Page 2: Woody Guthrie – House of Earth
For Guthrie, a socialist and frequent contributor to the Communist Party USA’s newspaper The Daily Worker, oppressed people must organize and resist their oppression or otherwise become complicit in it. Early in the novel Ella May recognizes:
We’re to blame because we let them steal…We let them think that they could cheat us because we are just plain old common everyday people. They got the habit…Like dope. Like whiskey. Like tobacco. Like snuff. Like morphine or opium or old smoke of some kind. They got the regular habit of taking us for damned old silly fools.
Ella May realizes that, in the minds of those who profit from her oppression, she doesn’t count because she is “common.” From this point of departure Guthrie sets out to redefine “common” as something weighty and virtuous. As we as readers are woven into the warp and woof of Tike and Ella’s outwardly simple lives we see them for the deep, mysterious individuals that they are, and in so doing we unlearn the viewpoint of their oppressors.
The novel’s primary emblem of Tike and Ella May’s struggle is the “house of earth” from which the novel draws its title. Tike and Ella’s wooden shack has become a cage due to its incessant need for repairs and the constant threat that it might collapse altogether. “Die! Fall! Rot!” Tike, exasperated, even screams at the house on one occasion. But Tike trusts—and has a five cent government pamphlet to back him up, which he carries with him at all times—that all he needs for a home is the dirt around him. He is convinced that the very same dirt that plagues his life like a disease (Guthrie knew Dust Bowl survivors who did, in fact, develop an illness from ingesting dirt called “dust pneumonia”) could be used to build a reliable, long-lasting, low-maintenance adobe home at virtually no cost at all. While Tike’s dream of a “house of earth” remains unfulfilled within the pages of the novel, his dogged, indefatigable hope alone forms the novel’s culmination and central message.
In the novel’s final pages Ella May’s successfully gives birth to her child at home during a blizzard. Guthrie manages to describe the event in language that is simultaneously reverent and gritty, perfectly capturing the abundant and indomitable power of raw life. Observing the birth
[Tike] saw the head so slick and red, so much soft, all filled with blue and purple blood veins. And he saw every inch of Ella May’s body squirm and sway in sobs and moans of pains mixed with laughs that she laughed just to give him ease. And he saw that for every inch that baby moved Ella May moved in a mile of misery, but a misery that had a smile, a dry joke, a little laugh, even under the chloroform.
The baby’s first cry is the last major event of the novel and in a paragraph spanning across three pages Guthrie describes it and its strange, primal grandeur that gives Tike such pride that, “he felt like a blacksmith’s anvil, and he heard in his soul a hundred hammers ring. And he heard his own hammer ring on every other anvil in the whole world.”
What was true in 1961 is true in 2013: Woody Guthrie “ain’t dead yet.” House of Earth, by exploring common people’s struggles against financial inequality, seems a premonition of our own era of increasing margins between the rich and the poor. Its investigation of the human yearning for reliable shelter is all the more relevant in the wake of a financial crisis that saw over four million Americans lose their homes. The novel invites us to fight for a radically different future while remaining persistently aware of the grimness of the present. It reminds us that as we work for “pastures of plenty,” we may have all the tools we need already in the everyday gifts of life and community—and even in the soil under our feet.
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Brett Beasley lives in Chicago with his wife, a dog, and two rabbits.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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