Small Town with One Road

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Small Town with One Road

Gary Soto 1990

“Small Town with One Road” first appeared in Poetry magazine and was reprinted in Gary Soto’s sixth collection of poetry, Who Will Know Us? in 1990. Written in conversational free verse, “Small Town with One Road” is a first-person meditative narrative that details the speaker and his daughter’s visit to a town very much like the one in which he grew up. Standing alongside the town’s one road, the speaker reminisces about his past and contemplates the difficulty children face in getting out of that town and the life of hard work and poverty that the town represents. Thinking about his own childhood, the speaker (a version of the poet himself) realizes that the escape he made from such a town could be undone, and he could lose his present “easy” job and again end up living the kind of hard, migrant-labor life that he now describes others living. The poem’s visual and symbolic imagery underscores the meditative nature of the poem. The work’s resulting dream-like quality also contributes to the speaker’s tone, which is one of both wonder and gratitude: wonder at life and its relation to time, and gratitude that he was able to lead a life other than the one that he remembers and describes. The daughter functions both as the audience for and the witness to her father’s words and memories, but we are never privy to her thoughts.

Author Biography

Gary Soto was born in the center of the San Joaquin Valley’s farming country in Fresno, California,

in 1952. His grandparents immigrated from Mexico during the Great Depression and found jobs as farm laborers, and his mother and father worked at factories for the Sun-Maid Growers of California, which sells raisins, and Redi-Spuds, a potato producer. As a youngster, Soto himself also labored as a fruit picker for various companies. The experience of growing up in an impoverished, segregated, and tough part of town marked Soto’s hope for the future, which was primarily focused on staying out of prison. A poor high-school student, Soto did not become passionate about poetry until he began reading Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets, and then took a workshop with Philip Levine at California State University at Fresno. Levine, known for making poetry out of his own working-class background, encouraged Soto to make his experiences as the child of farm workers material for his writing. Soto next earned an M.F.A. in poetry from California State University at Irvine, where he wrote many of the poems that appeared in his first book, The Elements of San Joaquin. These poems detail the hardscrabble, humiliating, and often violent existence, as well as the hopes and dreams, of migrant farm laborers and Mexican-Americans. In addition to poetry, Soto has written three collections of essays (mostly focusing on his years in Fresno), Living up the Street, Small Faces, and Lesser Evils, and numerous books, of both poetry and fiction, for young readers. He has also produced several films for children with his own production company, Gary Soto Productions. Believing that his mission is to cultivate a readership for Mexican-American literature, especially among Mexican-American children, Soto has left teaching and now writes full time from his home in Berkeley, California.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Lines 1-3

The title of the poem, “Small Town with One Road,” immediately fixes an image in our minds, and with that image, certain expectations arise about how the poem will approach the idea of the small town. Small towns are generally perceived as

Media Adaptations

Gary Soto’s official web site address is http://garysoto.com/. Another web site that contains links to much of his writing and current projects is http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/gsoto.htm
A good place to explore ideas for teaching Gary Soto’s poems is the Gary Soto Teacher’s site on the web, at http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/soto.htm.
In 1983 Soto produced a film titled The Pool Party, which he also published as a children’s book.

being both intimate and familiar, as well as provincial and confining; they are often lacking in opportunity for the ambitious and the young. The fact that the town is in a valley adds to our sense of claustrophobia about it, as does the description of the highway as “big-eyed.” A conventional knock against small towns is that everyone knows everyone else’s business, and that, because of the ways in which information circulates in small spaces, no one has secrets. The initial lines tell us that the narrator speaks both for himself and another (or others), but at this point we do not know who they are. The conditional “could” and the familiarity the speaker has about the place suggests that he has been here before. The rabbits “that won’t get across” suggest the difficulty in leaving small towns.

Lines 4-11

In these lines, the speaker meditates on his past, remembering how barefoot children would skip to the store for candy. He describes the act metaphorically, calling the change they carry to pay for the candy “hot times,” because of the way coins feel in your palm on a hot summer day, and “Chinks of light,” for they way they shine. The speaker provides a heavily romanticized image of childhood through his imagery: the “red stain of laughter” and the dogs, chickens, and cats at home all contribute to a sense of childhood as wholesome, happy, and relatively uncomplicated.

