The Great Depression Term Analysis

A lot of people were leery of our looks. Though with Pa working the coal, his mostly pale-blue skin didn’t bother folks as much when all miners came out of the hole looking the same.

But I didn’t have coal to disguise me in black or white Kentucky. Didn’t have myself an escape until I’d gotten the precious book route. In those old dark-treed pockets, my young patrons would glimpse me riding my packhorse, toting a pannier full of books, and they’d light a smile and call out “Younder comes Book Woman…Book Woman’s here!” And I’d forget all about my peculiarity, and why I had it, and what it meant for me.

Pa and I had seen our share of hunger. We only had the berries, morels, squirrels, rabbits, and other life we’d pinched from the forest. Sometimes Pa’d trade the miners his kills for other foods we couldn’t get, like eggs, corn, and fruit. Rarely could we afford the expensive staples at the Company store. The Company scrip and my paycheck helped us to stay afloat a little, despite Pa using most of it to buy up the store medicines rather than a doctor’s stronger ones to fight his lung illness. Still, he stayed in debt purchasing newfangled medicines, the next sure-fix potion that the store would bring in. Like a small bandage, the store-bought medicine would hide his sickness for a little bit, so that he could go back down into the mine and make more money for newer cures the Company kept stocking and pushing on the miners.

Winnie clasped her hands. “If only we could get more outreach programs up here. If only they could send a block of cheese with every book, a loaf of bread.” She tilted her head to the sky as if telling it to God.

I wished it too. Their hunger for books could teach them of a better life free of the hunger, but without food they’d never live long enough to have the strength to find it.

“Just one damn block of cheese,” Winnie scratched out in a whisper.

I thought of the cheese Doc promised. If I could bargain with him for more food, I could give it to the schoolchildren.

For a minute I envied her, wanted to send Junia home, unlace my heavy, tight shoes, and run free with her to escape Frazier, the doc and his medical tests, and everything damning to me—to hunt and fish in the woods like I’d done as a child. To be wilded. Have a wilded heart in this black-treed land full of wilded creatures. There were notches in these hills where a stranger wouldn’t tread, dared not venture—the needle-eyed coves and skinny blinds behind rocks, the strangling parts of the blackened-green hills—but Angeline and hillfolk here were wilded and not afraid. And I longed to lift bare feet onto ancient paths and be wilded once again.