Customer Reviews

You Have Seen Their Faces

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In the early years of the Great Depression, author Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent 18 months in the American Southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee interviewing and photographing tenant farmers, commonly known as sharecroppers. This book, published in 1935 is the result of their work. Caldwell wrote about sharecroppers barely scraping a living from land drained of all fertility, the landlords who kept 10 million Southerners in economic slavery to produce cotton, and the politicians and ministers who supported the system rather than reform it. While he interviewed, Bourke-White sat quietly with camera ready to photograph them. It includes 75 mostly, full-page pictures taken by her that portray the destitute life of the tenant farming families. This is an amazing depiction of Southern poverty in words and pictures that I found very moving in spite of its age.

A book is an interesting testimony of the poor people in the South in the 1930s. Some criticized it for making money from the fates of the poor, or for fabricating what people were saying on the photographs. Well, Calldwell said himself that people on the photos didn't say what he wrote and he warns the reader about that in the beginning. In my opinion some of the passages are really a bit too opinionated or maybe Caldwell tries to preach the reader. However, together with good photographs we get to know much about the plight of the poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the south, and also about the consequences of poverty and hunger. I recommend reading also some of Caldwell's novels or short stories: Tobacco Road, The God's Little Acre, Trouble In July.