Abstract

And the Rural Poor Get Poorer

The road leading to Marysville, California, passes through some of the best farmland in the world, thick with orchards of peach, nectarine and prune. It's also a land rich with shacks and trailers and people-like that woman walking on the side of the road. With her tumbleweed hair and eyes as fierce as a winter sky, she is straight out of one of writer Dorothea Lange's book "Farm Security Administration," pictures. The rural poor are not welfare cheats, as the far right would have you believe about people who live in shacks and trailers. When doing research in rural Alabama for a book tracing the fate of the 128 survivors and offspring of the cotton share-croppers documented by writers James Agee and Walker Evans in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."