Delta Narratives: Literature and Visual Arts of the Delta, 1849-1975

Stories matter.

Contemporary neuroscience fairly certainly supports our basic intuition that individual human beings construct their identities out of stories, and what is true for individuals is also true, though usually in a more complex way, for cultures.

To make the point through an unusually straightforward example, the story of Manifest Destiny had an interesting variant, which can be summed up in the slogan, “rain follows the plow.” The slogan captures an interesting story, one that sees the yeoman farmer heading into the “Great American Desert,” breaking up the sod, planting “civilized” crops, and finding that God shed his grace in rain on the newly opened fields. This variant of a story of God providing for his chosen people did not account for the fact that the western prairies were semi-arid, and, while a series of wet years might support farms, the long term climactic patterns could not sustain the kinds of agriculture known in the much moister east.

Still, when those settlers who took advantage of the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 to settle in the drier uplands of Oklahoma found that they were able to thrive for several years, they believed their story. What was there to disbelieve? A long drought that began in 1930 put most of these farmers on the road not only to destitution, but also to other states.

California’s Delta towns would have a different population if this story of providential rainfall hadn’t first moved so many people to Oklahoma. This brief story of a story merely exemplifies a much larger pattern not just of how human beings selectively interpret their lives by way of narrative arcs, but how these narratives shape human action.

We try to make sense of the past by telling its story; in the process, we shape our present and our future.