For winter was coming. The days were shorter, and frost crawled up thewindow panes at night. Soon the snow would come. Then the log housewould be almost buried in snowdrifts, and the lake and the streams wouldfreeze. In the bitter cold weather Pa could not be sure of finding anywild game to shoot for meat.
Instead of burning quickly, the green chips smoldered and filled thehollow log with thick, choking smoke. Pa shut the door, and a littlesmoke squeezed through the crack around it and a little smoke came outthrough the roof, but most of it was shut in with the meat.
A.Story.About.My.Uncle-RELOADED Crack Free
Laura and Ma watched the fire for several days. When smoke stoppedcoming through the cracks, Laura would bring more hickory chips and Mawould put them on the fire under the meat. All the time there was alittle smell of smoke in the yard, and when the door was opened a thick,smoky, meaty smell came out.
All that day and the next, Ma was trying out the lard in big iron potson the cookstove. Laura and Mary carried wood and watched the fire. Itmust be hot, but not too hot, or the lard would burn. The big potssimmered and boiled, but they must not smoke. From time to time Maskimmed out the brown cracklings. She put them in a cloth and squeezedout every bit of the lard, and then she put the cracklings away. Shewould use them to flavor johnny-cake later.
The little pieces of meat, lean and fat, that had been cut off the largepieces, Ma chopped and chopped until it was all chopped fine. Sheseasoned it with salt and pepper and with dried sage leaves from thegarden. Then with her hands she tossed and turned it until it was wellmixed, and she molded it into balls. She put the balls in a pan out inthe shed, where they would freeze and be good to eat all winter. Thatwas the sausage.
The doors and windows were tightly shut, and the cracks of the windowframes stuffed with cloth, to keep out the cold. But Black Susan, thecat, came and went as she pleased, day and night, through the swingingdoor of the cat-hole in the bottom of the front door. She always wentvery quickly, so the door would not catch her tail when it fell shutbehind her.
Ma was busy all day long, cooking good things for Christmas. She bakedsalt-rising bread and rye 'n Injun bread, and Swedish crackers, and ahuge pan of baked beans, with salt pork and molasses. She baked vinegarpies and dried-apple pies, and filled a big jar with cookies, and shelet Laura and Mary lick the cake spoon.
"That's what I thought," Aunt Eliza said. "I didn't know what to do.There I was, shut up in the house with the children, and not daring togo out. And we didn't have any water. I couldn't even get any snow tomelt. Every time I opened the door so much as a crack, Prince acted likehe would tear me to pieces."
For days the sun shone and the weather was warm. There was no frost onthe windows in the mornings. All day the icicles fell one by one fromthe eaves with soft smashing and crackling sounds in the snowbanksbeneath. The trees shook their wet, black branches, and chunks of snowfell down.
Mary had a cracked saucer to play with, and Laura had a beautiful cupwith only one big piece broken out of it. Charlotte and Nettie, and thetwo little wooden men Pa had made, lived in the playhouse with them.Every day they made fresh leaf hats for Charlotte and Nettie, and theymade little leaf cups and saucers to set on their table. The table was anice, smooth rock.
The horses walked around and around. The man who was driving themcracked his whip and shouted, "Giddap there, John! No use trying toshirk!" Crack! went the whip. "Careful there, Billy! Easy, boy! Youcan't go but so fast no how."
ANTONY THOMAS: [voice-over] Images of that extraordinary confrontation became icons of freedom. They have been reproduced on T-shirts and posters ever since. President Bush commended his courage, and leaders the world over hailed him He became an inspiration to millions, and he changed lives forever.
ROBIN MUNRO: It was just a carnival of protest. All the groups were out there with their own banners, saying, "We are the Beijing journalists. We demand press freedom. We demand the right to tell the truth."
ANTONY THOMAS: And from these cities, hundreds of thousands of supporters converged on the capital. The students had started the protest, hoping to cleanse the party of graft and corruption and encourage free speech. They sought reform, not revolution. After all, they were, by and large, the children of the elite. But as their movement spread outwards to the middle classes and then to the workers and peasants, attitudes hardened.
