A Painted House

Through the early 19th century, the fertile earth of the Arkansas Delta attracted an influx of farmers who depended on the labor of enslaved Africans to plant and harvest their cotton crops. Farming cotton in the Delta was an especially advantageous endeavor because farmers had access to the Mississippi River, which expedited the transportation of their harvest. After the abolition of slavery, the labor models governing cotton production shifted, giving rise to tenant farming, sharecropping, and wage labor. Tenant farmers worked the fields owned by wealthy landowners, typically using their own equipment to harvest and sell the crops. Tenant farmers often employed the use of wage laborers—migrant workers—to help harvest the crops. Sharecroppers, by contrast, owned none of the equipment they used to work the land. Though social mobility was difficult for all these groups, it was nearly impossible for sharecroppers.

The cotton industry underwent numerous changes through the first half of the 20th century. The Great Depression saw the price of cotton bales plummet, forcing the government to create programs that might help keep cotton farmers in business. Through the 1930s, as the country prepared to enter World War II, factories in urban areas created a demand for labor that paid much better than working the cotton fields did. This shift saw many Arkansas farmers heading north in search of better-paying work. Despite the introduction of mechanical cotton-harvesting methods in the 1950s that significantly reduced the need for human labor in picking cotton, cotton became less and less important to the state’s agricultural output through the second half of the 20th century.

A Painted House engages many of the complicated class dynamics created by the profit-sharing arrangements of the early 20th  century. The Chandlers are tenant farmers who employ the use of wage laborers—the Spruills and the Mexican workers—to try to outright buy the land that they farm. The Latchers are the novel’s most prominent family of sharecroppers. Through Luke’s visits to the Latchers’ home, Grisham illustrates the extreme poverty that these families endured, and how these families depended on the generosity of the community just to survive. Set in 1952, A Painted House is positioned at a transitional moment for cotton farming in rural Arkansas. The Chandlers still harvest cotton by hand, but they are aware of the ever-encroaching modernity that threatens to change their way of life: fancy new cars drive their unpaved roads, and television sets have begun to pop up in town. The migration of cotton farmers out of the Delta and into urban centers is not only part of the plot of the novel’s final chapters but also a conflict intimately connected to some of the novel’s core themes. Luke Chandler is a child caught between a father and grandfather who honor a long, difficult tradition of cotton farming and a mother who longs for a world made more livable by modern technology. This feeling of being torn between worlds defines Luke’s internal conflict for much of the novel.