by James Agee
You don’t have to look hard to see how our own credit system, administered not by small-time landlords but by banks, credit-rating companies, and collection agencies, has established an impersonal, finance-capitalist variant of the debt trap Agee described seventy-seven years ago. In what some economists wryly call “privatized Keynesianism,” the United States, by deregulating financial institutions over the last thirty years, puffed a credit bubble, creating consumer demand by encouraging high levels of personal indebtedness. States repealed usury laws capping credit card interest rates, and when these contributed to dramatically higher levels of personal bankruptcies, Congress stepped in to make it harder to escape credit card debt in bankruptcy courts. Workers pay the interest on their debt out of stagnant wages, transferring even more money from poor and working people to the wealthy. Working-class people who manage to enter college leave with punishing levels of debt (amazingly, aggregate student debt in the United States now surpasses aggregate credit card debt) and then face the worst job market in generations. It is harder to escape poverty and move up the class ladder in the United States than it is in most Western European countries, including Britain and France, whose class rigidities seem so much more apparent on the surface.
If this is the system, then what is the social glue that holds it together? Again, this requires the granular description of actual lives, but we could begin with mass identification with the rich and the famous. Ours has long been a lottery culture, in which we are—all of us—protorich. We are fed a constant diet of stories by the corporate media chronicling the extraordinary rise of everyday people into a life of ease and luxury. For a generation, the image of the superwealthy was of a lone software inventor who started his/her business in a garage, rather than the head of a trust in New York who bought and sold only money.
That, interestingly and hopefully, has begun to change. If the crash of 2008 and the protests that followed did anything for us, they made unavoidable some journalistic attention to class power—how wealth in the United States breeds advantage, which breeds more wealth and more advantage, not through labor or smarts but simply as a privilege of already being on top. This was always true, of course; it has just been hidden in plain sight for a very long time.
As long as people on the bottom and the shrinking middle of the income scale continue to imagine themselves as future members of the ruling elite, there is no possibility of class politics. Aspirational marketing fogs our brains and hides reality. But perhaps now more people previously loyal to the system are beginning to understand how rigged it is. Close and thorough description of people’s actual circumstances in the manner of Agee’s long-form report from Alabama, applied to our own time, would doubtless help burn off some of that fog, waking us from the fantasy that we can all earn or win lottery sums. Of such conscience-stricken journalism the aim isn’t to depress anyone’s ambition; it’s to understand how the world functions. There will always be exceptions to the rules. But if we don’t understand the rules, we can’t change them. That goes for the cruelties of capitalism as well as the sentiments that grant it the appearance of common sense.
*The best and most detailed and balanced examination of this history is found in Robert Vanderlan’s Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Introduction
JAMES AGEE
The cotton belt is sixteen hundred miles wide and three hundred miles deep. Sixty per cent of those whose lives depend directly on the cotton raised there, between eight and a half million men, women, and children, own no land and no home but are cotton tenants. This article is a detailed account of the lives of three families of them, chosen with all possible care to represent the whole. None of the three families written of here could alone show or even fairly suggest that whole. Together, they at least suggest it. They work neither for that worst type of landlord, the absentee (human being or corporation) and his manager and riding boss; nor for that “best” type, the paternalist. They work land whose yield approximates the national average. One runs a two-mule farm. Two are of that nominally more fortunate class of tenant which works on third and fourth. One is a repository for much that is the worst that poverty in the rural South can do to a white human being; one is much cleaner and more “self-respecting” than the average (with no happier results); the third cradles and interweaves a number of differences between. In the effort to avoid the least appearance of the bias which has made a good deal of reporting on the subject suspect, we have concentrated upon the Burroughs, that one of the three families which presents the least flagrant picture.
No serious study of any aspect of cotton tenancy would be complete without mention at least of the landlord and of the Negro: one tenant in three is a Negro. But this is not their story. Any honest consideration of the Negro would crosslight and distort the issue with the problems not of a tenant but of a race: any fair discussion of landholders would involve us in economic and psychological problems which there is room only to indicate here.
Readers who find this account lacking in detail of violence and of the more flagrant forms of blood-squeezing and of cheating will do ill to conclude either that they do not exist or that we have preferred to avoid mention of them; and will do well to bear a few facts in mind. That those forms of cheating, though generally enough distributed, are not necessarily unanimous. That violence, which quite certainly, anywhere in that country, is the reply to any gesture distinctly unsettling to the landowners, is not yet by any means representative of the country as a whole because the population as a whole is still kept tidily in line by its own ignorance and by the certain knowledge of what happens when you step out of line, in other words by fear. That tenants are quite properly not eager to communicate information which, published under their names and pictures, would entail unemployment and physical danger. And that if the life of the tenant is as bad as it has been painted—and it is worse—it will show its evil less keenly, essentially and comprehensively in the fate of the worst-treated than in that steady dripping of daily detail which effaces the lives even of the relatively “well” treated.
