Today, a guest post from Heather Johnston. The text is an excerpt from the 2019 memoir Working by Robert Caro. In the excerpt he describes moving to Texas with his wife Ina to conduct research for his biography of Lyndon Johnson. It’s a long text, and I think it stands on its own without commentary.
There is another reason the books take so long—a reason that has to do not only with my nature but also with what I am trying to accomplish with those books.
The original objective when Ina and I moved to the edge of the Hill Country of Texas in 1978 was to learn about the boyhood and young manhood of Lyndon Johnson. But while I was interviewing ranchers and farmers, and their wives, about him, I realized I was hearing, just in the general course of long conversations, about something else: what the lives of the women of the Hill Country had been like before, in the 1930s and '40s, the young congressman Lyndon Johnson brought electricity to that impoverished, remote, isolated part of America—how the lives of these women had, before "the lights" came, been lives of unending toil. Lives of bringing up water, bucket by bucket, from deep wells, since there were no electric pumps; of carrying it on the wooden yokes—yokes like those that cattle wore—that these women wore so they could carry two buckets at a time; of doing the wash by hand, since without electricity there were no washing machines, of lifting heavy bundle after bundle of wet clothes from washing vat to rinsing vat to starching vat and then to rinsing vat again; of spending an entire day doing loads of wash, and the next day, since there were no electric irons, doing the ironing, with heavy wedges of iron that had to be continually reheated on a blazing hot wood stove, so that the ironing was also a day-long job, a day of standing close to the stove even in the blazing heat of a Hill Country summer. I was hearing about all the other chores that had to be done by hand because there was no electricity, of all the tasks that made these women old and bent ("bent" being the Hill Country word for "stooped") before their time. It gradually sank in on me that I was hearing a story of a magnificent kind of courage, the courage of the women of the Hill Country, and, by extension, of the women of the whole American frontier. I was trying to use my books to tell the history of America during the years of Lyndon Johnson; this was a significant part of that his-tory, and I wanted to tell it. (Wanted? There it was again, same as always. I had to tell it, or at least to try.)
It took a long time to learn that story, and I don't think it could have been learned much faster than Ina and I learned it. At the beginning, these women, who lived lives of the deepest loneliness—their homes sometimes at the end of dirt roads on which, you realize, you have driven thirty miles without passing another house; who were so unaccustomed to talking to strangers, particularly about personal matters—weren't giving me the details I needed. Ina solved that. We had three fig trees on our property. Ina taught herself to make fig preserves, and when she started bringing a jar with her as a gift, suddenly these women were her friends, and were showing her—and then, when she brought me back with her, showing me—things I will never forget.
Some of those interviews contained moments of revelation—of shock, really. A woman with whom my earlier conversation had been stilted and unrevealing, this time suddenly blurting out, "You're a city boy. You don't know how heavy a bucket of water is, do you?" Walking over to her garage, she brought out an old water bucket to which a long length of frayed rope was attached, and walked partway down a slope to a well that was covered with wooden boards. Pushing them aside, she handed me the bucket and told me to drop it in. It dropped quite a way. When it seemed full, she told me to pull it up, and I felt how heavy it was, and thought of how many buckets she—mostly she alone, her husband working in the fields or with the cattle all day, her children working beside him as soon as they were old enough, no money on Hill Country farms or ranches to even think of paying a hired man—had to pull up every day. I found a 1940 Agriculture Department study of how much water each person living on a farm used in a day: forty gallons. The average Hill Country family was five people. Two hundred gallons in a day, much of it hauled up by a single person.
And then they had to get the water to the house. It was another elderly woman who asked me, "Do you want to see how I carried the buckets?" I suppose I nodded. Walking over to her garage, she pulled up the door, and there was her yoke. I don't know that I will ever forget that woman—old and frail now, but her shoulders were thin, and her arms, too, you felt, had always been thin—standing there in front of that heavy bar of wood. I don't know whether there might have been a faster way to do the learning for this chapter than the way Ina and I did it, because sometimes with these laconic farm and ranch women, it took several visits before they would relax. It wasn't until I had called on one Hill Country ranch woman several times, I remember, that she said, about washing the clothes, "Oh, did I tell you about the soap? We didn't have enough money for store-bought soap, so we used lye soap that we made ourselves. There was a saying around here: 'Lye soap peels the skin off your hands like a glove.’” And of course, as Ina became friends with them, they told her intimate details that they would never have told me: about the perineal tears, caused by childbirth without proper medical care, which seemed to be common in the Hill Country. (And indeed were: I was looking up federal statistics and studies from New Deal days all the time now, and one study by a team of gynecologists had found that out of 275 Hill Country women, 158 had perineal tears, many of them third-degree "tears so bad that it is difficult to see how they stand on their feet.") And yet, Ina would tell me, her eyes brimming, how these women had told her they had no choice but to stand on their feet and do the chores; with their husbands working "from dark to dark" (that was a phrase Ina and I learned during those three years) there was no one else to do them. I recall many moments of revelation like that; as I say, I hope to write about more of them someday. When Ina said to me one evening with real anger in her voice, "I don't ever want to see another John Wayne movie again," I knew exactly what she meant. So many of the women in Western movies were simply the background figures standing at stoves or pleading with their husbands not to go out to a gunfight. You hear a lot about gunfights in Westerns; you don't hear so much about hauling up the water after a perineal tear. But both acts are equally part of the story, the history, of the courage it took to settle America's fron-tier. I understood that now, and I remember how badly, when I sat down with my legal pads and my typewriter, I wanted to make others understand it, too. Usually I give Ina my drafts to read only when I've finished a whole section of a book, but I gave her "The Sad Irons" chapter as soon as I pulled its last page out of my typewriter, and I was really proud when she said it was okay.
And here's another thing: I'm not going to suggest that spending those three years learning about the Hill Country was a sacrifice. Getting a chance to learn, being forced to learn—really learn, so that I could write about it in depth, so that I could at least try to make it true to reality, to make the reader feel the harshness of the fabric of these women's lives—being given an opportunity to explore, to discover, a whole new world when you were already in your forties, as Ina and I were: that wasn't a sacrifice; being able to do that was a privilege, exciting. The two of us remember those years as a thrilling, wonderful adventure. Writing that chapter,
"The Sad Irons," didn't take so long, but researching it did. I cannot pretend that I regret having taken the time.
And there is another reason that my feelings about having taken so much time do not include even a trace of regret. Because for some years following publication of The Path to Power, the first Johnson book and the one that contains the "Sad Irons" chapter, I gave talks to conventions or meetings of America's rural electrification associations.
Over and over—in my memory, many, many times—at the end of my talk or during the book-signing that followed, women would approach me. Over and over again I would lean down from the platform or up from the book I was inscribing to hear some version of "I'm so glad you wrote that chapter. My mother used to try to tell me how hard her life had been, but I never really understood. Now I try to tell my daughter how hard her grandmother's life was, and she'll understand because I can give her your book."
Then, after a few years, what I was hearing was "My grandmother used to try to tell me…" Now there is no one left to tell the daughters and the granddaughters. The women who lived that life, a life before electricity—millions and millions of them—of course are almost all dead, and they can't tell their story to their descendants. So the story might easily have been lost. If in even small measure I told it for them, these women of the American frontier, and in order to accomplish that, The Path to Power took a couple of years longer to write, well—so what?