Personal Accounts of Black Sunday and Dust Storms
During the 1930s, many residents of the Dust Bowl kept accounts and journals of their life and of the storms that hit their area. Collections of accounts of the dust storms during the 1930s have been compiled over the years and are now available in book collections and online.
In a New Republic article, Avis D. Carlson wrote:
"People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk…. The nightmare is deepest during the storms. But on the occasional bright day and the usual gray day we cannot shake from it. We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions."
Lawrence Svobida was a wheat farmer in Kansas during the 1930s. He experienced the period of dust storms, and the effect that they had on the surrounding environment and the society. His observations and feelings are available in his memoirs, Farming the Dust Bowl. Here he describes an approaching dust storm:
"… At other times a cloud is seen to be approaching from a distance of many miles. Already it has the banked appearance of a cumulus cloud, but it is black instead of white and it hangs low, seeming to hug the earth. Instead of being slow to change its form, it appears to be rolling on itself from the crest downward. As it sweeps onward, the landscape is progressively blotted out. Birds fly in terror before the storm, and only those that are strong of wing may escape. The smaller birds fly until they are exhausted, then fall to the ground, to share the fate of the thousands of jack rabbits which perish from suffocation."
The Black Sunday storm is detailed in the 2012 Ken Burns PBS documentary The Dust Bowl.
Read more about this topic: Black Sunday (storm)
Famous quotes containing the words personal, accounts, black, sunday, dust and/or storms:
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—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the colored counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
“Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Beneath the azure current floweth;
Above, the golden sunlight glows.
Rebellious, the storm it wooeth,
As if the storms could give repose.”
—Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841)