The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  The houses were left vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from.

  What Steinbeck was saying in this rush of poetry, this torrent of feeling that became his book, was that the natural and economic disasters, bad as they were, were not the full story of The Grapes of Wrath. There was also the loss of something fundamental, as the love of the land gave way to simple greed and farms became agricultural factories, and the goal of the owners was to hold down costs, no matter the level of human suffering and pain. Humanity itself was threatened in the process—the workers’ certainly, but the owners’ also, for in their hunger for profit and wealth they were stripping the nobility from their own lives. Indeed, as Steinbeck understood the story, only the desperate workers in the fields, the families huddled in disease-riddled camps, managed to keep simple decency alive. In The Grapes of Wrath, the decency was there, ironically, in the character of Tom Joad, a paroled and unrepentant killer working with his friend, Jim Casy, a fallen preacher, to organize the migrants.

  “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there,” Joad proclaims, in perhaps the most famous passage in the book. “Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.”

  But it wasn’t just Tom, the central protagonist, who embodied the heroism of the novel. Throughout the story his mother, Ma Joad, works fiercely to hold her family together, and his younger sister, Rose of Sharon, when her baby is stillborn, offers her breast to a starving stranger, knowing that otherwise he will die. And when Steinbeck’s editors found the scene too erotic—too startling and melodramatic to be believed—he resolutely refused to take it out. “I think I know how I want it,” he said. “And if I’m wrong, I’m alone in my wrongness.”

  Wayne Flynt, an Alabama historian who has written at length about the Depression, believes that Steinbeck avoided a trap that was common among even the best of writers. The characters in The Grapes of Wrath, he noted, were poor and white, a class of people who have not fared well in American fiction. “From the Southwestern humorists to Harper Lee,” Flynt wrote, “poor whites appear as an object of satire and scorn, characterized by shiftlessness, racism, violence and demagoguery. Perhaps every society feels compelled to rationalize to itself the presence of so many poor people. What better way than to depict them as receiving what they deserve, suffering the consequences of their own failure . . .”

  One of the unrelenting missions of The Grapes of Wrath was to make such rationalizations impossible, and Steinbeck did it without apology. Nor was he alone. Carey McWilliams, a California journalist who would later become editor of the Nation, published his own best seller in 1939. His book, Factories in the Field, was a blend of sociology, history and journalism, tracing the evolution of California agriculture from the days of the Gold Rush through the Depression: a ninety-year span that included, as McWilliams made clear, the continuous oppression of workers in the fields. In the earliest days, those workers most often were American Indians, replaced in succession by Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos before the coming of the Dust Bowl refugees.

  In the twentieth-century economy of California, the corporate farmers recruited more workers than they could employ, thus driving down wages in a contrived and frantic competition for jobs. Not surprisingly, McWilliams reported, confirming Steinbeck’s novelistic portrait, living conditions were often appalling, migrants living in camps, often in tents, with no running water, and in the prevailing mythology of the time the filth was blamed on the workers themselves. In 1936, a publicist for the California growers described field hands as “the most worthless, unscrupulous, shiftless, diseased, semi-barbarian that has ever come to our shores.”

  For a seven-year period beginning in 1929, the workers fought back. A wave of strikes rippled through the valleys, as migrants demanded better wages and safer, more sanitary places to live. The response most often was vigilante violence. According to McWilliams, California strikebreakers in the 1930s employed a combination of beatings, cross-burnings, and sometimes murder to intimidate workers. And yet the refugees kept coming, kept heading west, driven by drought and dust and the lure of good land. In the end, McWilliams’s journalistic portrayal was as stark and disturbing as Steinbeck’s novel, and the two books’ appearance within the same year reinforced the credibility of both. Both became best sellers, but it was The Grapes of Wrath that became iconic.

  In 1940 John Ford directed an Academy Award-winning film, an adaptation of the novel, ending on a note of bravery and hope. Ma Joad, played in the movie by Oscar winner Jane Darwell, delivers this summation of her family’s troubles:

  I ain’t never gonna be scared no more. I was, though. For a while it looked as though we was beat. Good and beat. Looked like we didn’t have nobody in the whole wide world but enemies. Like nobody was friendly no more. Made me feel kinda bad and scared too, like we was lost and nobody cared . . . but we keep on coming. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, cos we’re the people.

  Woody Guthrie, among others, was ecstatic after he saw the movie, thrilled with the portrayal of strength that it offered, for he had been a part of that strength. He, too, had been driven from his home in Oklahoma, had written his songs about the Dust Bowl journey, and now he wrote another that he called “Tom Joad.” Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights, that’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma. That’s where I’m a-gonna be.

