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A character in Poor White

Ezra French

The cabbage farmer whose children crawl through the fields by moonlight setting plants — the sight that gives Hugh McVey his first machine.

What they want

The crop in, whatever it costs the people setting it. He tells his sons and daughters that the family is close to ruin: “We must get in a big crop. If we do not work hard now we'll starve.” He has several thousand dollars in the bank and no intention of mentioning it.

The book

Cover of Poor White by Sherwood Anderson
Poor WhiteSherwood Anderson, 1920

A farm town in Ohio turns into a factory town inside twenty years, and the man whose machines did it cannot manage a conversation. Sherwood Anderson's novel of 1920.

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At a glance

In the book
Cabbage farmer, two hundred acres on Turner's Pike, a mile north of the Wheeling station
Family
Four sons, three daughters and a tired little wife, all of whom set the plants by hand
Worth
Several thousand dollars in the Bidwell bank, and mortgages on two or three neighbouring farms
In winter
A wit — he goes to town every afternoon to stand in the stores and tell the stories he is known for

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Ezra French farms two hundred acres on Turner's Pike, a mile north of the Wheeling station, most of it in cabbage for the Cleveland and Pittsburgh markets. He came west from New England and has grown comfortably wealthy at it — several thousand dollars in the Bidwell bank and mortgages on two or three neighbouring farms. He broke his leg falling out of a barn loft in his youth and it never mended properly, so he limps and does little of the work himself. In winter he is one of the funniest men in Bidwell, standing in the stores telling the coarse stories he is famous for.

In spring he becomes a tyrant. Cabbage planting has to be done by hand, plant by plant, on hands and knees, and he will not hire labour for it. His sons and daughters do it, and when the moon is up he sends them back out after supper to work until midnight.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • The plantingFour sons crawling along the rows with a three-cornered hoe, three daughters and their mother walking ahead of them dropping the plants out of baskets, and Ezra standing at the fence in the dark swearing at anyone who stands up to stretch: “Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazies!” Then: “Keep at the work. Don't be idling around.”
  • The bluff about ruinHe has money in the bank and mortgages on his neighbours and pretends to be on the edge of losing everything, because it is the most efficient way to keep his family in the field. When his wife has finished the housework he calls her out too, saying they need every pair of hands they can get.
  • The son who leavesOne of the younger boys, resting at the end of a row, says he is going to quit this slavery and get a job in town if it is true the factories are coming — and, out of the darkness where Hugh McVey is hiding: “What's the good being alive if you have to work like this?”
  • The ghostWhen Hugh crawls into the moonlit field waving his arm and muttering, the whole family runs. Ezra, who did not see it, scents a revolution, swears, threatens them all with starvation, and never gets them into the fields at night again. He tells Bidwell that a lie invented by his lazy sons and daughters has ruined his chance of a living.
  • The one man against the machineHe would gain more from the plant-setter than anyone in the county and he is its loudest opponent, on scripture: “Don't it say in the Bible men shall work and labor by the sweat of their brows?” Can a machine like that sweat, he asks the drug store. It cannot, and it cannot do the work either, and if it could it would be wicked to try.
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

Ezra loses the argument in the most ordinary way available. The machine that was born in his cabbage field never works, but the factories come anyway, and his sons go to them. Late in the book Hugh walks home along the railway tracks behind a group of angry workmen and recognises one voice out of the moonlit field of years before: a French son with a bent back who quit his father, cannot go back because the old man calls him a quitter, has married, and now has to keep the job whatever they do to him. In the country, he says, he worked like a dog a few weeks a year; here he will probably have to work like that all the time.

The last that is heard of the farm is a row of cheap frame houses standing where the cabbage patch was.

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