Giants in the Earth
When I was small our family occasionally visited two people whom we knew as Uncle Marvin and Aunt Hazel. I was used to visiting aunts and uncles, but I could not help noticing that Uncle Marvin looked a good deal older than most of the others. I eventually learned that he was actually Dad’s uncle—my great-uncle.

I never knew Uncle Marvin and Aunt Hazel well. By the time I had gotten old enough to begin appreciating family visits Uncle Marvin’s mind had begun to slip with age. Eventually he had to go into a nursing home, and died there after several years. It was not until afterward that I began to learn what sort of a man he had been.

When Uncle Marvin was in his early teens the family lost its father under very tragic circumstances. Their mother was left to raise four boys and two girls. How they made ends meet I do not know. At some point, though, when he was still a teenager, Uncle Marvin went to do his part toward supporting the family by going down to the oil fields where the pay was good.

When he came back he had accumulated or was able to raise some working capital and went into the construction business. His father had been a brick mason. Uncle Marvin had learned the trade as well and also knew something about carpentry. I don’t know how old he was, but he was still quite young.

Uncle Marvin bought some land on the edge of town and built three houses on it. For a building crew he had two younger brothers, one of whom became my grandfather. They moved the family into one of the houses and sold the other two to help pay for it.

They had another way of making money. In addition to his regular construction work, Uncle Marvin got a contract to pour sidewalks for the city. While he spent the normal work day laying bricks, the younger brothers would dig footings and build forms for a section of sidewalk. In the evening Uncle Marvin would eat and then spend the waning hours of the summer sunlight with his brothers mixing and pouring concrete. The next day they would do it again. I have helped to pour concrete and lay bricks under an Arkansas summer sun, and can say from experience that a normal eight-hour day should be enough of that sort of labor for anyone. It is almost incredible to think of anyone putting in the kind of hours they did at such hard labor.

In Ole Rolvaag’s novel Giants in the Earth the author describes the labors of the generation of pioneers who settled on the Great Plains and built farms and cultivated fields from scratch. They were the “giants” of the title, with their backbreaking work to try to build a better life for themselves and their families. Uncle Marvin was such a giant of effort, forced to take on great responsibility at an early age. He proved equal to it.

He was a gentle giant. When the family was living in more secure circumstances and he felt he had established himself, he married Aunt Hazel and raised a family with her. One of their children, known as Buddy, was born with severe birth defects. He could not walk or speak. In family photos you see Buddy’s wasted form on Uncle Marvin’s lap, surrounded by the rest of the family. When Uncle Marvin came home from work in the evenings, he would carry Buddy out to the car and take him for a ride. That was a high part of Buddy’s day. Even though he could not speak, Buddy could make it apparent how he felt. He liked those rides with his daddy.

Life was not all work for the family. Uncle Marvin and his siblings and their families left many good memories of relaxed times at church and at family gatherings and other happy events. They ate watermelon (sliced with a mason’s trowel), made home-made ice cream (stirred to the same consistency as good mason’s mortar), visited and played games. Everything they had they had worked for, and they had the sense that they had earned it.

The few stories I’ve heard about Uncle Marvin in his prime suggest that he must have been something of a character. He chewed Prince Albert pipe tobacco. When he smoked a cigar he gnawed on the end as well. “Between me and the fire a cigar doesn’t last long!” he would say. He could also be rather sloppy in his work—it was said of him that he did not have to build a scaffold as quickly as most masons, since he built himself a walkway out of spilled mortar while he worked. Some older buildings around our home town bear spatters of mortar from his trowel. They are still standing, though, so he must have been doing something right.

Historians, especially in recent decades, have often been in the habit of seeing the past as nothing more than a long catalog of wrongs and oppressions and conflicts. There is no point in denying these things—they did happen. But such a view of history misses a lot else of what happened. Most of the ordinary people of the past had other things to do besides fight and put each other down. For the most part they spent their lives working, trying to take care of their families in a harder world than what most of us know now. They confronted challenges from which most of us now would shrink. That they succeeded in meeting most of these challenges is shown by the fact that we are here today. In a way, we are all descended from giants.