Susanna’s Ballad

The Dirt Farmer’s Daughter

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Susanna’s Ballad

-The Dirt Farmer’s Daughter

This story involves adoption, searching for roots, passing for white, white supremacy, effects of prejudice on people of color. But it is, above all, a love story—love overcoming every obstacle.

In 1932, during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl eras, an infant girl is abandoned by her mother, an unmarried teenager on the way to California with her destitute Oklahoma family. At the Clark Place Dairy near Mackenzie, Texas, she leaves a note giving the infant’s name as “Susanna” and asking Mrs. Lupe Clark to raise her.

Susanna is part Cherokee and thus a person of color in the South during Jim Crow and KKK times. Her adoptive mother is Hispanic; her adoptive father is passing for white, although of mixed race: white, Black, and Native. Susanna’s life is complicated, as she searches for her birth-mother’s family and adapts to her diverse adoptive family. She falls in love with a white boy and marries him despite Texas miscegenation laws.

This story follows Susanna’s family, from her grandparents’ assumption of white identities in 1910, through her parents’ early lives, and then from her birth in 1932 to her young married adulthood in 1954, when she finally comes to be proud of who she is: Okie, Cherokee, the “dirt farmer’s daughter,” and the peacemaker for the very diverse families of the Clark Place Co-op.