In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon.
So it was said. He could not recall where he had heard it, or from whom; it had been somewhere on the rivers of Brazil. He had never watched the lanterns at the time of the full moon; when he remembered it was always the dark of the moon or beyond the tropics. Yet the idea of the moths in the high darkness, straining upward, filled him with longing, and at these times he would know that he had not found what he was looking for, nor come closer to discovering what it was.
Through this powerful evocation of place, Peter Matthiessen, like all great writers, sets off on a journey through the human condition, and so, in his own way, does David Guterson in Snow Falling on Cedars. Though his setting is different, a fishing village on Puget Sound, Guterson uses character as deftly as Matthiessen and history with the power of Robert Penn Warren.
Before I read Snow Falling on Cedars the history at the heart of its story had never had a face. I remember feeling a vague discomfort when I learned of Japanese internment camps, wondering how, even in the middle of World War II, the United States could do such a thing. We were, after all, the land of the free. The numbers alone were unsettling enough—110,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were born in this country, rounded up and taken away to the camps; but it was not until 1994, with the publication of this novel, that I began to think about what really happened.
It was not the only time, of course, that a novelist had accomplished what historians couldn’t; Kurt Vonnegut had done the same in Slaughterhouse-Five, had seen the literary power in glossed-over history, and so had Warren in All the King’s Men. And now here was Guterson, sketching the hysteria after Pearl Harbor, the shock and the rage that swept through the country—and specifically, in this case, through an island community on Puget Sound, dividing whites and Japanese Americans, all of them sons and daughters of immigrants. Soon after the attack, an order came from the U.S. War Relocation Authority: all islanders of Japanese descent had eight days to get ready to move. They were taken away on a slow-moving train, a scene vaguely reminiscent of those unfolding in Europe as the S.S. forces rounded up the Jews. There was one major difference, of course. No gas chambers awaited the Japanese; there was instead, for this group of prisoners, a single square mile in the Mojave Desert.
The bitter wind came down off the mountains and through the barbed wire and hurled the desert sand in their faces. The camp was only half-finished; there were not enough barracks to go around. Some people, on arriving, had to build their own in order to have a place to sleep. There were crowds everywhere, thousands of people in a square mile of desert scoured to dust by army bulldozers, and there was nowhere for a person to find solitude. The barracks all looked the same . . . On the fourth night a young man in Barrack 17 shot his wife and then himself while they lay in bed together—somehow he had smuggled in a gun. “Shikata ga nai,” people said. “It cannot be helped.”
It was not the first time—and certainly not the last—that fear would take its toll on the American psyche, and a generation later President Reagan issued an apology for the nation. Signing a resolution passed by Congress, he acknowledged a moment of national shame, rooted, he said, in “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
If Snow Falling on Cedars captures the reality of that time, it is, in the end, more than a novel about the wounds of war. It is also a story of love, tender and star-crossed, and of a community struggling to do the right thing after a Japanese American is accused of murder. As the characters in the novel come vividly to life, perhaps the most intriguing is Hatsue Imada, a Japanese American girl searching through her own multilayered identity—the deeply held traditions of her family, her love of a boy who was not Japanese, her love of the sea and the cedar-shrouded island on which she was born: this tiny microcosm in the heart of Puget Sound where the passions of war were tearing neighbors apart. For Hatsue all of these complications receded only in the deep island forests, a place she had shared with her lover, Ishmael, and which beckoned to her when she was most alone.
Deep among the trees she lay on a fallen log and gazed far up branchless trunks. A late winter wind blew the tops around, inducing in her a momentary vertigo. She admired a Douglas fir’s complicated bark, followed its grooves to the canopy of branches two hundred feet above. The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.
Such was the poetry of Guterson’s prose, the sensuality, history and strong sense of place, which, for me at least, put him in the company of Matthiessen and Warren. I have returned to each of these books many times, driven, in part, by a case of writer’s envy, but more than that by the lure of the truth—by a sense of simple beauty in the world and the terrible complexity of the heart.
8
Forgotten Histories
featuring:
The Grapes of Wrath—John Steinbeck
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee—Dee Brown
Also, Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard, Carey McWilliams, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen, Vine Deloria Jr.
I
It was always a hard way of life and Woody Guthrie sang about it all. When he was a boy, his father had told him about a lynching, how he had been there, had been a part of it, and how one of those dangling from the bridge was a woman—a black woman, he said, and she was mean; tried to kill the sheriff before they took her away, and her son was there and he was mean, too, and finally they got what was coming to them. It happened on an Oklahoma afternoon, and there were photographs that somebody took; later made them into a post card, and that was how Laura Nelson and her boy went down in history, hanging side by side above the river.
