Several years ago, I spent seven months in the archive of the writer Sanora Babb, looking for evidence that John Steinbeck ripped her off. I’d heard that Babb’s novel Whose Names Were Unknown went unpublished because Steinbeck stole her notes to write The Grapes of Wrath. The truth was less sensational, though he did steal her thunder: Random House shelved Babb’s book after Steinbeck’s came out, believing that the market wouldn’t welcome another Dust Bowl novel. In a 1975 letter, Babb dispelled the rumors that Steinbeck took her material. She refused to be known for “sour grapes,” as she punningly put it. Whose Names Were Unknown was finally published in 2004, a year before Babb died at the age of 98.
“No matter how much we would like to have a peaceful life, we live in a time in history that will not permit it.”
As I progressed with my research, I realized that Babb far exceeds any literary “woman-scorned” narrative. She wrote fiction, poetry, and journalism; edited leftist publications like The Clipper; led an adventurous sex life; took care of her family and friends; and traveled the world. The focus on her relationship to Steinbeck obscures her life for what it was: revolutionary, creative, collaborative, and free.
Sanora Babb was born in the Oklahoma Territory in 1907, and her work draws on a High Plains upbringing, marked by itinerancy and crop failures. Babb graduated first in her high school class, but she was not allowed to give the valedictory speech because of her father’s reputation as a gambler. After college in Kansas, she taught in a one-room schoolhouse and worked at local newspapers, while publishing poems in little magazines across the country. In 1929, Babb moved to Los Angeles, where she held odd jobs while writing and growing involved in leftist politics. She joined the Communist Party (CP-USA) and in 1936 traveled to the Soviet Union with other writers. In 1949, following the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, she married her longtime partner, famed cinematographer James Wong Howe.
In 1937, Babb volunteered for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the New Deal agency that managed camps for displaced migrant workers. She worked under the supervision of Tom Collins, an administrator of several FSA camps who worked with the Congress of Industrial Unions to incorporate tenets of leftist organizing into their programming and prepare workers for union membership. Babb’s recollections of her time working for the FSA underscore her sensitivity to not only the threats that migrant workers faced, but also their resistance to the cruelties of capitalism, militarism, and fascism. In a letter to her sister, Babb wrote of the migrant workers she encountered, “Someday America will rumble with their voices against injustice and greed, someday they will rise up to a man and demand to live as decent humble beings in a world they have made for others…. No matter how much we would like to have a peaceful life, we live in a time in history that will not permit it. I do not care to live under fascism. I’d rather die fighting to live in a free country, if there is no other way than to fight…. I am not afraid anymore to get out of my nice clothes in the city and go out in the fields with the people.”
The same spirit is evident in “The Terror,” her account of the repression of a mining strike in Gallup, New Mexico. Originally published in 1935 by the Soviet magazine International Literature, the story captures the violence that capitalism inflicts on a psychic level. It reports on arrests, surveillance, and torture of striking coal miners and their families by police and vigilantes. Babb begins the piece by noting that workers were arrested based on a law originally created to suppress Indigenous resistance to U.S. settler colonialism.
The story challenges conventions of supposedly objective reporting by adopting the second-person plural “we,” a kind of new journalism avant la lettre. However, Babb’s “we” derives from her commitment to collective action. She’s less of a messenger than a member of the story’s cast of workers, who put up a fight against mine bosses and the police.
These were days of open fear and nights of secret terror.
Instead of male workers, the usual subjects of labor reporting, Babb focuses on their wives, whose toil is crucial to the success of the strike. Much of the story is set in kitchens, where the women share information, host clandestine meetings, and care for their husbands after they’ve been beaten and jailed by the police. Decades before Marxist feminists advanced a similar theory, Babb talks about capitalist immiseration and its violent enforcement by the state, which isn’t confined to the mine or factory. Capitalism also disciplines life and labor in homes and communities. Babb immerses readers in the emotional terrain of these women. While terror spreads among them, so does courage. The women in their kitchens and their striking husbands may be “fearful and waiting and bewildered,” but they are also always “brave and tireless and knowing.”
The Terror
By Sanora Babb
We drove across the railroad tracks leaving the better streets and the cleaner houses behind and came up the slope into the rough dark roads of the miners’ town. Back at the station, the Indians were setting out their little pots and beaded bands and silver charms. The Seven-Fifty-Eight was roaring over the desert, whistling a signal, entering the block. For meals and a few dollars a month, the Navajos were creating atmosphere for the travelers.
