“Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said and put out his hand. “I have to say, even after we talked last night, I still wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“Well, Mr. Pickett, here I am. You have Miss Hickok to thank for bringing all this to my attention.” She opened the passenger door before he could do it for her. “Now, let’s not waste a minute. I want to see these camps for myself.”
Clarence drove us out of Morgantown, on the winding mountain roads, through Osage once more and then on to Cassville, about three miles west on Route 7. He slowed a little as the dirt lane became the main road through town and cut between two empty buildings. One looked to have been a grocery store at some point, the other perhaps a doctor’s clinic, but both were shuttered and there wasn’t a stick left in the woodpile out front. I watched Nora taking it all in.
He parked at the top of a ridge and helped each of us out of the car. I sucked down a cigarette while he loaded a small pushcart with sacks of donated canned beans and stew, preserved vegetables, salt pork, and flour. Nora clutched her satchel. It looked to be stuffed to the gills and I wondered at the correspondence and reports and other evidence of important tasks that it might contain—and what she was doing bringing it with her into the camp.
The three of us walked down the tree-studded hill to a cluster of tent homes in a clearing. It had to be at least ninety degrees already— and just past 10:00 a.m.—and the humidity cast everything into a haze. In his measured baritone, Clarence delivered the same explanation he had given me about the pollution in the river and the effects of the sludge on the poor saps who lived here. I understood that he had been repeating this same address for years now, to anyone who would listen, over and over and over again. Poor Clarence, the oracle everyone ignored. I found it admirable that he didn’t see any reason to soften the rough edges of the gritty details just because he was now in the presence of the first lady.
She walked beside him, nearly as tall as he was, her posture erect. I had come to know this as a kind of barometer: the straighter her shoulders, the more intense her focus. Besides having removed her jacket, she seemed undaunted by the heat, but a telltale oval of perspiration on her lower back was already soaking through her blouse.
“This place is just about the same as the one you saw yesterday, Miss Hickok,” Clarence said. “But here we’ve got more immigrants. Greeks, Italians, Russians. Some Hungarians. The mine companies started bringing them in as scabs when the white workers organized years ago. Then, of course, the foreigners started to organize, so the mine companies brought Negroes up from Georgia to replace them. They mostly live a mile or so down the river. Same conditions, same troubles.”
Nora nodded once, absorbing the details. Some heads poked out of the canvas as we approached, the children zeroing in on our cart of food, and Nora strode to the first tent, where a man with a dark beard and thick, black eyebrows emerged. Behind him stood a woman and three children. The smallest was about two years old, and she toddled out into the sun. All of them were clothed, which was an improvement over Osage, but none of them wore shoes.
“Well, hello,” Nora said. She stooped down to face the girl, her navy skirt pooling in the black dirt around her ankles, and put out her palm. “What’s your name?”
The girl peered at her with a suspicious squint and then glanced back at her father. His expression was no more welcoming. When she turned back to Nora, she noticed the small luminescent pearl studs in the first lady’s ears and reached out to touch one.
“Ana,” the man barked. The toddler withdrew her hand.
Nora stood up. “Good morning. I apologize for the intrusion, but could I take a few moments of your time? Ask you some questions? My name’s Eleanor.”
He hesitated, looking down at her black oxfords, but finally shook the hand she offered. Maybe her shoes had made him uneasy; the fact that she had any at all marked her as an outsider. He probably thought she was a nurse, or a nun. This idea made me smile.
“Petros Riga,” he said. “This my wife, Agnes.”
They invited us inside the tent, though it was impossible for all of us to fit, so Nora went all the way in while Clarence and I hovered beneath the open flaps. Clarence handed Mr. Riga a bag of food, and Mrs. Riga rushed to put it away in the tin box where they stored their meager provisions before the children took account of everything that was inside. But their insistence wore her down and she opened a can of beans and scooped them into two bowls. The two older children devoured them with their hands before Ana even had a chance to smell them. Mr. and Mrs. Riga insisted that Nora sit down. She eased her satchel to the floor beside her chair, undid the clasp, and slipped her hand inside. When it emerged, her reedy fingers held three ripe apricots.
You would have thought she held a loaded gun, the way everyone froze. Nora handed one of the apricots to Ana, who scrutinized it and brought it to her nose. She opened her mouth then and licked its skin.
Nora laughed. “Let’s cut it,” she said. Mrs. Riga got her a knife and she sliced the fruit in half and pulled out the stone. Nora handed half to Ana and we all watched in silence as the little girl took a small bite. She chewed a moment and then her eyes widened and she emitted a tiny squeal. She turned to her mother and extended the arm that held the rest of her piece. Then she shrieked something that sounded like “yevsi!”—taste, Mr. Riga explained—and Mrs. Riga leaned down and took a bite. She smiled at her daughter, her eyes pooling.
Nora cut the other two apricots and passed them around, and Ana climbed into her lap and leaned back against her while Mr. and Mrs. Riga answered Nora’s gentle but thorough questions about their troubles. I remembered how the body odor and my fear of lice or worse had kept me standing at a distance from Ruth and her children the day before. I saw that my shrinking from them must have been obvious, and I felt like such a heel now as I watched Nora hold Ana. The little girl could no longer resist the lure of Nora’s pearl earring; Nora plucked it right off of her ear and handed it to Ana so she could examine it closer.
The Rigases’ story was the same one we’d heard in the last town. Mr. Riga had been let go by the mines over a year ago. The children had no access to medical care or reliable schooling, not to mention clean water, or decent clothes for the coming winter months.
“I know it not seem,” Mr. Riga said, gesturing to their meager belongings, “but I hard worker.”
“Of course you are,” Nora said.
“Some of mens in mine call me ‘dirty Jew.’” He threw up his hands and laughed. “I not even Jew! But who care, Jew, not Jew, if every man work hard? All we want is to work.”
Nora nodded and rose from the chair, setting Ana down on the bare dirt floor of the tent. She extracted the earring from the girl’s tiny hand and put it back on her ear. Then she shook each family member’s hand, including Ana’s, and thanked them for sharing the information about their lives. I noticed that she was careful not to make any promises of a particular kind of help, but then the Rigases could hardly have expected that since they had no idea they were talking to the wife of the president.
We went to seven or eight other tents in the hollow and met families from places I might not have been able to identify on a map—Serbia, Lithuania—and people who didn’t even seem to have a country, who had been roaming as long as they could remember, led only by the basic need for work. To each family, Nora gave a handful of apricots. The satchel was full not of reports and documents but fruit. Nora had known just what to do to put the people at ease so that they would talk to her.
I tried to crack a joke or two as we walked, but the place was so damned somber they didn’t stick. Once I saw her nearly lose her composure when we passed by a little boy who stood in the opening of his family’s tent, clutching a shivering white rabbit in his arms. His world-weary older sister stood behind him and when she saw us looking at them, she said, “He thinks we ain’t gonna eat his bunny, but we are.” And the little boy, perhaps thinking we were the executioners coming at last, took off running wit
h the rabbit under his chin. I glanced at Nora to see what gentle comment she would make to the girl, but instead Nora turned her face away, toward where I stood. I caught her eye and she gave me a pleading look, her mouth stretched briefly into the expression that precedes weeping. But, in a flash, the look was gone.
The rest of the tour was more of the same. We saw cases of the skin condition with the oozing sores again, and deformities that seemed to have occurred at birth. We saw plenty of bed bug bites and infections and broken teeth and blindness. Having lived in this place would be like a scar on these children’s hearts forever, even if they did get out someday. There were some things you could never get over. I knew that for sure.
How is Ruth today? I found myself wondering, though I could have guessed the answer.
Even steadfast, patient Clarence was starting to look a little frayed as the hours wore on. “Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said as we left behind a sobbing woman who had recognized the first lady, dropped to her knees, and begun a cadenced prayer of gratitude in Italian. “I wonder if it isn’t time for us to call it a day.”
Nora appeared not to hear him; she never seemed to notice that the people around her didn’t have access to the same limitless energy she had. She took a small pad and pencil out of the pocket of her skirt and jotted down some notes, pausing to count the tents that were visible from where we stood, and wrote that down too.
The sun had slipped from view, but it stained the sky the color of Nora’s apricots. All around us, fireflies sparked as we trudged up the hill. “I want to see more tomorrow,” she said, and stopped again to take more notes. “I want to meet the families in the Negro enclave and hear about their children’s schooling. We know they have to be worse off than all these others combined.”
Clarence raised his eyebrows. If he had expected this politician’s wife to sail in for a brief visit and then decamp for the country club, he was mistaken. “All right,” he said, nearly laughing. “I’ll come to collect you from the hotel first thing in the morning.”
She nodded, and I thought about how it had been hours since she’d said a word to me. Where we stood on the hillside—Clarence and I side by side, a few feet apart, and Nora a bit farther down—we made a little constellation in the shape of an arrow. Nora was its sharpened tip, facing away.
Chapter Fourteen
August 23, 1933
It was dark by the time Clarence delivered us to the hotel in Morgantown, to what now felt like the height of civilization. We wished him a good night’s sleep and made our way through the lobby to a small breakfast room, where two covered plates waited at a small table: spaghetti and meatballs Nora had arranged for the desk manager to bring from the diner before it closed.
“You think of everything, Nora,” I said as we fell into our chairs, exhausted.
“Well, we have to eat,” she said.
My back ached and my eyes felt heavy as sandbags, but I wasted no time in twirling my fork in the steaming pasta and relishing the sweet onion and beef. The manager brought me a telegram that had come in from Harry Hopkins. The first page was a message about my report—I KNEW YOU’D BE PERFECT FOR THE JOB—WELL DONE. H.H.—and the second contained my upcoming itinerary. After Morgantown, I was on to Kentucky, and then, in a few weeks, upstate New York and New England. The thought of more travel, with crowded buses and dingy hotels, sounded awful. I already missed Prinz, the panting pillow of him on my feet. For now at least, I told myself, Nora and I were together.
For every three bites I took, Nora took just one and chewed it slowly, lost in thought. She gave me a distant smile. Her collar drooped and her hair was a wreck. “Hick, it was as awful as you said it would be. I have never seen anything like it.”
