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    Tobacco Road: A Novel
    Tobacco Road: A Novel
    Tobacco Road: A Novel
    Ebook220 pages3 hours

    Tobacco Road: A Novel

    By Erskine Caldwell

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The classic novel of a Georgia family undone by the Great Depression: “[A] story of force and beauty” (New York Post).   Even before the Great Depression struck, Jeeter Lester and his family were desperately poor sharecroppers. But when hard times begin to affect the families that once helped support them, the Lesters slip completely into the abyss. Rather than hold on to each other for support, Jeeter, his wife Ada, and their twelve children are overcome by the fractured and violent society around them.   Banned and burned when first released in 1932, Tobacco Road is a brutal examination of poverty’s dehumanizing influence by one of America’s great masters of political fiction.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erskine Caldwell including rare photos and never-before-seen documents courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJun 21, 2011
    ISBN9781453216958
    Tobacco Road: A Novel
    Author

    Erskine Caldwell

    Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987) is the author of twenty-five novels, numerous short stories, and a dozen nonfiction titles, most depicting the harsh realities of life in the American South during the Great Depression. His books have been published in forty-five languages and have sold tens of millions of copies, with God’s Little Acre alone selling more than fourteen million. Caldwell’s graphic realism and unabashedly political themes earned him the scorn of critics and censors early in his career, though by the end of his life he was acknowledged as a giant of American literature.

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    Reviews for Tobacco Road

