P.S. (22 page)

I think during the Depression, if the government had tried to do to a country what we’re doing now to Vietnam, I think the people would have marched right up there and snatched Roosevelt out by the hair of his head, and shook him around. And I think maybe the whole atmosphere was created to separate people and make them suspicious of each other, and just stir a hatred of one human for another.

This may sound impossible, but do you know, if there’s one thing that started me thinking, it was President Roosevelt’s cuff links. I read in the paper about how many pairs of cuff links he had, and it told that some of them were rubies and all precious stones . . . these were his cuff links. And I just wondered . . . I’ll never forget, I was sitting on an old tire out in the front yard, and we were hungry and
so
poor. And I was sitting out there in the hot sun—there weren’t any trees—and I was wondering why it was 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. And I think maybe that was my first thought of wondering why . . . That’s the first thing I remember ever wondering why.

But one thing I did want to say about when my father finally got his bonus, he bought a secondhand car for us to come back to Kentucky in. And my dad said to us kids, “All of you
get in the car. I want to take you and show you something.” And on the way over there, he talked about how rough life had been for us. And he said, “If you think it’s been rough for us,” he said, “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. Here were all these people living in old rusted-out car bodies. I mean, that was their home. There were people living in shacks made out of orange crates. One family, with a whole lot of kids, were living in a piano box. And here this—this wasn’t just a little section; this was an area maybe ten miles wide and ten miles long. People living in whatever they could, jammed together.

And when I read
Grapes of Wrath
, that was like reliving my life. And particularly the part in there about where they lived in this government camp. Because when we were picking fruit in Texas, we lived in a government place like that, a government-owned place, in Robstown, Texas. And they came around and they helped the women make mattresses. See, we didn’t have anything. And they showed us how to sew and make dresses. And every Saturday night we’d have a dance. And when I was reading
Grapes of Wrath
, this was just like my life. And . . . and I never was so proud of poor people before as I was after I read that book.

 

VIRGINIA DURR: The Depression affected people in two different ways. One was—and I think this is the overwhelming majority—and that was that having faced the terror of the lack of a job, and the shame of having lived on relief, and the panic of not knowing whether you were going to be able to get work or not. . . . I think the great majority of the people reacted by, you know, thinking that money was the most important thing
in the world. And that the most important thing to do was to get—get yours . . . and get it for your children . . . and be sure that you had it and your children had it. And nothing else mattered but getting you some money and some property, and not having this terror ever come on you again of not being able to feed your family.

On the other hand, I think there were a small number of people who felt like the whole system was lousy, and that you had to change the system. Well, now, I’m not so sure that I know what kind of a system to put in its place. I do think you’ve got to have a system of government that’s responsive to the needs of the people.

 

PEGGY TERRY: I don’t think people were put on earth to suffer. I think that’s a lot of nonsense. I think we are the highest development on the earth, and I think we were put here to live and be happy and enjoy everything that’s here. I don’t think it’s right for a handful of people to get ahold of all the things that make living a joy instead of a sorrow. When you wake up in the morning and the minute consciousness hits you, it’s just like a big hand takes ahold of your heart and squeezes it, because you don’t know what that day’s gonna bring. A hunger, or . . . you just don’t know. It’s really—it’s really hard to . . . to talk about the Depression because what can you say except you were hungry.

 

[More strains of “God Bless the Child” playing]

One of my guests, the day of my interview with Myoka Harubasa, was the skipper of
The Golden Rule
, a ship sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers.
The Golden Rule
had been skirting the waters of the world, defying all barriers, calling out for an end to bombings such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My interview guest, Myoka Harubasa, was a hibakusha. Hibakusha means a survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose life to many is worse than any death could be. There was also an interpreter from Chicago, Joan Takada, who translated for the hibakusha. Two other guests were casual visitors, seated in the studio: a Danish former staff member, Vreni Naess, who was visiting with her two-year old baby, Eric. And that was it. The hibakusha is describing a sunny morning in August 1945, and toward the end the inter preter says “I can’t go on.”

 

[WE HEAR Myoka Harubasa speaking, followed by Joan Takada translating her words.]

 

MYOKA HARUBASA OF HIROSHIMA: They were looking up in the sky, trying to spot the airplane. And then she thought that there was a very big flash in the sky, so she hid her face on the
ground. Then she remembers that she must have been blown away by the impact . . . and when she regained consciousness she couldn’t find most of her friends. They were either blown to bits, or burned, or . . . She says that all her clothes were torn away except the very undergarment. And her skin where she has all her burns—the skin was just peeled off and hanging from her body. And she has that on her arms and legs and on her face . . . [Long pause] And she said it was such an intense heat that she jumped into the nearby river. . . . the small river that was running through the city. . . . She says that her friends who were in the river . . . [Pause; slight sob from the interpreter.] I don’t think I can say it.

