SOURCE: "Canonize Caldwell's Georgia Boy: A Case for Resurrection," in Erskine Caldwell Reconsidered, edited by Edwin T. Arnold, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 72-85.

Morris Stroup is no saint, but he deserves to be saved. Also worthy of salvation are his wife, Martha; his son, William; his yardboy, Handsome Brown; his jailbird brother, Ned; and an assortment of preachers, grass widows, gypsy queens, town marshals, necktie salesladies, ridgepole goats, shirt-tail woodpeckers, enticed calves and entrapped dogs, a triumphant fighting cock and a heartbreaking chicken pot pie. If it were up to me, I would elect them all, the whole damned circus and menagerie. Lamentable indeed is the moribund state of so much life, the more so in an age of canon revision. Unsustained by the adrenaline of his early public sensation, the literary vitality of Erskine Caldwell now depends on just two works, Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), the only major titles among his almost sixty books available in the paperback format necessary for classroom study and the limited immortality that it confers. To that short list I would add, at a minimum, the story cycle Georgia Boy (1943), currently out of print. The case for this recommendation may be expressed syllogistically. First, in order best to judge a writer's achievement, we must include a judgment of his work at its finest. Second, both Caldwell and a quorum of commentators have cited his stories as his best work and the Georgia Boy collection as the apex of his achievement in the form. Therefore, for our own enrichment and in fairness to Caldwell, we need to resurrect Georgia Boy for the extended reconsideration it deserves.

Although some critics have dismissed Georgia Boy as flawed and trivial, the book's structural integrity and thematic depth should rank it with another major American story cycle, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Far from being a loosely articulated constellation of simple stories, Georgia Boy is unified by contrapuntal characterization and a related animai motif, by dialogue refrains, by a complexly comic tone calling for varied reader responses, and by the twofold theme of coming of age in the South and the South's coming of age—a theme developed through a deceptively naive narrative perspective that requires our careful examination of the title itself. After briefly describing the book and its critical reception to date, I will offer my analytical defense—intended to be suggestive rather than exhaustive—of this largely overlooked and disregarded work.

Georgia Boy is the fictional account of fourteen episodes in the quirky life of the Stroup family of rural, turn-of-the-century Georgia. The principal figure in the book is Morris, a quixotic free spirit with a penchant for vagabonding, philandering and hopelessly impractical scheming. Engagingly incorrigible, he is to an extent suppressible by Martha, the locus of stability in Georgia Boy, whose mission is to keep home and household together by pulling Morris back whenever he goes too far. While good, Martha is not too good to be likable. For example, when Morris lures home Pretty Sooky, an irresistible calf belonging to a neighbor, Martha's righteous censure soon turns to complicity. This aberration humanizes her character, in two senses of the word. That both elder Stroups are sympathetically portrayed strengthens the book by complicating its world view.

The medium of sympathy in Georgia Boy is the narrator, William Stroup. He is a late préadolescent who appreciates his mother's sense and decency although he is drawn to the romantic model of his father. Observant and impressionable, he provides a superficially simple narrative viewpoint that is an artistic success for reasons to be discussed. The remaining member of the Stroup entourage is the family's black retainer, Handsome Brown. About the same age as his friend William, Handsome is akin to Martha in his emerging senibleness and propriety; indeed, when she is not present to admonish Morris personally, Handsome often functions as her surrogate cautionary voice. Treated by Morris variously as a second son, slave, companion and scapegoat, Handsome is leery of his employer's thoughtless abuse even as he obviously enjoys the intermittent status of fishing buddy and quasi member of the family. Handsome's unstable position complicates and lends interest to the essentially similar story lines, wherein Morris ingeniously lands in trouble either to get out of it or meet his comeuppance.

