11
A Queen
NAIFI WAS CROWNED queen next day. She was crowned on the Rays’ side lawn under one of the two young maples which Betsy’s father had set out; it was just the right size.
Pink and green streamers were wound around the tree up to the lowest branch, and from that point chains of flowers ran to either side of Mr. Ray’s armchair. It was a big leather armchair. It made a fine throne.
A large American flag overhung all, and small American flags were stuck into the ground in a half circle behind the throne. Flags which were ordinarily stored away in closets and brought out only on patriotic holidays had been produced by dozens to make Naifi’s coronation strictly American.
Paul and Freddie borrowed flags all up and down Hill Street while Margaret and Hobbie and the Rivers children picked flowers on the hill and Betsy and Tacy and Tib wove garlands and Julia and Katie decorated. Everything was done without the smallest disagreement. Everyone was kind to everyone else. And the mothers were so pleased that Mrs. Ray made lemonade, and Mrs. Kelly baked a cake, and Matilda baked cookies. Even a coronation needs refreshments.
When the decorating was finished, the children went out to invite people. Julia and Katie, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib skipped down to Pleasant Street to tell Dorothy and Alice what time to come. All the neighbors were invited, and many of them came. By half past two o’clock the lawn was full of people.
Mrs. Ekstrom came all the way down the Big Hill. And Mrs. Benson came, and Mrs. Rivers and the children. Mrs. Hunt who was deaf and dumb came, bringing her crowing baby. Mrs. Granger came, and Miss Williams, and Ben, and the boy named Tom.
Julia and Betsy and Margaret and Katie and Tacy all wore their best Sunday dresses. When they stood together they made a bouquet of light summer tints. Tib wore the accordion-pleated dress. Dorothy, who had dark curls, wore a red dress; it was silk. And Alice’s dress was blue, of thin nun’s veiling.
Grown-ups sat on the lawn in chairs but the children kept racing to the Rays’ front steps to look down Hill Street. They were pretty worked up about a princess coming. At last they saw an unfamiliar horse, a buggy loaded with satchels. It was Mr. Bushara, bringing Naifi.
He stopped at the hitching block and jumped out and pulled off his hat. The sun shone on his glistening cap of hair. He lifted Naifi out of the buggy, and his face was as proud as it was merry.
“Look at that, my heart!” he said, pointing to the big American flag.
The children swooped down upon them.
Naifi was a princess out of the Arabian Nights. Betsy could not have invented one more lovely. A cloud of chiffon floated about her face. Her mouth was hidden, but her dark eyes were sparkling. They were rimmed with sooty black.
Her dress was long and full-skirted, like the one she had worn the day they saw her first. But this one was of soft rich cashmere, purple in color and embroidered in gold. The short jacket was gold-embroidered too. Bloomers were tied at her ankles above little slippers of gold.
She was laden with jewelry … bracelets, rings, earrings….
“Naifi! You’re wonderful! You’re beautiful!” cried the children.
“Hel-lo,” said Naifi. “Hel-lo, hel-lo, hel-lo.”
Mrs. Ray asked her father to stay, but he said that he had to go. He returned to his buggy and drove down Hill Street with a proud smiling face.
The children hurried Naifi into the Rays’ parlor. There the parade assembled. Mrs. Ray was going to play the piano for it; Tom was going to play the violin.
On the lawn the other mothers and the guests waited expectantly. The sun shone down, and the air smelled of roses.
“No more queens, I hope,” Mrs. Muller said to Mrs. Kelly.
“It will be something else next week,” Mrs. Kelly answered.
Mrs. Ray played a rousing march. It was named “Pomp and Circumstance.” She played it with spirit and Tom played it with her on his violin. The procession streamed out of the door to the porch, down the porch steps, and over the lawn.
First came Margaret and Hobbie waving flags. They waved them in time to the music.
Next came Paul and Freddie in their best suits. They were pages. Pages walked straight and tried not to smile.
