Read: Lamb in His Bosom

Published 3 days ago • 3 min read

LAMB IN HIS BOSOM

by Margaret McGuire

Ah… the antebellum South. Celebrated for its stylish women and genteel manners. Reviled for its legacy of slavery and violence.

Well, you won’t find any of that down in the backwoods of Georgia, not in the lives of Cean (pronounced ‘see-ann’), Lonzo, and their children and extended family. This is a story of the Southerners that popular culture has all but forgotten. These dirt-poor farmers never saw, let alone owned, a slave. The women made their own simple clothes out of cotton they helped plant, harvest, spin, weave, and dye before it was ready to cut and stitch.

Caroline Packard Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lamb in His Bosom is a time capsule. Her characters speak in their own Southern dialect; one that was rapidly disappearing when she researched and wrote in the 1930s.

Lamb in His Bosom follows the married life of Cean Smith, starting from the day of her marriage to Lonzo Smith. We follow her as she grows and changes from Cean Carver, a “girl-child of unexpressed fancies and long imaginings” to Cean Smith, a woman who has “learned of Godalmighty how to bear a grief without complaining.”

There’s no glamor in this life, and Miller makes us feel the unceasing toil, as well as the exasperation and temptation to despair, that weighs on Cean at times. And yet there is also a breathtaking beauty and a hard-won satisfaction woven through her life; some of it resulting from the work of her hands, some accepted as a blessing from God.

Cean and Lonzo’s marriage is happy. Not perfect, but happy. They know and trust each other, and stand in awe of each other’s capabilities. They don’t question their roles in marriage or society; they just buckle down and do the work allotted to them. Cean struggles with birthing and rearing children on top of managing the house and garden, but she perseveres with grace and humility.

Cean comes to embody all the loving power that a woman is capable of. We feel her joys and sorrows, her frustrations and anger, her humble faith, and her agonies. Spoiler alert: not all of Cean’s loved ones survive to the end of the novel. Subsistence farming on the edge of civilization is a messy, dangerous life, and that’s before the Civil War starts.

And yet the love shared by Cean with her husband, her children, and her extended family consistently rises above their poverty, the war, and the normal brokenness of human nature.

They thrived in the face of what we moderns would call impossible circumstances. They are grateful for their blessings and recognize the gifts from God; the one who promised to carry His children like lambs in His bosom.

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