Tell the Story: Learning from Disaster

By Shelley ShaverOctober 29, 2021

Tell the Story: Learning from Disaster
JUST AS EVERY argument between lovers is not really about the topic but about somebody not feeling loved, so every significant story we tell about our lives is, I think, under the surface really about survival.

Think of a story from your life. Not just any story. At the end of your life, if you had to pick one memory that would say “This is who I was” or “This was what life was like for me” — what would it be?

Consider a minute the powerful position that story holds in your life. For the human mind, stories are irresistible. All humans want to tell a story, even if their talents lie in a different field. Now that I’m retired, I start my non-volunteer mornings by playing some Scott Joplin on the keyboard. You’ll never hear more beautiful music (I mean the way he wrote it, not the way I play it). But surprisingly, Scott Joplin was not satisfied to write his perfect songs. He was also driven to tell a story — his opera, Treemonisha. So even a musical genius is drawn to it; we all are.

Is the story you chose tragic? Triumphant? Funny? Regardless, I would guess it is at heart about survival. If it’s sad, it’s “This is how bad it gets” — and you’re still here to tell it. And if it’s happy, it’s “Despite everything that has struck me down, I still had this day.”

In a minute I’m going to ask you some questions about your story. Meanwhile, I’m not going to do what I asked you to do, because I’m afraid to. I don’t like to think about my life. But as I started writing this essay, one story did come to my mind, unbidden. It’s something I hadn’t remembered in a long time, something that happened in my family long before I was born. My uncle bit a wild mule’s ear.

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Background: my grandmother and grandfather were cotton farmers in West Texas during the Depression years of the Dust Bowl. They kept four children from starving as the exhausted land literally rose up against them. Suffocating dust storms rolled in over the horizon, darkened day into night, and turned the glass of milk on the table a gradual, gritty brown.

With dryland farming, always a risk, in ruins, my granddad tried desperately to hold on to his home. He did anything he could to make money — ginning cotton (the gin burned down), pouring concrete blocks outside in the heat, even rounding up and selling wild mules. As a child, my father’s brother, not the most verbal of humans, was deemed most fit for the job of sitting on a demonstration wild mule. Surrounded by a circle of skeptical farmers, when my granddad gave him the signal, the boy bit the mule’s ear. This was to prove to all doubters that the mules were tame enough to work.

That little boy on the mule grew up to have two daughters, one who turned out to be a brilliant schoolteacher, and one who had a heart of gold but who, they slowly realized, was mentally disabled. As time went on, my uncle and my granddad poured what little money they had into trying to fix the problem, but it could not be fixed. In those days there was nowhere outside of the family to turn. All this was survived.

Neither my granddad nor my uncle could have predicted the fate that befell them. But what happened changed their whole world. Is the story you chose a memory when, for you, the world changed? For good or for ill, that’s hard. It’s like reading a book, but when you turn the page, suddenly the previous storyline falls away. You’re plunged into the middle of a new story. What’s the plot? What’s the theme? Who to trust?

One of the biggest threats to our survival is when we lose our storyline. We never thought of ourselves as being without that other person; or without our parents; or with our children, or our health, or our “status” in the community, gone.

And imagine if, at the moment your storyline crashed, the narratives of everyone around you did, too. True, it’s annoying when you’re the only one, and the rest of life sails on. But in a sense, it’s even worse when everybody else’s life is also suddenly grabbed by the throat. People feel disoriented and afraid, lonely and disconnected form the world around them. We all seem to be going through something like that not only with COVID but also with our current culture. These days we are living through not only an epidemic of virus but also an epidemic of loneliness. Skyrocketing numbers of people are saying that they have fewer and fewer people to trust, people to talk to. Institutions once trusted by many (not, for good reasons, by all) are now widely suspect. Deaths of despair — alcohol, drugs — are at record heights.

