Books: Cheap South

KNEEL TO THE RISING SUN—Erskine Caldwell—Viking ($2.50).

The legendary character of the old South, all chivalresque, julepy and magnolious, is still stoutly upheld by such loyal romanticists as Stark Young and Julia Peterkin, but its present reputation has been considerably damaged by the nightmare realism of William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Author Caldwell, particularly, has been almost wholly concerned with telling tales on a part of the South no Southerner ever boasts of—the poor white trash that clutters the South’s backyards. Often he makes his tattered crackers the scarecrow-heroes of wildly ribald yarns, but almost as often they appear as the victims of a reality that is unflattering but recognizable even to Southerners.

Critics of Author Caldwell who had begun to think that his zany style was effective largely because of its Rabelaisian grossness last week were thinking again, after reading Kneel to the Rising Sun, his latest collection of short stories. As in all Caldwell books, the phallic content was high—though not so gamy as to attract the attention of the censor—but the best of these 17 stories were more cathartic than aphrodisiac. Some of them:

¶ A Negro fieldhand, making tracks across country one Saturday night to see his gal, is shot by a whimsical sheriff because he objects to being run in for vagrancy.

¶A well-fed farmer family lightens the after-dinner lull by laughing at the horrible trained antics of a half-witted Negro boy.

Best in the book, and well worthy of inclusion in a U. S. anthology, is the title story, Kneel to the Rising Sun: A spineless sharecropper, whose landlord persistently half-starves him and browbeats him, as he does all his tenants, one night finds his old father missing from the cabin. To help him search he rouses a Negro neighbor; together they find the old man’s body, half-devoured by their landlord’s hogs. When they wake the landlord there is a quarrel between him and the Negro, which is the excuse the landlord has been waiting for. While the Negro takes to the woods the landlord rounds up a posse. At dawn, directed by the sharecropper, they find their quarry, shoot him down from a tree. The sharecropper, his stomach full of two horrible deaths in one night, goes home to breakfast, but for once he cannot eat.