A photograph, a short story, a novel, and the truth

 

In 1936, documentary photographer Dorothea Lange took a picture that has become the symbol of the Depression. The photograph, taken in Nipomo, California, shows a woman sitting in the back of a beat-up truck, holding an infant, with two other children huddled close to her but turned from the camera, as though blocking it out. The woman stares into the distance, her face lined with fatigue, hunger, and anxiety. She and the children are dirty, their clothes obviously worn for days. It is a picture of abject poverty and hopelessness. Lange worked for the Farm Security Administration and did not own rights to the photos she took; she was paid a salary and never profited directly from the immense popularity of this image. Nor did she get the subject’s name or permission. A few days later, the photograph was published in the San Francisco News. The subject of the photo remained anonymous.

In 1978, a woman named Florence Owens Thompson wrote to the Modesto Bee identifying herself as the woman in the portrait. She and her family felt used by the photographer, disputed some of the facts that had grown up around the picture, and resented being symbols of the Depression. Thompson, who was full Cherokee from Oklahoma, eventually had several husbands and partners and as many as nine children (the record is a bit unclear). In 1983, her health failed, and her children asked for donations to cover her medical care, collecting several thousand dollars. She died a few months later at the age of eighty.

Knowing none of the story, I first saw the picture years ago and was struck by the anguish on Thompson’s face. What I wondered would bring some joy and hope into that life. I wrote a short story, “Sue Ellen Learns to Dance,” in which I plucked her out of the Dustbowl and gave her a new life. The story won a Wrangler (Western Heritage) Award from the National Cowboy Museum and a Spur from Western Writers of America.

This past week I read a novel, Mary Coin by Marisa Silver, also based on the life of Florence Thomson. Silver uses three voices to tell the story---that of Mary herself (Thompson), photographer Virginia Dare (Lange), and a college history professor named Walker Dodge who appears to be the only purely fictional addition to the story. Silver lays out a plausible life for Mary Coin—more marriages, more children—that ends with her living alone in a trailer, despite nicer accommodations arranged by her protective children. The three voices speak interchangeably, and I was uncertain early on where the novel was headed, though I had a suspicion. The characters are portrayed sympathetically, and the entire work is a graphic account of the hardships of the lives of migrant farm workers in the 1930s. There is also a lot of angst and much introspective wandering in the minds of these three characters, but eventually it ends with a climactic plot twist that takes real liberties with truth and possibility.

A friend and fellow novelist asked me what I thought about the differences between my story and Silver’s novel, and at first, I dismissed it as the romanticist (me, with a happy ending) against the realist (with a heart-wrenching though contrived ending). But the more I thought on the question, the more I realized that Silver took a specific woman and created a plausible, probable if grim life story for her. That is or should be historical fiction.

I saw the beleaguered woman as symbolic of the many migrant mothers and imagined a future rather than trying to stick to reality. There were other threads in my story—a hint of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (a dying grandmother is central to the resolution) and woven in is the theme often found in western stories about the good woman who cherishes memories of an outlaw lover or a wild escapade in her past. Though it takes place in the past, I see it as fiction without the historical qualifier.

I wonder if readers would see the same difference I do. Anyway, I find it fascinating that almost ninety years later, that iconic photograph is still inspiring writers.

Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories - Kindle edition by Alter, Judy. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.