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.
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