River of Earth by James Still

First published: 1940

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Regional romance

Time of work: Early twentieth century

Locale: Kentucky

Principal Characters:

• Brack Baldridge, a Kentucky mountaineer
• Alpha Baldridge, his wife
• Brack’s oldest boy, the narrator
• Euly, the narrator’s sister
• Grandmother Middleton, Alpha’s mother
• Uncle Jolly, Alpha’s brother

The Story

When the mines closed in March, there was very little food left in the house. It was still a long time before the garden crops would be ready, and Alpha wanted Brack to tell his two cousins, Harl and Tibb Logan, to leave the house and find food for themselves; but Brack said that as long as he had food in his house, he would never turn his blood kin away. Then Uncle Samp came to live with them, and the mother saw her four children getting hungrier and leaner. Knowing that the kin would leave if there were no place for them to sleep, she calmly set fire to the house, first moving the children and the skimpy furniture to the smokehouse.

All spring, while the family lived in the smokehouse, they ate less and less and waited for the first vegetables. When the beans were almost ready and the whole family dreamed of having their stomachs full, three men came from the mining town to beg food for their families. Unable to turn down starving people, Brack sent the men into his garden. When they came out, the boy saw that they had taken every bean from the patch. He turned away, wanting to cry.

In May, Brack took the boy with him when he went to help a neighbor deliver a colt. The boy expected to get the colt for his own, as his father’s fee, but the neighbor’s son told him that no Baldridge was going to get the colt, that the Baldridges were cowards, and that after their Grandpa Middleton had been killed by Aus Coggins, no Baldridge had done anything about it. The boy fought with the neighbor’s son. When the fight was over, they found that the colt was dead.

One day, Uncle Jolly arrived and brought them a pair of guineas from Grandmother Middleton. Uncle Jolly spent as much time in jail as out. It was said that he was avenging Grandpa’s death by tormenting Aus Coggins—cutting his fences, breaking his dam, and doing other mischief.

Soon after Uncle Jolly left, Brack wanted to move the family down to Blackjack, for the mines were going to open again. The mother did not want to go because the smoky valley would be a bad place for her sickly baby; but she resigned herself to her husband’s wishes.

In the middle of August, the boy and his sister Euly started to school. They were anxious to learn to read and write, the boy especially, because he did not want to be a miner. He hoped that someday he could be an animal doctor, as his father had always wanted to be. It seemed to the boy and Euly, however, that the most important thing they learned in school was how to smoke bats out of the building.

In late September, the boy was sent to stay with his Grandmother Middleton while Uncle Jolly served a term in jail. He was to stay with her only until Uncle Luce came, but the corn was husked and the other grain harvested before Uncle Luce arrived. The boy was astonished at his grandmother’s ability to do heavy work, for she was very old. When she learned that Uncle Jolly had been sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary, she asked the boy to stay with her during the winter. As soon as the crops were in, she spent a great deal of time in bed. She spent hours telling him about her children and her husband. It was easy to see that Jolly was her favorite.

In January, Uncle Jolly came home. There had been a fire at the penitentiary, and Jolly had been so brave in helping to fight the fire that the governor had pardoned him. Grandmother Middleton said nothing when Uncle Jolly told her that he had started the fire.

Uncle Jolly also brought the news that the boy’s family had moved at last to Blackjack, but there was no other word of his family. Visitors were scarce in the hills.

Spring and summer passed pleasantly for the boy. In October, Uncle Jolly was in jail again, this time for fighting. Uncle Toll came to bring Grandmother Middleton the news and he took the boy back to Hardin Town with him. They found Jolly content to be in jail except that he was lonesome. Uncle Toll begged him not to break out, for one more jailbreak would send him to the penitentiary for a long time. Toll left the boy at the jail so that Uncle Jolly would not break out for lack of companionship. The boy slept in the hall outside his uncle’s cell. When Uncle Jolly thought he would have to break out of jail or die, he stole the keys from the deputy and told the boy to take the key of Jolly’s cell to his mother and ask her to keep it until the remaining days of the sentence were served. In that way, the boy went back to his family.

In March, the family moved from Blackjack again, this time to a little rented farm on a hillside. There the baby died of croup. Another garden was planted, and in the summer, they had a funeral for the baby. The boy saw more relatives than he had known he had. At the end of summer, Brack decided to go back to the mines and moved his family to Blackjack and into a house with windows.

Uncle Samp and Harl and Tibb Logan came back to live with the family. Harl and Tibb worked in the mine, but Uncle Samp had never worked and did not intend to start now. Soon the mines began to close down, and men everywhere were laid off again. Brack was kept on, with only one or two days of work each week.

Harl and Tibb, angry because they were laid off, dynamited one of the veins. At first, it was thought that they were trapped in the mine and had died, but Uncle Samp and Brack rescued them. They left the Baldridge house after Harl and Tibb were kicked out by the mine boss, and Uncle Samp married a fortune-teller.

Food was scarce again, and the mother was sickly most of the time, her stomach swollen terribly. In March, Uncle Jolly brought Grandmother Middleton’s body to the house. The old lady had died at last, and Jolly was taking her to her old home to be buried. While they were sitting with the body in the front room of the house, the boy noticed his father looking constantly at the closed door behind which the mother had been taken by a neighbor woman. In the morning, the boy knew what his father had been waiting for and why his mother had been so swollen. As he stood looking at the tracks the wagon had made as it carried his grandmother’s body away for the last time, he heard a baby begin to cry.

Critical Evaluation:

James Still’s richly evocative style, particularly the sensuousness of his imagery, brings to stirring life the full range of a young boy’s introduction to experience. The anonymity of the boy narrator (readers never learn his Christian name) adds to the mythic dimension of his point of view. He recalls Wordsworth’s persona in the early books of the poet’s famous autobiography in verse, The Prelude: raised by the “ministries of beauty and fear,” like the young Wordsworth, Brack’s “boy” is initiated into the fullness of nature.

What distinguishes Still’s novel from the Romantic nature myth is the book’s stark realism. Wordsworth’s child fears strange spirits that haunt dark coves; Still’s narrator fears hunger. Nothing makes a greater impression in this book than the many descriptions of hunger and its psychological and moral implications. The primary urge is to get enough to eat, and it supplies almost all of the motivation and action.

At the beginning of the novel, Alpha announces to her husband: “We have enough bran for three more pans of bread. If the children eat it by themselves, it might last a week. It won’t last us all more than three meals. Your kin will have to go today.” With that kind of stark alternative, the story takes on the epic dimensions of a struggle for elemental survival. Later, when Brack brings home a table full of food, which he purchases on credit after being taken on at the coal mine, the family reacts as if he had returned from battle with an immense treasure: “We looked in wonder, not being able to speak, knowing only that a great hunger stirred inside us, and that our tongues were moistening our lips. The smell of meat and parched coffee hung in the room.”

In addition to its realism, the story is marked by compassionate humor. Uncle Silas and his mysteriously clipped moustache together with Uncle Jolly, the hopeless but lovable jailbird, balance the boy’s tragic education with joy.