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Tobacco Road (novel)
Encyclopedia
Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South like the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was...
about Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
sharecroppers. It was dramatized
Tobacco Road (play)
Tobacco Road is a play by Jack Kirkland first performed in 1933, based on the novel of the same name by Erskine Caldwell. The play ran on Broadway for a total of 3,182 performances, becoming the longest-running play in history at the time...
for Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
by Jack Kirkland
Jack Kirkland
Jack Kirkland was an American playwright, producer, director and screenwriter. His greatest success was the play Tobacco Road, adapted from the Erskine Caldwell novel. His other plays included Frankie and Johnnie , Tortilla Flats , Suds in your Eye, Mr...
in 1933, and ran for a then-astounding eight years (3,182 performances). A 1941 film version
Tobacco Road (film)
Tobacco Road is a 1941 film directed by John Ford starring Charley Grapewin, Marjorie Rambeau, Gene Tierney, William Tracy and Dana Andrews. It was based on the novel of the same name by Erskine Caldwell, but the plot was rewritten for the film.-Cast:...
, deliberately played mainly for laughs, was directed by John Ford
John Ford
John Ford was an American film director. He was famous for both his westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath...
, and the storyline was considerably altered. http://tcmdb.com/title/title.jsp?stid=93489
Plot introduction
Tobacco Road is set in rural Georgia, several miles outside Augusta, GeorgiaAugusta, Georgia
Augusta is a consolidated city in the U.S. state of Georgia, located along the Savannah River. As of the 2010 census, the Augusta–Richmond County population was 195,844 not counting the unconsolidated cities of Hephzibah and Blythe.Augusta is the principal city of the Augusta-Richmond County...
during the worst years of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
. It depicts a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as one of the many small Southern cotton farmers estranged by the industrialization of production and the migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and his faith in the fertility and promise of soil.
Plot summary
Lov Bensey, a friend of the Lesters, walks to his home at the train yard coal chute. He has walked seven and a half miles to get a sack of winter turnipTurnip
The turnip or white turnip is a root vegetable commonly grown in temperate climates worldwide for its white, bulbous taproot. Small, tender varieties are grown for human consumption, while larger varieties are grown as feed for livestock...
s for fifty cents; which is half of his daily wage. On his way home he stops by the Lesters to talk to Jeeter about Jeeter's twelve year old daughter Pearl, who is married to Lov. While Lov is talking to Jeeter, the book introduces the reader to sixteen year-old Dude, the youngest of the Lester boys; Ada, Jeeter’s wife; Grandma Lester; and Ellie May, an eighteen year old girl with a grotesque cleft lip. The entire family, acting in complete desperation, works to steal the turnips from Lov, who then becomes nauseated by the sight and leaves for home.
At this point the preacher Bessie enters the scene. Sister Bessie Rice, like Ellie May, also has a deformity of the face. Bessie’s nose contains no bone, and so when looking straight at her face one can see straight into her nostril
Nostril
A nostril is one of the two channels of the nose, from the point where they bifurcate to the external opening. In birds and mammals, they contain branched bones or cartilages called turbinates, whose function is to warm air on inhalation and remove moisture on exhalation...
s, like a pig
Pig
A pig is any of the animals in the genus Sus, within the Suidae family of even-toed ungulates. Pigs include the domestic pig, its ancestor the wild boar, and several other wild relatives...
. Despite this, Jeeter is still attracted to her. She does some preaching and praying for everyone’s sins, and then proposes marriage
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...
to Dude. However, Dude is more interested in her offer of letting him drive the new automobile
Automobile
An automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...
that she anticipates purchasing than in actually getting married to her. Bessie then goes home to her hovel to ask God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
whether or not she and Dude should get married.
Jeeter has lived on the same plot of land since he was born, and even though his standard of living
Standard of living
Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, income growth inequality and educational standards are also used. Examples are access to certain goods , or measures of health such as...
continues to decline until he and his family begin to starve, Jeeter stubbornly refuses to move to the city to make a better life for himself by working in a cotton mill
Cotton mill
A cotton mill is a factory that houses spinning and weaving machinery. Typically built between 1775 and 1930, mills spun cotton which was an important product during the Industrial Revolution....
. Such a life, he insists, would be impossible for him to live.
Alongside Jeeter’s preoccupation with farming the land is his preoccupation with his own imminent death. Ada as well is fixated on her death, but their morbidity does not take the form of lamentation or self-pity. Ada’s main concern is that she won't be buried in her tattered, old, out-of-style calico dress
Calico (fabric)
Calico is a plain-woven textile made from unbleached, and often not fully processed, cotton. It may contain unseparated husk parts, for example. The fabric is less coarse and thick than canvas or denim, but owing to its unfinished and undyed appearance, it is still very cheap. Originally from the...
, while Jeeter’s main concern is that his body will not be left in the old corn
Maize
Maize known in many English-speaking countries as corn or mielie/mealie, is a grain domesticated by indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica in prehistoric times. The leafy stalk produces ears which contain seeds called kernels. Though technically a grain, maize kernels are used in cooking as a vegetable...
storage shed where it might be eaten by rat
Rat
Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus...
s. He has had a terrible phobia of rats ever since he saw his dead father’s face half-eaten by a rat the day of his funeral
Funeral
A funeral is a ceremony for celebrating, sanctifying, or remembering the life of a person who has died. Funerary customs comprise the complex of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember the dead, from interment itself, to various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in their honor...
. Neither of these two characters have any doubts that they are going to die sometime soon, and it is not their present life but their lifeless bodies which they care about most. Possibly they realize that their way of life is already dead; thus their primary concern becomes not the preservation of that life but its appearance during burial.
When Sister Bessie returns the next day to the Lester house, she exclaims that God has given her his approval for the marriage between Dude and herself. The two then start the long walk to Fuller in order to purchase a new Ford
Ford Model T
The Ford Model T is an automobile that was produced by Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company from September 1908 to May 1927...
, for the purpose of traveling around the country and preaching. Once they are in the auto showroom, the salesmen take advantage of Bessie's rural naïveté to pull off a quick and profitable sale, while at the same time constantly making fun of her deformed nose. Later, Dude and Bessie then go off to get their marriage certificate and are questioned by the county official, who reprimands Bessie for attempting to marry a boy of sixteen years. (Bessie claims she is only 31 years old to the Lesters, but admits to 39 years at the registrar's office.) Finally, they get the marriage license
Marriage license
A marriage license is a document issued, either by a church or state authority, authorizing a couple to marry. The procedure for obtaining a license varies between countries and has changed over time...
, and the anxious Dude gets to drive the automobile again. Dude incessantly sounds the car horn whenever he gets behind the steering wheel to drive off somewhere.
Over the course of the next two days, the automobile slowly gets wrecked more and more. First there is an accident with a wagon in which they end up killing the negro driver, and then Dude drives into a stump. The seats get torn by Jeeter’s blackjack wood
Scrub Oak
Scrub Oak is a general name for several species of small, shrubby oaks, including the following species:*California Scrub Oak *Leather Oak *Coastal Scrub Oak...
, which he attempts to sell in the city of Augusta. The engine also becomes irreparably damaged by being run without enough oil. On top of this, the spare tire is sold for three dollars in order to pay for gasoline, food, and a night at a disreputable hotel where Bessie willingly gets prostituted by the manager from room to room. Much later Bessie refuses to let Jeeter ride in her car anymore, which makes him upset to the point of kicking her off the land. When she physically attacks him, Ada and Jeeter proceed to beat Bessie and poke her with sticks until she and Dude take off in the car.
While fleeing from Ada and Jeeter’s onslaught, Dude backs right over Grandma Lester, who then lies mashed into the dirt road, near dead. Lov runs down to see Jeeter, and asks him if he knows what happened to Pearl, Lov’s 12-year-old wife, who had run away to the city to be free of Lov, and the bleak and desperate country life surrounding her. Jeeter notes that more than a few of his daughters have run away to the city. After this discussion about the girls running away, the two notice Grandma’s corpse and drag her into the field to dig her grave
Grave (burial)
A grave is a location where a dead body is buried. Graves are usually located in special areas set aside for the purpose of burial, such as graveyards or cemeteries....
and bury her.
Lov departs and Caldwell reflects on Jeeter’s position as a tenant farmer
Tenant farmer
A tenant farmer is one who resides on and farms land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management; while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying...
in the South. Even though Jeeter, like so many others around him, had the urge to plant a crop during this time of the year, there was nothing he could do. His landlord was an absentee
Absentee landlord
Absentee landlord is an economic term for a person who owns and rents out a profit-earning property, but does not live within the property's local economic region. This practice is problematic for that region because absentee landlords drain local wealth into their home country, particularly that...
and had abandoned Jeeter and the rest of those who had lived on his land and given him shares of their crop in exchange for credit for seeds and fertilizer
Fertilizer
Fertilizer is any organic or inorganic material of natural or synthetic origin that is added to a soil to supply one or more plant nutrients essential to the growth of plants. A recent assessment found that about 40 to 60% of crop yields are attributable to commercial fertilizer use...
. The stores in the city would not grant any more credit to Jeeter or any of the other farmers because it was too risky and there were too many asking for it.
As Jeeter and Ada sleep, they are killed by a fire that ignites the shingles of their house, which fire Jeeter had created to burn off broom sedge, in the hope of being able to somehow gain enough credit
Credit (finance)
Credit is the trust which allows one party to provide resources to another party where that second party does not reimburse the first party immediately , but instead arranges either to repay or return those resources at a later date. The resources provided may be financial Credit is the trust...
to farm his land that spring. As the novel closes, Dude shares the same thoughts of plowing the Lester land that Jeeter has expressed earlier in the novel, indicating that the vicious cycle in which poor Southern farmers such as the Lesters are trapped, continues.