We had been waiting for the late summer dusk to cover us as we crossed the tracks. On one side was the free town, on the other the company shacks. Long lines of coal-filled cars ready to roll, and a string of low sheds blatant with huge letters spelling the company name ran like a wall of taboo between the separated people.
This was the dingy town where a few days before a wild bullet fired by a deputy had killed a sheriff, and over a hundred miners and their wives had been arrested and charged with mass murder. (The charge was made by evoking an old territorial law once used against the Indians before New Mexico was made a state.) These were the men and women who had protested an unjust eviction by setting the household belongings of a destitute family back into their shack. The miner had paid the company enough rent to have bought the house several times, but now he was unemployed and owed a month’s rent. His neighbors were putting the furniture back when the sheriff and his deputies arrived. They had taken them off to the jail, and as some of them were released into the alley, the shooting had occurred. Along with the sheriff who fell were many miners wounded in the back. The mass arrests had followed. The charge was murder. The crime: to be a miner or a miner’s wife, who would dare protest a company decree. The arrests outnumbered the protesters, but no one must be permitted to escape the fear-campaign. The jails of Gallup and Santa Fe were crowded. The hospitals were busier than they had been in many a day.
These were days of open fear and nights of secret terror. To see our friends, to question them, we had been warned to wait for the night, to locate the houses by car and then return later on foot. The blackened houses decaying on their foundations straggled unevenly along the dirt streets and up the sides of the black grassless cliffs, their fronts thrusting out dark and still and unlived in, hiding the faint lights in the back curtained rooms that opened and closed in the night like fearful eyes. We went along to find the houses we had known, looking closely for them on the wrong streets, then finding we were lost, drove back again over a rocky alley and came to the familiar hanging gates and the swaying porches surer in our memory.
Walking, slinking in the dim streets and leaning in the house shadows were the company-hired terrorists — drunken armed men like festers on the clean night, watching. We drove back over the tracks into the lighted places, away from the dark living blooded core of Gallup.
It was later and darker when we walked back along the coal sheds and over the railroad tracks and down the black street into the broken gate. The splintered porch squeaked under our steps and someone looked out the lace curtain and opened the door into the dim front room.
“Come in,” the woman said, remembering after a year, as if we had been here only yesterday. We followed her into the lighted kitchen where two men were. She leaned against the bright blue coal range stove that decorated the clean room like a piano. You could see the words in their minds and on their faces and know that no one had thought or spoken of anything else in the days since it happened.
“We don’t know nothing new,” the woman said, as if she had been waiting tensely a long time. “He was arrested,” she said pointing to the heavy man standing on the other side of the stove. “My man’s in jail — he was working — they took him anyway. I guess you read the papers.” One of us asked to see the late papers. The heavy man smiled and brought out the papers, holding one back. “You can have these,” he said, “but this one, it has my name in it. I keep this one.” He spread the paper out before us and pointed to his name in the long list of arrests. The other two laughed.
“You seen Mrs. Hayward?” the woman asked. “You go see her. She knows.”
On the way to see her, we stopped at another house one of us knew. Our feet sounded on the hard bare yard as we came up tall to the low-roofed thin-boarded shack. They were a long time coming to the door then a knotty old woman peered out a crack and said, “Oh,” and opened the door for us to come in. Her grey hair fell in strings around her strong face and she smiled warmly with only a few teeth showing from the pale gums. She motioned to the broken chairs and sat down on a box, her large worn hands smoothing the night dress down to her bare feet. Strong odors from the kitchen where we sat and from the curtained bedroom came together in our noses. The old woman spoke at once, calmly, stolidly, the same as the others: it was in their minds all day like a slow flame and in their sleep all night like an ember, and when they got up out of sleep they began speaking the words over again, bewildered into silence and sleep again. A woman in a loose cotton dress came through the door of another room and stood against the wall pressing one of her bare feet against the coal scuttle as if to ease her.
“Her man’s in jail in Santa Fe,” the old woman said, “She just got out, here. They arrested her on the street when she went to the relief store, and she never come home.”
“I don’t know why,” the woman said quietly, “I wasn’t even there that day when they put the furniture back in the house after the eviction, or at the shooting either. I went down to the relief and I was comin’ back along the street and they arrested me. I had the kids with me. They took us all to jail, and scared the kids to death. We was all in one cell for four days and nights, and then they told me to go home and take care of the kids until they want me, and not go out and not talk to nobody.” She was silent and self-conscious again, and she pressed her toes tightly against a piece of coal. “They took me up and said I was charged with murder. I never done anything. I wasn’t even there. There was some other women too, some more with kids.”
“Miners’ wives,” the old woman said. No one knew anything to say.
“How old are your little kids?”
