“Autumn” from Sherwood Anderson’s “Home Town”

Autumn—the mellow golden time of falling leaves, cider, apples, and pumpkins. The year’s decline and a farewell to summer’s heat and languor. Long hazy days, the time of “mist and mellow fruitfulness.” In the great Midwest the trees are in color and the corn and soy are harvested, leaving bare fields full of stubble to await planting in spring. In Sherwood Anderson’s Home Town (1940), the last of his books published during his lifetime, autumn is described as “the checking up time, the harvesting of the year’s efforts of the American man to survive, getting a little forward in life.”

Home Town is a quiet, leisurely kind of book, a kind of ambling, easygoing overview of the general aspects of small town life. There are sections devoted to each of the four seasons. This is the fourth and final post on Buckeyemuse devoted to these seasonal chapters in Home Town. Further down the road I will take a look at the book overall.

Sherwood Anderson, the American novelist, short story writer, and journalist, published Home Town shortly before leaving America in March of 1941 to write a series of articles for Reader’s Digest about South American countries and their people. The writer was interested in establishing cultural bonds between North and South America and finding new markets for his writing. The U.S. State Department saw value in his trip and asked him to serve as an unofficial American goodwill ambassador. The country wanted to foster good relations with these other nations, especially as the U.S. was likely to enter the world war. Anderson was well suited to the job. He wanted to speak with everyday people, not just other writers and journalists, and his quiet, down-to-earth manner made him a good fit for the role.

Home Town was his last publication before his untimely death from peritonitis in the Panama Canal Zone. The book is a series of reflections on small town life illustrated with photographs by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers. These photographers, whose ranks included such notables as Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn, recorded both American life during the years of the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to combat the Great Depression.

Home Town, in retrospect, seems like a good way for Anderson’s career to end. Anderson is best known for his classic collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which captures the loneliness and alienation of small town lives, but Anderson knew the more joyous and life-affirming elements in rural and small town America as well. Anderson’s best biographer, Walter Rideout, Jr., describes Home Town as “a compound of nostalgia and wide-traveled observation put together by the townsman who in Winesburg showed the dark side of a community more than its light and now, as though balancing his masterpiece, genially shows the light side more than the dark.”

Anderson knew small town life from his earliest days. He was born in the little town of Camden, Ohio on September 13, 1876. His family moved from Camden a year later and lived in Mansfield and Caledonia, Ohio before settling in Clyde in the state’s northwest corner. There Anderson spent most of his childhood and youth. He worked odd jobs and served in the Spanish-American War before finding success as an advertising copywriter and factory owner, but gave up business to write. His first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, appeared in 1916.

He followed it with another novel and a book of verse before Winesburg, Ohio appeared in 1919. This collection of interconnected short stories made Anderson’s name and has long been recognized as a classic work of American fiction.

Anderson continued to publish short story collections and novels, but during the mid 1920s he published the first of his volumes of memoir, and later in the same decade purchased two newspapers in Marion, Virginia—one Democratic and one Republican—and served for a time as a small town editor. Anderson increasingly turned more of his attention to journalism and essays. His fourth and last wife, Eleanor Copenhaver, a YWCA social worker, encouraged Anderson to travel the country and see firsthand the results of the Great Depression. Anderson was especially interested in the south, so he went on the road. His collection of essays entitled Puzzled America is a fascinating look at aspects of southern life at this time. The man who sat down and wrote Home Town had decades of experience with small town life in the Midwest and South to draw upon. The literary critic Maxwell Geismar later described Anderson as “The Last of the Townsmen”–meaning he not only knew small town life, but had witnessed the nation’s transition from a largely agricultural society to an increasingly industrial one.

Home Town is a work of photo-text, a combination of prose or poetry illustrated with photographs. This interesting genre became part of the literary culture of the mid 1930s to the early 1940s. The suffering created by the Depression inspired writers and photographers to record what was going on across the country. This impulse resulted in works that often have the documentary purpose of exploring, and sometimes celebrating, America and its people and places. Some famous works of photo-text from the time include Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free, and Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices.

Anderson’s narrative voice in Home Town reminds me of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town—an easygoing man who reflects on the lives and circumstances of the people around him. He writes of crops, small town papers, churches, schools, the rituals of courtship and marriage. It’s easy to picture Anderson as country editor in his fedora and rumpled suit sitting in a small town diner or on a bench on a courthouse square and speaking of the people and places he knows to some visitors. Home Town evokes an oral tradition, as befits a man like Anderson whose work had an oral quality and who was the son of a gifted storyteller.

