Loving Eleanor by Susan Wittig Albert

Author:Susan Wittig Albert [Albert, Susan Wittig]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780989203562
Publisher: Persevero Press
Published: 2016-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

“Deeply and Tenderly”

I’ve always been a practical, let’s-get-the-details person, and as a reporter, I had internalized the cardinal AP rule: Report what you see, not how you feel. Don’t get involved. It’s not your story, it’s his, or hers, or theirs. Don’t become part of what you’re seeing.

I went out for Hopkins and FERA with the same expectations. I was a reporter doing a job: collecting details, assembling the most meaningful into a coherent narrative, giving the whole a story shape that would convey its truths to its readers. And that was it.

But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw and heard out there in the country in 1933 and 1934. Ragged, barefoot children hauling water from a stream polluted with sewage and mining refuse. A family of six—six!—sleeping, head to foot, in one filthy bed. Young girls on a Houston street selling their bodies to men for “just a dime, only a dime, Mister, please?” A South Dakota farm wife offering to share the tumbleweed soup she’d made for her family: “It don’t taste so bad, dearie, but it ain’t very fillin’.”

I had been a reporter for nearly twenty years, and I’d honed the skill of assembling the stories of people’s lives, detail by detail. But in my decades on the job, I had never seen such sights or heard such tales. For the two years I worked for Harry Hopkins, it sometimes seemed impossible to keep from being swallowed up by what I saw and heard. But my mission was even more impossible: to witness these horrors and then recount them in a way that would get the attention of people inside the bubble that was Washington, people who were cocooned in their comfortable lives, bolstered by their possessions, buttressed by their firm belief that everything was working the way it was supposed to work. I wrote ninety-some reports for Hopkins in those years, and each time I sat down to write, I was submerged in hopelessness. I felt I was simply putting words on paper, words that could do nothing to heal the country’s wounds. Still, the stories had to be told. Someone, someday, might find something important in them.

Coping with the challenges of everyday existence was hard in those years, too. As a traveler, I was setting out in the worst year of the Depression. The trains rarely ran on time, banks and businesses were closed, utilities (public and private electricity, water, and sewage) had failed. The muddy country roads were appalling, the city streets downright dangerous. The food was usually unappetizing and often inedible and the accommodations simply dreadful. Unheated hotel rooms in the dead of winter, beds crawling with bedbugs, toilets overflowing in bathrooms where we lined up to get a bath, howling drunks in the room next door.

And through all these difficult months, I was grappling with my longing to be with Eleanor and with the growing sense that I had been exiled from the life we had together. Worse, as one

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