Tobacco Road revisited

Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell, 1932

A few months ago, on a whim, I downloaded Tobacco Road. I still have a physical copy in storage, which I acquired years ago for an undergrad class at LSU called "Southern Lit and the Visual Tradition." For this class, we read novels by Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Alice Walker, among others. We also studied the work of some artists but the only one I can remember with any certainty is Kara Walker (more amazing in person than a digital photo but, you get the idea).

Kara Walker

Since I don't like spending too much time rehashing the general plots of books, and there are about a million sources online that will provide a plot description, here is a brief plot summary, courtesy of Goodreads:

Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual longings, and fear that they will someday descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them.

I decided to revisit Tobacco Road after a recent discussion with a friend about Charlotte Mew's dark and beautifully creepy poem "The Farmer's Bride". I read the poem after I'd read Tobacco Road  and there seemed to be an odd kinship between the two. Here is Mew's poem:

The Farmer's Bride

Three summers since I chose a maid,

     Too young maybe—but more’s to do

     At harvest-time than bide and woo.

              When us was wed she turned afraid

     Of love and me and all things human;

     Like the shut of a winter’s day

     Her smile went out, and ’twadn’t a woman—

            More like a little frightened fay.

                    One night, in the Fall, she runned away.

     “Out ’mong the sheep, her be,” they said,

     ’Should properly have been abed;

     But sure enough she wadn’t there

     Lying awake with her wide brown stare.

So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down

     We chased her, flying like a hare

     Before out lanterns. To Church-Town

              All in a shiver and a scare

     We caught her, fetched her home at last

              And turned the key upon her, fast.

     She does the work about the house

     As well as most, but like a mouse:

              Happy enough to chat and play

              With birds and rabbits and such as they,

              So long as men-folk keep away.

     “Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech

     When one of us comes within reach.

              The women say that beasts in stall

              Look round like children at her call.

              I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.

     Shy as a leveret, swift as he,

     Straight and slight as a young larch tree,

     Sweet as the first wild violets, she,

     To her wild self. But what to me?

     The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,

              The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,

     One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,

              A magpie’s spotted feathers lie

     On the black earth spread white with rime,

     The berries redden up to Christmas-time.

              What’s Christmas-time without there be

              Some other in the house than we!

              She sleeps up in the attic there

              Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair

     Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,

     The soft young down of her, the brown,

The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!

Charlotte Mew

 
The first time I read this mesmerizing poem, it immediately brought to mind the character Pearl Lester from Tobacco Road, though Pearl is not brown but blue-eyed and yellow-haired and "sleeps on a durn pallet on the floor" and not in the attic as the farmer's bride.  Pearl is the twelve year old daughter, and one of seventeen children, of the novel's main character, Jeeter Lester and his wife Ada. She has been married off (at age twelve) to a local oaf named Lov and is completely terrified of him (and rightfully so). She is, like the farmer's bride in the poem above, frightened as a rabbit, quiet as a mouse, and wild as a feral cat. The connection I made between the farmer's bride and Pearl, for whatever reason, conjured up the fairy-tale images of "Snow White and Rose Red" I grew up with--the contrast between the dark and the light as portrayed in the artistic renderings of the fairy tale, juxtaposed with the brown of the farmer's bride's eyes and hair and Pearl's light hair and eyes. 

Snow White and Rose Red by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1911

 One of things that has been interesting in my second reading of this novel is how funny it is at times. There are some truly hilarious moments in this novel that I mostly missed on my first read because 1) I was a busy little undergrad majoring in English and reading so many other things at the time that nothing got my full attention and 2) I was too freaked out by this book to even think about finding anything funny about it. It's an odd mixture of sad, grim, grotesque realism, cliched colloquialisms, social commentary, farce, and macabre humor. Think: Squidbillies meets The Grapes of Wrath, under the direction of Harmony Korine and you will come close. It's a mixture that is surprisingly effective, if you give the book a chance. Judging by some of the reviews on Goodreads, it was a bit much for some readers. However, if you have lived in the deep South for most of your life as I have, or if you grew up there as Caldwell did, I think you will appreciate Tobacco Road and understand the historical context in which it is situated.

rural life

If you decide to read this book, here is an example of the kind of laughs you are in for. This particular piece of dialog is spoken by a man about to issue a marriage license to the almost-40-year-old Bessie, who is betrothed to the 16 year-old Dude Lester:

It’s all right at the beginning, but it don’t keep up like that long. After you been married a year or two a man wants to go out and do it again all over, but it can’t be done. The law puts a stop to it after the first time, unless your wife dies, or runs off, but that don’t happen often enough to make it of any good.

