Eat Thy Bread with Joy

Eat Thy Bread with Joy is a 1960 novella written by Mayme Hollensworth and published by Exposition Press of New York. Subtitled A Novel of Racial Tensions and Violence in Arkansas, the book centers upon racial conflict in a southern Arkansas town. The title comes from Ecclesiastes 9:7: “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.” 

The book opens with Harold Beavers, a Black man just out of the U.S. Army, returning home to Oiltown—a stand-in for El Dorado (Union County)—in southern Arkansas in a “brand-new secondhand convertible.” He is visiting his aunt, who lives in a shack in the “quarters,” one of the Black neighborhoods. On the way, he passes through Little Rock (Pulaski County), where soldiers are stationed around Central High School as a result of the violence surrounding its desegregation. Along the drive, Harold is remembering his childhood friends, brother and sister Jim and Lawrie. He became estranged from these white friends as they aged, given the expectations of race. Harold worked as the “yard boy” for their parents, Judge Lawrence Deal and Winnie Deal, until he left Oiltown. 

Lawrence is upset about the news coming out of Little Rock, knowing that “the Negroes of Oiltown boasted one of the strongest NAACP chapters in the entire state,” and thus were expecting efforts at integration to happen soon. When Harold visits the Deals on the way to his aunt’s house, Lawrie, seventeen years old, shows him great affection, disturbing her parents. Later, while out driving, Harold is harassed by a group of white youths in a car.  

After a week in town, Harold is trying to decide between doing another stint in the army or staying around. He goes to visit Dr. Brown, the only Black doctor in Oiltown, deciding that he wants to be a doctor himself. Dr. Brown offers him a room in the house (with daughter Lina and son-in-law George) and a job driving Dr. Brown around until he can save enough to go to what is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and then to medical school. That night, though, he goes out with his friend Alonzo York, who takes him to a cabin in one of the Black neighborhoods inhabited by impoverished white widow Caroline Wolff, who prostitutes herself, and her teenaged daughter Thelma, out to anyone, but Harold is disgusted and leaves—and, it is later revealed, Alonzo does not end up having sex with Thelma anyway.  

Dr. Brown has been holding secret meetings with civil rights activists in his house, and one evening a cross is burned in his yard. Harold’s college application is turned down due to his mentor’s activities being known to officials in the state government. After Thelma ends up pregnant, Caroline decides to blame Alonzo. Sheriff Roy Stokes does not believe her but feels pressured to act, arresting Alonzo. Brown Cole, a failed salesman of tinned foods who had previously been turned away by Dr. Brown when he was trying to get an abortion for his underage lover, goes to the courthouse where other white men are gathered and starts encouraging violence, eventually leading the mob to the jailhouse, intent upon lynching Alonzo. They saw through the bars, take him to the river, and shoot him.  

In the last chapter, right after the lynching, Harold reaffirms his determination to be a doctor, Caroline is making plans to have Thelma taken to a home in Little Rock for unmarried mothers, and Byron Thrash—a shopkeeper whose wife Bess is an alcoholic, and who himself has a Black lover in Lillie Sled “down in the quarters”—sees his lover downtown and realizes that “never again would he enter her door.” 

Little information is available about the author. According to publicly available records, she was born Mayme Bird Stevens on November 3, 1908, in Leola (Grant County). She was married to Carroll C. Hollensworth and, at the time of her death on January 6, 1994, in Stony Brook, New York, she was a resident of Little Rock. A WorldCat search finds a few other short books or pamphlets attributed to her, including The Slender Thread: Help for Women Alcoholics (1979) and The Single, Divorced or Widowed Woman: A Positive Approach to Living Alone (1987), as well as a handful of magazine articles. She also apparently traveled frequently. A letter by a Mayme Hollensworth of Warren (Bradley County) was published in the July 9, 1953, issue of the New York Times, complaining, “The more important people with whom one comes in contact in New York are friendly and kind. Why can’t the ‘hired’ help in hotels, cafes, boats, cabs and the like show to visitors a smattering of courtesy? In the South we would say that they had definitely not been ‘brought up’ correctly.”  

Exposition Press, founded in 1936 by Ukrainian immigrant Edward Uhlan (1912–1988), was “one of the leading vanity book publishers in the United States, publishing as many as several hundred books a year,” according to the New York Times obituary of Uhlan. 

For additional information:
Hollensworth, Mayme. Eat Thy Bread with Joy: A Novel of Racial Tensions and Violence in Arkansas. New York: Exposition Press, 1960. 

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas