by James Agee
The human organism, however, is remarkably tenacious of life, and miraculously adapted to it. In the course of adapting, it may be forced to sacrifice a few side-issues, such as the capability of thinking, of feeling emotion, or of discerning any possibilities of joy or goodness in living: but it lives.
Twenty-six thousand feet up the cols of Everest, a long way beyond the staying power of plants, pale spiders have been found, who subsist on nothing more discernible than air. Apparently they also reproduce their kind. What else they do with their time and, for that matter, why, no one has yet made out.
*Though each family has a lowprice alarm clock and as a rule keeps it wound and is respectful of it, the clock is almost invariably an hour or two fast or slow, and they are innocent of any time except the sun’s.
CHAPTER 4
Clothing
Some pretty silly attitudes could be and have been struck over the subject of clothes: such as reproaching society for the fact that tenant farmers do not plow in swallowtails. The fact remains, however, that clothes are powerfully significant psychologically and socially: in every garment you see there is a badge and division of class as distinct as any uniform could effect and far more subtly exact; and a human being is shaped by the clothes he wears quite as much as by the amount of money he is accustomed to feel the presence, or lack thereof, in his pocket; and as the world is today the future of a marriageable girl, for instance, can be profoundly influenced by what clothes she can or cannot wear.
Another fact to bear in mind is that “ugly” and “humble” clothes, shaped to their context, can like the people who wear them have an extraordinary dignity and beauty: and that this fact in turn is heavily qualified by considerations such as those mentioned above.
If in the illustrations and the following inventory you are surprised at the number of figured prints and “store” clothes and the number of garments in general, remember two things: that in a society steeped to the teeth in the fears and coercions of snobbery every class inclines to be emulous of the one next “above” it; and that poor people, particularly farmers, never throw anything away that has a conceivable ounce of usefulness left in it.
All right: any summer weekday, drop in on the Burroughses, and see what they are wearing.
Burroughs will be wearing overalls, pronounced overhalls, and a blue workshirt. Heavy shoes if he is at work; none if he is resting. On his head will be not the routine broadbrimmed straw (on which in fact one farmer in two creates a variant), but a bold-striped, square-visored ship cap. He has three or four changes of work clothes, and puts on a clean outfit every Monday morning or Saturday noon. They are in several stages of wear: none of them are new, and won’t be till fall, when and if there is money. The elder of them are fainted by sweat and sun to a subtle and very beautiful blue. They become frail with sweating and tear against the active body. Then they are stitched and later patched. Then stitches and patches are added over those; until at length whole sections of a garment, particularly round the swing and crest of the shoulders, contain virtually nothing of the original cloth but are one fabric of stitches and patches, as intricate and delicate as the feather cloak of a Toltec prince. This color and this richness of mending, of course, are characteristic of all old clothes in that country.
Saturday morning if there is time, and if not, then certainly on Sunday, Burroughs shaves. When he is unemployed he shaves twice a week. His equipment is a brokenhandled mug with rosebuds wreathing it, a sliver of toilet soap, a rundown tencent varnish brush, a straight razor, a strop made of an old belt, and a clear cheap mirror in a wire frame. Like all country men, he looks bashful and naked after he has shaved.
For the Saturday trip to Moundville he will dress either in the less ruined of his work clothes or in his Sunday clothes. These are the Sunday clothes: A light unionsuit. A pair of hard, dollar-and-a-half, cotton-wool store pants. A pair of fancy-patterned tencent mercerized socks, strung over the fistlike calves, one with a garter of pink and the other of green, scrap gingham. Black cheap dress shoes, streaked with rainy clay. A white or striped cotton shirt, detachable collar; collar detached. A gold-gray felt hat, of which his head and hands are still shy. The lining of the hat and the band, and the bright insole of the shoes, will be scarcely blemished for years to come.
He doesn’t like coats. What he wants to get is a pullover sweater.
Allie Mae is barefooted, most likely, though if she has had warning she will have put on the ruined oxfords her husband’s Sunday shoes superseded, and will quickly remove the sunbonnet she works in. (No more handsome headgear has ever been evolved, but it is “oldfashioned,” like snuff-dipping.) Her dress, whichever one it may be, began as a cheap cotton print for best and has been washed, worn, sunned, and sweated into something more faint and sad and finelooking. She has made it herself, like most of the other clothes. It is cut perfectly straight, longskirted, without decoration, loost at the breast for nursing. For town or Sunday, she puts on, newlaundered, one of the two or three dresses she would conceivably wear except at home; a fragile lavender straw hat, small and misshapen and worn on her shy graven head with sorrowful, clumsy, and ridiculous grace; black flatheeled slippers; and sometimes cotton stockings. Never worn, and probably never to be thrown out, are two other hats. One is a formerly Snappy red felt, impaled aslant with a stripped white quill. The other is a great-brimmed, triumphal affair, homemade out of scraps of cheap gold plush, cheap iridescent brocade, and cheap braid; irrevocably moldered and busted. It is a hat she cannot have had the heart to wear since she was sixteen and a bride: in the short while before, like every bride of her kind, she was drawn into the rollers in good earnest, and methodically defaced among them.
Speaking generally as well as of the Burroughses, the work clothes of the grown people become them as their own skins do. In their Good clothes they look stiff and shy, like orphans at a party.