1. The Great Ball on which we live.
The world is our home. It is also the home of many, many other children, some of whom live in far-away lands. They are our world brothers and sisters.
2. Food, Shelter, and Clothing.
What must any part of the world have in order to be a good home for man? What does every person need in order to live in comfort? Let us imagine that we are far out in the fields. The air is bitter cold and the wind is blowing. Snow is falling, and by and by it will turn into sleet and rain. We are almost naked. We have had nothing to eat and are suffering from hunger as well as cold. Suddenly the Queen of the Fairies floats down from the clouds and offers us three wishes.
What shall we choose?
“I shall wish for food, because I am hungry,” says Peter.
“I shall choose clothes to keep out the cold,” says John.
“And I shall ask for a house to shelter me from the wind, the snow, and the rain,” says little Nell with a shiver.
Now everyone needs food, clothing, and shelter. The lives of most men on the earth are spent in getting these things. In our travels we shall wish to learn what our world brothers and sisters eat and where their food comes from. We shall wish to see the houses they dwell in and how they are built. We shall wish also to know what clothing they use to protect themselves from the heat and cold.
These are the opening sentences from Around the World With the Children, a third grade geography textbook belonging to Lucile Burroughs, aged ten, daughter of a cotton tenant.
The world is our home. Human life, we must assume in the first place, is somewhat more important than anything else in human life, except, possibly, what happens to it. It deserves attention, and a seriousness of attention, commensurate with its importance. And since every possibility human life holds, or ma
y be deprived of, of value, of wholeness, of richness, of joy, of dignity, depends all but entirely upon circumstances, the circumstances are proportionately worthy of the serious attention of anyone who dares to think of himself as a civilized human being. A civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance. And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.
Only if we hold such truths to be self-evident, and inescapable, and quite possibly more serious and quite certainly more immediate than any others, may we in any honesty and appropriateness proceed to our story: which is a brief account of what happens to human life, and of what human life can in no essential way escape, under certain unfavorable circumstances.
The circumstances, that is to say, out of which and into which the cotton tenant is born; and under the steady raining of which he stands up the years into his distorted shape; and beneath the reach of which he declines into death. The fact that his circumstances are merely local specializations of the huge and the ancient, all but racial circumstance of poverty: of a life so continuously and entirely consumed into the effort merely and barely to sustain itself; so profoundly deprived and harmed and atrophied in the courses of that effort, that it can be called life at all only by biological courtesy: this fact should not confuse and indeed can only sharpen our discernment. We would be dishonest for instance to cheer ourselves with the thought that in ameliorating the status of the cotton tenant alone, any essential problem whatever would be solved: and we would be merely fools to comfort ourselves with the reflection that the South is a “backward” country.
Our story, however, is limited. We would tell you only of the living three families, chosen with all possible care fully and fairly to represent the million and a quarter families, the eight and a half to nine million human beings, who are the tenant farmers of the cotton belt.
The families are those of Floyd Burroughs, and of Bud Fields his father-in-law, and of Fields’s half-brother-in-law Frank Tingle. They live on a lift of red-land called Mills Hill, in Hale County, in west central Alabama. Fields and Tingle work for the brothers and partners J. Watson and J. Christopher Tidmore, who live in Moundville, a small town ten red clay and five highway miles north of them. Burroughs works for Fletcher Powers, who lives a couple of miles south of Moundville. We shall begin with an outline of those business arrangements between the tenant Floyd Burroughs and the landowner Fletcher Powers whereby Burroughs, and his wife, and their four children, live.
CHAPTER 1
Business
Burroughs furnishes his labor, and the labor of his family.
Powers furnishes the plant, the supplies, and the money. That is to say, he furnishes the land, the house on it, the outbuildings, the water supply, the garden plot, the directions on what to plant where, when, and how, the tools, the seed, the mule, half the mule feed, rations money, half the fertilizer and, for the time being, Burroughs’s half of the fertilizer.
Burroughs pays off his rent by turning over half the cotton, half the cottonseed, and half the corn he makes. (Some landlords take half of the peas and half of the sorghum, too.)
His own half of the corn, he keeps to bread his family and to feed the mule during the half of the year he has the mule.
Off his own half of the cottonseed, once his half of the ginning fee is paid, he gets the money he lives on during the picking season.
All the money he gets from his half of the cotton is his own, after he has paid back the rations money that was advanced him at eight per cent interest, and any other debts, such as doctor bills, that may be outstanding.
The rest of the money is clear cash money, with which to buy the shoes and clothes that are by that time badly needed; with which to buy at least a few pretties for the young ones at Christmas time; and on which to live through the hardest months of the year.
Under this arrangement he is what is known as a halvers-hand, or as a sharecropper.
If Burroughs owned a mule and tools, like Bud Fields, or tools and two mules, like Frank Tingle, he would like them be working on third and fourth, or he would be called a tenant.*
Fields and Tingle work under much the same arrangement, but furnish their own seed, and two-thirds of the guano they use (on their cotton) and three-fourths of the soda they use (on their corn), and pay, as rent, only a third of their cotton and cottonseed and a fourth of their corn.
