The D-Word

As we grow more bold about using "the D-word", our collective memory (and many haunting images) takes us back to The Great Depression of the 1930's. Here is a "family album" moment of my own, beginning in the great metropolis, traveling to a tiny town in North Dakota called Wyndmere (where coincidentally a relative of mine, Chuck Klosterman, also has roots).

I am a staunch supporter of President Obama's new "WPA" or Federal Writing Project initiative but my own family combined "old school" Republicans like my father (the GOP he believed in all his life subscribed to fiscal responsibility, the separation of Church and State, no government intervention in the lives of its citizens -not the Republican Party before us now!) and the Democrats like my mother, who supported liberal compassionate politics, who understood "farm" and "labor" as united causes. It was, as in the present, a complicated embattled time the history of individual lives more "true" than, as always, official versions.

Here are my "snapshots..."

Once upon a time, long ago, at a dinner party in New York City, I sat listening to a famous writer describe describe his father's government career over crepes flambeau. The crepes, though half eaten, still glowed from their bath in the blue brandy-flame. The lit faces around the table were well-fed, sardonic, amused, faces of writers and intellectuals. A well-known critic, a European poet, the famous novelist, our host and hostess, a powerful editor or two, and a few filler-types, into which category, I, at age twenty- seven or so, fell. I'd published one skinny book of poems which nobody much had read. I was there with my friend who was an up-and-coming literary politician, and savvy editor.

I'd remained silent through most of the meal and throughout the famous novelist's witty history, which followed his father from Harvard to European post-graduate studies to government service under F.D.R.

"And then" said the novelist, dabbing his lips with his napkin, "they sent him Out West to some absolutely astonishing place... to deal with the natives, you see, disgruntled over farm foreclosures. Wahpeton, North Dakota!"

He pronounced it all wrong. He said "Wah-pet-on", in three equally-inflected parts, as if he were sounding it out: I heard amazement and derision vying for the giddy emphasis of a punchline in his voice.

I spoke up quite happily amazed. "It's Wahpeton." I said. "I have relatives living there. In fact, those were my people your father was sent to... help. My mother's family has farmed outside Wahpeton near a little town called Wyndmere, since early in the century..."

I rattled on nervously, but nobody paid much attention. It was not, after all, my story that was being told. The novelist raised an eyebrow, smiled and nodded mildly in my direction. Conversation resumed around me and my friend shot me an inscrutable glance over the silver candelabra.

Certainly I'd been snubbed. Certainly I was embarrassed. I'd learned early in the thirteen years I lived in New York City how snobbily provincial it was. I was not surprised at the general indifference to my story, but I thought the novelist, who'd written so movingly of his own childhood, his sensitive growing-up years in the South and East, might have shown more interest in a coincidence. It was a continuing unfortunate naivete of mine, this surprise at writers, on one hand capable of moving readers to tears of compassion, who turn out to possess the personal sensitivity of a soup tureen.

I had, after all, only wanted him to acknowledge the amusing fact of an intersection of family anecdote. He had painted such a poignant, comical portrait of his father stepping off the prairie train from Fargo, trying to find a decent hotel: the Harvard-educated, frightened young man arriving with the New Deal in his pocket.

I could have completed the canvas. I knew exactly what it felt like to wander in any direction in that pretty little town and suddenly come to the edge of the prairie plains, where you could see the sun setting miles and miles away unobstructed, just the red dissolution above the flat stretch, a few telephone poles, no trees. I knew exactly what the people looked like, immigrant stock and children of immigrants: German, Swedish, Czech, Polish. None of them having much to say, the occasional comment on the weather, death or illness. Weatherbeaten faces, light arresting eyes. A quality you might take as literal-mindedness, till you caught the rhythms of the local deadpan humor. (My Uncle Gene responding to my question about how things were going in Wyndmere: "Well, I tell you Carol, everybody in Wyndmere's just fine. In fact, they're so good we had to shoot somebody to start a graveyard.")

Long before I was born, before the novelist's father came to North Dakota, my Czech grandfather and mother lived with their seven children on a good-sized farm just outside Wyndmere. It was a beautiful farm (it still is), but these were the drought years, the Depression years.

By the time the novelist's father arrived, the farmers were losing their war with nature. They plowed their fields in the middle of dust-storms, the gaunt exoskeleton of the thresher appeared and re-appeared in the blowing dust of harvest, they crawled on their hands and knees in the dust, wrapping the alfalfa plants in wet rags to hold them down. They were in debt and they feared the Government and the banks equally. They had come from places where State intervention in individual lives usually added up to death, exile, insolvency - they were not eager to trust anyone wearing a suit or a uniform. My grandfather, John Kuchera, my mother's father, had worked as a Separator-Man with a threshing crew that traveled the Dakotas - till he saved enough to buy his four hundred acres of farm. (My father's father, William H. Muske, farmed for a while too - but not in the same way, for he was college-educated, he'd married a Norwegian girl, Ida Christensen, from Wisconsin, who'd been a school-teacher - their lives were marked by other possibilities, though they were too poor and industrious.)
In Wyndmere, on the farm, the men were in the fields till late and my grandmother milked and churned and planted and baked and cooked for her family and numerous hired hands. And when they relaxed, they sipped my grandmother's homemade chokecherry wine and rolled up the carpets and danced.

There were stories of government men being shot as they crossed the property lines of family farms. There was suspicion of the Soil Bank and downright scorn for the WPA ("on the dole" they called it and "make-work"), and even The Grange. (It is a clear childhood memory of mine, my father describing government programs as "eating out of the public trough"). These were people who wanted to work, they did not want handouts, they did not want a government representative telling them what to do. They were the originals of the much-mythologized, fiercely-independent stubborn American farmer, long before corporate harvesting and agri-business.

This same proud, bitter sense of isolation and individual separateness co-existed, oddly, with progressive coalition politics: IWW, the Wobblies, The Grange, and in Minnesota, the historic Democratic-Farm-Labor party, with its sense of liberal idealism that I found particularly appealing, growing up.

But my people were the stubborn, "get up and plow it, it's your field" types, individual-against-the-odds types. If they lacked imagination, they provided themselves with a powerful sense of the fruits of individual labor and led to a gradual, purposeful enlightenment. Their work led somewhere: my mother and father's generation was deprived, but every single one of their children went to college.

Here is my mother, standing at her mother's grave, 1933, age sixteen. Elsie is quite lovely, her long brownish-blonde hair blowing in the prairie wind. There are purple-red peonies scattered about the grave, but she clutches a bouquet of iris, her favorite flower, to her heart. The situation is hopelessly sentimental: she wears her one good dress, the same dress she will wear graduating with honors from Wyndmere High, the dress she will give her Salutatorian address in, her Sunday Church dress. She is unsure what to do. The family has gone back to the farm for the post-funeral gathering, but she stands by the grave, unable to leave. She is the youngest girl of the family, her mother has been the absolute center of her life. She cannot bear to say goodbye to her. Yet there are no more tears inside her.

She kneels down suddenly and lays the irises, one by one, at the foot of the new headstone. Then she looks up at the great moving sky.

Soon my mother will win a scholarship to St. Catherine's College in St. Paul, Minnesota (the equivalent for her, of going to Harvard) - but although it is a full-tuition scholarship, it does not include "board and room" as her father will not be able to afford to send her. My mother wants to be a writer, her English teacher, Miss Byers, has encouraged her in a study of poetry - but my mother is not going to study poetry. She is going, the following year or two, to the North Dakota State School of Science in Wahpeton. Ambivalence, like that of standing by a new grave, will color the next year of her life: wanting to leave, wanting to stay. There's an old song, along with the cowboy plaints of the Red River Valley, she remembers:

We do not live,
We only stay.
We are too poor
To get away.

But in a year or two, she will be rushing along on the State School campus, in a new dress my Aunt Anna and Uncle Johnny have bought for her; she will be crowned Homecoming Queen and she will meet my father, a tall skinny outspoken young man with thick black wavy hair, studying business.

As a matter of fact, not too far in the future, my father is having car trouble with his "new" car, a used Ford Model A he bought with money he saved bagging groceries at the Red Owl. He and a pal are stopping just outside the train station, wearing identical wide-brimmed hats, light colored shoes, dogs-about-town. His buddy leaps off the running-board and they lift the hood, peer at the plugs and carburetor. They adjust a wire. The engine fires up. My father smiles at his friend and then looks past him over the chugging motor at the young man getting off the train from Fargo-Breckenridge.

He is older than my father and his friend, thirty maybe, but he looks untried, decidedly reduced in presence from hours on the bumpy train in a tweed traveling suit and grey Fedora. He has a well-trimmed moustache and he is carrying a leather briefcase.

My father stares at the traveler and the man feels his stare - for one second, my father's eyes and the famous novelist's father's eyes meet. "Government man" my father thinks scornfully. "Yokel" the famous novelist's father says to himself. Then they both look away. Around the corner comes Elsie Kuchera reading a book as she walks, talking to herself and smiling.

My father forgets the famous novelist's father instantly. He's seen this girl on the State School of Science campus. "Not bad looking" he thinks, "Not a bad looking girl."

The famous novelist's father looks at but does not see my mother. He's worried. It's getting late, and he has to find a hotel. He looks up over the false front buildings at the sky, huge and swift-moving, threatening - and shivers a little, alone at what seems, to him, like the end of the world.

Comments

[jerrypl]

Read Janet Peery's latest novella of stories beginning in Oklahoma during the dust storms and the depression, and following those characters and their children for a generation's worth of time and place. The Depression was devastating to families barely eating, full of sadness, while feeling locked into a place that took them nowhere. She is a fantastic writer. In her book of short stories, there are a couple about that time excellently written. The short story book is called Alligator Dance, and the the novella is called What The Thunder Said. I must say that Alligator Dance was the best book of short stories I ever read!!!!!!­!!!!!!!!!!­!!! It feels good to make a plug for a book and author that has a fairly small following in the scheme of things.

How nice it is to make a comment that is full of pleasure. It rarely happens!

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