Tobacco Road
by Erskine Caldwell
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Book Summary Information
Author: Erskine CaldwellForeword: Lewis Nordan
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-02-01
ISBN: 082031661X
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Book Reviews of Tobacco Road
Book Review: "He had felt himself sink lower and lower, his condition fall further and further, year after year, until now his trust in God
Summary: 5 Stars
...and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason."
I love bleak books. And this is one of the bleakest I've read. It's the story of a family of ignorant, racist, illiterate white sharecroppers barely getting by near Augusta, Georgia during the Depression. It begins with Lov Bensey, son-in-law of Jeeter Lester, cautiously passing by his father-in-law's place along Tobacco Road with a sack of turnips he's just walked miles to buy, to ask that he talk Bensey's barely-teenaged wife into sleeping with him rather than alone on a pallet as she has since they married about a year prior. All but two of the Lester family offspring, eighteen-year-old Ellie Mae and sixteen-year-old Dude, have moved away. The Lester family has lived a long time in abject poverty, ever since they lost the family land. Even though Jeeter knows he and his wife could earn a decent wage by spinning cotton if they moved to the city, he chooses to stay in a ramshackle house, put his faith in the lord, and get by collecting and selling the occasional load of near-worthless wood. While Jeeter and Lov discuss the situation, Ellie Mae (unmarried due to a prominent cleft lip), tries to make a move on the man to distract his attention from the bag. After the situation with the turnips (which ends badly for Lov), Jeeter returns home to find a boneless-nosed, preacher's widow named Sister Bessie (p 44) "past thirty-five, almost forty" on the porch with the rest of his family. Sister Bessie proclaims that she is going to buy a car with the insurance money from her husband's death so that she can continue her ministry and plans to pray on the idea of marrying Dude and making him a minister. The verdict comes in as expected. Dude agrees to marry Sister Bessie so that he can drive the fancy new car, purchased with her last penny, and they head out to do God's work. Following the keeping it bleak theme, there are collisions with the car (some deadly), a motherly mishap, Sisterly shenanigans and a whole lot of other sad stuff. The ending is the icing on the proverbial catastrophe cake.
My fellow book club members mostly disliked the book due to its racism, repetitiveness and stereotyping. I loved it. Although I'm usually the one raising the issue of racism and tracking the prevalence of the use of the "n" word (about 17 times by my count), what I loved about this book, which I expected to be difficult, dreary and dull, was that it was anything but. The overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Tobacco Road's characters was so over-the-top as to be comical. Other southerly stories: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Brilliantly bleak: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
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