Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  Did you find any kindness during the Depression?

  No kindness. Except for Callahan, the hobo—only reason I’m alive is’cause Callahan helped me on that train. And the hobo jungle. Everybody else was evil to each other. There was no friendships. Everybody was worried and sad looking. It was pitiful.

  When the war came, I was so glad when I got in the army. I knew I was safe. I put a uniform on, and I said, “Now I’m safe.” I had money comin’, I had food comin’, and I had a lot of gang around me. I knew on the streets or hoboing, I might be killed any time.

  I’d rather be in the army than outside where I was so raggedy and didn’t have no jobs. I was glad to put on a United States Army uniform and get some food. I didn’t care about the rifle what scared me. In the army, I wasn’t gettin’ killed on a train, I wasn’t gonna starve. I felt proud to salute and look around and see all the good soldiers of the United States. I was a good soldier and got five battle stars. I’d rather be in the army now than see another Depression.

  POSTSCRIPT: On recovery, he will return to his job as a washroom attendant in one of Chicago’s leading hotels.

  “When I was hoboin’ through the Dakotas and Montana, down there by General Custer’s Last Stand, Little Big Horn, I wrote my name down, yes, sir. For the memories, just for the note, so it will always be there. Yes, sir.”

  Emma Tiller

  At the time, she lived and worked in western Texas as a cook.

  WHEN TRAMPS and hoboes would come to their door for food, the southern white people would drive them away. But if a Negro come, they will feed him. They’ll even give them money. They’ll ask them: Do you smoke, do you dip snuff? Yes, ma‘am, yes, ma’. They was always nice in a nasty way to Negroes. But their own color, they wouldn’t do that for ’em.

  They would hire Negroes for these type jobs where they wouldn’t hire whites. They wouldn’t hire a white woman to do housework, because they were afraid she’d take her husband.

  When the Negro woman would say, “Miz So-and-So, we got some cold food in the kitchen left from lunch. Why don’t you give it to ‘im?” she’ll say, “Oh, no, don’t give ’im nothin‘. He’ll be back tomorrow with a gang of ’em. He ought to get a job and work.”

  The Negro woman who worked for the white woman would take food and wrap it in newspapers. Sometimes we would hurry down the alley and holler at ‘im: “Hey, mister, come here!” And we’d say, “Come back by after a while and I’ll put some food in a bag, and I’ll sit down aside the garbage can so they won’t see it.” Then he’d get food, and we’d swipe a bar of soap and a face razor or somethin’, stick it in there for ’im. Negroes would always feed these tramps.

  Sometimes we would see them on the railroad tracks pickin’ up stuff, and we would tell ’em: “Come to our house.” They would come by and we would give ‘em an old shirt or a pair of pants or some old shoes. We would always give ’em food.

  Many times I have gone in my house and taken my husband’s old shoes —some of ‘em he needed hisself, but that other man was in worser shape than he was. Regardless of whether it was Negro or white, we would give to ’em.

  We would gather stuff out in the field, pull our corn, roastin’ ears, and put ’em in a cloth bag, because a paper bag would tear. When they get hungry, they can stop and build a fire and roast this corn. We did that ourselves, we loved it like that. And give them salt and stuff we figured would last ’em until he gets to the next place.

  They would sit and talk and tell us their hard luck story. Whether it was true or not, we never questioned it. It’s very important you learn people as people are. Anybody can go around and write a book about a person, but that book doesn’t always tell you that person really. At that particular moment when you are talkin’ to that person, maybe that’s how that person were. Tomorrow they can be different people. It’s very important to see people as people and not try to see them through a book. Experience and age give you this. There’s an awful lot of people that has outstanding educations, but when it comes down to common sense, especially about people, they really don’t know….