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      This book was awfully depressing. It tells the story of a poor white family in the South during the Depression. These people were dirt poor, uneducated, and treated each other poorly. There was literally nothing positive in this story, and although I understand that the author was telling the true of story of these types of people, it was still tough to keep turning the pages. I think it was the part that they are so completely uneducated and had no understanding of anything outside of their own insulated world. I am glad to have read it from a historical perspective, but did not enjoy it as literature.
    • 3/5
      Depressing.
    • 1/5
      What the Hell was this? I'd heard about this book forever and finally got around to listening to the audiobook and I'm sorry I did. Was the author aiming for satire with these caricatures and outlandish situations? Was he trying to use exaggeration to draw attention to an impoverished segment of the population? I have no information on what the intent was. My guess is that this was exaggerated social commentary, but I may be being too generous. Nevertheless, this was often an offensive, insulting and unpleasant read and again I am amazed at what gets on best books lists.
    • 2/5
      Wow. I didn't like this one at all. Too dark and depressing and cruel.
    • 4/5
      Funny and heartbreaking and, despite the satire, still so very true. Also oddly relevant to our current times. For me the best comic novels are rooted in the profoundly tragic. It is a hard line to walk, but Caldwell holds his own for the most part. Not perfect, but close enough.
    • 3/5
      Not nearly so good as I had remembered.
    • 1/5
      I feel like I need to get a time machine to write a proper review of this book. I am astounded to see, "The most famous novel by the world's bestselling novelist" on the cover of my Signet paperback (with its 25 cent cover price!) How could Caldwell have been so popular, and what was it about this story that made the book sell millions of copies and even be turned into a Broadway play that lasted seven years?Is the story supposed to be funny? Is it a farce? I don't think so. It is not a story about "characters" who do stupid things. It is a story filled with grotesques, and watching them go about their "lives" is truly painful for the reader. There isn't much good you can say about any of them. The only one who has a job is also married to a 12-year old, for instance. The only saving grace is that Caldwell writes well. The story doesn't get bogged down with ridiculous Southern dialect. All the horror just unfolds neatly as you read along.And horror would be fine if the story had a point. As a Southerner myself, I can't help but feel that Caldwell had the same mixed emotions about the South that many of us do--or maybe Caldwell's weren't mixed at all. There is a hatred and venom that runs through the book that is pretty hard to hide. The fact that Caldwell never lived in the South after reaching manhood tells me that, unlike Faulkner, he was incapable of recognizing both the good and the bad of his native region. Perhaps that is why Faulkner will never be forgotten, and Caldwell, largely, already is.This still doesn't explain why anyone, Northern or Southern, was so fascinated with this sordid tale. Perhaps in the 1930s, in the midst of depression and hardship, it was a relief to watch a group of people who had it worse--much worse--than the reader.
    • 4/5
      Great book. Laughed a lot and was sad a lot. Not an easy read as the dialect made me slow down and I had to concentrate to understand what was going on. I think ,based on other reviews I have read on this book, it is either "I loved it" or "I hated it" book. Me I enjoyed it but it was not love.
    • 2/5
      If you want to read about this time period, don't waste your time with this book. Read Steinbeck instead.
    • 2/5
      Very depressing. Why should I care about characters without any redeeming quality? It is a dated work and probably gained notoriety because it was profane when published. Not worth the effort.
    • 3/5
      I just finished rereading Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. I must have read this novel when I was in high school or college. I remembered only the locale and the general tone of the book, and the names of a couple of the characters. However, the book has enjoyed both fame and noteriety over the years, and I wanted to see what it was I had read. It would have been half a century ago, so I could forgive myself for not being able to resurrect more of its substance.I wonder how it would fare in literature course today, not well, I think. Certainly both the religious conservative and the political correctnik would find much to appall them. The novel deals with the more or less final days of a white Southern family, the Lesters, which over the generations has slipped to the level of sharecropper, and lives in abject, brutalizing poverty. The characters are so wretched for the most part that it is hard to feel the milk of human kindness flooding in their direction, largely because they are without love or mercy for each other. I think that in several respects it could be compared to Liam O'Flaherty's novel Famine. Perhaps the most significant difference is that in Caldwell's book the land's refusal to support the people has gone on long enough to rot out any better natures the Lesters might have had; whereas Flaherty's impoverished family goes to its doom more rapidly, and the total decay of their characters is forestalled by wholesale death.If you allow yourself (and I did) there is dark, dark humor in some of the family's grotesque in-fighting, and the night that the preacher woman, Sister Bessie, spends in a city "hotel" with her teenage husband and his father is handled in a deadpan manner that almost dares the reader to smirk. What comes through with increasingly clarity as the short novel progresses is that the land itself has ruined these people, though not so much the wasted, worn soil as the protagonist's tenacious refusal to give it up. To the bitter-most final pages he is enduring in his belief that this land is his salvation. And when it is not, in the most grusome way imaginable, this makes the book's final sentence, spoken by his teenage son a mind-boggling return to novel's beginning.For those who would find Tobacco Road like eating glass, I would suggest reading his childhood memoir, Deep South. It is Caldwell's early years in the old segregated, provincial South as the son of a minister. It is a fine, fine book, and elegiac in its tone and simple nobility. It is not a book about religion, but rather one about the dignity and love that can sometimes be found in ordinary, unassuming people
    • 3/5
