TEJU COLE'S PAGE: KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS; TREMOR; EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF

KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS: Essays
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief

With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerations of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American photographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subjects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and pushback when it first appeared) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations are sentimentally aided by an America “developed on pillage.”

Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole’s wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities, and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames.

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My Review: Teju Cole says clearly and distinctly: "I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point." This is true; though he does not say a word about a novel not being pointed. All of his very much are; so are his essays collected here.

Fragments might be a better term for the shrapnel in this collection. None of them dig into their topic, develop a theme to a conclusion. It's more postmodern than that. I was "treated" to the horrors of mob justice in Nigeria; the fact of colorism, a strain of racism, in Brazil; the shame that's missing from the US's reckoning with its sin of racism and its ugly consequences; the horrors of Israeli apartheid (pre-2025):

The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor…Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab.

An unsparing gaze, always roving, roaming wherever he is. Quite a bit of the shards are centered on the photographic, framed for visual images, moments and techniques. He is making himself Isherwood's camera: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking," only adding the thinking back, more in the vein of James Baldwin.

It is, I suppose, unsurprising that Author Cole expends a lot of his energy on thinking about race in the US, as the Obama years were recent as this collection was taking shape. As those years radicalized the lowest of the low into the actions whose disgusting fruits we're being served now, his meditations on Obama's shortcomings as president feel...true, but not really the point. (He was, in my estimation, the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Measured as a Democrat, he was abysmal.) The fact that Author Cole lived half his life in Nigeria (at the point he was writing these pieces) meant he was looking at the US reaction to a Black man as our president with detached, slightly bemused, incomprehension.

More to my own personal taste was the selection of literarians Author Cole engaged with, eg Naipaul and Walcott. Both men were still living, both were being fêted, and both are now receding from the popular literary conversation into more academic renown. It is the course things take, so I can't say "boo hoo" very convincingly. It was a pleasure to re-engage with them through the author's intense, admiring (on balance) gaze.

I'm not that confident this is a collection of enough enduring insight to survive the long test of time. It was enjoyable to me, an adult in the Aughties, an Obama voter, a reader of Naipaul; it might not reach too much lower on the age ladder to find a large audience.

Erudite, pleasant reading, in a vein of early-internet pieces that don't go as deep as the old-fashioned word "essay" implies. Solidly four stars for me; maybe different for younger folk.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A young Nigerian writer living in New York City returns to Lagos in search of a subject—and himself.

Visiting Lagos after many years away, Teju Cole's unnamed narrator rediscovers his hometown as both a foreigner and a local. A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world: he hears the muezzin's call to prayer in the early morning light, and listens to John Coltrane during the late afternoon heat. He witnesses teenagers diligently perpetrating e-mail frauds from internet cafes, longs after a woman reading Michael Ondaatje on a public bus, and visits the impoverished National Museum. Along the way, he reconnects with old school friends and his family, who force him to ask himself profound questions of personal and national history.

Over long, wandering days, the narrator compares present-day Lagos to the Lagos of his memory, and in doing so reveals changes that have taken place in himself.

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My Review: A personal story of alienation, of reckoning with social and societal change, and the shifting bonds of family, we're in Lagos in the Aughties. We're following an unnamed narrator as reacclimates to life in Lagos after years spent in New York City.

It's autobiographical, or I'll eat my hat. Details have likely been massaged...reality doesn't often lend itself to this level of dramatic tension...but it's a roman à clef for his scoobygroup and autofiction for us on the outside. The level of social critique involved in observing his homeland, for it still very much is that to him, is all-consuming. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is done in Lagos to benefit anyone but the self. It's a prescient, if unintentional, alarm klaxon for the world of 2026's kakistocratic enshittification of the US: "What the trip back from the airport makes me think, and what is confirmed over the course of the following days, is the extent to which Lagos has become a patronage society". Everything old is new again....

Author Cole views this hypercapitalist dystopia with a level of humorous detachment that floats on a deeper pool of disillusionment. In many ways I felt I was reading a journalist's too-long think piece about homegoing, rejected by an editor who wanted 1000 words not 30,000. It's a novella-length work of self-analysis, working through the hurts inflicted by choosing outsiderhood over ill-fitting conformity. In no way is this Manhattanite going to submerge without a ripple back into the pool he climbed out of. Having experienced this myself, I was completely in tune with the narrative's driving force and direction.

I can't offer a fifth star because the double whammy of brevity, lack of space to develop the others in the story beyond foils for narrative reflection and amplification as outlines not rounded people, and an outsider-plus sense of superiority inherent in this return from a wealthier world.

It's an enjoyable story, if not a full novelistic reading experience.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TREMOR
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.

A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.

We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.

Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

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My Review: Rejecting tradition..."{I} wanted to give myself a chance to make something that could fail. I don’t know that people are doing enough with their freedom as writers—to keep doing this 19th-century thing bores me"...is often risky, even when you work inside the established alternatives to "the 19th-century thing" like modernism and its cousins. Here Tunde, our PoV character, is followed through a format I'd call braided stories around a stream-of-consciousness heart. Tunde's PoV third-person narrative shifts to fourth-wall-breaking first person at times, then into the satanic-second person as he addresses someone over our shoulder somewhere.

It's a complex read. It does little heavy lifting for you. It's your job as The Reader to supply your own thoughts about the purpose of Tunde's telling us his stories, giving us a story-mooning of his ass as we decide how to feel about that..."Tunde is startled out of these thoughts by {his wife}'s's return from work. They talk for a moment. She remains downstairs. He moves upstairs to her study. The room is lit by a single lamp and he continues reading" tells its own punch of a story about intimacy's failures and his failings in an introductory moment...we're launched into Tunde's trenchant observations: "It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul from across the globe. In the West a love of the "authentic" means that art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real. Better that the artist not be named, better that the artist be long dead. The dispossession of the object's makers mystically confers monetary value to the object," on the eternal nexus of culture, cultural appropriation, and colonialism.

Without a guide.

Tunde tells you what's what. From his position inside the colonizer/appropriators' world. Is he aware he's not reckoning with his own foothill of privilege adjacent to and causally connected to the mountains of privilege he's commenting on? I don't know. We're not told.

If you're going to experiment with style, do it interestingly. Build the maze and trust me to find a way out. Notice: A not The. I think this sums up the experience of reading this novel:

On his return he thought he was thinking of a photograph but he realized that he was thinking of a photographic negative, the colors inverted and left and right flipped. But it became clear to him that what he was actually thinking of was a photographic negative that had been made but had gone missing before it could be printed. And finally he realized that no, the negative had not even ever existed, it was all in the imagination or it was all in the future and he was thinking of a picture that existed only in the mind of the one who was thinking it. The more he tried to describe it the more elusive it was. It was there but it could not be looked at directly. At best it could only be seen out of the corner of the mind's eye and this was the way one might begin to speak of the city.

You're going to think this is a more interesting read after you've developed the negative, the text on the page, in your mind's developer bath. You're participating in framing the shot, in selecting the size...north-south, east-west, all or nothing on these meanings for a city's future (this only makes sense after reading the book)...and saturation of the print.

It's not easy but it's involving, it's exciting in the right mood, and it's using the 19th-century thing to mold a 21st-century object, a European art to draw an African subject. Did it fail?

Only a little around the middle saggy bits. Overconfidence in the reader leads some parts to feel unsatisfyingly undeveloped; untrusting of the readers' cultural background leaves other a mucky slog through extremely specific details that were not mission critical.

So, no full-five from me; but a half-star above "good" is "very good" and my three-quarters star is "very good indeed." It will be a read you invest in or bounce hard off; make your acquisition decisions carefully, try a sample or use the library; I hope you'll at least give it a try.

LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS, essential 19th-century reading tells us about the 21st century

LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS and Other Stories
REBECCA HARDING DAVIS (Tillie Olsen, editor; Kim Kelly, Foreword)
The Feminist Press at CUNY
$15.95 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Originally published in 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly, “Life in the Iron Mills” remains a classic of proletarian literature that paints a bleak and incisive portrait of nineteenth-century industrial America. Rebecca Harding Davis was one of the first writers to depict a working class that was exploited and exhausted as capitalism’s mills and factories destroyed both the natural environment and the human spirit.

Davis's work was first recovered in the 1970s by the Feminist Press and writer Tillie Olsen, and then expanded in the 1980s to be the most comprehensive collection of her work to date. This reissued edition includes an updated critical introduction, and shares a uniquely prescient capitalist critique with a new generation.

