Erskine
Caldwell, the son of a missionary, was born in Coweta, Georgia, on
17th December, 1903. As a child he travelled with his father and developed
a concern for the poor. He was educated at the University of Virginia
but did not graduate.
Caldwell moved to Maine in 1926 where he began writing for various
journals including the New Masses and
the Yale Review. He also published
several novels but it was not until Tobacco
Road (1932), a novel about the plight of poor sharecroppers,
that critics began to take notice of his work. Dramatized by Jack
Kirkland in 1933, it made American theatre history when it ran for
over seven years on Broadway.
His next novel, God's Little Acre
(1933) was also about poor whites living in the rural South. Both
novels dealt with social injustice and many people objected to the
impression it gave of America. When the New York Society for the Prevention
of Vice tried to stop God's Little Acre
from being sold, Caldwell took the case to court and with the testimony
of critics such as H. L. Mencken and Sherwood
Anderson, won his case.
In 1936 Caldwell met and married the photographer, Margaret
Bourke-White. They collaborated on four books, including You
Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a documentary account of
impoverished living conditions in the South. During the Second
World War he worked as a newspaper reporter in the Soviet Union.
An account of his experiences appeared in All
Out on the Road to Smolensk (1942) and Call
It Experience (1951).
By the late 1940s Caldwell had sold more books than any author in
America's history. God's Little Acre
alone sold over fourteen million copies. His attacks on poverty, racism
and the tenant farming system, had a significant impact on public
opinion.
Caldwell wrote numerous short stories: collections include Jackpot
(1940) and The Courting of Susie Brown
(1952). Essays on his travels throughout the United states appeared
in Around About America (1964)
and Afternoons in Mid-America
(1976). Erskine Caldwell died in Arizona on 11th April, 1987.
Margaret
Bourke-White, Peterson,
Alabama, Have You Seen Their Faces (1937)
(1)
Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces
(1937)
Clinton, Louisiana: There are no landlords striding over their
Mississippi Delta plantations cracking ten-foot braided-leather whips
at their Negro sharecroppers' heels. At least there are only a few.
Peonage, like lynching, is not condoned in theory; but conditions,
usually best described as local, are sometimes called upon to justify
it in practice. And when a plantation-owner feels the urge tp beat
and whip and maul a Negro, there are generally several within sight
or sound to chose from. Keeping a Negro constantly in physical bondage
would be an unnecessary expense and chore; the threat of physical
violence is enough.
(2)
Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces
(1937)
Magee, Mississippi: The white farmer has not always been the lazy,
slipshod, good-for-nothing person that he is frequently described
as being. Somewhere in his span of life he became frustrated. He felt
defeated. He felt the despair and dejection that comes from defeat.
He was made aware of the limitations of life imposed upon those unfortunate
enough to be made slaves of sharecropping. Out of his predicament
grew desperation, out of desperation grew resentment. His bitterness
was a taste his tongue would always know.
In a land that has long been glorified in the supremacy of the white
race, he directed his resentment against the black man. His normal
instincts became perverted. He became wasteful and careless. He became
bestial. He released his pent-up emotions by lynching the black man
in order to witness the mental and physical suffering of another human
being. He became cruel and inhuman in everyday life as his resentment
and bitterness increased. He released his energy from day to day by
beating mules and dogs, by whipping and kicking an animal into insensibility
or to death. When his own suffering was more than he could stand,
he could live only by witnessing the suffering of others.
Margaret Bourke-White, Belmont,
Florida, Have You Seen Their Faces (1937)
(3)
Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces
(1937)
Peterson: Alabama: The house was dirty and disheveled. He and his
wife no longer had any pride in their home or in their appearance.
They went unwashed. He sat in the shade, his hat pulled over his eyes,
and watched the spring come, the summers go. The older children struggled
with cotton. It did not matter much to him then. He found a shack
several miles away. He got the owner's permission to live in it on
the promise of making the children work out the rent in the cottonfield.
The children, old and young, worked for the landlord to pay the rent
on the shack. After that, one of them would find a day's work occasionally,
and earn enough to buy cornmeal and molasses, sometimes meat. The
shack was without a floor. There was only one bed. They lived in two
rooms, the eight of them. The youngest child died of pneumonia. The
two oldest boys left home one day and did not come back again.
(4)
Erskine Caldwell, interview with a woman from Troy, Alabama, You
Have Seen Their Faces (1937)
We've been here most of our lives, my
husband and me, and I feel like I'm done for, and my husband looks
it. If it wasn't for our boy, we just couldn't get any cotton raised
to pay the rent. My husband is just no account. He sits there on the
porch all day looking out across the road and don't pretend to move.
My daughter is only half-bright, and can't do nothing much more than
sweep a room, and she's not good at that. I've got body sickness and
can't stand working in the fields any more, and it's all I can do
to drag myself around the house and cook a little food. All I feel
like doing most of the time is finding me a nice place to lay myself
down in and die.
(5)
Erskine Caldwell, interview with a bank
manager, Augusta, Georgia, You Have Seen Their
Faces (1937)
Don't ask me whose fault it is. I don't know. I don't even know
anybody who thinks he knows. All I know is that one man out of ten
makes a living, and more, out of cotton, and the other nine poor devils
get the short end of the stick. It's my business to sit here in the
bank and make it a rule to be in when that one farmer shows up to
borrow money, and to be out when the other nine show up. Some nights
I can't sleep at all for lying awake wondering what's going to happen
to all those losing tenant farmers. A lot of them are hungry, ragged,
and sick. Everybody knows about it, but nobody does anything about
it. If the government doesn't do something about the losing cotton
farmers, we'd be doing them a favor to go out and shot them out of
their misery.
Margaret Bourke-White,
Belmont,
Florida, Have You Seen Their Faces (1937)
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