The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression

They
were almost a mile way, walking in the hollow, when the rain began in large
slow drops, and the far horizon quivered with sheet lightning. Fork lightning
snapped suddenly, splitting the moving clouds, flashing close to the wires. The
whole flat world under an angry churning sky was miraculously lighted for a
moment. A strange liquid clarity extended to the ends of the earth. Julia saw
the trees along the creek and animals grazing far away. The bleak farmyards
with their stern buildings, scattered sparsely on the plains, stood out in
naked lonely desolation. A sly delicate wind was rising. Their dresses moved
ever so little. Thunder clapped and boomed. They were afraid of the electricity
that speared into the ground with a terrifying crash after. Julia stopped for a
moment to get her breath and look at the approaching storm. Then she took
Lonnie from the bumping cart and pulled her along by the hand, while Myra
pulled the cart and clung to the pail of milk. They moved off the road away
from the wires, going through the open hollow.

There is no Steinbeckian pantheistic force in Babb’s
landscapes that joins human beings into a continuous environmental oneness;
there is only nature’s vast beautiful indifference across which people live,
love, struggle, and yearn. When her daughter asks if a cyclone might be forming,
Julia consoles her: “It’s only an electric storm.… Rain won’t hurt us. It’s just
scary.” Nature is neither malign nor consolatory; it’s implicitly nothing more
or less than itself.
And fear doesn’t arise from the world; it arises from individuals
when they are bereft of one another.

The failure of Names
wasn’t the only event in Babb’s long event-filled life that was difficult to
distinguish from legend. Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s compassionate and
respectful biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (largely based on stories recounted by Babb and her family, as well as passages
from Babb’s work), is filled with tales of a life that was lived to almost
tall-tale proportions. At the age of 5, Babb earned the nickname “Cheyenne—Riding
like the Wind” from an Otoe chief after the pony he gave her went galloping
wildly out of town while unyielding young Babb held on tightly, bareback. And
though she was unable to start school full time until age 10, she worked hard
enough to be named class valedictorian—only to have her graduation speech cut
at the last minute when the school authorities decided not to honor the
daughter of a notorious local gambler.

As a young woman in Los
Angeles, she went out to MGM looking for screenwriting work, where she caught
the always-roving eye of Irving Thalberg, who invited her back to his office to
sign up for a different career entirely—one that probably required spending at
least some time on the casting couch. She turned down both offers and, when
later asked if she was an actress, replied, “No. I’ve just had a narrow
escape.” At one point, when she was out on a date with her eventual husband, James
Wong Howe, a “finely dressed” woman drove up behind them in her car and,
angered by the sight of a white woman with an Asian man, shouted abuse. In
reply, Babb engaged in a street altercation that, by the end, left the woman
shouting “My hat! My $100 hat!”