Then came Betsy and Tacy, Tib and Alice. They scattered flowers as gracefully as they knew how. They scattered the flowers picked that morning on the hill, columbines and daisies and the scarlet Indian paintbrush.
Treading on the flowers came Naifi, dimples flashing. And just behind walked Dorothy, holding the edge of Naifi’s dress. Julia and Katie came last of all, bearing a pillow with a crown upon it.
Betsy’s mother played three or four crashing chords. Naifi seated herself on the throne. Two of the royal party darted indoors. The rest seated themselves on the grass.
Dorothy rose and swept her brown curls almost to the ground in a curtsey.
“Your majesty,” she said in her sweet voice, “we will now endeavor to entertain you.”
Mrs. Ray began to play the Baby Dance. Tib jumped up, picked her skirt up by the edges and made a pirouette.
After the Baby Dance, which was loudly applauded, two black cats capered out on the lawn. Mrs. Ray played the Cat Duet and Betsy and Tacy sang it. They were loudly applauded too.
Katie recited the Gettysburg Address. She despised reciting but she was too patriotic to refuse. When she had finished, she and Julia knelt before the Queen. They held the cushion high and Dorothy lifted the crown.
As she put it on Naifi’s head, Mrs. Ray, inside the house, began to play “Hearts and Flowers.”
Julia went up and stood on the porch steps, looking solemn. Paul and Freddie handed out flags. Mrs. Ray switched to “The Star Spangled Banner.” Everyone stood up, of course, and Julia sang.
She sang as only Julia could. Betsy thought about George Washington. She thought about Abraham Lincoln. She thought about Theodore Roosevelt, the President. She thought about Old Bushara saying that he was an American now.
At the end of a verse Julia smiled suddenly and asked everyone to sing. Everyone sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and waved flags. Naifi’s eyes were something to watch then. Bright as diamonds, they looked about the lawn at the tossing banners.
After that it was just a party with plenty of lemonade, cookies, and cake.
In the midst of all the gaiety no one noticed Mr. Goode, the postman. He had trudged up Hill Street on his usual afternoon round and arrived at the Rays’ front steps. He paused to look around, holding a letter in his hand.
“Hey, there!” he said to Mrs. Ray who was passing a tray full of glasses.
She stopped and came toward him.
“Hello, Mr. Goode. Won’t you have some lemonade?”
“Don’t care if I do,” he said. He slipped off his bag to rest his shoulder, but still he held the letter in his hand.
“Something for us?” asked Mrs. Ray.
“For Betsy and Tacy and Tib.”
“All three of them?”
“All three of them. And if you ask me,” he said, “it’s pretty important.” He handed it to her.
The envelope was large and square. It bore an unfamiliar stamp. Turning it over, Mrs. Ray saw an official-looking seal.
“Betsy! Tacy! Tib! Come here!” she said. And Betsy, Tacy, and Tib came running, for there was something compelling in her voice. Other children crowded behind them, grown-ups too.
“It’s a letter from Spain,” said Mr. Goode. “Do you know anybody in Spain?”
Betsy and Tacy and Tib felt for one another’s hands. They didn’t speak for a moment.
Tib whispered desperately to Betsy, “What shall I do if he wants to marry me? I don’t want to marry him. I want to be an American like Naifi.”
Tacy whispered to Betsy too. “Do you suppose it’s against the law to write to a king?”
Mrs. Ray noticed the whispers, the frightened faces.
“Do you want me to open it?” she asked. “I can’t imagine what it can be, but it’s certainl
y nothing to be afraid of.”
Betsy swallowed a burr in her throat.
“Yes. Open it,” she said.
She knew that Julia and Katie were there; she could see their curious faces. There was a crowd of people, and teasing could be very hard. But this was serious. If it was against the law to write to kings and they were going to be sent to jail, their mothers might as well know it. Their fathers would have to get them out.
Betsy and Tacy and Tib waited in frozen panic.
Mrs. Ray opened the envelope. She unfolded a rich creamy paper.
