Tobacco Road Quotes

Preachers has got to preach against something. It wouldn’t do them no good to preach for everything. They got to be against something every time.

You get to tour some of the historic homes and listen to ghost stories." "This is what people do in small towns?" "We could either do that or go sit on my porch, chew some tobacco, and play banjos.

Good preachers don’t preach about God and heaven, and things like that. They always preach against something, like hell and the devil. Them is things to be against. It wouldn’t do a preacher no good to preach for God. He’s got to preach against the devil and all wicked and sinful things. That’s what the people like to hear about. They want to hear about the bad things.

He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life.

Unless society came out past Flat Rock Crossroads, kept on past Booker T. High School, hung two rights, a left, turned in on Milk Farm Road and found Roland plowing a tobacco field, jerked him off the tractor, warped him and set him back up there without anybody riding by and noticing, blame can't be laid on society.

Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.

. . . [H]ad North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.

At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine--as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together--and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended. "Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebastian. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

She could sometimes stand the pain of it in her stomach when she knew there was nothing to eat, but when Lov stood in full view taking turnips out of the sack, she could not bear the sight of seeing food no one would let her have.

There were always well-developed plans in Jeeter’s mind for the things he intended doing; but somehow he never got around to doing them. One day led to the next, and it was much more easy to say he would wait until tomorrow. When that day arrived, he invariably postponed action until a more convenient time. Things had been going along in that easy way for almost a lifetime now; nevertheless,

He sometimes said it was partly his own fault, but he believed steadfastly that his position had been brought about by other people. He

There was a fierce jam on the road to Gurgaon. Every five minutes the traffic would tremble - we'd move a foot - hope would rise - then the red lights would flash on the cars ahead of me, and we'd be stuck again. Eveyone honked. Every now and then, the various horns, each with its own pitch, blended into one continuous wail that sounded like a calf taken from its mother. Fumes filled the air. Wisps of blue exhaust glowed in front of every headlight; the exhaust grew so fat and thick it could not rise or escape, but spread horizontally, sluggish and glossy, making a kind of fog around us. Matches were continually being struck - the drivers of autorickshaws lit cigarettes, adding tobacco pollution to petrol pollution.

The summer,' Randy explained. 'I'm going to appreciate it. I'm going to walk in the woods noticing everything, and ride my bike on all the roads I never explored. I'm going to fill a pillow with ladies' tobacco so I can smell it in January and remember about August. I'm going to dry a big bunch of pennyroyal so I can break pieces off all winter and think of summer. I'm going to look at everything, and smell everything, and listen to everything so I'll never forget --

When I think of this trip, I see David and me in the front seat of the car. It’s nighttime. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda, and smoke. (The smell of chewing tobacco is like a muddy lawn you’ve just fed a truckful of cough drops to.) The window is letting in a leak of cold air. R.E.M. is playing. The wheels are making their slightly sleepy sound of tape being stripped cleanly and endlessly off a long wall. On the other hand, we seem not to be moving at all, and the conversation is the best one I’ve ever had.

Though it sometimes looks like a rich man will never help the poor; whereas the poor people will give away everything they has to help somebody who ain’t got nothing. That’s how it looks to me. Don’t seem like it ought to be that way, but I reckon the rich ain’t got no time to fool with us poor folks.

In the last analysis, we must all, Indian and non-Indian, come together. This earth is our mother, this land is our shared heritage. Our histories and fates are intertwined, no matter where our ancestors were born and how they interacted with each other. Neither Wolf nor Dog is one small effort to help this coming together. It is not an attempt to build a fence around a man and his people, but to honor them with the gift of my words. I have done my best, and I place this book before you, like the tobacco before the buffalo rock, as a simple offering. May you receive it in the spirit with which it is offered. Kent Nerburn Bemidji, Minnesota Spring 1994

The spring-time ain’t going to let you fool it by hiding away inside a durn cotton mill. It knows you got to stay on the land to feel good. That’s because humans made the mills. God made the land, but you don’t see Him building durn cotton mills. That’s how I know better than to go up there like the rest of them. I stay where God made a place for me.

