Harvest the Dust takes a long look back at the Great Depression, a time when the nation suffered an economical collapse and many citizens fell into poverty. This was a time when President Roosevelt's New Deal was struggling to bring some relief; when drought spread a quilt of dust across the Southern Great Plains; when a staple crop was cotton; when water came from a hole in the ground. The plow, the mule, and human labor were the chief implements of agriculture. People traveled on the backs of horses or in wagons pulled by them—or simply walked as the automobile was an anomaly. Jacob Tallman and his wife Clara struggled to keep their family together, to keep their land and ultimate their love and respect for each other. Jacob lived with the trauma of witnessing, as a young boy, a black man being burned to death. His wife Clara was a mulatto and could have passed for white. Her mother was against Clara marrying a dark skin man and predicted their babies were sure to be born with black skin and doomed, because of that, to a life of sharecropping. True to her mother’s prediction Clara and Jacob became sharecroppers and had babies. But the skin color of their babies ran the spectrum from light-skin to black. As racial domination was law in society at that time, the success of their struggles was always in question.
