Title: Cropper’s Cabin
Genre: Crime Noir Fiction
Author: Jim Thompson
My paperback copy of Cropper’s Cabin (above) was published in 1952 by Trent Book Company of London. It’s dog-eared as hell and would have been purchased second-hand by my late brother Clem, probably way back in the 70’s. It would then have sat around for years gathering dust on the bookshelves in my parents house before I took it down to read, no doubt attracted by the lurid cover, but also the flyleaf blurb that I think is well worth quoting:
“The Place: Back-country Oklahoma
The Time: Today
The People: Pa – a land-starved white man
Mary – the woman who lives in Pa’s shack, and whom he calls “daughter”.
Tom – adolescent whose bitter poverty drives him into the arms of
Donna Ontime – a girl of a despised race, who uses woman’s most potent weapon to enter the white world
Abe Toolate – drooling degenerate whose tiny brain bears the seed of five generations of evil.“
And if that don’t whet your appetite, nothing will. If you don’t know Thompson’s work, he wrote a string of mostly wonderful crime noir thrillers in the 50’s and 60’s such as: “The Killer inside me”, “Pop 1280”, “The Getaway” (later a Steve McQueen Movie) and “The Grifters” (also a movie starring Angelica Huston and John Cusack). And Big Jim’s one of Stephen King’s favorite authors too, and recommendations don’t get much better than that.
However, Cropper’s Cabin isn’t one of his best, although it does still contain one of his trademark borderline psycho characters in narrator 19 year old Tom Carver. Tom’s consumed with hatred for Pa, who left his mother to die in child-birth while he spent a week in the arms of a whore; a whore, Mary, who Pa later moves into their shack where she shares a bed with both father and son.
Thompson sets his steamy melodrama in Oklahoma and he gives us a fascinating potted history of the area and in particular how the five civilized tribes – the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees and Seminoles – migrated there along the Trail of Tears in around 1817; and then came the influx of white settlers and the development of the share-crop system.
Pa’s tiny cotton holding is marooned smack bang in the middle of Matthew Ontime’s 5,000 acre spread, and Matthew won’t agree to Pa leasing the land out for Oil rights, so depriving Pa of $25,000, riches beyond his dreams. Exacerbating Pa’s seething resentment is Tom’s illicit, secretive relationship with Matthews beautiful daughter, smoldering, black eyed Donna. Here’s Tom describing Donna’s heritage:
“Matthew Ontime was a half-blood, and his wife had been a white woman. Donna, in other words, was one-fourth Indian and the rest white, and that’s a blood mixture that’s hard to beat if you’re breeding for beauty.”
But Tom’s attitude to Donna is complicated by Pa’s malign influence:
“Because when you’ve been raised by a man like Pa, you’re bound to absorb some of his ideas even when you know they’re completely unreasonable. Pa was always telling about how the Five Tribes had been forced out of Georgia and Mississippi and Florida, back in the early 1800’s; and how they should have been crowded right on out into the Pacific Ocean, instead of being allowed to hog onto the land that the white folks needed. He was always saying that they were all streaked with the tar-brush – that they were part nigger. He claimed that they were lazy and thieving loaded with all kinds of dirty diseases. And I’d soon learned better than to argue with him. I’d had to listen and listen, never saying anything back, until his way of thinking had almost become mine.”
And this attitude pops up unbidden in Tom in his interactions at school where he is a good student. When janitor Abe Toolate believes he has caught Tom stealing, this is Tom putting him straight:
“‘N-now look, Tom-Tommy,’ he stuttered. ‘I didn’t mean…’
‘Tommy?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you getting a little familiar, Abe? You mean Mister Carver, don’t you?’
‘M-mister Carver…’
He almost choked on that, having to call a white-trash sharecropper’s boy mister. It was like being made to admit that along with being Creek Indian he was also part nigger.”
But Tom starts to become self-aware too:
“Maybe you don’t know how it is when you’re so sick inside, sick and hopeless-feeling, that you want someone to cross you a little; just enough so you’ll have an excuse to make them feel bad too.”
