Food Symbol Analysis

Whenever food appears in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, it shows the capacity of people to be generous and kind to one other and to create community despite the hardest circumstances. The people who live in and around Troublesome Creek near the end of the Great Depression lead desperate, hardscrabble lives. The largest employer is the coal company, which treats its workers poorly and doesn’t pay well. Some of the mountainfolk are moonshiners, like Devil John, while others try to subsist on what they can grow and hunt themselves, like Angeline and Mr. Moffit. Only a few seem to be doing well for themselves, like Jackson Lovett with his lovely farm and his successful timbering business. Many other people work for the WPA and eke out a meager existence by supplementing their wages with foraged food and home gardens. Nevertheless, many of Cussy Mary Carter’s patrons offer her and her mule, Junia, food when she visits their homes. Jackson has apples for woman and beast; Angeline offers Junia stringy carrots; Miss Loretta Adams tries to feed Cussy Mary molasses cake; Oren Taft gives her a bag of wild onions. Most touchingly, Henry Marshall saves the precious Lifesaver candy he won in his school’s spelling bee and gives it to Cussy Mary, even though he himself is dying of starvation. Whenever someone offers food to another person, they are implicitly welcoming that person into their homes and into relationships. Conversely, when the sewing bee ladies refuse Cussy Mary’s homemade Bible Cake and the Fourth of July celebration, they demonstrate their hard-hearted and bigoted refusal to see Cussy as a fellow human being.