“Isn’t it?” I said. “It makes me so angry.”
“Me too,” she said, staring into the middle distance once more. I might have thought our shared outrage would draw us closer. But Nora had spent the day treating me with such impersonal professionalism. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
“Well, we can be sad and we can be angry,” she said, pushing the still-half-full plate away and dropping her napkin beside it. “But feeling things won’t help those people a bit. It only matters what we do.”
“And what is that?”
She opened her mouth to answer but then stopped. She met my eyes, finally, and gave me a half smile. “Hick, this is the perfect place to launch the housing program I’ve been talking about for years. I’ve been thinking of it all day. I can see it now, how I might present the idea to Franklin. I won’t say more yet, but I have a lot of work to do tonight.”
“That’s all right,” I said, trying not to be hurt that she wouldn’t confide in me yet. “I don’t mind if you work. I’m so tired, I think I could sleep through the sound of ten typewriters, much less one.”
“Oh … ,” she said. Her hand was on the table, but it didn’t come any closer to mine. “I went ahead and booked a second room.”
My face fell before I could stop it.
Nora glanced over at the desk manager out in the lobby, who seemed absorbed in the task of sorting phone messages. She lowered her voice. “You know I’d rather stay with you. But I needed to make the trip look legitimate. And plus, I didn’t know how long you would be staying, when you need to move on to your next assignment.”
Of course, she could have asked me those questions, coordinated her plans with mine. But she hadn’t. I wondered if I’d made some misstep along the way, on our vacation or here in West Virginia, that had caused her to retract. What an awful feeling, to be punished but not to know what for.
I plastered a smile on my face. “It’s okay, Nora. I understand.”
After two big glasses of bourbon, I spent a sleepless night in my hotel room, rising twice for water to wash away the salty tang of the tomato sauce and then twice more to use the bathroom. Even with the small window wedged open, the room was stuffy, and I flopped from side to side on the bed, trying to get comfortable. My exhausted mind shuffled through a jumble of images. The sores on the children’s skin morphed into the flesh of apricots, sticky sweet sirens for the flies. Nora’s white, sweat-soaked blouse became the ash in the New Brunswick clearing where we’d seen the aftermath of the forest fire. My thoughts returned to the walk to Ruth Johnson’s tent, but each dirt path I turned down in my mind led to my childhood home in Bowdle. When the alarm clock rang, I felt as though I had never closed my eyes. I called Nora’s room and told her I had a terrible headache and that she and Clarence should go on without me. Then I pulled the covers over my head and finally slept.
Around two in the afternoon, she knocked on my door. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and let her in.
“Good morning, Hick,” she said, her smile warmer than it had been the day before. She set a mug of coffee and a turkey sandwich on the dresser and kissed me. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” I said, and it was true. Both the kiss and the sleep had done me good, and I was relieved to have skipped act three of the opera of human suffering that was playing out in these mountain towns. I had seen enough to last me the rest of my days.
“Well, eat that, have some coffee, and then get dressed.” She opened the curtains and began tidying the bed with an efficiency that made me chuckle. I marveled at her. How was it that she was still here, still unnoticed by reporters? How was it that the president hadn’t sent out the cavalry to bring her home? The answer, of course, was that FDR knew better by now than to argue with his wife. Once she had made up her mind to take on a project, neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities could separate that woman from her aim.
“Hurry up.” She clapped her hands with deathly cheer. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Twenty minutes later, we were sailing in her convertible southeast of Morgantown on a shoulderless paved road that dropped off on each side into deep gullies. The prospect of one of her tires slipping off the road and stranding us in the middle of nowhere kept my
pulse racing. Here and there, we saw a shack or a roadside stand heaped with onions from someone’s garden, but for the most part the winding road was empty as it cut through the deep green hills. I inhaled the scent of honeysuckle and the lush trees baking in the heat; behind us a cloud of dust curled up to the sky.
“Where are we going?”
Nora turned to me and smiled. “You’ll see.”
I could sense we were climbing in elevation. The air felt cleaner here, and there was more light than there had been down in the mining camps. An incongruously grand farmhouse came into view, surrounded by dilapidated outbuildings and a sprawling verdant meadow. Nora slowed the car and pulled off to the right. When she got out of the car, I followed and stood beside her with my hand shielding my eyes from the sun.
“This is a farm owned by a man named Richard Arthur,” Nora said. The meadow was full of grasshoppers that sounded like a hundred hissing radiators. “It’s about a thousand acres, all within Preston County. Before Mr. Arthur owned it, and before the man before him, a man from Virginia named John Fairfax did. He was a close friend of George Washington, I’m told.”
I gaped at her. The big empty land was giving me the willies. “You didn’t bring me all the way out here for a historical tour, did you? Because I wouldn’t be surprised if that field is full of snakes.”
“Better than bed bugs and lice,” she said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that this land has pedigree.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Let’s put it in a telegram to the DAR. Now can we get back in the car?” The sun was blinding and I was still a little hungover, more from my unsettling dreams than the booze.
Nora didn’t move. “Important things happen on land with pedigree. I believe in that.”
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