Hard Times (40 page)

One day at noon, we had one of our worst dust storms. I never want to see one again! The air was so filled. We could just see it float in, and we had good, heavy storm windows. A year before, we heard of the dust storms to the south. They were collecting wheat to send down there by the carloads. Some of the good folks said, “Better share, because we never know when we may have a drought.” The next year, we finally did. I’m surprised to think we lived through it.

This neighbor woman lost her husband, and, of course, he was owing in the bank. So the auctioneers come out there, and she served lunch, and she stood weeping in the windows. “There goes our last cow….” And the horses. She called ’em by names. It just pretty near broke our hearts. They didn’t give her a chance to take care of her bills. They never gave her an offer. They just came and cleared it out. She just stood there crying.

 

THE DIRTY THIRTIES—the phrase was coined where we had the dust storms. My people came from Arkansas, where the years of drought coincided with the hard years of the Depression. Even the one good year was no good. Everything dried up … the springs, the wells, the ponds, the creeks, the rivers.

We saw bank failures everywhere. In my county, all but three of perhaps a dozen failed. The most valuable thing we lost was hope. A man can endure a lot if he still has hope.

Mountain people are more rigorous than others. We lived a harder life. We had to grow or make most of the things we needed. The country never did lend itself to mechanization … still doesn’t. Rock. We had relatives who just gave up. Broke up homes, scattered to different states. From down in my county, many would go to what we called
De
-troit. Then they started to go to California, any way they could. Thumbing rides … I thumbed rides when I was peddling Bibles. It was during a summer, while still in high school.

I became a schoolteacher. It didn’t pay much, but it was decent work. I taught in a one-room country school. By the time Roosevelt was elected,
I’d been to law school. A group of us there decided if we were going to hell, we might just as well get active in it. We ran for office ourselves.

I ran for the state legislature. I didn’t ask the machine. So I was viciously attacked at county meetings. The political and economic establishment were one. But I was elected. The majority in the House were new fellows who had beaten the sitting candidates. We called it the Revolution of 1932, and organized ourselves as Young Turks.

I’d been talking about electricity for the people. The little towns hardly had any—just a putt-putt plant that wasn’t reliable. The rural people had nothing. We could see the fogs rise over the White River, and when the river was up big, we heard the roar. We knew there was tremendous power going to waste. We had read about hydroelectric plants elsewhere in the world. We talked about it, but there wasn’t much we could do. The power companies were against it. Arkansas is probably the state most completely dominated by a power company.

We tried to do something about flood control—and in the process do something about electrification—because the TVA had come to be and it was multi-purpose: flood control and power.

We set to form electric co-ops, hoping to buy power from the companies. It would be too long to wait on the dams. They demanded an outrageous price. They were determined to fight the cooperatives all the way.

In 1934, I was elected to the state senate, and introduced another rural electrification bill. It was passed in ’35, but it was still a struggle. It became a model for the REA
⁹³
and other states used it around the country. In 1936, we got some electric co-ops organized.

Today, there are dams up and down the White River, and others along the Arkansas. Industry has come into the state and development is encouraged. And yet, there are some areas that have never recovered from the Depression.

 

 

I wanted to be at my parents’ house when electricity came. It was in 1940. We’d all go around flipping the switch, to make sure it hadn’t come on yet. We didn’t want to miss it. When they finally came on, the lights
just barely glowed. I remember my mother smiling. When they came on full, tears started to run down her cheeks. After a while, she said: “Oh, if we only had it when you children were growing up.” We had lots of illness. Anyone who’s never been in a family without electricity—with illness—can’ t imagine the difference.

From there, I went to my grandmother’s house. It was a day of celebration. They had all kinds of parties—mountain people getting light for the first time.

There are still areas without electricity. Coal oil lamps are used, with the always dirty chimneys. But there are more and more electric co-ops, which first sprang out of the New Deal. And the power companies are still fighting us….

 

IN 1929, me and my husband were sharecroppers. We made a crop that year, the owner takin’ all of the crop.

This horrible way of livin’ with almost nothin’ lasted up until Roosevelt. There was another strangest thing, I didn’t suffer for food through the Thirties, because there was plenty of people that really suffered much worse. When you go through a lot, you in better condition to survive through all these kinds of things.

I picked cotton. We weren’t getting but thirty-five cents a hundred, but I was able to make it. ’Cause I also worked people’s homes, where they give you old clothes and shoes.

At this time, I worked in private homes a lot and when the white people kill hogs, they always get the Negroes to help. The cleanin’ of the insides and clean up the mess afterwards. And then they would give you a lot of scraps. A pretty adequate amount of meat for the whole family. The majority of the Negroes on the farm were in the same shape we were in. The crops were eaten by these worms. And they had no other jobs except farming.

In 1934, in this Texas town, the farmers was all out of food. The government
gave us a slip, where you could pick up food. For a week, they had people who would come and stand in line, and they couldn’t get waited on. This was a small town, mostly white. Only five of us in that line were Negroes, the rest was white. We would stand all day and wait and wait and wait. And get nothin’ or if you did, it was spoiled meat.

We’d been standin’ there two days, when these three men walked in. They had three shotguns and a belt of shells. They said, lookin’ up and down that line, “You all just take it easy. Today we’ll see that everybody goes home, they have food.” Three white men.

