A Painted House

A Painted House, a novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author John Grisham, tells the story of seven-year-old Luke Chandler coming of age in Black Oak, Arkansas, in 1952. The novel focuses on a fateful autumn in which one of the workers on Luke’s family’s cotton farm murders a local man. Luke, as one of the only witnesses to the murder, must navigate the tensions that arise as his loyalty to his family is pitted against his desire to tell the truth and see justice served. A Painted House is a semi-autobiographical novel that diverges in genre from the fast-paced legal thrillers that John Grisham became famous for, such as The Firm and The Pelican Brief. Like Grisham’s earlier novels, A Painted House uses its Southern coming-of-age frame to investigate questions of violence and justice in American society, as well as the perils of life in a patriarchal culture. The novel, originally published in 2001, was adapted into a film by Hallmark in 2003.

This guide refers to the 2001 hardcover first edition of A Painted House, published by Doubleday.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide include descriptions of or references to sexism, ableism, classism, and racism.

Plot Summary

In A Painted House, seven-year-old Luke Chandler’s life is changed when, in the autumn of 1952 in his hometown of Black Oak, Arkansas, his family of impoverished tenant farmers hires a contingent of migrant workers to help harvest their cotton fields. Luke has lived his whole life with his mother and father, Jesse and Kathleen Chandler, as well as his grandparents, whom he calls Pappy and Gran. The Chandlers take in two groups of migrants: a cohort of Mexican people led by a man named Miguel, and a family of Ozark “hill people” called the Spruills. Luke is immediately taken with the beautiful 17-year-old Tally Spruill and intimidated by her mountainous older brother, Hank.

For a few weeks, the cotton-harvesting proceeds as anticipated. One Saturday, though, when the Chandlers and Spruills head into town, Luke witnesses Hank get into a fight during which he bludgeons a local man, Jerry Sisco, with a two-by-four. When Black Oak’s sheriff, Stick Powers, comes to the Chandler farm and reveals that Jerry Sisco died, Hank denies his actions, claiming he was only breaking up the fight and that it was Sisco who held the two-by-four. Hank adds that Luke witnessed the crime and will corroborate his story. Luke is faced with an impossible choice: If he tells the truth, Hank will be taken from the farm and all the Spruills will leave with him, thereby depleting the Chandlers’ workforce and cratering their income for the year; if he lies, he becomes an accessory to Jerry Sisco’s murder. Luke chooses to lie to save his family from financial ruin.

As Luke tries to manage his guilt, several other smaller dramas unfold on the farm. He and his mother visit the Latcher family, neighboring sharecroppers whose 15-year-old daughter, Libby, is pregnant but won’t reveal who the father is; Tally allows Luke to watch her bathe in the river, and Luke begins to have a sexual awakening; Luke starts to notice a budding romance between Tally and one of the Mexican men, Cowboy; the Chandlers receive letters from Ricky, Luke’s young uncle who’s fighting in Korea; and Trot, the youngest Spruill, who has physical and mental disabilities, begins to paint the Chandlers’ unpainted house with supplies purchased for him by Tally.

With Stick Powers still searching for sufficient evidence to arrest Hank, Hank’s violent behavior escalates. During a Mexicans-versus-Arkansans baseball game on the farm, Hank gets angry at Cowboy and intentionally hits him with a fastball, breaking his ribs. When the carnival comes to town, Hank makes $250 by physically assaulting the carnival’s strongman during a boxing match. With his newfound financial resources, Hank is less motivated to pick cotton, and his productivity dwindles. Hank uses his free time to harass Mexican workers by throwing dirt clods onto the roof of their abode while they sleep; when one of them looks out of the window to see what’s happening, Hank hits him with a rock.

As tensions between the Mexican and the Spruill workers rise, so do tensions elsewhere on the farm. When Libby Latcher goes into labor, Tally and Luke sneak out at night to spy on the birth; after the birth, one of the Latcher children reveals that Ricky is the father. Later, the Chandlers are visited by relatives from up north, Jimmy Dale and his Yankee wife, Stacey, whose new automobile and condescending attitudes toward blue-collar farmers anger Luke.

Eventually, Stick Powers returns to the farm, saying that he’s going to arrest Hank because one of Jerry Sisco’s relatives has escaped jail to kill Hank. Pappy asks Stick to wait until the cotton is harvested, but Gran comes up with a plan: If they let it slip to Hank that he’s being hunted, he’ll flee the farm of his own accord. Gran’s plan works. The night that Hank makes his escape, Luke watches as he’s followed off the property by Cowboy. Luke sees Cowboy murder Hank with a switchblade, rob the corpse, and dump the body into a nearby river. Cowboy catches Luke spying and threatens to kill Luke’s mother if he says anything.

Luke, now keeping secrets about both Jerry Sisco’s and Hank’s murders, feels increasingly ill at ease. His paranoia is only compounded when Cowboy and Tally disappear one day with Pappy’s truck; Stick Powers finds the truck at a local bus station and discovers that Tally and Cowboy are traveling north to elope. The Spruills, demoralized by their children’s departures, decide to leave the farm. Before they go, Trot gives his paintbrush to Luke, and Luke decides to finish the job of painting the house.

After the Spruills leave, the weather progressively worsens, with rainstorms halting the cotton harvest and threatening to flood the nearby river. Luke dedicates more and more of his time and hard-earned money to the house-painting project; the Mexican workers, unable to work in the fields, help him accomplish more than he could alone. The river eventually floods and ruins the Chandlers’ crops and floods the Latchers’ home. The Chandlers, using a boat borrowed from a neighbor, access the Latchers’ ruined home by the river and transport the family to the safety of their barn. The Latchers, now having lost almost all of their material possession, are content to stay in the barn for as long as they need to.

Luke’s mother reveals to him that, because the rains have destroyed the crops and there’s no viable work left for them in Black Oak, she and Luke’s father are planning to move the three of them north so they can work in the automobile factory where Jimmy Dale works. Luke is initially disheartened by this news since it means he’ll have to leave his friends and grandparents behind and won’t get to see Ricky when he gets home from the war. Eventually, though, he warms to the idea of leaving Black Oak. Luke tells Pappy the truth about Hank Spruill, and Pappy says that they’ll keep it secret between the two of them. Luke isn’t fully able to finish painting the house before he and his parents depart, and Pappy promises that he’ll finish the job before Luke one day returns.