The Truth According to Us (8 page)

May 28, 1938

Mrs. Judson Chambers

Deputy Director, Federal Writers' Project

Works Progress Administration

The Smallridge Building

1013 Quarrier Street

Charleston, West Virginia

Dear Mrs. Chambers,

I am in receipt of your letter of May 14, regarding the
History of Macedonia
to be sponsored by that city's town council. Your objections to the project have been noted, but as stated in the General Memorandum on Supplementary Instructions #15, the Central Office is exceedingly interested in these local and other-than-State Guide publications and wishes to encourage them as far as possible. In order to relieve the personnel deficiencies you mentioned and thereby allow your office to undertake this important local publication, I have assigned a new field worker to the West Virginia project. As she will be conducting her field work exclusively in
Macedonia, rather than in the Charleston office, and as the town council is eager to have the publication as soon as possible, in order that it will coincide with their sesquicentennial celebrations, I did not feel it necessary to send her down to your office but rather directed her to Macedonia, where she will begin work on the history of the town within the month. She will, however, be an employee of the West Virginia Project and her Field Editorial Copy will be filed to your office. I trust that you will convey the information of this new staff member to Mr. Oliffe, as he, the State Field Assistant, will necessarily have the most involvement in this publication.

Yours very truly,

Benjamin Beck

Field Supervisor

May 30, 1938

Mr. Benjamin Beck

Field Supervisor, Federal Writers' Project

Works Progress Administration

1734 New York Ave. NW

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Beck,

I am in receipt of your letter of May 28. Given that the research assistants who are available to gather agricultural and industrial information for the State Guide are entirely inadequate to the task of writing about it, I am most strongly of the opinion that any new personnel should be hired by me in order to complete that task. I cannot but regard the hiring of this field worker for the purpose of a publication other than the State Guide as a usurpation of my authority as Chief Research Editor for the West Virginia Writers'
Project, and I protest most vigorously. I will inform Mr. Alsberg of this breach of administrative protocols at once.

Yours sincerely,

Ursula Chambers

[Telegram from Benjamin Beck to Mrs. Judson Chambers]

June 1, 1938

HOLD FIRE. ALL WILL BE EXPLAINED. BEN

June 1, 1938

Private and Confidential

Dear Ursula,

My hair is singed and my fingertips charred by your last. Hush your screams of rage for a moment, and I'll explain what happened. Rely upon it, you'll be grateful to your old friend Ben instead of demanding my head from Alsberg. My previous letter was composed with the official file in mind; this one is for your personal perusal. If you show it to anyone, I'll deny that I wrote it and accuse you of forgery.

The new field worker is none other than my niece Layla, daughter of the Senior Senator from Delaware. Surely you remember his faithful support of Federal One last year? He believes—and given affairs in North Carolina, how can I deny it?—that he is entitled to some patronage in return, and he therefore demanded that I find a job on the project for his daughter. In view of his position on the Appropriations Committee, I thought it unwise to disappoint
him, and hired the girl at once. She is, to put it bluntly, spoiled, frivolous, and ignorant, and she's exactly as fit to work on the project as a chicken is to drive a Buick. She was a hair-raising child, and I was quite fond of her, but my brother likes his women purely ornamental, so she was packed off to a finishing school at the age of fourteen, and it was the ruin of her. They taught her to dance, play tennis, drink cocktails, and act as though she hadn't a brain to call her own. However, Layla has brains enough to know which side her bread is buttered on, so she learned her lesson well, and she's spent the past six years wrapping my brother around her little finger. Imagine his shock last month when she (to her credit) unexpectedly dug in her heels and refused to marry a bankroll. The reprisals were swift and severe—King Lear has nothing on Grayson Beck—and within days, Layla had been banished from the lap of luxury and told to support herself. The Senator from Delaware does not tolerate domestic dissent, you'll be pleased to know.

In any case, she was deposited on my head, together with some burning coals, and we were both left to make the best of it. The prospect was not heartening for either of us. When she came down for her interview, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that she had heard there was a Depression. And somewhere she has learned to type. Aside from this, she knows nothing. She's never worked a day in her life. I've spent the last week cudgeling my brains for a place to put her. Upon whom could I foist such an albatross? Anything west of the Mississippi is too far from home, wails her mother. No daughter of mine will interview Negroes, declares my brother. In New York, the Stalinists and the Trotskyites would lay down their arms to wage war against her. Vargas says she's no use to him if she doesn't know Spanish, and Wayland would kill her within a week.

Then my thoughts turned to you, Ursula, and West Virginia and
The History of Macedonia
. It is the perfect solution, not only for me but for all of us. It's true that Layla will be no help at all with your present problems (incidentally, I must have the agricultural chapter
by June 15), but think of the praise and honor you'll receive for taking on the Macedonia project simultaneously with the State Guide. You'll be held up as a model of industry and devotion to the aims of the Washington office, and Alsberg will send out a memo disparaging the work ethic of all the other state directors. They'll gnash their teeth while you bask in glory.

In the meantime, Macedonia will keep Layla out of the way and out of trouble. It's east of the Mississippi, and the town council prefers to pretend that it has no Negro population, so Layla won't be required to record their history. She'll work alone, so she won't irritate other field workers. And it's possible that the chivalrous councilmen of Macedonia will be so stirred by the spectacle of a Gentlewoman in Distress that they won't notice the quality of Layla's prose. It's ideal.

She need not derange the progress of the State Guide in any way. You simply inform the State Field Assistant for the district of her existence and ask him to supervise her work. I suppose he can provide her with a description of the project's requirements.

I hope you take my view of the matter, Ursula, because the thing has been done and would be difficult to undo. Reflect and you'll see that the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. You get the acclaim, Macedonia gets a book, and the project gets its appropriation renewed for a year.

Yours ever,

Ben