Yonnondio: From the Thirties (2 page)

One of Olsen’s strengths as a writer is her portrait of mothers. As Mara Faulkner
has noted in
Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen
(University Press of Virginia, 1993), many women authors avoid the subject of motherhood
because it is an undeniable marker of gender that can hinder a woman’s success as
an author. In Olsen’s fiction a mother’s love is real and enriching but also draining
and costly for her. Anna Holbrook loves her children, but she is also exhausted by
the effort to care for them and ill from the repeated pregnancies that have depleted
her physical strength. During the winter she is pregnant in South Dakota, she moves
in a lethargy that is a “dream paralysis,” not cleaning the house, hardly cooking,
paying little attention to her husband or the kids. Jim, frustrated and pent up, resorts
at times to beating up on the children, but Anna “scarcely seemed to hear or care.”
The chaos and horror the family suffers as a result of Anna’s disengagement with anything
other than her body is captured in the episode in which the baby chicks Jim had left
in her care to keep warm in the oven are incinerated because of her forgetful neglect.

The terrible life poverty imposes on Jim and Anna acts out its psychic consequences
in the violence between them. Though there is love in the marriage and Anna and Jim
have occasional moments of caring for one another, she taunts him with his failure
to provide for the family and he exercises in physical and sexual force the power
he lacks in any other space of his life. The climax of this abuse comes when Jim rapes
his sick and exhausted wife. Mazie hears this assault without full understanding,
but the brute sounds of that night stay with her as the signature violence of sexuality.
For Anna, who miscarries as a result, this episode in her marriage is the “culminating
vision of hostile; overwhelming forces” that surround and break her. After that Anna
retreats into an inner remoteness that only once leaves her: on a long walk out of
Omaha beyond the suburbs, where the fresh air and nectar from the catalpa trees revive
the vision of nature’s beauty, Mazie sees once again a look of happiness “and selfness”
in her mother’s face.

Though the class and gender issues remain out of analytical focus, the details of
the lives of the characters speak in significant and iconoclastic ways in the traditions
of American fiction. The novel’s proletarian point is muted by the lack of political
understanding any of the characters attain, but its portrait of the misery of poverty
and the difficulties of motherhood jolts readers out of their comfort zone. Anna,
depleted by the birth of five children in a matter of seven years, is no Ma Joad.
Jim, exhausted from work and abusive at home, is no leader of the proletariat. Their
children are not exceptional but instead devise contrary play and engage in childish
violence to relieve the fears and anxieties they absorb from the world around them,
both at home and on the streets. Their daydreams are not rich in the lore of books
but spun out of the pop culture of movies, junk food at the corner grocery, and the
glittering shards of trash from the dump. The pathos is that all of them know isolated
moments of tenderness and beauty and can dream of better lives. Each is absorbed in
his or her own fears and misery and often blind to the sickness and fear in the others,
or too tired or weak or young to address effectively what is only dimly seen.

The Holbrooks do not transcend their misery. They may be “the people,” but unlike
Ma Joad’s survivors of the Depression, they do not all “go on.” The poverty and exhaustion
of work take their toll on the body and on the mind. Father abuses mother, and both
at times abuse or neglect the children. The children devise daydreams or mischief
to displace the terror of hunger and violence that invades the home and pollutes the
very air they breathe. The family’s desire for beauty and peace and affection is never
quite extinguished by the ugliness around them, but the brief moments in which their
lacerated lives are soothed haunt them like ghosts from a world whose reality cannot
be realized. The Holbrooks move downward in American society, encountering too few
friendly or generous faces in their desperate journey. If they find little real hope
or kindness in the world, they embody an indomitable will for life. Despite the hostile
forces that consume their energy and degrade their lives, the last sounds we hear
from the Holbrooks are ones of laughter and hope. Gathered in the sweltering kitchen
in the brutal heat of a summer that enhances every other misery, they laugh together
as the baby Bess bangs a fruit jar lid in clamorous ecstasy that proclaims,
“I can do, I use my powers; I! I!”
The human spirits inventiveness, its will to survive and know the joy and power of
selfhood, sounds in defiance of the litany of miseries and hostile forces that make
their unrelenting claims on the lives of all.

