House of Earth - Woody Guthrie

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looked so awful black,

      And through our little city,

      It left a dreadful track.

      In the spring of 1935, Pampa was not the only town that had been punished by the agony and losses of the four-year drought. Sudden dust cyclones—black, gray, brown, and red—had also ravaged the high, dry plains of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Still, nothing had prepared the region’s farmers, ranchers, day laborers, and boomers for the Palm Sunday when a huge black blob and dozens of other, smaller dust clouds quickly developed into one of the worst ecological disasters in history. Vegetation and wildlife were destroyed far and wide. By summer, the hot winds had sucked up millions of bushels of topsoil, and the continuing drought devastated agriculture in the lowlands. Poor tenant farmers became even poorer because their fields were barren. Throughout the Great Depression, the Great Plains underwent intolerable torment. The prolonged drought of the early 1930s had destroyed crops, eroded land, and caused many deaths. Thousands of tons of dark topsoil, mixed with red clay, had been blown down to Texas from the Dakotas and Nebraska, carried by winds of fifty to seventy miles per hour. A sense of hopelessness prevailed. But the indefatigable Guthrie, a documentarian at heart, decided that writing folk songs would be a heroic way to lift the sagging morale of the people.

      Confronted with dreariness and absurdity, with poor folks in distress, many of them financially ruined by the Dust Bowl, Guthrie turned philosophical. There had to be a better way of living than in rickety wooden lean-tos that warped in the summer humidity, were vulnerable to termite infestation, lacked insulation in subzero winter weather, and blew away in a sandstorm or a snow blizzard. Guthrie realized that his neighbors needed three things to survive the Depression: food, water, and shelter. He decided to concern himself with the third in his only fully realized novel: the poignant House of Earth.

      A central premise of House of Earth—first conceived in the late 1930s but not fully composed until 1947—is that “wood rots.” At one point in Guthrie’s narrative, there is a tirade against forestry products that rot down … sway … keel over. Someone curses at a wooden home: “Die! Fall! Rot!” Scarred by the dust storm of April 14, Guthrie, a socialist, damned Big Agriculture and capitalism for the degradation of the land. If there is an overall ethos in House of Earth, it’s that those with power—especially Big Banks, Big Lumber, Big Agriculture—should be chastised as repugnant robber barons and rejected by wage earners. Woody was a union man. But his harangues against the powers that be are also tinged with self-doubt. Can one person really fight against wind, dust, and snow? Isn’t venting one’s spleen futile in the end?

      Scholars who devote themselves to Woody Guthrie are continually amazed by how much unpublished work the Oklahoma troubadour left behind. He had an unerring instinct for social justice, and he was a veritable writing machine. During his fifty-five years of life, he wrote scores of journals, diaries, and letters. He often illustrated them with good-hearted cartoons, watercolor sketches, and comical stickers. Then there are the memoirs and his more than three thousand song lyrics. He regularly scribbled random ideas on newspapers and paper towels. And he was no slouch when it came to art. But House of Earth—in which wood is a metaphor for capitalist plunderers while adobe represents a socialist utopia where tenant farmers own land—is Guthrie’s only accomplished novel. The book is a call to arms in the same vein as the best ballads in his Dust Bowl catalog.

      The setting for House of Earth is the mostly treeless, arid Caprock country of the Texas Panhandle near Pampa. This was Guthrie’s hard-luck country. He was proud that the Great Plains were his ancestral home. It’s perhaps surprising to realize that Guthrie of Oklahoma—who tramped from the redwoods of California to subtropical Florida throughout his storied career—first developed his distinctive writing style in the windswept Texas Panhandle. Guthrie’s treasured Caprock escarpment forms a geological boundary between the High Plains to the east and the Lower Plains of West Texas. The soils in the region were dark brown to reddish-brown sand, sandy loams, and clay loams. They made for wonderful farming. But the lack of shelterbelts—except the Cross Timbers, a narrow band of blackjack and post oak running southward from Oklahoma to Central Texas between meridians 96 and 99—left crops vulnerable to the deadly winds. Soil erosion became a plague, owing to misuse of the land by Big Agriculture, an entity that Guthrie wickedly skewers in the novel.

