Fair Use Blog

Three months ago, I happily announced that the complete text of the November 1914 issue of Mother Earth had been made available at the Fair Use Repository. To-day, I’m pleased to follow up that announcement — with the announcement that the Fair Use Repository now features the complete text of three issues of Mother Earth. The two issues recently made available are:

Mother Earth, Vol. VI., No. 11 (January, 1912)

This issue is mainly occupied with the arts and revolution. It leads off with Blaming the Fester, a poem by Rebekah E. Raney. The New Year is a fundraising appeal on the occasion of Christmastime and the New Year, while Observation and Comments includes short reports on current events — delays in the publication of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, the trial of the bosses who’d locked workers into the the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, strikes and conspiracy trials around the country, Big Bill Haywood’s feud with the Socialist Party of America, and more.

Paul Orleneff offers a celebratory review (unsigned, but probably written by Emma Goldman) of the actor’s performances in New York. A Review of the Year, by Harry Kelly, and the continuation of a serialized article by Voltairine de Cleyre on The Mexican Revolution, discuss revolutions and uprisings flaring up throughout the world in 1911. In The Right to Live M. B. argues that political rights are empty without workers’ material control over the means of their own survival (the organization of society in a manner to insure to each the material basis of life and make it as self-evident as breathing). Max Baginski reviews the Autobiography of Richard Wagner, taking it as evidence of the old commonplace that one can be a great artist and yet small as a man, and concluding that The suffocating dependence of artistic production upon wealth and patronage should cause the true artist—who is not content to produce mere market ware—to turn relentlessly rebel against the existing standards, to become a communist. … The dream that Wagner once dreamed in Art and Revolution will some day be realized by the people,—nor will they need the aid of philosopher or king. The issue concludes with a continuation of the serialized article Economy as Viewed by An Anarchist by C. L. James, on the historical emergence of the bourgeois system and its connections with past forms of economic hierarchy, as well as with the subjection of women.

Mother Earth, Vol. VII., No. 12 (February, 1913)

The February 1913 issue has a few things to say about the State and a lot to say about the union struggle, Syndicalism, and government repression of striking workers. The issue leads off with To Our Friends, an appeal for readers to help widen the circulation of the journal, followed by another monthly instalment of short reports in Observations and Comments — including remarks on the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, the futility of appeals to the law, the advantages of direct action, new strike arbitration laws in New Zealand (among the first such labor laws in the world), the legal repression of Anarchists in the U.S., police scandals in Denver, and the incorporation of the Rockefeller fund.

James Montgomery’s The Black Hundreds of Plutocracy and Government discusses the use of private security forces, with tacit or explicit government approval, to inflict large-scale violence on striking workers. The New Idol, a translation of an excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, declares the State the coldest of all cold monsters. Theodor Johnson’s Help Save These Comrades! reports on the case of a group of striking Swedish dock workers, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a bomb plot, and calls for international solidarity to get their sentences commuted. Making a Strike a Crime government’s assault on the rights to picket and speak freely, with the imprisonment of dozens of peaceful picketers and speakers in Little Falls, New York during a textile mill strike. Intolerance in the Union comments on growing regimentation and bureaucratic control within conservative trade unions and reprints a letter from a comrade discussing his objections to a corrupt bargain made by his union’s labor bosses, which resulted in his being persecuted by the labor bosses and expelled from the union. Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice concludes a long article by Emma Goldman on state-free Syndicalist organizing, with a discussion of Syndicalism’s characteristic methods — Direct Action, Sabotage, and the General Strike. The issue concludes with Anarchist writer and teacher Bayard Boyesen’s review of Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, and with an announcement of dates for Emma Goldman’s lecture tour through the Midwest.

Onward

These issues complete a set of three reprinted issues of Mother Earth that I picked up from a table at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. I’d very much like to make available more of Mother Earth’s print run online. A number of partial and complete issues — mostly earlier issues — are currently available from The Anarchy Archives, and a fair amount is available for browsing in Google Books. But I’d like to liberate the latter from the Google Books’s inaccurate automatic markup, often capricious behavior, and hypertext-unfriendly environment. And in any case, there are a lot of gaps to fill in. If you have any suggestions on issues to prioritize, or good lines on copies to be transcribed, please feel free to leave a comment here, or contact me with the details.

