East of Eden

America--urban America, that is--has never quite made up its mind about its rural areas. Are they stifling backwaters, incubators of ignorance, violence and really bad haircuts? Or are they fountainheads of our national identity, populated by the noble descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, full of “the old virtues” of hard work, fair play and decency? Is rurality something to escape from or aspire to? To put the question a different way: Which more accurately captures the essence of rural America: “Deliverance” or “The Grapes of Wrath”?

The truth, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals in her richly textured autobiography, “Red Dirt,” is that rural America contains the squeal-like-a-pig horrors of James Dickey’s Chattooga River, the quiet heroism of Steinbeck’s Tom Joad and much more besides. There is complexity in them thar’ hills. And why not? We’re talking about a huge expanse of land that ranges across our continent. More to the point, each rural community is itself a mixed bag, containing the many soaring ideals and hateful passions which, taken together, make America American.

Dunbar-Ortiz explores this tangled rural history as she experienced it growing up in the Dust Bowl. There is probably no one better suited to the task than Dunbar-Ortiz, who is both a trained historian and a gifted writer. One is tempted to say she was born to write this book, for her own family tree has roots deep in the fertile and fetid soil of rural America. Her mother, Louise Curry, is part Native American, a fact the family considered to be its shameful not-quite-secret. Her father, Moyer Dunbar, is Scotch-Irish, like the quintessential homesteaders of our nation’s early years.

When millions of Okies went to California in the 1930s, the Dunbars stayed behind, living as sharecroppers and always finding themselves at the mercy of weather, insects and the whims of hated landlords. Dunbar-Ortiz’s remembrances of brutal poverty are graphic and horrifying, beginning with the tiny windowless storage shed her parents and three children lived and sweltered in through the summer of 1938, just before Roxie was born, and continuing for many years afterward as the family trekked from one hardscrabble farm to another. Eventually they moved into a small house in the tiny town of Piedmont, Okla., where her father took a steady job driving a fuel truck.

Why didn’t the family just leave during those years of hardship? Her father offers several unsatisfactory answers. “You had to own a car to go” is one. Dunbar-Ortiz surmises that the decision to stay, despite all the grief, was because “Daddy was tied to the land, red soil in his blood.” It isn’t surprising that a palpable love of land, even fickle, parched and depleted clay, is a leitmotif in a book about rural America. The need to stake a claim to even a tiny plot of poor earth has been a potent psychological lash, driving people who, for generations, had been landless and suffered dreadfully because of that need. “Land hunger” was already a cliche when Scarlett O’Hara swore to the flaming heavens that she would do anything to keep her ancestral home of Tara.

In revealing her family’s travails on that land, however, Dunbar-Ortiz violates one of the fundamental rural taboos: You don’t complain, no matter how great your problems. “We took great pride in not being gripers and whiners, bellyachers,” she writes. “And that was our image writ large as in ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ the stoical, silent-suffering, dignified people of the soil.”

Yes, and a deadly dignity it is.

Suffering endured in silence finds other outlets, and it is usually family members who pay the price. Dunbar-Ortiz’s grandfather beat her father so severely with a horsewhip that the boy left home at 16. Dunbar-Ortiz herself was battered by her mother for years with fists, chairs and lamps (“I would curl up in the fetal position holding a pillow over my head, and check the damage in the morning sunlight”) before she, too, left home at 16.

But the routine violence of the Dunbar home was rooted in an even more complex dynamic, one which she explains with insight and eloquence: “We Okies are those tough, land-poor losers. . . . Our great shame, like all ‘white trash’ and colonial dregs, is poverty, that is, ‘failure’ within a system that purports to favor us.”

And nowhere was this failure felt more acutely than among the Scotch-Irish who, she astutely observes, were “the foot-soldiers of empire.” It was this group that England in the 17th century took from their homes in Scotland to settle in Northern Ireland and to serve as a buffer between the “wild Irish” and the far less numerous English. Their role was much the same in the new British colonies of America, except that this time the Scotch-Irish were called upon to subdue the “wild Indians.” Of course, they didn’t see themselves as lackeys of the Anglo elite. No, they were “the true native-born Americans, the personification of what America is supposed to be.” To see others prosper, particularly African Americans and more recent immigrants--Jews, Italians, Mexicans--when they, “the true Americans,” couldn’t get ahead, filled the Dunbars of America with an exquisite blend of self-loathing and explosive anger.

“Red Dirt” is more than just a story about the necrotic effects of poverty endured in silence. There is a counterpoint to the stoic rural tradition, a less-well-known tradition of rural radicalism. If rural people have often suffered in silence, they have also periodically risen in protest against their bleak existence. Once again, Dunbar-Ortiz’s family seems designed for following this particular thread of history. By the time she was growing up, the Cold War was in full censorious swing and politics was no longer a suitable topic of conversation in the Dunbar house. Her father, Moyer Haywood Pettibone Dunbar, had been named for the three founders of the International Workers of the World, and her grandfather was a dedicated Wobbly, until the Ku Klux Klan beat him half to death for his support of communism.

Radicalism is often painted as somehow alien to rural life, but nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the most important radical insurgencies in American history began among the rural discontented. There were the Non-Partisan League in the Dakotas and the Populist Party throughout the South. Socialism was once referred to as the “Iowa Idea” for the support it found among Heartland farmers. Even the Black Panthers had its origin in rural Alabama.

There have always been two strains of rural protest, however, existing side by side, but headed in opposite directions. One, represented by such groups as the Non-Partisan League and the Populist Party, is mostly democratic, egalitarian and devoted to pluralism. The other strain is reactionary, led by demagogues with appeals to white supremacy, nativism and nostalgia for a social order that exists only in American mythology. The klan and modern militias are examples of this second branch of rural activism. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. The rhetoric used by each is largely identical, confirming the suffering and inequity of rural life (something our urban-focused political parties almost never do). And movements of the first sort can switch to the second with dizzying speed. The Populist Party, for example, started out as the largest inter-racial movement in the nation’s history, fielding both black and white candidates in scores of elections. In the end, it succumbed to the siren-song of racism when the leadership appealed to white solidarity to revive the party’s sagging fortunes.

An equally important factor blurring these two movements is our contemporary failure to appreciate the importance of class in rural America, that mythic bastion of democracy. Even billionaire Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, was seen as just another good ol’ boy because he wore jeans and drove a beat-up pickup truck, never mind his union-busting or his strategic use of part-time employees (who didn’t qualify for benefits) and his ruthless destruction of small businesses around town squares.

There are many qualities to praise in “Red Dirt”: its masterful evocation of a time and place, its telling details of both the pain and beauty of rural life, its straightforward yet elegant prose. But Dunbar-Ortiz’s most important achievement--in a book filled with them--is to put class back on the rural map where it belongs. Without stooping to mere polemics, Dunbar-Ortiz’s story is steeped in class awareness. And that’s important, for without the compass-rose of class, rural America will remain forever terra incognita: quaint, mythic and meaningless.