He would not even consider going elsewhere to live, even though he were offered a chance to work another man’s farm on shares. Even to move to Augusta and work in the cotton mills would be impossible for him. The restless movement of the other tenant farmers to the mills had never had any effect on Jeeter. Working in cotton mills might be all right for some people, he said, but as for him, he would rather die of starvation than leave the land. In seven years his views of the subject had not been altered; and if anything, he was more determined than ever to remain where he was at all cost.

If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse, along with the junk food, cosmetic surgery, and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and the medical profession from top to bottom. Domestic abuse would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity, migraine headaches, road rage, and dandruff.

In 1946, Eric Johnston—president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1941 to 1946 and a former board member of Spiritual Mobilization—became president of the Motion Picture Association of America. He immediately began redirecting Hollywood’s mythmaking machinery. In a talk to screenwriters, Johnston said: “We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we’ll have no more Tobacco Roads, we’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as villain.”1 Socioeconomic criticism was out, market fundamentalism was in.

Many have noted that had North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.

She lives in a town of sorry history, indifferent to ethical perspectives, apathetic to female attributes, cargo and trunk liners, spilled oil in the garage, telephone poles shaped like liquor bottles, sustaining burly weather, cardiac distressing cold, tobacco and mortality, lying face-up on the bar’s concrete floor, no one can waste a life faster than a Montana redneck.

But so little has changed. This is practically the same country I left thirty-five years ago. Maybe worse. The government doesn’t even care enough to help you.’ This was too broad a subject. She said with what seemed like hesitation but something that was actually a statement of fortitude, ‘It’s – just - light a little candle.’ We passed grass huts, smallholdings of tobacco, some of them being harvested, soggy fields. Not much traffic, though many ragged people marching down the road. ‘My husband is sixty-four. He’s going to retire sometime soon. The government has no plan to replace him. They probably won’t send anyone.’ She looked grim, saying this. ‘If we’re not here, there’ll be no one ‘What’ll happen then?’ ‘They’ll die,’ she said softly. ‘They’ll just die.

Pete offered tobacco and paper, but Claude brought out his cigarettes and they both decided to try those. Pete provided the match. When he had their cigarettes burning strongly he turned to look back at the road, then straight up ahead. "We'll get there for supper if we get there," he said, and Claude laughed. Pete was a young man, but had a wild old grin stretched all out of shape in the corners and punched full of holes.

Before becoming Sam Goldwyn’s prized possession—and during a decade and more of taking roles that put him out there to be seen and perhaps noticed—Brennan did play characters who disparaged women. But what happened when he was offered the plum role of Jeeter Lester in John Ford’s production of Tobacco Road (March 7, 1941) is revealing. Erskine Caldwell’s best-selling novel had been a huge hit when it was adapted for the Broadway stage, and now the prestigious director was casting the film version with several actors—including Ward Bond, Gene Tierney, and Dana Andrews—whose careers would benefit from Ford’s attention. In Tobacco Road, Jeeter is the shiftless family patriarch. Not only does he lack ambition, his jokes, to Walter Brennan, seemed offensive. Ada, Jeeter’s wife, is demeaned just for laughs when he says she “never spoke a word to me for our first ten years we was married. Heh! Them was the happiest ten years of my life.

As it rolled by, Jean Louise made a frantic dive for her uncle’s trolley: “That’s been over for a—nearly a hundred years, sir.” Dr. Finch grinned. “Has it really? It depends how you look at it. If you were sitting on the sidewalk in Paris, you’d say certainly. But look again. The remnants of that little army had children—God, how they multiplied—the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with—in some cases they became horrifyingly more. They were never destroyed. They were ground into the dirt and up they popped. Up popped Tobacco Road, and up popped the ugliest, most shameful aspect of it all—the breed of white man who lived in open economic competition with freed Negroes. “For years and years all that man thought he had that made him any better than his black brothers was the color of his skin. He was just as dirty, he smelled just as bad, he was just as poor. Nowadays he’s got more than he ever had in his life, he has everything but breeding, he’s freed himself from every stigma, but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred. . . .” Dr. Finch got up and poured more coffee. Jean Louise watched him. Good Lord, she thought, my own grandfather fought in it. His and Atticus’s daddy. He was only a child. He saw the corpses stacked and watched the blood run in little streams down Shiloh’s hill. . . .