Woody wrote three songs about it, about his Klansman father and this bitter land in which he was raised, but he also knew there was more to the story—more to the land and the people who coaxed a hard living from it before it finally gave way to the dust. Woody was born in 1912, a luckless son of the southern plains when people still thought they could turn it into farms. For a while the rains fell steady and strong, especially as the first dirt farmers came and plowed away the deep prairie grasses that had always held fast to the soil. The men plowed their fields in long, straight rows and their cotton crops stole nutrients from the earth, and finally in the summer of 1930 the rains went away. Month after month, year after year, the land grew dry and the hard prairie winds carried clouds of dust all the way to the Atlantic.
On April 14, 1935, winds of sixty miles an hour descended on the plains and stirred a mountain of dust so high it blotted out the sun. The prairie people called the day “Black Sunday.” Not long after, Woody Guthrie wrote a song called “Black Pneumonia” about that day and a few others like it: about people getting sick when they tried to breathe. Woody was living in Texas then, in a Panhandle town just across the state line, and like thousands of his neighbors in that part of the West—in Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, South Dakota, but most of all in Oklahoma—he set off in search of better times.
Many of the Okies, as they were then known, wound up in California, flooding the migrant labor camps and sometimes working for starvation wages. Woody, for his part, kept writing songs, kept trying to tell the story of hard times, for he was a “small-c” communist, flirting with the theories of Karl Marx, and writing tribute songs to Pretty Boy Floyd, Franklin Roosevelt, and Jesus Christ—to people who seemed to care about the poor. But mostly he wrote about ordinary folks, and his most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” proclaimed a my-country-too kind of patriotism, offering the radical affirmation that America belonged to its working people as much as it belonged to the rich.
A generation later another Dust Bowl poet came along, or rather a poet of the Okie refugees who had suffered oppression in California, pushed to the point almost of g
iving up. This is the way Merle Haggard told the story:
I remember daddy praying for a better way of life
But I don’t recall a change of any size
Just a little loss of courage as their age began to show
And more sadness in my mama’s hungry eyes.
These were artists who tried to put into words the dark underside of the American story, the disillusionment at the hands of a country they loved, and they did it in bursts of poetry and feeling. As they tried to make the story come alive, they knew with certainty and deep gratitude that they were not alone. There was also John Steinbeck, whose iconic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, became a centerpiece in the telling.
Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, a point of destination for the Okies, and as a young but well-established writer in the 1930s, he saw the misery taking shape all around. It was a human tragedy; that much was clear—all these people driven by calamity from their homes, hoping to start again in California, to find a piece of fertile land and to help make it bloom. They didn’t mind picking another man’s crops, whether cotton or grapes, cauliflower or lettuce; for a while at least it would be all right, for they would work hard and put a little money aside and pretty soon they would have their own place. They could see when they crossed the last mountain range that there were still vast acres waiting for the plow.
Soon, however, they discovered something else. There were simply too many refugees, too many people scrambling for jobs and driving down wages almost to the point that it didn’t pay to work. But they had to work, for what else could they do, assuming they were lucky enough to get the jobs. In 1936, John Steinbeck, who had studied journalism at Stanford University, accepted an assignment from the San Francisco News to write a series of articles about the Okies. He enlisted the aid of a federal bureaucrat by the name of Tom Collins, a thinnish man with high cheekbones and a little mustache and a look of kindness deep in his eyes. Collins was director of a migrant labor camp in Kern County, California, a New Deal experiment that became a study in grassroots democracy.
In the Kern County camp, the migrants mostly governed themselves. Paying rent of a dollar a week, they elected a Central Committee to make the camp rules, and those families too broke to pay any rent worked it off by doing maintenance chores in the camp. The workers policed the grounds themselves, and the local and state police of California, who were developing a reputation for brutality, were not allowed in the camp without a warrant. As federal administrator of the facility, Collins understood that it was a far cry from conditions elsewhere, and as he and Steinbeck set off on a tour of the state, the stark realities came quickly into focus. As Steinbeck wrote in the San Francisco News, “In California we find a curious attitude toward a group that makes our agriculture successful. They are needed and they are hated.”
The hatred was an institutional thing, Steinbeck concluded, a mixture of bigotry and economics. In “The Harvest Gypsies,” his seven-part newspaper account, he set out to explain how it worked. For generations, he noted, agriculture in California had been unlike anything the Dust Bowl refugees had ever seen. In California, farming was a business, not the product of one man’s sweat or love of the soil, but a corporate undertaking with decisions made in distant boardrooms. The faceless people who ran these vast farms knew they had a ready supply of labor—tenant farmers whose lives had come apart in Oklahoma, who had made the crossing to California, starting out with almost nothing, watching children die along the way, or perhaps grandparents too old to start again; and they struggled to keep old cars running and old tires patched, and when they finally made it to the promised land, they were almost always broke. So they took whatever jobs they could find, in a peach orchard maybe with two thousand others, and bought food on credit at the corporate store, and pretty soon they were working for no money at all, toiling simply to pay off debt. Then the peaches were picked and the workers moved on, settling most often in squatters’ camps, building huts of scraps from the garbage dump, and their bellies were empty and their eyes were glazed with desperation and hurt.
