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:
“If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with course black hair, and grey eyes—no other marks or brands recollected.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“... by and large, wife-changing and high office are not compatible. This inequity accounts for the many dull women in Washington and is the cause of much smug complacency on the distaff side of political marriages.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)
“And my eyes are blue;
So ferry me across the water,
Do, boatman, do!”
“Step into my ferry-boat,
Be they black or blue,”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.”
—Italo Calvino (1923–1985)
“A tree is made to live in peace in the color of day and in friendship with the sun, the wind and the rain. Its roots plunge in the fat fermentation of the soil, sucking in its elemental humors, its fortifying juices. Trees always seem lost in a great tranquil dream. The dark rising sap makes them groan in the warm afternoons. A tree is a living being that knows the course of the clouds and presses the storms because it is full of birds’ nests.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)