Cotton Tenants: Three Families

by James Agee

  CHAPTER 3

  Food

  All a human being needs to live on is food, clothing, and shelter. And, to a man anyhow who must do a lot of hard work; to a woman who must do likewise and carry a child during the fourth to half her mature existence; and to children whose Little Bodies Need Building, perhaps the least dispensable of the three is food.

  It is therefore a pleasure to be able to report that the Burroughs and their neighbors can virtually always count on three meals a day, except perhaps during those four hard winter months when, after all, no one in their position can be sure of anything. But let us take not merely an average day but a day better than average, when the meals are three and square: a day in full summer, at the Burroughses, where the cooking is cleanest.

  Breakfast begins at about four, by lamplight which pales as it proceeds. It is a very important meal, particularly to Floyd, because he has the height of an increasingly hot morning to climb, and his morning is eight hours long. There is always coffee: coalblack, crudely bitter, silty, scorching hot. There is nearly always biscuit, fresh-baked and likewise hot, and very heavy. When there isn’t biscuit there is warmed over cornbread. There is fry more often than not: a saucer floating, in their grease, six or eight small patches of salt pork, fat almost untainted by any hint of pink fiber. Often, too, there are eggs; plenty when there are any; and whenever there are eggs they are fried; and whenever they are fried they are fried hard as yellow-white stones. Always there is sorghum and, in the summer, fresh unsalted butter. Floyd eats four or five big biscuits, three or four eggs, two or three pieces of the fry, and big helpings of the grease and sorghum, which he mixes with his spoon and takes up on his biscuit. He drinks three or four cups of the coffee, without sugar (though there is sugar), out of his saucer. Towards the end of his breakfast, Allie Mae sits down to hers, and their children come in, by order of age, stiff with sleep. Everyone is quiet at breakfast, around the lamp under the increasing light: there is a formal quality about it, as about the silent meals in monasteries.

  Lucile and her mother eat the normal foods, less of them than Floyd does: the three boys eat what the little children eat. Junior and Charles each have a piece of the fry, if there is any left, and maybe half an egg, and a big glass of the buttermilk, and a lot of biscuit, which Floyd hands them stuck on his fork. But the fry and egg are adult foods, to which they are being broken in. Mainly their meal is this: they put two or three spoonsful of sugar in the middle of their saucers, pour on sorghum out of the Mason jar, and get helped to pork grease. This they mix thoroughly with the spoon and take up on their biscuits. The baby meanwhile has had prepared for him a miniature edition of this and a bowl of bread broken in buttermilk. He stands up to it on the bench the three boys use, hanging his round paunch over the china like a Jefferson Day banquet speaker, revolving his bright glance, and going through the seldom completed gestures of eating, jerkily yet gracefully, like a faulty clockwork doll unwinding. What he actually lives on he gets of his mother, many times during the day. Meanwhile the flies are wakening more and more thickly and meanwhile, too, the dogs and cats have assembled under the table, in postures which would do honor to any Bethlehem stable painting of the Holy Family. The dogs are fed at length—mainly on cornbread. Nobody likes the cats or ever pays them any sort of attention; they have to fend for themselves. As the meal disorganizes, Nigger flows up on the bench, insinuates his snaky skull and grabs what he can. He and his companion make it up on fast lizards, fat rats, and an occasional snake.

