McAdams 1

Garrett McAdams

English 2600

Professor Stanford

19 October 2019

Pantoum of the Great Depression Adaptation

Much of the world had fallen on hard times in the early months of 1933, but Oklahoma was

devastated. My father, a cattle rancher, had seen a near 50% decline in income and he wasn’t

alone in this situation. Many of the townspeople were hurting and had their eyes on the

promising vineyards of California and a few of them actually packed up and headed out West

with nothing but a pamphlet and a prayer. Mostly, though, we just talked about it knowing fully

well that nothing would actually be done. It was in this way that our lives avoided tragedy:

gathering around the living room or the dancehall and trying to carry on with life as usual. The

severity of the situation was understood but never really vocalized yet. It was almost as though

we thought that the hard times would go away simply if we didn’t look at them for too long.

The winter gave way to spring and still there were no signs of improvement. Every now

and then strange men would come to town offering jobs to those who were willing to move a

few towns over and put in some extra work but few people accepted. My mother says that they

were either prideful or distrustful. I have a vague memory of sitting on my mother’s lap one

morning in March and listening to the inauguration of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt

who was promising change over the radio. My mother sat and stared hopefully out the kitchen
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window as his words were transmitted from over one thousand miles away. Some of the details

of these days are lost on me still; I was only six years of age.

The same strange men came around offering jobs and the same townsfolk refused their

offers and stood stubbornly by their shrinking incomes. Life went on as normally as it was

allowed to; children grew older and parents threw them birthday parties, more jobs were cut as

a result of businesses closing in town. Even at such a young age, I remember taking comfort by

the sound of our neighbors playing cards on their porches or tending to the cry of a baby inside.

In retrospect I’m beginning to remember the newspapers collecting on my father’s nightstand

with bold headlines that I couldn’t yet read. I imagine they were talking about a nation trying to

get its own wheels moving again. If there were ever any signs of the times taking an emotional

hold on my parents, I didn’t see it. It was done at night into a pillow or while I was playing out in

the yard.

There were no poets writing in verse or novelists writing in prose and thank god for it.

All that would come later. In those days, we needed an escape from our situation. We didn’t

need to understand it beyond a surface level. Times were hard and that was that. Everyone

around us was struggling and at a certain point it became normal and even expected. If we

needed solace then we found it in the form of a quick and knowing glance at our neighbors

over the fence or from the street. One night I laid awake and wondered whether there was

anyone listening in on my prayers for some sort of financial relief. Whether our suffering had an

audience or would ever have an audience. Beyond my window and past the southern plains

shone the actual world.

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Gradually our neighborhood began to change as the foreclosure letters were delivered

impersonally to the rusted mailboxes. Those who were being evicted could only give vague

answers as to where they were heading; a relative’s house in the city or a few towns over to

take up those men on their employment offer. My mother told me when I was older that the

truth was typically that they were off to the nearest shantytown. These evictions brought those

of us that managed to hold onto our houses closer. No longer did we hush our voices when we

spoke of our struggles. We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor. Time began to

pass more and more slowly. The Great Depression had taken us in its relentless grip and there

was no denying it any longer.

One morning in May of ‘33, when the dust clouds rose above the plains and blotted out

the sky for a time, one of those letters came to our neighbor’s house who we had shared those

knowing glances with. The mother cried and the father drank as they packed up their car with

the essentials and left behind what they couldn’t fit. I’m not sure where they ended up going.

No one knew when the end was or if there even was one. We watched as the houses around us

vacated only to be taken into the hands of the banks and left sitting empty for years. I always

found it funny how it’s the people that have the least that are most willing to give to others

what they do. If the Adams needed dinner, my mother would put something together for them.

If I had the cold, the Downing’s would bring me what was left of their cough syrup. I believe

that it was this camaraderie that kept us and millions of other families across the nation going

through that terrible decade. It is by blind chance that we escaped true tragedy. It is by blind

chance that I didn’t fall l seriously ill and was left without the care that I required or the funds
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to pay for it. It is by blind chance that those foreclosure letters never came to our mailbox. And

there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.

Statement of Goals and Choices

With this adaptation I was mostly trying to flesh out and expand on Pantoum of the Great

Depression by Donald Justice while still keeping its themes and its tone intact. I wanted to walk

the line between being too imposing on the original story and being too derivative. The first

thing that I realized that I needed to do to be successful in this was to expand on the hardships

that Justice’s family experienced while still preserving the poignant tone that was found in the

poem. Next, I knew that I had to pace my adaptation similarly to how the poem was paced.

Lastly, I realized that I needed to include historical terms and events to create an accurate and

interesting setting for the story to take place in. During the writing process I found that I was

most aware of how Justice used plaintive and simple diction to communicate to his audience

what it was that he was trying to say with this poem. This made me consider my own diction

and what I could do to reflect his style of writing while also putting my own spin on it. All in all,

plot and setting were definitely the most important aspects of short fiction and poetry for me

while I was writing this adaptation.

As mentioned above, I decided while I was writing this piece that I needed to include

historical terms and events in order to keep the story interesting and prevent it from growing

stale. This was the first decision that I made and it first happens with my mentioning of the

migrants heading to California in search of work. This also helped to establish setting. Next, I

decided not to include any dialogue as to keep the story consisting of quiet observations made
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by a child and later reflected on as an adult. Lastly, and this was something that I wasn’t

necessarily even aware of while I was writing it, I found myself using a lot of semicolons to

create rhythm within my paragraphs the same way that Justice did in his stanzas by using

frequent caesurae. I believe that all of these choices helped me to create a piece of work that

was true to the original yet creative in its own right.

Citations

Justice, D. (n.d.). Pantoum of the Great Depression by Donald Justice. Retrieved from

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58080/pantoum-of-the-great-depression.