Things come to a head when Pa confronts Matthew Ontime about the Oil rights. Here’s Ontime (clearly an early environmentalist) reasoning with Pa:
“‘It takes years before land that’s been drilled for oil can be brought back to farm land. Sometimes it can never be brought back. It’s worthless, eroded and gullied, soaked with oil and salt water. And what happens to the people who farmed that land? What would happen to the sixty families who work this plantation?’
Pa grunted. ‘What do I care what happens to ‘em? A bunch o’ white trash an’ niggers and half-breeds!’
‘I see,’ said Matthew Ontime slowly. ‘Is that your attitude also, Tom?’
‘You’re talkin’ to me,’ snapped Pa.
‘I’m speaking to Tom. What about it, Tom?’
I waited. Pa jerked his head. ‘Go ahead, boy. Answer him.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. I forced the words out. ‘That my attitude.’
‘I’m sorry. But perhaps it’s just as well. Now, you’ll have to excuse me.’
He started to turn towards his horse. Pa leaped forward and caught him by the arm. ‘I ain’t through talking to you, you…!’
I couldn’t see what happened, it was so fast. But Pa suddenly rose up in the air, and when he came down again he was a good two yards from where he had been standing. He landed on his feet, upright, but it took all of the breath out of him.
‘It would seem,’ said Matthew Ontime quietly, ‘that I’m not through talking to you either. You’re not cropping for me any longer, Carver. I’m dividing your forty among my other tenants.’
‘B-but what’ll I…’
‘I don’t give a damn, Carver. But if I find you on my land after tonight, you’ll be treated as a common trespasser.’
He nodded curtly and put a hand on the saddle pommel. And Pa was screaming, ‘You dirty half-breed! You yaller nigger! You…!'”
And when Matthew Ontime is found dead in a Hog pen, killed with Tom’s knife, Tom’s arrested and charged with the murder. Later we meet another great Thompson character, the lawyer, Kossmeyer, or “Caustic” Kossmeyer, as the papers dub him – retained to defend Tom. Here’s sharp-talking Kossmeyer attempting to convince Tom they have to go after Donna to avoid the chair:
‘Let me tell you something, kid. There’s just one thing that people never get over. Being dead. Anything else can be patched up, and when I say that I’m talking from experience. I defended a madam one time; mayhem and attempted murder. She put a bullet through her gentleman friend’s head. Now, he was a hell of a nice guy; honest, easy-going, had his own business. In fact, the whole trouble started when he threatened to drop her if she didn’t get out of her racket. I said to hell with the facts, to hell with the way things look. He’s an okay guy, I said, and he doesn’t really want this beautiful piece of ass hung in the smokehouse for twenty years. He’s suffered for it and he’s entitled to it, and I’m going to keep it out where he can get at it when he cools off. So I put him on trial. I smeared him like sump grease on a dance floor. I hit him so hard his shirt ran up and down his back like a window-shade. Before I was through with that nice guy, he could have walked back into the place he came out of. On stilts. And the jury wanted to give my client a medal. And about three months later she and this guy got married…”
I wont spoil the ending; I’ll just leave you with Tom daydreaming in his cell in the Sandstone State Reformatory: ‘Because I knew I was going to go back. I was going to stand there in the doorway with the axe in my hands.’ and Later:
‘And I knew it wouldn’t be too long because I was going to see Pa at the house… The axe was there.’
Jim Thompson was one of the great crime noir writers who started out in the US in the 1940’s writing alongside greats like Chandler, James M Cain and Charles Williams and later John D MacDonald who lead on to writers like Elmore Leonard. Big Jim’s golden years were the 50’s and early 60’s. He was a functional alcoholic for much of that time and it eventually caught up with him in 1977. I have included so many long extracts above because I believe they show just what a wonderful, fantastic writer he was. His prose is still fresh more than 60 years after it was written
Can't stop the train better let it roll on... 