Read, cite, and enjoy!

This is from Chapter 8, The Most Daring of [Our] Leaders, in Freedom’s Daughters, Lynne Olson’s history of women organizers’ role in the black Freedom struggle, in which she tells the story of Diane Nash, the campaign in 1960 to desegregate downtown Nashville through a direct-action campaign of nonviolent sit-ins and economic boycotts, and the protests that it helped inspire across the South.

[Diane] Nash’s moment of epiphany came at the Tennessee State Fair in 1959. She had gone to the fair on a date, and wanted to use the ladies’ room. She found two—one marked White Women, the other Colored Women—and for the first time in her life suffered the degradation of Jim Crow. This was no longer an intellectual exercise: She was being told in the most searing way imaginable that she was beyond the pale, unfit to use the same facilities as white women. Outraged by the experience, she was even more upset that her date, a Southerner, did not share her fury. Neither did most of her fellow Fisk students. They did not seem to care that they could shop at downtown stores but not eat the stores’ lunch counters, or that they had to sit in the balcony to see a movie. The more Nash found out about segregation in Nashville, the more she felt stifled and boxed in. In the rest of the country, Nashville had the reputation of being more racially progressive than most Southern cities. Blacks could vote in Nashville. The city’s schools and buses were integrated. Blacks served on the police force, fire department, City Council, and Board of Education. But segregation still firmly ruled in theaters, restaurants, hotels, and libraries, and Diane Nash, a deep-dyed moralist, decided then and there that Nashville was in a stage of sin. She couldn’t believe that the children of my classmates would have to be born into a society where they had to believe that they were inferior. Above all, she could not believe that her classmates were willing to let that happen.

Since they did not seem to share her anger, she looked elsewhere for support. Paul LaPrad, a white exchange student at Fisk, told her about a black minister named James Lawson, who was training college students in the use of nonviolence as the framework for an all-out attack on segregation. For Lawson, who had spent three years in India studying the principles of Gandhi, nonviolence was more than just a protest technique: It was the means by which he ordered his life. The young minister talked about the power of nonviolent confrontation with evil, about overcoming the forces of hate and transforming society through love and forgiveness. At first, Nash was skeptical. How could such high-flown idealism be harnessed as a weapon against gun-toting sheriffs and club-swinging racists? Even after attending several of Lawson’s workshops, she still was sure this stuff is never going to work. But since, as she said, it was the only game in town, she kept going back, and after weeks of studying theology and philosophy, of reading Thoreau and other advocates of passive resistance, of discussion and arguments with the workshop’s other participants, the intense young woman from Chicago was finally captured by Lawson’s vision. She was particularly drawn to his belief that to be effective, these young would-be activists would have to transcend self-hatred and a sense of inferiority, that they would have to learn to love themselves. Having been raised in a milieu that downplayed her blackness, she now found herself part of a group suddenly proud to be called black. Within the movement… we came to a realization of our own worth…

Many students at the workshops did not know what to make of Nash. She was one of only a handful who attended from Fisk, where the notion of protest was antithetical. So what was this beautiful, light-skinned, quintessentially Fisk type doing at the workshops? Whatever the reason for her being there, her presence entranced virtually every man in the group. Plenty of fellows attending those sessions gave a go at hitting on Diane, said John Lewis, an American Baptist College student who was one of the participants. You saw some resentment among some guys because they thought another guy was making an inroad with her. Several women in the group were jealous of the attention she was getting. Even so, sexual and romantic undercurrents remained generally in the background of the Nashville movement. In time, Lewis said, Nash came to be seen more as our sister than as an object of lust…. We all became brothers and sisters, a family.

In the late fall of 1959, the students at Lawson’s workshops formed a a central committee to act as the decision-making body for the group. Nash, who had impressed everyone with her clear-eyed thinking and the intensity of her developing commitment to nonviolence, was named to the committee. More and more, the students were turning to her as one of their main leaders.