Despite the dearth of criticism on Caldwell in general and his stories in particular, Georgia Boy has accrued some noteworthy favorable attention, not the least of which is Caldwell's own often-expressed opinion. Throughout his long career, Erskine Caldwell repeatedly cited Georgia Boy as his greatest achievement in the short-story form; and on those occasions when he was pressed to choose a single favorite from his many books, he named Georgia Boy most often. In 1961 he termed it "the most complete book I have ever written," adding that "it has everything, sociology, economics." He concluded, "I believe it will hold up longer than any other book I have written. .. . It goes into people more" [interview with Guccione, in Conversations with Erskine Caldwell, edited by Edwin T. Arnold, 1988]. In the first extended study of Caldwell, James Korges [in Erskine Caldwell, 1969] called the "neglected" Georgia Boy "one of the finest novels of boyhood in American literature," lauding its blend of pathos and humor along with a "flawless handling of the point of view." And in his final essay on Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley praised Georgia Boy as the author's last significant book. "I feel angry with recent critics," he declared, for "neglecting" this and other important Caldwell works ["Erskine Caldwell's Magic," Pembroke Magazine 11, 1979]. Henry Seidel Canby also was impressed, declaring that "it would be hard to find much more amusing reading" than the "perfectly delightful stories in Georgia Boy" [Introduction to The Pocket Book of Erskine Caldwell Stories, 1947].

Not all responses have been favorable, however, and at least two commentators have found Georgia Boy seriously flawed. In an essay published just three years after the book itself, W. M. Frohock termed the collection funny but "facile." "There is no point in claiming that it is a great or even a significant book," he said. Rather, Georgia Boy is simply "something like what Mark Twain might have done had he come from Georgia and found himself in a playful mood" ["Erskine Caldwell: Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia," Southwest Review 31, Autumn, 1946]. More recently (1984) and more damagingly (because it is the only comprehensive, book-length study of Caldwell), James E. Devlin's Erskine Caldwell dismisses Georgia Boy as too inconsequential to be really good. Says Devlin: "The stories .. . for the most part, are extraordinarily slight. That is not to say that familiar topics such as the sex drive and racial injustice are altogether ignored. They are not; but they are touched on in such a manner as to escape the serious attention they command in more substantial works." Devlin places the blame for the alleged slightness on the narrator, William. Unlike Huck Finn, who responds sensitively to the suffering and confusion he encounters, William, says Devlin, "is more like a camera who [sic] accords equal importance to everything in range." Censuring this perceived indifference, Devlin contends that "the book's objectivity, in its unfavorable sense, becomes overwhelming." Curiously, Devlin here records as a fault what Malcolm Cowley, in a predecessor to his already-cited essay, applauded as a virtue. In Caldwell's writing, said Cowley, too often "the intrusion of moral feeling spoils the comedy, making you hesitate to laugh." He added, however, that although this problem is present in all the novels, the stories generally escaped the moralist's heavy hand. "The poet alone, with his wild humor, is responsible for . . . 'The Night My Old Man Came Home'" ["The Two Erskine Caldwells," The New Republic 111, November 6, 1944]. This example of an unspoiled story is a representative selection from Georgia Boy. I will demonstrate that there is more of what Caldwell termed sociology and economics in the book than either Cowley or Devlin allows, although, as the former rightly affirmed, the essential humor does escape uncompromised, if not unqualified.

One excellent reason for bringing back Georgia Boy is its intriguing form. Structurally, the book is a bona fide story cycle akin to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, among the few writers and titles that Caldwell admitted to admiring. Indeed, Malcolm Cowley went so far as to suggest that "most of his [Caldwell's] early stories could not have been written without the encouragement offered by Winesburg, Ohio, which served as a beacon light to many new talents of that age" ["Georgia Boy: A Retrospect of Erskine Caldwell," in Pages, edited Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1976]. Even the evolution of the two books ran a parallel course. Like Winesburg, Ohio, Georgia Boy had its beginnings in independently conceived and separately published stories, stories nonetheless linked by shared settings, characters and a recurrent narrator. For both writers the emerging notion of a story cycle—that is, a work functioning not just as a collection of discrete stories but as a novel-like, articulated whole—impelled them to write additional episodes to round out their books and pull them together.

