Feudin’ in Floridy: Lois Lenski’s "Strawberry Girl"

When I was about ten my family moved into a duplex with my grandma. One of its best features was that it had a big backyard. One of the downsides to this feature was that the yard was not fenced in, and therefore was combined with half a dozen other backyards to form a sort of vast green space.

Due to some logistical issues my family ended up living in my grandma’s basement for about seven months while we waited for the previous occupants to vacate our side of the house. Perhaps because of the cramped quarters, or perhaps because there was nowhere to store it, my Dad set up our swing-set before we were even properly moved in.

The other neighbor kids had started to think that we had built the “playground” for them. They would come and use it all the time without asking. Some lady even brought her grandkids to push on the swings. Not that we begrudged them using it (being new in the neighborhood, I was desperate for new friends and was all too willing to share my swingset with them), but my parents became concerned that someone was going to get hurt—fall off the swing, for instance—and then because it was on our property we’d be sued.

So, a fence went up. Actually, the main reason for the fence was because we had dogs who were used to being left outside in the summer. But the neighbors did not take it well, feeling that we were “hogging the playground” to ourselves!

All of this reminded me of a book I had read not too long before the move: Strawberry Girl. This novel by Lois Lenski was fairly well-known when I was a girl, but recently I decided to reread it to see what my younger self found so appealing.

Strawberry Girl is the story of Birdie Boyer, a young girl who moves with her family to a rural part of Florida (“Floridy”--all of the dialog is written in vernacular, though surprisingly I didn't have any problem understanding it as a beginning reader). There they find themselves neighbors to the Slaters, who immediately become antagonistic toward the Boyers. The Boyers are everything the Slaters are not: Mr. Boyer is hardworking and enterprising, Mrs. Boyer is kind, and the children are all obedient. They’ve bought their property in hopes of raising strawberry and orange crops.

The Slaters are led by the father, Sam, who is an alcoholic who lets his family live in squalor rather than put any effort into making a living. Nominally a family of “cattlemen,” the Slaters don’t even feed their cows, letting them roam wild throughout the country instead.

This immediately causes friction between the Boyers and Slaters, as the Boyers’ crops keep getting trampled or eaten by the Slaters’ animals.

This book is actually pretty tense, and Lenski doesn’t gloss over the brutality of some of the things that happen. For instance, some of the older Slater boys get the school closed by beating the teacher to a pulp so bad that he later skips town.

I was also pretty impressed with how fleshed out the characters were. Birdie isn’t a goody-two-shoes, but rather struggles with her own prejudices and even hatred. One of the Slater kids, Jefferson Davis “Shoestring” Slater, is a very interesting character: though he often mimics the coarse heartlessness of his father, several times Birdie sees past this act into the life of a lonely, ashamed, neglected boy. The adult characters are also well-rounded, with Birdie’s father dealing with his own issues of temper as Sam Slater continues to needle and take advantage of him.

Upon rereading, I was surprised by two things in Strawberry Girl. The first is its adept treatment of the moral “violence doesn’t solve anything.” Mr. Boyer is convinced that the only way to deal with the Slaters is to “fight fire with fire,” but really that just escalates the stakes to dangerous levels. Mrs. Boyer thinks that cleverness is the answer, but even her attempt to keep the peace fails (and sort of gives Sam Slater an idea for future trouble he can cause).

In the end, it’s an act of kindness that breaks the cycle of violence and grudges. This is where the second surprise came: I had completely forgotten that this book ends with a very Christian message. Mrs. Slater buys a Bible from a travelling salesman after Mrs. Boyer buys one. It’s an act of “keeping up appearances,” but it foreshadows the story’s climax, where a circuit pastor comes to town for a revival meeting and ends up ministering to the entire Slater family.

Lenski wraps the entire story up nicely with the Biblical notion of “loving your neighbor,” of letting go of bitterness and embracing a life of forgiveness and compassion.

As for the conclusion of my own story, it turns out the only person who fell off the swingset was me. Twice. Once I even knocked myself out and sprained my shoulder. What can I say? Swinging is a high-impact, dangerous sport!