      Guthrie, it seems, knew more about the Caprock country than perhaps any other creative artist who ever lived. He knew the local slang and the idioms of the Panhandle region, the secret hideaways, and the best fishing holes. Throughout House of Earth, Guthrie uses speech patterns (“or something like that”; “shore cain’t”; and “I wish’t I could”) with sure command. Exclamations such as “Whooooo” and “Lookkky!” help establish Guthrie’s populist credibility. He had lived with people very similar to the novel’s hardscrabble characters. His slang expressions are lures similar to those found in O. Henry’s folksy short stories. Building on Will Rogers’s large comedy repertoire, Guthrie, in a little pamphlet titled $30 Wood Help, gave a thumbnail impression of his beloved Lone Star State while carping about the lumber barons turned loan sharks. “Texas,” he wrote, “is where you can see further, see less, walk further, eat less, hitch hike further and travel less, see more cows and less milk, more trees and less shade, more rivers and less water, and have more fun on less money than anywhere else.”

      House of Earth has a literary staying power that makes it more than just a curiosity: homespun authenticity, deep-seated purpose, and folk traditions are all apparent in these pages. Guthrie clearly knows the land and the marginalized people of the Lower Plains. In the novel, he draws portraits of four hard-luck characters all recognizable, or partly recognizable, to readers familiar with his songbook: the dutiful tenant farmer “Tike” Hamlin; his feisty pregnant wife, Ella May; a nameless inspector from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) who asks farmers to slaughter their livestock to raise farm prices; and Blanche, a registered nurse. When Tike, full of discord, lashes out at his own ramshackle house—“Die! Fall! Rot!”—he is speaking for all of the world’s poor living in squalor. Like all of Guthrie’s work, which is often erroneously pigeonholed as mere Americana, this book is a direct appeal for world governments to help the hardest-hit victims of natural disasters create new and better lives for themselves. Guthrie contrives to let his readers know in subtle ways that capitalism is the real villain in the Great Depression. It’s reasonable to say that Guthrie's novel could just as easily have been set in a Haitian shantytown or a Sudanese refugee camp as in Texas.

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      It was desperation that first brought Guthrie to forlorn Pampa. He had been born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, but in 1927, after Woody’s mother was sent to Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman (for what today would be diagnosed as Huntington’s disease), his father moved to the Texas Panhandle. Not only were the crops withered in the Oklahoma fields during the 1920s, but the oil fields were also drying up. Tragedy seemed to follow young Woody around like a thundercloud: his older sister, Clara, died in a fire in 1919; then a decade later the Great Depression hit the Great Plains hard, bringing widespread poverty and further dislocation. After spending much of his teens scraping out an existence in Oklahoma, Woody decided in 1929 to join his father in Pampa, a far-flung community in the Texas Panhandle populated largely by cowboys, merchants, itinerant day laborers, and farmers. The mostly self-educated Woody, who had taken to playing the guitar and harmonica for a living, married a Pampa girl, Mary Jennings, who was the younger sister of a friend, the musician Matt Jennings. They would have three children. An oil discovery in the mid-1920s unexpectedly turned Pampa into a boomtown. The Guthries ran a boardinghouse, hoping to capitalize on the prosperity.

      Temperamentally unsuited to a sunup-to-sundown job, Guthrie—a slight man weighing only 125 pounds—played a handsome mandolin for tips or sandwiches in every dark juke joint, dance hall, cantina, gin mill, and tequilería from Amarillo to Tucumcari. Leftist and progressive-minded, Guthrie was determined not to let poverty beat him down. He considered himself a straight-talking advocate for truth and love like Will Rogers. With head cocked and chin up, he embodied the authentic West Texas drifter complaining about how rotten life was for the

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