  Floyd has left before it is all over. He is working in the fields, or working at the sawmill, or looking for work. During chopping time, Allie Mae and Lucile and Junior work all day with him; during the picking season, Charles helps, too. And even in the emptier times of year there is work for his family, and the whole weight of living is in work: clearing the table, washing the dishes, milking the cow, churning, sweeping the floors, scrubbing them once or twice a week, cultivating the garden, shifting the cow to fresh feeding, breaking off corntops, gathering vegetables, drying peaches, peas, and beans, canning, making jelly, laundering, mending clothes, making clothes, minding the children, slopping the hogs: plenty of work. It is done steadily, at a quiet place, and though there is a lot of it there is also a good deal of leisure: a leisure which, as a rhythm of the day, is a sliding into blank and glassy quiet of water: a space in the hot middle of the morning, another in the afternoon, when a woman is just sitting, in the blue shade of the porch next the white edge of heat, with all her joints disengaged and her eyes nearly as bare as a child’s; while her baby sleeps on the floor, beneath a flyswarmed floursack, and her children convolve in any chance stage between heat-enchanted silence and rampant cruelty against each other or the animals. It is the time of morning when Mrs. Tingle comes in gray-faced and gasping from the sunlight among the dark green shadows of her house, falls into a chair, wipes her delicate reeking head on her skirt and, reviving a little, from between lip-pressing fingers squirts snuff-water over the heads of her children into the fireplace. There is always more talk among the Tingles than elsewhere: someone has always been hurt, or is feeling poorly, or has done something laughable. In season, in the middle of the morning, a melon is cut and divided and everyone eats by wet hand or knife while the hens stab at the slippery seeds. Everyone is hungry by that time of morning, and the melon gives a better illusion of fulness than the cold cornbread on which, in other times of year, the children fill up. Blown up with soda as it is, the melon is also liable to loosen the bowels and to weaken and sicken in general, but one becomes accustomed to that.

  Dinner is usually about noon; no set time.* The children have gathered it out of the garden, and Allie Mae has cooked it and possibly shown Lucile something about cooking, a craft as traditional from mother to daughter and as hermetically sealed against innovation as the patterns in Persian rugs used to be. The stove and the tin roof together make the small kitchen so hot, at dinner time, that the sweat starts out and streams all over your body the instant you come in the door, and all through the meal the oilcloth is slippery as a rink under your bare forearms. The animals are there, in their scheduled dancelike places and postures; and the flies are there, a whole drowsing fog of them, struggling and letching on the food, hanging from the mouths and the plastered cheeks of the children, vibrating to death in the buttermilk.

  The constants for the middle of the day are cornbread, peas, and molasses. The peas are not the green ones you may be thinking of, which are rarely raised and are called English peas: these are field peas, small, oval, colored a dirty mauve. They are very dense, not unlike some large version of the lentil which, by the way, is a staple of the French peasant. They are boiled three hours, in water heavily “seasoned” with lard. The cornbread is turned out from the pan, a footlong slab, generally milkless and eggless; so hot it burns your fingers as you break off your piece, appetizing, and as heavy as wet concrete. The sorghum is just as usual: a sour, heavy, heady, black taste. There is also, usually, some other vegetable: boiled potato, fried okra, thin stewed tomato, boiled corn, butterbeans, stringbeans: vote for one or, quite seldom, two. The stewed tomato is called soup: so is any mixture of two boiled vegetables. The okra is fried with a thick crumbing of yesterday’s cornbread. Everything is cooked with lard and mulled in a puddle of sorghum; the juices are sopped up in crumbed bread; the plate is wiped with a crust. The three younger children eat small helpings of this material; a lot of bread and sorghum; a glass of buttermilk. There is no meat.

  Supper is dinner warmed over, plus a fresh batch of biscuit, plus sometimes jelly or jam or preserves, plus sometimes meat: pieced out, perhaps, with another vegetable if dinner was overeaten. Though the meal is always eaten by lamplight, the day still makes it pale. Before supper is over, Junior and Charles have slid from their bench and flopped on the floor like dogs, dead asleep. Floyd sits in the hallway, heavy with daylight, smoking, while his wife and daughter clear the table and wash the dishes. His bare feet like roots draw comfo
rt from the gritty floor. When Allie Mae and Lucile are done they will maybe sit with him a few minutes, the two adults windlassing out of the deep wells of their fatigues their gently low voices, communicating little about nothing, with long falls of silence. Generally, though, they are too tired. The lamp is transferred to the bedroom. One by one, in the basin reserved for that purpose, they wash their feet; by sexes and with modesty, they retire into that room where six sleep in no privacy, and undress. The wife and daughter change into cotton shifts the respective ruin and april of their flesh, only seventeen years apart; they turn their heads away as Floyd comes last, bringing the bucket and dipper, buttons the door, and takes from the nail beside speech, sometimes with a weaving of goodnights and then blank silence, they are asleep, generally, before the last daylight is lost out of the air. Frogs, the dark, take over with noise the dampened and lowbreathing world, but upon this house and the effigies within it, and upon each of a million square houses of that country, there is inviolable silence. A man may wake, coughing in darkness; a child may cry, and be quieted; on the porch, a dog may burst up bellowing from a nightmare and set ten miles of country echoing with his kind: yet these are merely enhancements of a most profound and noble silence: that silence peculiar to the deathlike resting, under the seaweight of deep country night, of people who work.

