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The Great Depression #1
The Least One
The Least One, published originally in 1967, portrays a white sharecropping family during the Great Depression and is based on Borden Deal’s experiences growing up on a small farm in northeastern Mississippi. “My own memory produced a flood of material,” said the author. “I remembered the loss of the farm, the day the sheriff had come to dispossess us; I remembered picking blackberries and selling them in town for a dime a bucket; I remembered the hope and promise of a government mule.”
The story is told through the voice of a twelve-year-old, significantly called Boy Sword, and is set in a fictitious community that suggests the area of Cullman, Alabama. Deal portrays the realities of cotton-field work: planting, chopping, the laying-by time, and harvesting. He succeeds in evoking not only the crushing economic circumstances of poor Southern whites in that period but also their fierce sense of independence and self-sufficiency.
The story is told through the voice of a twelve-year-old, significantly called Boy Sword, and is set in a fictitious community that suggests the area of Cullman, Alabama. Deal portrays the realities of cotton-field work: planting, chopping, the laying-by time, and harvesting. He succeeds in evoking not only the crushing economic circumstances of poor Southern whites in that period but also their fierce sense of independence and self-sufficiency.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
1 person is currently reading
89 people want to read
About the author
Borden Deal
51 books10 followersBorden Deal was an American novelist and short story writer. Born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, Deal attended Macedonia Consolidated High School, after which he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and fought forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. Before he began writing, his checkered career included work on a showboat, hauling sawdust for a lumber mill, harvesting wheat, a position as auditor for the United States Department of Labor, a telephone solicitor, copywriter, and an anti-aircraft fire control instructor in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In 1946, Deal enrolled in The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. While there he published his first short story, "Exodus". His creative writing professor was Hudson Strode. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree within three years, then enrolled in Mexico City College for graduate study.
It was not until 1956 that Deal decided to become a full-time writer. Among the pseudonyms he used were Loyse Deal, Lee Borden, and Michael Sunga.
A prolific writer, Deal penned twenty-one novels and more than one hundred short stories, many of which appeared in McCall's, Collier's, Saturday Review, and Good Housekeeping. His work has been translated into twenty different languages. A major theme in his canon is man's mystical attachment to the earth and his quest for land, inspired by his family's loss of their property during the Great Depression. The majority of his work is set in the small hamlets of the Deep South. From 1970 Deal also published, under the name "Anonymous", a series of erotic novels with pronoun titles such as Her and Him.
His novel The Insolent Breed served as the basis for the Broadway musical A Joyful Noise. His novel Dunbar's Cove was the basis for the plot of the movie Wild River, starring Lee Remick and Montgomery Clift.
Deal was married twice and had three children. He died of a heart attack in Sarasota, Florida.
In 1946, Deal enrolled in The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. While there he published his first short story, "Exodus". His creative writing professor was Hudson Strode. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree within three years, then enrolled in Mexico City College for graduate study.
It was not until 1956 that Deal decided to become a full-time writer. Among the pseudonyms he used were Loyse Deal, Lee Borden, and Michael Sunga.
A prolific writer, Deal penned twenty-one novels and more than one hundred short stories, many of which appeared in McCall's, Collier's, Saturday Review, and Good Housekeeping. His work has been translated into twenty different languages. A major theme in his canon is man's mystical attachment to the earth and his quest for land, inspired by his family's loss of their property during the Great Depression. The majority of his work is set in the small hamlets of the Deep South. From 1970 Deal also published, under the name "Anonymous", a series of erotic novels with pronoun titles such as Her and Him.
His novel The Insolent Breed served as the basis for the Broadway musical A Joyful Noise. His novel Dunbar's Cove was the basis for the plot of the movie Wild River, starring Lee Remick and Montgomery Clift.
Deal was married twice and had three children. He died of a heart attack in Sarasota, Florida.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 6, 2021
I guess it don't matter so much how you wind up as how you live the day to day.