“They baby’s a year and a half, and a girl five and a boy eight. They kept the boy out of school.”
A thin young man came out from a dingy curtained cubbyhole. His miner’s face was very pale and the pores of his skin were pointed with coal dust. He had pulled on his trousers quickly when he heard voices. The heavy undershirt showed the frail hollow of his chest, and his face was startled with being suddenly awake. He nodded to us and stood there listening. The old woman looked at him.
“A lot of us been livin’ together and pilin’ up anyway these fearful days. A body ain’t safe alone,” she said and went on about the children. “You won’t believe it, but a deputy sheriff called some of the kids out of school and asked ‘em where their mamas and dads was when the sheriff was killed, and told ‘em God would shoot ‘em if they didn’t tell. And they told the kids, ‘Now, wasn’t they there?’ and the kids was scared enough to say anything.” The old woman suddenly blew out the oil lamp. In the silence we all listened to the quiet steps on the crusty yard.
“Creepin’ around like vermin all hours,” she whispered. “It makes me fightin’ mad!” Her bravery warmed the others. They began to speak again in low voices.
After a while we went out and climbed up the narrow dirt streets to the Hayward place. There was a light in the kitchen but she wasn’t there. We went in and waited. Under the lamp on the littered table were school tablets with the uncertain writing and figuring of little boys and girls, and the books were piled up neatly, ready for school. Everywhere was the confusion and disorder of a recent police search, and things not yet put back in place.
A Mexican woman came in. She was gay and bright like a bird. She was not afraid, a woman who had been in jail with the others charged with murder and told to stay at home. She sat on a high kitchen stool with her feet on the rungs and her thin knees bent under the red dress; and her voice bubbled like a bird’s.
After an hour Mrs. Hayward came, a young woman with a tired serious face and a gentle strong mouth, the youth in her turned mature and handsome the way a woman can be when she forgets her beauty. She stood with her back to the big range stove and held her hands as if to warm them, although there was no fire. The flesh around her eyes was red and swollen a little from days and nights without sleep. The other woman kept talking about the jails being full in Gallup and Santa Fe, and about the workers who were shot, all shot in the back as they turned to go.
“They’re in the hospital except Chavez who got away. How’s your husband Joe?” she asked the younger woman, and to us, “He was shot in the back but getting along alright. Today the defense attorney was permitted to talk to him.” The young woman smiled but her lips turned down bitterly.
“He’s dead,” she said. “They poisoned him last night!” The young woman spoke to us quietly, “He was one of the chief witnesses, and they wouldn’t let the attorney see him at first. They finally said he could talk to Joe today. He was getting well, and would talk, so they killed him.”
“Do you know?”
She looked at us with a kind of hostile pain on her gentle face, almost reproof, and she didn’t speak. The Mexican woman was shaking her head, “Oh, yes. At the hospital…” She looked at the young woman and stopped, smoothing her red dress over her knees, then she went on, “as they were bringing me out of the jail today, I saw Carlos. He was blood all over. I saw him. Blood all over.”
“It keeps getting worse,” the young woman said, “Every day they pick up people on the streets, and when they turn them loose, if they do, they pick up more. They keep beating us up and throwing us over the state line. And they keep men drunk and turn them loose on us all over town with their guns. There’s over a hundred in jail now, charged with murder.”
“Poisoned him,” the other woman said again.
“What are you going to do?” we asked.
“We’re going to fight,” Her voice came dull and fierce and very quiet. Her eyes were bloodshot and weary with no sleep and we got up to go. The older woman stayed.
It was after midnight when we started down the hill. The great dark sky fell like a theater back-drop behind the sharp lines of earth and the secret lights in the houses that hung on the hillside. The dry sweet air of the high places of New Mexico, the terrible, lonely beauty of western nights caught here in this little mining town. And the people in their houses, sitting in the kitchens with their shoes off, fearful and waiting and bewildered. Brave and tireless and knowing. Awake with the remembrance of blood, of terror, of men watching with guns, dark words going around in their heads: of murder and bribery and treachery, of blood again and pistol shots, of the thump and smack of club and hose against naked flesh. Asleep with the ache in their hungry belly, with the strong smell of night urine in the covered jars. And outside the clean air and the wind and the wonder.
Reprinted from The Dark Earth and Selected Prose from the Great Depression, Muse Ink Press, 2021. Previously published in Reportage, International Literature (USSR) in 1935.
Annie Bares is a writer and researcher who lives in New York. She is currently working on a book that tells the story of 20th-century cultural production through works of literature and art that struggled to attract philanthropic funding.
Photographs at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, courtesy of Joanne Dearcopp
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