Religion for the Blues: Evangelicalism, Poor Whites, And the Great Depression‪.‬

MAY JORDAN LIVED A HARD LIFE. BEFORE HER DEATH IN OCTOBER 1914 at age twenty-five, she spent most of her time helping her father and family survive on a small farm in remote Washington County, Alabama. The sandy soil made agriculture difficult and forced many of the county's residents, black and white alike, to trap animals in the swamps along the Tombigbee River and sell their furs. But anyone who reads the diary she kept between December 1912 and March 1914 recognizes that her poverty did not diminish her sense of self-worth, family solidarity, community identity, or religious faith. (1) Indeed her family's poverty enhanced her delight in simple pleasures, her storytelling and singing, and especially her theology. Yes theology, for that is what it was: a distinctive way of understanding God, of explaining the meaning of life, of making sense of her own social reality, and of relating her powerless self to an omnipotent God, to ultimate vindication and justice.