In Caldwell's case, eight of the fourteen stories in Georgia Boy were published there for the first time. This simultaneous appearance of more than half of the book's contents is a corrective to the misconception, partially fostered by Caldwell himself, that Georgia Boy is not an integrated whole. His various statements that the stories were written independently over a number of years and that, as he told an interviewer in 1983, "I had no idea I would write enough to make a book" [interview with Kay Bonetti, Saturday Review 9, No. 9, July-August, 1983] are true only of the earlier, separately published stories and most probably not for all of them, especially those several published in the year or two immediately preceding the book itself. His most accurate explanation of the development of Georgia Boy is apparently one of his last, a 1986 statement that "I had started writing these episodes .. . and I just continued because I had the whole book in mind and wanted to do a whole, book-length series" [interview with Edwin T. Arnold, in Conversations with Erskine Caldwell]. Clearly, Caldwell recognized and approved of the hybrid shape of his book. He said in 1958, "It could be that it is the ideal form as far as I am concerned: it can be divided into parts and yet the whole put together is a novel" [interview with Carvel Collins, in the Atlantic Monthly 202, July, 1958]. Georgia Boy is emphatically in the great tradition of English language story cycles, the distinguished lineage of which is traceable all the way back to the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. The Stroup family stories must therefore be considered in a context that dictates the greater worth of the whole compared to the sum of the separate parts.

Like the almost certain model of Winesburg, Ohio, two of Caldwell's own earlier works suggest our consideration of Georgia Boy as a meaningfully and deliberately unified book. Although all three sections of his long prose-poem The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1936) appeared initially as independent publications, their development was a continuous evolution, their final merger a natural combination. The Sacrilege of Alan Kent manifestly functions as a whole. Even more to the point, Caldwell's story collection Jackpot, published in 1940, combined into a single story three pieces, published separately elsewhere, that would later appear as chapters in Georgia Boy. "My Old Man" includes "The Night My Old Man Came Home," "Handsome Brown and the Aggravating Goats" and "My Old Man Hasn't Been the Same Since." In his brief Jackpot preface to "My Old Man," Caldwell said: "I read the first part of this story and immediately wrote the second. Afterwards I went back and read the first part for the second time, and straightway wrote the third part." These successful combinative experiments in his own publishing history show that Caldwell was well prepared to execute a longer story cycle, especially one based on the Stroups.

The essential unity of Georgia Boy is best demonstrated by the book itself. One of the principal structuring devices here is Caldwell's deft employment of contrapuntal characterization. Morris and Martha are portrayed as polar opposites with more or less alternating moments of control over one another. Meanwhile, Handsome Brown—sometimes by inclination and sometimes by victimization—moves from one magnetic field to the other. Taking in all of this activity and making his report to the reader is the ever-watchful narrator, William. In a 1980 interview Caldwell alluded to this volatile characterization: "Martha was more dominant than Morris, certainly, but he was more animated than she was. In fact, I don't think there would have been any story at all without his animation. Just her role alone was not strong enough. When you write a story, you have to have a contrast between light and dark, high and low" [interview with Ronald Wesley Hoag and Elizabeth Dell Broadwell, in the Mississippi Quarterly 36, Fall, 1983]. The seesawing of the Morris-Martha struggle moves the book along, making the conclusions of separate stories doubly significant because they also mark shifts in the relative ascendancy of the major characters. Against this lively context of dynamic equilibrium, the final stasis of the last chapter becomes especially noteworthy. When Martha kills the feisty rooster College Boy in "My Old Man Hasn't Been the Same Since," she symbolically cuts off her wayward husband's "cock." The story's last-word location in the book and the suggestion of final resolution in its title seemingly tilt the balance once and for all in favor of Martha and domestic virtue, leaving the reader to place that new reign of tranquility on the continuum of gain and loss.

As anyone who has read Tobacco Road knows, Erskine Caldwell was adept at exploiting similarities between people and animals for a variety of literary purposes. Snoutnosed Sister Bessie and fanny-dragging Ellie May make that book, in certain parts, something like a comic, naturalistic beast fable. In Georgia Boy, too, animal imagery functions as a major motif, employed here as an adjunct to structure, characterization and theme. Although the animals and humans in Georgia Boy are separate entities, the former help to catalyze and define the latter: characters are revealed by the animals they react against, respond to or imitate.

