Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road examines the harsh poverty in the daily life of the Lester family. Jeeter Lester is a failed sharecropper whose family are starving and all but two of his seventeen children have abandoned him. Jeeter’s sister, a widowed preacher, arrives and lures his son Dude into marriage.

Jeeter Lester is such a curious character. He is driven by a faith in nature, a faith in God, despite numerous setbacks which he solely accredits to the work of God; but it is a misguided religious faith, almost an excuse for not taking responsibility for his own livelihood. Then there is the faith of preacher Sister Bessie, whose religious devotion does not seem to be any more active that Jeeter’s. Her motivation for marrying Dude is unclear, the marriage doesn’t seem to benefit her – and this is a tale devoid of all love, marriage is a business transaction.

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.

There is always the undercurrent of suggested violence, especially against women. Lov and his child bride Pearl Lester, all of 12 years old and refuses to speak to or sleep in the same room as him. The position of women in Tobacco Road is perplexing. They are wives who fail, according to their husbands, their duties both around the home and sexually. Ellie May and Sister Bessie are physically deformed: Ellie May with her reparable harelip (which Jeeter keeps talking about how he will take her to get it fixed, but after eighteen years still hasn’t managed to provide for her), Sister Bessie with her absent nose – just two black holes in her face. The male characters continually point out these physical attributes, often claiming that it prevents them from being able to find a man. This continual degradation of the female characters made me feel uncomfortable.

The novel sometimes appears to be repetitive – characters repeat the same action or speak the same words over and over. At first I thought it was lazy writing, reducing the characters to mere simpletons with very little internal, emotional processes; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that this repetition worked to keep them within the vicious cycle of poverty. Jeeter talks about how all he needs is a mule and cotton seed – at least once each chapter – but he just doesn’t have the motivation or means to actually do it. Talking about it, knowing the way out, but being unable to translate that into action keeps the Lester family in their state. Jeeter prides himself on maintaining tradition, without realizing that it comes at the expense of progress.