Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987)

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: First published in 1933, when the author was a mere slip of a thirty-year-old, this novel starts in a hole and keeps digging deeper and deeper. Literally, not metaphorically. Well, literally AND metaphorically.

Ty Ty and his sons are poor white Southern Americans in the grimmest economic times of the 20th century. There was revolution brewing because of the depth of the economic crisis, and the complete absence of any safety net for anyone at all. Ty Ty show more and his boys, like modern-day conservatives, are digging for gold in their unpromising Georgia home's unyielding land, and finding lots of dirt and not much else. The womenfolk are trying to keep food on the table and as many rapists as possible outside. The ones at home, well, we all have our crosses to bear, don't we?

Since the land's being dug up for gold instead of farmed for food, the boys go off to work in the textile mills. Yes Virginia, there once was a textile industry in the USA. Now it's all in Pakistan, where a couple dollars a month is a (barely) living wage. Mill owners naturally want to keep their costs down to maximize profits, and families are going hungry to make sure the rich get richer (is this sounding familiar?), until the unions come to town. With predictable results.

There's death, there's misery, there's hard work followed by failure, there's more misery, the end.

My Review: And what an end! What a beautiful piece of writing this is, and how very grim the picture it paints in its simple shapes and clear colors. There is nothing unclear or muddy about the book, except the minds of the characters, and that is by the author's design.

The search for gold isn't as stupid as it sounds. The Georgia north was Cherokee country until white folks found gold in them thar hills and booted the native inhabitants off the land. In the novel, some few flakes are found, but never enough to do what Ty Ty wants, which is free him and his family from want and dependence on others. It works well as a metaphor for the frayed and threadbare Murrikin dream, too: Keep working keep working keep working and the rewards will (not) come! Or if they come, at what cost, and ultimately to what end?

The title, God's Little Acre, refers to Ty Ty's gift of one acre of his farmland to God to support the church. But because Ty Ty wants gold for himself and his family, he moves the location of the acre at will, so he'll be sure not to give his gold away. Not so unfamiliar here, either, is it?

Murder, betrayal, lust, rage, and that's all before we get to the workplace! Is it any wonder this book was called obscene by the forces of reaction? It *was* obscene! The horrible exploitive relationships in every single nook and cranny of the world the characters inhabit is obscene. The dreadful ignorance, the grinding and maliciously intentional poverty, all of it obscene!

Sadly, with the slow withering of liberalism, the story's outlines are rapidly recrudescing in the modern Murrika being carved from the living flesh of the unwashed masses too drugged on the crack of an American Dream they will never, ever attain by Lotto or hard work or virtue rewarded. The horror is we've been here before, and a few brave and good men tried to steer us away from this hideous abyss. And here we are, back again.

Sick-making, isn't it? Read the book, and use it as a cautionary tale. show less

Update 10/19/2024
Third attempt to assess this problematic novel!

I had it wrong. Erskine and his father Ira were not proponents of eugenics, although the elder did think it could help in the short term and wrote some articles for a eugenics periodical.

Erskine Caldwell's 1932 Tobacco Road, however, went on to be firmly at the center of a eugenics discussion in Georgia in the 1930s.

After the novel's release, the mortified citizens of Georgia disputed any possible foundation in reality within show more the novel. And when various reporters went to investigate, the horrors were found to be true. Their investigations found many shocking examples of the level of poverty in the state, and included finding the source family nicknamed the "Bunglers" by Ira Caldwell, whom Ira tried and failed to uplift, the family that Erskine fictionalized as the Lesters. Then, true to the long-standing southern prejudices, some Georgian citizens began to worry out loud about the effects these--now acknowledged as real--Tobacco Road types would have on the whites' case for racial superiority. That's where eugenics came in.

Unlike his father, Erskine did not think eugenics was the correct solution, even short term; he advocated for socio-economic solutions, suggestions that went unheeded. Instead, in 1937 Georgia passed a law legalizing forced sterilization. The state of Georgia ultimately oversaw the operation on more than 3,200 individuals. It was only in 1970 that the law was repealed, although it had ceased forced sterilizations by 1963, a still ignorantly and shamefully late year, long after WWII ended and the truth of Nazi Germany known.

Source: Chapter 3 of A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era

So, how to assess this novel now, knowing the history and its context?

The novel backfired for Caldwell by fueling a misguided decades-long repugnant history. (It did, however, lift Caldwell himself and his family out of poverty.) Then along comes me, in 2024, reading the novel because it is listed in the Modern Library's 100 best novels.

I hated the novel. I hated experiencing the story within it. It was as repugnant as the sorry history of eugenics and forced sterilization in America (and ultimately part of Nazi Germany's horrifying "final solution"). Without any hint of redemption or call for reform within the text, surrounded in so-called black humor, it left me and countless others wondering what the heck we were supposed to take away from it. It seemed the only choices were ridicule or pity.

I'll go with pity, though the Lesters created by Caldwell had no pity for one another, especially cruelly none for their old and young. (Maybe that was a point he was making? That because they are pitiless themselves all the more reason for us to have pity?) Ultimately, I can only come away with a firmer belief in the foundations of a good public education system and additionally of public welfare as being in the best interests of a nation, the best interests of humanity.

Now, at last, I'm done with personally wrestling this unpleasant novel. show less

He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him.

Those are the words of Jeeter Lester. I could have made him a pretty comprehensive list of reasons why, and I think Erskine Caldwell could have too. And, some of those things were not his fault and perhaps beyond his control, but most of them were not.

This book is raw and almost depraved. Its characters are only true of a type, and as such not real at all as show more people you would know or meet. And, it is not easy to nail down exactly how the author views them or the message he is trying to convey. There is sardonic humor and yet you are never tempted to laugh; there is unmitigated tragedy, but you are also never tempted to cry.

It is a good thing Caldwell kept this short, because no one would wish to spend another minute with the Lesters. The only characters who even deserve compassion are Pearl, who gratefully hid from her “husband” and escaped the fate of her mother, and the starved and abused grandmother, who was beyond any ability to escape the torment.

I think the hyperbole is intentional. I don’t think these are the real hard-pressed, poor people of the rural south in 1930. Whatever statement Caldwell was trying to make about religion (and I’m not sure I have decided what that was), I doubt many of those real Southerners would have recognized themselves, or the belief system his characters displayed. I can remember my grandmother, in the 1950s, on her very thin knees for periods of time that made my own little ones ache, and I can assure you there was not an ounce of insincerity or hypocrisy in her prayers--on your knees in hard prayer was common. I am not convinced things would have changed that much in the course of twenty years.

I am left with a mixture of unexpected feelings. There is something unforgettable about the story, beyond the shock factor, but it also makes you feel like you have just witnessed something foul that you would like to put away. show less

... oggi ne godo la scrittura, la capacità miracolosa di ricostruire un mondo senza alcun apparente intervento esplicativo: non c'è alcuna esplicita ricostruzione psicologica dei bestiali (in senso proprio) protagonisti, non viene offerta nessuna chiave interpretativa sociale o morale, non c'è una 'storia' che venga narrata, le descrizioni più lunghe sono di una riga, e il romanzo è costruito quasi esclusivamente con il dialogo diretto dei protagonisti (e lui disse e lei rispose...). show more Eppure ripugnanza e fascino, giudizio morale e compassione per questi disgraziati crescono di pagina in pagina e scaturiscono da soli dall'aggrovigliarsi insensato del loro moto relativo, dall'inconsistenza casuale e irrazionale delle loro azioni, dalle parole, tra loro mai leggere, ma quasi sempre inutili...
Insomma un gran libro. show less