Book Review--Black Sunday by Benjamin Myers

Job's friends had his health in mind, but none of them, nor their arguments, could satisfy the emptiness in his soul. He'd lost everything, his family, his land, his enterprise, even his health in a tsunami of bad times unlike anything ever seen in this world. He numbered his days as "the worst hard times," which is also the title of Timothy Egan's masterful portrayal of an American time and a place we've commonly become to describe as "the Dust Bowl."

It's impossible to imagine thick black winds so strong they dented fenders, dunes so high they swallowed farm machinery, static electricity so severe people dared not to touch each other, storms so black that men, women, and children could get lost between house and barn. 

You can go back imaginatively by a shelf of vivid portrayals right there beside Egan's The Worst Hard Times. There's a masterful film by Ken Burns, a museum of photographs by masters like Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans. There's John Steinbeck and Sonora Babb's overlooked portrayal in Their Names are Unknown. 

But no one I know has done what Benjamin Myers, who teaches at Oklahoma Baptist University, has done with the Dust Bowl in a series of sonnets (of all things) that open up the lives of six characters he carefully chooses as a chorus out the high plans, all of them living through "the worst hard times." 

Suffering, oddly enough, can be beautiful in the hands of someone who sees more than meets the eye, and Myers does. Black Sunday is poetry, but when you close the book, you have to remind yourself that the world you were just in was verse--sonnets, in fact. For what Myers has done with these portrayals is bring us, heart and suffering soul, into our own humanness. See if you agree--

Will Lists His Assets on Another Loan Application

800 acres of itch, grit, and chirr
crawling with hoppers, burning like a match.
All mine. The foot deep drifts of dirt that were
my neighbor's field, mine too now, since I catch
with my strip lists the dirt he don't do much 
to keep. The tractor  with the rear wheels stuck
halfway in sand I owe your bank a bunch
on still and won't pay off unless my luck 
turns. But it won't. We shot the little herd. 
The truck is dead. Your bank has got the car.
The combine's broke. I guess I've got my word,
and next to that my other assets are
dirt sore eyes, overalls with one knee hole,
a body dressed in rags, a ragged soul. 

It's a masterful portrayal of Dust Bowl despair done by way of the kind of assessment we all do, formally and informally. Will Burns' list of assets is barely fourteen lines long, scribbled out in despair as real as sweeping the house out with a shovel. 

Is there hope here? I think yes, not because the clouds of Black Sunday hold some blessed silver lining, but because Will Burns ends his paltry list of assets not with something outside but something eternal within, his soul. Putting "his ragged soul" gives it most attention in a final line that is not so much a confession as it is David-like testimony. What comes before it is commodity; the last line reveals his eternal self, his destiny. 

And it's there, he says. It may be as ragged as his overalls, but his soul has not blown away. 

God himself does not speak in Benjamin Myers Black Sunday, certainly not the way he does to end the book of Job. Will Burns' losses don't tally the way Job's did. After all, Will still has a family. 

All of which is to say that Benjamin Myers' Black Sunday isn't the book of Job. But the times he describes and the folks whose intimate portrayals surface in this moving book of poems are most definitely kin.