Lines 12-19

The tone of the poem shifts here, as the speaker now describes the poverty and toil of farm labor. Farm laborers frequently subsist on little more than beans and water, and the speaker implicitly suggests the monotony of this diet and of the work itself in his images. An “Okie” is a derogatory name for someone from Oklahoma. Many farmers and laborers came from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression to look for work, and many stayed. The “Jew that got lost” is an odd detail here, but perhaps Soto is using “Jew” to signify any or all people other than “Okies” or Mexicans who work as farm laborers. Working, for both men and women, the poem says, is not a matter of choice but of necessity. For men, picking cotton is a “money dream” (albeit not a very rewarding one), while for women, “the mill is a paycheck.”

Lines 20-25

The speaker moves from the general to the personal in his imaginings, as he now fantasizes about how he and his wife could be farmhands once again, if he were to lose his “easy” job. These lines tell us that the poem is largely autobiographical, as Soto is referring to his own job as a writer, “This easy one that’s only words.” The image of “Papa’s field that wavered like a mirage” underscores the dream-like state of the speaker’s mind and creates a sense of intimacy with the reader, as we are now privy to particulars of the speaker’s memory.

Lines 26-33

What is the speaker’s feeling toward the possibility that he could once again be a farm laborer? On the one hand, the often romantic imagery he uses to describe youth and his own dwelling on the past suggest that maybe he wouldn’t mind that much—that “worry” is reserved for his daughter, who is the witness to her father’s fantasies. Conversely, the grueling life that he describes, both in this poem and in others in the collection, suggest that he is grateful that he has managed to escape from this small town, via the one road out of it. That this question is unresolved makes the poem richer.

The last lines of the poem also introduce us to the daughter for the first time. She is part of the “We” in the first sentence, and the poem, readers realize, has been partially motivated by the speaker’s act of visiting this town with his daughter. The speaker is shaken out of his dreamworld when his daughter touches his hand. That they are eating snowcones is significant when we remember the description of children eating candy at the beginning of the poem. The image of the candy’s sweetness is what links the beginning of the poem to the end, the dreamworld of nostalgia and fantasy to the real world, and the past to the present. These links are made evident as we are, for the first time, given a description of the speaker and his daughter, who are standing in the shade, protected from the sun. When the daughter stops eating her snow-cone after the father announces that he sees himself in a child crossing the road, we understand that she has had a revelation of sorts. Maybe for the first time she understands that her father was a child once, like herself, or maybe she understands that his life had once been significantly different than it is now. The last image suggests the possibility that children still have the chance of building a better life for themselves. The boy, whom the speaker says reminds him of himself, makes it across the road, itself a symbol of crossing a divide.

Theams

Nostalgia

“Small Town with One Road” is comprised of a series of the speaker’s childhood reminiscences and meditations, which are prompted by a visit he and his daughter take to a small town. The nostalgia the speaker experiences is contradictory. On the one hand, he has positive memories of the past, especially his childhood. This is underscored by his description of the happy times he remembers of children buying candy and leaping barefoot to the store and back home again, where playful dogs await them. At the same time, however, his thoughts of youthful days are tempered by his memories of farm labor and the difficult life he and his family had to endure in order to survive. He describes their bean dinners, which were “muscle for fieldwork,” and he talks of “the tired steps to the fruit ladder.” The visit to this town reminds the speaker that he is lucky to have left it and become a poet, “This easy [job] ... that’s only words.” Having ambivalent emotional responses to the past is common for people who become swept up in nostalgia, and this speaker’s reactions are doubly complicated because he is unsure of how to represent his past to his daughter, who worries about her father

Topics for Further Study

Imagine revisiting a place that you have conflicting feelings about (e.g., a school you went to, a place you worked, etc.). Write a description of that place, taking into account how you’ve changed since being there.
Research the farm labor movement of the 1960s and 1970s, paying particular attention to Cesar Chavez’s role. Write a short essaying describing two or three accomplishments of that movement.
Interview people from various ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds, asking them what the American Dream means. Write an essay comparing and contrasting their responses.

as she watches his reactions to the town and the boy he sees. The poem’s final image, of a boy crossing the road to a place “where riches / Happen on a red tongue,” is fittingly ambiguous. It can be read symbolically to suggest the possibility of leaving the hard life of farm labor behind, or it can be read quite literally, as the boy crossing the road to where the speaker and his daughter stand, their own tongues red from eating snowcones.

