron for at least 300 m (1,000 ft). He made his way down into a narrow and twisted gulch in front of the huge ridge he had seen earlier. Carefully he avoided the ice-covered stream that snaked below him. Get wet, you get hypothermia, you die.

Mary Johnson may have been the first African American woman. She arrived sometime before 1620 as the maid of a Virginia planter. Like white women, the black residents of the early southern colonies found opportunities in the general chaos around them. Johnson and her husband were indentured servants, and once they earned their freedom, they acquired a 250-acre farm and five indentured servants of their own. By the mid–seventeenth century, a free black population had begun to emerge in both the North and the South. African American women, who weren’t bound by the same social constraints as white women, frequently set up their own businesses, running boardinghouses, hair salons, or restaurants. Catering was a particularly popular career, as was trading. In Charleston, South Carolina, black women took over the local market, selling vegetables, chickens, and other produce they acquired from the growing population of slaves, who generally had small plots beside their cabins. The city came to depend on the women for its supply of fresh food, and whites complained long and loud about the power and independence of the trading women. In 1686, South Carolina passed a law prohibiting the purchase of goods from slaves, but it had little effect. A half century later, Charleston officials were still complaining about the “exorbitant price” that black women charged for “many articles necessary for the support of the inhabitants.” The trading women had sharp tongues, which they used to good effect. The clerk of the market claimed that the “insolent and abusive Manner” of the slave women made him “afraid to say or do Anything.” It’s hard to believe the marketers, some of whom were slaves, were as outspoken as their clientele made them out to be, but the war between the black female traders and their customers continued on into the nineteenth century. (One petition in 1747 said that because of the market “white people…are entirely ruined and rendered miserable.”) The

In the 1990s, the preserve was renamed Joppa (pronounced Joppee) in honor of a freedman’s community that existed nearby. The community was established in the 1860s–’70s by former slaves emancipated during the Civil War, some of whom came from the nearby Miller Plantation. Interestingly, plantation owner William Brown Miller’s log cabin, which was at one point located in this area, has been moved and is now preserved in Dallas Heritage Village next to the historic Millermore Mansion. Today, the Joppa community still exists and, according to Preservation Dallas, is considered one of the last remaining freedman communities.

I tried to explain [to my parents] that HarperCollins was the publisher of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the most popular book of the nineteenth century, a book that started a war, according to President Lincoln. Would my book start a war? Fingers crossed!