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My Review:

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent throuhg all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.

Choosing to bring her story to us via a first-person introductory passage was a stroke of genius by Author Harding Davis. At first, I felt very nervous because the idea of first-person present-tense narration for a whole novella's length isn't, um, too terribly appealing to me; but we get into the action when she has the narrator say that the people he's going to talk about lived there thirty years ago and....

Well! All is on track, then! Stand down, adrenal gland.

But mere lines later, my mind hit another conceptual pothole:

She did not drink, this woman,—her face told that, too,—nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,—some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone.

Wow! That's not even a little bit judgey, is it. (And "nothing stronger than ale" must resound oddly in the modern Puritanical no-booze no-sex no-fun ear! The paeans to the clean air and the purity of this bygone world make me itch. The entire world drank some sort of beer or wine because drinking water could kill you via cholera and/or diphtheria and/or typhoid fever.) Kim Kelly (author of Top Ten Words Women Hate which is short and to the point besides having a great title), in her Foreword to this second Feminist Press edition, says of the author:

Rebecca Harding Davis was born into a life of relative ease and had next to nothing in common with the workers in her story, and yet she writes about them and the proletarian struggle with such compassion and depth of insight that it's hard to believe she was merely watching from the window.

I must decline to co-sign, Kim Kelly. To my elderly man-ears, this story sounds like the Abolition era's standard christian social-reform literature à la Uncle Tom's Cabin. Built into its very real sympathy is the distancing judgmental mind-set inescapable by a woman of Author Harding Davis's background. She isn't all about the judgments, it is true, because her point is to bring into sharp relief the inequitable, really iniquitous, world that has done this to Deb, the character described here. But baked into the clay is that vocabulary of blame and othering inescapable in 1861's world-view.

The capitalist mouthpiece character is a piece of work. He's called Kirby, but really could've been called Carnegie or Rockefeller. His anthem:

"I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other's throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible."

In that unlovely speech, addressed to one Mitchell, the dilettante character of no special moral fiber but a deep and abiding aesthetic sensibility, one hears echoes of "I don't see race" and its ilk, doesn't one. Mitchell is moved to say in riposte, "Money has spoken!"

Kirby and Mitchell are discussing the existence of one of the mill-hands, Hugh Wolfe. He is a true Other, a man out of place in his place of residence. He has had a modicum of schooling; he is aesthetically aware of the world around him; therefore he is the subject of the other mill-hands' bullying. He has created a statue of great aesthetic interest to Mitchell, a carved woman whose anatomy Mitchell criticizes for being not starved-looking when Hugh tells him the korl sculpture is meant to be hungry. In a passage that felt to me more than a little codedly homoerotic, Wolfe, Kirby, and Mitchell pass around the idea of bodies on display (half-naked men abounding in the smelthing-furnace heat, summer or winter) being essentially lower-class unless they are Art.

Mitchell ends his part of the conversation with a "cool, musical laugh." ::eyebrow:: Then Author Harding Davis delivers this about him:

Bright and deep and cold as Arctic air, the soul of the man lay tranquil beneath. He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.

The hairpins are dropping...nay, flying! And then she has him speak Scripture, "De profundis clamavi" no less!, at which juncture he is compared to the Devil. Now I do not know Author Harding Davis's other works, but these are Uranian markers in nineteenth-century gay parlance. Mitchell, and to a lesser degree Kirby, are assessing Hugh Wolfe as a sex object. And he's right there with 'em.

Think not? Thus Hugh of Mitchell, so recently departed and he fears and expects not to return:

Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him,—the pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty or truth. In his cloudy fancy he had pictured a Something like this. He had found it in this Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at {Hugh's} pain: a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,—the keen glance of his eye falling like a sceptre on other men.

And the rest of the story might as well have been A Tragic Gay Romance. I'm fine with that, and don't feel the need to chisel away my impression of what Author Harding Davis did because it might not be what she intended (note use of conditional).

If you've paid me the slightest attention at all, you'll know that the anti-capitalist message of the story is so in tune with my own thoughts about a properly run world that this really needs no belaboring. I was absolutely sure I'd enjoy this story when I read this:

Everything old is new again, including the tension between the workers who make and the bosses who take. How many more Hughs are there out there now, working dangerous, soul-sucking jobs instead of following their passions? How many more will have to suffer before this wretched capitalist system finally breaks down and sets us all free?