American Dream

Gary Soto’s poem is a thinly veiled autobiographical recounting of his own hopes, desires, and responses to his past life of hardship and his current life of good fortune. Appropriately enough, the audience for his memories and meditations is his daughter, someone whom the poet hopes will never have to live the kind of life—that of a low-paid farm laborer—that he, his wife, and his family once did. Soto sees himself in the “brown kid” who crosses the road, a symbolic marker for the divide between the past and the present, the haves and the have-nots. He recognizes that a life of hard physical labor awaits these kids in this small town, but that they also have a chance, a possibility, of escaping the town, as Soto himself did. The field-workers he describes—“Okie or Mexican, Jew that got lost”—make up the bulk of California’s farm labor. They are also groups often associated with the American Dream in popular culture, who helped to perpetuate the idea that one can start with nothing and build a successful life through sheer hard work, astute decision making, and a bit of luck. Soto’s own grandparents immigrated to the United States from Mexico with this very desire. Soto underscores the idea, typical in the myth of the American Dream, that with hard work you can transcend circumstances and make a better life for yourself when he states that “The cotton gin stands tall in the money dream / And the mill is a paycheck for the wife.” The “money dream” is what work is all about for farm laborers, many of whom are undereducated and unskilled. The irony is that although many of them have the dream of doing better, few of them ever do. Soto is one of the lucky few who managed to escape the impoverished life of working in the field.

Style

“Small Town with One Road” is a descriptive meditation on the speaker’s past that uses short, enjambed lines, a conversational voice, and symbolic imagery to evoke the dreamy world of the speaker’s mind. Enjambement, or run-on lines, occur when the syntactic unit (whether it be a sentence or a clause) continues after the end of a line. For example, the second sentence of the poem, begun in the first line, spills over into lines 2 and 3. Run-on lines give the poem its rhythm and help move the poem forward, requiring the reader to more closely pay attention. The voice of this poem—the agent that is speaking through the poem—is wistful, but that is what we would expect from a poem about memory. Because we understand that the speaker is, to a large degree, the poet himself, and because Soto is speaking to his daughter, the voice achieves an intimacy often associated with confessional poetry. The conversational prose rhythms of the lines add to this intimate feeling. Undergirding the poem is the symbolic imagery. Symbolic images signify an object or an event that, in turn, denotes something else. For example, “red stain of laughter” refers to the color of the candy on the children’s tongue, yet it also signifies the carefree days of youth. The poet returns to this image at the end of the poem to suggest that the possibility the children had earlier—of leaving the small town—still exists.

Historical Context

Gary Soto, the son and grandson of farm laborers, grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, a period during which migrant farm workers were routinely exploited, working without benefit of union contracts or government regulations. The hardscrabble existence he describes in “Small Town with One Road” was, to an extent, the life that Soto and his family lived. Soto hoed cotton and beets, and his father, a worker for a large agricultural company, died in an industrial accident (a fall from a ladder) when the poet was five years old. As a child, Soto could never imagine climbing out of poverty. “The likelihood of going beyond that was minuscule,” he says in an interview in Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, farm workers, most of whom were either Mexican or Mexican American, began to organize, calling for safer working conditions and a living wage. In 1980, more than twenty percent of Mexican Americans lived below government-defined poverty levels. Many of these people were recent illegal immigrants from Mexico, some five million of whom crossed the border to flee inflation and look for a better life during the 1970s. Cesar Chavez was to Mexican and Chicano farm workers what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was to African Americans during this time. Fighting tirelessly to improve the life of field workers, Chavez, the leader of the militant but nonviolent United Farm Workers (UFW) union, won the first collective bargaining agreement between growers and workers in 1966. The UFW used boycotts, especially of grapes and lettuce, to prod growers into bettering working conditions for field workers and to keep the gains they had already negotiated. On the heels of Chavez’s success with the UFW, civil rights groups addressing the concerns of Mexicans and Chicanos sprung up across the country. By the late 1980s, Hispanics constituted the country’s second-largest minority and established themselves as a voting bloc that could no longer be ignored. In Texas and California especially, Chicanos used their political power to fight discrimination and press for changes in education and immigration policies.

