Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen

He learned all right, the tortures of the damned:

feet slapping the pavement, digging humbly into carpets, squatting wide apart in front of chairs and the nojobnojob nothingdoingtoday buzzing in his ears; hugging the coffee--and, shuffling along, buddy (they made a song out of it) can you spare a dime, and the freights north east south west, getting vagged, keep movin, keep movin (the bulls dont need to tell ya, your own belly yells it out, your own idle hands), sing a song of hunger the weather four below holes in your pockets and nowhere to go, the flophouses, the slophouses, a bowl of misery and a last month's cruller and the crabs having a good time spreading and spreading (you didn't know hell would be this bad, did you?).

The subtitle of Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio is "From the Thirties," and what it has to say about the Thirties is that they sucked big time and were bad. The novel follows the Holbrook family--father Jim, mother Anna, daughter Mazie, siblings Jimmie, Ben, Will, and baby Bess--as Jim moves from job to job in the American plains, looking for work that will allow the family to survive and rise above the depredations of poverty. First, it's coal mining in Wyoming, then farming in South Dakota, and finally the slaughterhouses of Omaha. In each place, Jim finds himself owing more to his bosses than he is paid, thanks to the brutal policies of company towns, and he takes his anger and frustration out not on his bosses--one thing Yonnondio seeks to illustrate is how poverty and abuse don't necessarily translate into political awareness--but on Anna. Sickness, violence, and misery ensue.

I like Yonnondio more when I read in the postscript that it was written by Olsen when she was in her early twenties, put away unfinished, then rediscovered and published decades later. As a novel, it seems to have only a downward shape, like The Inferno, from one circle of Hell to another. Even though there are small and hopeful moments--the discovery of a beautiful field of dandelions, with their edible greens, in the middle of Omaha--Yonnondio shows how punishing life was for the poor during the Great Depression by punishing the reader.

But seeing it less as a novel than a collection of fragments, the poetic and impressionistic elements of Yonnondio come to the forefront. Olsen's language can be brutal and lurid, Gothic in imagery and sentiment, and filled with strange, bold choices (like the stretch quoted above). Less successful, I thought, were Olsen's attempts to capture the family's vernacular, which very well might be accurate, but doesn't sound like any human beings I've ever heard. Jim is a thoughtless brute, and Anna and Mazie mostly characterized by their suffering, which approaches madness at times. But some of the minor characters provide the most interesting moments: the coal miner, disfigured and addled by the explosion of a seam, who nearly drops Mazie into the mineshaft to appease the gods of coal he imagines are torturing him; the street urchin Mazie befriends in Omaha who patterns her personality after movies she's too poor to have seen.

Olsen, as I understand it, chose not to finish or rework any of the material she had written in her youth, when the Depression was not yet a memory. As a result, there's no cant here about the nobility of poverty, or of those who grind through the exploitation the Holbrooks experience. Poverty isn't ennobling, Olsen shows; in fact, one of its harshest consequences is that it breeds cruelty in its victims. For that observation alone Yonnondio remains powerful.

Black Boy by Richard Wright

Though I have not been posting for a while, I have been reading: This is one of about five reviews I have in my backlog. As it turns out, teaching in an actually functioning school has certain demands and some things have fallen by the wayside--reviews being one of them. I apologize, and promise never again to sacrifice my blog stewardship for something as trivial as the education of American youth.

In this case, the two are not exclusive--I read Black Boy because I thought it was going to be the next book I would read in my senior class; but when we discovered that there was only one full class set I had to turn my attention (not without some pleasure) to Pride and Prejudice.

Which is not to say I didn't like Black Boy--I did. But I didn't connect with it like many do. Why not, I wondered? I briefly considered that it may be because I simply don't have a point of reference for Wright's narrative; I can't relate to it, as my students often say.

It is the quintessential outsider narrative: Wright grows up in the Jim Crow South, a place and time not amenable to the ambitions of young blacks. Richard is fiercely intelligent, but his poverty means that his schooling is intermittent and he never connects with his classmates. Work is scarce and demeaning, and usually involves submitting to the tyranny of a white boss who fails to even imagine that a black child may have aspirations, or can write. At home, things are not much better: Richard fails to grow into the religious mold his grandmother and aunts and uncles expect of him; his father is absent from his earliest days. Wright subtitled the memoir American Hunger, and recalls that he is perpetually starving:

Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night with hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly.

First he associates the hunger with the absence of his father, but it is more; it is the starvation of all that it means to be human, the deprivation of the things which sustain life and thought. He survives meagerly, snatching at scraps of knowledge as he does scraps at food.

But I am not an outsider. I am not so progressive to admit that, in the great scheme of things, I am a have and not a have-not. Though I thought this, I rejected it: I had forgotten that relatability is one of the great smokescreens of reading. (As if we should never stoop to understand what we do not recognize as like ourselves.)

Instead, I think that Black Boy failed to resonate with me because I suspect there is some measure of airbrushing in Wright's accounts of himself. It isn't a self-hagiography; he hardly paints himself as a saint, but his sins are sins of youthful ignorance. For example, he takes a job delivering a newspaper because he likes the serials printed on the back, but fails to notice that the paper itself is militantly pro-Jim Crow. Contrast the scene in which Richard, desperate to please his grandmother, tells her that he would believe if he saw an angel--which she mishears as fact and tells the church that her grandson has had a vision. These misunderstandings lead to Richard being beaten, but always through the intolerance and narrow-mindedness of his family; he admits to no malice or ill intention. This pattern continues into the book's restored second half, which traces Wright's dalliances with the Chicago Communist community, which finds his free-thinking suspicious and seeks to eradicate it as his family did.

Ultimately, I think we are meant to see Wright as a victim. Not a victim to be pitied, but to be championed because of his ultimate success, but a victim all the same. I think this is the source of ambivalence for this book--yet it makes me want to read Native Son, whose protagonist seems more conflicted. That's the kind I like.