Harder than Hardscrabble: Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country.

Harder than Hardscrabble: Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country. Edited by Thad Sitton. Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas Heritage. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 297. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-292-70238-8; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-292-70199-3.)

Country Women Cope with Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories. Edited by Melissa Walker. Women's Diaries and Letters of the South. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xxxii, 208. $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-524-5.)

Because the voices of rural southerners are often muted in written records, many scholars are using oral history to document changes in farming and country life in the twentieth century. Interviews with elders featured in Harder than Hardscrabble: Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country and Country Women Cope with Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories describe the intricacies of rural economies, the social relations of rural settlements, and women's contributions to families, farms, and communities. These two volumes also reflect the different strategies the editors chose as they turned oral history interviews into narratives.

Melissa Walker retained the biographical integrity of the interviews she conducted with country women in East Tennessee and upcountry South Carolina between 1992 and 2001. This collection complements Walker's All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941 (Baltimore, 2000), and Walker uses her deep knowledge of the region to place each of the sixteen narratives in context, clarify references that would confuse outsiders, and explain the conditions surrounding each interview.

Although the edited narratives are the heart of the book, Walker brackets them with interpretive essays. Her introduction traces structural changes in southern agriculture between 1900 and 1945, analyzes farm women's work, and explains choices she made as she conducted interviews and edited transcripts. In an afterword, Walker reflects on the nature of memory, the interpretation of oral history, and the lessons that emerged from the interviews. Country women, she concludes, understood their work to be vital to the family's well-being, centered their lives around a profoundly local world defined by their families and communities, and adapted to new roles as some farm families became specialized commercial farmers while many left the land altogether and took jobs in industry.

Country Women Cope with Hard Times is interesting for a number of reasons. The women who tell their stories represent a cross-section of white upcountry families. Some were tenant farmers while others were prosperous landowners; some farmed full-time while others combined farming and public work; and some women loved country life while others abandoned the land, went to college, and pursued occupations such as teaching school. The women describe the culture and economy of cotton, tobacco, peaches, and dairying, and they reflect upon how they dealt with challenges at different stages in the life course.

While reading Walker's book one can also follow a scholar as she emerges and matures. Some of the interviews that she conducted as a novice in the 1990s are brief and spotty, and one often wishes that she had probed for more detail. But certain narratives were short, Walker explains, because the intermediary who introduced her to women in one community accompanied her during interviews and may have been a memory monitor. Interviews that Walker conducted later tend to be more expansive and the best of them capture the humor and gritty determination of individual women. One of the strongest narratives is actually edited letters that describe the hardships of the correspondent's mother--a college graduate who endured a bad marriage, rose above it, and made sure her daughter had options. In the end, Walker takes us with her as she experiences the satisfaction, frustration, and serendipity of oral history fieldwork and as she grows in her interpretive sophistication.

Harder than Hardscrabble takes a different tack. The volume sprang from oral history interviews conducted with central Texas farm families who were abruptly uprooted in 1942 when the U.S. Army claimed their land to build the Camp Hood training base. Begun in 2000, the Fort Hood interviews focused on farm life on the western edge of the cotton South before World War II.

Rather than honoring a life history approach, Sitton arranged portions of interviews among numerous themes in chapters dealing with four main topics--home-places, money crops, settlements, and modernizations and the takeover. As a result, the personality of a place emerges far more clearly than the personalities of individuals because no one person speaks for very long. Nonetheless, there is much grist for the social historian's mill as the fifty-two narrators describe in lively detail a wealth of topics: childhood chores, illnesses and injuries, picking and ginning cotton, raising sheep and goats, killing rattlesnakes for bounties, patronizing peddlers and country stores, Christmas programs and commencement festivities at schools, playing basketball, house parties and dances, and religious life. In the final chapter, change comes rapidly as automobiles, telephones, and radios become commonplace in the 1930s and then eviction notices arrive overnight in 1942.

Older landowners, in particular, took displacement hard; narrators recalled three suicides and some survivors who were never the same again.

One of the strongest portions of Harder than Hardscrabble is sixty-four pages of family photographs gathered from participants in the oral history project. The photo gallery, composed primarily of candid snapshots, provides a visual interlude and complements the oral recollections.

Sitton set out to produce a popular book that would offer readers a window on a rural world that seems foreign and quaint by today's standards. Short introductions to chapters and their subsections orient readers. A brief appendix explains the Fort Hood Oral History Project and shares the topical guide that interviewers followed. Omitted, however, is any explanation of how Sitton turned interview transcripts into edited excerpts. The recollections read so smoothly, so little explanatory material appears in brackets, and the varied voices flow so seamlessly that one wonders if he manipulated the text and, if so, what criteria guided his editorial judgments.

LU ANN JONES

University of South Florida