So what are you after, eh? Side of beef? Some chops?' 'Aye, sir. Whatever you fancy.' He licked his lips and listed his favorite dishes: plain pudding, lemon pickle, roast beef. Then he asked for his own particulars: tobacco and coltsfoot for his pipe, and some more comfrey for Her Ladyship's tea. 'And no green oils. Get a block of dripping and cook it plain.' It was true that the food in France had been a great hog potch of good and bad. One night on the road we were served a right mess of giblets, fishy smelling frogs' legs and moldy old cheese. But at Chantilly the fricassee of veal was so tender I'm not sure how they softened it. I could have eaten the whole pot it was that good, but instead had to watch Jesmire scraping off the sauce, whining all the time for a little boiled ham.

The Major's laughter boomed out again. "And I never kept a diary in my life!" he cried. "Why there's enough cream in this situation to make a dishful of meringues. You and I, you know, the students of Tilling! The serious-minded students who do a hard day's work when all the pretty ladies have gone to bed. Often and often has old--I mean has that fine woman, Miss Mapp, told me that I work too hard at night! Recommended me to get earlier to bed, and do my work between six and eight in the morning! Six and eight in the morning! That's a queer time of day to recommend an old campaigner to be awake at! Often she's talked to you, too, I bet my hat, about sitting up late and exhausting the nervous faculties." Major Flint choked and laughed and inhaled tobacco smoke till he got purple in the face. "And you sitting up one side of the street," he gasped, "pretending to be interested in Roman roads, and me on the other pulling a long face over my diaries, and neither of us with a Roman road or a diary to our names. Let's have an end to such unsociable arrangements, old friend; you lining your Roman roads and the bottle to lay the dust over to me one night, and I'll bring my diaries and my peg over to you the next. Never drink alone--one of my maxims in life--if you can find someone to drink with you. And there were you within a few yards of me all the time sitting by your old solitary self, and there was I sitting by my old solitary self, and we each thought the other a serious-minded old buffer, busy on his life-work. I'm blessed if I ever heard of two such pompous old frauds as you and I, Captain! What a sight of hypocrisy there is in the world, to be sure! No offence--mind: I'm as bad as you, and you're as bad as me, and we're both as bad as each other. But no more solitary confinement of an evening for Benjamin Flint, as long as you're agreeable.

The autumn was a happy time. The crops around the countryside were good, and over at the Forks Falls market the price of tobacco held firm that year. After the long hot summer the first cool days had a clean bright sweetness. Goldenrod grew along the dusty roads, and the sugar cane was ripe and purple. The bus came each day from Cheehaw to carry a few of the younger children to the consolidated school to get an education. Boys hunted foxes in the pinewoods, winter quilts were aired out on the wash lines, and sweet potatoes bedded in the ground with straw against the colder months to come. In the evening, delicate shreds of smoke rose from the chimneys, and the moon was round and orange in the autumn sky. There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall. Sometimes, late in the night when there was no wind, there could be heard in the town the thin wild whistle of the train that goes through Society City on its way far off to the North.

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back to Marylou’s hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up. I was too young to know what had happened.

Above the list of children she read: Mister Jackson Henry Clark married Miss Julienne Maria Jacques, June 12, 1933. Not until that moment had she known her parents’ proper names. She sat there for a few minutes with the Bible open on the table. Her family before her. Time ensures children never know their parents young. Kya would never see the handsome Jake swagger into an Asheville soda fountain in early 1930, where he spotted Maria Jacques, a beauty with black curls and red lips, visiting from New Orleans. Over a milkshake he told her his family owned a plantation and that after high school he’d study to be a lawyer and live in a columned mansion. But when the Depression deepened, the bank auctioned the land out from under the Clarks’ feet, and his father took Jake from school. They moved down the road to a small pine cabin that once, not so long ago really, had been occupied by slaves. Jake worked the tobacco fields, stacking leaves with black men and women, babies strapped on their backs with colorful shawls. One night two years later, without saying good-bye, Jake left before dawn, taking with him as many fine clothes and family treasures—including his great-grandfather’s gold pocket watch and his grandmother’s diamond ring—as he could carry. He hitchhiked to New Orleans and found Maria living with her family in an elegant home near the waterfront. They were descendants of a French merchant, owners of a shoe factory. Jake pawned the heirlooms and entertained her in fine restaurants hung with red velvet curtains, telling her that he would buy her that columned mansion. As he knelt under a magnolia tree, she agreed to marry him, and they wed in 1933 in a small church ceremony, her family standing silent.