The commitee had chosen the lunch counters and restaurants of Nashville’s downtown stores as the target of the students’ first protest, scheduled for February 1960. For the next several months, the students underwent rigorous training to prepare for the upcoming sit-ins, and on February 13, 124 students left a Nashville church and made their way to the lunch counters of several downtown stores. There, they took their seats and asked for service. The men wore suits and ties, the women, dresses, stockings, and high heels. They were poised and polite and gave little outward sign of the fear many of them felt. Diane Nash, for one, was terrified—a terror that would never leave her, no matter how many sit-ins and protests she would participate in afterward.

As frightened as the students were during that first sit-in, however, they had to struggle to keep from laughing at the stunned, panicky reactions of white store workers and patrons, who acted, Nash recalled, as if these well-dressed young people were some dreadful monster… about to devour them all. Waitresses dropped dishes, cashiers broke down in tears, an elderly white woman almost had a seizure when she opened the door of a store’s white ladies’ room and found two young black women inside. Throwing up her hands, she screamed, Oh! Nigras everywhere!

There were no arrests and no violence. After a couple of hours, the students left the stores, jubilant that their first foray had gone without a hitch. A second sit-in was planned for the following week. In the meantime, several members of the students’ Central Committee came to Nash and asked her to head the group. She was hardworking and outwardly fearless, and she did not seem to have the ego problems that a lot of the men had. Because she was a woman and not a man, I think Diane never had to go around and do any posturing, said Bernard Lafayette, an American Baptist College student and one of the Nashville movement’s leaders. But Nash had no desire to become the recognized head of this movement. Like most young women of that time, she had been raised to stay in the background. The men pressured her into accepting, however, and when she returned to her dorm room, she was so frightened by what she had done that she could hardly keep her legs from collapsing under her. This is Tennessee, and white people down here are mean, she told herself. Not only that, but we are going to be coming up against … white Southern men who are forty and fifty and sixty years old, who are politicians and judges and owners of businesses, and I am twenty-two years old. What am I doing? And how is this little group of students my age going to stand up to these powerful people?

Once again, she managed to damp down her fear. She joined the other students in the second sit-in, which was as quietly successful as the first. Nevertheless, the city was losing its patience. Nashville officials, deluged by complaints from store owners that the sit-ins were causing whites to stay away from downtown, warned the students not to continue. If the warning wasn’t heeded, they made clear, the kids could forget about being treated with kid gloves any longer. Worried about the possibility of violence and arrests, the ministers connected with the movement urged the students to reconsider their plans for another demonstration on February 27.

With their numbers swelling, the young people refused. In the middle of another snowstorm, more than three hundred of them poured into downtown Nashville. No sooner had some of them sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter than the ministers’ fears proved justified. The demonstrators were met with an opposing force of cursing young white toughs, who yanked them from their stools and threw them to the floor, beat them with fists and clubs, kicked them, spat on them, extinguished lighted cigarettes on their backs and in their hair. The police were nowhere in sight, and when they finally arrived, they approached not the white attackers, but the bruised and shaken demonstrators, who were spattered with mustard and ketchup, spit and blood. Okay, all you nigras, get up from the lunch counter or we’re going to arrest you, one of the cops barked. When no one obeyed, the students were ordered to their feet, arrested for disorderly conduct, and marched out, through a guantlet of hostile whites, to police paddy wagons. When they looked over their shoulders at the lunch counter, they saw a new wave of students quietly moving in to take their place.

As the police wagons pulled away, the demonstrators inside steeled themselves for an experience for which there was no adequate preparation. They had rehearsed the sit-ins, had tried to get a sense of what they would be like, how it would feel when someone beat them or called them nigger. But it was impossible to simulate how it felt to go to jail for the first time, to give themselves up voluntarily to this dreaded system, to risk incurring a stigma that would mark them forever. Like others in the wagons, Diane Nash was wrestling with an almost paralyzing fear. Only bad people went to jail, she had been taught, and bad things happened to them once they were there.