Olsen wrote this story when she was a young woman living close to the conditions she
describes, struggling with her own poverty and motherhood, yearning to organize the
working class and somehow find an identity for herself as an emerging writer. Because
she did not revise the manuscript when she returned to it many years later, the grim
circumstances of the family’s life are untouched by the softening shades of memory.
Baby Bess’s assertion of “
I! I!”
is a tentative gesture toward a time when things “get tolerable” and they might breathe
deeply again of air that does not stifle life. Despite the youthful awkwardness of
the unfinished narrative and the lack of political or historical contexts that might
have provided a fuller thematic development,
Yonnondio: From the Thirties
remains a powerful reading experience and an important addition to an American literary
tradition in which the tragedy of the poor and uneducated is too often neglected.

For Jack

Lament for the aborigines … the word itself a dirge
…

No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:

Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn’d they disappear;

To-day gives place, and fades—the cities, farms, factories fade;

A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the air for a moment,

Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

from
Walt Whitman’s “Yonnondio”

The time at the opening of this
book is the early 1920’s;
the place: a Wyoming mining town.

ONE

The whistles always woke Mazie. They pierced into her sleep like some guttural-voiced
metal beast, tearing at her; breathing a terror. During the day if the whistle blew,
she knew it meant death—somebody’s poppa or brother, perhaps her own—in that fearsome
place below the ground, the mine.

“God damn that blowhorn,” she heard her father mutter. Creak of him getting out of
bed. The door closed, with yellow light from the kerosene lamp making a long crack
on the floor. Clatter of dishes. Her mother’s tired, grimy voice.

“What’ll ya have? Coffee and eggs? There aint no bacon.”

“Dont bother with anything. Havent time. I gotta stop by Kvaternicks and get the kid.
He’s starting work today.”

“What’re they going to give him?”

“Little of everything at first, I guess, trap, throw switches. Maybe timberin.”

“Well, he’ll be starting one punch ahead of the old man. Chris began as a breaker
boy.” (Behind both stolid faces the claw of a buried thought—and maybe finish like
him, buried under slaty roof that the company hadn’t bothered to timber.)

“He’s thirteen, aint he?” asked Anna.

“I guess. Nearer to fourteen.”

“Marie was tellin me, it would break Chris’s heart if he only knew. He wanted the
kid to be different, get an edjication.”

“Yeah? Them foreigners do have funny ideas.”

“Oh, I dunno. Then she says that she wants the girls to become nuns so they won’t
have to worry where the next meal’s comin from, or have to have kids.”

“Well, what other earthly use can a woman have, I’d like to know?”

“She says she doesnt want ’em raisin a lot of brats to get their heads blowed off
in the mine. I guess she takes Chris’s … passing away pretty hard. It’s kinda affected
her mind. She keeps talkin about the old country, the fields, and what they thought
it would be like here—all buried in da bowels of earth, she finishes.”

“Say, what does she think she is, a poet?”

“And she talks about the coal. Says it oughta be red, and let people see how they
get it with blood.”

“Quit your woman’s blabbin,” said Jim Holbrook, irritated suddenly. “I’m goin now.”

Morning sounds. Scrunch of boots. The tinkle of his pail, swinging. Shouted greetings
to fellow workers across the street. Her mother turning down the yellow light and
creaking into bed. All the sounds of the morning weaving over the memory of the whistle
like flowers growing lovely over a hideous corpse. Mazie slept again.