 

[Japanese children singing a Japanese children’s song segues into American children singing an American children’s song]

 

MAN AT DINNER TABLE: The fact that you find a nine- or tenyear-old child being gravely concerned about the fact that he’s not going to be living in ten or fifteen years because of this atomic war that’s coming up is . . . is . . . this is the frightening part to me. Heck, when I was nine or ten years old, I was wondering if . . .

 

WOMAN AT DINNER TABLE: You were greedy!

 

MAN: Jesus! Is the pond going to have polliwogs in it this year or not, you know, something like this. But here these kids are wondering: Am I going to be alive?

 

WOMAN: It bothers them. It really does. And to have these remarks come out at home out of a clear blue sky: “I wish I’d never been born.” Oh! It’s frightening. No, she just said, “Well,
if the bomb is going to hit, I’m going to enjoy life while I can. I’ll do what I please.” Oh, what an answer! And what do you say?

[American children singing]

PERRY MIRANDA: Well, remember, we talked a little about the guys thinking over different things. Y’know, putting down their head sometimes, and going back, say, thinking over some memories. Well, what do you think? What are some of the things they think about, or what are some of the things they worry about? [Pause] What are some of the things that the guys worry about?

 

YOUTH: I don’t know, man.

 

MIRANDA: Do you ever worry about what’s gonna happen to you when you grow older?

 

YOUTH: We was born to die; that’s all.

 

MIRANDA: You were born to die?

 

YOUTH: Yeah.

 

MIRANDA: What about in between the time you’re born and the time you die?

 

[Pete Seeger strumming Beethoven’s Ninth on his banjo]

 

Born to die? What about in between the time you’re born and the time you die?
[
Strumming continues under Terkel’s voice.
]
Man is a long time coming. To paraphrase the old Chicago poet:

[Sound of drums and bells]

 

 

T. P. AMERASINGHE: That’s a favorite pastime of the people on a Sunday afternoon—after work, for example. You will find drums playing, drummers trying to outdo one another.

 

 

AMERASINGHE: No, they themselves come together. That’s the beauty of it. The two drummers, finding that they cannot
be . . . one cannot outdo the other, play a final duet together.

 

 

AMERASINGHE: No, no, no.

 

 

AMERASINGHE: I think that’s also an old tradition of a comradely feeling, you see. You have the competition, but at the end both meet on equal terms.

 

[Drummers drumming]

 

 

 

ALEXANDER ELIOT: This picture of the two men clobbering each other in the quicksand in the valley, at the Prado, is first of all a horrible picture; a shocking picture. After that you begin to see it within the context of this magnificent landscape: all a silver, somber, magnificently harmonious thing . . . [A cello plays under his words.] and in the midst of it are these two bloody idiots. And you see that if you could only get through to them somehow, and tell them what they’re doing, and how they are denying by their very action the beauty and the harmony and the mystery that surrounds them—they’re denying the fact that they’re equally brothers—somehow they would recognize what Goya so poignantly makes you realize in looking at the picture.

 

[Cello ends and the Weavers sing.]

LILLIAN SMITH: My father and my mother were quite sincere in believing in human dignity, in democracy, in the Christian beliefs of brotherhood, fellowship, love, mercy, justice; that sort of thing. And yet, at the same time, they accepted what I call the ritual of segregation just as though it were something immovable. And you had to be as decent as possible, you know, within this immovable something. And so, I would go to church, and as a small child—and I was a rather critical small child—I’d hear about Christian brotherhood, and of course none of my little Negro friends were at church. And I would come home and say, “Why? Why?” And always, the questions were gently unanswered . . .

 

 

LILLIAN SMITH: And when I would say, “Why? Why?” and say it too much, they would say, “When you’re older, you will understand.” Now, that was the part where it began to really work in my mind, and I began to feel that part of my mind was segregated from another part of my mind. There was a great split there, you see. A great chasm had already entered my mind, so that I was believing something and I was not living it. And that began to disturb me very much, although in many ways, I was just a kid, just a gay, funny, and ridiculous child. But in many ways, I was asking what I always speak of as the
“Great Questions”: “Who am I?” “Where am I going?” “What is death?” “Who is God?” “Why am I here?” And sometimes I think I worried my mother very much because I said, “Mother, why are
you
my mother?”

Here now we all ask; children ask, and the Greeks ask, and existential philosophers ask, and every thoughtful person: “Who am I?”

 

 

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: When I was young, I misunderstood the importance of the external world. I believed you can just do what you want and think what you think by yourself. Little by little I learned that my own ideas were the reflection of things going around me; that my whole life was the reflection of a lot of things going on in the world.

I was not at all a lonely person, and I did not invent and create myself. It depended mostly on circumstance. It was the war which was a big revelation in that respect. And then, going deeper and deeper into the experience provided by the war, I discovered the tightness of the ties which tie me to the whole world.

 

JAMES BALDWIN: The effort, it seems to me, is if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms in which you are connected to other lives. And they can discover, too, the terms in which they are connected to other people . . .