Martha particularly objects to roof-climbing goats, while Morris cannot abide impertinent woodpeckers. Handsome Brown reluctantly has his hands full with both species. The controversies surrounding these two episodes establish for the reader the pecking order in the Stroup household. Yet all is not turmoil here, for the darling calf Pretty Sooky proves too tempting for wife and husband alike. Martha's soft spot for this bovine "stray" and her willingness to look the other way in a potential moral crisis help the reader understand both her attraction to and tolerance for the philandering Morris. Structurally, "My Old Man and Pretty Sooky" sets up two other episodes involving Morris's penchant for collecting strays—"My Old Man's Political Appointment," with its similarly baited stray dogs, and "The Night My Old Man Came Home," with its pretty young stray of another kind. In the latter story, a whimsically inebriated Morris brings home a diminutive girlfriend who, he somehow thinks, will be accepted by Martha in the manner of Pretty Sooky. When Martha instead ends up in a hair-pulling brawl with the girl, Morris bemusedly picks apart the family furniture for drunken recreation. This humorously drawn domestic disturbance sets up, in turn, the bittersweet irony of the last animal story in Georgia Boy, the book's final chapter in which the bantam College Boy, spiritual double to Morris, loses his life to the fed-up Martha. Thus, the patterned and, to a degree, incremental use of the animal motif both moves the story cycle along and provides its closure.

An aspect of style in Georgia Boy that has received mention, but not attention, is the rhetorical use of repetition.

Specifically, dialogue refrains serve to link episodes and establish character. When Martha is about to reprimand Morris, she customarily first orders William to "go in the house right this instant and shut the doors and pull down all the window shades." These directives and their occasions help to identify all three Stroups: she is the scolding parent to her childish husband and the sheltering parent to her child son. Her latter function also elucidates William's disinclination to judge the events he observes. Clearly, he has been habituated not to concern himself with the affairs of adults. For a child of contentious parents, there is no doubt a measure of comfort in such disengagement.

The reader comes to anticipate, in addition, characteristic utterances by both Morris and Handsome Brown. Typical of Morris are his incantations at the commencement of his schemes, for example: "We'll have more money than we'll know what to do with. . . . It's a shame I didn't know about this way of making money before, because it's the easiest way I ever heard of." Typical also are his repeated stiflings of Handsome: "Shut up, Handsome. . . . Mind your own business." Handsome, however, is delineated by his vain attempts to avoid entanglement in Morris's imbroglios and by his equally futile efforts to explain his involvement to Martha. "Sometimes I get a little mixed up when I try to tell the truth in both directions at the same time," he tells her in one such dilemma. His comment accurately portrays his pawnlike position. Yet perhaps even more powerless than Handsome is the narrator of Georgia Boy himself. William's first words to his parents in the opening episode of the book establish his disenfranchised status as a little boy: "Can't I, Ma? Can't I go see what it was?" "I'll help, Pa. . . . Let me help, Pa." In these as in similar instances, his beseechings are to no avail.

Tone, too, is a unifying element in Georgia Boy as well as vehicle for advancing theme. Although the tone of all the stories might broadly be labeled as comic, the comedy ranges from farce ("My Old Man's Political Appointment") to fabliau ("My Old Man and the Gypsy Queen") to social satire ("The Time Handsome Brown Ran Away") to tall tale ("Handsome Brown and the Aggravating Goats") to domestic comedy of both a genial and melancholy sort ("My Old Man and Pretty Sooky" and "My Old Man Hasn't Been the Same Since," respectively). As often as not, a story calls for more than one reader response by employing different kinds of humor for different purposes. For example, the three episodes in which Handsome Brown is indirectly or directly abused by Morris ("Handsome Brown and the Aggravating Goats," "Handsome Brown and the Shirt-tail Woodpeckers" and "The Time Handsome Brown Ran Away") may be laughed at, if taken with a grain of salt as tall-tale exaggerations. They should, however, also be read—especially the last one—as social satires in which the real butt of the joke is not Handsome but rather the caste system that fosters such misuse. Because James Devlin neglects the important role of satire in these stories, he mistakes black humor at the expense of blacks.

Similarly complex in their seriocomic tone are the stories in which Morris strives to rise in the world by an assortment of cockeyed get-rich-quick schemes. The episodes involving the baling of paper, the collecting of scrap iron and the rounding up of baited dogs are supposed to be antically funny, of course. There is poignancy here as well, however, for these stories present a man's continuously frustrated, and therefore pathetic, efforts to grow wealthy in a land of stunted opportunity. Witness, also, the condition of Handsome Brown as a post-emancipation economic slave. That the American Dream has not found realization in this Georgia hinterland community can make both man and boy do some funny things. To the reader falls the responsibility of deciding when laughter is appropriate.

