America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw Read Free Book Online Page A

moving. It is a completely recorded and documented period. But to those of us who lived through the period and perhaps were formed by it, the Thirties are a library of personal memories. My own recollections will not be exactly like others, but perhaps they will set you thinking and raise up your memories.
    The Depression was no financial shock to me. I didn’t have any money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold. I had two assets. My father owned a tiny three-room cottage in Pacific Grove in California, and he let me live in it without rent. That was the first safety. Pacific Grove is on the sea. That was the second. People in inland cities or in the closed and shuttered industrial cemeteries had greater problems than I. Given the sea a man must be very stupid to starve. That great reservoir of food is always available. I took a large part of my protein food from the ocean. Firewood to keep warm floated on the beach daily, needing only handsaw and ax. A small garden of black soil came with the cottage. In northern California you can raise vegetables of some kind all year long. I never peeled a potato without planting the skins. Kale, lettuce, chard, turnips, carrots and onions rotated in the little garden. In the tide pools of the bay, mussels were available and crabs and abalones and that shiny kelp called sea lettuce. With a line and pole, blue cod, rock cod, perch, sea trout, sculpin could be caught.
    I must drop the “I” for “we” now, for there was a fairly large group of us poor kids, all living alike. We pooled our troubles, our money when we had some, our inventiveness, and our pleasures. I remember it as a warm and friendly time. Only illness frightened us. You have to have money to be sick—or did then. And dentistry also was out of the question, with the result that my teeth went badly to pieces. Without dough you couldn’t have a tooth filled.
    It seems odd now to say that we rarely had a job. There just weren’t any jobs. One girl of our group had a job in the Woman’s Exchange. She wasn’t paid, but the cakes that had passed their salable prime she got to take home and of course she shared so that we were rarely without dry but delicious cakes. Being without a job, I went on writing—books, essays, short stories. Regularly they went out and just as regularly came back. Even if they had been good, they would have come back because publishers were hardest hit of all. When people are broke, the first things they give up are books. I couldn’t even afford postage on the manuscripts. My agents, McIntosh and Otis, paid it, although they couldn’t sell my work. Needless to say, they are still my agents, and most of the work written at that time has since been published.
    Given the sea and the gardens, we did pretty well with a minimum of theft. We didn’t have to steal much. Farmers and orchardists in the nearby countryside couldn’t sell their crops. They gave us all the fruit and truck we could carry home. We used to go on walking trips carrying our gunny sacks. If we had a dollar, we could buy a live sheep, for two dollars a pig, but we had to slaughter them and carry them home on our backs, or camp beside them and eat them there. We even did that.
    Keeping clean was a problem because soap cost money. For a time we washed our laundry with a soap made of pork fat, wood ashes and salt. It worked, but it took a lot of sunning to get the smell out of the sheets.
    For entertainment we had the public library, endless talk, long walks, any number of games. We played music, sang and made love. Enormous invention went into our pleasures. Anything at all was an excuse for a party: all holidays, birthdays called for celebration. When we felt the need to celebrate and the calendar was blank, we simply proclaimed a Jacks-Are-Wild Day.
    Now and then there came a bit of pure magic. One of us would get a small job, or a relative might go