Talmadge Farm” by Leo Daughtry
In a sweeping story set in eastern North Carolina, Leo Daughtry takes readers from 1957 to 1970, a time of convulsive societal change in Talmadge Farm (Story Merchant 2024). As the Vietnam War intensifies, the civil rights movement spreads across the South, reaching even wealthy bank president and tobacco farmer, Gordon Talmadge. North Carolina’s Research Triangle has its birth, accelerating the industrial development of farms and the decline of tobacco. Another blow to the tobacco industry comes from the Surgeon General, who warns of health risks and mandates warnings on cigarette packs.
Buffeted by changes he resists, Gordon badly misplays his hand. Alternating between defiance and compliance, he treads a crooked path, using alcohol and denial to avoid the challenges he faces. While his wife Claire shows kindness to the farm’s two sharecroppers and their families, Gordon exhibits enough arrogance, disregard, and bigotry to earn readers’ distain.
With sensitivity and attention to detail, Daughtry tells the story of Gordon Talmadge, along with his family members. Interwoven are two other families, those of the sharecroppers who work the fields. Each family has its own demons and secrets. The sharecroppers live in poverty, toiling in ways that benefit the Talmadge family but not their own. One of the sharecroppers —the White one—bootlegs and drinks himself into trouble. The kindly Black sharecropper and his equally kind wife suffer from their inability to protect their three children from threats and influences beyond anyone’s control but that of Gordon and his near-clone of a son, Junior.
One of those sharecropper children, Jake, is forced to flee the farm:
He “squeezed himself into the bed of Mr. Allen’s truck. He was completely surrounded by baskets of summer crops: tomatoes, beans, okra, watermelon, peaches. He couldn’t help feeling as if he, too, had been plucked from the earth, uprooted from everything he’d ever known.”
The circumstance of Jake’s ultimate return is one of the poignant comeuppances of Gordon Talmadge, whose power and wealth turn out to be a house of cards. As Gordon struggles to keep from losing the farm, his bank flounders. In crisis, as he “pulled out of the employee lot, he noticed the workmen had finished installing the new bank sign. Waiting at the stop sign for traffic to clear, he watched them hurl the old lettering from Farmers and Merchants into the back of their truck, probably headed for the town dump.”
Gordon mellows into a character who is more insecure than imperious, and far more vulnerable than powerful. Forced to watch underlings succeed as he fails, Gordon emerges as the most transformed figure in this engaging saga.
Talmadge Farm serves as a timely cautionary tale about prejudice, greed, and resistance to change. It also serves as a reminder that human kindness can transform and resurrect lives going off the rails. It is a rebuke of privilege and a testament to Southern grit.
Leo Daughtry
Leo Daughtry is a first-time novelist who grew up in the tobacco fields of Sampson County, North Carolina. A graduate of Wake Forest University and its law school, he established a private practice and also served as a member of the North Carolina House and Senate for twenty-eight years. Still practicing law, Daughtry especially enjoys time at Atlantic Beach with his wife and daughters.
No comments:
Post a Comment