An important structural link in Georgia Boy is the book's overarching theme, the coming of age of southerners and the South. One aspect of this comprehensive theme is what Leo Marx referred to as the "machine in the garden." The earlier example of Sister Bessie's automobile in Tobacco Road demonstrates that Caldwell was clearly aware of the impact of the machine age on the countryside and on country folk. Several stories in Georgia Boy involve this collision. The device that gives "My Old Man's Baling Machine" its title swallows up even Martha's collection of old "love and courtship letters" as Morris fervently pursues his latest version of better living through technology. Similarly, in "The Time Ma Spent the Day at Aunt Bessie's," his harvesting of scrap iron for industry scavenges all but the shoes off the village horses' hooves. And in "Uncle Ned's Short Stay," the Coast Line freight train carries convict Ned and trouble to Martha's doorstep. Although Georgia Boy is essentially a rural nostalgia piece, the pastoral it presents is not simple and sentimental, but irretrievably compromised.

As to what the character of the new South will be when maturity finally arrives, Caldwell here offers two contending possibilities in the models of Morris and Martha, with a strong suggestion that the future will side with the latter. Neither a lazy William Byrd "lubberlander" nor an Al Capp Dogpatch derelict, Morris Stroup is, instead, a spiritual son of Simon Suggs, the Johnson Jones Hooper character [in "Simon Plays the 'Snatch' Game"] who proclaims, "It is good to be shifty in a new country." Shifty, not shiftless, describes Morris. With a little better luck he could pass for a Snopes, that clan of once-poor whites whose more illustrious members recognized that the turn from agrarianism to mercantilism could be turned to their advantage. Morris's back may flare up whenever Martha wants some household labor performed, but he is tireless in the service of his own designs. His willingness to bale up even his love letters to his wife, cheerfully exchanging these emblems of the family bond for a modest financial gain, indicates one of the forces pulling at the thread of southern life. That this homely fabric will hold, however, is implied by Martha's final domination over Morris at the end of the book. "My Old Man Hasn't Been the Same Since" is Erskine Caldwell's rendition of Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" and Mary Wilkins Freeman's "The Revolt of Mother." What those stories said about the Far West and New England, Caldwell's said for the Old South—that is, when the dust of change settles, civilization and domesticity will prevail over the gambles of boyish men who refuse to grow up. In a country no longer new, shiftiness has lost its sanction.

Another manifestation of coming of age in Georgia Boy is what critics have termed, with reference to Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson, the "revolt from the village." Whether by influence or confluence, Caldwell's book exhibits in muted form this same revolt from provinciality. There is, however, a significant difference. The actual flight of Huck Finn and George Willard is only latently present in Georgia Boy, nascent in the not yet fully fledged William Stroup. When the social and economic injustices that William records lead, with his own maturing, to ethical rejection, presumably then will revulsion find expression in revolt. Certainly, such revolt lies at the heart of many other Caldwell works, both fiction and nonfiction.

Bridging all fourteen stories in his role of narrator, William Stroup is both observer of and player in the drama of coming of age. In a 1982 interview [with D. G. Kehl, in the South Atlantic Quarterly 83, Autumn, 1984], Caldwell indicated that William is a boy of "ten or twelve years old." This age is crucial to our understanding of the narrator and his narration. As a preadolescent, William has not yet reached the stage of second-guessing the adult world. Instead, he is at an age when bonding to and imitating both his parents largely prohibit rebellion. Otherwise objective in his narration, he does, however, become emotionally engaged in two of the last three stories, wherein he is forced to respond to severely divisive family crises. In the first instance, that response is passive and private. In the second, though, his assertive judgment upon a parental act marks his incipient emergence from boyhood, the significant note on which Georgia Boy ends.

In the twelfth episode, "The Night My Old Man Came Home," even as Martha battles the girlfriend and besotted Morris wrecks the furniture, William nonetheless gives thanks for his footloose father's presence: "I snuggled down under the covers, hugging my knees as tight as I could, and hoping he would stay in the home all the time, instead of going off again. .. . It sure felt good being there in the dark with him." The hug itself is a poignantly displaced gesture of need and affection. The book's final story, "My Old Man Hasn't Been the Same Since," concludes with two more gestures by William, this time openly expressed. When Martha informs Morris that he has just eaten College Boy, William is the first to speak out against her action: '"That was College Boy, Ma,' I said, 'you shouldn't—'." Immediately after delivering this censure, he goes off into the night to seek his father, who has fled in horror from the fatal, fateful dinner: "I got up and went through the house behind him. . . . The cigar stub he had left on the porch railing when we went inside to supper was still burning, and it smelled just like my old man. I hurried down the steps and ran down the street trying to catch up with him before it was too late to find him in the dark." In a reversal of roles from the earlier episode, William's presence will presumably now comfort Morris in the elder Stroup's hour of darkness. Together, the endings of these strategically placed and related stories reject the proposition that the narrator of Georgia Boy is too much the camera to convince as a human being. A camera neither feels nor grows.