      Book Circle Reads 148Rating: 3* of fiveThe Book Description: University of Georgia Press's sales copy--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.My Review: Ye gods and little fishes! Talk about "been down so long it looks like up to me!"A shockingly honest book when it was published in 1932, it's still a picture that comparatively rich urban Americans need to see. The details have changed only a little in 80 years. This kind of poverty not only still exists, but these horrific racial prejudices do too. Read Knockemstiff and The Galaxie and Other Rides and American Salvage for the modern-day honest storytellers mining the same vein of American life. Winter's Bone is its direct descendant! So many of the works I've labeled hillbilly noir...and this is the granddaddy of 'em all. I loved the fact that it was so grim when I first read it as an angry, angsty teen, and it still, or again, aroused my loathing and ire when re-read last year at 52.I can't remember not thinking that people were vile, irredeemable scum, and reading books like this taught me I wasn't the first to have this insight. Even the best are brought low by the vicious kicks of a merciless gawd. They keep going to church, though, to get kicked again...ultimately the solace of "at least we're not black" (though they use the other word I can't stand even to type) isn't enough to overcome the characters' various phobias and anxieties.This won't make sense to someone who hasn't read the book, and will if one does read or has read it, but constitutes no spoiler: GO RATS!! Sic 'em!A megaton of misery detonating in your brain, leaving craters a mile wide for compassion to leak out of.
    • 3/5
      For a real life view, read "Such as Us....A very early experiment in the publication of oral history, it consisted of thirty-five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers, mill workers, townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast, selected from over a thousand such histories collected by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. Caldwell was simply angry about the conditions of the poor and the callousness of the rich.
    • 3/5
      There's a lot about "Tobacco Road" that hasn't aged particularly well. The book's unflinching portrayal of Southern poverty might be, in its own way, commendable, but the author's occasional commentary -- at one point he informs the reader that collective agriculture and modern farming methods might have rescued his characters from their fates -- seems a little clumsy now. Likewise, for a man who can't read or write, Jeeter Lester seems uncannily articulate when he describes the economic factors that have contributed to his predicament. His family, the broke, starving, Lester clan, come off as the ur-hillbillies, but I'm sure that this is one stereotype that most modern Southerners would gladly put behind them. What's left, then? The Lesters' desires: to farm, to work, or just to survive, do come through loud and clear, and it's genuinely difficult to watch them struggle. There's also Jeeter's malevolent, bullying self-pitying presence that throws a long shadow over the entire book and makes him one of the most unpleasant villains I've met in a while. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, "Tobacco Road" presents a chilling vision of a sort of alternate America -- one that twentieth-century middle class prosperity and typically American notions of self-reinvention hardly acknowledged. America's not the promised land for everyone, and we don't all do better than our parents, and Caldwell's novel seems to want to offer up its characters as living proof of this sad reality.
    • 3/5
      A precursor to God's Little Acre, much more reportorial in style, about the Lester family, slowly starving to death on their meager land in Georgia cotton country. Jeeter Lester is lazy, hopeless, and hungry, with little or no vision of a way out of his plight. He and his wife have had 17 children, 12 of them presumably living, although all but two have left home and none have sent word of their progress. One is known to have done well nearby. One, 12 year old Pearl, has recently been married off to a neighbor, but has resisted becoming a wife. Jeeter's mother hangs on to life grimly, with no help and definite hindrance from the rest of the family.The Depression, and the hopelessness it engendered, has never been more grimly portrayed, although other stories allow the reader to like to characters at least a little.
    • 2/5
      Throughout the reading of this book my mouth was agape. I really tried to like these characters and feel for their plight during the depression era in the deep south but it was just more than I think I could force upon myself. The level of ignorance was just incredible and the repeatative nature of the dialouge made me want to scream. If I never hear the words "seed cotton and guano" I will die a much happier person.
    • 2/5
      this book was acclaimed as 'fully realistic' and 'funny like Mark Twain' on the back...i have to disagree. i honestly have a hard time believing in a group of people this stupid. i did laugh, once. i almost felt like this was written as a cruel stereotype of southern people...prehaps i just didn't get it.
    • 1/5
      Initially, I thought this would be a sad tale of misery, like [The Beans of Egypt, Maine], but about 20 pages in, I realized that it is dark comedy. It portrays a family of down-and-out farmers in Georgia, and the community that surrounds them, an extended joke on poor country rubes. If you find desperate poverty, ignorance, failure, disappointment, physical deformity, pedophilia, ageism and cruelty humorous, dig in. I hated it.The book has been compared to [Mark Twain], but what Twain and also [Herman Charles Boseman] wrote about country folks was truly humorous, perhaps because they had a gram of compassion for their characters.
    • 3/5
      it is difficult to believe there are people this ignorant in the world, but erkine caldwell brings us into their world (not that we want to spend much time in it)and, mostly through narrative repetition, he stamps us there. over and over and over and over again we are told by jeeter all he wants to do is grow crops, bessie wants to get laid, and the grandmother is a non-entity, completely ignored so much that when she is run over by bessie's car, her face mashed in, she is left alone to suffer and die. nobody even walks up and looks at heer! if you don't believe we descended from apes, read caldwell.And for those of you who say this is a farce (quoting some New Yawk times fellow or such), let me tell you it surely is not a farce. It is real as I have met some of the people. Poverty doesn't breed grace, necessarily, nor does scrapping for food bring brotherly love, espite the romantic proclamations of the politically correct.
    • 4/5
      enjoyed it very much, nicely written tale of poor farmers trying to make ends meet. everytime i read a book like this, i want to kick anyone who talks crap about "southern hillbillies" or things like that.
    • 4/5
      An earthy novel of the earth and the passions of the very poor in the South of the 30s. A novel of desires accentuated by hunger, poverty, and a lack of hope for any of Caldwells characters. Even today many poverty stricken individuals and groups share the same heart-breaking felling of disenfranchisement that live in "Tobacco Road."'Sharply observed and not to be missed. miltonblack852@gmail.com
    • 4/5
      My introduction to Erskine Caldwell, who detested such epithets as 'white trash' used here. Yes, there are grotesque, deformed people , sex-crazed and insanely violent. But this is on a cartoon level, as though the protagonists are playing caricatures of themselves, while all around the wasted land of opportunity serves to mimic the deadness of their lives.
    • 3/5
      I had some problems with this book.

      First was with Lov and Pearl - I know things were different in the rural South during the Depression but it bothered me that Pearl was married off (I am pretty sure without her consent) at the age of 12. That isn't a flaw in the book, just something that creeped me out.

      Initially I was bothered by the whole situation about Bessie's car too especially getting into two accidents in the first two days of owning it!. But after some thought I realized how ignorant Bessie and Dude were. I don't mean stupid but uninformed; how could they be otherwise when they had limited life experience and neither one could read or write?

      That realization helped me have some sympathy for the characters until the end of the book. But that sympathy dried up with the callousness displayed towards the grandmother when Bessie and Dude ran her over with the car. Not only did they not stop but then Jeeter, Ada and Ellie May just left her lying in the dirt!. Being poor and ignorant doesn't mean that you can't be a caring person, which it seems like Caldwell is implying. That is the biggest issue I had with the book.
    • 2/5
      Published in 1932, this book tells the story of Jeeter Lester, his wife, Ada, daughters, Pearl and Ellie May, son Dude, and son-in-law, Lov Bensey. The Lesters are a family of poor sharecroppers living in rural Georgia during the Great Depression. Lov married Pearl when she was twelve years old, and he is upset that she will not speak to or sleep with him. The family has had seventeen children, but some have died young and others moved to the nearby city of Augusta. The storyline is focused on the many hardships and sufferings of the rural poor. The characters seem like caricatures. Several are preoccupied with anticipating their own deaths. This book is considered a classic. I appreciate that it is a novel about the Great Depression, written contemporaneously, but do not expect anything pleasant. It is grim, bleak, and tragic – too dark for me. I am glad it is short (187 pages), or I might not have finished.
    • 4/5
      Title: Tobacco RoadAuthor: Erskine CaldwellGenre: American FictionPublisher: New York, Charles Scribner’s SonsDate: 1932Pages: 241Modern Library: The Board’s List #91Started: 21 August 2013I have had this book tucked away on a shelf with its pristine cover for several years now. I used to belong to The First Edition Library and would purchase a book or two a month until they went out of business. At least I think they went out of business. My copy is a facsimile of the first edition. I never did amass the personal library of my dreams but this book is a keeper. When I’m done with it, I will return it to its place on my shelf to rest until I need it again.Here are a few interesting points about this book and the author:~ When it came out in 1932 it sold for $2.50.~ When Caldwell sent his typed final version of the book to Max Perkins at Scribners it was accepted for print within ten days and required no editing. Imagine that – every T crossed on the first go ’round, that’s pretty amazing.~ Tobacco Road was Caldwell’s first and most renowned novel.Okay, I’m headed to Georgia to hang out with the Lester family for a while. I’ll check back in later.You might have noticed that I didn’t chime in part way through this book like I usually do. There was no need because the story line never changes. The Lester family, along with Lov and Sister Bessie are so poverty-stricken that survival is their only thought, well – that and sex. Jeeter Lester is a white share-cropper, and the head of the Lester family that lives along the tobacco road. The story revolves around the happenings at the Lester household and the occasional trip away from the property. The repetitiveness of Caldwell’s writing style reiterates the truth of the Lester’s starvation and desperation over and over again on each of the 241 pages of this book. Caldwell makes you want to keep reading, if for nothing else to see what catastrophe Jeeter’s laziness and lack of common sense will bring upon the family next.If you need to pound out a classic I do suggest you grab Tobacco Road. It’s sad, it’s short, there is a small amount of humor, and in its own odd way it will keep you interested to the last page. This novel will also give you a good feel for southern literature and what it was like for poor white America during the depression.Oh, and there are turnips and a couple of cases of vehicular homicide that are sure to please. (In a grotesque sort of way.) Enjoy!Finished: 31 August 2013
    • 3/5
      It's hard to believe there were ever any people as ignorant as the characters in this story, but who knows? I never lived in Georgia, either.
    • 4/5
      I'm coming into this story with nothing more than the title and Caldwell's introduction to guide me as to what the story is about. I was immediately perplexed as to what Caldwell was trying to do. Was he trying to publicize the plight of the poor as Steinbeck did in [book:The Grapes of Wrath|18114322] or was he doing something else?Don't get me wrong. The book is very well written but I'm not sure of the author's intentions. Early on it became apparent that his portrayal of the Lester family is exaggerated to the point of being a caricature. You can call it a work of black comedy but, if so, it is still mean spirited. I can understand why people were offended when Tobacco Road was first published.
    • 4/5
      I’m really not sure what I think. It’s a really short book, but at a third of the way through I still wasn’t interested and thought it was pretty dull and silly parody of Southerners. Then it got weird.

