April 14, 1935, is a date known in history as “Black Sunday.” According to the National Weather Service, Grand Island experienced a northerly wind shift around 9:30 a.m., with visibility dropping to around 1/4 of a mile. The weather had been unusually dry, resulting in drought, which, combined with poor soil management by farmers and others, created the historic event known as the “Dust Bowl.”
One month later, the National Weather Service has noted, several thunderstorms moved across eastern Colorado and southwest Nebraska, culminating with an unusually heavy storm of cloudburst intensity in eastern Colorado and western Nebraska during the night of May 30-31, 1935. The result of the storm was the great Republican River Flood of May 30, 1935.
These events are the bookends to a novel titled The Antidote, that is being released today, Tuesday, March 11, by New York Times bestselling author Karen Russell, writer of the Pulitzer-prize nominated Swamplandia! and four other books of fiction. Omaha Magazine spoke to Russell ahead of publication.
“This book started after I wrote Swamplandia. I had this feeling that I should write about the Dust Bowl,” Russell said. “I was reading a book called Dust Bowl Diary by this young woman Anne Marie Low. It was such a great book. It was all the more moving for me, because she was a very young person writing for herself, writing for this private document (a diary).”
That book was set in Nebraska, and Russell became intrigued with the idea of the Dust Bowl and how it affected this state. One of the main characters in The Antidote, set in fictional Uz, Nebraska, is a wheat farmer, a Polish immigrant, whose crop is mysteriously untouched by the storm.
A key part of the book is the idea of memory—how time affects our memory, and how omitting pieces of history can harm history through generations. It also touches on the displacement of Native Americans, photography, ecology, and more. In researching this book, Russell collaborated with soil ecologists and Native American historians, traveling to the U.S. Indian Industrial School in Genoa and the Nebraska Industrial Home for Unwed Mothers in Milford.
This multilayered book touches on subjects that will feel real to many—agricultural problems, race and colonialism problems, and even capitalism.
“I started with this one idea (the collapse of memory) and that in some way that collapse was connected to the financial and ecological collapse of the Dust Bowl,” Russell said. “I had not been taught what that collapse (the Dust Bowl) was, and how quickly it happened. I certainly didn’t grow up connecting the dots. The global soil erosion crisis is happening today, and it’s very much connected to colonial violence, and the kind of capitalism we practice today.”The Antidote is available in hardcover for $30, and can be found at bookstores nationwide. Those who want to hear Russell speak about her latest novel in person can to do so on several dates. Russell will be in conversation with Judi M. gaiashkibos on April 1 at Francie & Finch in Lincoln; on April 3 at The Bookworm in Omaha; and on April 4 at The National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud.
