THERE ARE TIMES WHEN, as if by some mysterious alchemical process, mere ink and printed typeface can bring an actual human existence to life, and a person’s voice seems to rise, almost audibly, from the page. In this case, the voice belongs to a Black woman named Emma Tiller who lived in West Texas in the 1930s and worked as a cook for some of the better-off white folks. She and her husband had previously been sharecroppers, and she is speaking of her solidarity with other poor people.
“When tramps and hoboes would come to their door for food, the southern white people would drive them away,” she recalls. Many of these homeless men were white, yet Tiller remembers that when a Black person came to the door, her white employers would offer food and sometimes money. “They was always nice in a nasty way to Negroes,” Tiller observes. And so she and other domestics went out of their way to help the white men who were driven off.
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.” . . . 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.” . . . Regardless of whether it was Negro or white, we would give to ’em.
Tiller’s words were recorded and quoted, along with those of more than 150 others who lived through those years, by Studs Terkel in his 1970 oral history of the Great Depression, Hard Times. It’s a period that’s been much on my mind this past year, as Americans have suffered mass unemployment and social upheaval on a scale not experienced since the thirties—a time when the American system appeared on the brink, and a wave of radicalism, of desperate people and emboldened social movements, rose to meet the moment.
There are plenty of political and economic histories of the period, but they tend to lose sight of the daily realities of lived experience. Which may be why, last spring, when life as we knew it fell off a cliff—when our converging catastrophes, political and planetary, were overtaken by the coronavirus pandemic—I became preoccupied with what it was really like to survive through that earlier decade of crisis, how it was that people and communities and movements held together or came apart under extreme conditions. And so I reached for Terkel’s book and other such documents, and I was reminded of the great value, especially in a theory-heavy time, of oral history as a form: its testimony to the unavoidable and not always convenient fact that history and politics, economic forces and mass movements, are driven not simply by ideological and demographic abstractions but by individual, living-breathing human beings.