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a boom in publishing by and about Mexican Americans. Writers such as Helena Maria Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, Alma Luz Villanueva, Gary Soto, Ron Arias, Juan Felipe Herrera, Francisco X. Alarcon, Ray Gonzales, Rudolpho Anaya, and Lucha Corpi, riding the wave of success of Latin-American writers

Compare & Contrast

1965: Because of poor working conditions and below poverty wages for farm workers, the union of United Farm Workers initiates a public boycott of grapes.
1966: The first collective bargaining agreement between farm workers and growers in the continental United States is signed.
1970: Some grape growers sign agreements with the union, and the union lifts the grape boycott.
1973: The relationship between grape growers and farm workers once again deteriorates, and the grape boycott is reinstituted, along with a boycott on lettuce.
1978: The UFW lifts boycotts on grapes and lettuce because some of their conditions have been met.
1985: After several changes in the California labor laws, the unionized farm workers begin to march again for better wages and improved working conditions.
1970-78: Between four and six million illegal Mexican immigrants come to the United States, many of them settling in California and working as migrant farm laborers.
1978: More than ten percent of California’s labor pool is made up of Mexican migrant workers.
1986: The Immigration Act is passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan. The law fines employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. It also gives amnesty to any immigrant who can prove their entry into the United States before 1982.
1988: To date, more than two million illegal aliens, most of whom are Mexican, have applied for amnesty under the terms of the 1986 Immigration Act.
1990: According to the 1990 U.S. census, people of Mexican origin form the largest Hispanic community in the United States, with more than 13 million people.
1993: The United States gains its greatest number of legal immigrants from Mexico, with 109,027 people moving into the country.
1997: Four-fifths of the Hispanic populations (29.3 million people) live in seven states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and New Jersey.

—such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa and others—in the 1960s, have articulated the Chicano (and Chicana) experience to millions of readers worldwide. One of the early promoters of Mexican-American literature has been Arte Publico Press, a Houston-based publisher of Latino writing. Fueling this explosion of Chicano literature has been the tremendous increase in the number of Spanish speakers in general, and Mexicans and Mexican Americans in particular, in the United States. In the Los Angeles area alone, Mexican Americans number more than two and a half million. Partially because of the language barrier, this population historically has been ignored by the mainstream publishing world. However, with the critical and popular successes of writers such as Sandra Cisneros and Laura Esquivel, more publishers are taking notice. Soto has given up teaching and devoted himself to cultivating a readership for Mexican-American writing. His forays into writing children’s literature is a political, as well as artistic, endeavor, as he seeks to reach out to this often neglected community.

Critical Overview

“Small Town with One Road” is written in a style typical of most Soto poems and can be read as representative of his work. Early in his career, particularly in the 1970s when “la causa”—the movement begun by United Farm Workers (UFW) leader Cesar Chavez that would grow to encompass the concerns of all Chicanos, not just field workers—was in full bloom, Soto was faulted for not being more overtly political in writing about the Chicano experience. But critic Juan Bruce-Novoa sees a virtue in that, claiming in Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos that Soto’s poetry has “great significance within Chicano literature” precisely because it is more personal. Miriam Rinn notes that Soto is a strong proponent of the idea that only Mexican Americans should write about Mexican Americans, quoting the poet as saying that whites writing about the hardship of field workers wind up composing “unauthentic tearjerkers.” In a 1989 volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Héctor Avalos Torres claims that “Soto’s consistent attention to the craft of writing and his sensitivity to his subject matter have earned him an indisputable place in American and Chicano literature.” Soto’s willingness to make himself vulnerable by writing about painful experiences has won him a wide audience from mainstream poetry critics and audiences as well, as he was one of the youngest poets ever to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Criticism

Heather Davis

Heather Davis has an M.A. in English literature and creative writing from Syracuse University and is an editor and freelance writer. In the following essay, Davis notes how, in “Small Town with One Road,” Gary Soto reflects upon the power of imagination to transform our realities, even as it grows from those realities.

In his poem “Small Town with One Road,” Gary Soto paints an affectionate portrait of a small, poverty-stricken town whose residents must struggle merely to survive. Although the exact setting is not specified, it’s a place that looks like the contemporary American West—a place far removed from the world portrayed, for example, in Hollywood’s old “Westerns.” While gunfights were the means to settle scores or get ahead in the old West, in Soto’s West, such use of force would be futile. This is a place where an altogether different kind of act is called for—the act of imagination.

Indeed, for the poor, Chicano farm laborers one often encounters in Soto’s poetry, the act of imagining is no idle pastime. As Raymund A. Paredes noted, in his article “Contemporary Mexican-American Literature, 1960-Present,” “for Gary Soto, probably the most acclaimed of contemporary Mexican-American poets, the ‘transcendent principle’ has been imagination. In his four volumes, Soto presents an array of characters who use their imaginations to lift themselves, however momentarily, out of squalor and oppression.”

Born in Fresno, California, in 1952, Soto—like the people he writes about—grew up poor. That he turned to writing and teaching (on occasion Soto has lectured in Chicano Studies at the University of California at Berkeley) may be surprising to some. Even Soto, who, in the introduction to his New and Selected Poems, says he came “from a family with no books,” describes his becoming a writer as something of a “fluke.”

Nevertheless, it was the art of poetry that he grew up to pursue. Like all of the arts, poetry, even when it focuses on real people and events, requires a large dose of imagination. But the importance of imagination is not limited to the world of art; in Soto’s “Small Town with One Road,” one sees how imagination can be essential even in a world where survival, not the art of writing, is the immediate goal.

The speaker in this clearly autobiographical poem is viewing the scene by a “black strip of highway.” Beginning the poem with the words “We could be here,” he indicates that he recognizes this poor, desolate area as a place that he himself might still be, had his fortunes turned out differently. The use of the pronoun “we” at the opening also creates a sense of inclusion that helps to draw in the reader. Because we do not yet know for sure to whom the “we” refers, there is a possibility it may refer to the reader and the speaker together. The use of “could” also creates a sense of possibility; even if it is not probable, it is entirely possible that the reader, too, could go to or someday end up in the place described. The use of the present tense lends the poem a heightened sense of immediacy: as readers, we are placed in the center of the action, which seems to be taking place as we read the poem.

“This is the valley,” Soto continues, “And its black strip of highway, big-eyed / With rabbits that won’t get across. / Kids could make it, though.” Here the speaker presents the landscape as something that watches over everything it contains. It is an unforgiving, inescapable landscape—at least for the rabbits. The “kids,” however, are another matter. Leaping across the road in order to get to the candy store, they imagine the “Sweetness on their tongues, red stain of laughter” before they have even paid the dime it will cost to buy the candy. The implication is that the power of imagination is what allows them to dodge the treacherous traffic on the highway. And although the rabbits are most likely faster than the children, what is more important here is not physical power but the power of the mind. The children can express this power on their tongues through laughter and, perhaps later, through the use of language.

After buying their candy, the children will go to their homes for a dinner of “Brown soup that’s muscle for fieldwork / And the tired steps of a fruit ladder.” Unlike their snack of candy, no laughter is associated with their proper meal, the purpose of which is simply to provide them with the energy they’ll need as laborers. The sounds here are simply the sounds of everyday life: “A pot bangs and water runs in the kitchen.”

