A Land Remembered

The earliest chapters of A Land Remembered focus on the survival and resilience of the MacIveys. In vivid terms, Smith describes the hardships the MacIveys face. For the first two years in Florida, the family barely survives in a state of near starvation. What little food Tobias grows from the sandy soil is frequently devoured by animals. While he has a small guinea cow that provides the family with milk, it is killed within a year by panthers that leave behind nothing more than a “pile of shattered bones” (14), a phrase that evokes one of many grim scenarios the MacIveys face. While there are plenty of deer, hogs, and other wildlife to hunt, shotgun shells are so scarce that Tobias resorts to killing game only when the family is on the brink of death. The author emphasizes the forbidding nature of mid-19th-century Florida when describing Tobias’s reason for choosing this spot to wait out the war: “There was nothing in the Florida wilderness worth fighting over” (13).

In his state of perpetual hunger, Tobias somehow finds the energy to build a cabin. For the two years before it is complete, the MacIveys live in a makeshift tent made from tree limbs and palmetto thatch:

There was nothing to ward off the summer mosquitoes and the roaming rattlesnakes and the rain and the biting winter cold. Emma feared for the safety of the baby, and they finally made a crude hammock so that she could at least keep him off the ground (14).

Meanwhile, whatever joy the family experiences from notching a victory over the wilderness is short-lived, undercut by the perpetual threat of calamity, like the bears that raid the smokehouse and nearly kill Emma, or the Confederate deserters’ crippling attack on the homestead. Nevertheless, the MacIveys persist.

These depictions of the MacIveys struggling mightily against the elements introduce one of the book’s most important themes: When nature is an adversary, there is no clear line between surviving the wilderness and conquering it. Early on, the odds in this fight are stacked heavily against the characters. The MacIveys take from nature only what they truly need, for that is all they can expect nature to give. Unlike the Seminoles, whom the MacIveys first encounter in Chapter 3, the MacIveys’ respect for nature is driven by necessity rather than philosophy. Even still, Zech and Tobias possess a distinct appreciation for nature that goes beyond fearing it in its awesome force. When they come across a group of Carolina parakeets, Zech says, “They’re too purty to kill” (29). Tobias describes a vicious cycle in which men slaughter the parakeets when the birds return to grieve their dead: “They kept coming back to the dead till the men just sat there and killed every one of them” (29). Tobias has no appetite for such displays of brutality. In forthcoming chapters, when the MacIveys possess a surer command over the elements, their decisions regarding how and whether to alter their natural surroundings are some of the most important choices the characters face.

The MacIveys’ encounter with Keith also underlines the themes of racism explored in the novel. Keith’s experience of being driven out of his homeland and treated as less than human upon his return is indicative of the experience of most Native Americans during the mid-19th century. When US President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the Seminoles—along with every other Southern Native American tribe—lost the right to inhabit their ancestral lands and were forced to relocate West of the Mississippi. Resistance culminated in 1835 when the Seminoles ambushed two US Army companies sent to forcibly remove them. During the attack, all 110 men belonging to the army companies were killed, and the US government responded by declaring war on the Seminoles. Although the Seminoles were intermittently successful in employing guerrilla tactics against the US Army, by 1842 the war had decimated the Seminole population, resulting in untold numbers of casualties by fighting, disease, and starvation. In 1843, only an estimated 295 Seminoles remained in Florida, the rest having been killed or relocated.

By the 1860s, when Tobias encounters Keith, the Florida Seminole population numbers less than 200, and those who remain—or who, like Keith, returned following relocation—are at the mercy of white men who may kill and terrorize them without consequence. When Keith explains why there are men trying to kill him, he says, “We killed a calf for food. It had no marking on it, and we thought it to be wild. We were seen by a man on foot, and now riders are coming for us” (19). Unlike many white men living in Florida at the time, Tobias offers what little he can to Keith and his companions, saving their lives and forging a bond with the Seminoles that will span several generations. While the reasons behind Tobias’s lack of prejudice are never interrogated or explored, his relatively progressive attitude toward other races is a distinct component of his strong moral character.

Finally, these chapters explore the extent to which starvation ravaged the Confederate Army, contributing heavily to its defeat in the Civil War. When two of the cows Tobias delivers to Confederate troops in Georgia drown and wash ashore, soldiers “swarmed over the carcasses like ants, and in a matter of minutes there was no trace left of meat, hides, hooves, or horns” (43). This harrowing scene puts the MacIveys’ lingering threat of starvation into perspective, suggesting that the threat is even more severe on the frontlines than on the frontier. Starvation within the Confederate Army also led to a massive outpouring of deserters like the ones who attack the MacIvey homestead in Tobias’s absence. In Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War, historian Andrew F. Smith writes, “While there were many reasons for the Confederacy’s defeat, hunger is what tipped the scales in favor of the South’s surrender” (Smith, Andrew F. Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War. St. Martin’s Press, 2011).