A Different Dust Bowl

Tia Glista reviews Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s “Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb.”

By Tia GlistaNovember 6, 2024

• Biography & Autobiography

• Nonfiction

• History

ON AUGUST 31, 1939, officials in Kern County, California, decided to ban The Grapes of Wrath, published earlier that year. “Whereas John Steinbeck’s work of fiction […] has offended our citizenry by falsely implying that many of our fine people are a low, ignorant, profane and blasphemous type living in a vicious and filthy manner,” their action article begins, “be it resolved, that we, the Board of Supervisors […] request that use and possession and circulation of the novel, Grapes of Wrath, be banned from our library and schools.” Those familiar with the Steinbeck controversy may know that Kern County was the only district to succeed in banning the novel, though others considered it—what is lesser known, however, is that the case was brought forward by conservative, anti-migrant locals, including members of the Ku Klux Klan. The ACLU, local clergy, and other library officials fought to keep Grapes, arguing that the novel would aid the migrant farmworkers’ cause and shed light on their new neighbors: this was, of course, the Dust Bowl, and the county’s population grew by 64 percent that year as refugees headed west from Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri.

Yet, while middle class liberals stood up for Steinbeck on behalf of their migrant neighbors, their defense of Grapes was troubling in its own right. Growing up in rural California almost half a century later, writer Iris Jamahl Dunkle recalls telling her grandmother—a survivor of the Dust Bowl from the Oklahoma Panhandle—that she had been assigned Steinbeck in high school. To Dunkle’s surprise, her grandmother “told [her] Steinbeck got it all wrong. She said he made her and her family look like helpless victims. She said not to mention the book ever again.”

When Steinbeck researched Grapes, he spent time in Kern County—specifically, he toured the Weedpatch labor camp with the camp’s manager Tom Collins and the Farm Security Administration. But he spent only two weekends in the fields before he left, writing the novel in 100 days and barely glossing the very real lives of those who would furnish his American classic. Moreover, Dunkle argues, his efficiency can be in part attributed to the work of others: when Steinbeck withdrew to write, he brought with him extensive field notes by Sanora Babb, an FSA volunteer born in Oklahoma who was working on a novel of her own. While Steinbeck dashed off a fable about the migrant farmworkers, Babb stayed on the ground with them, and by the time her novel was ready for publication, it was too late—no one wanted another Grapes of Wrath. It would not be until 2004 that Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown would finally go to print, telling the story of the Dust Bowl from the inside. Significant effort has since been made to bring her story forward, including Dunkle’s new biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb.

Babb was born in 1907, on Otoe land in Oklahoma Territory. She lived a restless childhood directed by the whims of impulsive, prideful men—namely her father Walt, a violent gambler who married her mother when she was 15 and still shy of 100 pounds (in her 1970 memoir, An Owl on Every Post, Babb recalls a grocer giving her and her younger sister candies, before hesitating and giving one to her mother as well, since she was also “just a little girl”). As a child, Babb was often called Cheyenne Riding Like the Wind, a name given to her by the Otoe with whom she rode ponies on the plains and whom she long considered to be her second family, even after the Babbs moved to a dugout in Colorado. Here, Babb learned to read from old pages of The Denver Post that lined the walls, not starting school until the seventh grade when the family moved into town. Her love of writing and drama in high school eventually led her to depart for Los Angeles, but Babb never forgot the land where she was raised—both its hardships and its beauty, particularly the solidarity and interdependence of neighbors.

As Dunkle argues, Babb’s canonical marginalization happened not only because of Steinbeck: Babb was a fierce leftist and a woman who scorned heteronormative monogamy. In Los Angeles, she lived in an illegal interracial partnership with the Academy Award–winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, to whom she could not officially be married until California’s anti-miscegenation laws were repealed in 1948. She was also involved in the US Communist Party and traveled to the League of American Writers Congress in New York, where she began a passionate affair with Ralph Ellison (in letters, they briefly mused about quitting their partners for one another). And so, while Babb proudly lived an unconventional, vigorous life among artists and activists, she was also constrained by the twin handcuffs of the post–World War II “silent generation” and the Red Scare, phenomena that Dunkle claims wrote many “once-popular female leftist writers of the 1930s and 40s” out of the canon.

Dunkle’s biography is thus expressly interested in “adding Babb’s name to that elite and ever-growing list” of writers of the American West. Her canonical restoration is also about revising Steinbeck’s narrow imaginary: in Whose Names Are Unknown, organizers include women and immigrants alongside union leaders, whose strikes, mutual aid, and fights against corporate greed present a kind of feminist, multiracial solidarity erased from mainstream labor and literary histories. This not only corrects how we might view the past, writes Dunkle, but could also inform our understanding of the present, as “so much of the American West is plagued with natural disasters and climate migrants are a growing worldwide concern.” Babb’s scenes of solidarity offer a departure from the American idealization of individual liberty and resilience, values wedded to whiteness and masculinity, to the exclusion of the coalition-building that actually enables survival.

Yet in her effort to add Babb to the canon, Dunkle at times reaches for traits that evoke its traditional values: the reclamation of individual agency is a touchstone throughout the biography, as Dunkle lauds Babb for unapologetically claiming her own voice, her own sexuality, and her own desires. These points are by now familiar terrain in feminist biography and perhaps have come to feel toothless, especially when measured alongside Babb’s efforts for collective struggle and what might be described as her anti-individualist aesthetics. Where Dunkle’s biography is strongest then, is in her asides about the difference that Babb makes; Dunkle analyzes Babb’s activism, the literary circles in which she ran, and the dozens of short stories and essays that describe an experience of life untended to in this period, and which are sometimes read closely for insightful personal and political details. But Riding Like the Wind is most often a linear, straightforward biographical narrative, not offering reflexive gestures or moments of interpretive tension; Dunkle is more interested in repairing the archive than in putting further pressure on it. This may be a deficit in the first third of the text, which retells much of what Babb herself already covers in her memoir as well as in the heavily autobiographical early chapters of Whose Names. What Babb wrote little about, however, was her extraordinary second act in Los Angeles, which Dunkle’s depth of research shows to have been both difficult and dazzling—this is the making of an icon, and it will certainly add to understandings of the midcentury California literary scene.

In this portrait of a prolific artist overlooked, there is also a recurrent confrontation with time. Just as the biographer reaches into the past to change the way it has been remembered, Babb, too, lived in conflict with the clock: when she moved to L.A. in 1929, she got a job at the Los Angeles Herald but was summarily laid off shortly after, when the stock market crashed, leaving her homeless; later, she was unable to marry her partner for decades because of anti-miscegenation laws, and just when their lives settled down and her career picked up, she became caregiver to her husband, her young sister, and the 10-year-old daughter of actress Lotus Fragrance (stage name of Rebecca Ho Hing Du, who deserves her own biographical consideration). Even outside of a traditional relationship or family, Babb’s time was so often not her own; perhaps most affecting of all is the knowledge that because she gave her time to others while volunteering with the FSA, rather than taking it for her career like Steinbeck, her novel was overlooked and remained shelved by the publishing world for some 75 years. Writing in fits and starts, being both ahead of her time and told she was “too late,” Babb perhaps worked against the wind more than she was able to “ride” it. Yet the recovery of her extraordinary life and career, though long overdue, may at last allow us to say: Babb’s time is now.