The Least One

The Least One portrays a white sharecropping family during the Great Depression and is based on Borden Deal’s experiences growing up on a small farm in northeastern Mississippi. Deal portrays the realities of cotton-field work: planting, chopping, the laying-by time, and harvesting. He succeeds in evoking not only the crushing economic circumstances of poor Southern whites in that period but also their fierce sense of independence and self-sufficiency.