So what happens to us now? Where can we look to find out how Americans before us — going back a couple of generations — suddenly found themselves in a Great Depression shipwreck and had to figure out, step by step, how to build a lifeboat while they were drowning, how to keep it from capsizing, what had to be jettisoned and what could be saved. Years ago I wrote a story about such people, people who had lost their story. Faced with climate disaster, economic collapse, and personal humiliation, these people survived. I wanted to learn how, and to put that down on paper. As Dr. Johnson said: “The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”

So because I wanted to learn from these people how to endure, I made up a story about that Dust Bowl my father grew up in. It centers on my hometown of Lubbock, Texas, when the choking black storms rolled in one after the other, and the drought dragged on year after year. I wrote about Riah McKenna and her husband Tom, a young farm couple suddenly faced with their living ruined. But this was a communal disaster, including their little boy James who suddenly has to deal with overwhelmed parents and not enough food to eat, his best friend Barker who speaks sign language, which nobody there understands, and the woman who becomes Riah’s best friend, an outspoken redhead (I always pictured her as Bette Midler), an outcast from the community, whose husband beats her decades before there were laws against it. And there’s a town full of other people, each with their own burdens, each just as horrified at what has befallen them.

You’d think their first reaction would be to talk about it, right? That would be mine; I’m a writer. Words are my first and last recourse. But I knew this prairie region too well for that. I grew up there. Lord knows, our Depression ancestors had every reason to complain. Roosevelt famously said: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Cut loose from all familiar moorings, with no social safety net, and with their relatives and neighbors just as bad off as they were — Roosevelt’s ideas are just being worked out when we first meet them — my characters are people in crisis.

But they were also people raised never to ask for help. They were raised never either to think or speak about their feelings. It’s dangerous: saying how you feel always carries the risk of making you a pariah. Even before the dust storms, this almost treeless water-starved prairie, sparsely populated by family farmers, was a survival-based culture. As such, there’s not much tolerance for individual preferences. Anybody who says the “wrong” thing or doesn’t “act right” can be seen as imperiling the survival of the tribe — and be exiled. That became even more true after the storms befell them, crop after crop failing. And you know in your gut that you can’t survive an apocalypse alone.

So at the very time they most need to use language to help them figure out how to replace a wrecked personal and national narrative, these people would much rather say nothing. They are shamed at being forced into language. When they speak it is reluctant, hesitant. I don’t remember much about the ten years I spent writing it, but I remember at one point going to the National Archives in D.C. I was stunned at my reception. I wasn’t a full-time faculty member anywhere; I wasn’t a published or an important person; yet the staff treated my request with utmost respect. I had written ahead of time. Upon arrival I went up to the desk and said innocently, “I’d like to see the original letters farmers wrote to Roosevelt during the Dust Bowl.” A nice man said, okay. I forget what the rules were, but I was taken into a room by the man and allowed, I think, paper and pencil. I was sat down at a table all by myself.

I waited for the file folders to be retrieved from their archives and brought in. It seemed to take a little longer than I’d expected, but I knew they had many other requests to fill.

Imagine my surprise when I looked up and saw the nice man driving into the room with a forklift. He began unloading carton after carton of letters.

And the letters: handwritten, many of them from people with a grade school education or less, each word painstakingly not so much written as drawn, usually in pencil. These were people who had worked hard all their lives and prided themselves on never asking for help. In fact, they lived in a country that had never offered any. But now their child was starving to death under their eyes. Now their home was about to be lost. They wrote with great respect; they apologized continually; needing everything, a farm wife would write Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt as if she were writing in a kind of shame-faced way to a distant but trusted grandparent. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, It is cold, could you send my little girl a coat? Her little sister is wearing hers now. Thank you so much. Dear President Roosevelt, We haven’t made a crop in two years. Could you find me work? I will go anywhere. Or: My husband is sick. He can’t get out of bed any more. We can’t ask the doctor for any more favors. Can you help us. We will pay you back as soon as we can. Thank you very much. And always the signature, written out slowly, clearly with intense concentration.

Each letter would usually have a margin around the edges. Like a poem. And in the middle of the blankness around it: the attempt at language, clearly unwilling, kept as brief as possible. So when I set out to tell the saga of these people, I felt that they had already kind of shown me how to do it. I divided each part of the bigger story into smaller pieces, each piece with a silence before, a silence after, and a silence at the end of each line. We have a name for language like that. You know what it is. Many today think poems are not supposed to be stories, but these stories had to be poems because they demanded built-in silence, and because the care of the language was bearing the weight these people felt.

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You may think by now that I’ve forgotten about your story, but I haven’t. Just as I created my story because I hoped it would help other people endure, so, with respect, I would like to encourage you to share your story with someone else. In a time of ideological division and tribalism, sharing stories may be one of the few ways left to build bridges. In Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World (2020), Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says: “Even in the absence of others, stories make individuals feel connected and promote a sense of belonging. […] They give meaning to our struggles, and comfort us when we are suffering or afraid. They bring us together.”

How do stories bring us together? Increasingly, in our culture, language is wielded as a weapon, either offensive or defensive, each side sure they’re right. But let’s not forget how helpful language can be when we’re not sure, how helpful it can be in lowering defenses, not raising them. Words can provide a space for a communal working out of confusion and uncertainty, where we can pick up the broken strands and start weaving a new storyline. In my Dust Bowl story, people are feeling their way into a new language, trying to create a tentative grammar, a stumbling syntax, that might allow them to speak a new self. Like us on a bad day, only in their case, day after day after day, they have been left with nothing but questions. In the midst of enormous and identity-annihilating confusion, how do people learn how to speak not in anger, but in sorrow? What are the defenses people struggle to compose inside their heads when thrust into a world where nothing goes right and everything goes wrong? With the old cues gone, how do you find words for what you have to do to be a good person? Is there a core of goodness inside some people — if so, what strikes and evokes that core? Or is there no core, only a community of people fumbling toward acts of goodness?

Fumbling is key. The structure of a poem provides a shelter for each character’s attempts, false starts, tentative steps, regrouping. When the world changes, it’s impossible not to make mistakes. The people in this town make wrong turns, foolish efforts, wander, err. How do they feel about it? What do they do? They do the same thing we do when we’re blindsided: walk around in shock, keep on trying, giving up, trying to find language, cling to old behaviors, learn to give up what we thought we could never live without, try to figure out, please God, how not to fail in the one territory always left under our control: how we treat one another.

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My uncle bit a wild mule’s ear. His brother lost a finger in the ill-fated cotton gin. The youngest child, my father, had asthma attacks, and since there was no medicine, my grandmother used to lie down on the bed and breathe with him. I come from a family of gasping, four-fingered, mule-biting survivors. So do you. If you look at your story, at the stories of your family, the most important ones will reveal a struggle for purpose. In setting his boy up on that mule, my granddad, a ruined farmer, was trying to reclaim his sense of purpose in life — to help his family — rather than just giving up to drink and despair. In my 40 years of teaching at a local community college, when we read a novel or poem about someone in trouble, I used to tell my students: People can survive anything if they find a sense of purpose. That’s really the same, isn’t it, as trying to write and rewrite our continuing story?

Many episodes in my Dust Bowl story have people trying to talk to each other, sometimes completely misunderstanding each other. Yet they keep talking, staying in one another’s presence. They are people talking to each other like real people do, having not only interior monologues but exterior dialogues, feeling desperately alone the way we seem to be these days, but slogging out there with painful honesty and self-doubt into the territory of language. Because even when it fails them, in their own ears they can hear how human it is to try.

That attempt may be the biggest gift they have to pass down to us now.

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from Rain: A Dust Bowl Story

24. Sewing Club: February

Am I the only one?
Cross, she let slip her needle.
It jabbed her — Riah jumped
And sucked the blood.
Oh, you heard folks say,
“Times are hard” or “Money
Scarce as hen’s teeth” —
Mrs. Parr’s old saw —
“Going gets tough,
And the tough get going” —
Were they losing farms? Their house?
Their land?

Money. It’s a private thing,
She understood. As private
As between a man and wife.
You never asked about;
You mostly knew.
Assumed the others
Had what you had, more or less.
In the Sewing Circle,
Christmas-time,
Used to make new skirts,
Coats for the kids.
Last year, though — no
Gay clothes. Nothing new.
Patches and torn pants.
It was like the color,
Ribbons, Christmas reds
Drained from their hands
And laps. In December
They darned socks.

They sewed now in haste.
Lately, no one asked
For cake or coffee.
No one offered —
Waste of flour, eggs.
They canceled food breaks —
Said they’d much to do.
Mrs. Mack, the older ones,
Began to bring in pieces,
Almost shreds — rescued
From the rag pail,
Trying to put these
To rights. The others
Followed suit — rags,
Till rags ran out.

These here are the ones,
She thought, scanning them,
Who’d help me.
They’d take me in.
They’d give me food
For James. But what —
Here her breath stopped, and
Her thoughts —
If they’re bad off, too?
If it struck them all?
They seemed peaceful, mending,
But they all looked strange
These days. Cotton’d never
Dropped so low.
And it was dry.
But then it always was,
And rain was due.

Riah’d seen a picture
In the paper,
A line of men that went
Clear down the street,
At the county seat,
Waiting for soup.
Nowhere to go.
She tied off a knot.
Hope to God, she thought,
That I’m the poorest woman
In this room.

31. February 17: Driving Home

James sat between them,
Not in back. Riah had been
Glad to see his cap,
Not lost in wind, but
Clamped in his small grasp.
The Ford rolled slowly —
Headlamps little use —
Shouldered by the weather,
Batted, shoved, trembling,
Shying off the road
With each new yank
And lash of sand.
The wheel jerked in Tom’s hands.
Sand spurted up their noses.
They pursed lips.

James hunched forward, tensed.
He thought: should I tell
About “Eclipse?”
In his science book, the word
“Eclipse” stood by a drawing
Of three balls:
Earth. Sun. Moon.
Somehow — Dad and Mama
Might not know — these three
Could run amok.
Then the sun, big as it was,
Held back.
The earth was dark and cold,
Looking on the yellowed page
Like a round hole.
Like now: James could not
See the roadside brush.
Tom and Riah sat so straight,
Eyes fixed ahead,
James feared for his life
If he said boo.

Wind hammered at the car.
“I wonder,” Riah called
Above the din,
“If we couldn’t turn in
At the Blacks’.
Opal’s home by now.”
She pulled out a kerchief, wiped
Her mouth, and handed it
To James.
No answer.
“You know,” she said, “Just till
The worst blows by. No use
Being out in this
All way home.”
“Let’s go on,” said Tom.
James sneezed: she left
The handkerchief with him.
“You know, I mentioned to you,
Opal’s got that magazine.
The one I need.
Over in the store
She said she’s through.”

The truck veered
And lurched into a field.
Tom leaned in the wheel
And steered it back.
The wind had not died down:
No sign of light.
The Blacks were nearby, if
The Ford would last. Riah
Frowned. She’d never seen this,
Or heard tell of this —
She could hardly hear
Her thoughts. But —
Nothing to be out in,
Nor to play with —
Lay low.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Tom: “Let’s go home.”

The car rolled into blankness.
He tried the high beam,
But it did no good.

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The full poem can be read here.


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Photograph from NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) Collection.


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Shelley Shaver was raised in Lubbock, Texas, and has been teaching in a California community college. She has been published in The Seattle Star, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and American Poetry Review.

LARB Contributor

Shelley Shaver was raised in Lubbock, Texas, and has been teaching in a California community college. She has been published in The Seattle Star, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and American Poetry Review.

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