THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701130195
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: 85 lines
TALK ABOUT TROUBLE
A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression
NANCY J. MARTIN-PERDUE and CHARLES L. PERDUE JR.
University of North Carolina Press. 493 pp. $45 hardcover. $19.95 paper.
True enough, trouble is rampant in Talk About Trouble. But trouble doesn't overpower the warm realism and fascinating historic details in the husband-and-wife Perdue team's collection of life histories subtitled, A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression.
Nancy J. Martin-Perdue is a longtime free-lance writer and most recently anthropology scholar-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Charles Perdue, a former geologist, is a folklorist who has taught English and anthropology at the university for the past 24 years.
Between them, they have sifted through dusty files - and stitched together with pertinent comment and research material - upwards of 60 family stories gleaned from residents of this state, most of them struggling to make ends meet, by government-paid participants in the Virginia Writers' Project (VWP). The VWP was one of the programs initiated by the national Works Progress Administration (WPA).
The VWP writers' accounts, sometimes in longhand and as short as three pages, were composed on the eve of World War II or just as the war began. The VWP trove of more than 1,300 narrative texts has been tapped in various ways over the years, but this selection has special breadth and depth. Contributing to its impact are the editorial notes connecting these lives with wider events and the aptly placed Depression-era photographs assembled by the New Deal agency first called the Resettlement Administration and later, the Farm Security Administration.
The mini-biographies (many almost autobiographies because of the direct quotes used by the interviewers) illuminate not only the hard times that the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt battled, but tell much about pre-New Deal Virginia history, on occasion going back as far as slavery and the Civil War.
The book deals largely with the desperation of farmers, miners, tobacco growers and tobacco factory employees, mill hands, crabbers and fishermen (as hereabouts), shipyard and migrant laborers, plus other breadwinners during crisis years when many of them were pressed into painful career changes by technology and social flux.
An unemployed former ironworker in the mountain region laments the competition and other factors that put his company out of business: ``I would get out of here if there was any place to go for work. As I said before, but for the Federal government, people would have starved all around us. There are some pitiful cases, now, where want is great.''
As counterpoints to such dreariness, the life histories contain many nuggets of goodwill and humor. Frequent reference is made to the high spirits and useful results of such communal projects as log-rolling (assembling materials for a house), peach peelings and quilting bees.
Colorful talk abounds. Ma Henrietta proclaims that ``single blessedness was better than double cussedness.'' Another Virginian shies away from buying too much for fear that, like his mother used to say, he might have to ``charge my debts to the dust and let the rain a'settle them.'' And there is Mollie Williams, of Danville, who comments that ``most of my folks is cemetery dead.''
Many of the interviewees, too, seemed to take their straits as a matter of course and to be enjoying happy lives in the emotional, family sense. Some hard workers had children in college; one of the better-off subjects was the civic militant Emily Palmer Stearns, an animal lover who became known as the Culpeper Cat Lady.
On the minus side, allowances have to be made for the stilted-to-clumsy prose of some among the 40-odd VWP writers, and for the way a few of them interpreted their mission. Some interviewed their relatives; others, out of good motives probably, disguised the real identity of the people they wrote about; there are indications that some individuals were written up more than once. Personal biases and a tendency to use racial stereotypes (there is a lot of Uncle Remus dialect) occasionally blur the picture.
Also, it's not a very good idea to give this fact- and event-packed book a straight, fast reading. Talk About Trouble is most lively and informative - and most useful as a kaleidoscope of grass-roots Virginia at a historic moment of passage - if absorbed in short, alert sessions. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. He lives in
Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
JACK DELANO/From ``Talk About Trouble''
Migratory worker on the Norfolk-Cape Charles ferry, July 1940.