Anna Holbrook lay in the posture of sleep. Thoughts, like worms, crept within her.
Of Marie Kvaternick, of Chris’s dreams for the boys, of the paralyzing moment when
the iron throat of the whistle shrieked forth its announcement of death, and women
poured from every house to run for the tipple. Of her kids—Mazie, Will, Ben, the baby.
Mazie for all her six and a half years was like a woman sometimes. It’s living like
this does it, she thought; makes ’em old before their time. Thoughts of the last accident
writhed in her blood—there were whispered rumors that the new fire boss, the super’s
nephew, never made the trips to see if there was gas. Didn’t the men care? They never
let on. The whistle. In her a deep man’s voice suddenly arose, moaning over and over,
“God, God, God.”

The sun sent its grimy light through the window of the three-room wooden shack, twitching
over Mazie’s face, filtering across to where Anna Holbrook bent over the washtub.
Mazie awoke suddenly; the baby was crying. She stumbled over to the wooden box that
held him, warming the infant to her body. Then she dressed, changed the baby’s diaper
with one of the old flour sacks her mother used for the purpose and went into the
kitchen.

“Ma, what’s there to eat?”

“Coffee. It’s on the stove. Wake Will and Ben and dont bother me. I got washin to
do.”

Later. “Ma?”

“Yes.”

“What’s an edication?”

“An edjication?” Mrs. Holbrook arose from amidst the shifting vapors of the washtub
and, with the suds dripping from her red hands, walked over and stood impressively
over Mazie. “An edjication is what you kids are going to get. It means your hands
stay white and you read books and work in an office. Now, get the kids and scat. But
dont go too far, or I’ll knock your block off.”

Mazie lay under the hot Wyoming sun, between the outhouse and the garbage dump. There
was no other place for Mazie to lie, for the one patch of
green in the yard was between these two spots. From the ground arose a nauseating
smell. Food had been rotting in the garbage piles for years. Mazie pushed her mind
hard against things half known, not known. “I am Mazie Holbrook,” she said softly.
“I am aknowen things. I can diaper a baby. I can tell ghost stories. I know words
and words. Tipple. Edjication. Bug dust. Supertendent. My poppa can lick any man in
this here town. Sometimes the whistle blows and everyone starts a-runnen. Things come
a-blowen my hair and it is soft, like the baby laughin.” A phrase trembled into her
mind, “Bowels of earth.” She shuddered. It was mysterious and terrible to her. “Bowels
of earth. It means the mine. Bowels is the stummy. Earth is a stummy and mebbe she
ets the men that come down. Men and daddy goin’ in like the day and comin out black.
Earth black and pop’s face and hands black, and he spits from his mouth black. Night
comes and it is black. Coal is black—it makes a fire. The sun is makin a fire on me,
but it is not black. Some color I am not knowen it is,” she said wistfully, “but I’ll
have that learnin’ someday. Poppa says the ghosts down there start a fire. That’s
what blowed Sheen McEvoy’s face off so it’s red. It made him crazy. Night be comen
and everything becomes like under the ground. I think I could find coal then. And
a lamp like poppa’s comes out, but in the sky.
Momma looks all day as if she thinks she’s goin to be hearin something. The whistle
blows. Poppa says it is the ghosts laughin ’cause they have hit a man in the stummy,
or on the head. Chris, that happenened too. Chris, who sang those funny songs. He
was a furriner. Bowels of earth they put him in. Callin it dead. Mebbe it’s for coal,
more coal. That’s one thing I’m not a-knowen. Day comes and night comes and the whistle
blows and payday comes. Like the flats runnin on the tipple they come—one right a-followen
the other. Mebbe I am black inside too…. The bowels of earth…. The things I know but
am not knowen…. Sun on me and bowels of earth under …”

For several weeks Jim Holbrook had been in an evil mood. The whole household walked
in terror. He had nothing but heavy blows for the children, and he struck Anna too
often to remember. Every payday he clumped home, washed, went to town, and returned
hours later, dead drunk. Once Anna had questioned him timidly concerning his work;
he struck her on the mouth with a bellow of “Shut your damn trap.”

