Summary :
Operating on the conviction, or at least the hope, that it is better to plead forgiveness than ask permission, I acknowledge my debt to Jim Bissett and the Bible. The book’s title was inspired by Jim Bissett’s Agrarian Socialism: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside. I met Dr. Bissett once and complimented him on his excellent book and its winsome title. I remember bragging on the title a lot. I think—but cannot be sure—that I threatened to borrow his exquisite and apt phrasing. The title of this book proves my guilt. The second acknowledgment and apology concern the first part of the title. Goshen was the best of the land of Egypt, and the initial terms of the sharecropping arrangement that Joseph negotiated turned out to be liberal and profitable. The prospect of occupying the best of the land on terms that promised prosperity (Pharaoh required only a fifth of the crop—“on fifths,” as a Delta cropper might say) must surely have enticed the sustenance-challenged children of Israel. Any extension of the theological and anthropological implications of the biblical Goshen violates the boundary between employing an analogy and torturing it. Goshen remains a bare analogy, and I claim no thaumaturgic properties in its further application to plain folk of the Great Depression South. The hope, among the most distressed of the Great Depression, of inclusion in one of three “American Goshens” must have engendered feelings at least in some ways akin to those of the Hebrew children as they viewed Goshen for the first time.

Copies :