During this same discussion there is some confusion on the part of Bessie as to the meaning of the word "venereal", making an already ridiculous scene skin-crawlingly absurd. Bessie is actually the source of much of the comic relief in this novel, which is underscored by her incredibly grotesque appearance. Bessie "hasn't got a bone in her nose", a deformity, like Ellie May Lester's cleft lip, that other characters will make constant references to throughout the course of the novel.

John Ford's film adaptation of Tobacco Road (1941)

There are these light moments throughout the book but, be warned, some of this is harsh stuff. This is not a picturesque portrayal of rural life on a farm; these characters lead a miserable existence, sometimes through their own poor reasoning, sometimes for reasons beyond their control. While many of the characters are too awful too often to elicit much pity from the reader, the plights of Pearl, Ellie May, and Grandmother Lester are heart-wrenching, to say the least.

Pearl is a terrified child bride at the beginning of the book and eventually becomes a terrified child runaway. FYI, Jeeter isn't really her father. She was fathered by a man who was just passing through town and was never seen again. This isn't something Jeeter seems to be aware of but, since, by his own reckoning, he has fathered numerous children across the county with women other than his wife Ada, it probably wouldn't bother him too much if he did know.

Pearl's older sister Ellie May, the only Lester daughter still at home, is faced with a life of loneliness and isolation because of her cleft lip, which her father "has been meanin' to get sewed together" for the past fifteen years but never does, mostly out of sheer laziness.There are, by my count, around 25 references to Ellie May's "harelip" throughout the book--it's one of the only things we really know about the character because she rarely speaks and is usually hiding behind the house or a tree listening, rather than interacting with others. After one of her father's careless, unfeeling comments, Ellie May runs off into the woods, sobbing. Her father acknowledges that it is the first time he has seen her cry since she was a baby but he isn't able to make the connection that he is the cause of it or that he could have done anything about it. In this scene, Ellie May's misery, isolation, and hopelessness can be felt, but it is Jeeter's reaction to her tears and his inability to grasp the cause of her pain or to be sensitive to it in any way, that we see how truly hopeless her case is.

The grandmother is one of the saddest and most disturbing characters I have ever encountered in literature. She is really old. We aren't sure how old. And really hungry. All the time. In fact, she is slowly and painfully starving to death. She eats grass sometimes because there's no other food to eat. What little food there is in the Lester household is not to be shared with her because her family is just waiting for her to kick off. They chase her with sticks whenever she dares come out from behind the chinaberry tree (chinaberry trees feature prominently in this novel...wondering what the significance is...). Seriously, this grandmother character will jerk the tears right out of your eye holes. Not to give away too much of the plot but, well, things DO NOT end well for Grandma Lester and that was the most difficult part of the book for me and why it disturbed me so the first time I read it. She's one of the few truly sympathetic characters (other than Pearl and Ellie May) and the fate she meets, while probably inevitable, is no less shocking. The abuse she suffers at the hands of her own relatives, the deprivation and neglect, all culminate in a horrible scene that Caldwell treats with an almost clinical detachment, which makes it all the more chilling.

What else can I say about Tobacco Road? It's well-written. It's funny. It's creepy. It's dark. It's depressing. It's disturbing. It is the most grotesque novel I've ever read. I like this book. Very much. It has found a special place in a corner of my heart that I reserve for disturbing Deep South Southern Gothic and the Grotesque, keeping company with Flannery O'Connor's Wiseblood, the stories of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, and the art of Kara Walker. It is rarely read these days but I highly recommend tracking down a copy.

Flannery O'Connor