“It’s a hard life where the sun looks,” the speaker comments: in this harsh environment, the sun is not the object of sentimental reflection. Unlike more privileged people, who may associate the sun and other natural wonders with leisure time, the poor laborers regard nature as an indifferent entity that watches over their labor without mercy. And although their labor is performed with hope (“The cotton gin stands tall in the money dream”), only the mill that is simply “a paycheck for the wife” is real.

Yet the speaker still finds some small pleasures, some type of richness, in the midst of this difficult life, noting that there is “a dog for each hand / Cats, chickens in the yard.” His words contain a hint of nostalgia for this kind of life, this childhood, the past from which he came. The speaker recalls how his wife used to be a laborer, boxing peaches and plums, and hoeing fields. “We could go back,” he then posits, “I could lose my job, / This easy one that’s only words, / And pick up a shovel, hoe, broom to take it / Away.”At this point, we realize that there is a counterpart to imagination’s “transcendent principle,” as the speaker, whose days of hard labor and poverty are behind him, imagines himself losing his job that uses words in the act of creation and going back to a job where the purpose is simply “to take it away.” Although the speaker does not seem disturbed by the prospect of going back, and in fact may even fancy

What Do I Read Next?

An informative profile by Don Lee, “About Gary Soto,” detailing Soto’s childhood and literary influences, appears in the spring 1995 issue of Ploughshares magazine.
The spring 1999 issue of American Literary History carries an article by Gary Soto answering the question, “Who are your readers?” In it, Soto discusses his attempts to cultivate a readership among Mexican-American children. This is a good piece to read to understand Soto’s conception of his audience.
Alfredo Mirand’s 1985 study The Chicano Experience lays out the history of Mexican-American immigration and the resulting cultures.
Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera’s 1972 book The Chicanos: A History of Mexican-Americans offers a progressive historical reading of Mexican migration into the United States.
Cesar Chavez: A Triumph of Spirit by Richard Griswold Del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia provides an intimate look at the politics and personal life of the civil rights leader and champion of farm workers. It was published in 1995 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

this prospect, his daughter, who we now know is with him, does not share her father’s sense of nostalgia: “Worry is my daughter’s story. / She touches my hand.”

Like the children they have been watching, the speaker and his daughter are eating sweets: “We suck roadside / Snowcones in the shade and look about.” As they enjoy their snowcones, they see one more child attempting to cross the road. Although it is not stated explicitly, one may surmise that the sweetness of the snowcone energizes the speaker somehow and perhaps even gives him a greater sense of clarity. For the first time in the poem, the speaker actively looks at his surroundings. At the beginning of the poem, the “big-eyed”

“... [I]n Soto’s ‘Small Town With One Road,’ one sees how imagination can be essential even in a world where survival, not the art of writing, is the immediate goal.”

road observed the speaker and his daughter; now, they are the ones doing the looking and being active. This “active looking,” so important to a poet’s art, is perhaps what allows the speaker to gain a certain mastery over his surroundings.

“Behind sunglasses,” the speaker notes, “I see where I stood: brown kid / Getting across.” He is looking back at himself through the shield of sunglasses, of something that stands between him and the direct sunlight, just as his adult experiences outside of the small town may now separate him from his childhood and the town where he grew up. There seems to be a recognition by the speaker of what has been lost and of how he has changed: he will never again be able to see the world as he did when he was a child.

“He’s like me,” the speaker tells his daughter, suggesting that, like him, the boy attempting to cross the road will succeed. They watch, and the poem ends as the child “looks both ways and then leaps / Across the road where riches / Happen on a red tongue.” In this land “where the sun looks” and the highway is “big-eyed,” the boy has learned how to look as well. Thus, through his ability, the boy is empowered enough to make a leap—of imagination or, perhaps, of faith—and make it to the destination he has chosen for himself.

One may view “Small Town with One Road” as a description of the battle between what is imagined and what is real, between the “money dream” and the “paycheck,” between the sweet escape candy provides and the more practical purposes of “brown soup.” The poem does not dismiss the need for the practical, but its major theme is the embracing of the “sweetness,” or what, at first, may seem frivolous or inessential. Although the bean soup may be the instrument of survival, the candy is what makes survival worthwhile.

Granted, “Small Town with One Road” borders on being overly sentimental, a product of the speaker’s nostalgia for his own childhood. One may argue that the sense of hope the speaker feels at the end is gratuitous and only serves the purpose of making him and his daughter feel better about the scene they are witnessing. Certainly, for the destitute children in the poem, the moment of transcendence is brief. But what is implied is that these moments can spur them on to greater achievements, to new situations that are not fantasy but reality, and that the act of imagining, like the creation of a work of art, is something that has worth in and of itself.

Source: Heather Davis, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky’s most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, has been published by 26 Books of Portland, Oregon. In the following essay, Semansky argues that “Small Town with One Road” is a cautionary Tate whose moral is unclear.

“Small Town with One Road,” a meditation on youth, the past, and possibility, can be read as a cautionary Tate without an explicit moral. From the first sentence, we are thrown into a world of “what if.” By opening the poem with the conditional “could,” the speaker signals that if circumstances were different, he might still be in this small town. But to whom is he speaking? Although the poem begins with a “we,” readers don’t know that the speaker is with his daughter until three quarters of the way through the poem. He addresses her only once during the poem, when he tells her that a boy he sees crossing the road is like him. A more meaningful way of understanding the speaker’s audience is to think of it as an idea of his daughter. That is, the nostalgic reverie that the speaker falls into and his descriptions of the children he sees are addressed to a conception of his daughter separate from the one he sees physically in front of him. This makes sense if we consider the daughter to be very young and possibly incapable of comprehending the meaning of her father’s descriptions. The speaker, of course, is also “speaking” to himself, trying to understand the meaning of his experience as he has it.

The symbolic imagery of the poem forms the setting for the lesson to be taught. The “black strip of highway,” the one road in the town, at once signifies a dividing line between the small-town life of the hard-working farm laborer and a life with more possibility. Its “big-eyed[ness]” suggests an almost godlike power, the power to lead someone out of the town. We are told that “rabbits won’t get across,” but that “Kids could make it.” The very oddness of this comparison (what is the significance of rabbits?) alerts us to the fact that the speaker himself is unsure of his meaning. However, this does makes sense if we see his descriptions and thinking as a kind of daydream. In daydreams, images appear with their meaning only half or partially understood, or sometimes not understood at all, and events frequently appear out of order. This explains why the children the speaker fantasizes about have “Sweetness on their tongues” before they purchase the candy; this description of the children buying the candy also adds to the dreamlike atmosphere. “A hot time” refers to the feeling of the coins in their hands, but it also suggests the work they performed to earn the money. “Chinks of light” refers to the coins themselves, as they fall from the children’s palms, but “light” also signifies hope and possibility.

Although the speaker could conceivably have seen the children actually buying the candy (after all, he has just bought snowcones at the store), he could not have seen the backyards or the kitchens of the children’s homes. At this point, he begins to envision what their homes might be like, a fantasy based upon his own childhood living in a small town just like this one. His generalizations about how the children live then extend outward to, presumably, the children’s family. The didactic nature of the speaker’s thinking becomes clearer as he moves from particular to generalization. By naming the field workers as “Okie or Mexican, Jew that got lost,” the poet plays on popular images—with the exception of the “Jew”—of farm laborers. As readers, we are no doubt meant to empathize with the hard life of these workers and their small, yet still unattainable, desires. They live paycheck to paycheck, and the only satisfaction they get from their sun-scorched, backbreaking labor is that check—the “money dream,” itself a pittance. When the speaker comments that his own wife once worked the field (his father’s), we are meant to trust that the speaker knows firsthand what such a life is like. But if the poem is meant to teach, what is the lesson being taught? One possibility is gratitude. When the speaker says that

We could go back. I could lose my job, 
This easy one that’s only words, 
And pick up a shovel, hoe, broom to take it 
Away....

“[‘Small Town with One Road’] is not a story about how the child of a migrant farm worker escaped from the fields to create a better life for himself by wording with his head instead of his hands. It is a story about that grown-up child reflecting on his past and trying to make sense of where he’s been and where he is”.

we get a sense of the tenuousness of life, that hard work is not enough to transcend circumstances, because circumstances themselves could change. So be grateful for what you have; but grateful to whom or what? This poem is not a story about how the child of a migrant farm worker escaped from the fields to create a better life for himself by working with his head instead of his hands. It is a story about that grown-up child reflecting on his past and trying to make sense of where he’s been and where he is. His meditations are prompted, presumably, by the presence of his daughter, who could be one of the children he sees. That her story is “worry” underscores the idea that she has not had to live the kind of childhood her father lived. While she might be worrying (however unconsciously) about the possibility of “downward mobility,” her father is not. His quasi-romantic descriptions of the joys of childhood temper his descriptions of hard farm work and poverty, suggesting that he could bear the change were it to pass. Indeed, his identification with the “brown kid / Getting across” points to his own pining for the past, however complicated it may have been. By telling his daughter that the kid is “like me,” the speaker seems to be saying that not only does the kid have the chance of getting out of the small town, but that the speaker himself has retained the hopes and dreams of childhood.

The last image of the poem underscores the indeterminate nature the poem’s moral. For the first time, the daughter and the father watch something together: the boy—whom the father tells his daughter looks like him—crossing the road. The daughter is awestruck at her father’s confession, “stop[ping] her mouth,” while the father watches “Behind sunglasses,” a symbol of protection from the fierce sun. But what is the significance of the boy crossing the road? Is the place “where riches / Happen on a red tongue” symbolic of the safe life of writing that Soto has found? Is it a place of fantasy, the nostalgic dreamworld that the speaker inhabits? Or is it “merely” the physical spot where the speaker and his daughter stand as they watch the boy? When it works, didactic literature often embodies principles or theories or doctrines, illustrating them through examples, with the moral or lesson of the work coming at the end. In this case, we must find the lesson in the boy “look[ing] both ways” and then leaping. One possible lesson would be that one should never give up hope. But why would the daughter, who was born into a life of relative privilege, need to learn this lesson? The answer is that she wouldn’t. The moral, if there is one, is for the speaker himself. By waxing nostalgic about his own past and by seeing the present small town in terms of that past, he is able to make sense of them both. His daughter, at the least, is an accidental witness, and at the most, she is his muse.

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Sources

Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.

Copeland, Jeffrey S., ed., Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults, Cham-pagne-Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993.

Ellman, Richard, and Robert O’Clair, eds., The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, second edition, New York: Norton, 1983.

Gish, Robert Franklin, Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, & Chicano Literature, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Horowitz, David A., Peter N. Carroll, and David D. Lee, eds., On the Edge: A New History of 20th-century America, Los Angeles: West Publishing Co., 1990.

Paredes, Raymund A., “Contemporary Mexican-American Literature, 1960-Present,” A Literary History of the American West, Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987.

Rinn, Miriam, “Gary Soto,” Book Report, Vol. 14, Issue 4, January/February 1996, p. 27.

Saldivar, Ramon, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Soto, Gary, A Summer Life, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990.

Soto, Gary, Who Will Know Us? San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1990.

Torres, Héctor Avalos, “Gary Soto” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 82: Chicano Writers, First Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley, Detroit, Gale Research, 1989.

For Further Study

Martinez, Julio A., and Francisco A. Lomeli, eds., Chicano Literature, Hartford, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1985.

The book is arranged alphabetically, with comprehensive coverage of the individual authors’ lives and examination of their works by more than forty critics of Chicano literature. The selected bibliography provides access both to the author’s works and to secondary sources.

Lopez, Tiffany Ana, ed., Growing Up Chicana/o, New York: Avon Books, 1995.

This collection of stories of coming-of-age in America from Chicana and Chicano writers—such as Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chavez, Alberto Alvaro Rios, Marta Salinas, Gary Soto and others—celebrates the tremendous diversity of Chicano life through the universal themes of boundaries, family, education, and rites of passage.

Soto, Gary, ed., Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993.

Introduced by Soto, this collection of Chicano fiction includes stories from well-known writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Helena Viramontes, Alberto Rios, and Dagoberto Gilb.

Weber, Devra, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.