Touch and Go by Studs Terkel

Author:Studs Terkel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2011-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

16

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been . . .

If ever there was an experience that altered my life, not simply in a political way, but in every aspect, it was the Great American Depression. I was there watching what hard times did to decent people. The great discovery is how they behaved during a specific issue, not what they were labeled. It was easy to call somebody a Commie, or a Red, or a Fascist for that matter. It’s how that person behaved at a certain moment that counted.

I remember the generosity practiced by those with little. A guy would leave to get on the streetcar and he’d pass another guy a cigarette, or, getting off, would hand someone else his transfer. There were these little things. There’s the innate decency of human beings. But when your livelihood is at stake, it’s you or the other guy, not you and the other guy.

In The Grapes of Wrath, sharecropper Muley Graves is being forced off his land; a young man in goggles seated on a Caterpillar tractor is about to knock down his house. Muley, in a gesture of resistance, raises his rifle toward the tractor.

“You touch my house with that Cat and I’ll blow you to kingdom come.”

The man raises his goggles and declares, “You ain’t gonna blow nobody nowhere. In the first place, they’ll hang you and you know it. Next day they’ll send someone to take my place.”

Then Muley recognizes him. “Why you’re Joe Davis’ boy. How can you do this to your own people?”

The man on the tractor says, “I got a wife and kids to feed. Everybody else, they can look after their own selves. . . . Now go on, get out of the way!”

When, fifty years later, I visited that fourth-generation Iowa farmer and his wife facing the same foreclosure troubles, Muley’s words echoed. With the bankers breathing down their necks, Mrs. Nearmyer, fretting over the effect of the times on her small daughter, asked the same question that Muley Graves does. “Whenever the deputy came to take our stuff away from us, I asked him, ‘How can you go home and face your family?’ I happen to know he has an eight-year-old girl too. I said, ‘How can you sleep tonight, knowing that someday this could be you? You don’t have to be a farmer. This is not just a farm crisis.’

“He said, ‘If I don’t do it, somebody else would be here. To me, it’s just a job.’ ”27

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