ANTONY THOMAS: In fact, the government was paralyzed by infighting between those who advocated peaceful negotiation and hard-liners who demanded a crackdown. On May the 19th, Zhou Ziyang, the reformist general secretary of the Communist Party, suddenly appeared in Tiananmen Square to appeal for compromise. It would be his last public appearance.That night, before an audience of party faithful, hard-line Premier Li Peng showed the way forward. "We must end the situation immediately. Otherwise, the future of the People's Republic will be in grave danger." He completed his address with a declaration of martial law. Troops would occupy the city and put an end to the protests in Tiananmen Square.Never before in the 40-year history of communist rule had China put its citizens and its army in this situation.
TONG YI: And I witnessed a mother with an infant talk face to face with the soldiers in the truck, telling him it was a very peaceful city and that what we did was to just ask for more freedom for the people.
ROBIN MUNRO: Before June 4th, you had millions of people, all over China in the cities, up in the streets, peacefully demanding more rights, freedom, democracy, press freedom, end to corruption. After June 4th, what did you have? You had one man, one sacrificial figure almost, who took it on himself to speak for everyone else, who had been silenced by that time.
ANTONY THOMAS: We are in Anhui province, 300 miles and several centuries from Shanghai. It's a dizzying descent from the skyscrapers and freeways, the glittering boutiques and futuristic train to this. And yet there have been changes here, real changes for the better. Under the old collective system, peasants were virtually slaves of the state. Now they own - or rather lease their plots and are free to sell their produce on the open market. As a result of these reforms, rural incomes doubled within a decade. But the trouble is that what the state gave with one hand, it has taken away with the other.
NICHOLAS BEQUELIN: Education and health care, which are the two main benchmarks for the advancement and progress of a society at large, have totally collapsed in the past 20 years. Education used to be free and accessible for every child in China., but now there is not one kid in China that doesn't have to pay to go to school not only the school fees, but the book fees, the heating fees, an array of fees.
ANTONY THOMAS: The figure for 2005 has risen further to 87,000 incidents. All over China, the pressure is building. Here peasants, defending their land from takeover by a power company, are beaten, stabbed and shot by hired thugs one incident in June of last year that happened to be recorded by a villager who was able to smuggle his tape out of the country one incident in June 1989 that happened to take place under the very noses of Western cameramen.The challenge of powerful images for an authoritarian state is enormous. How do you stop one person's example becoming an inspiration to others? How do you prevent the fire from spreading?Beida, the University of Beijing, and the most prestigious in all of China. In 1989, Beida was the nerve center of the student movement that would inspire a popular uprising. Today's undergraduates enjoy all the benefits that have flowed into China A. Largely the children of the elite, they enjoy freedom of travel and a lifestyle many Western undergraduates might envy. But what do they know of their recent history?[on camera] I'm going to try a little experiment. Show this picture around and tell me what that picture says to you. Pass them around.[voice-over] They were baffled. After a long silence, one of them whispered
ANTONY THOMAS: Any regime attempting to combine economic freedom with rigid one-party rule is faced with a challenge. How do you allow in all the information necessary to keep a free market economy running, while filtering out anything that contradicts the party line and undermines its authority?Press censorship is one thing, but China already has 111 million Internet users, monitored by at least 30,000 Internet police. For more sophisticated controls, China relies on Western technology. When we in the West search for images of Tiananmen Square on Google, photos of Tank Man pop up immediately. Move through the selection of 18 pages, and Tank Man appears again and again.When people in China make the same entry on their Google search engine, they get just three pages, featuring maps, architecture, cooking hints and smiling tourists posing in the square. But not one single image of the Tank Man.
ANTONY THOMAS: [voice-over] There's only been only one crack in the wall silence. In 1990, Jiang Zemin, the man who would soon be president of China, was asked pointblank by Barbara Walters.
Prof. XIAO QIANG: The power of that story is not getting weaker because of the time, because we don't know who he is, it's actually getting stronger. That ultimate spirit of freedom will last longer than the strength of tanks and machine guns. In the long frame of history, it's the human freedom, courage, dignity will stay and prevail. That picture will testify that forever.
ANNOUNCER: There's more of this report on FRONTLINE's Web site, including a roundtable with experts on China's efforts to curb the freedoms of the Internet, a timeline of Tiananmen and the regime's debate over how to deal with the protesters, a talk with producer Antony Thomas about his experience making this film, a chance to watch the full program again on line and more. Then join the discussion at pbs.org.Next time on FRONTLINE: From behind the battle lines in Iraq, the inside story of the insurgency, their strategy 2ff7e9595c
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