  In the torrent of art that Steinbeck inspired, Guthrie was merely the first of the twentieth century’s finest songwriters to write directly about The Grapes of Wrath. A generation later, Kris Kristofferson wrote “Here Comes That Rainbow Again,” a bit of poetry adapted from the story of the Joads’ journey west. In the book they stop at a desert café with hunger setting in and their money running low, and they plead with the waitress for a loaf of bread—not as charity, not as a gift, but as something they could buy for a dime. The waitress sells them the bread and then sees the Joad children, Ruthie and Winfield, eyeing a container of nickel candy. “Them’s two for a penny,” she says. In his song, released in 1981, Kristofferson offers this chorus to punctuate the story:

  And the daylight grew heavy with thunder,

  and the smell of the rain on the wind.

  Ain’t it just like a human.

  Here comes that rainbow again.

  What Kristofferson saw clearly in The Grapes of Wrath, embedded in the massive story of despair, was a kind of existential triumph, a humanity that was stronger than social injustice. That seemed to be the general impression of the artists—Kristofferson, John Ford, Woody Guthrie—and later Bruce Springsteen, who, in 1995, crafted an album called “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” an echo of hope in hard times.

  Waitin’ for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last

  In a cardboard box ’neath the underpass.

  Oddly enough, some of these songs prompted my return to The Grapes of Wrath, to a reconsideration of its artistry and meaning, and the multiple layers of Steinbeck’s achievement. Until then the novel had mostly been a revelation, light shone on a darkened corner of history, about which I knew nothing at all.

  II

  It was late high school when I came upon the legacy of John Steinbeck. I loved his words and was deeply moved by the story of the Joads, and sin
ce this was a novel I assumed at first that the author had simply made the whole thing up. No, my English teacher explained; Steinbeck’s story was rooted in the truth. I remember my astonishment at this bit of knowledge. I knew about social injustice, of course, but mostly in the South, and I knew a little about the Great Depression and the alphabet soup of New Deal programs. But it had never occurred to me that greed had run with so little shame through the idyllic countryside of California.

  Looking back on it now, I can think of only one other book that had a similar impact on my notion of history, particularly the history of our own country. That book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, was very different from The Grapes of Wrath—different subject matter, a work of nonfiction instead of a novel, but the poetic force was remarkably the same. Dee Brown, like Steinbeck before him, had entered the world of history’s losers, and his empathetic journey was, if anything, even more unexpected.

  Brown was such an unlikely candidate to force a basic reconsideration of our history—of the conquest of American Indians and the expansion of a country across the breadth of a continent. Until Bury My Heart, which was published in 1970, it was a story told almost exclusively by the winners. Like many others, I thought when I read this passionate book that Brown must be an American Indian, for how else could he have felt so deeply the tragedy at the heart of the white man’s triumph? I was astonished to discover that he was, in fact, a white librarian from Arkansas.

  It was a measure of the originality of his work, and the strength of his writing, that almost everyone found it disturbing. The latter-day defenders of Manifest Destiny called it one-sided, which of course it was. Brown made no apology for that. He was, after all, setting out in a single book to balance the scales on a century’s worth of history—a national understanding in which Indians were, as Brown put it, “the dark menace of the myths.”

  In refuting that notion, Brown relied on primary sources—particularly the rich record of negotiation between the Indians and the U.S. government. As a librarian he knew his way around these musty troves of revelation, and as a novelist-turned-historian he also knew how to tell a good story. His principal instrument in Bury My Heart was simply to adopt the Indians’ point of view, to refer, for example, to the month of October as the Falling Leaves Moon or December as the Moon When the Wolves Run Together. He also offered a ready supply of villains. There was, for example, Colonel John Chivington, a barrel-chested cavalry commander who on November 29, 1864, led a force of volunteers against a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho, camped at Sand Creek in the eastern part of Colorado. In the carnage that followed, Chivington’s soldiers killed and mutilated more than one hundred Indians, mostly women and children. They carried away scalps, genitalia, and other body parts as souvenirs, and even at the time many people were appalled.

  “Jis to think of that dog Chivington and his dirty hounds, up thar at Sand Creek,” declared the Indian fighter Kit Carson. “His men shot down squaws, and blew the brains out of little innocent children. You call sich soldiers Christians, do ye? And Indians savages? What der yer ’spose our Heavenly Father, who made both them and us, thinks of these things?”

  In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown follows the exploits of Colonel Chivington, and also of General Phillip Sheridan, famous for the phrase, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” (Actually, according to Brown, what Sheridan really said was “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” The general’s words, written down by one of his lieutenants, were passed along and polished through the years.) And of course we meet George Armstrong Custer, known to the Indians as Long Hair and also as Hard Backside for his apparent willingness to ride for days in pursuit of a fight. From the Native American point of view—with the conspicuous exception of Custer’s Last Stand—most of these encounters with the army ended badly, leading at last to Wounded Knee.

  The wintry dusk and the tiny crystals of ice dancing in the dying light added a supernatural quality to the somber landscape. Somewhere along the frozen stream the heart of Crazy Horse lay in a secret place, and the Ghost Dancers believed that his disembodied spirit was waiting impatiently for the new earth that would surely come with the first green grass of spring.

  On this particular day, December 28, 1890, a band of Hunkpapa and Minneconjou Sioux had been taken to Wounded Knee by troops from the Seventh U.S. Cavalry. It was the same unit, reconstituted, that had been led to its bloody demise by Custer. Now, fourteen years after Little Big Horn, many of the soldiers thirsted for revenge. At the very least, they seemed to relish their current assignment, which was essentially an exercise in humiliation. They were under orders to disarm this peaceful band of Sioux, a defeated people, by taking away their last hunting rifles. All over the West, tribes that had once roamed freely through the plains were now confined to reservations, tiny remnants of their vast homelands, but a few had discovered a glimmer of hope—a desperate consolation against poverty and despair—in the contagious teachings of a Paiute prophet. This prophet, Wakova, spoke of a day not far in the future when the prairie grass would once again turn green, and the buffalo and the fallen ancestors, who now roamed the hunting grounds as ghosts, would return together, and the Indian people would live in peace.

  Soon, the believers in every tribe began to dance the Ghost Dance, and once again the white people were afraid. They called on the soldiers to end this madness, to take away the last remaining rifles before the Indians, in their delirium, were stirred to revolt. Thus, on the morning of December 29, the Sioux at Wounded Knee were ordered to give up their guns. One young brave named Black Coyote raised his rifle above his head in defiance, and the soldiers immediately opened fire. Within a few minutes nearly three hundred Indians, the majority of them women and children, lay dead or dying in the South Dakota snow. Brown ended his account, the final pages of his heart-breaking book, with the words of Black Elk, a Wounded Knee survivor:

  I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . .

  Among many others, Vine Deloria Jr., a Sioux author whose “Indian Manifesto,” Custer Died for Your Sins, was a simultaneous best seller with Bury My Heart, was deeply moved by the power of Brown’s book. “A magnificent work,” he proclaimed. “The real story of the settling of the West—the Indian side of the ledger . . . Every Indian will be happy to read this book—and will wish he had written it. I wish I had.”

  I’m not an Indian, but I understood exactly what Deloria was saying. Having also read Custer Died for Your Sins, I felt as readers in 1939 must have felt after reading Steinbeck and Carey McWilliams. Here was a story I simply hadn’t known, a shameful history of atrocity and greed, and a way of life that had been overrun. As a young reporter in the 1970s, thoroughly inspired by Deloria and Brown, I spent the early part of my career also writing about Native Americans—not their history so much as the problems they faced in the twentieth century.

  From the Everglades to the Wind River Mountains, from North Carolina to the northern Cascades, I began to interview Indian people and the story that slowly began to emerge seemed no longer to be one of despair. It was true that massive problems remained. Poverty was the norm on most reservations, and with it the lingering echo of defeat. Suicide was a leading cause of death among the young. And yet there was also a kind of renaissance, uncertain at first, but rooted, I thought, in a newfound sense of identity and pride. It would be an oversimplification to give the credit for that to Dee Brown. But traveling from one reservation to another, it was absolutely clear to me what he and Vine Deloria had wrought. They had not only rewritten the history of the West, but had also reaffirmed what it meant to be an Indian—the spiritualit
y and love of the land, the willingness to live in harmony with nature; qualities that society as a whole would do well to adopt.

  Most obviously, of course, these writers—like Steinbeck before them—offered an affirmation of humanity in the face of its opposite, a discovery embedded in the agony of events that sometimes only the artist can see.

  9

  Family Values

  featuring:

  Roots—Alex Haley

  Ava’s Man—Rick Bragg

  The Great Santini—Pat Conroy

  Also, C. Eric Lincoln, Tim McLaurin, Harry Crews, Tim Russert, Calvin Trillin, Winston Groom

  I

  I came from a family with a patriarch. My grandfather, Samuel Palmer Gaillard, was ninety years old when I was born, and lived to be 103, and told me stories about the Civil War. I came to think of him as the family griot, a term I learned from Alex Haley, and it was a role he passed along to his daughters. They, too, became keepers of the family myth, that body of knowledge and understanding that one generation, if it is wise enough, has the opportunity to pass along to the next. In our family there were stories of the Revolutionary War and the family’s journey to the Alabama frontier; of the California Gold Rush, and the Apache chief Geronimo on a prison train passing through Mobile; of my grandfather’s memory of that Indian face: not the ferocity that he had expected, but a sadness haunting dark, furtive eyes.

  All of this was part of an oral history passed down carefully through the years, until in 1988 my Aunt Mary—the last of the family storytellers—died. For me, the most cherished part of her inheritance was a cardboard box. In it I found deeds and letters and certificates of baptism, a kind of treasure trove of confirmation that the oral histories I had learned were the truth. There were certainly embellishments here and there, the prerogatives of a good storyteller, but somehow as I sifted through the contents of the box, the people I had heard about in the stories became more fully alive. And the most remarkable thing was this: in their letters especially, they spoke in a language I knew very well. I heard my grandfather’s voice in theirs, and my father’s, perhaps even my own, and I set about creating a gift for my daughters—a book that would chronicle for Rachel and Tracy a family’s journey through the mists of Southern history.