It's the Great Depression, and the Sword family has suffered the loss of their farm. Left with no land, no stock, and no tools, they take up the life of sharecropping in northeastern Mississippi, starting over from scratch. Government mules and commodities. It's a tough row to hoe for them, in all ways. Proud and hardworking people brought down hard. Life lessons are here for the taking. Your first duty is to the stock. The sounds of living, and the value of silence. The smell of freshly plowed earth and cut sassafras root. Never asking another person to do something that you yourself aren't willing to do.
My parents grew up on farms during the Depression. When I was a little girl back in the 1950's, my brother and I were taken each summer to stay with our relatives in North Missouri for a few weeks. We were city folk, so this was great fun for us with all the animals. Water was drawn from a hand pump in the backyard, brought into the kitchen in a galvanized bucket where it sat right inside the backdoor with a community ladle in it from which everyone would drink. Baths were not taken every day, even in the heat of the summer; water was heated and poured into a large galvanized tub for bathing. The farms in the area had no indoor plumbing. The outhouses were always abuzz with wasps and mud daubers and flies. A long stick was kept inside and it was important to run it around the inside of the seat to clear it of lurking spiders. As you might imagine, the novelty of these visits wore off fairly quickly. The delight of being around all the animals was not enough to make up for the inconvenience and all of the other.
My thanks to Diane, whose review set me on the hunt for this. And to Howard, as well, for his review that steered Diane toward the book in the first place. This one is worth its weight in gold.
It's the Great Depression, and the Sword family has suffered the loss of their farm. Left with no land, no stock, and no tools, they take up the life of sharecropping in northeastern Mississippi, starting over from scratch. Government mules and commodities. It's a tough row to hoe for them, in all ways. Proud and hardworking people brought down hard. Life lessons are here for the taking. Your first duty is to the stock. The sounds of living, and the value of silence. The smell of freshly plowed earth and cut sassafras root. Never asking another person to do something that you yourself aren't willing to do.
My parents grew up on farms during the Depression. When I was a little girl back in the 1950's, my brother and I were taken each summer to stay with our relatives in North Missouri for a few weeks. We were city folk, so this was great fun for us with all the animals. Water was drawn from a hand pump in the backyard, brought into the kitchen in a galvanized bucket where it sat right inside the backdoor with a community ladle in it from which everyone would drink. Baths were not taken every day, even in the heat of the summer; water was heated and poured into a large galvanized tub for bathing. The farms in the area had no indoor plumbing. The outhouses were always abuzz with wasps and mud daubers and flies. A long stick was kept inside and it was important to run it around the inside of the seat to clear it of lurking spiders. As you might imagine, the novelty of these visits wore off fairly quickly. The delight of being around all the animals was not enough to make up for the inconvenience and all of the other.
My thanks to Diane, whose review set me on the hunt for this. And to Howard, as well, for his review that steered Diane toward the book in the first place. This one is worth its weight in gold.
October 21, 2021
Once again, Howard has steered me to a forgotten author who has written a magnificent novel that goes on my favorites list. I have lost track of how many books he has recommended to me that I have loved, but even if this were the first one I would trust him forevermore.
This one takes place during the Depression and is narrated by Boy Sword, a 12 year old who is called Boy because his father thinks every man should choose his own name when he's ready, but Boy believes it's his father's duty to give him a name. How this plays out is the central theme of this book, but along the way we get the story of hardscrabble lives getting along the best they can. They live in Bugscuffle Bottoms with several other sharecropping familes. Each character was delineated so well I felt I knew them all, but Boy's mother had my heart. Tough, hard-working and no-nonsense, she still felt things deeply but hid her softer side. His older brother John ( who did name himself when he was 10) was quiet and resigned to a life of hardship. The father was a deep thinker, smart, kind, and sometimes showed the wisdom of Soloman. As in all our lives, there is humor, heartbreak, good times and bad, and difficulties to be overcome. Boy uses the language of his time and place to tell his story, and gives us a rare glimpse of poetic prose.