One of ’em goes to the counter, lays his slip down and says he wants meat. He had brought some back that was spoiled. He said to the boss, “Would you give this meat for your dog?” So he got good meat. He just stood there. So the next person gets waited on. It was a Negro man. He picked up the meat the white man brought back. So the white guy said, “Don’t take that. I’m gonna take it for my dog.” So the boss said, “I’m gonna call the police.”

So the other reaches across the counter and catches this guy by the tie and chokes him. The Negro man had to cut the tie so the man wouldn’t choke to death. When he got up his eyes was leakin’ water. The other two with guns was standin’ there quietly. So he said, “Can I wait on you gentlemen?” And they said, “We’ve been here for three days. And we’ve watched these people fall like flies in the hot sun, and they go home and come back the next day and no food. Today we purpose to see that everybody in line gets their food and then we gonna get out.” They didn’t point the guns directly at him. They just pointed ‘em at the ceiling. They said, “No foolin’ around, no reachin’ for the telephone. Wait on the people. We’re gonna stand here until every person out there is waited on. When you gets them all served, serve us.”

The man tried to get the phone off the counter. One of the guys said, “I hope you don’t force me to use the gun, because we have no intentions of getting nobody but you. And I wouldn’t miss you. It wouldn’t do you any good to call the police, because we stop ’em at the door. Everybody’s gonna get food today.” And everybody did.

The Government sent two men out there to find out why the trouble. They found out this man and a couple others had rented a huge warehouse and was stackin’ that food and sellin’ it. The food that was supposed to be issued to these people. These three men was sent to the pen.

When the WPA came in, we soon got to work. The people, their own selves, as they would get jobs on WPA, they quit goin’ to the relief station. They just didn’t want the food. They’d go in and say, “You know, this is my last week, ’cause I go to work next week.” The Negro and white would do this, and it sort of simmered down until the only people who were on relief were people who were disabled. Or families where there weren’t no man or no one to go out and work on the WPA.

I remember in this Texas place, they had twenty-five people came in that day saying they wouldn’t be back any more ‘cause they signed up and they was gonna work on the WPA the next week. Some of ’em had to sort of stretch things to make pay day ’cause it really didn’t come to what they thought it would. But they didn’t go back after any more help.

You sort of like to know to feel independent the way you earn your own living. And when you hear people criticize people of things like this today it gets under your skin.

What bothered me about the Roosevelt time was when they come out with this business that you had to plow up a certain amount of your crop, especially cotton. I didn’t understand, ’cause it was good cotton.

And seein’ all this cattle killed. Bein’ raised with stock, to me it was kind of a human feelin’ we had toward them. We had this cow and calf raised with us. I’d see these farmers, terrible big cattle raisers and they didn’t have the food to feed these cattle, and there was drought, so they had these cattle drove up and killed by the hundreds of head.

I would go down and look at those cows—to me it was sorta like human beings, because they would just groan and go on—when they was killin’ ’em and they wasn’t dead. I remember one day I went down there, and all of a sudden it hit me. I seen the war.

When I listened to those cows and looked at how they were carryin‘ on, then I seen how horrible wars were. I thought then: Why do they have wars? To me, those cows were like women, moanin’ over their husbands, their children and the starvation and the places where they were, everything was wiped out. I ran up to the house and I sit up there a long time and then I went to cryin’ because they was doin’ these cows this way.

 

WE HAD A BIG FARM near Salinas, California. Lettuce, celery, cauliflower, broccoli…. In 1934, I bought a truck for $1600. Paid everything back within a year. I bought another. In 1936, I bought four trucks and trailers for $24,000. We had our own packinghouse. It got rough in ‘37 and ’38. There were too many crops, over-production. In those two years, we lost almost everything. We wound up owing the bank $78,000. In ‘39, ’40, ’41, we covered up our losses. The day I was to report to the assembly center, in 1941, we brought that mortgage down to $9,875. The
day I left for the internment camp, I walked into the bank, paid them $9,875.

We had an inventory of $80,000 worth of equipment. The people around, the whites, knew we had to leave. They were just standing around, waiting. I was thinking of storing it, but they told us we couldn’t do it. It would be hampering the war effort. So they set up appraisers. I got $6,000 for it.

After the war—I wound up in the army, counter-intelligence, would you believe it? (Laughs.) I took a trip back to Salinas. I couldn’t lease one acre of land. Nothing available. The people who took over our place, they’re doing quite well. (Laughs.) So I came to Chicago, and here I am. (Laughs.)

 

OH, GOD, one of the reasons I went broke is that a farmer would say: “I want to put an ad in the paper. I had to sell the place off.” He had so many head of Jersey cattle and a baler and a tractor and wagon and this and that. At the bottom of the ad, there was always the line: “And other articles too numerous to mention.”

You’d go to the auction and what would you see among the “articles too numerous to mention”? A doll, a couple of books, a basket with the Bible in it, the kids’ wagon…. Here you had the whole history of the family in all this junk. People pawing over it and buying it for a penny on the dollar.

I never had the heart—the guy wanted a forty-inch ad. Twenty-five cents an inch. That’s ten bucks, isn’t it? And he always wanted about fifty or a hundred handbills to put on telephone posts and fences. How could you charge a guy who’s dead broke for those extra handbills? You’d feel funny about charging for the ad in the first place.