Railways, by days and by night. The flowers in the cuttings with their sooty blossoms, the birds on the wires with their sooty voices, they are their friends and long remember them. And we also stand still, with astonished eyes, when-already from the far distant distance- there's the cry of promise. And we stand, with hair streaming, when it's there like thunder and as though it had rolled round heaven knows what worlds. And we're still standing, with sooty cheeks, when-already from the far distant distance-it cries. Cries, far, far away. Cries. Really it was nothing. Or everything. Like us. And they beat, beyond the windows of prisons, sweet dangerous, promising rhythms. You are all ears then, poor prisoner, all hearing, for the clattering, oncoming trains in the night and their cry and their whistle shiver the soft dark of your cell with pain and desire. Or they crash bellowing over the bed, when at night you're harboring fever. And your veins, the moon-blue, vibrate and take up the song, the song of the freight trains: Under way-under way-under way- And your ear's an abyss, that swallows the world. Under way. But ever and again you are spat out at stations, abandoned to farewell and departure. And the stations raise up their pale signboards like brows beside your dark road. And they have names, those furrowed-brown signs, names, which are the world: bed, they mean, hunger and women. Ulla or Carola. And frozen feet and tears. And they mean tobacco, the stations, or lipstick or schnapps. Or God or bread. And the pale brows of the stations, the signboards, have names, that mean: women. You are yourself a railway track, rusty, stained, silver, shiny, beautiful and uncertain. And you are divided into sections and bound between stations. And they have signboards whereon is written women, or murder, or moon. And then that is the world. You are a railway- rumbled over, cried over- you are the track- on you everything happens and makes you rust blind and silver bright. You are human, your brain giraffe-lonely somewhere above on your endless neck. And no one quite knows your heart.

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, which showed the darker side of American society, was one example of the banned book, while samurai movies were among the 236 films condemned by Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers as feudalistic and militaristic. Alle reference do SCAP's involvement in government reforms were also prohibited.

oaks, the forest opened up and we flew in an oval pattern around the scene. The grille of a blue Mustang was nosed up against an earthen barrier, the vehicle’s doors open. Two bodies, both male, were sprawled nearby in the grass. Between the long drying sheds, three gray, refrigerated semitrailers were lined nose to tail like elephants on parade. The truck windows and windshields were shot through and spiderwebbed. Behind the last semi was a black Dodge Viper with two dead men in the front seat. The pilot landed out by the highway, where a perimeter had been established. After checking in with the Virginia State Police lieutenant and the county sheriff, we went to the crime scene on foot. It was hot. Insects buzzed and drummed in the forest around the tobacco facility. Truck engines idling swallowed the sound of blowflies gathering around the Viper. “They’ve swept their way out again,” Mahoney said when we were ten yards from the Dodge. I looked at the glistening dirt road between the Viper and us. I saw faint grooves in the moist dirt and said, “Or raked.” The door to the muscle car was ajar. The window was down. The driver had taken a slug through the back of the skull, left occipital. Blood spattered the windshield and almost covered two bullet holes, one exiting, and one entering. The passenger in the Viper had been rocked back, his left eye a bloody socket and a spray of carnage behind him.

Women ain’t good for nothing but to marry and work for men,

It all stems from the firm belief in survival after death. Or rather that there is no death. Activities are merely changed from one condition to the other. One old man smoking jackass rope tobacco said to me in explanation: “One day you see a man walking the road, the next day you come to his yard and find him dead. Him don’t walk, him don’t talk again. He is still and silent and does none of the things that he used to do. But you look upon him and you see that he has all the parts that the living have. Why is it that he cannot do what the living do? It is because the thing that gave power to these parts is no longer there. That is the duppy, and that is the most powerful part of any man.

Aunt Etta liked to joke that nicotine ran in our veins. I looked over at Anthony, gripping the wheel and squinting to see the road as darkness closed in. Where would he be without Bright Leaf Tobacco Company? Where would any of us be?