I'm not sure why this author is out of print and hard to find, but if you can get your hands on a copy of this one, grab it.
Once again, thank you Howard.
This one takes place during the Depression and is narrated by Boy Sword, a 12 year old who is called Boy because his father thinks every man should choose his own name when he's ready, but Boy believes it's his father's duty to give him a name. How this plays out is the central theme of this book, but along the way we get the story of hardscrabble lives getting along the best they can. They live in Bugscuffle Bottoms with several other sharecropping familes. Each character was delineated so well I felt I knew them all, but Boy's mother had my heart. Tough, hard-working and no-nonsense, she still felt things deeply but hid her softer side. His older brother John ( who did name himself when he was 10) was quiet and resigned to a life of hardship. The father was a deep thinker, smart, kind, and sometimes showed the wisdom of Soloman. As in all our lives, there is humor, heartbreak, good times and bad, and difficulties to be overcome. Boy uses the language of his time and place to tell his story, and gives us a rare glimpse of poetic prose.
I'm not sure why this author is out of print and hard to find, but if you can get your hands on a copy of this one, grab it.
Once again, thank you Howard.
January 6, 2022
BORDEN DEAL
Borden Deal (1922-1985), a native of Mississippi, published twenty-one novels and over a hundred short stories. His first novel, Walk Through the Valley (1956), was a best-seller. The second, Dunbar’s Cove (1957), was later combined with William Bradford Huie’s novel, Mud on the Stars, to serve as the basis for the film Wild River (1960). Another novel was adapted for a two-part TV movie and one made it to Broadway as a musical. Several of his short stories were adapted for TV and his work was translated into twenty languages.
With that track record I’m sure you have heard of him, right? No? I never had either.
After reading Mud on the Stars, I began a search for a copy of Dunbar’s Cove and found a couple, but they were priced higher than I wanted to pay for a used paperback. (In addition, I was afraid that it would have such small print that I would have to struggle to read it; which is exactly what had happened with Mud on the Stars, even to the point of having to purchase a magnifying glass in order to finish it.)
Nevertheless, Deal intrigued me and I looked over a list of his books and settled on an available one that had the advantage of being a hardcover and therefore had larger print and also was priced considerably lower than Dunbar’s Cove. It also helped that the story appealed to me. And that is how I came to read The Least One.
THE LEAST ONE
The Least One (1967) is a semi-autobiographical novel narrated by an adult looking back to a year in which he was twelve-years old. It was a year after his family had lost their farm, due to the economic turmoil of the Great Depression.
Most of Deal’s work is set in the villages and cotton country of the Deep South. He evokes the dire economic circumstances of poor Southern cotton sharecroppers during the Depression, but he also recounts their strong streak of independence and their drive to regain self-sufficiency. His protagonists possess a sense of place and a spiritual attachment to the land, including the desire to acquire it, all of which was inspired by his own family’s loss of their farm during the Depression.
Deal said that as he began writing the novel that his “memory produced a flood of material” about the time that his own family had lost their farm and “the day the sheriff had come to dispossess us” and he remembered “picking blackberries and selling them in town for a dime a bucket.”
He recreated these scenes in the opening pages of his novel.
The fictional father in “The Least One” found himself trapped in an utterly hopeless set of circumstances:
Eventually the Sword family was forced to relocate on a large cotton farm that they sharecropped with seven other families – in a place called Bugscuffle Bottoms.
The father in the story is doing the best that he is capable of doing for his family, but his strong-willed wife (another ‘tall woman’) is not happy about having to live so near to so many other families on the farm.
“All the land is thrown together,” she said. “I like a fence around my fields. Next thing you know, we’ll be eating cornbread for breakfast.
“[B]ut I’ll say one thing for Mama. She never put cornbread on the table for breakfast. That was always her saying: We never been down so far we had to eat cornbread for breakfast. I reckon she’d have laid down and died out of sheer mortification if we had ever come to that.”
Ironically, the same point is made several times in Huie’s Mud on the Stars. A family would have to really be in sad, low-down economic circumstances if they were forced to eat cornbread rather than biscuits for breakfast.
About that title: At age twelve, for reasons that I don’t want to divulge because it would be too much of a spoiler, the narrator had no proper name, but was known simply as “Boy.” The title is due to Boy being younger than his fourteen-year old brother and thus the smallest person in the Sword family, which leads him to describe himself as being “the least one.”
One reason that the story resonated with me is that much of it is devoted to growing cotton, including planting, cultivating, chopping, and picking it. I would have agreed that “we figured that when the Good Lord said that mankind would have to make his living by the sweat of his brow, he was talking about raising cotton.”
And I would have agreed with this:
But sometimes that did happen and one year it rained so much that our farm missed a crop entirely. That was not “the best rain there is.”
In 1985, Borden Deal, a prolific and once popular writer, died virtually unknown. He deserves to be remembered.
Borden Deal (1922-1985), a native of Mississippi, published twenty-one novels and over a hundred short stories. His first novel, Walk Through the Valley (1956), was a best-seller. The second, Dunbar’s Cove (1957), was later combined with William Bradford Huie’s novel, Mud on the Stars, to serve as the basis for the film Wild River (1960). Another novel was adapted for a two-part TV movie and one made it to Broadway as a musical. Several of his short stories were adapted for TV and his work was translated into twenty languages.
With that track record I’m sure you have heard of him, right? No? I never had either.
After reading Mud on the Stars, I began a search for a copy of Dunbar’s Cove and found a couple, but they were priced higher than I wanted to pay for a used paperback. (In addition, I was afraid that it would have such small print that I would have to struggle to read it; which is exactly what had happened with Mud on the Stars, even to the point of having to purchase a magnifying glass in order to finish it.)
Nevertheless, Deal intrigued me and I looked over a list of his books and settled on an available one that had the advantage of being a hardcover and therefore had larger print and also was priced considerably lower than Dunbar’s Cove. It also helped that the story appealed to me. And that is how I came to read The Least One.
THE LEAST ONE
The Least One (1967) is a semi-autobiographical novel narrated by an adult looking back to a year in which he was twelve-years old. It was a year after his family had lost their farm, due to the economic turmoil of the Great Depression.
Most of Deal’s work is set in the villages and cotton country of the Deep South. He evokes the dire economic circumstances of poor Southern cotton sharecroppers during the Depression, but he also recounts their strong streak of independence and their drive to regain self-sufficiency. His protagonists possess a sense of place and a spiritual attachment to the land, including the desire to acquire it, all of which was inspired by his own family’s loss of their farm during the Depression.
Deal said that as he began writing the novel that his “memory produced a flood of material” about the time that his own family had lost their farm and “the day the sheriff had come to dispossess us” and he remembered “picking blackberries and selling them in town for a dime a bucket.”
He recreated these scenes in the opening pages of his novel.
The fictional father in “The Least One” found himself trapped in an utterly hopeless set of circumstances:
Where he had once owned work stock and tools, now he had nothing. Not only that; the countryside was full of men just like him, walking the roads mile after mile offering all they had to offer, the labor of their hands, their minds bewildered by the turn of events, because around them the fields were fertile beyond the memory of the oldest man, choked to bursting with cotton that was worth only four cents a pound … if a man could even find a buyer. And that not even the worst, the hardest part coming when they gave up on the day and came home to not-look into the faces of wife and children because they had returned as empty-handed as they had set out.
Eventually the Sword family was forced to relocate on a large cotton farm that they sharecropped with seven other families – in a place called Bugscuffle Bottoms.
The father in the story is doing the best that he is capable of doing for his family, but his strong-willed wife (another ‘tall woman’) is not happy about having to live so near to so many other families on the farm.
“All the land is thrown together,” she said. “I like a fence around my fields. Next thing you know, we’ll be eating cornbread for breakfast.
