Raintree County

Disk 1

Student John's mother Ellen asks him, "You learn ya to smoke tobacco?"
Referring to her husband T.D.: "You ever hear his sermon on the evils of tobacco?"
"Some do it chew,
and some do it smoke,
while some do it up their nose do poke." (0:07)

Professor Jerusalem expounds to a group of students that Socrates would "be reduced to sitting on a cracker barrel chewing tobacco..." (0:08)

Talking to John and his friend Nell, student Garwood refers to Jerusalem as "that expert in calculated insanity." (0:13)

T.D. asks Flash Perkins, "Why don't you come around to our next temperance rally? Come round and take the total abstinence pledge."
"We want men to take that pledge only when they're sober."
Flash: "But if they're sober, what's the sense of having them take the pledge?... I want to testify that I have been drunk for two weeks... I am drunk this here now minute." (0:18)

Flash boasts to the others, "I chew up little boys like you with my tobacco..." (0:21)

His wife Susanna tells John, "That's where my daddy and Mom were buried." She points to a graveyard. (1:03)

Susanna tells John, "I had trouble sleeping again." (1:19)

Disk 2

Susanna tells John, apparently believing there was a missing baby, "There was another that was dark." (0:13)

Susannah tells John about the fire that killed her parents. (0:23)

Susanna leaves John a note indicating she must escape from "them." (0:30)

Jerusalem tells John, "Apoplexy I presume." (0:36)

Susanna's maid from birth tells John, "As long as I knowed that child there's been a war going on inside her." (0:53)

Ms. Roman tells John Susanna has been at times "suicidal." They walk through a room full of psychiatric patients. "We don't even have sedatives." (1:01)

Susanna lies dead in the swamp. John is grief stricken. Suicide? (1:19)

Susanna appears to blame herself for the deaths of her parents and the slave woman she believes may have been her biological mother, believing that her mother may have shot and killed her father and the slave in reaction to a note she wrote impulsively as a child to punish the mother she hated. Are her symptoms in adult life consistent with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, bereavement or some other mental illness?