This Very Earth was published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce in 1948, and it marks Caldwell’s return to the rural South after several novels set in urban and industrial settings. Chism Crockett is a small cotton farmer in Georgia who is losing his battle to keep his land: cotton prices are low, the soil is exhausted, and the bank is threatening foreclosure. Meanwhile, Chism exploits the Black sharecroppers who work his land, paying them less than subsistence and keeping them trapped in the same cycle of debt that is destroying him.
The novel lacks the explosive energy of Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre — by 1948, Caldwell’s best work was behind him — but it has a directness about the economics of Southern agriculture that gives it documentary value. The relationship between white landowner and Black sharecropper is depicted as a system of mutual destruction: Chism’s exploitation of his tenants is not profitable enough to save him, and their exploitation is not bearable enough to sustain them. The land itself — “this very earth” — is the real victim, depleted by generations of single-crop farming and treated by everyone as a resource to be consumed rather than maintained.
Collecting This Very Earth
First edition (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1948): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$15