First published 1947
Jeeter Lester sits on the porch of his ramshackle house, watching the barren fields that once grew cotton. His family has nothing left. The sharecropping system has collapsed, the soil is exhausted, and creditors no longer bother to collect debts from people this poor. Jeeter's wife Ada grows thinner each day. Their children scatter or scheme for scraps. The family obsesses over their next meal and eyes their Black neighbors with resentment, terrified of sinking even lower in the social order. Caldwell places readers inside a household where poverty has stripped away all pretense and left raw human need. The Lesters lie, steal, and abandon each other as easily as they breathe. Set in the depleted farmlands around Augusta, Georgia during the Great Depression, this story reveals what happens when economic collapse meets a family already living on the edge of desperation.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, family-drama
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-secrets, poverty
Setting: Augusta, Georgia
Period: Great Depression
Mass Market Paperback · Signet