Snowdigger, a life history

As Washington, DC gets a record load of snow dumped outside, it calls to mind a WPA life history from New Orleans, blending life and death and looking for work. New Orleanian Melinda Parker told one WPA interviewer about a visit she got from her long-dead brother Jim:

   "Just the other day I was sitting down here by my stove, praying to the Lord, when who walks in the door but my brother that's dead. He used to live in Detroit so I always called him a snowdigger. I says to him, 'What you doin' down here now, you snowdigger?' And he says, 'I just had some money an' I thought I'd come an' give it to you.' And he puts five dollars in my lap. Just then it looked to me like my brother that's a minister comes in the door and he turns to my brother and says, 'Jim, what you doin' here?' And Jim says, 'I come to give Melinda some money.' So my brother that's a minister, he gives me five dollars. I got so excited about havin' that money for Christmas that I went out the house and was goin' to tell my friend and was all the way to Saratoga Street and the money was gone ... I told my brother that's a minister about it on Christmas Day and he said that Jim knew that I'm lookin' for a job and that his spirit is goin' to help me find one soon."

The full interview is at the Library of Congress WPA life histories page.

Black History Month and the Writers' Project

This marks the start of Black History Month, and also the month in 1941 when Richard Wright published 12 Million Black Voices, his photo essay on black life and history. A collaboration with photographers of the Farm Security Administration, the book showed in almost cinematic sweep the journey that African Americans had made from Africa through slavery to the 20th century.
    As novelist David Bradley says in his interview for Soul of a People: Writing America's Story, Wright pored over the FSA photographs, armed with the history he had gathered, and found inspiration: "So he's looking at these pictures, and he's seeing himself. He's seeing his own experience, he's seeing alter egos, he's seeing where he might have ended up..."
    For Black History Month, Smithsonian Networks will rebroadcast the film, starting February 2.

Juanita Brooks, Courageous Historian of the Southwest

Last Friday marked the 112^th anniversary of the birth of Juanita Brooks, premier Utah historian. Brooks was born January 15, 1898. This year also marks 60 years since the publication of her investigative masterpiece, The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

    That 1950 book gave America a nuanced investigation into the hidden story of a slaughter by Mormon settlers in southwestern Utah of a group of migrants bound for California in 1857. In it, Brooks wrote penetratingly about Utah and the people who lived there.

    A Mormon herself, Brooks uncovered long-hidden pioneer diaries while on the Writers’ Project in Utah in the 1930s. Working late at night on a typewriter in her kitchen, she continued to explore the episode for years, as recounted in her remarkable memoir, Quicksand and Cactus. Her persistence and publication defied church elders, who tried to keep the massacre hidden. Every epic about Utah from that time up to the HBO series Big Love has had to reckon with that episode of mass murder and cover-up.

    Jon Krakauer called Mountain Meadows Massacre “groundbreaking … an extraordinary work of history.” With it, noted the Salt Lake Tribune just over a year ago, Brooks provided a “painful reminder that the propensity for unspeakable violence resides in every human heart," and began a journey that concluded recently with the Mormon church finally issuing its own report on the massacre. An example of brave exposure for this Martin Luther King Day.

Best Books of 2009

Thrilled to find Soul of a Peopleon the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Best Books of 2009 list.
Happy New Year and best wishes for 2010!

Jobs and the WPA Guide to Florida

The WPA Guide to Florida, which marks its 70^th anniversary this week, is unlike other travel guides, as I wrote in yesterday’s Florida Times-Union. The guide tells stories from the ground up, with little gloss. The entry for Belle Glade in one breath praises the area’s lush fertility and, in the next, acknowledges that African-Americans working the harvest had to be, by law, “off the streets by 10:30 p.m.” As Stetson Kennedy, one Florida WPA writer, recently told a St. Augustine blog, “We wanted to show the warts, like the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and Jim Crow laws,” not just palms and bathing beauties. 

    The WPA guide came out amid an anxious campaign blitz. In December 1939, as America emerged from the worst of the Depression, a divide remained between many skeptics of the New Deal and the WPA scribblers. A WPA job, as a former WPA worker says in Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever, was “a stigma of the lowest order, a dark and embarrassing symbol of a time of their lives when circumstances beyond their control compelled them to admit, on public record, personal defeat.”

    Zora Neale Hurston felt that sting. For decades she didn’t want to mark any WPA anniversary. Yet the WPA job saw Hurston through a hard time, and for the Florida guide she wrote up heartbreaking episodes and rich folk tales that people on the Gulf Coast told each other. (There's more on Hurston and Kennedy in Soul of a People.)

    Then as now, any federal job program was a hot-button issue. A Gallup poll in 1939 found that in the run-up to a presidential election, more voters ranked WPA relief as the worst part of FDR’s government than any other — far ahead of farm subsidies, foreign policy or even packing the Supreme Court. Yet, the same poll also found that more respondents (28 percent) ranked WPA relief as his greatest accomplishment.

    Some WPA writers found the experience of producing the WPA books an education. I mentioned in an earlier post an event in 1983 where Ralph Ellison, who began writing fiction while on the WPA, defended it as more than make-work. The WPA, he said, ushered people’s history into official history, and allowed an “intermixture between the formal and the folk — the real experience of people as they feel it.”

    Now as the unemployment rate hovers in double digits and we consider the recent jobs summit, we might open the WPA Guide to Florida for more than landmarks and customs. It might inspire the kind of employment that brings future benefits and a clearer view of where we are.

WGA TV Award Nomination for Soul

WGA TV Award Nominations

Hollywood: Soul of a People brings the WPA writers to the limelight.

Meridel Le Sueur Pioneered Women's Stories on the WPA

In the 1930s a young Meridel Le Sueur was living in Minnesota and writing about how desperate poverty pushed law-abiding women across the line of criminality. She was going to meetings with women in the Workers Alliance, writing “to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of sagas.” She had published several articles in New Masses, Anvil and other lefty magazines before she got a job on the Writers’ Project. (More in Soul of a People.)

On her own time, Le Sueur wrote up the stories of her fellow women, and in her novel The Girl, she created a composite portrait of a female character forced by circumstances to work at a speakeasy, which leads her to work as a prostitute, and later as a getaway driver in a bank holdup that goes wrong. The protagonist is eventually rescued by a group of homeless women who are probably communists.

When the novel was finally published in the 1970s, Le Sueur was known as a pioneer in the women’s movement. She called the book a “hosanna” from one generation of women to the next, a shout of joy and strength to “those wonderful women … who keep us all alive.”

“It was a white culture up to then,” Le Sueur said at a reunion of WPA writers in the 1980s. “There was no black movement,” she explained, “no women’s culture” on the radar before the 1930s. By gathering these stories, the WPA writers paved the way for new American histories.

Watch a free screening of Soul of a People this Wednesday at the American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Le Sueur's work was featured recently at the St. Paul public library.