Books: Cotton King

DOLLAR COTTON—John Faulkner—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

“William Faulkner’s younger brother” is not likely to be called that much longer. Forty-year-old John Faulkner has quite a South of his own, and his own way of telling about it. He knows how to give social history the easy clarity of a good comic strip, the human resonance of a good novel. His first book, Men Working (TIME, Aug. 11, 1941), was a tragicomedy about poor white farmers, brought to town and stranded there by WPA. Dollar Cotton is the life story of a Cotton King, Otis Town.

Otis Town’s lust for land, and the wartime price of cotton, carried him from poverty to fantastic wealth and ruin, made assorted monsters of his wife and children, and left him in the end with a certain indestructible magnificence. It is the vivid history of Delta cotton and the people who raised it, from the day when they cleared the first land to the early ’20s, when cotton let them down and the great Northern combines took over.

Wee Boy. When Otis Town left the Tennessee hills for the Delta, “the richest farming land since the discovery of the Nile Valley” was selling at 90¢ an acre. Town put every cent he had into 600 acres. Then he cleared the tremendous cane that towered 20 feet above him and walked the cotton seed into the reeking-rich earth. The next spring two Negroes, a man and a woman, shared his cabin, his labor, his prospects. They cleared and planted twice the past year’s acreage. Settling up in the fall, Otis skinned the Negro so unmercifully that he drew a knife. Otis Town smashed in his skull with a singletree. Then he went to the cabin with a jar of vaseline and a piece of red ribbon, which he gave to the woman. Next winter, Mammy bore him a son and called him Wee Boy.

The day Otis Town cleared his fifth crop he sent his bride-to-be, a teacher back in the hills, her train fare and a dollar for emergencies. They were married the minute she stepped off the Doodlebug. The minute they got home, Otis Town hurried out to his fields. His wife bore him three children in three years, named them Loraine, Elaine, Otis Van Town Jr. Van looked like his father. The day Mrs. Town saw that he also looked like Wee Boy, she locked her door against “Mr. Town” and called him by that name only, from then on.

Year after year Otis Town added to his acreage with every cent he made or could borrow. By the time he had 12,000 acres the rest of the Delta had been bought up at $10 an acre. The latecomers called him Old Man Town, and Old Man Town set to work draining his sloughs and developing every clod he had.

Cotton Queens. World War I began: Delta cotton went to 25¢ a pound and Delta land went to $35 an acre. The second year of the war, Old Man Town sold 750 bales and bought 4,000 acres from a neighbor. He also mortgaged his 16,000 acres and his next year’s crop to a Memphis cotton factor for $50,000. He gypped his hands out of “everything he thought they would stand . . . sold them cheap whiskey at bonded prices for what little money they did draw.” In 1917 cotton went to 50¢. Old Man Town, in his $75 custom-made boots, his faded wash pants, his wide Stetson and his 50¢ work gloves, was a Cotton King. Mrs. Town decided that her daughters should become Delta Queens. Old Man Town’s lawyer bought them “a wine-colored brick monstrosity” on Memphis’ Speedway. The girls were enrolled in Miss May’s Select School for Fashionable Young Ladies.

One day in Memphis an automobile salesman walked into the factor’s office. “Why don’t you get yourself an automobile?” the factor said. “Well, I never thought about one,” said Old Man Town. “Whut they wuth?””We’ve got a nice little job here for five thousand that ought to get you over your place ail right,” said the salesman.

Old Man Town “walked around the car as he would a horse, feeling its slick sides and the gleaming brass of the headlights.” The salesman “stomped the cutout open, and they sat listening to the throaty roar of sound. ‘How does she sound?’ said the salesman. ‘Hit sounds right powerful,’ said Old Man Town.”

He bought it outright and a mechanic drove him home. Wee Boy did the chauffering and things went smoothly until they got a flat tire. A mechanic came down from Memphis to fix the first one. Old Man Town chopped the second one off. After that they got along for a while on the naked rim.

Cash Payment. Next fall cotton went above 90¢. When settlement time came, Old Man Town set before each of his hands a check for several hundred dollars (only a scrap of what he owed them) and a hatful of quarters and half-dollars. He told them to take their pick. “The Negro reached for the hat. ‘All dis mine?’ he said. ‘Wait,’ said Old Man Town. ‘I fergot to take out my half.’ ”

The war ended. Mrs. Town came back to the Delta and Old Man Town built her a $100,000 house with $50 doorknobs. She added an “e” to her name. Next year Old Man Towne raised dollar cotton. Mrs. Towne, pallid Loraine and nympholeptic little Elaine went to Europe. Van, demoniacally drunk, scorched around the State in an Apperson Jackrabbit with a siren on it, leaving terror, curses and shaken fists in his wake. Old Man Towne borrowed $500,000against the open draft notes signed in his name in Van’s handwriting, and against the importunate cables from abroad. One day he came back from Memphis with a suitcase and called Mammy in. Old Man Towne explained that he was deeding over to her the house in Memphis and that the suitcase, which contained $25,000, was for her. “Yas suh, Mist’ Otis,” said Mammy.

Authentic Jellybean. Mrs. Towne and her daughters came back. Mrs. Towne was “overflowing with misinterpreted Continental idioms, bad hotel French, and a lofty disdain for everything American.” Elaine got herself pregnant, and half the young sports in the Delta made up a $10,000 purse for the salesman who married her off their hands. Van, as viciously authentic a jellybean* as has ever seen print, headed faster & faster toward jail. Old Man Towne bought a ball team so he could watch Sunday baseball, won $10,000 bets on game after game.