“The workers are herded about like animals,” Steinbeck wrote. “Every possible method is used to make them feel inferior and insecure. At the slightest suspicion that the men are organizing they are run from the ranch at the points of guns. The large ranch owners know that if organization is ever effected there will be the expense of toilets, showers, decent living conditions and a raise in wages.”
And so the situation grew worse. Sometimes smallpox descended on the camps, wiping out whole families, or children died from too little food, leaving their parents, as Steinbeck put it, with “that paralyzed dullness with which the mind protects itself against too much pain.” But perhaps the most bitter image of all came in the winter of 1938. Two years after his newspaper series, with the migrant story still tearing at his conscience, Steinbeck drove to the town of Visalia, where the rain had fallen for nearly three weeks. He was there on assignment for Life magazine, and the scene of misery and disease left his objectivity in shreds.
“The water is a foot deep in the tents,” he wrote, “and the children are up on the beds and there is no food and no fire, and the county has taken off all the nurses because ‘the problem is so great we can’t do anything about it.’ So they do nothing.”
It was apparently that experience that propelled him to write The Grapes of Wrath, to move beyond his journalistic efforts, and even his first attempt at a novel, to write something more ambitious, more disturbing and grand. Writing in longhand, as he always did, he began to craft a scene about the flood:
The rain began with gusty showers, pauses and downpours; and then gradually it settled to a single tempo, small drops and a steady beat, rain that was gray to see through, rain that cut midday light to evening. And at first the dry earth . . . drank the rain, until the earth was full. Then puddles formed, and in the low places little lakes formed in the fields. The muddy lakes rose higher, and the steady rain whipped the shining water. At last the mountains were full, and the hillsides spilled into the streams, built them to freshets, and sent them roaring down the canyons into the valleys . . . Level fields became lakes, broad and gray . . .
Steinbeck knew, by 1938, that the story needed an artist’s touch—the literary equivalent of Woody Guthrie’s songs, or perhaps of Dorothea Lange’s photographs. He had worked with Lange, a photographer living in Berkeley, on his articles for the San Francisco News, and it was easy to feel the power of her art. There was one image in particular that stood out from the rest, a photograph taken in 1936 that came to be known as “The Migrant Mother.” The woman in the picture, Florence Owens Thompson, looks much older than her thirty-two years, with two small children huddled beside her and her face a mixture of desperation and pride.
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange later recalled. “I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
There were some who compared the force of the photograph to the early paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, when he grew fascinated by the miners of Belgium and the peasants of Holland, helping to shift the focus of art from the realm of kings to the pain and nobility of ordinary people. Fifty years later, Steinbeck was driven by the same sense of mission.
“The writer can only write about what he admires,” Steinbeck declared. “Present day kings aren’t very inspiring, the gods are on vacation . . . and since our race
admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor . . .”
As he began to write, there were moments he feared he couldn’t carry it off. “I’m not a writer,” he confessed in his diary. “I’ve been fooling myself and other people.” But then the words began to flow, coming in a torrent of two thousand a day, and by the fall of 1938 he was finished. His wife, Carol, had suggested a title from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and somehow that phrase, “the grapes of wrath,” had given him an edge, a final sense of focus for a story that he thought could be extraordinary.
When the novel was published on April 14, 1939—the fourth anniversary of the “Black Sunday” dust storm in Oklahoma—the public reaction confirmed his hopes, as well as some of his fears. Sales the first year topped four hundred thousand (on the way to fifteen million by the end of the century); there were more than one hundred and fifty reviews, most of which were positive; and Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize. But there were also detractors, especially on the political right. An Oklahoma congressman called the book “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind,” and as Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott has noted, California agribusiness leaders “mounted smear campaigns to discredit the book and its author.”
As of this writing, the debate has raged for more than seventy years. In 2002 conservative critic Keith Windschuttle insisted, “. . . almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief.” But the more liberal Norman Mailer, a gifted novelist in his own right, seemed to speak for the critical majority when he declared: “I wonder if any of us since have been equal to Steinbeck’s marvelous and ironic sense of compassion . . . What a great novel was The Grapes of Wrath.”
Among other things, Mailer shared the admiration many others felt for the risks that Steinbeck took as a writer—his willingness to travel, as Mailer put it, “to the very abyss of offering more feeling than the reader can accept.” Steinbeck did it with a unique structure, alternating chapters about the Joads, a fictional family fleeing the devastations of the Dust Bowl, with broader, more lyrical descriptions of a history unfolding even as he wrote.
The Books That Mattered Page 13