  Peggy Terry and Her Mother, Mary Owsley

  It is a crowded apartment in Uptown.28 Young people from the neighborhood wander in and out, casually. The flow of visitors is constant; occasionally, a small, raggedy-clothed boy shuffles in, stares, vanishes. Peggy Terry is known in these parts as a spokesman for the poor southern whites…. “Hillbillies are up here for a few years and they get their guts kicked out and they realize their white skin doesn’t mean what they always thought it meant.”

  Mrs. Owsley is the first to tell her story.

  Kentucky-born, she married an Oklahoma boy “when he came back from World War 1. He was so restless and disturbed from the war, we just drifted back and forth.” It was a constant shifting from Oklahoma to Kentucky and back again; three, four times the route. “He saw the tragedies of war so vividly that he was discontented everywhere.” From 1929 to 1936, they lived in Oklahoma.

  THERE WAS thousands of people out of work in Oklahoma City. They set up a soup line, and the food was clean and it was delicious. Many, many people, colored and white, I didn’t see any difference, ’cause there was just as many white people out of work than were colored. Lost everything they had accumulated from their young days. And these are facts. I remember several families had to leave in covered wagons. To Californy, I guess.

  See, the oil boom come in ‘29. People come from every direction in there. A coupla years later, they was livin’ in everything from pup tents, houses built out of cardboard boxes and old pieces of metal that they’d pick up—anything that they could find to put somethin’ together to put a wall around ’em to protect ’em from the public.

  I knew one family there in Oklahoma City, a man and a woman and seven children lived in a hole in the ground. You’d be surprised how nice it was, how nice they kept it. They had chairs and tables and beds back in that hole. And they had the dirt all braced up there, just like a cave.

  Oh, the dust storms, they were terrible. You could wash and hang clothes on a line, and if you happened to be away from the house and couldn’t get those clothes in before that storm got there, you’d never wash that out. Oil was in that sand. It’d color them the most awful color you ever saw. It just ruined them. They was just never fit to use, actually. I had to use ’em, understand, but they wasn’t very presentable. Before my husband was laid off, we lived in a good home. It wasn’t a brick house, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. These storms, when they would hit, you had to clean house from the attic to ground. Everything was covered in sand. Red sand, just full of oil.

  The majority of people were hit and hit hard. They were mentally disturbed you’re bound to know, ‘cause they didn’t know when the end of all this was comin’. There was a lot of suicides that I know of. From nothin’ else but just they couldn’t see any hope for a better tomorrow. I absolutely know some who did. Part of ’em were farmers and part of ’em were businessmen, even. They went flat broke and they committed suicide on the strength of it, nothing else.

  A lot of times one family would have some food. They would divide. And everyone would share. Even the people that were quite well to do, they was ashamed. ‘Cause they was eatin’, and other people wasn’t.

  My husband was very bitter. That’s just puttin’ it mild. He was an intelligent man. He couldn’t see why as wealthy a country as this is, that there was any sense in so many people starving to death, when so much of it, wheat and everything else, was being poured into the ocean. There’s many excuses, but he looked for a reason. And he found one.

  My husband went to Washington. To march with that group that went to Washington … the bonus boys.

  He was a machine gunner in the war. He’d say them damn Germans gassed him in Germany. And he come home and his own Government stooges gassed him and run him off the country up there with the water hose, half drownded him. Oh, yes sir, yes sir, he was a hell-raiser (laughs —a sudden sigh).
I think I’ve run my race.

  PEGGY TERRY’S STORY:

  I first noticed the difference when we’d come home from school in the evening. My mother’d send us to the soup line. And we were never allowed to cuss. If you happened to be one of the first ones in line, you didn’t get anything but water that was on top. So we’d ask the guy that was ladling out the soup into the buckets—everybody had to bring their own bucket to get the soup—he’d dip the greasy, watery stuff off the top. So we’d ask him to please dip down to get some meat and potatoes from the bottom of the kettle. But he wouldn’t do it. So we learned to cuss. We’d say: “Dip down, God damn it.”

  Then we’d go across the street. One place had bread, large loaves of bread. Down the road just a little piece was a big shed, and they gave milk. My sister and me would take two buckets each. And that’s what we lived off for the longest time.

