The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  I can remember one time, the only thing in the house to eat was mustard. My sister and I put so much mustard on biscuits that we got sick. And we can’t stand mustard till today.

  There was only one family around that ate good. Mr. Barr worked at the ice plant. Whenever Mrs. Barr could, she’d feed the kids. But she couldn’t feed ‘em all. They had a big tree that had fruit on it. She’d let us pick those. Sometimes we’d pick and eat’em until we were sick.

  Her two daughters got to go to Norman for their college. When they’d talk about all the good things they had at the college, she’d kind of hush ’em up because there was always poor kids that didn’t have anything to eat. I remember she always felt bad because people in the neighborhood were hungry. But there was a feeling of together....

  When they had food to give to people, you’d get a notice and you’d go down. So Daddy went down that day and he took my sister and me. They were giving away potatoes and things like that. But they had a truck of oranges parked in the alley. Somebody asked them who the oranges were for, and they wouldn’t tell ’em. So they said, well, we’re gonna take those oranges. And they did. My dad was one of the ones that got up on the truck. They called the police, and the police chased us all away. But we got the oranges.

  It’s different today. People are made to feel ashamed now if they don’t have anything. Back then, I’m not sure how the rich felt. I think the rich were as contemptuous of the poor then as they are now. But among the people that I knew, we all had an understanding that it wasn’t our fault. It was something that had happened to the machinery. Most people blamed Hoover, and they cussed him up one side and down the other—it was all his fault. I’m not saying he’s blameless, but I’m not saying either it was all his fault. Our system doesn’t run by just one man, and it doesn’t fall by just one man, either.

  You don’t recall at any time feeling a sense of shame?

  I remember it was fun. It was fun going to the soup line. ’Cause we all went down the road, and we laughed and we played. The only thing we felt is that we were hungry and we were going to get food. Nobody made us feel ashamed. There just wasn’t any of that.

  Today you’re made to feel that it’s your own fault. If you’re poor, it’s only because you’re lazy and you’re ignorant, and you don’t try to help yourself. You’re made to feel that if you get a check from Welfare that the bank at Fort Knox is gonna go broke.

  Even after the soup line, there wasn’t anything. The WPA came, and I married. My husband worked on the WPA. This was back in Paducah, Kentucky. We were just kids. I was fifteen, and he was sixteen. My husband was digging ditches. They were putting in a water main. Parts of the city, even at that late date, 1937, didn’t have city water.

  My husband and me just started traveling around, for about three years. It was a very nice time, because when you’re poor and you stay in one spot, trouble just seems to catch up with you. But when you’re moving from town to town, you don’t stay there long enough for trouble to catch up with you. It’s really a good life, if you’re poor and you can manage to move around.

  I was pregnant when we first started hitchhiking, and people were really very nice to us. Sometimes they would feed us. I remember one time we slept in a haystack, and the lady of the house came out and found us and she said. “This is really very bad for you because you’re going to have a baby. You need a lot of milk.” So she took us up to the house.

  She had a lot of rugs hanging on the clothesline because she was doing her house cleaning. We told her we’d beat the rugs for her giving us the food. She said, no, she didn’t expect that. She just wanted to feed us. We said, no, we couldn’t take it unless we worked for it. And she let us beat her rugs. I think she had a million rugs, and we cleaned them. Then we went in and she had a beautiful table, full of all kind of food and milk. When we left, she filled a gallon bucket full of milk and we took it with us.

  You don’t find that now. I think maybe if you did that now, you’d get arrested. Somebody’d call the police. The atmosphere since the end of the Second War—it seems like the minute the war ended, the propaganda started. In making people hate each other.

  I remember one night, we walked for a long time, and we were so tired and hungry, and a wagon came along. There was a Negro family going into town. Of course, they’re not allowed to stop and eat in restaurants, so they’d cook their own food and brought it with ‘em. They had the back of the wagon filled with hay. We asked them if we could lay down and sleep in the wagon, and they said yes. We woke up, and it was morning, and she invited us to eat with’em. She had this box, and she had chicken and biscuits and sweet potatoes and everything in there. It was just really wonderful.

  I didn’t like black people. In fact, I hated ‘em. If they just shipped ’em all out, I don’t think it woulda bothered me.

  She recalls her feelings of white superiority, her discoveries. “If I really knew what changed me...I don’t know. I’ve thought about it and thought about it. You don’t go anywhere, because you always see yourself as something you’re not. As long as you can say I’m better than they are, then there’s somebody below you can kick. But once you get over that, you see that you’re not any better off than they are. In fact, you’re worse off ‘cause you’re believin’ a lie. And it was right there, in front of us. In the cotton field, chopping cotton, and right over in the next field, there’s these black people—Alabama, Texas, Kentucky. Never once did it occur to me that we had anything in common.

  “After I was up here for a while and I saw how poor white people were treated, poor white southerners, they were treated just as badly as black people are. I think maybe that just crystallized the whole thing.”

