Post Office has WPA

We may be heading for a New Deal.  We might have Work Project Administration initiatives in our future once again.  Let’s hope Biden is thinking big.  Let’s hope the specter of depression can be kept at bay. 

The Poughkeepsie Post Office has WPA murals.  I remember my grandmother showing them to me and explaining that they were tied to FDR.   All the artists who were out of work got paid jobs painting murals, such as these that speak to the history of the city.  I was making my way through another WPA initiative today, one of many that had put writers back to work.   “Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives,” acknowledges at the outset that it was an imperfect initiative.  Some writers were inexperienced, or robotic in their efforts, though fortunately there seems to have been a lot to cull through.  This edition is a selection of the overall body of work and each tale is roughly the same length, of two to three pages.  Many people don’t know when they were born and a notably sampling suggest they are precisely one-hundred years old.  They generally trace the living memory of slavery and end swiftly by saying they moved here or there after the war, had some children and carried on till the present.  The rapid-fire engagement though, with so many different people who were born as chattel and remember manumission creates an unnerving sense of familiarity.  Slavery as life, over and over and over again.

Most interviews suggest dreadful violence as a way of life.  More interviewees that one might suspect, suggest life wasn’t bad during slavery or that it somehow got worse thereafter, as a sharecropper.  And it is also to be remembered that the interviewees were all white people, sent by the federal government so more than a few people might have thought it was the better-part-of-valor to keep candor to a minimum or tell them what they expected these interviewers wanted to hear.  None of the stories “feel” inauthentic though.  And in each case, you have at best a few quick glimpses of what survives the strongest from childhood, nuggets, one assumes that had been shared many times before and were what was first reached for when the topic came up.  What would writers be gainfully employed to research and save from oblivion today?  The time is just about ninety-years on from this last last effort.  So, we’d be looking to speak to people who had memories of life before 1955. 

No one is interested in a formal dinner.  I made way too much food yesterday when I had my extended family over.  There is a big pile of turkey, and four or five cuts of ham.  Not sure anyone else was in love with this quinoa salad but I’m enjoying it cold. 

Monday, 06/08/20