No Promises In The Wind

Hunt vividly portrays the damaging effects that the Great Depression has on the characters’ mental health. These hard times often cause people to lash out in anger and behave in ways that would be out of character for them in normal times. The male characters in the novel seem most prone to angry outbursts, which is not surprising because during this time period, men were the primary breadwinners in families. Josh’s father, Stefan, is a perfect example. After he loses his job, he becomes bitter and lashes out at his oldest son, Josh. As Josh notes, “It was hard for Dad, I knew, but his unreasonable rages in which I was usually the whipping boy bewildered me at first and then angered me deeply” (6). In one early scene, Stefan angrily scolds Josh after his mother comments about his going outside without a sweater on a chilly Chicago morning:

Must your mother dress you like you are three years old again? Must she be worried with all her other worries because you show no responsibility—even for wearing the right clothes? It will be fine, won’t it, when you catch a cold and we have doctor’s bills on top of everything else? (7).

Josh’s father then feels guilty about the flash of anger and apologizes—to his wife, not to Josh: “Forgive, Mary. Please forgive. Why do I say things to the boy that hurt you? I think there is a meanness in me—” (8). Later in the same chapter, a hungry Josh asks for more potatoes, which sparks another angry eruption from his father. This outburst prompts Josh to leave home and try to make it on his own.

While on the road, Josh and Joey often encounter the Depression’s psychological wrath. After “bulls” (railroad police officers) kick them off a freight train in the middle of the night, a mob of angry men descends upon them with clubs and pitchforks:

‘Don’t take another step this way,’ a huge man yelled, stepping in front of the others. ‘You can take your empty bellies to another part of the country. We’ve enough of your kind to feed already. Take another step and we’ll club you down like dogs.’ (31).

Josh and Joey later encounter men who lash out in anger against the government. A truck driver who picks them up north of Baton Rouge rants about “the feeling among the jobless and the starving that they must rise against men in high office […] never forget what the system has done to you and thousands more like you” (106).

Besides anger, guilt, and shame are two other emotions that the characters often exhibit. In one scene, the boys ask a woman for food. She screams at them:

‘What would you have me do?’ she asked in a high, wild sort of voice. ‘Would you have me hand out food to every tramp when my own children have just one meal a day? Do you think I can stretch the little I have to feed tramp-children and see my own starve tomorrow?’ (124).

However, the woman then feels guilty about her outburst and insists that the boys come to her house, where she feeds them bowls of soup. Like the boys’ father, Stefan, the woman’s flash of anger is followed by guilt.

The mental meltdowns in the novel often correlate with the Depression’s physical ravages. For example, when Josh is sick with a fever, he castigates Joey for giving away half a loaf of their bread: “You gave away our bread, you little fool? Here we are starving and you give away food enough to keep us alive for days—” (126). In his feverish anger, Josh hits Joey. In thinking about the angry woman who fed the boys soup, Josh recalls how she seemed unwell and was “feeble-looking.” At the end of the novel, Josh describes how the Depression has changed his father: “He had been so big, so strong, and he was now thin and stooped with great hollows in his cheeks. There in his face were the lines of his suffering” (184). In fact, throughout the story, Hunt shows the toll of the Depression in the characters’ weary faces and withered bodies as well as in their troubled minds.