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You probably would not have noticed the small drawing on the sidewalk or on the side of the house unless you were looking for it. If you were looking for it, you would probably be desperately hungry, poor, alone, and frightened. What you sought was a simple drawing of a well-fed and contented cat, or a stick figure of a smiling woman; it was called "the good woman" or "the nice lady," the image indicating that someone of that ilk lived within.
The stories about her are many. If you have read about the Dust Bowl, the Grasshopper Plague, the Wall Street failure, and the Great Depression, you have met her. She was not a myth but a continuum of real women across the country whose generosity and sympathy offered hope when hope itself had come to seem a myth. She was legion-though there were never enough of her.
In a time when the hoboes that travelled the states had grown used to being jeered at, reviled, threatened, and run out of town, the figure of the good woman indicated a safe place. She was the one who would listen to stories of foreclosed homes, broken families, and wrecked dreams. It was she who would think up small, temporary jobs-not as payment for the food she shared but as a token to ease injured pride. Most of all, the kind lady supplied the traveller with a respite from a cold-hearted world, a few minutes in which he was treated as a human being.
Mary Barbara Cason, born in Toomsboro, Georgia, lived through the depression years as a child. Born in 1925, she often noted that she was an exact contemporary of Mary Flannery O'Connor, though she was to be granted a...