Gage

The Formative Years of Benjamin Bird Gage

The story of Benjamin Bird is set in Western Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Benjamin was born in 1934, the third child of a sharecropper. Ben's heritage encompasses the history of late nineteenth-century frontier America, for his grandfathers were born in the aftermath of the Civil War. His paternal grandfather was the son of a former slave owner, and his maternal grandfather, the youngest son of a Confederate veteran, was from an extended family who, for generations, had subsisted squatting on public land beyond the edge of the farming frontier. Like nomads, when the frontier was closed, they owned no land. Benjamin's first memory was when, in late 1935, his farm family moved into a two-room frame shack whose plastered walls were pasted over with 1932 newspaper front pages, to seal the cracks. Benjamin was a happy boy who found joyous harmony in the natural world on the hardscrabble farm on which they subsisted, while the 1932 newspaper headlines kept him inquisitive about the world beyond his boundaries. He was secure in the love and support of his parents, his brother, and his sister. Nearby, Ben's grandparents, uncles and aunts, and sturdy, competitive cousins provided a support system, sharing what they had, a blood-related social security system, a workforce during harvest, a force to turn to for help in crisis. He loved them all and remained loyal to them throughout his formative years, even after he detected among them certain blemishes of character, even after their occasional hurtful words made him seem inferior, even after he began to doubt the infallibility of their fundamentalist religious convictions, even after he developed a secret, forbidden, gripping crush on a handsome, roguish older neighbor boy. In conflict of conscience, will Ben defy his heritage and lose his beloved family's love and support by rejecting their religious fundamentalism? Will they condemn him and shun him as a heretic? How will Ben cope with confusion about his sexuality without being guilt-ridden, inhibited, closeted, or shunned, filled with self-loathing? * * * * * Watch for the forthcoming sequel, The Adolescent Years of Benjamin Bird.