On Palm Sunday, April 14, 1935, a day that would become known as Black Sunday, Woody Guthrie was witness to the biggest single event in the biggest ecological disaster in American history.
An enormous dust cloud that had risen in the Dakotas and had gathered strength and size as it swept southward across the Great Plains, reached the farming town of Pampa, Texas, near Amarillo. By the time the cloud arrived there, it was a black mountain, reaching far into the sky, turning day to night, its wind lashing the town with a fury that only the unprotected plains can know.
The people huddled inside their flimsy frame homes, holding wet cloths over their faces to keep from smothering. The dust blew almost unimpeded through the houses while destroying everything — crops, farm machinery, automobiles, livestock — outside the walls. In the darkness of the houses, the people prayed for their salvation. Among them was Guthrie, an itinerant sign painter who would become the rough-hewn troubadour of the Dust Bowl and the people it would displace and destroy.
In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck told the story of those Dust Bowl refugees who were evicted by greedy banks and landlords from their homes on the plains and who trekked to California hoping to find a better life, only to encounter more of the cruelty they had tried to escape. In House of Earth, this novel recently discovered among Guthrie’s papers and here published for the first time, the balladeer of the poor and dispossessed writes of those lesser-known victims, those who didn’t flee, who stayed on the plains and tried to oppose their oppressors — big agriculture, the banks, the landlords, the corporations and the brutal weather — on their native ground.
Guthrie, whose songs of protest and hope, and whose “This Land Is Your Land” has become an anthem often sung into the ears of social and political oppressors — still big agriculture, banks, landlords and corporations — is famous worldwide for his music and other writings. House of Earth is his only novel. Written in 1947, its long and explicit scenes of sex and childbirth apparently were too pungent for the literary mores of the time.
The story — told in four long chapters — takes place on the tiny rented farm of Tike and Ella May Hamlin in the Texas Panhandle, within sight of Route 66, the Mother Road that was carrying so many of their neighbors toward California. The Hamlins’ world is their barn, their cowshed and the drafty one-room shack that the wind may carry away at any moment. There are only three characters — the Hamlins and Blanche, a nurse who comes to help Ella May through the last days of her pregnancy.
Dirt-poor though they are, the Hamlins find happiness in each other. Until their landlord refuses to renew their rental of the farm. To remain on it, the Hamlins must work the land as sharecroppers until the landlord decides when to bulldoze their house and incorporate their few acres into his larger farm operation.
Meanwhile, Tike has a dream. He has sent away for a government booklet that provides instructions to build an adobe house. He wants to buy an acre or two, build a house of earth that will withstand the dust storms and the blizzards, and own his own little piece of the world. He carries the booklet with him at all times. He reads it like the Bible. But he lacks the one thing he needs to make his dream real — money to buy his plot of land. “And,” Tike tells Ella May, “there are a few people that work to hurt, to hold down, to deny, to take from, to cheat the rest of us. And these few are the thieves of the body, the germs of the disease of greed, they are few but they are loud and strong and your baby must be born well to help kill these few out.”
The style of House of Earth is strange and lyrical. Its people don’t speak in conversation, but in speeches and soliloquies, some of them pages long, as are the descriptions of the farm, the land, the weather and the three characters.
The introduction by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp provides a concise summary of Guthrie’s life and a history of the lost manuscript. House of Earth becomes an invaluable addition to the literature of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, one with an eerie relevance in today’s America.
Former Dallas Morning News writer Bryan Woolley is the author of several books, most recently The Wonderful Room: The Making of a Texas Newspaperman.
House of Earth
Edited and introducedby Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp