I Hear the Reaper's Song

By Sara Stambaugh

Book Overview

Portrays tragedy and crisis in a small Pennsylvania community in 1896 from the point of view of a 15-year-old Mennonite boy in the whirlpool of his first encounter with death. In the spring of 1896, Silas Hershey was 15. He worked hard six days a week alongside his family in their corn and tobacco fields. On Sundays he gossiped with his cousin Sam, eyeing the girls from a corner of the Paradise Mennonite Church yard, and several evenings a week he drove his sister Barbie and cousin Biney to "special meetings" at nearby churches. Then there were the troubled romances of both Barbie and older brother Hen. But social and political change was flooding the country, and in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the ripples lapped up over the church steps and into the pulpits. The special evening meetings which to Silas and Sam were little more than out-of-the-ordinary social occasions in fact signalled a radical change in Mennonite belief and tradition. All promoted by the "Western preachers," as Silas called them. Events come to a climax one summer Saturday night when Barbie and her young man, Enos Barge, are coming home from a party and a train hits their buggy at a dangerous crossing. The Western preachers capitalize on the incident; neither Barbie nor Enos had yet joined church, and the revivalists point to them as examples of what can happen to those who are not "saved." People convert in flocks. And the Hersheys, to whom Barbie was their light and joy, are left stunned by grief, struggling to keep a shattered family from disintegrating. Sara Stambaugh tells the story with both sympathy and candor. She also succeeds remarkably well in capturing the point of view, language, and feelings of an adolescent Mennonite boy, caught in the whirlpool of a first encounter with death. Her images evoke a time and place so clearly that the reader can almost smell the arbutus and feel the crackle of ice underfoot.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0934672415
• ISBN13: 9780934672412
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Good Books
• Length: 221 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Valuable insights into a misunderstood culture

1896 is the most eventful year of Silas Hershey's life. The Mennonite teenager works on the family's Pennsylvania farm, plays with his nearest cousins, and worships at whichever home hosts the meeting that week. He unquestioningly obeys his parents and the church elders and assumes life (with the addition of a girlfriend) will continue as it has.Later he recognizes the early signs of change. One brother has moved to Montana to work, another wants to quit farming altogether. Sister Barbie is resisting her approaching marriage, raising fears she'll abandon the simple Mennonite lifestyle as her older sister did. These small conflicts have a wide-reaching effect. As Silas explains, "Joining church was different in those days, something you did when you were grown-up and sure you'd decided for certain, usually after you'd been married a year or so.... That way young people had a chance to get the wildness out of their systems." Now, though, one segment of the community wants hellfire sermons followed by public "born again" conversions and a stricter separation from the world, such as the Amish practice. This segment seizes on Barbie's tragic death to push their conviction that the unbaptized are damned.Stambaugh is the granddaughter of Silas Hershey, which has given her access to private records and eyewitness accounts of that significant year. A native of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, she uses the sights, smells, and sounds of her childhood to make the Hershey farm live in the reader's mind. So does young Silas and through him, the whole question of, "How do we know we're saved?" This book is a jewel. Kathleen T. Choi, HAWAII CATHOLIC HERALD