“[B]ut I’ll say one thing for Mama. She never put cornbread on the table for breakfast. That was always her saying: We never been down so far we had to eat cornbread for breakfast. I reckon she’d have laid down and died out of sheer mortification if we had ever come to that.”
Ironically, the same point is made several times in Huie’s Mud on the Stars. A family would have to really be in sad, low-down economic circumstances if they were forced to eat cornbread rather than biscuits for breakfast.
About that title: At age twelve, for reasons that I don’t want to divulge because it would be too much of a spoiler, the narrator had no proper name, but was known simply as “Boy.” The title is due to Boy being younger than his fourteen-year old brother and thus the smallest person in the Sword family, which leads him to describe himself as being “the least one.”
One reason that the story resonated with me is that much of it is devoted to growing cotton, including planting, cultivating, chopping, and picking it. I would have agreed that “we figured that when the Good Lord said that mankind would have to make his living by the sweat of his brow, he was talking about raising cotton.”
And I would have agreed with this:
It come on to rain the next day, a hard, steady drizzle that started at daylight so a body could wake up and turn over in bed and think comfortably, There won’t be no work in the fields today, and go back to sleep. That’s the best kind of rain there is, for man and beast, providing it doesn’t go on so long it rots the seed already in the ground.
But sometimes that did happen and one year it rained so much that our farm missed a crop entirely. That was not “the best rain there is.”
In 1985, Borden Deal, a prolific and once popular writer, died virtually unknown. He deserves to be remembered.
January 29, 2022
A slow, meandering Southern sharecropping family’s life in the 1930s, this lightly fictionalized autobiography (per the author’s daughter’s front-of-book note), is a book full of flavor and period content (rather than tight fictional plot). It’s sweet and sad and harsh and nostalgic. It hurt, yet I enjoyed it.
Borden Deal’s daughter, Ashley Deal Moss, who declares flat-out that her father is Boy Sword, the twelve-year-old narrator in this book, also says to readers: “Perhaps an understanding of your family or parents and heritage will ring true as this novel rang true for me.”
A particularly timely comment for me, reading the book in the wake of my dog’s death, and synchronistic with a distant relative sending me a digitized video of home movies of my father’s family from 1926 to 1936. The lives of the Robinsons and the Deals could not be more different, but what they have in common is rich, intense physical family relationships and complicated community dependencies.
There is not a lot of philosophizing in The Least One, but when it comes it's good:
One day a swarm of bees descends on the sharecroppers' homes in Bugscuffle Bottoms and everybody goes nuts trying to get them to land and form a honey-producing hive. Observing this, Boy says:
In my present quiet mood—morose at times—this statement says it all. I do not understand this life process at all: what we’re doing, why we try so hard, and what the point is. But I know this mood will pass and eventually, once again, I’ll look at someone and see pure life force and, as forgetful as the bees, I’ll fall as in love as Deal was and my father’s massive family were when they had no idea of the disasters and mindless dying-off that were to come.
I apologize if this review brought you down. For a more uplifting one, check out Diane Barnes’s.
Borden Deal’s daughter, Ashley Deal Moss, who declares flat-out that her father is Boy Sword, the twelve-year-old narrator in this book, also says to readers: “Perhaps an understanding of your family or parents and heritage will ring true as this novel rang true for me.”
A particularly timely comment for me, reading the book in the wake of my dog’s death, and synchronistic with a distant relative sending me a digitized video of home movies of my father’s family from 1926 to 1936. The lives of the Robinsons and the Deals could not be more different, but what they have in common is rich, intense physical family relationships and complicated community dependencies.
There is not a lot of philosophizing in The Least One, but when it comes it's good:
One day a swarm of bees descends on the sharecroppers' homes in Bugscuffle Bottoms and everybody goes nuts trying to get them to land and form a honey-producing hive. Observing this, Boy says:
We whirled in and around ourselves, too, our own little world. If we’d had a queen bee, Bugscuffle Bottoms would have been exactly like that swarm of wild bees, trying to get closer and closer and dying off and not paying any attention to the dying because living was more important. (271)
In my present quiet mood—morose at times—this statement says it all. I do not understand this life process at all: what we’re doing, why we try so hard, and what the point is. But I know this mood will pass and eventually, once again, I’ll look at someone and see pure life force and, as forgetful as the bees, I’ll fall as in love as Deal was and my father’s massive family were when they had no idea of the disasters and mindless dying-off that were to come.
