(3 of 5)
Authentic Jellybean. Mrs. Towne and her daughters came back. Mrs. Towne was "overflowing with misinterpreted Continental idioms, bad hotel French, and a lofty disdain for everything American." Elaine got herself pregnant, and half the young sports in the Delta made up a $10,000 purse for the salesman who married her off their hands. Van, as viciously authentic a jellybean* as has ever seen print, headed faster & faster toward jail. Old Man Towne bought a ball team so he could watch Sunday baseball, won $10,000 bets on game after game.
Then the bottom began to drop out of cotton.
It dropped to 75¢. Old Man Towne hung on: "Hit's wuth a dollar and I aim to git a dollar." He mortgaged his crop, his next year's crop, his 20,000 acres of lien-free land. Next year the Delta went broke. Towne's banker wired that he would have to sell. Towne wired back "NO." "I ain't aiming to sell hit fer less'n hit's wuth," he said. "But," said the banker, "all it's worth is what the market says it is." "The market is them New York fellers," said Old Man Towne. "Whut do they know about whut cotton's wuth? They ain't never growed none."
He went up to St. Louis to try to find a banker who saw it his way. He went to Wall Street. He worked himself into a paralytic stroke. By the time he came back home there was nothing left to live for. Son Van had made the penitentiary at last. Loraine and her mother had encountered social and mental disaster in a sometimes successful try at Brother William Faulkner's sort of tragedy. Old Man Towne's one friend, his lawyer, had been unable to prevent the gruesome lynching of his one good child, Wee Boy. The bankers were forced to sell every inch of land Old Man Towne had ever owned. When the old man heard that, he died. The lawyer buried him in an Indian mound, and the Negroes raised above him their rich shout of "resurrection and green pastures and surcease of toil."
The Will to Live
THE RAFT—Robert Trumbull—Holt ($2.50).
The story is history—the story of the three-man crew of a Navy plane who were forced down in the Pacific and spent 34 days on a rubber raft (TIME, March 22).
What is here in this book is the word portraits of the men themselves. Robert Trumbull, city editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, portrays them and their actions as nearly as possible in the words used by Chief Petty Officer Dixon when Trumbull interviewed him.
The three seamen were not a picked team. The unlucky flight was their first together. They barely knew one another's surnames.
Gene Aldrich. Youngest of the three was Gene Aldrich, 22-year-old Missouri farm boy. He was a radioman and gunner, with only 15 months' experience in the Navy. He had been a cook in a CCC camp, and as the days of torment and hunger closed down on the raft, Gene would regularly "cook meals" for his mates. When the sun rose on three empty bellies, Gene liked to recall shooting squirrels for breakfast with his father . . . "It seems there are a lot of squirrels in Missouri," says Dixon dryly.