  I didn’t feel any identification with the Mexicans, either. My husband and me were migrant workers. We went down in the valley of Texas, which is very beautiful. We picked oranges and lemons and grapefruits, limes in the Rio Grande Valley.

  We got a nickel a bushel for citrus fruits. On the grapefruits you had to ring them. You hold a ring in your hand that’s about like that [she draws a circle with her hands], and it has a little thing that slips down over your thumb. You climb the tree and you put that ring around the grapefruit. If the grapefruit slips through, you can’t pick it. And any grapefruit that’s in your box—you can work real hard, especially if you want to make enough to buy food that day—you’ll pick some that aren’t big enough. Then when you carry your box up and they check it, they throw out all the ones that go through the ring.

  I remember this one little boy in particular. He was really a beautiful child. Every day when we’d start our lunch, we’d sit under the trees and eat. And these peppers grew wild. I saw him sitting there, and every once in a while he’d reach over and get a pepper and pop it in his mouth. With his food, whatever he was eating. I thought they looked pretty good. So I reached over and popped it in my mouth, and, oh, it was like liquid fire. He was rolling in the grass laughing. He thought it was so funny—that white people couldn’t eat peppers like they could. And he was tearing open grapefruits for me to suck the juice, because my mouth was all cooked from the pepper. He used to run and ask if he could help me. Sometimes he’d help me fill my boxes of grapefruits, ‘cause he felt sorry for me,’cause I got burned on the peppers. [Laughs.]

  But that was a little boy. I felt all right toward him. But the men and the women, they were just spies and they should be sent back to Mexico.

  I remember I was very irritated because there were very few gringos in this little Texas town, where we lived. Hardly anybody spoke English. When you tried to talk to the Mexicans, they couldn’t understand English. It never occurred to us that we should learn to speak Spanish. It’s really hard to talk about a time like that, ’cause it seems like a different person. When I remember those times, it’s like looking into a world where another person is doing those things.

  This may sound impossible, but if there’s one thing that started me thinking, it was President Roosevelt’s cuff
links. I read in the paper how many pairs of cuff links he had. It told that some of them were rubies and precious stones—these were his cuff links. And I’ll never forget, I was setting on an old tire out in the front yard and we were poor and hungry. I was sitting out there in the hot sun, there weren’t any trees. And I was wondering why it is that one man could have all those cuff links when we couldn’t even have enough to eat. When we lived on gravy and biscuits. That’s the first time I remember ever wondering why.

  And when my father finally got his bonus, he bought a secondhand car for us to come back to Kentucky in. My dad said to us kids: “All of you get in the car. I want to take you and show you something.” On the way over there, he’d talk about how life had been rough for us, and he said: “If you think it’s been rough for us, I want you to see people that really had it rough.” This was in Oklahoma City, and he took us to one of the Hoovervilles, and that was the most incredible thing.

  Here were all these people living in old, rusted-out car bodies. I mean that was their home. There were people living in shacks made of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano box. This wasn’t just a little section, this was maybe ten-miles wide and ten-miles long. People living in whatever they could junk together.

  And when I read Grapes of Wrath—she bought that for me [indicates young girl seated across the room]—that was like reliving my life. Particularly the part where they lived in this Government camp. Because when we were picking fruit in Texas, we lived in a Government place like that. They came around, and they helped the women make mattresses. See, we didn’t have anything. And they showed us how to sew and make dresses. And every Saturday night, we’d have a dance. And when I was reading Grapes of Wrath this was just like my life. I was never so proud of poor people before, as I was after I read that book.

  I think that’s the worst thing that our system does to people, is to take away their pride. It prevents them from being a human being. And wondering why the Harlem and why the Detroit. They’re talking about troops and law and order. You get law and order in this country when people are allowed to be decent human beings. Every time I hear another building’s on fire, I say: oh, boy, baby, hit ’em again. [Laughs.]

  I don’t think people were put on earth to suffer. I think that’s a lot of nonsense. I think we are the highest development on the earth, and I think we were put here to live and be happy and to enjoy everything that’s here. I don’t think it’s right for a handful of people to get ahold of all the things that make living a joy instead of a sorrow. You wake up in the morning, and it consciously hits you—it’s just like a big hand that takes your heart and squeezes it—because you don’t know what that day is going to bring: hunger or you don’t know.

  POSTSCRIPT

  (A sudden flash of memory by Peggy Terry, as I was about to leave.) “It was the Christmas of ‘35, just before my dad got his bonus. We didn’t get anything for Christmas. I mean nothing. Not an orange, not an apple—nothing. I just felt so bad. I went to the church, to the children’s program and I stole a Christmas package. It was this pretty box and it had a big red ribbon on it. I stole it off the piano, and I took it home with me. I told my mother my Sunday school teacher had given me a Christmas present. When I opened it, it was a beautiful long scarf made out of velvet—a cover for a piano. My mother knew my Sunday school teacher didn’t give me that. ’Cause we were living in one room, in a little shack in what they called Gander Flat. [Laughs.] For a child—I mean, they teach you about Santa Claus and they teach you all that stuff—and then for a child to have to go to church and steal a present... and then it turned out to be something so fantastic, a piano scarf. Children shouldn’t have to go around stealing. There’s enough to give all of them everything they want, any time they want it. I say that’s what we’re gonna have.”