  That is supper; and three square meals a day; and that is the shape of a day; strung between two flowerings of a lamp; slung from its meals as from three thick wood pegs; and mostly work; and the leisure mindless.

  Next day, breakfast is this: black coffee, fried eggs, hot biscuit, butter, fry, sorghum; buttermilk for the children. Dinner is this: peas, cornbread, sorghum. Some one of a half dozen vegetables; buttermilk for the children. Supper is this: dinner warmed over, plus maybe meat, plus maybe another vegetable; buttermilk for the children.

  The day after that, breakfast is just the same. So is dinner. So is supper.

  Two weeks from now, a chicken may be killed and fried, or boiled with dumplings.

  Once in a great while there is cake: a plain sponge cake with cocoa-chocolate frosting. Or a cocoa-chocolate pudding. Or a sweetpotato pie. Or a can of salmon.

  There are two appletrees. Their yield is small, sour and negligible: good only for betweenmeals and bellyaches.

  There are three or four peachtrees; one was blown down last summer. During the summer the small sweet peaches are stoned and put on the tin roof to dry. Stews and occasional pies are made of them. Peas are dried. Beans are dried. Some figs are got by barter, and preserved. Peaches, beans, butterbeans, tomatoes, are put up in jars. Berries come ripe during a time when everyone’s help is needed in the fields; but so much as there has been time for, they are put up in stews or jams or jellies.

  Early every spring, they buy a shoat or two. Every September they begin to fatten them on corn. Late every fall they knock them on the head with the flat of an axe, hang them up by their hind feet, slit their throats, let them drain, cut them up, and put them down in salt: meat for the winter. It is seldom a family can afford to carry a hog over to the next year, when his meat might really amount to something: generally he is only eight months old when he is killed. He doesn’t by any means last them out the winter. Burroughs’s two hogs won’t last them out for that matter unless they go very easy on the meat and lard. They have more meat in winter than in summer, though, because in summer they have to buy it.

  During the winter, then, there is salt pork. There are preserves and jams. There are canned vegetables. There are dried peaches and beans and peas. There are peanuts. There is, if the season was normal, enough cornmeal to bread them. How much of everything else there is depends on several things: the providence of the woman, the size of the garden, the chance of the season, the size, appetite, and self-control of the family. Plenty of women are far less foresighted than Mrs. Burroughs; plenty plant little, more monotonously, and can much less in less variety, or none. No gardens are large. Much canned-goods spoils, as in the case of Mrs. Fields, for lack of the half dollar it would take to buy new rubbers and new tight leads for the jars. Unbridled hunger by summer means less to put up for the winter; by winter, less to satisfy it that much sooner. The tenant’s life is a mirrormaze of such little choices between two losses. The winter diet of a more normal family than the Burroughses is reduced to winter greens and roots, peas, cornbread, and sorghum: and even that can fail. Burroughs even, with his corn in moist sandy land, is sure to have to buy it for bread this winter, at at least a dollar a bushel for ungristed corn: Fields and Tingle have virtually no corn at all, and a poor crop of peas.

  Add on food:

  One morning Lily Fields’s mother came trudging back from a visit, bringing a letter from a relative (letters go by hand, seldom by mail). Her greeting from down the road was “Kill the cat, compny’s acomin.”

  It is not likely that cats are often killed, even for Christmas dinner, but collectors of Americana are welcome to add it under Section 7G: Sardonic Humor with a Certain Grim Underlying Reality.

  This is worth adding, too, as indicative of the strength of custom and the asininity of deploying the totally unintuitive Nicegirl type of dietician who is customarily sent out to bring the gospel to these women:

  Far from being able to afford the pure hoglard needed for good “seasoning” of everything that goes into the face, Mrs. Fields often can’t even afford the “compound.” In that case she jist has to git along the best way she can on butter.