“Heavens and earth!” she said. And then, “Children! Children!”
Betsy and Tacy and Tib did not speak. They squeezed one another’s hands.
“What did you do?” demanded Betsy’s mother.
They did not answer.
“This letter,” said Mrs. Ray, “comes from the King of Spain. At least it comes from his Palace. It seems to be written by a secretary. I can’t pronounce his name.”
“What does he say?” asked Tib in a trembling voice.
“He says that His Majesty thanks you for the sentiments expressed in your letter.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all. Isn’t it enough?”
It was quite enough.
With a common impulse Betsy, Tacy, and Tib flung their arms about each other. They jumped up and down shouting in a glad release from fear.
“How did you happen to write to him?” asked three mothers at once.
“Oh,” said Betsy vaguely. “It was his birthday.”
Tacy remembered something.
“But how did our letter get mailed?”
“That’s so,” said Tib. “We lost it.”
They looked around the agitated circle. One face stood out above all others. It was red from suppressed laughter.
“On the hill you lost it,” Mrs. Ekstrom said.
Mrs. Ekstrom had mailed it!
The letter passed from hand to hand. And Betsy, Tacy, and Tib felt mighty proud now that they knew they hadn’t done anything wrong or stepped into trouble.
Getting a letter from a king was a perfect ending to an afternoon in which a queen was crowned.
The fathers came home in time for some remnants of cake and to see Naifi’s regal costume. Betsy’s father took Naifi home. She left with many smiles and nods of thanks. Everyone went home … the grown-ups, the children … except Tacy and Tib. They sat on the hitching block with Betsy in the long golden rays of the sun.
“I was scared when that letter came,” said Tib.
“So was I,” said Tacy. “I’m certainly glad none of us had to marry him.”
“So am I,” said Betsy. She thought about Old Bushara. “Why I wouldn’t not be an American for a million dollars.”
“Neither would I,” said Tacy. “Not for ten million.”
“Neither would I,” said Tib. “I should say not!”
“It was fun,” said Betsy, “playing kings and queens like this. But I don’t think we’ll do it any more.”
“What will we do?” asked Tib.
“Oh, American things. Patriotic things.”
Betsy had an idea.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll write to Ethel Roosevelt.”
Ethel Roosevelt was the President’s daughter. She was just their age.
“We’ll offer to come and see her in the White House,” Tacy cried.
“I could dance my Baby Dance,” said Tib.
“We could sing the Cat Duet,” said Betsy. “We’ll write the first thing in the morning.”
And they did. But if Ethel Roosevelt ever received their letter, which is doubtful, she never got around to answering it. And so the plan to dance and sing in the White House came to nothing.
It didn’t matter though. Betsy and Tacy and Tib found plenty of things to do. They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.
About the Author
MAUD HART LOVELACE was born on April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota. Like Betsy, Maud followed her mother around the house at age five asking questions such as “How do you spell going down the street?” for the stories she had already begun to write. Soon she was writing poems and plays. When Maud was ten, a booklet of her poems was printed; and by age eighteen, she had sold her first short story.
The Hart family left Mankato shortly after Maud’s high school graduation in 1910 and settled in Minneapolis, where Maud attended the University of Minnesota. In 1917, she married Delos W. Lovelace, a newspaper reporter who later became a popular writer of short stories.
The Lovelaces’ daughter, Merian, was born in 1931. Maud would tell her daughter bedtime stories about her childhood, and it was these stories that gave her the idea of writing the Betsy-Tacy books. Maud did not intend to write an entire series when Betsy-Tacy, the first book, was published in 1940, but readers asked for more stories. So Maud took Betsy through high school and beyond college to the “great world” and marriage. The final book in the series, Betsy’s Wedding, was published in 1955.
