Learning through books and movies - Keith Roulston editorial

One of the fascinating and enjoyable things about living in our modern world is that with books, movies, computers and TV we can be entertained and gain knowledge in so many ways. I recently experienced that in both a book and movie.

 

First of all, I had the opportunity to share the world of a century ago in the drought years of the Great Depression in the novel 
The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. Unlike John Steinbeck’s equally gripping story, the great classic The Grapes of Wrath, this 
book focuses the story on a woman and her children. 

 

A small-town woman, Elsa Martinelli, marries the charming son of a Texas farmer and moves to their farm with him following World War I. Things begin prosperously with good weather and they have two children. Then, toward the end of the 1920s, the Depression hits economically, coinciding with a 10-year drought that stretches all the way up to the Canadian prairies. Year after year they plant crops, but hot dry weather sets in and the dust buries their crops and hopes.

 

Elsa’s husband wants them to walk away from the farm and move to California, but both his parents and Elsa resist. Finally, 
he simply disappears. She hangs on as another crop is planted and fails, but finally gives up and prepares to move. At the last moment, however, her husband’s parents, so grateful for their farm and now helped by support from the U.S. government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, decide to stick it out.

 

After a stress-filled trip, Elsa and her children arrive in California, but discover thousands of other homeless people from Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas had sought the same escape. All are called simply “Okies” and they are not welcomed. So poor, many of them must settle for wretched camps beside the road.

 

Though not welcomed, they are taken advantage of by large local planters of tobacco  farms and orchards. Eventually, Elsa and her children find a place in a camp on a tobacco grower’s land. The camp has a store, where they can buy groceries on credit, though the prices are high and the store takes a discount to turn their credit slips into groceries.

 

With so many “Okies”, the landowners soon start reducing wages. I won’t go into the whole story, but it’s not a light or happy tale, though it definitely lets us see how privileged are the lives we lead by comparison.

 

The movie we pulled off our shelf was Hidden Figures, made in 2014 about three real-life mathematicians who helped the U.S.A. catch up to the Soviet Union in the space race in the 1960s. The three real-life women were Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson and they were all Black and all working at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia at a time when Blacks were still segregated in southern states. 

 

The women in the beginning have to work, with other Black women, in a separate building from where the main research is done. After they find out she has the math skills they need, Katherine is transferred to work in the main building - but there’s a funny/frustrating scene in which she disappears for long periods because the only bathroom a Black woman can use is in the old building. Every time she uses the bathroom, she’s away from her desk for a long period.

 

Johnson lived to be 102 and only died in 2020. 

 

Dorothy Vaughan supervises all the Black women in that special building, but she steps up when the staff can’t get the IBM mainframe computer operating and solves the problem. She was short-lived by comparison to Johnson, enduring only until she was 98.

 

Mary Jackson starts out as a mathematician, but we see her battle the odds to be able to study engineering at a top university and she becomes NASA’s first Black female engineer. 

 

The stories of these three remarkable women are revealed during the tense fight to meet the challenge of U.S. President John F. Kennedy to put a man on the moon. As the U.S. prepares to return to the moon 60 years later, their stories show how far we’ve come in that time, the U.S. having elected the first Black president in Barack Obama from 2008 to 2016. And yet at the same time, seeing the current Southern Republican leadership push back with restrictions on women and Blacks, it’s hard to think of the U.S. being the same country that elected Obama a mere decade ago.

 

The great thing about books like The Four Winds and movies like Hidden Figures is that they can help us experience difficult times like the Depression Dust Bowl or the complicated world of pre-liberation southern Black women although we live in the comfort of 2023. We can see what it was like to experience the lives of others.