Yonnondio: From the Thirties

by Tillie Olsen

  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 meb
be 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 …”

  Andy Kvaternick stumbles through the night. The late September wind fills the night with lost and crying voices and drowns all but the largest stars. Chop, chop goes the black sea of his mind. How wild and stormy inside, how the shipwrecked thoughts plunge and whirl. Andy lifts his face to the stars and breathes frantic, like an almost drowned man.

  But it is useless, Andy. The coal dust lies too far inside; it will lie there forever, like a hand squeezing your heart, choking at your throat. The bowels of earth have claimed you.

  Breathe and breathe. How fresh the night. But the air you will know will only be sour with sweat, and this strong wind on your body turn to the clammy hands of sweat tickling under your underwear.

  Breathe and breathe, Andy, turn your eyes to the stars. Their beauty, never known before, pricks like tears. You belong to a starless night now, unimaginably black, without light, like death. Perhaps the sweat glistening on the roof rock seen for an instant will seem like stars.

  And no more can you stand erect. You lose that heritage of man, too. You are brought now to fit earth’s intestines, stoop like a hunchback underneath, crawl like a child, do your man’s work lying on your side, stretched and tense as a corpse. The rats shall be your birds, and the rocks plopping in the water your music. And death shall be your wife, who woos you in the brief moments when coal leaps from a bursting side, when a cross-piece falls and barely misses your head, when you barely catch the ladder to bring you up out of the hole you are dynamiting.

  Breathe and lift your face to the night, Andy Kvaternick. Trying so vainly in some inarticulate way to purge your bosom of the coal dust. Your father had dreams. You too, like all boys, had dreams—vague dreams, of freedom and light and cheering throngs and happiness. The earth will take those too. You will leave them in, to replace the coal, to bear up the roof instead of the pillar the super ordered you to rob. Earth sucks you in, to spew out the coal, to make a few fat bellies fatter. Earth takes your dreams that a few may languidly lie on couches and trill “How exquisite” to paid dreamers.

  Someday the bowels will grow monstrous and swollen with these old tired dreams, swell and break, and strong fists batter the fat bellies, and skeletons of starved children batter them, and perhaps you will be slugged by a thug hired by the fat bellies, Andy Kvaternick. Or death will take you to bed at last, or you will strangle with that old crony of miners, the asthma.

  But walk in the night now, Andy Kvaternick, lift your face to the night, and desperately, like an almost drowned man, breathe and breathe. “Andy,” they are calling to you, in their lusty voices, your fellow workers—it is an old story to them now. “Have one on us.” The stuff burns down your throat. The thoughts lie shipwrecked and very still far underneath the black sea of your mind; you are gay and brave, knowing that you can never breathe the dust out. You have taken your man’s burden, and you have the miner’s only friend the earth gives, strong drink, Andy Kvaternick.

  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 fea
r 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?”

  Mazie smiled, but her heart was still sad. “Pop, does the boss man honest have a white shiny tub bigger than you and he turns somethin and the water comes out? Or is it a story? And does he honest have a toilet right inside the house? And silks on the floor?” She held her breath.

  “Sure, Big-eyes. And they eat on white tablecloths, a new one, every night.”

  “How come he aint livin like we do? How come we aint livin like him, Pop?”

  Why indeed? For a moment Jim was puzzled. “’Cause he’s a coal operator, that’s why.”

  “Oh”—another wall of things not understood gone up. Something made the difference. A big word. Like what happened to Miss Tikas when she was cut up. But how could he cut up a mine? His knife would have to be awful big.

  “But you could lick him, Pop, couldn’t you? Couldn’t you lick anybody?”

  “Sure.” And to prove it he told her an elaborate story of three dogs he fought, each big as a horse, finishing triumphantly, “Now, do you think anybody could lick your daddy?”

  “Pop, I can make the bacon when I stand up on the box, and I can wash the baby, honest. Pop, momma says I’m gonna get an edjication, and my hands white. Is that a story, Pop?”