I don't know, Kim Kelly. But the short answer is "not soon enough."

KNEEL TO THE RISING SUN, out-of-print Erskine Caldwell short-story collection

KNEEL TO THE RISING SUN and Other Stories
ERSKINE CALDWELL
Out of Print
various prices, depending on scarcity and condition

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Encyclopedia Says: Kneel to the Rising Sun is a collection of short stories by Erskine Caldwell first published in 1935. The seventeen stories, only a few pages each, all deal with various tragedies occurring in the early twentieth century American South, chiefly caused by poverty or racism. Caldwell is most well known for his novels, such as Tobacco Road; however, Kneel to the Rising Sun is held in high acclaim by his critics.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY COUNTY'S LIBRARY SYSTEM. USE THAT LIBRARY, FOLKS, THEY NEED US.

My Review: Erskine Caldwell, author of the indelible splotches on the American Southern escutcheon God's Little Acre and Tobacco Road, here collects seventeen of his short stories written before 1934, and set in the interwar period South, that was uneasily eyeing change and almost imperceptibly moving into the 20th Century...much against the white folks's will.

Caldwell says, in his introduction to this collection, that many writers are guided away from the short story format by well-meaning self-appointed cicerones. The novel, an aspiring writer is told, is the principle written medium, and short stories are a dead end. Pfui, says novelist Caldwell, some stories only need a few hundred words, and don't let anyone tell you any different.

Caldwell was right. Some stories don't need a novel. Even if some of these collected tales could be blown up into good novels, they're right-sized in this memorable, wonderful (if depressing) body of good work.

For this review of a collection of short stories, I'm adopting what I've come to call “the Bryce Method.” for the gentleman who first brought it to my attention on Goodreads. I will offer capsule reviews of the stories that make up the collection, since they're the important players and not the gestalt of the collection as such.

Candy-Man Beechum: A very short tale of Candy-Man, a seven-foot-tall mule-skinner who, one fateful Friday night, sets off across the fields and through the white folks's town to see his little yellow gal. Stopping for a fish-fry dinner, Candy-Man runs afoul of the white night policeman, refuses to stop and submit to being imprisoned for the crime of being on his way, and is shot dead in front of everyone at the fish-fry. He dies, however, glad not to be cowed and submissive, but instead as a man and worthy of respect. 4 stars

The Walnut Hunt: Church and Ray, two young country lads, meet up to hunt them some walnuts from the trees growing wild around P.G. Howard's farm. They jump over ditches in the red cotton-farming dirt to get to the grove closest to them, and damn if they don't find somebody's beaten them to all the walnuts in there. The boys jump another ditch when Ray says he sees someone already diwn there. Scared, the two lean over the ditch and see a strange sight: Annie, the town pump, at the bottom of the red-clay ditch staring up at the sky and screaming! She makes the boys promise they won't tell. Tell what, they ask, since they have not clue one about what they're witnessing. “I'm having a baby,” replies Annie. With that, she screams again, and the boys take off running like the Devil himself is after them. Ray, a little more scared than Church, and a little less emotional about it, reaches his front porch without even checking to see if his sobbing buddy has gotten up from the stubble he fell down in there in P.G. Howard's cotton field.

Childhood ends for us all. For some, the ending is rougher than for others. 5 stars

Horse Thief: Mr. John Turner's hired man takes Betsy, the rawboned mare, out for a clandestine rendezvous with Lud Moseley's younger daughter, Naomi, one Thursday night. Since he's only supposed to call on Naomi on Sundays, he won't tell Mr. John where he's going, though Mr. John pretty much knows, and gets a chuckle out of it. Seeing Naomi and her older sister arguing through their bedroom window, he knows he'll have to wait an hour or more for Naomi to sneak out and meet him by the swing in her front yard, so to keep his presence a secret, he puts Betsy into an empty stall in Lud Moseley's barn. Comes midnight or one, he gropes around the unfamiliar barn, finds Betsy all unbridled and unharnessed, figures he did it himself in his excitement at seeing Naomi, bridles and harnesses the horse and rides off home to Mr. John Turner's. The next morning, Lud Moseley and the sheriff come to get him for horse theft! Turns out he took Lightfoot, Lud Moseley's calico horse, by mistake, and the only way out of trouble would be to tell the men that he was there to see Naomi...thus ruining her reputation, getting her into trouble with her pa, and breaking his promise that he'd do anything for her.

Even go to prison for being a horse thief. Which anyone who knows him knows he's not. Such is the role of honor among the not so bright Southern males. 3 stars

The Man Who Looked like Himself: Luther Branch, past forty, can't catch a break or make a dime. No one in his little town can figure it out, why Luther can't sell a single solitary thing to anyone...why he can't even sell oranges to Mrs. Todd, who came out her front door to look at the ones Luther'd brought onto her porch! But everything changes when Luther, trying to tell Ben Howard at the grocery that he's decided to apply to get on the county poor farm, gets the break of his life: Henry needs a hog butchered AND NOW because it's been run over! Ben and Henry look Luther over, and decide then and there that this is Luther's calling: Butcher. Why, he even looks like a butcher.

Luther finally knows what he looks like, and so who he is: He looks like himself, and he's a butcher. He can finally take up life and make a living. He looks like himself, and he's a butcher. Every misfit's dream is to find the place he fits. Luther Branch does it.

Huzzah? 3.5 stars

Maud Island: Jim and Milt are out camping on Maud Island with their Uncle Marvin the preacher when, alas alack and welladay, a shantyboat comes along to take advantage of the privacy afforded by being in the middle of the Mighty Mississippi River for Jane and Marge and Mr. Graham. And, it looks like, for Uncle Marvin the preacher too. He drinks a beer or two with the low companions foisted on him by fate, then rushes the boys off to the Tennessee shore to get themselves on home before he takes full advantage of his luck. Once home, the boys's Aunt Sophie wants to know the whereabouts of Uncle Marvin. They don't tell, and turns out they don't need to: Sophie lays into the absent Marvin Hutchins with fury and verve for taking up with another shantyboat girl. Thus do Milt and Jim learn, forcefully, that the adult world is riddled with secrets and most of them are sordid and creepy and involve lies and sex.

Childhood ends for us all. 4 stars

The Shooting: A girl with a gun starts shooting up the town square, aiming for a man who is running as fast as he can away from her. Townsfolk are up in arms and along comes Toy Shaw, the local lawman. He's as scared as anyone else, but the crowds force him to deal with the scared girl with the big gun...he orders her to drop it, she refuses and fires again at the man she's trying to kill, then Toy shouts at her to aim for the sky, not to kill the man...she aims for the sky, drops the gun when it's empty, and swoons into her terrified would-be victim's arms. Toy, according to the townsfolk, saved the day. Sort of. From a girl with a gun.

Beats me what this one's got to say. Nothin' much, if you want my opinion. 2.5 stars

Honeymoon: Claude Barker and Willeen Howard get married. It's Claude's first time with a white girl. Willeen, a willing young slut who's even offered herself to dimwitted ol' Crip who works down at the gas station, has gone and tied herself to no-account Claude, who'd rather shoot pool than takes his low-rent bride on a low-rent honeymoon in his daddy's no-rent house. And there's poor Crip, all sad because he never took Willeen up on her offer.

Yeah, it's a slice of life. It's just not a slice I myownself fancy. In fact, Claude makes me queasy and Willeen makes me mad and the story is just distasteful. In the 1970s, there was a song called “Third-Rate Romance.” The chorus was, “Third-rate romance, low-rent redezvous...” I never knew it before now, but the band that sang it was made up of Erskine Caldwell readers. 3 stars

Martha Jean: When Hal and his pal The Type get tossed out of their crap game, busted flat, they brave the sleety winter night long enough to get to Nick's, where they expect a quick loan and maybe something to eat. What they get is the stiff-arm, as Nick tries to close up for the night and save some money on heating his mostly empty place where no one's playing the slots. Then in walks a pretty young girl, who tells Nick her name's Martha Jean. Nick clearly decides he's going to have his way with her the instant he sees her, and she, hungry as she is, either doesn't see it or doesn't understand it until it's too late. Hal tries to step in between them, but gets no back-up from The Type or anyone else, and ends up on the floor after Nick clocks him. Next thing Hal knows, he's out the door int the cold and sleety night, listening to Martha Jean scream.

Erskine Caldwell did not think much of his fellow man. No indeed he did not, no sirree bob. 2.5 stars

A Day's Wooing: Painfully shy Tuffy goes a-wooin' Miss Nancy after he moves the cows over to the johnson grass to give them a change of diet. He can't make himself say a single word to Miss Nancy, and her daddy Berry, sitting on the front porch with the rest of the family having a late summer Sunday watermelon, has to carry the conversation pretty much by himself. Carry it he does, as Tuffy can't make a sound to express the fact that he's come to ask for Nancy's hand in marriage. Finally, Nancy's pill of a brother drives Tuffy away by snapping him with a garter and urging him to go over to Hardpan and pick up some girls with them. Tuffy, completely undone, runs back to his car and leaves. Berry is confused, Nancy is distraught, and the brothers go for another melon out of the field.

It must be torture to be shy. I read this story while shouting “SPIT IT OUT!!” at hopeless, hapless Tuffy. I squirm and writhe in acute emotional pain when I read about this type of character. I try to help them, to shove my own “what's the worst that can happen” mindset into their “cannibals will eat me if I Do It” fearful, anxious brains. Oddly, it never works. *sigh* 4.5 stars

The Cold Winter: A man in a single unheated room listens to the life of a little girl and her mother in the single room next door as a way of keeping himself from feeling the numbing, deadly cold of February outside. The mother and child talk and laugh, and go about their lives, in a curious state of waiting. Finally, the man hears what they've all come to wait for: the arrival of the child's father, and the tense confrontation that ends in murder. The man next door shivers under his blanket in his unheated room, doing nothing.

There is a paralysis that comes with desperation. The man in this story is desperate. He has no job, he has no life, he has no support system. And he has no reason left to do even the simplest thing, like open his door and look at the murder taking place in the room next to him. Caldwell thinks about this level of society a lot, as most good socialists did back in his day. Those were the days.... 4 stars

The Girl Ellen: Jim and Doris have a single girlfriend named Ellen. She shows up on Jim's one day off from the factory where he works, when he and Doris were planning to go for a swim. Flirty Ellen horns right on in and, as she follows Doris into the house to get ready for the three-way outing, turns to give the startled and displeased Jim a quick kiss on the lips. Things degenerate from there to the point where Doris is aware of the inappropriate flirtation because Jim is warming up to the idea of some adventure with Ellen. Sadly, things go wrong, Doris ends up dead on the bottom of the pool, and Jim walks miles home only to collapse exhausted on his own floor, falling asleep wondering if Ellen would be there when he awoke.

I once had a close relationship with a married couple. It ended badly because the wife developed strong and unreciprocated feelings for me. It was a painful situation. I can't imagine how such a three-legged stool can ever be anything but trouble waiting to happen. Happily for me, in my case no one died! 5 stars

The Growing Season: Jesse's cotton crop is dying under the double threat of wire-grass (a horrible, horrible weed) and blistering, unrelenting heat. He's got no help, and he got behind in killing the wire-grass; his wife had a sunstroke year before, so she's no use, and there isn't even a Negro around the place. While he's out scraping the wire-grass, he finally loses what little is left of his sanity and kills Fiddler. What Fiddler might be, we are not told. Hounds are mentioned as a class of being, but not named, so Fiddler wouldn't seem to be a dog, and yet was kept chained outside under a chinaberry tree. Your guess is as good as mine, but my money's on Fiddler being a defective child or relative, because the wife has a twelve-volt conniption fit as Jesse's out killing Fiddler. Afterwards, Jesse's all energized and goes into battle with the wire-grass again. The end.

Yikes! 3 stars

Daughter: After that last story, one shudders to think what this one might be about....

And rightly so, as it turns out. Jim Carlisle, sharecropper for Colonel Henry Maxwell, shot his eight-year-old daughter dead because she woke up again saying she was hungry. Her daddy couldn't take it any more. He'd made enough to feed the family on his share. Colonel Maxwell took it all away because a mule died on Jim's watch. The whole town's there at the jail to find out what happened, and when they hear, there assembles a mob set to free Jim from jail. The sheriff walks away on home.

Grim, grim, grim. Life among the poor isn't any fun ever, but ye gods and little fishes! The Slough of Despond looks like a movie star's pool compared to the dark, stagnant waters Caldwell has us treading in these stories! 4 stars

Blue Boy: What fresh hell is this....

Blue Boy is a mentally defective Negro servant of Grady's, trained by the master to entertain his guests with repulsive party tricks. This New Year's Day, Grady has five counties' worth of relations to his hog-and-turkey dinner and, in the post-prandial stupor that a feast can leave a person in, has Blue Boy come and entertain the assembled company. For the last time, it turns out, as Blue Boy has a fatal fit after his last party trick.

Horrible, and horrifying, and completely without any tiniest stretch of human decency. 2.5 stars

Slow Death: Doesn't THAT title just buoy your hopes for some relief from the grims!

Dave was a family man, a wife and three daughters and a modest rented home, until he lost his job at the fertilizer plant in South Augusta, Georgia. His landlord was unusually generous, letting him slide for six months. After that, though, the pressure to move cost Dave the lives of two daughters and his wife as windows were removed, doors taken away, and the January elements and hunger did the rest. Dave's remaining daughter was last seen in the arms of a policeman, carrying her off to a fate he doesn't know. Now Dave lives with Mike in a packing crate down under the Fifth Street Bridge, picks up odd jobs for fifty cents a day at most, and shares what he makes with the younger Mike, who tries not to take what little Dave has. This is the slow death of the title. It's speeded up for Dave as a traffic accident leaves him barely breathing and his fellow bums cluster around calling for the driver who hit him (a scumbag who denies Dave is even hurt, and finally runs away) to take Dave to the hospital, which never happens. Mike watches Dave die, the whole time refusing Dave's insistent urgings to take the half-dollar in his right-hand pants pocket. In the end, when a cop arrives, it's the bums he's eager to rush off, and Mike catches the worst of it, a billy club to the head. He wakes up being carried back to the Hooverville by his fellow bums.

Brother, can you spare a dime? It would surprise many of the people able to read this review online to know just how easy it is to lose everything. It's happened to me, and it took less than two years. Luckily for me I have a social network and I was not forced to live in a packing crate under a bridge. But believe someone who has been there when he tells you, conservatives and libertarians, the “generous handouts” that so many of you rail against were not there for me, and I was not able to...am still fighting for, in fact...access the disability benefits that my Social Security contributions over the years theoretically, and socialistically according to many, funded. My own savings long gone from fighting to retain my home against the insurance companies that refused and the hospital that demanded payments my employer-provided plan guaranteed, what hope was there? My family? No. My friends? Thank goodness, yes, but all personally granted generosity has a limit. So perhaps some of you who haven't experienced this upending and upheaval will pause to reflect on WHY your payment taxes, if some of those taxes save your fellow humans from starvation and homelessness, should cause you such pain.

Shut up and pay for what a decent person should not complain about funding: Food, shelter, and health care for all. 4.5 stars

Masses of Men: Too disgusting even to describe. Mother so desperate she pimps her ten-year-old out for food because her husband was killed on the job and suddenly no one at the company knows who he was.

Greed appalls me at the best of times. This level of greed is unthinkable, and yet it's not. When I was unemployed, I was denied benefits because my employer didn't want to pay them. Explain to me again how capitalism and a free, unfettered market are good. I've forgotten. 4.5 stars

Kneel to the Rising Sun: Lonnie Newsome, starving sharecropper of vile bully Arch Gunnard, is too cowardly, too stupid, and too hungry to ask for his due rations for himself, his father, and his wife, or to prevent Arch from sadistically cutting off Lonnie's dog's tail. When his father wanders away in the night, searching for food, and falls to his death into the hog pen, Lonnie wakes his Negro friend Clem up to help Lonnie look for the old man. Clem ends up talking back to Arch, and runs away when Arch calls up a lynching party. Lonnie, too weak and cowardly to resist the pressure on him, tells the lynch mob where to find Clem, sealing the Negro man's doom. After witnessing the murder, Lonnie goes home to his wife, who asks him to get them some food before his father comes home. Lonnie can't even bring himself to tell her what has happened to his father, and greets the dawn of another day as he greets them all: On his knees, unable to stand on his feet. 5 stars