Voice of the People

THESE ARE OUR LIVES--Federal Writers' Project--University of North Carolina Press ($2).

> Sarah Easton, a rawboned, middle-aged woman with an eroded face, was "raised hard." She lives with her moon-faced husband and their 16-year-old twin daughters in a neat, sagging one-room shack near Raleigh, N. C. They live on $4 or $5 a week, remember good times when they had $12. They own a 1924 Dodge but can't afford to run it. Years ago, discouraged by debts and annual babies, John started drinking "like a hog in a bucket of slops." But when Sarah drank cotton-root tea to bring on a nearly fatal miscarriage, John was sobered. "God knows, Sarah," he said, "I love the brats but I'm worried about how to look atter them." Next time he took to drink, Sarah "suddenly took a notion that I could beat the stuffin out of him, and I did. I got a barrel stave and I turned him across the table bench and I blistered his rump."

When twins came along the doctor charged double, "and from that minute on ever' bill has doubled it seems like." While waiting for times to get better they fortify themselves with a helpful game. While eating a breakfast consisting of only black coffee "we poke the fun at rich people and pretend that we are having just what we want. We ask each other polite-like to have toast and jelly and bacon and eggs and it shore helps."

> The Turners--nine in all--are Negro sharecroppers, who clear about $50 a year. Thinks Grade: "De gover'ment's got no business a-payin' out relief money and a-givin' WP and A jobs to farmers. . . . If 'twas fixed right dey'd make all de livin' dey need from de ground." What worries her most is having had to drop out of the burial association which costs 25-c- each time a member dies. Haunted by the prospect of a pauper's grave, Gracie prays: "Please keep death off till I get out'n dis shape."

> When Farmer X was a young fellow, a Yankee sawmill superintendent took a fancy to him, taught him to be a timber estimator. He bought a 200-acre farm, raised a family, slipped a little each year as the land got poorer. Now he philosophizes: "Life don't work like a job of work. You study out how to do a job and do it. But when it comes to living, they's not any way you can plan it and have it go according." He doesn't blame the Government though. "Our troubles," guesses Farmer X, "is just because we've lived too long."

> Joe, 5 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs., is a Negro handyman in Knoxville, who "jest don't care nothin' about a stiddy job." Says Joe: "The Lord cut me out in the shape of a man that's naturally made to have a good time. But he didn't give me the money to have that good time."

Six months ago W. T. Couch, regional director of the Federal Writers' Project, sent his best writers out to get the life stories of a typical cross section of Southern sharecroppers, landlords, millworkers and owners, relief workers, storekeepers, etc. No editorializing was allowed; stories were to be told mainly in the first person; the results were to be judged on "accuracy, human interest, social importance, literary excellence." Result: something new in sociological writing, a 421-page volume of 35 such true stories to be published May 20. Already exciting advance comment (Charles Beard: "As literature more powerful than anything I have ever read in fiction."), it gives the South its most pungent picture of common life, the Writers' Project its strongest claim to literary distinction.

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