Free Hard Times by Studs Terkel Page B

back by after a while and I’ll put some food in a bag, and I’ll sit down aside the garbage can so they won’t see it.” Then he’d get food, and we’d swipe a bar of soap and a face razor or somethin’, stick it in there for ’im. Negroes would always feed these tramps.
    Sometimes we would see them on the railroad tracks pickin’ up stuff, and we would tell ’em: “Come to our house.” They would come by and we would give ‘em an old shirt or a pair of pants or some old shoes. We would always give ’em food.
    Many times I have gone in my house and taken my husband’s old shoes —some of ‘em he needed hisself, but that other man was in worser shape than he was. Regardless of whether it was Negro or white, we would give to ’em.
    We would gather stuff out in the field, pull our corn, roastin’ ears, and put ’em in a cloth bag, because a paper bag would tear. When they get hungry, they can stop and build a fire and roast this corn. We did that ourselves, we loved it like that. And give them salt and stuff we figured would last ’em until he gets to the next place.
    They would sit and talk and tell us their hard luck story. Whether it was true or not, we never questioned it. It’s very important you learn people as people are. Anybody can go around and write a book about a person, but that book doesn’t always tell you that person really. At that particular moment when you are talkin’ to that person, maybe that’s how that person
were. Tomorrow they can be different people. It’s very important to see people as people and not try to see them through a book. Experience and age give you this. There’s an awful lot of people that has outstanding educations, but when it comes down to common sense, especially about people, they really don’t know….

Peggy Terry and Her Mother, Mary Owsley
    It is a crowded apartment in Uptown. 28 Young people from the neighborhood wander in and out, casually. The flow of visitors is constant; occasionally, a small, raggedy-clothed boy shuffles in, stares, vanishes. Peggy Terry is known in these parts as a spokesman for the poor southern whites…. “Hillbillies are up here for a few years and they get their guts kicked out and they realize their white skin doesn’t mean what they always thought it meant.”
    Mrs. Owsley is the first to tell her story.
    Kentucky-born, she married an Oklahoma boy “when he came back from World War 1. He was so restless and disturbed from the war, we just drifted back and forth.” It was a constant shifting from Oklahoma to Kentucky and back again; three, four times the route. “He saw the tragedies of war so vividly that he was discontented everywhere.” From 1929 to 1936, they lived in Oklahoma.
     
    THERE WAS thousands of people out of work in Oklahoma City. They set up a soup line, and the food was clean and it was delicious. Many, many people, colored and white, I didn’t see any difference, ’cause there was just as many white people out of work than were colored. Lost everything they had accumulated from their young days. And these are facts. I remember several families had to leave in covered wagons. To Californy, I guess.
    See, the oil boom come in ‘29. People come from every direction in there. A coupla years later, they was livin’ in everything from pup tents, houses built out of cardboard boxes and old pieces of metal that they’d pick up—anything that they could find to put somethin’ together to put a wall around ’em to protect ’em from the public.
    I knew one family there in Oklahoma City, a man and a woman and seven children lived in a hole in the ground. You’d be surprised how nice it was, how nice they kept it. They had chairs and tables and beds back in that hole. And they had the dirt all braced up there, just like a cave.

    Oh, the dust storms, they were terrible. You could wash and hang clothes on a line, and if you happened to be away from the house and couldn’t get those clothes in before