  That is all. The food at the Fieldses’ is what landowners and tenants unite in describing as good plain country food, a shade more monotonous and several shades less clean than at the Burroughs’.

  The Tingles have a harder time. Less money per head accounts for their food in part; a lack of any sense of system, and an all but total loss of consciousness of dirt, accounts for it the rest of the way. They raise virtually nothing in their garden of that mild array which gives at least a little variety to the other two tables; they can only peaches and —— for the winter: things dry up on them in their garden, or choke under the weeds. It comes down to just about this: coffee, buttermilk, butter, sorghum, less than half as much pork per head as in the other two families; cornbread, fieldpeas, sweet potatoes; biscuit; most of it informed with lard that somehow always manages to be rancid. All this cooked in pots and eaten off china and “silver” that has been cleaned infrequently and with still less frequent thoroughness; off a table whose odors have been spoken of; and among a steady black drowse and the affection of flies. One who isn’t used to this food and who brings a bite of it towards his mouth, finds every muscle and tissue from navel to epiglottis closing and wrestling against it. They are used to it of course, and that doubtless makes everything all right. Most of them eat with good appetite. As Tingle says: “We’re regular meat eaters. No knickknacks, no borl nothn. Give me meat and biscuit three times a day year round and I’ll lof for ye ever day the sun shines.” Mrs. Tingle can’t eat meat, though. She eats biscuit two times ever day, because she needs to fill up, but it hurts her. “Nor butter neither. Molasses: I like them but I can’t eat.” She can eat mush, or soup. She likes turnip soup, though people do say you might as well to eat the booger man as to drink his blood. Once in a while she gets back to the stove and makes mushmelon cake, and last Christmas she made them a banana cake. It would warm the cockles and, very possibly, the ventricles of any good Dickensian to see how delightedly Newton, on those happy occasions when another chicken is killed, tackles the gold bone feet.

  But getting back to the supernormalcy of the Burroughs, let us make a last checkup on food.

  Outside of an occasional chicken, a dependable part of whose diet has been human excrement, there is never any meat except pork, and never any pork except salt pork, and never more than a dab of that at a time, and often enough not even a dab.

  There is virtually never any sweet milk even for the children, because that would be a waste of good butter.

  There is very seldom any fi
sh. When there is, it is canned fish.

  Of the vegetables which began life green, there are few. They are cooked with pork when there is pork to spare; they are cooked in lard when there isn’t; they are at all times cooked far beyond greenness to a deep olivecolored death.

  Everything, in fact, fried, boiled, or baked, is heavily seasoned with lard, and flows lard from every pore. So, after even a meal or two, do you.

  Between thirty and forty per cent of all the food taken into the body is corn. To mention merely the doubtless negligible esthetic angle on this, two weeks of corneating blackens the never-brushed teeth and draws over each tooth a peculiarly thick and odiferous woolen sock of tartar.

  Quite certainly twenty per cent of the rest of the food is field peas.

  All the food is doubleseasoned with sorghum, which blinds its monotony with a more powerful monotony, and loosens the bowels.

  Through five months of fall, winter, and early spring this fare is diminished to canned and dried foods cheered only by winter greens which, again, are cooked to the texture of shoetongues.

  It is only fair to observe of this food as of much about their living that they “like” it—prefer it, indeed, by some odd chance, to things which have never entered their experience: and that a good deal must be explained less in terms of their present particular situation as cotton tenants than in terms of ignorance, slovenliness, and small-farm tradition all over that country. And it is quite as fair to observe that ignorance and slovenliness and the tradition itself are the inevitable products of just one thing: poverty. The music can go all sorts of places but it comes out here.

  And now finally realize, insofar as that is vicariously possible, that this steady, brutal bastinado of the bowels and belly and brain goes on every few hours three times a day (when there is food at all, that is) for exactly as long as life lasts. Consider seriously the favorableness of this food as a diet for an unborn and for a suckling infant; for a child; for an adolescent; for an adult: and consider seriously whether it is not remarkable to the point of nausea that a plant nurtured in such soil should manage to live not in any full health nor in any fulfillment of its form, but at all.