Yonnondio: From the Thirties Read Free Page A

will to survive and know the joy and power of
     selfhood, sounds in defiance of the litany of miseries and hostile forces that make
     their unrelenting claims on the lives of all.
    Olsen wrote this story when she was a young woman living close to the conditions she
     describes, struggling with her own poverty and motherhood, yearning to organize the
     working class and somehow find an identity for herself as an emerging writer. Because
     she did not revise the manuscript when she returned to it many years later, the grim
     circumstances of the family’s life are untouched by the softening shades of memory.
     Baby Bess’s assertion of “ I! I!” is a tentative gesture toward a time when things “get tolerable” and they might breathe
     deeply again of air that does not stifle life. Despite the youthful awkwardness of
     the unfinished narrative and the lack of political or historical contexts that might
     have provided a fuller thematic development, Yonnondio: From the Thirties remains a powerful reading experience and an important addition to an American literary
     tradition in which the tragedy of the poor and uneducated is too often neglected.

For Jack

Lament for the aborigines … the word itself a dirge …
    No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:
    Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn’d they disappear;
    To-day gives place, and fades—the cities, farms, factories fade;
    A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the air for a moment,
    Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.
    from Walt Whitman’s “Yonnondio”

The time at the opening of this
book is the early 1920’s;
the place: a Wyoming mining town.

ONE
    The whistles always woke Mazie. They pierced into her sleep like some guttural-voiced
     metal beast, tearing at her; breathing a terror. During the day if the whistle blew,
     she knew it meant death—somebody’s poppa or brother, perhaps her own—in that fearsome
     place below the ground, the mine.
    “God damn that blowhorn,” she heard her father mutter. Creak of him getting out of
     bed. The door closed, with yellow light from the kerosene lamp making a long crack
     on the floor. Clatter of dishes. Her mother’s tired, grimy voice.
    “What’ll ya have? Coffee and eggs? There aint no bacon.”
    “Dont bother with anything. Havent time. I gotta stop by Kvaternicks and get the kid.
     He’s starting work today.”
    “What’re they going to give him?”
    “Little of everything at first, I guess, trap, throw switches. Maybe timberin.”
    “Well, he’ll be starting one punch ahead of the old man. Chris began as a breaker
     boy.” (Behind both stolid faces the claw of a buried thought—and maybe finish like
     him, buried under slaty roof that the company hadn’t bothered to timber.)
    “He’s thirteen, aint he?” asked Anna.
    “I guess. Nearer to fourteen.”
    “Marie was tellin me, it would break Chris’s heart if he only knew. He wanted the
     kid to be different, get an edjication.”
    “Yeah? Them foreigners do have funny ideas.”
    “Oh, I dunno. Then she says that she wants the girls to become nuns so they won’t
     have to worry where the next meal’s comin from, or have to have kids.”
    “Well, what other earthly use can a woman have, I’d like to know?”
    “She says she doesnt want ’em raisin a lot of brats to get their heads blowed off
     in the mine. I guess she takes Chris’s … passing away pretty hard. It’s kinda affected
     her mind. She keeps talkin about the old country, the fields, and what they thought
     it would be like here—all buried in da bowels of earth, she finishes.”
    “Say, what does she think she is, a poet?”
    “And she talks about the coal. Says it oughta be red, and let people see how they
     get it with blood.”
    “Quit your woman’s blabbin,” said Jim Holbrook, irritated suddenly. “I’m goin now.”
     
    Morning sounds. Scrunch of boots. The tinkle of his pail, swinging. Shouted greetings
     to