Thorpe

Thorpe is a 1967 novel by Union County native Mary Dutton that explores race relations through the eyes of its narrator, a young girl named Thorpe Torrance. The book received positive reviews and comparisons to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It was adapted into a television movie in 1980.

Thorpe (whose first name is her mother’s maiden name) is five years old, soon to turn six, and her brother James is eleven when the narrative begins. The year is 1935, and the setting is a (fictional) southern Arkansas town called Strawne, surrounded by oil wells and timber. Thorpe’s father, Jim, resigns from his position as the principal of the local high school, refusing to apologize to school board president and businessman Will Jackson (whom Jim dubs an “illiterate fanatic”) for having made books available to African American children. This sends his more conservative wife, Lavinia (Venie), into a state of moral outrage. The family is forced to move into a house outside of town, back onto Thorpe family land, and Jim takes a job at Will Jackson’s sawmill.

The Torrance children’s closest playmates during the summer are Josie May (called Josie) and Theotus (called Thee), the children of Donie—the Black washerwoman who works for Venie and lives on Thorpe family land—and her husband, Lewis. Around the start of the new school year, Venie realizes that she is pregnant again, and Will Jackson tells Jim that he is considering closing down the sawmill but will let him begin teaching again if he joins Will’s band of nightriders. Josie is soon discovered to be pregnant, having been raped (and threatened into silence) some months back by Billy Bob Jackson, Will’s son, who works at the tie yard (and whom Jim describes as a “blob of sadistic idiocy”).

Thorpe is bored by school and, after being examined by the county superintendent, is placed in the third grade rather than the first, due to her reading skills. Venie’s sister Eloise, who is a “working girl” in New Orleans, arrives for the Thanksgiving holiday. Josie’s baby, Junior, is born soon, and one week before Christmas, Will closes down the mill. After Will also buys the mortgage of Mr. Byrd, who runs the grocery store in the (fictional) county seat of Wellco, the Torrance family can no longer receive credit. However, Jim receives a job offer in (fictional) Orchard Springs, near the Missouri state line, to start at the beginning of April, although Venie does not want to move. Will again offers Jim a job with the school, provided he engage in nightriding, especially against Lewis, who has been spreading the news of Billy Bob raping his daughter.

In early April, Thee is challenged by the somewhat feral Thompson kids to jump into the local creek. He cannot swim and drowns. Thorpe is not the same afterward, and one night, she and her cousin Dawn Starr, who is visiting, sneak out to go to the reportedly haunted Pig White cabin, but on the way, they find a burning cross in front of cabin inhabited by Martin, a white widower who lives in the woods. At the Pig White cabin, they see nightriders dressed in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan whipping Martin, who is tied to a tree, and Thorpe recognizes several of the men, including Billy Bob Jackson, their leader, and her own father. Thorpe tries to intervene and suffers a brutal whip injury. Billy Bob had apparently been looking to whip Lewis and settled for Martin, and Jim, after bandaging his daughter, calls off the whole affair. Later, as Billy Bob passes by the house of the preacher and sees his new wife (whom Brother Mearl had “rescued” from a carnival) on the porch; he attempts to rape her but is shot in the crotch.

As she heals from her whip injury, Thorpe discovers that her mother, who earlier warned her against being friends with Thee and Josie, had pawned her family watch, a treasured heirloom, to pay for Thee’s casket, and had also sewn his funeral clothes. She also learns that Lewis had been warned about the nightriders, giving him time to flee with his family, by Una, Billy Bob’s mother, who tells Thorpe that her parents are “both good people. An’ they might apt to have to make some more decisions that won’t be easy. Decisions that hurt, whichever way it goes. That’s what we pay, pay for bein’ grown-up.” An epilogue set a week later finds Jim away, having taken a job, and Venie planning to move the family to be with him.

Author Mary Dutton (1922–2010) was valedictorian, at age sixteen, of her high school in Strong (Union County) and attended what is now South Arkansas College in El Dorado (Union County) before marrying and moving to Texas. She taught school, wrote for newspapers, and worked in public relations. Thorpe, her only novel, was a Book of the Month Selection and a Literary Guild Selection. Kirkus Reviews described Thorpe as a “surprisingly good novel,” one whose “strength stems from its authenticity as a personal record, transcribed with active but well-controlled sensibility.”

The book was adapted into a 1980 television movie titled Joshua’s World, directed by Peter Levin and starring Mary Alice (who would later play the Oracle in The Matrix: Revolutions) as the Torrance family housekeeper and Richard Crenna (best known for playing Colonel Trautman in the Rambo series) as Dr. Joshua Torrance (the father character having his first name and occupation changed), with Tonya Crowe playing Thorpe Torrance.

For additional information:
Dutton, Mary. Thorpe. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1967.

“Joshua’s World.” Internet Movie Database. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181615/ (accessed August 21, 2025).

“Mary Frances Ball Dutton.” Find-a-Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/50467411/mary-frances-dutton (accessed September 11, 2025).

Review of Thorpe. Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/mary-dutton/thorpe/ (accessed August 21, 2025).