      This is a book that’s not easy to pigeonhole, and it’s full of contradictions. It’s dark, yet funny. He seems to completely belittle, mock and insult the characters (who are all awful), and somehow makes it seem like they're responsible for all their own problems while also showing sympathy and how the system fails them, and how hard it is for them to get ahead. I read an article about the book that said "Was the novel a cry for social justice, or a nasty satire?" I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I think it was both.

      It was like a weird cross of The Grapes of Wrath and A Confederacy of Dunces, except much meaner and stranger. I keep thinking about the book, so I guess it’s getting 4 stars.
    • 4/5
      Is Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell meant to be taken seriously or is it a comedic tour de force? I read the book cold-turkey. This is how I like to describe a book in which I lack prior knowledge of plot, characterization, or theme. I merely pick the book up to try a new author or in this case I liked the title.I was halfway through the book before I stopped to read the small bio, brief description, and critic comments located on the back cover. The New York Herald Tribune claims, “Mr. Caldwell’s humor, like Mark Twain’s, has as its source an imagination that stirs the emotions of the reader.”Ah, Mark Twain(ish) humor, it is supposed to be funny. That changes everything! The characters and their disregard for human life, other than their own, was a little disheartening to read. Knowing now that it is a farce, allows me to really enjoy the story full of unbelievable characters.Leading the role for most unbelievable is main character, Jeeter, patriarch of the Lester family. Jeeter is all about Jeeter. He even shoos his own mother from the dinner table. Ada, his wife and producer of 17 children, is a quiet woman, but lately, “hunger has loosened her tongue,” and made her a trite annoying. All of the children except for Dude, 16, and Ellie May, 17, have left home for the big city of Augusta, Georgia and its cotton mills. The youngest child, Pearl, 12, was traded to Lov Bensey for food. Grandmother Lester is allowed to haunt the house as long as she stays out of the way. The family actually wills her to wither and blow away.The book was originally published in 1932, and the timeline is concurrent with the Depression. The Lesters have become sharecroppers on their own original Lester land after Jeeter squanders their assets with fraudulent home loans. As the story opens the family is subsiding on corn meal, snuff, and chicory, while Grandmother Lester forages off the land.I am so thankful this book is comedic in nature. Not, laugh-track, ha-ha funny such as Beverly Hillbillies or Green Acres, but rather a relief these aren’t real people. The character Elly May Clampett is way more forgiving to the eyes than poor, hair-lipped Ellie May Lester. Oh, and how misleading is the title, where’s the tobacco?

    Book preview

    Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell

    Tobacco Road

    Erskine Caldwell

    Contents

    Chapter I

    Chapter II

    Chapter III

    Chapter IV

    Chapter V

    Chapter VI

    Chapter VII

    Chapter VIII

    Chapter IX

    Chapter X

    Chapter XI

    Chapter XII

    Chapter XIII

    Chapter XIV

    Chapter XV

    Chapter XVI

    Chapter XVII

    Chapter XVIII

    Chapter XIX

    A Biography of Erskine Caldwell

    Chapter I

    LOV BENSEY TRUDGED homeward through the deep white sand of the gully-washed tobacco road with a sack of winter turnips on his back. He had put himself to a lot of trouble to get the turnips; it was a long and tiresome walk all the way to Fuller and back again.

