Erskine Caldwell--Tobacco Road (1932)

Toward the end of Tobacco Road, preacher Sister Bessie Rice, explains why it’s better to preach against things rather than for things, because “That’s what the people like to hear about.  They want to hear about the bad things” (161).  This may be the theme for the entire novel, as the characters in the novel live in inescapably desperate poverty.  Tobacco Road is a trap—though it was once, a few generations ago, the successful place of transport for tobacco, the changeover to sharecropping cotton resulted in leached soil, an inequitable sharecropping system, the growth of cotton factories, and eventually the pullout of the boss, which resulted in the general collapse of the area.  With a very few exceptions, the only road for survival is escape—of the seventeen children born by Jeeter and Ada Lester, only two have remained at home: the harelipped and hypersexualized Ellie Mae and the simpleminded Dude, whose only interests are throwing a ball against the side of the house and finding a functioning automobile horn to honk.

Caldwell seems to be making a statement about those who have been left behind by industrialization and capitalism, as even those who are able to put in a crop can’t win: “A bale to the acre was the goal of every cotton farmer around Fuller; but the boll weevil and hard summer rains generally cut the crop in half.  And on the other hand, if it was a good year for the raising of cotton, the price would probably drop lower than it had before.  Not many men felt like working all year for six-or seven-cent cotton in the fall” (174).  Jeeter Lester is worse off than those, though, as he hasn’t planted a crop in several years, as all possible sources of credit have dried up.  The only possibility left for the Lesters is the county poor-farm—or, as the novel ends, death by fire.  Often, Jeeter refuses to leave for better economic prospects, however, because he claims that the land is in his blood.  Even then, however, the surviving son, Dude, seems to be haunted by the dead Jeeter, as he notes at the novel’s end that he thinks he might see about putting in a cotton crop, like his dad always wanted to.  The novel ends on this sense of absolute futility.

Nevertheless, what’ s most interesting to me are the presentation of female ugliness and sexuality in the novel.  Both Ellie Mae and Sister Bessie Rose are women whose faces are grotesque: Ellie Mae’s cleft lip is such that her “upper lip had an opening a quarter of an inch wide that divided one side of her mouth into unequal parts; the slit came to an abrupt end almost under her left nostril.  The upper gum was low, and because her gums were always fiery red, the opening in her lip made her look as if her mouth were bleeding profusely” (21).  Sister Bessie May, the preaching woman, is in fact “much better-looking than most women in the sand hills, except for her nose.  Bessie’s nose had failed to develop properly.  There was no bone in it, and there was no top to it.  The nostrils were exposed, and Dude had once said that when he looked at her nose it was like looking down the end of a double-barrel shotgun” (45).  Both of them are hypersexual—Ellie Mae doesn’t seem to talk, but only dawdles behind chinaberry trees, emerging to jump on men such as Lov with an “excited, feline agility” (34); Sister Bessie can’t keep her hands off of Dude when kneeling to pray with him, and the two of them shortly end up embracing and rubbing against each other (51).  Further, in the hotel scene—a scene so absurd as to echo a Restoration play—Sister Bessie is taken to several different rooms throughout the night, all of which have occupied beds (and it’s implied that she engaged in sexual activity throughout the night in these different occupied rooms).  

There’s a Faulknerian comparison of women to cows in the novel, as Lov’s complaint that his wife Pearl—the pretty Lester daughter, whom Jeeter approved marrying Lov at the age of twelve—as it’s considered as unnatural for a woman to reject male sexuality in the same way that Lester’s cow was worthless once it “wouldn’t take no freshening” (17).  In refusing to sleep in the same bed as Lov, Pearl is frequently characterized as “queer.”  (She’s also Ada’s daughter by someone other than Jeeter; all that’s known is that her father was that he was “from Carolina and on his way to Texas” (31)).  So, while a properly natural woman responds to a man’s advances, it’s only a monstrous woman who expresses or acts on her own sexual desires, as we see with Sister Bessie and Ellie Mae.  

This insistence on the “natural” is related to the role that God is understood to play in the novel’s deprivation.   Jeeter’s concept of the unshakeable divine plan for the farmer is reminiscent of Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying, such as when he explains that, “When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man” (36).  Thus, anything that doesn’t work for Jeeter can be blamed on divine plan.  Bessie, on the other hand, represents an interestingly active interpretation of the divine.  Not only does God’s plan reveal itself to her to align nicely with her own desires—such as her desire to marry Dude—but she seems to consider God as finite, or having limited abilities.  When, for example, Jeeter asks her to pray for Pearl, she suggests that it might be more successful if she was to talk to Pearl herself, as “I expect I know more about what to tell her than He does, because I been a married woman up to the past summer….I expect I know all about it.  God wouldn’t know what to tell her” (48). Religion, like mules and guano (and women), is simply another resource available to those on Tobacco Road, to be used or blamed according to the individual’s ability and predilection.

