Athens Memories
The WPA Federal Writers' Project Interviews
Edited by Al Hester
These collections must exist all over the country. The Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency created to put "intellectuals" to work, set up field offices in cities and major towns and sent interviewers out to local residents. The staffers worked up their notes and sent them up a chain of command for editing and archiving. Athens, Georgia, a town of some 20-24,000 in the late 1930s, yielded three dozen papers. Historian Al Hester put fifteen of them together, restored the disguised names, sought vital statistics on the writers and subjects, and made or found photographs bearing on the documentary materials.
I won't say it is fascinating reading, but rather satisfying. The WPA didn't apply a fixed nationwide standard to choosing the people its writers would visit; nor did it have a single set of criteria for hiring its staff. No doubt the emphasis in other places fell out in different ways; certainly these local interviews had a different aim from the work that produced the fine "state guide" series. What interested Athens writers was Athens people, and this book deals with a broad cross section of them.
The speakers in these papers are a Negro preacher, the widow of an aviation pioneer, a Negro nurse, an agribusinessman, the chronically ill wife of a farmer, a Negro school principal, a Georgia Writers' Project supervisor, a music teacher (also a WPA staffer), a renowned former football player and successful real estate man, a mill worker, a Negro midwife, a housekeeper, two fishermen, a department store manager and a life insurance executive. I should probably add the other three interviewers—Hester, too—for in the spirit of the project they all narrate in the first person.
Athens in 1938-39 was like most other Southern towns of the day, but here is an important fact:
You've never lived in a Southern town of the day.
We can therefore learn together. Blacks and whites did not mix but, within limits, could enjoy relationships that ranged from cordial to testing. You could eat fish you caught in the Oconee. Hardly anyone had anything, but the few well-off people had lots. Many adults had not finished what we now regard as a minimum of schooling. If you wanted a car, you saved your money first. Physicians were around, but most health care came through midwives, practical nurses and herb doctors. Even the most successful families very likely had a business-failure story to tell. Whole neighborhoods had unpaved streets. When people talked about the First World War they didn't have to say "First." You could make plans for the long term, but you knew a child's illness or the closing of the mill would cancel them for you, as like as not. Students at the university often caused disruptions.
It's trite to speak of the past as being a different country. You can, indeed, read lots of statements in these interviews that still hold. What strikes me more than anything else is that people hoped for good health, steady work, respect and recognition; not expected but hoped for.
Athens Memories is not a unique collection, or shouldn't be. Find such a book about the place where you live, and read it and savor it. Then wave at an old person; you can't live in their world, but at least you've read the guidebook.
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Athens Memories