In Tobacco Road, his most well-known work, the Lesters, headed by the impossibly lazy and licentious Jeeter, are a sort of low-budget Snopes family.  Jeeter’s children have mostly left home for work in the cotton mills of west Georgia.  His daughter Pearl married a local railroad man at age 12.  The only children remaining at home are his disfigured daughter Ellie Mae and the borderline retarded Dude.  (Dude, however, eventually marries a disfigured “woman preacher” 20 years his senior and spends the rest of the novel idiotically crashing her car into various objects.)

In God’s Little Acre (made into a feature film, as all terrible books are, in 1958), Caldwell reprises his earlier hit with the Walden family.  Replacing laziness with a comically unbelievable “gold fever,” the Walden’s brain-dead paterfamilias, Ty Ty, occupies his time by digging vast pits on his fallow cotton land in search of a lode of gold.  The ensuing plot is of little consequence and seems to be little more than a shabby backdrop for his parody of rural idiocy.  The Waldens and their various in-laws do little more than have sex with one another indiscriminately and have mind-numbing conversations about the presence of gold on their crumbling farm.

Caldwell primarily traffics in ignorance and incest, making his characters either unbelievably stupid, unbelievably libidinous, or both.  In God’s Little Acre, Darling Jill Walden manages to sleep with pretty much every male in the novel, including a captive albino named Dave.  Her father is obsessed with her older sister’s breasts and often praises them loudly in public.  Also present is an impossibly dim and obese would-be sheriff named Pluto who may or may not have been the inspiration for Boss Hogg.

These novels are naked farces, and to an extent that absolves them of their failures.  Unlike the best examples of the genre, however, Caldwell falls back on cheap laughs and absurd sexual situations to provide ballast to his leaden narratives.  Though both novels briefly light upon serious issues (misuse of farm land and the sacrifice of the small farmer at the altar of greater profits), neither does more than indicate Caldwell’s awareness of social injustice and ruinous farming policies.

In short, neither novel is worth the reading.  They survive largely because they lampoon poor rural whites, and that is the last socio-economic group acceptable to abuse.  It is difficult to imagine any work of fiction whose reputation survives into the 21st century that treats any other group so roughly.  Caldwell fails as both satirist and cultural critic, and both novels would be better off relegated to the scrap heap of forgotten books.  His narratives are plodding and amateurish, his characters achingly one-dimensional, and his books will almost certainly make you wish you hadn’t read them.

And so we come to a book by Bob Brewer and Warren Getler alternately titled Rebel Gold: One Man’s Quest to Crack the Code Behind the Secret Treasure of the Confederacy and the less unwieldy Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man’s Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy. The publisher seems to have tried out both titles to see which one would stick.  Regardless, it’s an ostensibly nonfiction book about a retiree who allegedly comes from a long line of treasure guardians and sets out to decipher their intricate code of carvings on rocks and trees in the Arkansas wilderness.

The alleged treasure belongs to the Knights of the Golden Circle, an order who, as the book would have us believe, was ultimately behind the Civil War and who ran the Confederacy as a sort of shadow government.  I’m not joking.  After the war was all but over, the KGC apparently decided to squirrel away vast amounts of gold in the Arkansas hills in order to finance the next war of secession, which they believed would come relatively soon.  And so, we are faced with a book in which a retiree and his wife chase around the woods with Radio Shack metal detectors and unearth Mason jars full of coins.  Wheee.

I’m going to be completely honest here: I didn’t finish this book.  I couldn’t.  That’s why this post is so delinquent; I kept putting it off for another day, hoping to finish this book and be able to write a review of it so punishingly snarky that it would make the authors weep with shame and self-reproach.  But I couldn’t.  I thumbed the last 100 pages or so, which seems to involve some sort of Confederate helicopter.  Again, not joking.  What I did read (the first 200 pages or so) was a deadly mixture of terrible narrative pacing, absurd logical leaps, and brutal and oppressive boredom.

We are expected to believe the following, among other gems:

1. An immensely wealthy group was secretly financing the Confederate government.  At a certain point they decided that, rather than pouring their remaining funds into the existing war, that they would tuck it away and wait for the next national bloodbath.

2. This immensely wealthy group chose to stash its money in Mason jars in the Arkansas wilderness rather than use, say, foreign banks.

3.  The Knights of the Golden Circle entrusted penniless backwoodsmen with the treasure’s safety.

4.  That, while much of the country was starving and their own families were living at subsistence level, these backwoodsmen dutifully guarded a vast hoard of wealth that could have made them rich beyond imagination, and did so out of some fierce loyalty to a twisted version of Lost Cause ideology.

5.  That there is some sort of massive cache of Confederate gold stored somewhere in Arizona, but if you get near it, helicopters will come and shoo you away.

So.  Needless to say, this book doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way to the discourse on the Southern condition.  It is a poorly written and dreadfully boring thing and relies solely upon conjecture and the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief in order to get the least bit of traction.  So why am I writing about it?

Because, as sad as it may be, it’s an effort to tie Southern culture (or at least elements of Southern history) to a larger milieu of broad, vaguely Masonic conspiracy theories.  In this case, the Civil War just happens to be a convenient target.  Brewer and Getler wield Southern history like a weapon and use its history in the cheapest of ways (the cover of the book is so low-rent as to be offensive).  They are essentially cashing in on America’s vague fascination with the otherness of Southern culture and landscape and cobbling together a silly conspiracy as a means to sell books.

I don’t begrudge them their right to capitalism.  I just wish they would take it somewhere else.