Leigh Anne Duck--The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, And U.S. Nationalism (2009)

  

 In this insightful work, Duck looks at the how the “backwards” South not only coexisted with but was a necessary component of the U.S.’s emerging identity as a liberal democracy.  Duck’s use of the term “apartheid” to characterize the state of racism in the South at this point not only calls attention to the separation caused by segregation and racism, but also to emphasize that segregation was not simply a “cultural practice tolerated by the liberal state” but also system codified and enforced by law (4).  Her use of apartheid also brings the text into larger discussions of postcolonialism in general. 

By focusing on work by Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner (among others), Duck demonstrates how apartheid has been able to continue in a nation which claims to be a liberal democracy.  In each of the chapters, she examines the kinds of chronotypes (or collection of temporally coded traits (5)) posited in these works, and how these authors dealt with a South which was (or at least was considered) to be temporally different from the rest of the nation.  To Duck, identifying the South as temporally different from the rest of the country allowed it to tacitly sanction racial injustice by attributing it to cultural or interpersonal—rather than systemic or structural—relations (6). 

In the first section, “Imagining Affiliation,” she looks at how post-Reconstruction America relied up regionalist writers to offer “amelioration for precisely the damage that U.S. nationality  threatens to inflict: though citizens may justly fear being ‘left out of’ or ‘left behind in’ U.S. capitalist progress, identification with regions is held to be sustained—determined by roots—and, concomitantly, sustaining” (32).  More specifically, “regionalism, as a cultural discourse, has often functioned as a supplement to U.S. nationalism; it serves to suggest that, at the local level, the United States maintains precisely the kid of the cultural particularities that the state ideology of liberalism disavows” (33).  The South has provided the U.S. this kind of supplementation beyond the period of post-Reconstruction local color writing.

In the section section of the book, “Modernist Mappings,” Duck locates different strategies of portrayal and understanding the kinds of (particularly, but not exclusively, temporal) alterity represented by the South in texts from the Reconstruction era to approximately World War II.  Her analysis of Erskine Caldwell’s work looks specifically at his portrayal of southern culture of one of stasis and alternative temporality, and how it was possible that such a region of stasis and alterity could coexist in a nation so heavily invested in an identity of capitalist modernity.  Relying heavily on Kristeva’s theories of abjection, Duck shows how Caldwell’s portrayal of the grotesque, a grotesque particularly situated on the body, aligns this community with the kind of abject which results in reinforcing the larger ideas of order.  Particularly in her discussion of stage version of Erskine’s work, Duck says that “many audience members preferred the belief that, in another part of the country, people routinely killed and slept with their nonspousal family members to the belief that such activity was, at least in this case, restricted to a fictional realm.  The latter explanation would place the abject not only in Caldwell’s imagination but also in their own, thus violating a topographical rule of abjection—that it must be ‘hemmed in and thrust aside,’ not repressed but ejected, perhaps most effectively projected onto another, spatially distanced body” (94).

Turning to Hurston, Duck notes that most critics situate her work outside of modernity (115).  Duck notes that “Even as much African American writing from the 1920s and 1930s suggested that folk culture offered the attraction of an authentic racial community, that allure was often represented as uncanny—a dangerous nostalgia for an experience inaccessible to modern subjects, and, furthermore, inextricably linked to racist exploitation” (116), which is how many see Hurston’s writing.  However, Duck’s emphasis on Hurston’s inclusion of modernization in her work demonstrates Hurston’s more complex and often ambiguous position relative to technology, modernization, and modernity: “In representing this transition, Hurston provides or the preservation of folkloric values by incorporating them into the modern self-fashioning of her individuated protagonist” (116).

Again, what Duck refers to as allochronic time is important in this portrayal of the South.  She discusses Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology (1925), which while it “inscribes a modern national community in which individuals, though unacquainted and spatially distanced, recognize themselves as working together in homogeneous linear time to pursue shared goals” (117), also demonstrated how these individuals may experience time differently.  Compared to authors such as Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer, whose work is much more in line with more temporally progressive ideas of time, Duck notes that “though Hurston’s political beliefs were unquestionably complicated, they comprised not a consistent conservatism, but rather a continuing and dynamic ambivalence concerning the effects of modernization in southern African American communities.  Such ambivalence was partly a result of her work as an anthropologist, which allowed Hurston to see and portray the very real possibility of coexisting temporal differences within a seemingly homogenous geographical/cultural space.  When combined with the pressures of a changing capitalist democracy, Hurston’s work “explored the emotional responses that might emerge from concomitant cultural change” (131).

From Hurston, Duck moves to Faulkner’s work, focusing on his use of gothic conventions in order to convey the kinds of concomitant chronotypes and temporal fragmentation which existed in his South.  According to Duck, while “gothic tropes were mobilized to represent individuals’ anxieties as they perceive both substantial cultural differences and by uncontrollable psychological responses,” for Faulkner, they worked as “an analytic tool through which to investigate ideas of southern collective memory”: “Faulkner’s representations of haunting memories belie the idea that his characters participate in a shared white southern cultural identity.  Rather, they suffer individualized mnemonic disorders presented in the novels as sources of pain, cultural misrecognition, and ethical failure” (147).  As other Southern writers used gothic tropes for aesthetic reasons, Faulkner’s Gothicism was rather a “reflection of the temporal alterity in which both author and subject matter were submerged” (149). 

She compares Faulkner’s Gothicism to more traditional gothic works—in particular, to that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  In all of these works, there is a distinct tension between an embrace of modernity undercut by temporal and geographic alterity: “Through their confluence of gothic imagery and the logic of psychological trauma, these narratives suggest that the encounter with a temporality perceived as nonlinear might itself be sufficient to detach subjectivity from the time of capitalist modernity, leaving individuals isolated and confused by memories that manifest precisely the sort of temporal multiplicity that they first sought to disavow” (155).  Duck sees Faulkner’s Gothicism as going a step beyond these more traditional gothic narratives, however: “Faulkner’s novels suggest not simply a backward culture but one in which individuals damage themselves and other by avowing an absolute split in time and refusing to engage in more nuanced investigation of the relationship between past and present” (159).

The final section of the book, “The Shifting South,” examines the post war period, in which “polarized perspectives on racial injustice continued to impede recognition that apartheid constituted not merely a recalcitrant holdover from the past but rather a broadly dispersed element of regional national modernity” (174).  The first section, “Provincial Cosmopolitans,” examines the how what in an allegedly liberal capitalist nation might be seen as backward southern culture in fact “exemplified prominent patterns in global modernity” (178).  Duck notes that uneven development is actually a key component of “capitalist spatiality” (179), thus showing that the South’s temporal alterity was not the anomaly it was so often understood to be.  Further, the characterization of the South as backward created a de facto disenfranchisement of all of its inhabitant—not only (though remarkably) its African American inhabitants—in larger national discourses of progress and modernization.

As a part of American exceptionalism, southern exceptionalism (as exemplified by writings by the Agrarians or W.J. Cash) claimed that those in the South were of a different breed from the rest of the country, which made them immune to full rehabilitation to the level of the rest of the country.  In this way, the infallibility of modernity and capitalist progress were able to stand despite what commentary the poverty of much of the South might otherwise present.  In the work of Richard Wright, Duck sees a critical analysis of this situation, again framing her discussion in particularly temporal terms: “Wright’s fiction, particularly, often undercuts or reframes such perceptions describing African Americans’ explicitly modern experience—both the ways in which racial oppression constituted a distinctly modern system of economic and political exploitation, and the ways in which African Americans positioned themselves in time….Like many African Americans and leftists of the era, Wright expressed substantial concern about how such a temporal lag might affect the consciousness of the people it affected” (186).  Duck shows how Wright’s work highlights how by highlighting the South as a culturally different region disavows any political foundation for what were in fact highly political/systemic/institutional acts which reinforced southern apartheid, with lynching as a prime example of such an act.

Duck then looks at James Agee’s Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, focusing on Agee’s words more than Walker Evans’ photographs.  She emphasizes the uncertainly Agee expresses, in his claims of both being unable to fully connect with his subjects and his inability to fully convey the connections he is able to make.  Finally, she ends with a consideration of Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, with which she suggests that “southern literature from the 1930s through the 1940s participated in changing understandings of southern time.  Once considered a backward region whose racial oppression was inextricable from its idiosyncratic bounded temporality, the South in this period was increasingly represented, in literature and in political discourse, as a coeval region with strained by undeniable ties to the larger nation” (212).  Even after this period, in a post-Brown v. Board of Education nation, the idea of an anachronistic South became more and more important to an increasingly cosmopolitan world.  In Faulkner’s later work as well as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Duck shows how these writers stage “the problem of how to articulate the political meanings that might emerge from cultural differences”: “minority political beliefs are, variously, embedded in gestures concerning heritage and aesthetics, considered so futile as to be unutterable, rendered through heavy use of figurative or ironic language, or, famously, invisible” (217).

Ultimately, Duck shows how the “slippage” between the cultural and the political which emerges in these novels, these works speak to the current red state/blue state view that “political differences emerge from spatialized cultural difference, implicitly raising the question of whether meaningful exchange can take place among opposing parties” (231).  To Duck, examining how such slippage between spatialized cultural differences and politics emerged in the period of her study is key in disentangling current understandings of their connection.