In Mac Hyman’s 1954 comic military novel, “No Time for Sergeants,” a U.S. Air Force psychiatrist tries to provoke the protagonist, a naive rural draftee named Will Stockdale, into some sort of normal response to his questions by insulting Will’s home state of Georgia.
“That’s where they have the tobacco roads and things, isn’t it?” the psychiatrist says.
“‘Maybe so, but not around my section,” replies Will, one of nature’s innocents. “I never seen no tobacco planted in a road. Maybe you from some other part than me.”
Will probably would have plenty of company today in not recognizing a reference to “Tobacco Road,” Erskine Caldwell’s scandal-raising 1932 novel about the abjectly poor and equally abjectly licentious and amoral folk in rural Georgia. But in 1954, and for decades before and after, “Tobacco Road” was shorthand for an entire ethos of hillbilly degeneracy. Today, mention of the movie “Deliverance” probably would elicit the same shudders of repulsion that Caldwell’s novel did then.
“Tobacco Road” sold millions of copies here and abroad, notably in paperback editions with lurid covers in the 1940s and ’50s. It has never been out of print in the 75 years since its initial publication by Scribner’s in late January 1932.
It’s a simple story about simple-minded, yet complex people. Jeeter Lester lives in a ramshackle house along a disused “tobacco road” in eastern Georgia with his wife, Ada, sick with pellagra, and his senile mother, eternally peering from behind a china berry tree.
Out of an original 17 children, two are still at home – Dude, 16, a certifiable idiot, and Ellie May, 18, whose voluptuousness is marred by a harelip that almost, but not entirely, keeps her from snaring the men she feverishly yearns for.
Another daughter, Pearl, left home eight months earlier to marry, at age 12, Lov Bensey, to whom Jeeter had sold her for $7, some quilts and cylinder oil. But Pearl has refused to perform a wife’s conjugal duties, and Lov has come by to obtain Jeeter’s opinion on the advisability of tying his daughter down to the marriage bed.
For their part, Jeeter and family are interested only in the sack of turnips Lov carries, for they are all literally starving. Exploited by the rich, all the farmers of the region are in dire straits, but the Lesters’ fecklessness has added to their misery.
It gets ever more eye-poppingly grotesque, at times comically so. Sister Bessie Rice, an itinerant preacher, visits and takes a shine to Dude. Since she is more than twice Dude’s age and is afflicted with a deformed nose, she seduces the boy with the offer of a brand-new Ford automobile, which she pays for with her last $800.
Bessie’s motor is racing as fast as Ellie May’s, but the only motor the nearly insentient Dude is interested in is that of the Ford, which he promptly wrecks. But not before running over his grandmother and leaving her for dead – a state she reaches only after her indifferent family unceremoniously dumps her into a hole in the ground.
Before that not-exactly-sad occasion, however, Bessie succeeds in getting satisfaction when she and Dude and Jeeter stay overnight at a whorehouse, thinking it’s a cheap hotel. Bessie, as clueless as her companions, gets passed around, willingly, from strange man to strange man. “I want to go back some time and spend another night at that hotel,” she says the next day. “They sure know how to treat a woman real nice.”
It ends, appropriately, in self-inflicted conflagration. Jeeter-hoping, as ever, against hope-thinks he can somehow get in a crop of cotton. He “prepares” the land by burning it over, setting off a fire that spreads in the night and consumes him and Ada as they sleep in their tinder-dry shack.
The novel received at least as many plaudits as condemnations, though it got enough of the latter. Caldwell considered his dispassionate, nonjudgmental approach to his casually and thoughtlessly carnal subjects as a counter to the genteel “moonlight and magnolias” tradition of Southern literature, but one reviewer compared it to “a man watching an anthill.”
“Tobacco Road” and the equally scandalous “God’s Little Acre” (1933) sealed Caldwell’s reputation. Though fellow novelists praised him highly – William Faulkner thought Caldwell might even be in the same exalted pantheon as himself – it was downhill after that.
In 1936, James Thurber published “Bateman Comes Home,” a short parody of Deep South literature. In it, Old Nate Birge sits “watching the moon come up lazily out of the old cemetery in which nine of his daughters were lying, only two of whom were dead.” That’s still funny-and not too great a stretch in capturing the substance and excesses of the genre.
Thurber went on in that vein for more than a page, ending: “If you keep on long enough, it turns into a novel.” Thurber meant it as sarcasm, but-you know what? – through sheer force of obsession, Caldwell actually managed to do it.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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Tobacco Road
By Erskine Caldwell
University of Georgia Press, 184 pages, $16.95
