Little doubt in my mind as to why a twelve-year-old would balk at sharing a bed with her new adult husband. Especially knowing of her mother’s 17 pregnancies. Her father, Jeeter Lester and his wife Ada specialize in avoiding work, chewing “snuff”, stealing, and making babies. Their children, once old enough, leave home without ever looking back and move far enough away to avoid visits from Pa to put the touch on them. The action takes place on Tobacco Road in a part of Georgia on the Savannah River Marshes where tobacco and cotton once grew on soil now too depleted to grow anything without liberal applications of “guano” that washes out of the sandy soil when it rains.
I have always asserted that poverty is a state of mind. In this novel lack of education, malnutrition, ill-health, unemployment breed poverty, ignorance, racism, and crime. Erskine Caldwell does for the Low Country of the East Coast what John Steinbeck does for the migrant workers of the Salinas Valley in California or Ivan Doig for settlers in Montana. Published in the depression years of the “Dirty Thirties” this novel documents a time and place but could hardly be termed uplifting.
I have always asserted that poverty is a state of mind. In this novel lack of education, malnutrition, ill-health, unemployment breed poverty, ignorance, racism, and crime. Erskine Caldwell does for the Low Country of the East Coast what John Steinbeck does for the migrant workers of the Salinas Valley in California or Ivan Doig for settlers in Montana. Published in the depression years of the “Dirty Thirties” this novel documents a time and place but could hardly be termed uplifting.
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