Time and time again, his ailing wife Ada and neighbouring farmers have counselled him to move to the city where working for mills would provide just enough subsistence for their survival. The land was where I was put at the start, and it’s where I’m going to be at the end Maybe I ain’t got much sense, but I know it ain’t intended for me to work in the mills. Year after year, crops have died out either owing to some natural calamity or a dearth of resources which are required to plough and harvest the crops. But the soil which he worships so much, does not provide for him anymore.

Jeeter Lester, a father of seventeen children, reveres the land his ancestors left him. I can’t move off to the cotton mills like the rest of them do. Us Lesters sure like to stir the earth and make plants grow in it. I did it for near about fifty years, and my Pa and his Pa before him was the same kind of men. It’s in my blood-burning broom-sedge and plowing in the ground this time of year. Chickens had roosted on it, when there were chickens at the Lesters’ to roost, and it was speckled like a guinea-hen. He would get out then and look for a creek so he could fill the pail again.

When Jeeter got ready to go somewhere, he filled the lard pail to overflowing, jumped in, and drove until the water splashed out and the engine locked up with heat. They are constrained by the heinous cycle of poverty in which they live and eventually wither away. Each day, hunger gnaws at their insides, depleting them of any impetus that might result in motivation to leave their land, settle in the city and begin working in mills. Extreme indigence doesn’t even begin to describe the plight of this family that has gone year after year without adequate resources of survival. This is an incredibly powerful and tragic tale depicting the Depression Era and its effects on a destitute family, the Lesters. Down there on the tobacco road no one ever laughed.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell