Ruby’s Hope: A Story of How the Famous “Migrant Mother” Photograph Became the Face of the Great Depression

In her “Author’s Note”, Monica Kulling states: “Ruby’s Hope is based on real people and an actual event: the day Dorothea Lange took a photograph of a migrant farm worker and three of her children. This book is historical fiction. In my story I’ve used the names of the family members, but reimagined the events leading up to the taking of the photograph.”

Kulling’s reimagining initially takes readers to a farm in Oklahoma following the stock market crash in 1929 and just prior to the beginning of the drought that created the Dust Bowl. The opening spread shows the farm’s verdant fields and the family members tending to their crops and livestock. However, flipping the page reveals a bleak landscape, the farmhouse and outbuildings barely visible in the blowing dust and a tractor tire half buried in the wind-drifted soil. The only signs of life (and colour) are three hardy thistles. Seven-year-old Ruby, the middle child in a family of five children, resists the idea of abandoning their farm notwithstanding the fact that the family’s crops have failed and the cows and chickens, without feed, have all died. Despite Ruby’s objections, Pa and Ma, with assistance of the older children, pack up their car, a Hudson Super-Six, and head west toward Route 66, the road to California. Two weeks later, the lush fields of California appear welcoming and comforting, but the family quickly discovers that the only work available is as seasonal farm laborers, picking whatever crop requires harvesting. When a pea crop is destroyed by frost, the family finds itself unemployed and staying in one of the temporary workers’ tent camps. It is there that Ruby encounters Dorothea Lange, the photographer who came to take the iconic photo, “Migrant Mother”, the appearance of which in newspapers led to needed supplies being donated and delivered to the camp.

Though the invented storyline is somewhat thin, Dvojack’s illustrations, rendered in graphite and coloured digitally, accurately and effectively capture the historical period. Today’s young readers may be surprised to see the book’s children working alongside their parents, picking lettuce in what visually appears to be a seemingly endless field of lettuce .

The final two pages of Ruby’s Hope contain an “Author’s Note”, a brief “Bibliography” and the explanatory “How the ‘Migrant Mother’ Came to Be”. Though a full-page reproduction of the famous black and white “Migrant Mother” photo appears just prior to the story’s final spread, two more of the six photos that Lange took that day in 1936 are inserted into the closing pages’ informational text.

Ruby’s Hope would serve as a good introduction to a study of the Great Depression or as a starting point in identifying other, more recent, iconic photographs.