Everyday life, the interactions of people as shaped in part by the seasons, the sports particular to each time of year, the underlying economic uncertainty of the Great Depression—all are part of  Home Town’s seasonal chapters. Given that autumn is the harvest season, Anderson focuses heavily on agriculture and its importance to small town life. Anderson particularly enjoyed the autumn of 1940 in Marion, Virginia, where he had lived for many years by the time he wrote Home Town. The leaves were especially spectacular that year, and Anderson enjoyed driving through the hills and seeing them in their fall splendor. Home Town was released at this time. Anderson had always loved the beauty of the American earth. It was to be his last autumn.

One feature that separates his fall and winter sections with those of spring and summer is increased concern about money and hunger. A theme of economic uncertainty runs through the book, which is not surprising given its appearance during the Depression years. This theme adds a more somber tone to these two seasonal chapters. But for rural people, this anxiety was nothing new. For those working the land, the possibility of disaster from weather is always present, and American farmers had contended with serious economic problems in the years between the end of World War One and the Crash of 1929. A poor harvest, a low bank account, cold weather and lack of food mean real suffering. Anderson himself knew what it was like to experience poverty. He knew it did not discriminate, that it could be found in a bucolic small town as well an an urban slum.

There is an interesting topical reference in Home Town. Anderson makes mention of “Tobacco Road.” He is referring to the novel by Erskine Caldwell, which made quite an impact in the 1930s along with Caldwell’s novel God’s Little Acre. Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933)both deal with southern rural poverty. While both concern impoverished life on southern farms,  God’s Little Acre includes material on life in southern textile mills. Southern agriculture and industrialism were both important interests of Anderson during these years. Readers at the time would have recognized “Tobacco Road” as a shorthand reference for rural southern poverty and squalor. Tobacco Road became even more widely known when it became a long-running Broadway play.

However, the joys of autumn in rural and small town America are here also: football games, hunting, canning, meat-curing, nut-gathering, and cider-making are part of fall’s richness in the small towns. Anderson looked upon all these things with a wise and loving eye. Here is Anderson on autumn, from his 1940 book Home Town:

In the towns the fall is the checking up time, the harvesting of the year’s efforts of the American man to survive, getting a little forward in life. To the poor it brings dread of the long cold days of the North, the rain and mud of the South. Now in the gardens back of the houses in the towns the potato and tomato vines are withered and blackened. Men and women walk with a new soberness along the streets. In many hearts there is a creeping fear.

“How are we ever going to get through the winter, keep warm, feed and clothe the children?” a small town wife says to her husband.

In Southern towns now the trucks and wagons piled high with the newly-picked cotton stand waiting their turn at the small town cotton gins. Along the roads leading into town, weeds, bushes, and trees are decorated with clinging bunches of cotton. Soon the rows of baled cotton will be standing in the vacant lot about the gin or on the freight station platform. They will go off to the Southern mill towns or to the compresses in nearby cities to be squeezed small for shipment abroad. Great trucks, piled high with bales, are running along Southern highways and through Southern towns. Formerly the cotton went by wagon to the nearest river steamboat landing, river towns having a boom time, songs of the Negro stevedores floating up from river boats.
It is settlement time in the Southern towns, the tenant farmers of the South, white, black and brown, come in to check up on the year’s work. There is the eternal hope of a little money coming in. The land owners have stood good for the tenants at the town stores, fertilizer bought in the spring, a tenant farmer allowed a little credit for fat-back and meal during the year. It is Tobacco Road come to town.

Men, women and children of the Southern towns, white and black, go out into the fields for the fall cotton picking, children wanting shoes, the men new overalls, the women new dresses. The cotton crop and the price it brings is a vital story to them.

The coming South of the cotton mills brought hordes of the poor tenant farmers into the towns. Often the mill seems the town’s one hope. Stock in some of the mills was sold by preachers in the churches. It was done with prayer in which the whole town joined, hoped-for employment, a little actual money coming in, often a chance for some sort of education for the children in the mill town schools.

In the upper South in the fall the tobacco markets are opened in the towns, in the Sugar Belts down Louisiana way, it is the time of cane cutting. The big cane mills are pressing the juice from the cane. You see the children of the towns, white and black, each sucking away at a joint of cane.

The tobacco markets enliven the streets of town in the tobacco country, in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. The tobacco buyers, shrewd fast-working men, have come to town. They are living in the town hotel. They seem like supermen to the tobacco growers. They are to make the price for the year’s tobacco crop. In the evening they go together to the movies or sit together in a hotel room playing cards. It is hard to convince the tobacco growers and town people that they do not get together on prices. When prices are down you hear people along the street growling at them as they go back and forth to the big warehouses.

“Hey you, how much tobacco are you going to steal today?”
There are huge trucks loaded with tobacco in “hands” coming into town. Little broken down trucks climb painfully the steep grade into town in the hill country. Automobiles have tobacco piled high in the back seat.