    The day before, Lov had heard that a man over there was selling winter turnips for fifty cents a bushel, so he had started out with half a dollar early that morning to buy some. He had already walked seven and a half miles, and it was a mile and a half yet back to his house at the coal chute.

    Four or five of the Lesters were standing in the yard looking at Lov when he put his sack down and stopped in front of the house. They had been watching Lov ever since he was first seen an hour before on the sand hill nearly two miles away, and now that he was actually within reach, they were prepared to stop him from carrying the turnips any farther.

    Lov had his wife to feed and provide for, in addition to himself, and he was careful not to allow any of the Lesters to come too close to the sack of turnips. Usually when he came by the Lester place with turnips or sweet potatoes, or for that matter with any kind of food, he left the road half a mile from the house and made a wide circle through the fields, returning to the road a safe distance beyond. Today, though, he had to speak to Jeeter about something of great importance, and he had ventured closer to the house than he had ever done before when carrying home turnips or sweet potatoes.

    Lov’s wife was Jeeter Lester’s youngest daughter, Pearl. She was only twelve years old the summer before when he had married her.

    The Lesters watched Lov closely while he stood in the middle of the road. He had dropped the sack from his shoulder, but he held the neck of it in the rigid grasp of both hands. No one in the yard had changed his position during the past ten minutes. The next move was left entirely up to Lov.

    When Lov came to the house and stopped, he had a good reason for doing so; otherwise he would never have come within hailing distance. He wanted to speak to Jeeter about Pearl.

    Pearl would not talk. She would not say a word, no matter how persuasive Lov tried to be, nor how angry he was; she even hid from Lov when he came home from the coal chute, and when he found her, she slipped away from his grasp and ran off into the broom-sedge out of sight. Sometimes she would even stay in the broom-sedge all night, remaining out there until Lov went to work the next morning.

    Pearl had never talked, for that matter. Not because she could not, but simply because she did not want to. When she was at home, before Lov had married her, she had stayed apart from the other Lesters and rarely opened her mouth from the beginning of one day to the next. Only her mother, Ada, had been able to converse with her, and even then Pearl had never used more than the barest of negatives and affirmatives in reply. But Ada was herself like that. She had begun to talk voluntarily only during the past ten years. Before then, Jeeter had had the same trouble with her that Lov was now having with Pearl.

    Lov asked Pearl questions, he kicked her, he poured water over her, he threw rocks and sticks at her, and he did everything else he could think of that he thought might make her talk to him. She cried a lot, especially when she was seriously hurt, but Lov did not consider that as conversation. He wanted her to ask him if his back were sore, and when was he going to get his hair cut, and when was it going to rain again. But Pearl would not say anything.

    He had spoken to Jeeter several times before about his troubles with Pearl, but Jeeter did not know what was the matter with her. Ever since she was a baby she had been like that, he said; and Ada had remained untalkative until the last few years. What Jeeter had not been able to break down in Ada for forty years, hunger had. Hunger loosened her tongue, and she had been complaining ever since. Jeeter did not attempt to recommend the starving of Pearl, because he knew she would go somewhere to beg food, and would get it.

    Sometimes I think it’s just the old devil in her, Lov had said several times. To my way of thinking, she ain’t got a scratch of religion in her. She’s going to hell-fire when she dies, sure as day comes.

    Now, maybe she ain’t pleased with her married life, Jeeter had suggested. Maybe she ain’t satisfied with what you provide her with.

    I done everything I can think of to make her satisfied and contented. Every week I go to Fuller on pay-day and buy her a pretty. I get her snuff, but she won’t take none; I get her a little piece of calico, but she won’t sew it. Looks like she wants something I ain’t got and can’t get her. I wish I knowed what it was. She’s such a pretty little girl—all them long yellow curls hanging down her back sort of gets me all crazy sometimes. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I’ve got the need of Pearl for a wife as bad as any man ever had.

