The Girls in the Stilt House

The postwar period in America was an era filled with social change, new laws, holdovers from the past century, and hope for the future. Prohibition, the Great Migration, and sharecropping impacted the national climate of the 1920s and certainly influenced the text and its characters.

The temperance movement of the 1800s led to the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. This created a new national relationship with alcohol that is reflected in characters like Creedle, Frank, Dalton, and Virgil. From 1920 to 1933, “the law that was meant to foster temperance instead fostered intemperance and excess. The solution [to] the problem of alcohol abuse had instead made the problem even worse. [… It] is very clear that […] more people were drinking, and people were drinking more” (“Unintended Consequences of Prohibition.” PBS). In the novel, Virgil is often drunk and displays withdrawal symptoms when he cannot get the alcohol to which he’s become addicted. In addition, Creedle enlists Dalton Patterson to transport and store his alcohol, decreasing Creedle’s risk and implicating Dalton in the scheme. Prohibition also led to a great deal of police corruption, and it is this corruption that gives Frank such confidence that he can manipulate the law. He tells Ada, “That deputy and me, we’ve been in business together since I came back to the farm. Exporting, you might say” (349). This corruption paves the way for the Creedles and Bowerses of the world to exploit their privilege even more and for less powerful and privileged men like Dalton to suffer.

In addition, the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the North and West shifted the nation’s demographics. In 1900, nearly 90% of all Black Americans lived in the South, but between 1916 and 1970, 6 million Black people left the region in search of job opportunities and a more welcoming society (“The Great Migration, 1910–1970,” U.S. Census Bureau). Likewise, the family of Matilda’s friend Lorraine “Rainy” Day relocates from Natchez, Mississippi, to Cleveland, Ohio. Rainy’s great-uncle runs a newspaper for Black audiences, and Rainy makes more money in a day than Matilda does in a week. For these reasons, Cleveland comes to symbolize freedom for Matilda; it represents a fairer world, one that feels far from the violence and oppression she experiences in the South.

Although enslavement ended with the Civil War in 1865, sharecropping kept many Black families beholden to white landowners, so much so that the practice is even referred to as “slavery by another name” (“Sharecropping.” PBS). It is “a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop. This encouraged tenants to work to produce the biggest harvest that they could and ensured they would remain tied to the land” (“Sharecropping”). Dalton is a sharecropper, and so he and his family are incredibly reliant on Creedle, the farm’s owner. Because he owes Creedle money, perhaps for a loan on equipment, fertilizer, or some other farming implement, he agrees to assist with Creedle’s bootleg operation. This protects Creedle, of course, while risking Dalton’s safety. Dalton seems unable to get ahead, making his dream of buying his own land a pipe dream until Matilda gives him her earnings. Sharecropping was a way to keep the descendants of enslaved Black people under the thumb of white landowners and prevent them from achieving social mobility and economic success. Thus, though the 1920s was an era of extreme change, some groups still had more opportunities than others.