the depression: story prompt
There's something about this photograph which really strikes me as melancholy, and it doesn't have to do with the sharecropper's torn clothes. It's got more to do with the fact that he's standing by the side of the roada, which moves off without him while he's looking over the fields.
This photo was taken in 1936 in rural Mississippi. It's hard to imagine what life was like for people who were poor to start with. How much worse could it get? Did sharecroppers in the rural south starve to death in the Depression? I don't know the answer to that question.
I do know that relentless povery grinds people down. It robs people of hope, of the ability to feel anything but despair and anger. The poorest places are the biggest eyesores not so much because soap and paint cost money, but because they require hope and optimism and energy.
This particular sharecropper might have been one of the lucky ones. Maybe he and his sons were able to earn enough to keep the family fed. Maybe the younger kids could get a couple years of school. Maybe his extended family was made of strong, stern stuff and they found ways to manage. If his boys came home now and then with a chicken they said they found dead in the road or pockets full of butterbeans, he looked the other way and hoped his wife would do the same.
Maybe he considered himself well off, and fortunate in his family and faith. Maybe he was too tired to go to services on Sunday, and dragged there by his mother, sat stewing in his anger at the preacher and his god.
Maybe he died of bleeding ulcers or tuberculosis or a cut he got in the field that turned septic, in an age when there was no such thing as an emergency room or antibiotics. Maybe he lived to be 98 and died surrounded by his great grandchildren.
I hope somebody remembers his story.