Yonnondio: From the Thirties Read Free

family suffers as a result of Anna’s disengagement with anything
     other than her body is captured in the episode in which the baby chicks Jim had left
     in her care to keep warm in the oven are incinerated because of her forgetful neglect.
    The terrible life poverty imposes on Jim and Anna acts out its psychic consequences
     in the violence between them. Though there is love in the marriage and Anna and Jim
     have occasional moments of caring for one another, she taunts him with his failure
     to provide for the family and he exercises in physical and sexual force the power
     he lacks in any other space of his life. The climax of this abuse comes when Jim rapes
     his sick and exhausted wife. Mazie hears this assault without full understanding,
     but the brute sounds of that night stay with her as the signature violence of sexuality.
     For Anna, who miscarries as a result, this episode in her marriage is the “culminating
     vision of hostile; overwhelming forces” that surround and break her. After that Anna
     retreats into an inner remoteness that only once leaves her: on a long walk out of
     Omaha beyond the suburbs, where the fresh air and nectar from the catalpa trees revive
     the vision of nature’s beauty, Mazie sees once again a look of happiness “and selfness”
     in her mother’s face.
    Though the class and gender issues remain out of analytical focus, the details of
     the lives of the characters speak in significant and iconoclastic ways in the traditions
     of American fiction. The novel’s proletarian point is muted by the lack of political
     understanding any of the characters attain, but its portrait of the misery of poverty
     and the difficulties of motherhood jolts readers out of their comfort zone. Anna,
     depleted by the birth of five children in a matter of seven years, is no Ma Joad.
     Jim, exhausted from work and abusive at home, is no leader of the proletariat. Their
     children are not exceptional but instead devise contrary play and engage in childish
     violence to relieve the fears and anxieties they absorb from the world around them,
     both at home and on the streets. Their daydreams are not rich in the lore of books
     but spun out of the pop culture of movies, junk food at the corner grocery, and the
     glittering shards of trash from the dump. The pathos is that all of them know isolated
     moments of tenderness and beauty and can dream of better lives. Each is absorbed in
     his or her own fears and misery and often blind to the sickness and fear in the others,
     or too tired or weak or young to address effectively what is only dimly seen.
    The Holbrooks do not transcend their misery. They may be “the people,” but unlike
     Ma Joad’s survivors of the Depression, they do not all “go on.” The poverty and exhaustion
     of work take their toll on the body and on the mind. Father abuses mother, and both
     at times abuse or neglect the children. The children devise daydreams or mischief
     to displace the terror of hunger and violence that invades the home and pollutes the
     very air they breathe. The family’s desire for beauty and peace and affection is never
     quite extinguished by the ugliness around them, but the brief moments in which their
     lacerated lives are soothed haunt them like ghosts from a world whose reality cannot
     be realized. The Holbrooks move downward in American society, encountering too few
     friendly or generous faces in their desperate journey. If they find little real hope
     or kindness in the world, they embody an indomitable will for life. Despite the hostile
     forces that consume their energy and degrade their lives, the last sounds we hear
     from the Holbrooks are ones of laughter and hope. Gathered in the sweltering kitchen
     in the brutal heat of a summer that enhances every other misery, they laugh together
     as the baby Bess bangs a fruit jar lid in clamorous ecstasy that proclaims, “I can do, I use my powers; I! I!” The human spirits inventiveness, its