    I expect she’s too young yet to appreciate things, Jeeter had said. She ain’t grown up yet like Ellie May and Lizzie Belle and Clara and the other gals. Pearl ain’t nothing but a little gal yet. She don’t even look like a woman, so far.

    If I had knowed she was going to be like she is, maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to marry her so bad. I could have married me a woman what wants to be married to me. But I don’t want Pearl to go now, though. I sort of got used to her around, and I’d sure miss seeing them long yellow curls hanging down her back. They make a man feel kind of lonesome some way. She sure is a pretty little girl, no matter if she does act like she does all the time.

    Lov had gone back home that time and told Pearl what Jeeter said about her, but she sat in the chair and made no sign of answering him. Lov did not know what to do about her after that. But he had realized from that time on that she was still a little girl. During the eight months they had been married she had grown three or four inches in height, and she weighed about fifteen pounds more now than she had at the beginning. She still did not weigh much more than a hundred pounds, though she was gaining in weight and height every day.

    What Lov wanted to speak to Jeeter about now in particular was the way Pearl had of refusing to sleep with him. They had been married almost a year, and still she slept by herself, as she had done since the first. She slept by herself on a pallet on the floor, refusing even to let Lov kiss her or touch her in any way. Lov had told her that cows were not any good until they had been freshened, and that the reason he married her was because he wanted to kiss her and feel her long yellow curls and sleep with her; but Pearl had not even indicated that she heard him or knew what he was talking about. Next to wanting to kiss her and talk to her, Lov wanted to see her eyes. Yet even this pleasure she denied him; her pale blue eyes were always looking off into another direction when he came and stood in front of her.

    Lov still stood in the middle of the road looking at Jeeter and the other Lesters in the yard. They were waiting for him to make the first move; friendly or hostile, it mattered little to them so long as there were turnips in the sack.

    Jeeter was wondering where Lov had got the turnips. It did not occur to him that Lov had bought them with money; Jeeter had long before come to the conclusion that the only possible way a quantity of food could be obtained was by theft. But he had not been able to locate a turnip patch that year anywhere within five or six miles. There had been planted a two-acre field the year before over at the Peabody place, but the Peabody men had kept people out of the field with shotguns then, and this year they had not even planted turnips.

    Why don’t you come in the yard off the tobacco road, Lov? Jeeter said. Ain’t no sense standing out there. Come in and rest yourself.

    Lov made no reply, nor did he move. He was debating within himself the danger of entering the yard, against the safety of staying where he was in the road.

    For the past few weeks Lov had been thinking about taking some plow-lines and tying Pearl in the bed at night. He had tried everything that he could think of so far, except force, and he was still determined to make her act as he thought a wife should. He had reached the point now where he wanted Jeeter’s advice before going ahead with the plan. He believed Jeeter would know whether it was advisable from the practical side, since Jeeter had had to contend with Ada for almost a lifetime. He knew Ada had once acted as Pearl was now doing, but Jeeter had not been treated as he was treated, because Ada had borne him seventeen children, while Pearl had not even begun to have the first one.

    If Jeeter said it would be satisfactory to tie Pearl in bed, then he would go ahead and do it. Jeeter knew more about such things than he did. Jeeter had been married to Ada forty years.

    Lov hoped that Jeeter would offer to go down to the house at the coal chute and help him tie Pearl in the bed. Pearl fought back so fiercely whenever he attempted to catch her that he was afraid he would not be able to accomplish anything without Jeeter’s help.

    The Lesters stood around in the yard and on the front porch waiting to see what Lov was going to do next. There had been very little in the house again that day to eat; some salty soup Ada had made by boiling several fat-back rinds in a pan of water, and corn bread, was all there was when they had sat down to eat. There had not been enough to go around even then, and the old grandmother had been shoved out of the kitchen when she tried to come inside.

    Ellie May stood behind a chinaberry tree, looking around the trunk at Lov. She moved her head from one side of the tree to the other, trying to attract Lov’s attention.

    Ellie May and Dude were the only Lester children left at home. All the others had gone away and married, some of them just leaving in a casual way as though they were only walking down to the coal chute to see the freight trains. When they failed to return within two or three days, it was known that they had left home.