The eighty-one arrested students were released on bail that evening. Monday morning, they reported to the city courthouse for their trials. Nashville’s black community had been shocked by the arrests, and more than 2,500 blacks surged around the courthouse in an impressive show of solidarity. Inside the courtroom, the trials proceeded with bureaucratic efficiency—one after another, the students stood, were found guilty of disorderly conduct, and given fifty-five dollar fines. Then, suddenly, Diane Nash threw a monkey wrench into the works. Nash told the judge that she, John Lewis, and fourteen others had decided to go to jail instead of paying the fines. Drawing on the principles of Gandhi, Nash declared, We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants. Stunned by Nash’s announcement, the students who already had agreed to pay their fines declared that they, too, would go to jail.

Until then, most students arrested in sit-ins nationwide had spent little, if any, time behind bars. The idea that young people who had done nothing more than politely demand their rights would be sentenced to jail for thirty-three days electrified Nashville’s blacks and touched off protests throughout the country. The city put the demonstrators to work, and the sight of the men shoveling snow and cleaning city streets and the women polishing the marble staircases of the courthouse threw the black community into even more of an uproar.

The jailing of the students had clearly backfired. Nashville’s mayor, Ben West, a political moderate who had courted black votes in his last election, proposed a compromise: He would let the jailed students go and appoint a biracial commission to consider steps to desegregate the downtown stores if the demonstrations stopped. Nash and the others agreed and were released. Nash, however, was not content to sit around and wait for the committee’s report. Two days after her release, she and three other students sat in at the city’s Greyhound bus terminal, which was not covered by the demonstration cease-fire that the mayor had arranged. To the astonishment of everyone, including the demonstrators themselves, they were served at the bus station without any problem. It was one of the first sit-in victories in the South.

But there was little time for celebration. When the mayor’s biracial committee failed to make any serious recommendations for desegregating downtown lunch counters and restaurants, the students resumed their sit-ins. At the same time they launched a boycott of downtown stores and picketed the city’s central square and courthouse. Racial tensions escalated, and this time the mayor seemed powerless to do anything about it.

On April 19, just two weeks after Nash and the other leaders of the Nashville movement attended SNCC’s organizing conference in Raleigh, a tremendous explosion ripped through the home of Alexander Looby, the students’ lawyer. The early-morning bombing was so powerful that it shattered more than a hundred windows in nearby Meharry Medical College, yet, miraculously, Looby and his wife were not injured. Outraged, the students called for a mass march to City Hall and sent a telegram to Mayor West, asking him to meet them. When the marchers, now numbering more than three thousand, reached City Hall, the mayor was waiting for them at the top of the steps. An activist minister named C. T. Vivian made a short speech, and the mayor began to reply, pointing out all that he had done for Nashville’s blacks and reminding them that he was mayor of all the community. Listening to him, Nash grew increasingly frustrated: He was making a political speech, and I remember feeling like, This is not getting us anywhere. What can I do? What can I say?

What she did was ask a simple question, one that would have far-reaching consequences in the city of Nashville. Mayor West, she said, do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color? The question went to the heart of nonviolence, bypassing all the political boilerplate and appealing directly to West’s conscience. The mayor did not disappoint. He nodded—and then said yes. They asked me some pretty soul-searching questions—and one that was addressed to me as a man, West said years later. And I found that I had to answer it frankly and honestly—that I did not agree that it was morally right for someone to sell them merchandise and refuse them service. And I had to answer it just exactly like that.

Stunned by West’s honesty, the marchers burst into thunderous applause, and the next day, the Nashville Tennesseean ran a huge headline: Integrate Counters—Mayor. Three weeks later, six downtown stores targeted by demonstrators opened their lunch counters to blacks.

It was an enormous victory for the fledgling movement. The day after the march, Martin Luther King came to Nashville to honor the students. Calling their campaign the best organized and the most disciplined in the South, he said he had come not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community.