The Betsy-Tacy books are based very closely on Maud’s own life. “I could make it all up, but in these Betsy-Tacy stories, I love to work from real incidents,” Maud wrote. “The Ray family is a true portrayal of the Hart family. Mr. Ray is like Tom Hart; Mrs. Ray like Stella Palmer Hart; Julia like Kathleen; Margaret like Helen; and Betsy is like me, except that, of course, I glamorized her to make her a proper heroine.” Tacy and Tib are based on Maud’s real-life best friends, Frances “Bick” Kenney and Marjorie “Midge” Gerlach, and Deep Valley is based on Mankato.
In fact, so much in the books was taken from real life that it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between fact and fiction. And through the years, Maud received a great deal of fan mail from readers who were fascinated by the question—what is true, and what is made up?
Midge Gerlach (“Tib”) in her accordion-pleated dress.
The illustrator, Lois Lenski, based many of her drawings on photographs—here, Tib looks just like the photo of Midge!
Maud’s older sister, Kathleen Hart, loved to perform just as much as Julia Ray does in the book.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
About Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill
BETSY AND TACY GO OVER THE BIG HILL was first published in 1942 by Thomas Y. Crowell Company. It was originally published as Over the Big Hill, but the publisher later decided to add the names “Betsy and Tacy” to the title so that it would appeal to fans of the previous books. But Maud had an entirely different title in mind at first, which the publisher didn’t like. She wanted to call it “Betsy-Tacy and Tib are Ten.” And the events in the story are based on Maud’s life at around the time she and her friends really did turn ten, in 1902.
In writing about her childhood so many years later, Maud didn’t depend on just her own memory to get the details right. She reread her diaries, wrote to friends in Mankato, and did a lot of other research to make sure that as much as possible was historically accurate. For example, not only did Maud, Bick, and Midge write to the King of Spain as Betsy, Tacy, and Tib do, but Alphonso the Thirteenth really was crowned the King of Spain on May 17, 1902, and it really was a Saturday, as it is in the book. It is this kind of attention to the very smallest detail that makes the books feel so true.
Readers may be curious to know if there really was a Syrian settlement in Mankato, Minnesota, at the turn of the last century. There was. It was called Tinkcomville after its founder, James Ray Tinkcom. Like Mr. Meecham in the story, Mr. Tinkcom came to Mankato from New York and in 1873 bought all the land in the valley. He called it Tinkcom’s Addition and sold parcels of land to a group of immigrants in the 1890s. (Although the immigrants called themselves Syrians, they were actually of Lebanese descent. At the end of the last century, Lebanon was part of Syria; it became a country in its own right in 1948.) And j
ust like Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, Maud and her friends enjoyed visiting the friendly community, which seemed exotic to them. Maud wrote: “From spring to fall we children picnicked and roamed on the hills. We loved to invade Tinkcomville, fascinated by the colorful Syrian colony. There was a rumor which used to enthrall us that one Syrian child was a princess.”
Unfortunately, we can find no historical evidence of a Syrian princess in Mankato. So we don’t know if Maud, Bick, and Midge really did meet a little Syrian girl on the Big Hill or if they really did fight with their older sisters over who would be the Queen of Summer. But in the summer of 1902, there was an event that may have provided a model for Naifi’s patriotic coronation at the end of Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Mankato, and as she so often did, Maud put a real-life event to good use in her fiction.
The character of Mr. Meecham was based on James Ray Tinkcom.
Maud, Bick, and Midge probably sighed over newspaper photos of the sixteen-year-old King of Spain like this one.
Maud Hart Lovelace died on March 11, 1980. But her legacy lives on in the beloved series she created and in her legions of fans, many of whom are members of the Betsy-Tacy Society and the Maud Hart Lovelace Society. For more information, write to:
The Betsy-Tacy Society
c/o BECHS
415 Cherry Street
Mankato, MN 56001
The Maud Hart Lovelace Society
Fifty 94th Circle NW, # 201
Minneapolis, MN 55448
Adapted from The Betsy-Tacy Companion: A Biography of
Maud Hart Lovelace by Sharla Scannell Whalen
Copyright
Harper Trophy® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill
Originally published under the title Over the Big Hill