Drought by Eric Walrond (1925)
Coggins Rum, a black stone cutter at a quarry, walks home at eleven o'clock through drought-stricken country, exchanging guitar-playing banter with a girl tending the English driver at the rock engine. On the broad road Coggins stumbles on a rock in the gap and tears the nail from his big toe, bleeding badly; his children Sissie, Ada, Rufus, and the dog Rattah Grinah tend to him at the cabin while Sissie treats the wound with salt water and lotion. Coggins asks for Beryl, his six-year-old daughter, the only light-skinned child among the black Rum children, and finds her outside eating marl (stone dust) again, as she has before. He scolds and slaps her hands, dragging her home through the gap while she cries, which pains him more than his own injury. Sissie beats Beryl for the habit and sends her under the bed. The narrative recalls the previous day, when the drought's full severity struck Coggins on his walk to the quarry: parched canes, dying potato and peanut vines, fruit rotting prematurely, dogs and blackbirds scavenging, frogs gasping in dried-up water courses, and black peons praying on their knees for rain even as Coggins wonders privately why they expect God to pour water down from the sky. He reflects on how the sun blackens black skin and whitens white skin, and on the quarry's effect on him and on Beryl's unusually light coloring, which Sissie explains by invoking a sister-in-law who had a white child by a black man. Back at the cabin, Sissie serves cookoo (cornmeal, okra, and butter) for the family's one meal of the day, since there is no money for salt fish, herring, butter, or sugar, and the yard can no longer grow vegetables for lack of water. Coggins rescues one of the family's hens from a centipede lodged in its throat, slitting its craw, and the hen is strung up to be eaten. At dinner the children scramble over the food; Beryl eats sparingly, her hands and mouth still marked white with marl dust despite Coggins's warning that eating it will harden her belly. At tea time, Beryl collapses. Coggins and Sissie try reviving her with rainwater, then with assafetida and a strip of red flannel held to her nose, a remedy previously used on Rufus for measles. Beryl's stomach swells and rises, taut and shiny like polished mahogany wood, though no one recognizes the danger since none of them has seen such a thing before. Sissie declares that Beryl is simply too "hard ears" to listen to her father. At dusk, neighbors returning from town greet Coggins, who waits on the stone step; Rufus and Ada, uneasy, avoid him and sit apart by an empty pond. An old buckra doctor arrives, examines Beryl, and holds something up to the light. Coggins, in a daze, hears the sounds of his own working life (pounding corn, sawing, drilling) echo through his mind as the doctor tells him Beryl has died, and that what he holds up is marl, the dust she had been eating. The doctor leaves in his buggy. Inside, Sissie, looking at what was taken from the child's body, calls Coggins to come see the marl. Coggins, slowly, tells her that if she knows what is good for herself, she had best leave those stones alone.
By Eric Walrond · First published 1925 · Genre: Naturalism, Modernist Fiction, Postcolonial Literature · 3 chapters · 4,523 words
First lines
The whistle blew for eleven o'clock. Throats parched, grim, sun-crazed blacks cutting stone on the white burning hillside dropped with a clang the hot, dust-powdered drills and flew up over the rugged edges of the horizon to descent into a dry, waterless gut. Hunger -- pricks at stomachs inured to brackish coffee and cassava pone -- pressed on folk, joyful as rabbits in a grassy ravine, wrenching themselves free of the lure of the white earth. Helter-skelter dark, brilliant, black faces of West Indian peasants moved along, in pain -- the stiff tails of blue denim coats, the hobble of chigger-cracked heels, the rhythm of a stride... dissipating into the sun-stuffed void the radiant forces of the incline.[1]
Similar titles
- Odour Of Chrysanthemums by D. H. Lawrence
- Tales The Drunkards Death by Charles Dickens
- The Drouth by Payson Sibley Wild
- Jenny Wren by Charles Dickens
- The Tryst by Edith Wharton
- The Handkerchief by Akutagawa Ryunosuke
Genres
- Naturalism — The story exemplifies naturalist principles through environmental determinism (the drought as an inescapable force), the struggle for survival among impoverished workers, and the depiction of characters shaped by biological and environmental forces beyond their control.
- Modernist Fiction — The text employs experimental prose techniques including stream of consciousness, poetic density, lyrical imagery, and a fragmented narrative structure that privileges psychological depth and sensory perception over conventional plot progression.
- Postcolonial Literature — The narrative explores colonial power dynamics between English colonizers and Caribbean workers, linguistic colonization through Creole dialogue, racial exploitation in labor systems, and the cultural identity and suffering of colonized peoples.
- Social Realism — The story provides unflinching documentation of working-class West Indian peasant life, focusing on poverty, labor exploitation, inadequate food and water, and the daily struggles for survival in a harsh economic system.
Tags
Barbados · Caribbean · West Indian · tropical · drought · environmental disaster · poverty · hunger · labor · colonialism · child death · death
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Drought is listed on Textopian as a short story by Eric Walrond, dated 1925 CE.
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- Work type: Short story
- Author: Eric Walrond
- Date: 1925 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Naturalism, Modernist Fiction, Postcolonial Literature, Social Realism, Tragic Fiction
- Length: 4,523 words
- Structure: 3 chapters, 142 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)
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