Essay Questions

How does Caldwell portray Lester farm as a representative of rural squalor and humiliation faced by Americans in this novel?

Lester farm is Georgia home of Jeeter Lester's family, close to the town of Fuller. A three-room shaky house with a hanging porch and defective rooftop remains in a grassless yard with a few of chinaberry trees to a great extent. The encompassing cotton fields have not been cultivated for quite a long while and are congested. Some seventy-five years prior, it had been a promising tobacco farm possessed by Jeeter's grandfather. Running through the property is a tobacco road about fifteen miles in length, when used to move tobacco containers to the steamboats on the distant Savannah River.

Jeeter's powerlessness to create a sensible yield from the sandy, drained soil has left him so intensely paying off debtors that he has gone to sharecropping on what was at one time his family's manor. The soil opposes Jeeter's inexorably vulnerable, however good natured, endeavors to grow a maintainable harvest. Its barrenness reflects the ineptitude that step by step surpasses Jeeter and decreases him to minimal more than a shadow of a man. Before the finish of the novel, there stays even less of the farm after a fire obliterates the old house, leaving just a “tall brick chimney . . . blackened and tomb-like.”

The complete, miserable destitution so graphically delineated by the Lesters' predicament is representative of the rustic lack of sanitization and humiliation looked by numerous Americans living at the most reduced degrees of monetary and moral degradation.

What happened to Jeeter Lester’s family at Augusta?

Augusta is a Georgia city around fifteen miles from the Lester farm. The Lesters go to Augusta naïvely wanting to vend some firewood. The excursion, in a brand-new car acquired by Sister Bessie, the new spouse of Jeeter's sixteen-year-old son Dude, neglects to collect any cash to purchase food or different necessities. They spend the night in a "hotel," which looks like a brothel or hookers’ hotel, and Sister Bessie, in her numbness, gets shunted about from room to room, experiencing different obscure men holding up in beds. When they all head home the following day, they are unaware or more extravagant for having had the experience. Besides, the heap of wood and the absence of oil in the engine have destroyed the new car.