[A Labor Day week offering.]
Still the fruit tramps came every year
when the Elbertas were turning yellow in the shiny leaves. Not so many came,
but the grove was pretty well filled with men and women and children who drove
along the highway leading to the hills and pitched their camps in the shade of
the trees planted there by a man named Cole fifty years before.
When times were bad it wasn't easy to make
a living picking peaches and grapes, cutting the peaches in half, laying them
in orderly rows on the trays. It was hard, unpleasant work. Out in the orchards
the heat waves rose, and when you knelt on the earth to pick the fruit up the
sand burned through your overalls. The cutting sheds offered little shelter
from the sun, and the fuzz from the peaches crept up the women's arms and down
the necks of their dresses. They stood all day on the packed earth of the shed,
picking the fruit up with their nimble fingers, jabbing the knife point to the
soft flesh and, with a twist, halving the fruit.
This 1934 short story by Daniel Mainwaring is an
example of the proletarian fiction that was popular in the Depression era, the most
notable example being Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
This genre emphasized the plight of the common man,
often had a political bent to it, and when in an urban setting, there was often
a strong union element to it.
Alternately, when proletarian fiction had a rural
setting as in the case of the itinerant fruit pickers in this story or the melon
industry in Elmore Leonard’s Mr. Majestyk, the tales take on a decidedly
gritty western feel. We are treated to accurate descriptions of hard work and
when there is confrontation,as in this story and Mr. Majestyk, one is
hard-pressed to deny that these are “Western Stories” in their own right.
[The Leonard novel is also reviewed on in this blog]
Mainwaring’s story, found in the July 1934 issue of Harper’s
Magazine is a strong example of the proletarian genre with an obvious
element of the Western to it.
In addition, it is a fine piece of writing well in the
vein of the aforementioned Mr. Leonard.
Well worth a read.
