Caldwell, Erskine

From Philosopedia

Caldwell, Erskine (1903—1987) Caldwell was a proletarian novelist who wrote Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), both of which librarians often hid on special shelves and required permission in order that they be checked out. With his photographer-wife Margaret Bourke-White, he collaborated on You Have Seen Their Faces (1942). Asked his view in 1951 concerning humanism, Caldwell replied to the present author, I prefer leaving critical comment of that nature left to others far better qualified. Some critics have pointed to Caldwell’s anti-Semitism. But in “Deep South,” he exposes a fundamentalist Christianity which promises a “better world” that never comes. He includes details of the rituals of snake handling, of speaking in tongues (glossolalia), and bloodletting. With his father, he felt fundamentalism was a dangerous narcotic for poor Southern workers who had little hope or other entertainment. But what readers have liked has been his description of those very people: Jeeter Lester, a sharecropper in Tobacco Road who has fifteen children, who pawns off his own daughter for a turnip; a daughter, Pearl, who was married when only twelve years old; a near-catatonic mother; a grandmother so worthless she is left to die when run over by a car; a dumb son named Dude who marries Sister Bessie Rice, a widowed preacher, when promised he could blow the horn in her new car; and Jeeter’s daughter with the hare-lip: Ellie May’s 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. Caldwell’s fame soared in 1946 when God’s Little Acre was reissued, but after his marriage to Margaret Bourke-White ended—she left him often but once wrote him a cable, saying simply, “My pussy grows cold for you”—he was accused of writing inferior work and many magazines refused to publish his work. {WAS, 14 February 1951}