Tobacco Road 2006

Driving through the outskirts of Augusta, Georgia, today, I crossed over a street named Tobacco Road. This was in the general area where portions of Erskine Caldwell’s novel Tobacco Road would have taken place. Several stores fronted the road at this intersection, including, as I recall, a car wash and a Kangaroo Gas Station and Convenience Mart.

I experienced one of those moments of certification Walker Percy talks about in The Moviegoer. Somehow I felt I was experiencing something authentic, something real. I had to do my best to pinch myself, to wake myself up. Nothing real or authentic here.

Whether there actually was a Tobacco Road near Augusta after which Caldwell named his novel I do not know. I doubt it, really. The road was probably built and named well after the novel was published, probably in recent years, a faint and insincere token of esteem for the novel.

Tobacco Road is an intensely comic novel. It is also a tragic novel, a serious effort to document the plight of poor white dirt farmers in middle Georgia at the time of the Depression. It is about, in part, the agricultural and economic wasteland that beset poor farmers, often too unskilled and, from Caldwell’s point of view, shiftless, to adopt farming practices that wouldn’t leach nutrients from the soil and leave them unable to grow crops that would earn a living.

So here we are in 2006, with Tobacco Road Resurrected in Augusta, a convenience store and a car wash and whatever else might have been built there by people who probably knew of the novel in a loose sort of way but who probably hadn’t read it and who probably would not have approved of it if they had— replacing one kind of wasteland with another.