I apologize if this review brought you down. For a more uplifting one, check out Diane Barnes’s.
January 8, 2022
Took me some time but one of the best southern lit books I’ve read. This coming of age book is fine story telling. You’ve got government commodities, thieving neighbors,a government mule program, grapefruit preparation tips, a black widow and a water moccasin, and a pair of mules all with their own stories told by Boy, the least one. And shout out to Boy’s mother, jimmie, she’s a lady that would cast a long shadow. At times the story was more about her than Boy but it’s about a family working together to survive hard times.
I recommend to any fan of southern lit but don’t get too excited, this book is out of print and hard to find. But if you find a copy reasonably priced, snatch it up.
I recommend to any fan of southern lit but don’t get too excited, this book is out of print and hard to find. But if you find a copy reasonably priced, snatch it up.
June 17, 2017
Another golden read found in our inherited library. My mother grew up in Alabama shortly after the depression and this book reminded me of all the stories I heard about my grandfather during this time period.
Heartwarming novel about a boy coming to age, and the hardships he and his family endures as sharecroppers during the depression years. The characters each had an individual voice, were brought to life by the great descriptions and dialogue. I felt they were all interesting. Unique twist of 'Boy' not having a name and the father leaving 'Boy' to choose his own name, and the chosen name being woven into the story. I really enjoyed this book, would definitely recommend for all to read.
Heartwarming novel about a boy coming to age, and the hardships he and his family endures as sharecroppers during the depression years. The characters each had an individual voice, were brought to life by the great descriptions and dialogue. I felt they were all interesting. Unique twist of 'Boy' not having a name and the father leaving 'Boy' to choose his own name, and the chosen name being woven into the story. I really enjoyed this book, would definitely recommend for all to read.
May 15, 2020
Imagine a 12-year-old lad from the backwoods South in the early 1930s who among other things doesn't have a name except "Boy"; for some reason, his father argues that it's up to the lad to pick a name for himself. Lots happens as the family struggles to re-establish its economy in a different place. Pitfall after pitfall, good neighbors and bad neighbors, foolish mules and Princely ones -- stubborn kids and stubborn parents are all in the mix. Borden Deal's "The Least One" is a change of pace indeed. I'll tell you one thing -- I might've thrown this old book down the hill if the author had killed off little Foxy.
May 23, 2020
The Least One by Borden Deal is a wonderful story about life during the Great Depression through the eyes of a 12 year old boy. This story gives the reader an idea of what it was like during that period of time in our nation's history. Life was tough and to a young boy, it was probably normal to him, but at the same time, it was an experience that he will never forget.
I enjoyed reading this story and I loved the characters. I understand that the story was partially autobiographical in that some of the scenes were from the author's memory and not pure fiction.
I recommend this book if you are interested in history and if you just enjoy a great story.
I enjoyed reading this story and I loved the characters. I understand that the story was partially autobiographical in that some of the scenes were from the author's memory and not pure fiction.
I recommend this book if you are interested in history and if you just enjoy a great story.
July 15, 2020
The Sword family loses their home during the depression and must move to a place called Bugscuffle Bottoms. It is here that the main character, a twelve year old called Boy, finds his place in his family and in life. He struggles with not having a name and not being quite grown-up enough.
The trials and tribulations he encounters will rip your heart out. They seem to happen one after another, barely giving the reader a time to take a deep breath. Borden Deal is a wonderful writer, and I will be looking to read more of his twenty-one novels and numerous short stories.
