Beating a Dead Horse: A Child's Perspective of the Great Depression

(Taken from C. Zlotchew’s “Beating a Dead Horse: A Child’s Perspective of the Great Depression” published in The Abstract Elephant Magazine, June 30, 2021.)

It was a sweltering August day, and a stricken horse lay prostrate on its side in the street. When I say horses in the streets were an everyday sight in my childhood, the average millennial might assume I was born in the last decade of the 19^thCentury or at least in the first decade of the 20^th-Century in some small town located on the prairie. The Wild West would come to mind. However, I’m referring to the streets of New York City in the third decade of the 20^th Century.

The horse in question was still attached to the vegetable vendor’s cart. It was 1938 and I was five years old during the height of the Great Depression, living in the Bronx. I don’t know if the horse had died or simply fainted with heat exhaustion. The peddler was slapping the horse in the face, yelling and cursing at the stricken animal in a futile attempt to force it to stand up. My mother explained to me that horses employed by fruit and vegetable vendors didn’t belong to the men who used them; the peddlers rented them for the day. She told me the man probably hadn’t fed the animal (it cost money and loss of time) or watered it because he wanted to cover as much ground as possible and sell all his produce as quickly as possible. The rented horse and wagon and his investment in the vegetables themselves represented a great financial risk. He could either make some profit at the end of the day, or lose money. Money, of course, represented food, shelter and clothing for the middle-aged vegetable man and his family. But my mother was just as dismayed and angry as I that the vendor could treat a dumb animal with such cruelty. Ironically, she thought the man should be horse whipped.

Clark Zlotchew is the author of 19 books, among them two thriller novels, a poetry collection, and three collections of short stories, one of which was an award winner. His fiction, poetry, CNF, and author interviews (Borges and others) have appeared in Crossways Literary Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and many other literary journals in the U.S. and abroad.  Earlier fiction of his appeared in his Spanish versions in Spain, three Latin American countries and the state of Colorado. His experience at sea often influences his writing. Dr. Zlotchew is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Spanish, Emeritus.