The Nashville students would become models for thousands of young people in the burgeoning Southern civil rights movement, and the Nashville leaders, including John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and Marion Barry, would be among the movement’s foremost activists. But in the early days, at least, no one was better known or more awe-inspiring than the intrepid Diane Nash. Lewis called her the most daring of [our] leaders. Demonstrators on trial in Nashville were often asked, Do you know Diane Nash? Suddenly, she was everywhere—on the cover of Jet, on television, on the front pages of the Nashville newspapers. Her fame was not much to her liking—she was not fond of personal publicity, and she was often singled out by racists who recognized her from her picture in the paper. Once, at a sit-in, she was terrified when one of the toughs surrounding the students spotted her and yelled, That’s Diane Nash! She’s the one to get!

But if that was the price that had to be paid, so be it. She had been transformed by her experiences, and now she was true believer, surrendering her heart and soul, in a way few people ever would, to nonviolence and the fight for freedom. In early 1961, her reputation as one of the most daring young firebrands in the movement would be burnished even further by a monthlong stint in jail. At the request of local college students, Nash and three other SNCC activists, including a Spelman College sophomore named Ruby Doris Smith, had joined a sit-in at a drugstore in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They were promptly arrested, but rather than post bond, they opted to go to jail for thirty days.

Not long after the four were released, Nash dropped out of Fisk. The Chaucer classes, she said, became unbearable after Rock Hill. She was hired by both SNCC and the local SCLC affiliate. Her combined salary was about twenty-five dollars a week, and she rented a room at Nashville’s [YWCA][]. When Jet magazine asked about her plans for the future, she said, I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life.

—Lynne Olson (2001). Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970. 154-160.

Here, if you don't remember, are the rules to Over My Shoulder. The book here is:

Boquet, Elizabeth H. Noise from the Writing Center. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2002.

The quotation is from pages 42-43, emphasis in original.

I fear, sometimes, that we are too willing to give our institutions what we think they want, whether or not it is what we want or, ultimately, even what they want. The shift from remediation to efficiency illustrates this point to me. We take great pains now to highlight in our studies, in our annual reports, the very broad appeal that most writing centers enjoy on our campuses and the cost-effective manner in which we operate. Most of us, for example, are advised to include in our annual reports hard numbers (As opposed to soft numbers? Or easy numbers?): number of students served (Do you want fries with that?), number of students from each course, from each major, from each year, from each school, always-another-from-each-that-I-seem-to-have-forgotten. Is this what we do? No. But do we do it? Yes. And we do it for "good" reasons, I suppose, though I don't feel like writing about those. What I do feel like writing about is what happens when we mistake doing it for what we do -- and when our colleagues, administrators, and occasionally our tutors and students, follow us in making the same mistake. I feel like thinking about what happens when we fetishize the numbers of students we see from every end of campus, the numbers of hours we've worked, the numbers of students we've helped to retain for so comparatively little cost, rather than what happened during those hours, between those students. It is rare that annual reports -- my own included -- tell stories of the latter.

Here, if you don't remember, are the rules to Over My Shoulder. The book here is:

Hartzog, Carol P. Composition and the Academy: A Study of Writing Program Administration. New York: Modern Language Association, 1986.

and the quotation is from page 90.

[Erika Lindemann's TA training] manual sends teaching assistants a message something like this: The teaching of writing is a sophisticated practice, grounded in theory, history, and research. You can do it, and you can do it well. Those of us preparing the manual know more about teaching writing than you do right now, and we've reached consensus on how it should be done, but we trust you to carry it out and gradually to develop your own variations, your own distinctive style and practice. This work is important: it matters to your students now and throughout their careers, and it matters to you, personally and professionally. You should do it well and with dignity, and it will be a good experience for you. You begin as a novice who needs instruction and support, but you join a community; it is a sharing community, and you will make your own contributions to your students and your peers. You will be called to account, but you will be judged fairly. You will know what's expected, and you will be given direction and help. You will be treated with the same respect we want you to give your students.