It is a nervous waiting time. Here again, when the towns of the upper South have not become factory towns, the whole year’s chances for prosperity hang on the price the crop brings, on the condition of the crop. Everything counts in making the price—the color, the texture of the leaf. In the light-yellow tobacco country of North Carolina and in Tidewater, Virginia, the tobacco is kiln dried but in the burley country of southwest Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee it is cured in big tobacco barns or sun cured on poles in the field.

A hail storm on the growing tobacco can ruin it. Not too many growers know the secret of grading. They mix the bad with the good, the rain-splashed leaves at the base of the plant, called “ground lugs,” with the broad green leaves out of the center of the plant’s middle and the whole crop goes off at a low price. In the big tobacco warehouses of the towns there is the sustained, queerly Oriental chant of the auctioneers. Farmers wait about for their turn to get their tobacco on the sales floor. They stand by the loaded trucks, lined up in the town streets. They wait on the warehouse floor anxiously watching as the prices go up and down. Where there is a big market, farmers sleep on their loads in the town streets.

The grocers stand about in the streets of the town. Wives and children stand waiting. There is a curious intensity in faces. Merchants of the town wait anxiously. Will it be a good or a bad year?
The buyers for the big tobacco and cigarette companies are going up and down pulling hands out of the great baskets, making their bids. They become temporarily half gods, deciding the fate of growers and town men alike.

What the cotton crop means to the towns of the lower South and tobacco to the upper South the potato crop means to the communities in the northern New England states, to Colorado and Idaho, the apple crop to north Pacific coast towns and to the valleys of Virginia.

In the Middlewest it is corn cutting time and at the edge of some of the towns corn husking contests are held. Champion corn huskers come to town to win prizes. Trucks loaded with yellow corn run swiftly through the streets of Middlewestern towns, some of the yellow earns falling in the streets. There are yellow ears, fallen from trucks, along the sides of roads leading into town. In some of the states they break the ears out of the stalks and turn the cattle into the fields. On still nights in little towns you hear the crash of cattle among the dry standing corn in nearby fields. When the corn is shocked you see the piles of gold against the brown earth.

Although the coming of the factories has changed life tremendously in many small American towns the greater number of them are still tied to the soil, hay prices, cattle prices, cabbage, wheat, corn, oats, potato prices, abundance or failure of crop, prices the crops bring, tell the story of hard or good times in the towns.

The fall is the time for the town boys to go nut gathering in the woods, the hunters to clean their guns and go into the fields with their bird and rabbit dogs.
Apples to be picked and cider made, the women of the little frame houses of the towns doing their fall canning.

Only a generation or two ago in the smaller American towns a hog was kept in a pen in the back yard but now the town man, instead of killing his own hog, goes out into the country and buys a pole hog. There is lard and sausage making, hams and slabs of bacon are hung up to be cured. For the most part the old fashioned family cellar with its bins of apples and potatoes, its long rows of fruits in glass jars on shelves is disappearing. There is more dependence on the canned goods bought in stores, put up by the big canneries. The town man is a little less close to the life of the farms but with the coming of tight times there is, in many small towns, a going back to old ways.

In the houses of the town when fall comes the radios bring the result of the baseball world series and the big football games. High school boys are being put through football practices on the playground back of the town high school building. Where is your American small town, in the coal mining country, in the North, South, East, or West without its high school football team? If a town boy shows up well, has speed and power, he may be able to make football carry him through some big state college or university. It happens.

In the coal mining towns the mines have speeded up production. In the late summer and fall the roar of coal down the tipple goes on all day long, a black dust settling over the towns, winds carrying it over nearby fields, dimming the fall colors in the trees. It is in your hair, your nose, your eyes, your clothes. An increasingly big amount of coal is carried away from the mine town in trucks, over hundreds of miles of paved highways, to towns outside the mining section. The fall is the time for strikes, for a tightening up of the labor front. As in the southern cotton mill towns, the houses in which the miners live are owned by the companies that operate the mines.

The fall is election time in the towns. The politicians are about, often going from house to house, shaking hands with the men, caressing babies, making promises.

Can a man make the old overcoat last through another year, can he get new shoes for the kids, will the town factory run full-handed this year, what about the price of coal, can the wife make the old cookstove stand up through another winter?

“I tell you what, Jake, I wish I was one of the lucky ones. I wish I could put the family in the old car, go off south to Florida or west to California. I wonder if we will ever have real prosperity back again, plenty of jobs, plenty of work for a man to do?”

“Say, have you put anti-freeze in your car yet?”
“Gee, but the summer seemed short. Seems like a wind just blew it away.”

Patrick Kerin

Resources:

Home Town by Sherwood Anderson from “The Face of America” series, edited by Edwin Rosskam. Photos by Farm Security Administration photographers. Alliance Book Corporation, New York. 1940.

Sherwood Anderson by Kim Townsend. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1987.

Sherwood Anderson: A Writer In America, Volumes I and II by Walter Rideout. Introduction by Charles Modlin. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2007.