  We Still See Their Faces

  AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF THE GRAPES OF WRATH30

  It is 1988. We see the face on the six o’clock news. It could be a Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange shot, but that’s fifty years off. It is a face of despair, of an Iowa farmer, fourth generation, facing foreclosure. I’ve seen this face before. It is the face of Pa Joad, Muley Graves, and all their lost neighbors, tractored out by the cats.

  In the eyes of Carroll Nearmyer, the farmer, is more than despair; there is a hardly concealed wrath: as there was in the eyes of his Okie antecedents.

  Sure, cried the tenant farmers, but it’s our land. We were born on it, and got killed on it, and we died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours—being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

  (The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Five)

  Listen to Carroll Nearmyer. I had visited his farm, twenty-four miles southeast of Des Moines. It was a soft, easy twilight in May 1987: “There was several times I had the gun to my head and she didn’t know it. And then I got damn mad. I got to thinkin’ about it and I got madder. These people don’t have the right to do this to me! I have worked, I have sweated, and I have bled. I have tried out there to keep this place goin’. And then they tried to take it away from me!”

  During a trip in 1987 through Iowa and Minnesota, I saw too many small towns with too many deserted streets that evoked too many images of too many rural hamlets of the Great Depression. I could not escape the furrowed faces and stooped frames of John Steinbeck’s people. It was a classic case of life recapitulating art. The work of art, in this instance, caught more than people; it was their “super-essence” [Steinbeck’s word].

  It was a flash forward fifty years. The boarded-up stores and houses. The abandoned jalopies. The stray dog. The pervasive silence. “It’s both a silence of protest and a silence of acceptance,” observed my companion, who was doing the driving.

  The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of their houses to stand beside their men—to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men’s faces secretly, because the corn could go, as long as something else remained.

  (The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter One)

  What was that something else? It had something to do with respect for Self; sought from those dear to him and at least a semblance of it demanded from the Others. It was something he had to husband and preserve by himself, alone. Therein lay the fatal flaw; a fault he had to discover the hard way.

  A half century later, Carolyn Nearmyer, Carroll’s wife, recognized it. “The women are apt to talk to other farm wives about their problems, rather than sit down with their husbands. If I was to come up with a suggestion, he’d get very upset. It was not that I did not know as much as he did. It was just he was keeping it inside himself.”

  Ma Joad knew it, too. Though in her good-bye to Tom, she says, “I don’ un’erstan’, I don’ really know,” she does know. Her generous heart gives the lie to her words. In Tom’s reply, Preacher Casy’s transcendental vision comes shining through: Maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on‘y a piece of a big one—and then.... Then I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up on a guy, I’ll be there. Why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an‘—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An‘ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.

  (The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Twenty-eight)

  There are constant variations on this theme throughout The Grapes of Wrath, as in a symphony. The novel is constructed more like a piece of music rather than mere prose. It is not unlike Frank Lloyd Wright’s approach to architecture. As Bach and Beethoven were ever with the architect as he conceived buildings, as he reflected on the vision of his lieber meister, Louis Sullivan, so as we learn from the journal he kept during the book’s com
position, John Steinbeck was listening to the lushness of Tchaikovsky and the dissonance of Stravinsky, while he traveled with the Joads and their fellow tribesmen.

  And when there was a pause in the recorded music, there was still a sort of rhythm: the incessant bup-bup-bup of the washing machine. Always, there was the beat, as though it were the beat of a throbbing heart, caught and held by these uprooted people whom he had come to know so well. “I grew to love and admire the people who are so much stronger and braver and purer than I am.”31

  In the musical architecture of the book are point and counterpoint. Each chapter, recounting the adventures of the individual family, the Joads, is followed by a brief contrapuntal sequence: the tribe, the thousands of Okie families on the move. The one, the many, all heading in the same direction. The singular flows into the plural, the “I” into the “We.” It is an organic whole.

  Organic was Wright’s favorite word. The work had to flow naturally, whether it were a building or a book. Everything was of one piece, as the fingers on a hand, the limbs on a tree. It was not accidental that Wright’s Imperial Hotel withstood the Tokyo earthquake of 1924. It was not accidental that The Grapes of Wrath has withstood another earthquake.

  Preacher Casy’s vision, as revealed to Tom Joad, was presaged by earlier variations on the theme. During the journey to California, twenty or so Okie families rested at a campsite, near a spring:In the evening a strange thing happened; the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of a home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning.