Contents: IntroductionPoem Summary Theams Style Critical Overview Sources |
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 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.
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.