Brennan’s contribution to The Wedding Night (March 8, 1935), starring Gary Cooper and Anna Sten—the Russian beauty Samuel Goldwyn was promoting as the next European import to rival Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich—was of a different order. The anxious producer, worried about Sten’s accent (even though she was playing a Polish American), began to take notice of Brennan in a seemingly forgettable role he nevertheless freshened with his rapid-fire delivery. Brennan is Bill Jenkins, a cackling Connecticut cab driver, spitting tobacco juice (actually licorice) and showing the tobacco fields to Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper), an alcoholic writer modeled on F. Scott Fitzgerald and trying to dry out in a country hideaway. Goldwyn had been much impressed with the velocity of dialogue in It Happened One Night (February 23, 1934) and wanted his actors to perform at the same screwball speed. Brennan manages this feat more deftly than the picture’s ostensible stars, although Cooper perks up when doing scenes with Brennan. Unfortunately Sten did not the have the same opportunity. “I never even met Anna Sten,” Brennan told biographer Carol Easton. When Jenkins drives up to deliver a telegram to Barrett, walking along the road, neither the writer nor Jenkins has a pencil to use to reply to Barrett’s wife, who wants him to return to the city. So Barrett simply gives a verbal response: “My work won’t let me. Love Tony.” Jenkins repeats the message twice to fix it in his mind, but as soon as he drives off the message gets garbled: “My love won’t work me.” He tries again: “My work won’t love me.” Not satisfied, he begins again: “My work won’t love me.” In frustration, he spits, and says, “Gosh, I’m losin’ my memory.” His role is inconsequential, and yet so necessary to the local color that director King Vidor works Brennan into a scene whenever he can. Brennan would have made his character even more authentic if Goldwyn had not complied with a request from the Breen Office, the enforcers of the Production Code, that Brennan’s use of “damn” and “hell” be cut from the film.

Sam Goldwyn had a long-standing business partnership with Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio making Tobacco Road. As a contract player, Walter had to do what he was told. The system usually suited him. He was never one to gripe about servitude; indeed, he always seemed happy to serve. He might imitate the autocratic Sam Goldwyn, calling up Gary Cooper and convincingly fire the studio’s star in Goldwyn’s voice. But Walter also told a reporter, “Sam was class. We used to consider the Goldwyn studio the country club of the motion picture industry. He did nothing cheap. Everything was first class. So I have a soft spot in my heart for Sam Goldwyn.

What is your favorite song? The Silent Song. I could sing it for you, but you wouldn’t be able to hear it. Only alpacas and very rare mice have the ability to hear The Silent Song.   Do you have any children? rufus, joseephus, artie choke, woody bush, pat may wiener, meowy, boopsie and bob.   What’s your favorite movie? It’s a tie between “The Anal girls of tobacco road: vagina slimes” and “sex starved fuck sluts #22: stinky white women.” The well-developed plot and range of emotions portrayed in vagina slimes far outweighs that of stinky white women, but at the same time, the complexity in the cinematic quality of stinky white women should not be overlooked.

He caught a glance of himself in the stand-up mirror in the corner of the room. His hair was soaking wet, beads of sweat ran down his face, and the black hair on his arms and chest had matted together. He looked more Tobacco Road than Rittenhouse Square, and his already thin frame looked more frail than usual—it was. He had to remind himself to eat real food.

The tobacco road would lead through Star Wars, nuclear winter, acid rain, and the ozone hole, all the way to global warming. Seitz and his colleagues would fight the facts and merchandise doubt all the way.

We are doing 55 on Indiana 65. Jasper County. Flooded fields. Iroquois River spread way out, wide and brown as a Hershey bar. Distances in this glacier-flattened planed-down ground-level ground aren't blue, but whitish, and the sky is whitish-blue. It's in the eighties at 9:30 in the morning, the air is soft and humid, and the wind darkens the flooded fields between rows of oaks. Watch Your Speed - We Are. Severely clean white farmhouses inside square white fences painted by Tom Sawyer yesterday produce a smell of dung. A rich and heavy smell of dung on the southwest wind. Can shit be heady? La merde majestueuse. This is the "Old Northwest." Not very old, not very north, not very west. And in Indiana there are no Indians. Wabash River right up to the road and the oaks are standing ten feet out in the brown shadowmottled flood, but the man at the diesel station just says: You should of seen her yesterday. The essence is motion being in motion moving on not resting at a point: and so by catching at points and letting them go again without recurrence or rhyme or rhythm I attempt to suggest or imitate that essence the essence of which is that you cannot catch it. Of course there are other continuities: the other aspect of the essence of moving on. The county courthouses. Kids on bikes. White frame houses with high sashed windows. Dipping telephone wires, telephone poles. The names of the dispossessed. The redwing blackbird singing to you from fencepost to fencepost. Dave and Shelley singing "You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma" on the radio. The yellow weedy clover by the road. The flowering grasses. And the crow, not the Indian, the bird, you seen one crow you seen 'em all, kronk kronk. CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST on an old plank barn, the letters half worn off, and that's a continuity, not only in space but time: my California in the thirties, & I at six years old would read the sign and imagine a Pony Express rider at full gallop eating a candy cigarette. Lafayette Greencastle And the roadsign points: Left to Indianapolis Right to Brazil. Now there's some choice.