Admittedly, there are no statements by William to match Huck Finn's ruefully enlightened pronouncement that "human beings can be awful cruel to one another." Nor should there be any. The charm of Georgia Boy is that despite its candidly portrayed inhumanities, it is primarily an idyll of innocence. In a 1958 interview [with Collins], Caldwell strongly suggested that he viewed Georgia Boy as a nostalgia piece: "I still have a feeling for a book I wrote. .. . It was a book called Georgia Boy, a series of sketches about a boy in Georgia growing up in company with his mother, his father, and a Negro playmate of the same age—growing up at that particular time in America when life was a little more leisurely and there was not so much compelling action put upon people."

The author's own feeling, expressed here, for this allegedly mellow yesteryear does much to explain the point of view in his book. While a grown man like Erskine Caldwell or even a sensitive teenager like Huck Finn might be expected to condemn social and economic wrongs, a younger boy may be permitted to describe them without rendering a verdict. To depict the Georgia of his fondly remembered boyhood as a kind of localized age of innocence, Caldwell required a narrator who was at an innocent age. The nostalgic ambiance of Georgia Boy Mainly derives from the second word in its title, not the first. In 1980 Caldwell described as follows his erstwhile ambivalence toward the South: "As I was growing up, I did resent the South. I resented its economy and sociology. I resented the lack of opportunity in general, and especially the fact that the black people there were not accorded the same opportunity as the white people. .. . On the other hand, I would also say that, just like anyone who has a homeplace, I have always had a deep regard for this region. .. . I have always liked the South and liked its people, even though I had these qualifications because of some of the conditions there" [interview with Broadwell and Hoag, in the Georgia Review 36, Spring, 1982]. In other works Caldwell scourged his homeplace for its deprivations and its racism. In Georgia Boy he found a way, by using a narrator who had not yet had to grow up, to express his love without compromising his principles or distorting the historical record.

The facts in Georgia Boy speak for themselves, directly to the reader, without any needed proddings by William Stroup. Although there is no judgment pronounced about such reprehensible occurrences as the persecution of Handsome Brown, there is judgment amply implied. James Devlin cites "The Time Handsome Brown Ran Away" as a story calling for moral response with none forthcoming. In this episode, Handsome leaves the Stroups to join a carnival, where his dubious employment consists of offering his head as a target for baseball-throwing customers. Morris resents the absconding of his retainer and knocks Handsome silly with spitballs before leading him back to the fold. Clearly, this carnivalized brutality is no laughing matter. Neither does Caldwell present it that way: "The spit-ball hit him on the left side of the head with a sound like a board striking a bale of cotton. Handsome sank down to the ground with a low moan. 'Look here, mister,' the man in the silk shirt said, . . . 'I think you'd better quit chunking at this darkey. He'll be killed if this keeps up much longer'." Although the story has its comic moments, the pointed description and dialogue here are sufficient proof that this scene is not meant to be one of them. Morris's spitballs are manifestly dangerous and demeaning.

Nor should we find funny the scornful racism of Uncle Ned Stroup, who takes exception to Handsome's request that he not be the one to tell Martha of her ne'erdo-well brotherin-law's arrival: "What you talking about, nigger! .. . Don't you never talk back like that as long as you live! One more peep out of you like that again, and I'll bash your head in with this rock! You hear me, nigger!" Handsome's difficulties with goats and woodpeckers may be laughed off as pratfall vaudeville, defused by their exaggeration and improbability. Ned's threat of racist murder, however, is unmistakably malicious. Just as Caldwell's prose differentiates between outrageousness and outrage, so too must the reader. In the division of labor established by this book, other characters act and are acted upon, the narrator observes and reports with a naivete appropriate to his age, and the readers must decide when to laugh and when to shake their heads. Georgia Boy is a work involving children, not necessarily for them.

