Clarification: The books I think the majority of people tend eschew are heavy analytical tomes of bygone eras and what went wrong. The intellectuals and literati appropriately embrace them; but most folks have a down-home working knowledge about how we got here. Now they want encouragement and hope and that pick-me-up that comes from collaboration and community.
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The inhabitants of those file drawers told stories about how they got by using a mixture of ingenuity and guile. They hawked lucky charms and patent medicine made from "roots and barks and good raw whiskey." They peddled cake flavoring and cased sausages, they auctioned tobacco, they fished and smuggled rum—and sometimes aliens—from Cuba to Key West. They worked in coal and granite and cotton and iron. ("You ain't an ironworker unless you get killed.")
The women quilted and pressed laundry, stitched shoes and danced in burlesque shows. They took in boarders and delivered babies, and when their men ran out on them, they swallowed their pride and threw rent parties, as Bernice Porter described doing in 1920s Harlem.
These days, we may not be passing the hat at parties to come up with rent money, but we are in the midst of an economic meltdown. Now that hard times have returned, I believe storytelling is due for a revival. While the Federal Writers' Project is no longer around, it has inspired a modern version in StoryCorps, a five-year-old oral-history organization that encourages people to "celebrate one another's lives through listening." And we have just elected a president who invited us on his transition Web site to "Start right now. Tell us your story."
We need again to imagine a future that is meaningful in the face of difficult circumstances. Listening to each other's stories may grant us a sense of common purpose that money can't buy.
Banks is the editor of “First-Person America,” an anthology of oral histories collected by the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project. She lives in New York City.
© 2009
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