Anna too became bitter and brutal. If one of the children was in her way, if they
did not obey her instantly, she would hit at them in a blind rage, as if it were some
devil she was exorcising. Afterward, in the midst of her work, regret would cramp
her heart at the memory of the tear-stained little faces. “’Twasn’t them I was beatin
up on. Somethin just seems to get into me when I have somethin to hit.”

Friday came again. Jim returned with his pay, part money, most company script. Little
Will, in high spirits, ran to meet him, not noticing his father’s sullen face. Tugging
on his pant’s leg, Willie begged for a ghost story of the mine. He got a clout on
the head that sent him sprawling. “Keep your damn brats
from under my feet,” Jim threatened in a violent rage, while Anna only stared at him,
almost paralyzed, “and stop looking at me like a stuck pig.”

The light from the dusk came in, cold, malignant. Anna sat in the half dark of the
window, her head bent over her sewing in the attitude of a woman weeping. Willie huddled
against her skirt, whimpering. Outside the wind gibbered and moaned. The room was
suddenly chill. Some horror, some sense of evil seemed on everything.

It came to Mazie like dark juices of undefined pain, pouring into her, filling the
heart in her breast till it felt big, like the world. Fear came that her heart would
push itself out, roll out like a ball. She clutched the baby closer to her, tight,
tight, to hold the swollen thing inside. Her dad stood in the washtub, nude, splashing
water on his big chunky body. The menacing light was on him, too. Fear for him came
to Mazie, yet some alien sweetness mixed with it, watching him there.

“I would be a-cryen,” she whispered to herself, “but all the tears is stuck inside
me. All the world is a-cryen, and I don’t know for why. And the ghosts may get daddy.
Now he’s goin’ away, but he’ll come back with somethin sweet but sicklike hangin on
his breath, and hit momma and start the baby a-bawlen. If it was all a dream, if I
could only just wake up and daddy’d be smilin, and momma laughin, and us play-in.
All the world a-cryen and I don’t know for why…. Maybe daddy’ll know—daddy knowen
everything.” The huge question rose in her, impossible to express, too huge to understand.
She ached with it. “I’ll ask Daddy.” To ask him—to force him into some recognition
of her existence, her desire, her emotions.

As Jim Holbrook strode down the dirt street, he heard a fine patter-patter and a thin
“Pop.” He wheeled. It was Mazie. “You little brat,” he said, the anger he had felt
still smoldering in him. “What’re you runnin away from home for? Get back or I’ll
skin you alive.”

She came toward him, half cringing. “Pop, lemme go with you. Pop, I wanna know what…
what makes people a-cryen. Why don’t you tell us ghost stories no more, Pop?” The
first words had tumbled out, but now a silence came. “Don’t send me home, Pop.”

The rough retort Jim Holbrook had meant to make vanished before the undersized figure
of Mazie, outlined so clearly against the cold sunset. In some vague way, the questions
hurt him. What call’s a kid got, he thought, asking questions like that? Though the
cramp in his back from working, lying on his side all day, shot through him like hot
needles, he stopped and took her hand.

“Don’t be worryin your head with such things, Big-eyes—it’ll bust. Wait’ll you grow
up.”

“Pop, you said there was ghosts in the mine, black, not white, so’s you couldn’t see
’em. And they chased a feller, and then when they got him they laughed, but people
think it’s just the whistle. Pop, they wouldn’t chase you, would they?” The fear was
out at last.

“Why,” chuckled Jim, “I’d like to see ’em try it. I’d just throw them over my shoulder,
like this.” He lifted her, swung her over his shoulder, set her down. “My right shoulder,
or it wouldn’t work. And then I’d pin ’em down with the crossbar so they’d have as
much chance as a turkey at Thanksgiving. Now, how’d you like to ride to town on poppa’s
shoul-diehorse and buggy, and get served with a sucker?”