William Stroup is a Georgia boy, but the comprehensively apt title of this story cycle refers to more than him alone. There are three Georgia boys here, not one; and the separate responses required by each mark the range of reader responsibility to Caldwell's book. To be sure, William is still a little boy. In order to appreciate his view of Georgia we must understand the limitations of his youthful vantage point. Although the Georgia he depicts is Eden after, rather than before, the Fall, he himself is an Adam without meaningful knowledge of good and evil. As a result of his inchoate perception, the Georgia this boy gives us is at once idyllic without being ideal. Indeed, his own innocence is its principal saving grace.

Being both a youth and a black, Handsome Brown is doubly cast as a boy. When playing with his white friend William, Handsome, too, is an icon of childhood, that brief span before economics and sociology break up the games. But in the following stereotyped calumny by Uncle Ned, we are given another image of what it meant to be black and Maie, regardless of age, in early twentieth-century Georgia: "'I'll bet he ain't never done enough work, all told, to earn a day's board and keep,' Uncle Ned said, 'Ain't that right, boy?'" Both the statement and the question address Handsome. When in the company of William Stroup and Handsome Brown, the reader is simultaneously present in two different Georgias and must respond appropriately to each.

So, too, does the extended boyhood of Morris Stroup call for a divided response. On the one hand, we like Morris just because he is such an unregenerate, though by no means unchastened, good old boy. We are drawn to him as to all the good-natured screwups who manage to prolong boyhood into middle age and in so doing do not lack for company. To this day in the South they are at once social pariahs and a prideful club, depending on the eye of the beholder. But while Morris behaves as if "boys will be boys" were his exemption from adult mores, Martha finally does not. All the years of his cockfighting, his philandering and his remorseless gallivanting have unraveled her to the point where she must either pull things together or let them come completely apart. The axe that claims the head of College Boy cuts off the boyhood of Morris as well, and to at least the half-hearted approval of the reader. A fitting end to the entire book, her decisive action also moves her son to the edge, if not the age, of judgment and the South, symbolically, to the brink of change.

In an important sense, there is still another boy present in Georgia Boy, never described or even mentioned but nonetheless haunting these Georgia scenes—haunting them, haunted by them. When Erskine Caldwell told an interviewer [Arnold] in 1986 that the stories here are "not in any way autobiographical," he almost certainly meant only that the specific incidents are fabrications and that his own stable parents had not stood as models for the elder Stroups. In 1983, however, Caldwell left no doubt that his personal experience of boyhood had been the inspiration for this book. After citing Georgia Boy as a favorite work, he described it as follows: "This was a whole series of short stories I wrote as the result of looking back at my early life and a playmate who happened to be a black boy. . . . That was a sort of landmark [for me] as far as writing was concerned, because I wrote it purely for the fact that I wanted to go back and think about my early life" [interview with Kehl]. Thus, even if Georgia Boy is not personal history, it is a kind of spiritual autobiography—the more significant of the two because that is the material of mythology, which we value above the historical record.

Not since before the revival of academic interest in Erskine Caldwell's writings over the last decade has Georgia Boy been available in a paperback edition. For classroom study, the book, in effect, does not exist. This essay has several functions. It is a petition to publishers to act pro bono publico by reissuing Georgia Boy in an accessible, competitively priced format. It is a recommendation to teachers to adopt this book for appropriate courses: "Southern Fiction"; "American Humor"; "The American Bildungsroman" short-story, novel and historical surveys are among its logical contexts. Further, it is an invitation to students and all other readers to approach Georgia Boy with great expectations. Certainly, there are other works by Caldwell that deserve to be brought back. The novels Journeyman (1935), Trouble in July (1940) and Tragic Ground (1944) all have champions; and many voices have praised his early stories. The combinative advantages of the story-cycle form, however, set Georgia Boy apart from, and arguably above, these other works. It is distinguished, moreover, by a complex structural and stylistic weave and by the many variations on its major theme played by an instrumental narrator whose personal simplicity is the book's greatest sophistication. For these reasons and others, if I had to choose just a single Caldwell work for regeneration, I would unhesitatingly select the too long neglected Georgia Boy. In all likelihood, so would he.