Going to California: Ruby's Hope by Monica Kulling

Ruby and her family were slow to leave.

Ruby loved big-sky Oklahoma.

But the stock market crashed, and the rains stopped. The dust storms got worse and worse until it was hopeless to grow anything on their farm, and Ruby sadly joined her parents, her big brother and sister, and two little sisters in the family car, hoping to afford enough gas to make to California.

The Hudson Super-Six was packed tightly with everything needed to live on the road: a lantern, pots to cook in, clothes and tools, two mattresses....

They found work picking lettuce, and when the fields were empty, they followed word of work picking peas. But a sudden freeze had ruined the peas, and Ruby's family had no money for gas to move on. Ruby's dad and big brother went to work sweeping streets in a nearby town, but there was less and less food in the pot over the campfire, and Ruby's family had nothing but hope that somewhere out there they'd find work and someday a home.

Then a strange woman with a limp and a big black box appeared in their camp.

"My name's Dorothea," she said, shaking Ruby's small hand. "This is my camera. The government hired me to take photographs of migrant farm workers."

Ruby had an idea. "Would you like to take my mama's picture?"

And that picture of Ruby's mother, Florence Owen Thompson, is of course the famous photo, "Migrant Woman," which helped prompt private and governmental assistance for the "Okies," over 200,000 American Depression-era migrants from the Dust Bowl to California. Florence Thompson's image, posed with her small children in front of a lean-to tent, remains an iconic image of motherhood in one of America's pivotal times in this story told in Monica Kulling's Ruby's Hope: A Story of How the Famous “Migrant Mother” Photograph Became the Face of the Great Depression (Page Street Kids, 2019).

Young readers see the true story of people displaced by climate problems through the eyes of young Ruby and famed photographer Dorothea Lange, who immortalized a family's hard times and hopes for the whole nation to see. In her retro-styled illustrations, artist Sara Dvojack empathetically depicts the lives of the Dust Bowl "Okie" emigres' in a moment in time which lives on in our national memory in an image of a real mother. A first purchase for school and public library collections.