  I can remember one time, the only thing in the house to eat was mustard. My sister and I put so much mustard on biscuits that we got sick. And we can’t stand mustard till today.

  There was only one family around that ate good. Mr. Barr worked at the ice plant. Whenever Mrs. Barr could, she’d feed the kids. But she couldn’t feed ‘em all. They had a big tree that had fruit on it. She’d let us pick those. Sometimes we’d pick and eat ’em until we were sick.

  Her two daughters got to go to Norman for their college. When they’d talk about all the good things they had at the college, she’d kind of hush’em up because there was always poor kids that didn’t have anything to eat. I remember she always felt bad because people in the neighborhood were hungry. But there was a feeling of together….

  When they had food to give to people, you’d get a notice and you’d go down. So Daddy went down that day and he took my sister and me. They were giving away potatoes and things like that. But they had a truck of oranges parked in the alley. Somebody asked them who the oranges were for, and they wouldn’t tell ’em. So they said, well, we’re gonna take those oranges. And they did. My dad was one of the ones that got up on the truck. They called the police, and the police chased us all away. But we got the oranges.

  It’s different today. People are made to feel ashamed now if they don’t have anything. Back then, I’m not sure how the rich felt. I think the rich were as contemptuous of the poor then as they are now. But among the people that I knew, we all had an understanding that it wasn’t our fault. It was something that had happened to the machinery. Most people blamed Hoover, and they cussed him up one side and down the other—it was all his fault. I’m not saying he’s blameless, but I’m not saying either it was all his fault. Our system doesn’t run by just one man, and it doesn’t fall by just one man, either.

  You don’t recall at any time feeling a sense of shame?

  I remember it was fun. It was fun going to the soup line. ’Cause we all went down the road, and we laughed and we played. The only thing we felt is that we were hungry and we were going to get food. Nobody made us feel ashamed. There just wasn’t any of that.

  Today you’re made to feel that it’s your own fault. If you’re poor, it’s only because you’re lazy and you’re ignorant, and you don’t try to help yourself. You’re made to feel that if you get a check from Welfare that the bank at Fort Knox is gonna go broke.

  Even after the soup line, there wasn’t anything. The WPA came, and I married. My husband worked on the WPA. This was back in Paducah, Kentucky. We were just kids. I was fifteen, and he was sixteen. My husband was digging ditches. They were putting in a water main. Parts of the city, even at that late date, 1937, didn’t have city water.

  My husband and me just started traveling around, for about three years. It was a very nice time, because when you’re poor and you stay in one spot, trouble just seems to catch up with you. But when you’re moving from town to town, you don’t stay there long enough for trouble to catch up with you. It’s really a good life, if you’re poor and you can manage to move around.

  I was pregnant when we first started hitchhiking, and people were really very nice to us. Sometimes they would feed us. I remember one time we slept in a haystack, and the lady of the house came out and found us and she said, “This is really very bad for you because you’re going to have a baby. You need a lot of milk.” So she took us up to the house.

  She had a lot of rugs hanging on the clothesline because she was doing her house cleaning. We told her we’d beat the rugs for her giving us the food. She said, no, she didn’t expect that. She just wanted to feed us. We said, no, we couldn’t take it unless we worked for it. And she let us beat her rugs. I think she had a million rugs, and we cleaned them. Then we went in and she had a beautiful table, full of all kind of food and milk. When we left, she filled a gallon bucket full of milk and we took it with us.

  You don’t find that now. I think maybe if you did that now, you’d get arrested. Somebody’d call the police. The atmosphere since the end of the Second War—it seems like the minute the war ended, the propaganda started. In making people hate each other.