    Dude was throwing a lopsided baseball at the side of the house, and catching it on the rebound. The ball hit the house like a clap of thunder, rattling the loose weather-boarding until the vibration swayed the house from side to side. He threw the ball continually, the ball bounding with unfailing regularity back across the sandy yard to where he stood.

    The three-room house sat precariously on stacks of thin lime-rock chips that had been placed under the four corners. The stones had been laid one on top of the other, the beams spiked, and the house nailed together. The ease and simplicity with which it had been built was now evident. The centre of the building sagged between the sills; the front porch had sagged loose from the house, and was now a foot or more lower than it originally was; and the roof sagged in the centre where the supporting rafters had been carelessly put together. Most of the shingles had rotted, and after every wind-storm pieces of them were scattered in all directions about the yard. When the roof leaked, the Lesters moved from one corner of the room to another, their movements finally outlasting the duration of the rain. The house had never been painted.

    Jeeter was trying to patch a rotten inner-tube. He had said that if he could ever get all the tires on the old automobile standing up at the same time again, he would haul a load of wood to Augusta and sell it. Woodcutters were being paid two dollars a load for seasoned pine delivered in the city; but the blackjack that Jeeter tried to make people buy for fuel never brought him more than fifty or seventy-five cents. Usually, when he did succeed in getting a load of it to Augusta, he was not able to give it away; nobody, it seemed, was foolish enough to buy wood that was tougher than iron water-pipes. People argued with Jeeter about his mule-like determination to sell blackjack for fuel, and they tried to convince him that as firewood it was practically worthless; but Jeeter said he wanted to clear the land of the scrub oak because he was getting ready to farm it again.

    Lov had by that time moved a few steps nearer the yard and had sat down in the tobacco road with his feet in the drain ditch. He kept one hand gripped tightly around the mouth of the sack where it had been tied together with a piece of twine.

    Ellie May continued to peer from behind the chinaberry tree, trying to attract Lov’s attention. Each time he glanced in that direction, she jerked her head back so he could not see her.

    What you got in that there croker sack, Lov? Jeeter shouted across the yard. I been seeing you come a far piece off with that there croker sack on your back. I sure would like to know what you got on the inside of it. I heard it said that some people has got turnips this year.

    Lov tightened his grip on the mouth of the sack, looking from Jeeter to the next Lester in turn. He saw Ellie May peering at him from behind the chinaberry tree.

    Did you have a hard time getting what you got there in the sack, Lov? Jeeter said. You look like you is all out of breath.

    I want to say something to you, Jeeter, he said. It’s about Pearl.

    What’s that gal done now, Lov? Is she treating you mean some more?

    It’s just like she’s always done, only I’m getting pretty durn tired of it by this time. I don’t like the way she acts. I never did take to the way she does, but it’s getting worse and worse all the time. All the niggers make fun of me because of the way she treats me.

    Pearl is just like her Ma, Jeeter said. Her Ma used to do the queerest things in her time.

    Every time I want to have her around me, she runs off and won’t come back when I call her. Now, what I say is, what in hell is the sense in me marrying a wife if I don’t get none of the benefits. God didn’t intend for it to be that way. He don’t want a man to be treated like that. It’s all right for a woman to sort of tease a man into doing what she wants done, but Pearl don’t seem to be aiming after that. She ain’t teasing me, to her way of thinking, but it sure does act that way on me. Right now I feel like I want a woman what ain’t so—

    What you got in that there croker sack, Lov? Jeeter said. I been seeing you for the past hour or longer, ever since you came over the top of that far hill yonder.

    Turnips, by God, Lov said, looking at the Lester women.

    Where’d you get turnips, Lov?

    Wouldn’t you like to know!

    I was thinking maybe we might fix up some sort of a trade, Lov—me and you. Now, I could go down to your house and sort of tell Pearl she’s got to sleep in the bed with you. That’s what you was aiming to speak to me about, wasn’t it? You want her to sleep in the bed, don’t you?

    She ain’t never slept in the bed. It’s that durn pallet on the floor that she sleeps on every night. Reckon you could make her stop doing that, Jeeter?

    "I’d be pleased something powerful to make her do what she ain’t doing. That is, if me and you could make a trade with them turnips,

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