ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701110006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
Nancy Martin-Perdue and Charles Perdue were searching for documents on ex-slaves in the Virginia State Archives back in the mid-1970s when they came across an extraordinary discovery.
Stuffed into old boxes were pages and pages of life histories - the stories Virginians told in their own words near the end of the Great Depression.
More than 1,300 oral histories - some typed, some written in pencil - had sat hidden for decades. Many pages crumbled in the Perdues' hands. Some boxes were so stuffed with papers it was hard to reclose them.
But the University of Virginia scholars dug deeper, made copies and found still more of these histories at other archives. The result is a new book, more than two decades in the making, that digs into an almost forgotten era in Virginia's past.
Their book - "Talk About Trouble: A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression" - is not the sort of history that dominates library shelves.
It's not about statesmen or corporate giants or military heroes. It's about average Virginians, of all ages and races. It tells of their struggle to survive the ravages of the nation's economic disaster, cope with vast social changes and get along in an era when political and economic freedoms were limited.
They were people who often didn't see themselves as important in the greater scheme.
"You say you are writing life histories," Craig County native Josephine Wright told an interviewer in June 1939. "Mine ain't worth tellin', but if I'd tell it all nobody would believe it for I've done the work of a man and at the same time I was living the life of a woman. I've built fences and helped to build everything on the place except the barn, and all the time I was raisin' children."
Wright's fascinating oral history - and dozens more included in "Talk About Trouble" - were the work of a job program created as part of the New Deal, the federal government's response to the Depression.
Interviewers with the Virginia Writers' Project talked with people around the state from 1938 to 1941.
The Perdues' interests in folklore and history were shaped during this era. Both were born during the Depression with family roots in the Deep South; both their families benefited from New Deal programs. Today, Nancy Martin-Perdue is a free-lance writer and scholar-in-residence at UVa. Her husband, Charles, is a folklorist who has taught at UVa for 24 years.
After discovering the New Deal life histories in the 1970s, they juggled their research into them with other projects until 1984. At that time, with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the New Deal life histories became a consuming focus of their work.
The Perdues wanted to go beyond simply reprinting the interviews in book form. They dug into old newspaper clippings, census records, and birth, marriage and death certificates, then used their detective work to put the interviewed subjects' lives into perspective.
In some cases, interviewees were given pseudonyms, so the Perdues had to piece together facts to try to discover their real identities.
Like other New Deal projects set up for writers, photographers and artists around the nation, the Virginia Writers' Project was created to provide relief jobs for out-of-work people. But these programs accomplished more: They offered a means of creative expression for those it hired, and they helped chronicle the nation and its people at a crucial time in its history.
Their kin and communities
Across the country, these projects gave sustenance to many writers who went on to acclaim - including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow and Zora Neale Hurston.
"Talk About Trouble" notes, however, that the writers' projects also opened avenues of expression for people with varying degrees of education, people who were not normally thought of as writers.
In Virginia, seven men and women - six whites and one black - wrote two-thirds of the 1,300 New Deal life histories. They documented their own lives along with the lives of their kin and others in their communities.
Gertrude Blair, almost 70 when she began working for the writers' project, was a Botetourt native who had studied Renaissance art in Italy. She kept house for her father and brothers, who were in the real estate and building business in Roanoke.
Mary S. Venable, born in 1878 in Alleghany County, went on to write a number of books of poetry.
She died in Los Angeles in 1962.
These "field workers," as they were called, were led by Virginia project director Eudora Ramsay Richardson. Richardson, who had attended Hollins College and went on to get a graduate degree in English from Columbia University, had a reputation for being independent-minded with a commitment to women's rights.
Many of the oral histories reflect the social and political conventions of the times. But some interviewees didn't hesitate to voice their complaints about the powers that be.
An Alleghany County tenant farmer named Hooker talked about the tight political control exercised in state and local governments during that era - recalling how his vote against the local "courthouse ring" had brought trouble down on him.
"I'm not beholden to any politician, so I voted to suit myself," Hooker said. "It was a local election. Seems like everybody got a chance to read the ballots sent by mail. I didn't vote to suit the courthouse-county ring, and so they had a lot to say about why I didn't vote for them. Not long ago a man got after me again about it, and that was five years ago I done the votin'.''
`A hard wind will blow it down'
Others talked about their suffering in hard times.
Ben James described the shack on Petersburg's Squaw Alley that he and his spouse rented for $1 a week. The floor was covered with linoleum scraps. They had to move their bed to the center of the room to avoid the rain pouring in. They begged for old newspapers to insulate the walls.
"We want a better house and to live better, if I could only get a job," he said in March 1939. "This house is not fit for people to live in. It's just a hull. A hard wind will blow it down."
Times were changing, though. New Deal programs were putting some of the unlucky to work, and the nation was changing with growing speed from a farm-based society to a modern industrial state.
There was still more change as the Depression faded and the nation began preparing for World War II. People lost their homes as military bases and factories were built or expanded. Many more left their rural roots for defense jobs in the cities.
To some, the pace of change was dizzying. Many interviewees pined for simpler times. "Things ain't now like they used to be nohow," one lamented.
Others saw no way to hold back the inevitable.
A Southside tobacco farmer told a writers' project interviewer that he wanted to get a job in the city so he could do better by his wife and daughters. He tried a lumber yard in Suffolk with no luck. He returned to the farm.
"All I want to do is to hang on here till my girls is full and grown," he said. "The only thing is, I hope don't none of them marry farmers. There ain't no future in farmin'. But as soon as they get fixed, I'm gonna quit the farm for good."
* "Talk About Trouble: A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression" is reviewed on our Book Page, Horizon 4
LENGTH: Long : 156 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ``Fort Belvoir, Virginia. November, 1942.'' It wasn'tby CNBuntil the start of World War II that the economic struggles of the
Depression finally gave way, as Virginia turned to preparing for
military struggle. Photo by Alfred Palmer.
2. Above: ``Covington, Virginia. January, 1939. City limits. Photo
by Arthur Rothstein.''
3. & 4. Above: ``Roanoke County, Virginia. March 1941. A farmer
plowing. Photo by John Vachon.'' Left: ``Caroline County, Virginia.
June 1941. Children of William Corneal, a farmer who must move out
of the area which is being taken over by the Army for maneuver
grounds. Photo by Jack Delano.''
5. Left: ``Roanoke, Virginia, October 1942. Nobody played hookey the
day teacher Doris Jordan at Jamison Elementary School explained how
every pupil can help win the war.... Photo by Howard Liberman.''
6. & 7. Roanoke, Virginia, October 1942. Above: ``The charge of the
scrap brigade.... The patriotic and energetic youngsters... are
making an all-out effort to corner every available piece of scrap in
the city, so that their soldier and sailor brothers will have the
shells and guns and tanks with which to beat the Axis....'' Left:
``She's put her playthings aside for a more important game...''
Photos by Valentino Sarra.
8. ``Roanoke, Virginia. June 1943. Paper mill. Photo by John
Vachon.''