Harvest the Dust

Harvest The Dust is about a time when the Great Depression still held the nation in its grip; when President Roosevelt's New Deal was struggling to bring some relief; when drought spread a quilt of dust across the Southern Great Plains; when the staple crop was cotton; when water came from a hole in the ground. The plow, the mule, and human labor were the chief implements of agriculture. People traveled on the backs of horses or in wagons pulled by them-or simply walked. The automobile was an anomaly. As a young boy Jacob Tallman witnessed a black man being burned alive. That experience planted seeds of fear deep inside him. Those seeds sprouted into weeds that grew into stalks of feigned kindness and hidden shame. It took a white man, entering Jacob's house, knocking his wife to the floor and firing a shotgun at his son for Jacob to finally cut the roots of his fear. Jacob and Clara Tallman married young and had four children, two girls and two boys. Jacob's folks were sharecroppers. Clara's mother was a domestic worker; her white father was a prominent doctor in the area. Everyone knew but no one, black or white, talked about it in public-especially within Clara's hearing. Because of Clara's near-white skin color, her mother never accepted Jacob-whose skin was black. She predicted their babies were sure to be black and doomed, because of that, to a life of sharecropping. True to the prophecy Clara and Jacob became sharecroppers and had babies. But the skin color of their babies ran the spectrum from light-skin to black. Jacob and Clara broke her prophecy again when they purchased their own land. A tragic drowning accident claimed the life of their first born while still a young man. Jacob, his son, and a neighbor were returning from town with a wagon load of supplies when a levee gave away-his son went to the bottom of the river locked in the arms of the neighbor who couldn't swim. Jacob nearly drowned searching for him. When Clara and Jacob's remaining son is killed in a gambling dispute Clara could find no rest on the land. She leaves Arkansas taking their youngest daughter, and her grandson, with her and away from an illicit relationship. Jacob's remaining daughter, a schoolteacher, falls in love with a man and decides to also leave the land. Jacob is left alone, committed to working the land and hoping for Clara's return. She does return. And the two of them work the land together.