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:
“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“... black women have always found that in the social order of things we’re the least likely to be believed—by anyone.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)
“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)
“The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And threw away the Road.”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)