  I remember one night, we walked for a long time, and we were so tired and hungry, and a wagon came along. There was a Negro family going into town. Of course, they’re not allowed to stop and eat in restaurants, so they’d cook their own food and brought it with ‘em. They had the back of the wagon filled with hay. We asked them if we could lay down and sleep in the wagon, and they said yes. We woke up, and it was morning, and she invited us to eat with ’em. She had this box, and she had chicken and biscuits and sweet potatoes and everything in there. It was just really wonderful.

  I didn’t like black people. In fact, I hated ‘em. If they just shipped ’em all out, I don’t think it woulda bothered me.

  She recalls her feelings of white superiority, her discoveries. “If I really knew what changed me … I don’t know. I’ve thought about it and thought about it. You don’t go anywhere, because you always see yourself as something you’re not. As long as you can say I’m better than they are, then there’s somebody below you can kick. But once you get over that, you see that you’re not any better off than they are. In fact, you’re worse off ‘cause you’re believin’ a lie. And it was right there, in front of us. In the cotton field, chopping cotton, and right over in the next field, there’s these black people—Alabama, Texas, Kentucky. Never once did it occur to me that we had anything in common.

  “After I was up here for a while and I saw how poor white people were treated, poor white southerners, they were treated just as badly as black people are. I think maybe that just crystallized the whole thing.”

  I didn’t feel any identification with the Mexicans, either. My husband and me were migrant workers. We went down in the valley of Texas, which is very beautiful. We picked oranges and lemons and grapefruits, limes in the Rio Grande Valley.

  We got a nickel a bushel for citrus fruits. On the grapefruits you had to ring them. You hold a ring in your hand that’s about like that (she draws a circle with her hands), and it has a little thing that slips down over your thumb. You climb the tree and you put that ring around the grapefruit. If the grapefruit slips through, you can’t pick it. And any grapefruit that’s in your box—you can work real hard, especially if you want to make enough to buy food that day—you’ll pick some that aren’t big enough. Then when you carry your box up and they check it, they throw out all the ones that go through the ring.

  I remember this one little boy in particular. He was really a beautiful child. Every day when we’d start our lunch, we’d sit under the trees and eat. And these peppers grew wild. I saw him sitting there, and every once in a while he’d reach over and get a pepper and pop it in his mouth. With his food, whatever he was eating. I thought they looked pretty good. So I reached over and popped it in my mouth, and, oh, it was like liquid fire. He was rolling in the grass laughing. He thought it was so funny—that white people couldn’t eat peppers like they could. And he was tearing open grapefruits for me to suck the juice, because my mouth was all cooked from t
he pepper. He used to run and ask if he could help me. Sometimes he’d help me fill my boxes of grapefruits, ‘cause he felt sorry for me, ’cause I got burned on the peppers. (Laughs.)

  But that was a little boy. I felt all right toward him. But the men and the women, they were just spics and they should be sent back to Mexico.

  I remember I was very irritated because there were very few gringos in this little Texas town, where we lived. Hardly anybody spoke English. When you tried to talk to the Mexicans, they couldn’t understand English. It never occurred to us that we should learn to speak Spanish. It’s really hard to talk about a time like that, ’cause it seems like a different person. When I remember those times, it’s like looking into a world where another person is doing those things.

  This may sound impossible, but if there’s one thing that started me thinking, it was President Roosevelt’s cuff links. I read in the paper how many pairs of cuff links he had. It told that some of them were rubies and precious stones—these were his cuff links. And I’ll never forget, I was setting on an old tire out in the front yard and we were poor and hungry. I was sitting out there in the hot sun, there weren’t any trees. And I was wondering why it is that one man could have all those cuff links when we couldn’t even have enough to eat. When we lived on gravy and biscuits. That’s the first time I remember ever wondering why.

  And when my father finally got his bonus, he bought a secondhand car for us to come back to Kentucky in. My dad said to us kids: “All of you get in the car. I want to take you and show you something.” On the way over there, he’d talk about how life had been rough for us, and he said: “If you think it’s been rough for us, I want you to see people that really had it rough.” This was in Oklahoma City, and he took us to one of the Hoovervilles, and that was the most incredible thing.