Sanora Babb

Sanora Babb (born April 21, 1907 in a settlement of the Oto- Indians in the area of ​​today's Osage County (= Osage Indian Reservation ), Oklahoma ; † December 31, 2005 in Hollywood Hills , California ) was a socially committed American author , Journalist and poet.

biography

Early years

Sanora Babb was born in 1907 as the daughter of Walter Babb and his ( Kentucky native ) wife Jennie. With her sister Dorothy (Marcella) (* 1909 in Waynoka , Woods County , Oklahoma ,; † 1995) she grew up in a settlement of the Oto-Indians in the area of ​​today's Osage Indian Reservation (= Osage County ) in northern Oklahoma. The restless father tried all sorts of professions, as a baseball player, baker, and finally a gambler. The family moved frequently. Eventually they moved to the extreme southeast of Colorado, where Sanora's grandfather, Alonso Babb, had been running a tiny farm in Baca County near Two Buttes since 1910 . Here the family lived in dire poverty in a dilapidated one-room barrack. Recurring crop failures repeatedly brought them to the brink of starvation. In order to survive, one was forced to eat herbs, grasses and thistles. Sanora was bitten by rats and had to experience that her brother died shortly after his birth. Events that dug deep into her memory and in her later literary work ecological catastrophes, human tragedies, broken dreams, false expectations, disappointed hopes, the never-ending greed for land were always the focus.

Sanora Babb did not go to school for the first time until she was eleven years old. Her grandfather taught her to read by reading from a book about Kit Carson's adventures or from newspaper articles that were pasted on the walls of the barracks to replace wallpaper. Once in school, however, she quickly caught up, was best of the year ( valedictorian ) and gave the graduation speech at the end of her high school education. The family eventually gave up the small farm, moved to Elkhart , Morton County in the extreme southwest of Kansas , Forgan in the northwest corner of Oklahoma , and finally to Garden City , Kansas. After graduating from high school, Sanora worked as a journalist for the Associated Press , moving to Los Angeles , California in 1929 because she had the prospect of a job at the Los Angeles Times . However, the stock market crash of 1929 , the so-called Great Depression, thwarted all these plans.

Eventually she found a job with a radio station. In addition to this work, she wrote short stories , wrote poems that were published in various literary magazines - such as Prairie Schooner , The Anvil , The Southwest Review , The San Francisco Review - and thus met William Saroyan (1908–1981), among others. , John Fante (1909–1983), Carlos Bulosan (1913–1956), John Sanford (1904–2003), Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996) and Ralph Ellison (1913–1994) (“ The Invisible Man ”). Some of them were to become victims of the hysterical communist hunt after the Second World War during the so-called McCarthy era because of their social commitment. Her personal career had sensitized her to social imbalances and social injustice. She joined the Communist Party and, like many other left-wing writers of her time, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936 .

Whose Names Are Unknown ( e.g. whose names are unknown )

She returned to California in 1938, working for the Farm Security Administration as an assistant to Tom Collins, the head of the US federal agency created to help farmers distressed by the Great Depression .

Marriage prohibition (Micegenation Laws)

Before the Second World War, she met James Wong Howe (1899-1976), a cinematographer of Chinese descent, while she was doing test shoots for producer Irving Thalberg in Hollywood . James Wong Howe, born as Wong Tung Jim in Canton , (today: Guangzhou , South China ), succeeded his family, who had already settled in the USA, in 1904 at the age of five. His father, who emigrated to the United States the year he was born, settled in Pasco , south Washington , where he worked for the Northern Pacific Railroad . Howe, quickly known as a specialist in the use of shadows and subdued brightness ( "low-key Howe" ), quickly rose to become one of the most famous cameramen and was among other things. a. for his work in "The Rose Tattoo" ( " The tattooed rose " , 1955) and "Hud" ( " The wildest among a thousand " , 1963) each with an Oscar . Sanora Babb often accompanied him during his work (abroad) and so her own writing took a back seat.

At that time so-called intercultural marriages were banned in California and so the couple was not able to get married in the USA. In almost all other states, intercultural marriages were also prohibited ( see wiki: keyword: micegenation laws ). So they married in Paris in 1937 , although this was not recognized in the USA. It was only after the California Supreme Court was heard in Perez v. Sharp ruled that California's Anti-Miscegenation Act was inconsistent with the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution , and California became the first state in the United States to lift the ban on intercultural marriages. Sanora Babb and James Wong Howe then married (again) under California law on December 16, 1949. (In the 1950s, most other US states followed the California example. With the exception of 17 states - all so-called southern states plus Oklahoma -, in which these laws were repealed only in 1967 - due to the judgment of the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia .)

McCarthy time

However, the couple found themselves immediately exposed to new difficulties due to the communist hunt that began immediately after the Second World War and which is associated with the name Joseph McCarthy . During the Second World War, when around 120,000 Americans of Japanese origin were interned in so-called War Relocation Centers , James Wong Howe was forced to wear a large badge that read "I am Chinese" because of his Asian origins . (His friend James Cagney also put on such a badge out of solidarity). Howe was not on one of the many " black lists set" that their livelihood was the many people working possibility deprived of the House Un-American Activities Committee but (House on Un-American Activities Committee / HUAC) suspected him, "observed" him because of his willingness to continue to work with people who are discriminated against by the committee as "commis" ("communists"), "reds" , "pinks" and "fellow travelers" ("sympathizers") and whose names were on " black lists " such as John Garfield (1913–1952).

Sanora Babb also came into the crosshairs of the Committee on Un-American Activities because of her membership in the Communist Party and her stay in the Soviet Union. She eventually escaped the fictitious allegations and defamations by moving to Mexico for over a year . During this forced exile she completed her novel “The Lost Traveler” , in which - in encrypted form - dealt with her relationship with her father. The portrait of a gambler from the perspective of his daughter. It was published in 1958 and was the first novel she published.

Works

• The Lost Traveler , 1958
• To Owl on Every Post , 1970
• The Dark Earth and Other Stories from the Great Depression (with Lew Amster), 1987
• Cry of the Tinamou , 1997
• Told in the Seed , 1998
• Whose Names Are Unknown , University of Oklahoma Press 2004
• Killer Instinct and Other Stories from the Great Depression (with Lew Amster)
• On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps (with photos of her sister Dorothy Babb)

To date, there are no German translations.

Web links

• Obituary in The Boston Globe, Jan. 21, 2006
• Obituary in Washington Post, Jan. 9, 2006