Before he could change his mind, Marsden texted his Alpha. He made it a point to never text Stark because he was an asshole on a good day, but this was important. Do you see ghosts? Send. Thirty seconds later and Stark responded. Oh yeah, I see my dad all the time. He lives in our woods. Can you bring us Rocky Road ice cream? Lyndi is having a craving and I just got home. What? Get your own mate her pregnancy cravings. Send. I’ll pay you in hugs. Never mind. Fuck off. Send. On second thought…Are we just going to gloss over the fact that you see your dead dad in the woods? Send. I’ll introduce you sometime. He’s pretty boring. Mostly he just chatters about how worthless I am. Did you know ghosts can chew tobacco? Also, he told me there’s no chicken nuggets in hell. Fuck that. I’m going to church on Sunday if you want to go with me. Marsden pinched the bridge of his nose and prayed for patience. This was his Alpha. This was who was leading their Pack.

The tenants with jobs at the lumber mill or the warehouses or on a road crew pay cash. Some tenants pay with Kincaids, as we call the scrip we give out at the Emporium. The dirt farmers pay with corn, tobacco, hams, eggs, sacks of walnuts or potatoes, jars of pickles or fruit preserves, but mostly bottles of homemade whiskey—and we sell it all at the Emporium.

He always called himself a shithead when he screwed up.

Neither of the two biggest causes he has invested in over the years—reducing tobacco use and improving traffic safety—register much in the glittery precincts of philanthropy, but Bloomberg has picked two real winners. Smoking kills six million people worldwide every year, which is far more than AIDS and malaria put together. That number is projected to rise to eight million by 2030. A funder who bends this curve even slightly can save untold lives, which is why Bloomberg has so far poured at least $600 million into the cause. The same goes for road safety, where the body count is also huge: 1.25 million people die annually from accidents and tens of millions are injured. His foundation estimates that some 125,000 lives will be saved as a result of Bloomberg’s investment of more than a quarter of a billion dollars in road safety activities across the world. Sounds like a bargain, right? Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s quest to shut down coal-fired power plants—a cause to which he’s now given over $130 million—is a twofer: shuttering such plants reduces carbon dioxide emissions but also lowers old-fashioned air pollution, saving lives. In early 2015, Bloomberg estimated that 5,500 lives annually were already being saved because of coal plant shutdowns in recent years.

Me and Tom used to get along first-rate concerning everything. Me and him never had no difficulties like I was always having with my other children. They used to throw rocks at me and hit me over the head with sticks, but Tom never did. Tom was always a first-rate boy when I knowed him.

It was still not too late to begin, but Jeeter did not have a mule, and he did not have the credit to purchase seed-cotton and guano at the stores. Up until this year, he had lived in the hope that something would happen at the last moment to provide a mule and credit, but now it seemed to him that there was no use hoping for anything any more. He could still look forward to the following year when he could perhaps raise a crop of cotton, but it was an anticipation not so keen as it once had been. He had felt himself sink lower and lower, his condition fall further and further, year after year, until now his trust in God and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason. He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life.

He knew the time for burning and plowing had ended the day before, but there still lingered in the warm March air something of the new season. The smell of freshly turned earth and the odor of pine and sedge-smoke hovered over the land even after burning and plowing was done. He breathed deeply of it, filling his body with the invigorating aroma.

Erskine Caldwell’s stories of rural poverty (Tobacco Road) and