Then the bottom began to drop out of cotton.

It dropped to 75¢. Old Man Towne hung on: “Hit’s wuth a dollar and I aim to git a dollar.” He mortgaged his crop, his next year’s crop, his 20,000 acres of lien-free land. Next year the Delta went broke. Towne’s banker wired that he would have to sell. Towne wired back “NO.” “I ain’t aiming to sell hit fer less’n hit’s wuth,” he said. “But,” said the banker, “all it’s worth is what the market says it is.” “The market is them New York fellers,” said Old Man Towne. “Whut do they know about whut cotton’s wuth? They ain’t never growed none.”

He went up to St. Louis to try to find a banker who saw it his way. He went to Wall Street. He worked himself into a paralytic stroke. By the time he came back home there was nothing left to live for. Son Van had made the penitentiary at last. Loraine and her mother had encountered social and mental disaster in a sometimes successful try at Brother William Faulkner’s sort of tragedy. Old Man Towne’s one friend, his lawyer, had been unable to prevent the gruesome lynching of his one good child, Wee Boy. The bankers were forced to sell every inch of land Old Man Towne had ever owned. When the old man heard that, he died. The lawyer buried him in an Indian mound, and the Negroes raised above him their rich shout of “resurrection and green pastures and surcease of toil.”

The Will to Live

THE RAFT—Robert Trumbull—Holt ($2.50).

The story is history—the story of the three-man crew of a Navy plane who were forced down in the Pacific and spent 34 days on a rubber raft (TIME, March 22).

What is here in this book is the word portraits of the men themselves. Robert Trumbull, city editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, portrays them and their actions as nearly as possible in the words used by Chief Petty Officer Dixon when Trumbull interviewed him.

The three seamen were not a picked team. The unlucky flight was their first together. They barely knew one another’s surnames.

Gene Aldrich. Youngest of the three was Gene Aldrich, 22-year-old Missouri farm boy. He was a radioman and gunner, with only 15 months’ experience in the Navy. He had been a cook in a CCC camp, and as the days of torment and hunger closed down on the raft, Gene would regularly “cook meals” for his mates. When the sun rose on three empty bellies, Gene liked to recall shooting squirrels for breakfast with his father . . . “It seems there are a lot of squirrels in Missouri,” says Dixon dryly.

Gene had a “deep streak of piety” and organized the trio’s regular evening prayers. What bothered him was whether his mother had been able to collect on his life insurance: she needed the money badly. Gene would think it all over and shake his head. “If mother could see me now!” he would say with amazement. . . . Says Dixon: “She wouldn’t have liked the look of it.”

Tony Pastula, the 24-year-old bomber, came of a Polish family in Youngstown, Ohio. He had a horror of being buried at sea on a rough day. “Perhaps, also,” says Dixon, “he had a # Seamen Pastula, Dixon, Aldrich. horror of being eaten [by his mates].” Tony was the thinnest and thought he might be the first to die. Nevertheless, he agreed with the other two that “the survivors should eat the heart, liver and other such organs” of whichever one went first. Says Dixon: “Today I don’t believe that any of us had a real intention of stooping so.”

Chief Petty Officer Harold F. Dixon was the leader of the three. His story is an astonishing self-portrait. Dixon has no humble streak in his nature. At 41, “a tough old chief petty officer” with 22 years service behind him, he knew precisely what he meant to do with that raft. “I was determined to sail it if I could. And I maintain that I did sail it. I worked like the devil to sail it, and I resent anyone’s saying we ‘drifted.’ ” Nor did he ever doubt who was boss. “Naturally I was in command. I took an occasion to remind the boys that I, as captain, held absolute authority.” When he tried to teach them navigation, he was not sorry that their sun-dulled minds could not absorb his lessons, “as this left the responsibility for our progress entirely in my hands.”

Again & again there are glimpses of the sureness of those hands, and insight into a deeply practical mind. Dixon might have been specially trained for this job. He made an all-important sea anchor out of a life jacket, paddles out of his own shoes. He treated Gene’s finger expertly when a shark ripped it from end to end. A superstitious man and an “ardent” spiritualist, Dixon was ready to participate in Gene’s daily prayers “because it worked a couple of times . . . and later because it gave us something regular to do.” When Tony, who had heard only Polish religious services, begged to hear Bible stories in English, Dixon rationed them, giving him one story a day. (“I didn’t want to tell him everything I knew in one night.”)

With his own mistakes Dixon has little patience. He bitterly regrets the times when, exhausted with thirst, hunger and desperation, with his clothes washed away to shreds and his skin a mess of huge sun blisters scaled with burning salt, he would lose control and scream at his companions. He confesseswith shame that he was afraid to catch a passing shark with his bare hands. But he kept his strength of mind to the end.

When, after covering 1,000 miles in 34 days, the three men staggered ashore on an unknown island, Dixon remembered to outline a plan for avoiding possible Japanese sentries, and to seek out a strong mooring post for the precious raft. Even at that moment he was thinking ahead: if the place was dangerous, or uninhabited, they would rest up, scrape together provisions — and take to the raft again.

It is this quality that makes The Raft much more than another saga of human heroism of which there will be many before World War II ends. The special quality of this book is that it restores and documents by deed something that has long been lacking from men’s books and minds — a sense of the therapeutic goodness of the unflagging will to live.

* A Southern name, used in the late Scott Fitzgerald’s early stories, which best describes the gilded youths of that period.