A Wilder Rose by Albert Susan Wittig

Author:Albert, Susan Wittig [Albert, Susan Wittig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
Publisher: Persevero Press
Published: 2013-10-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

A Year of Losses: 1933

The year 1933 was worse than 1932, and I would rather just skip it. But I can’t tell this story without including that year—a long, dark year that was a long, dark night of the soul, not just for me, but for most Americans. Many were sick in mind and spirit, many were sick in body, and almost all were adrift in seas of bleak misery. Failed hope is a knife that slashes all moorings.

In 1933, thirteen million people, a third of the workforce, had no work. People who lost their jobs moved themselves and their families into makeshift housing with little to eat and no way to stay warm and dry. Dispossessed farmers stuffed their belongings into dilapidated jalopies and headed for California in pursuit of a dream of plenty, only to find a cruel desert. Homeless men hopped freight trains and rode the rails, aiming to hop off in a town where they could exchange work for food—although it was more likely that a railroad detective or the local sheriff would collar them and toss them in jail for vagrancy. But it was the children who suffered the most. Malnutrition and a lack of medical and dental care would doom them to a lifetime of poor health and bad teeth. I knew that from my own painful experience as the child of poverty-stricken parents.

Am I trying to lighten the darkness of those lost months in my life by framing them in the context of a black, black time in the lives of all Americans? Perhaps I am, although I’d rather think I’m just trying to understand. Yes, of course, I suffered my own personal unhappiness, which spilled into my daily diary and the journal I kept intermittently. But I am more likely to write about my pain and grief in my journal than any fleeting pleasures, so the journal is bleaker by far than my lived life. I once wrote that I would be glad to die, although in the same entry, I noted that I was ordering garden seeds—a startling and slightly irrational intersection of despair and hope, it seems to me now.

Still, I saw clearly the relationship between my personal pain and the country’s pain: I was not just I, but a metaphor. Trapped as I was at Rocky Ridge, ill, adrift, often unable to work—I was like many people, like all the others who were caught in situations over which they had no control. The sense of national helplessness created by the Depression was enough to blight the dreams of even the sunniest optimist. For me, it was also the awakening of a stronger and more determined political consciousness.

After the positive reception of “Hurricane” as a magazine serial, I was bitterly disappointed by what happened to the book early in 1933. It was published on February 21, to positive reviews. The Bookman, for instance, called the book a “rich and moving experience” that was so “natural, direct, and simple” that it might have come from a pioneer journal.

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