Very few tenants keep books. Of those who do, still fewer are so foolish as to bring them up for comparison with the landlord’s. It is not only that no landlord, nor influential citizen, nor any court of law, would give his accounting any credit against his landlord’s. It is, more importantly, that any questioning of the landlord’s word would create an extremely unfavorable impression. Such a tenant would not be the type of willing worker a landlord would care to keep on his place. Moreover, any other landlord the tenant tried moving to would feel the same about it; and so would any other local employer. It is perfectly true that a tenant, if he is out of debt, is no slave. He is free to move from man to man and place to place. But since everything is run on a personal as well as a business basis, it is up to the tenant to create and to sustain an impression which at worst is not unfavorable. This of course is true in some degree of jobs all over the world, but the case of a man like Burroughs is somewhat special to Burroughs’s country: “I’d be askeered to move any fur place fm Maounvul: I don’t know how I’d live. You see I’m knowed here.” All three families have moved around some; but none of them has ever moved beyond call of Moundville.
Burroughs has been married eleven years. He farmed for three and got discouraged. He worked in a sawmill for three; got more money. $2 a day; but it cost more to live; and got discouraged. He went back to farming and has been farming the past five years. One year he cleared an encouraging piece of money, he forgets how much, and got him a mule. When he found out how he was coming out the next year he sold the mule and went back on halvers. The most money he ever cleared was $140, in the plow-under year. He made seven bales, more than twice his average, which is around three, and they sold at twelve cents a pound, and he got $25 from the Government on the bale he plowed under. He had $140 clear when all his debts were paid off. The worst year, which was the year before that, he wound up $80 in debt. The last year of which there is a completed record, 1935, he wound up twelve dollars in debt.
The landlord buys his fertilizer in bulk and puts it against the tenant’s account at cost plus interest. That is one strong part of a tenant’s debt (once he has paid his rent): the other is the rations money. What that amounts to is come at by agreement of landlord and tenant but depends finally on the landlord. A tenant can, after all, spend every cent he is advanced without notably mussing up the lap of luxury, and every landlord knows that. Some landlords are born tight, others loose with money. Some are sincerely concerned that the tenant does not overdraw and overspend. And some are willing to advance him an amount governed only by an estimate of what his paying-up power will be in the fall. Tenants, so far as their choice goes, have their choice between small possibilities in the spring and large possibilities in the fall, or vice versa. They differ, too. Burroughs has lived on six and on eight dollars a month; this last year it was ten. Fields for several years has taken, for his family of six, seven dollars; and argued it up to nine last year. Tingle, with a wife and seven children, is quite scornful of shortsighted tenants who take it all in rations and have nothing in the fall: his family lives on ten. This money is paid out four and a half months of the year, from the first of March, when the crop is started, through mid-July, when the crop is laid by. Income from the cottonseed varies a little: generally a tenant clears abo
ut six dollars on a bale; and a one-mule tenant averages three bales: eighteen dollars or so, to live on during the picking season, between late August and late October.
Fields owns one mule and farms on third and fourth. He has in the past made better money as a halver, but you are ordered around less on third and fourth and he hates to be ordered around. One year back in the War time, when cotton sold for forty cents a pound, he cleared $1,300. Off and on through the twenties he cleared $250 and $300. Even the year before last he cleared $160, but it was a hard winter with a lot of sickness. Some years of course he has cleared next to nothing: a bad crop, or sickness and bills. This last summer his corn was mostly burnt up in the drought; a lot of it didn’t even put on the year. Moreover he had heard that the West was burnt up. Corn was already a dollar a bushel and would go higher in the fall and winter. Rather than buy feed for him, he aimed to sell his mule. Burroughs’s corn was better off: it was planted in sandy, moist land, down the slope of the hill.
Tingle’s corn was just as bad as Fields’s. He planted a lot of late corn, and even by late July it was so sorry that looking at a slope of it from a hundred yards away you couldn’t see anything but the blank ground. Of their combined thirty acres Mr. Chris didn’t expect fifteen bushels—an exaggeration, but there almost certainly will not be enough to bread the family, let alone feed the mules. He doesn’t think of selling the two mules, though: he is an optimist and a progressive, rides a cultivator, and would feel he had gone down a long way in the world if he went back on halvers. Years ago the Tingles were comparatively well-off; they had at one time ten cows and sold the milk. Tingle confidently went in debt $450 for a fine pair of mules. One mule died before its first crop was made; the other died four years later; he nearly died of appendicitis; he nearly died of congestive chills; he had a bad time with dyspepsia of the bowels; his wife got pellagra; now and then children died; he had to go into debt for another pair of mules and became a halvers-hand again. One by one the Tingles, for all their frugality about rations money, have cleared no cash whatever. Last year they came within $125 of paying off their debts. This year they would have done it sure, but for the dry-drouth.