Louisiana in Your Palm

Next week marks the publication anniversary of the WPA guide to Louisiana, a statewide scavenger hunt that New Orleanian Lyle Saxon guided from fieldwork to bookstore. Saxon was an unlikely choice to manage such an undertaking. In 1935 he was a used-up journalist moping around a plantation house in the sticks, teaching his hens to perform stupid tricks.
    But Saxon loved storytelling. In the 1920s he’d befriended some of the best American writers of the decade, including Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. Saxon wanted to do for Louisiana what Faulkner was doing for Mississippi: capture all its vitality in big, hearty novels. He started a novel with great hopes but by the mid-1930s, his youthful energy was spent.
    “I’m getting ready to die through sheer lack of interest in life,” Saxon confided in his diary in 1933. His love of fiction showed itself mainly in compulsive book-buying sprees. “What insanity,” he wrote after spending nearly $400 on books. He often got drunk alone. One day he looked in the mirror and wrote, “Where is that man that I used to be? Have I lost him completely?”
    He needed a challenge to shake him out of himself. When he received a letter from Washington in 1935 asking him to be state director of the Louisiana Writers’ Project, he accepted.

    The job proved a bureaucratic headache, but he kept with it and documented Louisiana life in two well-praised guidebooks (Louisiana and New Orleans) and a boisterous book of state folklore titled Gumbo Ya-Ya.
    All three books are among the growing number now available as pdfs from the Prelinger Library's digital collection. (All the guides are in the public domain; thanks, Uncle Sam.) The Prelinger list includes Arizona, California, Here’s New England, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York City, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, U.S. One: Maine to Florida, and Virginia.
    They're all searchable, adaptable to your handheld on your next trip, and more portable than the 1,000-plus-page WPA guide to Washington, D.C., which FDR joked should come with its own steamer trunk.

The Hook - 16th VA Book Fest; 16 lit picks

The Hook - COVER- Sweet 16: 16th Book Fest; 16 lit picks

Zora and Women Artists Day

The blog for WomenArts has a thoughtful post noting the 75th anniversary of the WPA programs and the third annual Support Women Artists Now (SWAN) Day, coming up on March 27. Martha Richards notes the daunting obstacles that women artists faced then and now: "We put in long hours for under-staffed non-profits or juggle several part-time jobs along with childcare duties," and still often get overlooked in surveys of the workforce and the economy.

    Richards highlights WPA writers Eudora Welty, whose experiences as a publicity assistant and photographer fed her first short stories, and Zora Neale Hurston, a main figure in Soul of a People (see my 8/18/09 post). Hurston's great gift, said Alice Walker, was showing her characters "relishing the pleasure of each other's loquacious and bodacious company." Richards then looks forward another 75 years with the hope that women artists will continue to celebrate each other's bodacious company, in good times and bad.
    Watch their website and Facebook page for SWAN Day plans and opportunities.

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!