The trials and tribulations he encounters will rip your heart out. They seem to happen one after another, barely giving the reader a time to take a deep breath. Borden Deal is a wonderful writer, and I will be looking to read more of his twenty-one novels and numerous short stories.
January 7, 2024
Though I haven't read this book, I read an except about the choosing of the name of Boy Sword. That has always stuck with me and I think it is so important.
January 21, 2015
I read this book as a RD Condensed book when I was 13. It left powerful images in my mind, but no memory of the title. After several thematic Google searches, I found the title only to learn that it has been out of print for years. The library had to retrieve the one copy out of storage. I think some of the rougher spots must have been removed from the Condensed version, but the writing and story were still as enjoyable and enthralling to me today as in 1969.
The Good: themes of hard work, responsibility and thrift as higher virtues; the evocative, even poetic, descriptions of the depression era, rural south (as in a paragraph describing the sights, sounds and scents of early plowing and how the smell of sassafras can take him back there); the use of the two mules as metaphors of the character of the two sons; the excellent character development and use of language. Oh yes, and the theme of naming that runs throughout the story. Both the father, and "Boy" have reasons why each refuses to give "Boy" his name, those reasons expand some in the telling of the story and figure into the final climax (which also involves the fruition of the mule/boy metaphor).
The Ugly: use of the n_ word (in context: a black character describing his treatment during past events); some other minor profanities during the course of the story; the use (and, in my opinion, justification) of two female characters, one only "6 going on 7" for male sexual gratification. In both cases, the girls are seen as willing participants who are happily accepting of the after effects. Granted, the setting was in the 30s and the family with these two girls was described as "dirty and mean", but agressively sexual behavior in such a young girl smacks of underlying sexual abuse, and probably incest. The sexual scenes are not graphic, not frequent, and mostly alluded to in a round-about way, but still unambiguously sexual.
The Good: themes of hard work, responsibility and thrift as higher virtues; the evocative, even poetic, descriptions of the depression era, rural south (as in a paragraph describing the sights, sounds and scents of early plowing and how the smell of sassafras can take him back there); the use of the two mules as metaphors of the character of the two sons; the excellent character development and use of language. Oh yes, and the theme of naming that runs throughout the story. Both the father, and "Boy" have reasons why each refuses to give "Boy" his name, those reasons expand some in the telling of the story and figure into the final climax (which also involves the fruition of the mule/boy metaphor).
The Ugly: use of the n_ word (in context: a black character describing his treatment during past events); some other minor profanities during the course of the story; the use (and, in my opinion, justification) of two female characters, one only "6 going on 7" for male sexual gratification. In both cases, the girls are seen as willing participants who are happily accepting of the after effects. Granted, the setting was in the 30s and the family with these two girls was described as "dirty and mean", but agressively sexual behavior in such a young girl smacks of underlying sexual abuse, and probably incest. The sexual scenes are not graphic, not frequent, and mostly alluded to in a round-about way, but still unambiguously sexual.
September 29, 2016
This book reminded me of my dad whose father also lost his farm during the Great Depression. It also reminded me of Borden Deal's short story, " Antaeus", which I taught to freshmen in high school. Deal always creates such an interesting,strong voice in his narrators and his use of the naming theme and the importance of land to Southerners are both important elements of both stories. His use of dialogue is both authentic and crucial to the narrative. In fact, I usually had the boys read Antaeus as if it were a play. They loved playing the characters, and it taught them how to write dialogue. The mule symbolism is obvious enough that it would work well with freshmen, as well.
February 8, 2008
An account of a poor family in the south, and how the youngest son, "Boy" came to have a name.
Good read. Bugscuffle Bottoms was the place, and the Sword family tells the story. Depression era America is the time-frame. It's a savvy, affectionate and sometimes comical picture of family life. I think it also gives a true look at what was a difficult era of America.
Good read. Bugscuffle Bottoms was the place, and the Sword family tells the story. Depression era America is the time-frame. It's a savvy, affectionate and sometimes comical picture of family life. I think it also gives a true look at what was a difficult era of America.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews