Customer Reviews

Georgia Boy

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This book is a novel / short story collection. The book involves a poor Georgia family: an ignorant but pleasure seeking husband, his nagging, hard-working wife, their young teen-age son, and their black workman ( who is treated as a thankless slave ).

Each chapter in the book, is not related to the previous, but are simply episodes of humor in ignorance. Their father's money making schemes are a stitch. Their are also some sobering stories as well, but mostly it is a funny book. I found myself really attached to the family at the end and enjoyed the book quite a bit. It is typical Caldwell writing here.

Equal parts burlesque, farce, and tall tale, Erskine Caldwell's interrelated short story collection Georgia Boy (1943) finds its author near the peak of his writing talent. Young William Stroup, the observant only child of a poor Georgia family, narrates the fourteen stories. While the endless string of shenanigans William reports clearly demonstrate his father Morris' stupidity, sloth, and immorality, objective William never offers an opinion on his father's behavior. As the stories progress, it becomes clear that while he mildly sympathizes with his hardworking, frustrated, and put-upon mother, William actually admires his father's outrageous breaches of acceptable behavior.

Like Jeeter Lester of Tobacco Road (1931) and Ty Ty Walden of God's Little Acre (1933) before him, Morris Stroup is a daydreamer constantly on the lookout for pie in the sky and any shortcut to prosperity, no matter how absurd, outlandish, or illegal.

In fact, the Stroups stand somewhere between the Lesters and the Waldens in terms of socialization; while they are not as backward, uneducated, and dispossessed as the poorest-of-the-poor-Lesters, the Stroups lack the Walden's daring-do, ingenuity, marginal prosperity, and relatively strong interrelationships. Like the Lesters, the Stroups live in a house divided: since the extraverted Morris is constantly misbehaving on a grand scale, William's mother ("Ma") finds it necessary to constantly be on her guard against her husband's latest transgression. One of the book's hilarious running jokes is Ma telling William to "go in the house right this instant and shut the doors and pull down the window shades" so she can confront Morris alone with his latest deception, chase him with a broom, or throw any object available in his direction. Like most men and teenage boys in Caldwell's fiction, Morris thinks with his genitals and his stomach first.

When Ma is not suffering due to Morris's behavior, Handsome Brown, the black "yard boy," is. Handsome lives in a shed on the Morris property and receives only food and occasional secondhand clothing for his work. Though Handsome is thrown from a second-story roof into a deep well, attacked for hours by a flock of woodpeckers, and hit repeatedly in the face with baseballs due to Morris's wild machinations, Handsome also shows far more common and moral sense than any other character in the book. Handsome, who has a slight lazy streak of his own, also does most of the work around the house, while Morris "hasn't done an honest day's work in ten years." While Morris is clearly a fool in every sense, Handsome is only a fool in Morris's unthinking opinion: Morris unquestioningly considers Handsome a lesser being strictly on the basis of his race.

But Morris is an archetypal fool extraordinaire, ridiculously bringing one avoidable disaster after another upon his head. A pure fool, Morris is incapable of learning from his mistakes or perceiving his own culpability, lacks foresight entirely, and regardless of the outcome of his actions, still manages to have a high opinion of himself as a `hail-fellow-well-met,' kind, light-hearted individual.

The stories of Georgia Boy abound with loaded, riotous situations, most of which have been precipitated by Morris. The Stroup home is invaded by caravans of marauding gypsies; the roof of their two-story house becomes home to a family of goats; Morris discovers that a young widow likes having her toes tickled with a chicken feather; Ma discovers her precious ribbon-bound love letters and the church's new hymnals have disappeared; Morris decides to become the town's dog catcher; Handsome decides to run off to work for the circus; Morris decides to purchase and bright yellow and green necktie he can't afford and has no use for; Morris decides his neighbors have less use for their own property than he does; Ma decides Morris's cock fighting days have to come to an end.

As in his other early fiction, Caldwell excels at characterization, even while his men, women, and children tend to run to type. Caldwell had a genius for comedy that stretches the boundaries of probability without ever going too far. Like a fourteen-story illustration of F. Scott Fitzgerald's statement that "there's no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind," Georgia Boy is a warm, touching, and uproarious examination of the large and small foibles of man.

Readers who were struck by the bleakness and power of Caldwell's Tobacco Road will find something very different in these almost homey, amusing reminiscences of a seriously dysfunctional Southern family. The book is structured as a series of self-sufficient vignettes, detailing separate incidents in the everyday lives of these very everyday people in the early 20th century. The father, Morris Stroup, is lazy, thoughtless, possibly a womanizer (only the Grass Widow knows for sure), certainly a thief, frequently a drunk, and willing to turn his hand to anything except honest work. The mother, Martha, is appropriately harried, cantankerous, demanding, and dictatorial. She takes in wash to help make ends meet, but she bitterly resents the fact that she has to do so much hard work (that she considers beneath her) just to make up for her husband's shortcomings. So what's a boy to do, but just try to stay out of the way?

The stories are told from the viewpoint of young William, but he is rarely more than an observer. Handsome Brown, the `Negro yardboy', gets stuck doing the really dirty work, and gets pretty short shrift from both grownups, although he and William are great pals. He bears the brunt of most of the book's physical humor, and some enterprising student could probably write a good paper about racism (or just plain southern stereotypes) using this book. Despite the nostalgic, Wonder Years viewpoint, there's an undercurrent of pain and frustration that makes us sympathize with these characters even when we see them behaving pretty badly, as when Pa comes home drunk and starts breaking the furniture, or Ma's endlessly distressing over what the neighbors will think. Caldwell's picturesque prose paints some hilarious pictures - the goats on the roof, and the attack of the shirt-tail woodpeckers stick in the mind - but the actual belly-laughs are few and far between, and too often the characters come off as more pathetic than lovable. As a result, the pleasure one might derive from these slapstick antics is tempered by the misery and poverty that these luckless people seem doomed to live in. Fans of southern literature will find this book fairly light reading, however, since many American authors (Faulkner, Twain, Harper Lee, etc...) have dealt with the foibles, follies, pain and pathos of these kinds of characters far more effectively.

In this collection of fourteen short stories, Caldwell continues his allegory of the proto-Capitalist South found in God's Little Acre, Tobacco Road and Journeyman. Each short story is a humorous look at the issues facing the South with one foot in the mythical Antebellum and one in a modern world for which it is not prepared.

The stories are told through the eyes of a twelve year old boy who is an innocent reporter of the upheaval of the world around him. The actions of his part-time farmer "old man," his down-to-earth mother and the black man, Handsome Brown do not phase him as out of the ordinary. Instead Caldwell allows the readers to analyze the validity of their actions.

The "Old Man," Morris Stroup, is a chip off the old block of Jeeter and Ty Ty. He is constantly finding ways to mortgage his future for a quick buck. In one instance Morris is willing to use his old love letters and all his wife's recipes to bundle paper to gain a few dollars. In another story, Morris steals the capital of his neighbors just to earn some money from the scrap iron buyer. Caldwell uses Morris to show how the South of Caldwell's day appeared unwilling to invest in its future.

Caldwell also shows the virtual servitude Blacks were held in. The Black yard boy, Handsome Brown, is constantly forced to do what no white man would attempt. In one story he tries to run away from his predicament with his only way out being the man who is dunked in the dunk tank at the fair. The Old Man wins Handsome back but only by spending his son's twenty-five cents to do so, mortgaging the future of the South.

The tales are pointed and funny. The reader is left to marvel at the stupidity of Morris Stroup and the other whites. Meanwhile, the narrator, the New South, doesn't see that its funny, but merely the way things are. Great Book and the next one to read after Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre.