Dale Maharidge > Quotes

“A train is a poem that will take you anywhere you want to go.”
― Dale Maharidge, The Last Great American Hobo

“What I would say to people right now is that you can’t count on anything that you don’t do yourself,” Jim said. “If your hand don’t put it there, and you don’t provide for your own family yourself, by your own intelligence and by your own means, you can’t count on anybody else to do it for you.”
― Dale Maharidge, Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression

“Margaret [Arlo] was once asked how she felt about her life over the past fifty years. The look in her eyes revealed that she understood the true question: How is it that you continued over fifty years to be as poor as you were at the beginning? ... 'I'm rich-poor,' she said. 'You see, I got my son. I got my Bible. That's all I need. I don't treasure nothin' on earth.”
― Dale Maharidge, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South

“Maggie Louise sat in a hardback chair, holding her baby brother, Squinchy, and her eyes fell upon Agee. There was something about the eyes of Maggie Louise that caught him the first time they met. They were 'temperature less, keen, serene, and wise and pure gray eyes,' Agee said, and they seemed to look everywhere and see into things. To look into the eyes of Maggie Louise was 'scary as hell, and even more mysterious than frightening,' said Agee. She knew she'd like him and he her.”
― Dale Maharidge, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South

“There was, however, a fundamental difference - namely, that Maggie Louise, at least at that point in her life, had the ability to be satisfied, which, while different from being happy, is essential in finding contentment. In this regard, there may be two kinds of people, or perhaps, more accurately, two extremes, and if so, Agee and Maggie Louise represented them.”
― Dale Maharidge, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South

“It was a slow news day. The kind of day that made me wonder why I became a reporter -- an often dull, plodding profession. Adventure and stories of unknown worlds pleading to be written were waiting somewhere. I was thinking I'd rather be Out There -- Alaska, the Amazon, a cornfield in Nebraska. Anywhere.
But not here, in the Sacramento Bee newsroom.”
― Dale Maharidge, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass

“No one lives on Hobe's Hill today. Only a few abandoned shacks remain. The land has greatly changed. When Walker Evans took his pictures, it was a grand, open place, full of cotton. Now forest has reclaimed the land. There is still some field, planted in soybeans, and this provides some sense of how things once were. These soybeans, as well as those down by the main highway, were planted by Joe Bridges and his son Huey.
Amid the soybeans, the ground is stony, and the water-starved beans grow with more courage than success. This same dust was breathed by Fred Ricketts as he plowed behind the seat rump of a mule fifty years ago. He and his children stared at this ground as they chopped weeds and, later, hunched over the long rows to pick. They knew this same sun, this silence, the awful loneliness of this red plateau.
The heat dulls the senses. Even sulfur butterflies, those neurotic field strutters, are slothful. The whole South seems under a hot Augustan pause--all the highways blurry beneath the burden of hear, be they four-lane marchers, two-lane winders, single-track dirt poems. From this hill, it's hard to imagine life going on in this hear anywhere across the six hundred miles of the South, in any of those terrible little towns...”
― Dale Maharidge, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South

“
History has shown that when California erupts, America does, too.”
― Dale Maharidge, The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism, and America's Future

“After the camp was dead, Michael ran into the mysterious woman walking her dogs a few times. Michael's presence with the guys gone formed a truce of sorts, for it made her realize he was coming for reasons other than the ones she believed. On her penultimate visit, she roamed through the camp with great sadness. Yet she stuck to her story that she was only coming to walk her dogs. The last time the woman came, Michael confronted her and told her he was there for the same reason she was: out of need. He said they were both looking for ghosts. She stood amid the camp crying. Michael hugged her briefly. She allowed this and said nothing. Then she left.”
― Dale Maharidge, The Last Great American Hobo

“Defeat.
It is written across the face of the once great land, in all the brittle shells of towns that once were, in all those little-town eyes that wait (but for what?), and in the cemeteries, the abandoned sharecropper fields, the vine-covered shack on the Burgandy land where Maggie Lousie and her children last grew cotton. That home still stands, valiant and silver against thirty empty seasons of frost and sun, containing fragments—the last straw sun hat she ever wore out in the cotton, a pair of high heels—all rotting, rat-chewed, faded. It is going the way of the gin down the road, abandoned in 1977, finally, to rust, pigeons, vandals.
It is no surprise some of these people react negatively to the outside world, that Junior Gudger sat on his porch in 1969, even before his sister committed her ultimate act of rebellion, and vented his fury. He was holding a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the first he had ever seen, it is said. He fumend that it made them look like slaves.”
― Dale Maharidge, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South

“James H. Street, in his book The New Revolution in the Cotton Economy, saw the system as not much different from slavery: The arrangment between planter and tenant took the form of an enforceable contract, though it was rarely reduced to writing. The legal device which was most frequently used to prevent the cropper from leaving his crop in mid-season, and when desirable, to prevent him from moving to another farm after the annual settlement was reached, was systemic indebtedness. Some of these arrangements were scarcely distinguishable from peonage, and they were often reinforced by the complicity of local law enforcement officers. Several states adopted "alienation of labor" laws which were designed to protect landlords from having their labor hired away from them by other farmers. . . . Farm hands who were attracted to new jobs by such offers were subject to forcible return by peace officers.”
― Dale Maharidge, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South

“After the camp was dead, Michael ran into the mysterious woman walking her dogs a few times. Michael's presence with the guys gone formed a truce of sorts, for it made her realize he was coming for reasons other than the ones she believed. On her penultimate visit, she roamed through the camp with great sadness. Yet she stuck to her story that she was only coming to walk her dogs. The last time the woman came, Michael confronted her and told her he was there for the same reason she was: out of need. He said they were both looking for ghosts. She stood amid the camp crying. Michael hugged her briefly. She allowed this and said nothing. The she left.”
― Dale Maharidge, The Last Great American Hobo