From Gabriel García Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, page 65:

Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

Another passage from The Autobiography of My Mother (pp. 96-98):

I had never had a mother, I had just recently refused to become one, and I knew then that this refusal would be complete. I would never become a mother, but that would not be the same as never bearing children. I would bear children, but I would never be a mother to them. I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god. I would bear children in the morning, I would bathe them at noon in a water that came from myself, and I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole, all at once. They would live and then they would not live. In their day of life, I would walk them to the edge of a precipice. I would not push them over; I would not have to; the sweet voices of unusual pleasures would call to them from its bottom; they would not rest until they became one with these sounds. I would cover their bodies with diseases, embellish skins with thinly crusted sores, the sores sometimes oozing a thick pus for which they would thirst, a thirst that could never be quenched. I would condemn them to live in an empty space frozen in the same posture in which they had been born. I would throw them from a great height; every bone in their body would be broken and the bones would never be properly set, healing in the way they were broken, healing never at all. I would decorate them when they were only corpses and set each corpse in a polished wooden box, and place the polished wooden box in the earth and forget the part of the earth where I had buried the box. It is in this way that I did not become a mother; it is in this way that I bore my children.

The blurb on the cover of this book, written by Michiko Kakutani, says that it is "powerful and disturbing." I wouldn't say it's all that disturbing as a whole (yet), but this excerpt definitely stands out.

I finished up the Joanna Russ book; it was okay. I'm now a good way into The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, and this gem looked nice. I'll probably end up teaching a grammar course in the near future; shall I require the students to diagram this sentence?

My world then -- silent, soft, and vegetable-like in its vulnerability, subject to the powerful whims of others, diurnal, beginning with the pale opening of light on the horizon each morning and ending with the sudden onset of dark at the beginning of each night -- was both a mystery to me and the source of much pleasure: I loved the face of a gray sky, porous, grainy, wet, following me to school for mornings on end, sending down on me soft arrows of water; the face of that same sky when it was a hard, unsheltering blue, a backdrop for a cruel sun; the harsh heat that eventually became a part of me, like my blood; the overbearing trees (the stems of some of them the size of small trunks) that grew without restraint, as if beauty were only size, and I could tell them all apart by closing my eyes and listening to the sound the leaves made when they rubbed together; and I loved that moment when the white flowers from the cedar tree started to fall to the ground with a silence that I could hear, their petals at first still fresh, a soft kiss of pink and white, then a day later, crushed, wilted, and brown, a nuisance to the eye; and the river that had become a small lagoon when one day on its own it changed course, on whose bank I would sit and watch families of birds, and frogs laying their eggs, and the sky turning from black to blue and blue to black, and rain falling on the sea beyond the lagoon but not on the mountain that was beyond the sea.

From Picnic on Paradise published 1968, which I scored in Knoxville at McKay Used Books for 75 cents (pp. 94-95):

He sighed. It was rather peaceful, actually.

"Look, dear," he said quietly, "I've done my best. But if you want me, myself, you'll have to do without; I've heard that too often. Do you think they don't want me out there? Sure they do! They want me to open up my" (she could not catch the word) "like a God damned" (or that one) "and show them everything that's inside, all my feelings, or what they call feelings. They talk about their complexities and their reactions and their impressions and their interactions and their patterns and their neuroses and their childhoods and their rebellions and their utterly unspeakable insides until I want to vomit. I have no insides. I will not have any. I certainly will not let anyone see any. I do things and I do them well; that's all. If you want that, you can have it. Otherwise, my love, I am simply not at home. Understood?"

Another installment of Over My Shoulder, a tradition started by Rad Geek (the rules). This passage comes from Saving the World by Julia Alvarez, an author from the Dominican Republic whose protagonists (in this case Alma) are also usually women from the Dominican Republic.

But she couldn't let it go. This periodic homeland rage that would crop up out of nowhere, even though she had been in the United States almost forty years, this feeling that her own luckiness was off the backs of other people, not because her family had been exploiters but because the pool of the lucky was so small in that poor little place that God forgot. In the United States there was a larger pool of luck, and the overspill trickled down: extra toilet paper in the stalls, soup kitchens, social service programs, sliding scales, legal aid, free clinics, adjunct teaching posts and art enrichment grants so that people like Tera, like Helen, like Alma before she lucked out with her novels and marriage to Richard managed to scrape by. (275-276)