Lucile’s mother dresses her carefully in the idiom of the little girl she is ceasing to be, and a “respectable” little girl at that: she will never have to wear what Ruby, far less the Tingle children, wear, and the psychological imprint is going to be strong on her, and not entirely fortunate. Excepting one or two flimsy skirts of sheeting cotton she wears dresses made of store cloth, of gay though faded colors, and with some style of cut, sashed, and ruched out behind like a pulley: and beneath, the floursack clout which appears to be the standard lingerie in that country. She and the other children are customarily barefooted from early spring through the fall and, with all serious respect to the dangerous relationship between bare feet and hookworm, it is nevertheless true that a good deal of tripe has been written on the matter. To say that these children can’t afford shoes is true. It had better be added, though, that they would refuse to wear them if they could afford them: also, that summer shoes, in a warm country, are as useful as neckties for polar exploration: also that for growing children new shoes have to be bought each fall whether or not the old are worn out, because they are outgrown. Only two considerations make this subject serious at all: one, again, is the hookworm; the other is the fact that some children can’t be afforded shoes for winter, go to school with their feet wrapped in sacks, or for that same reason stay at home.
Junior wears overalls every day of the week and Sunday, too, blue and store-bought. All summer his feet are a flycrawled, festered crust of sores: bites scratched and dewpoisoned, and swollen to their worst in dog days, and disinfected by coaloil and turpentine: the routine summer status of the feet for a country boy his age; the routine medicine for all minor injuries. (Perhaps it would be well to reconsider the shoe question; but bear in mind how normal and unnoticed this is.) Charles has some yellow, home-made overalls, but more of the time he wears a faded, twopiece blue-and-white suit caught together at the waist by four big buttons. Squeaky has a whole flock of dresses which no doubt come in handy for future babies (and no doubt have done so for Charles; some of them even for Junior). The best he has is a town-bought, very Nursery job wi
th pink flowers and white rabbits printed on a blue ground, all laundered quite pale. The dressing of babies up to three or so is very simple, and is uncomplicated by genital genteelism. In hot weather they often go naked as jaybirds. The dresses are short and bell-shaped, usually split down the back with a single button at the nape. Babies let loose in such garments, especially those in the amphibious stage between crawling and walking, look comic and irrelevant in them, trailing them wide on the floor beside their shrimpish nudity, like dogs dressed up by children.
Most of Floyd’s clothes are store-bought. Now and then a woman, and more frequently a maturing girl, buys a readymade dress. But most of the clothes are homemade on the sewing machine which next to the beds and stove is the least dispensable article of furniture. During the spring and summer some occasional scraping of money goes into bits of cloth—how little the money is, the preponderance of babies’ dresses indicates—but the only real buying of clothes and cloths comes in the fall.
The other two families have been going longer than the Burroughses: and pride over clothes and such breaks down with age. The Tingles could ill afford pride anyhow. The Fields and Tingles buy some clothes; but clothes are a foolish thing to spend on when cash is scarce and when flour and fertilizer sacks are plentiful. Fields has store overalls, and Sunday clothes (Tingle wears a new, tieless workshirt for Sunday), and his wife and Ruby and their children all have snatches and remnants of garments homemade of store cloth: but Mrs. Fields’s town dress is plain as a nightgown, and as flimsy: basted together out of coarse pillowslip cotton; and for the rest, everything is fertilizer and floursacks, for her and her children, with the brands and insignia and poundage still smiling thru. Fields himself wears an extremely handsome fertilizer sack shirt. This handsomeness is only fair to mention: also, as a landowner would tell you, they cover their nekkidnuss all right: the other sides of the story are, we trust, self-evident. Fields also wears a work-hat, a torn, pierced, sewn-together, cockeyed, ex-best hat that any Dartmouth man of ten years back would forfeit at least the Freshman game with St. Anselm’s prep for. The Fieldses make and wear these sackcloths frankly enough, and yet surreptitiously as compared with the Tingles. The Tingles for the most part have dropped entirely out of the realm of cotton prints, and have invested spaciously in very coarse, creamcolored cotton that was intended for sheeting. They mend and keep clothes even longer than the other two families; so they have quite a lot of them. Ida Ruth wears just a floursack, or a simple smock of sheetingcotton: and for Sundays and company, pink mercerized drawers. Sadie and Laura Minnie Lee have a choice of sheeting or guanosack dresses, totally plain, and sheeting overalls. They wear the overalls, usually, without shirts. The two boys have homemade overalls, guanosack shirts, and shallownapped corduroy pants which are far too worn to whistle as they walk. Flora Bee and Elizabeth have more variety, as befits young women. Flora Bee has her quota of sacks; her sheeting is trimmed, some of it, with pale pink gingham, and the collars are flounced; and besides the she has an old, fancy, ruined, curtain-lace blouse, with drabbled ribbons running in it, and a bright bold cotton print such as the town girls wear to the Post Office up in Moundville. Work and weather and diet and the desperate knowledge that it is an attractive dress bar her from ever being mistaken for a girl to whom such clothes come natural: wearing it, she looks as though she has stolen it. Besides a number of plain sack and sheeting dresses, Elizabeth has a sheeting dress decorated with a half-cape of rough blue cotton, and, for best, a translucent, dead-black crepe sown with twinkling beads and sweated open alarmingly at the armpits. All among these girls, by the way, scatter a few strings of glass beads and a belt or so with a sporty buckle, to garnish and complete the picture.
Mrs. Tingle wears sacks and sheets all week and a dead-black dress, equally designless, on Sunday. She is barefoot, even on Sunday.
Some of these clothes are in fair shape: most of them are torn and sweated and befouled and patched and stitched far beyond any Bureau of Charities conception of what old-clothes means.
For work in the sun, most of the children and some of the women wear straw hats: modified, crackling sombreros. The Tingles alone among the three families go in for cornshuck hats, and they go in strong. A straw will cost anywhere from fifteen to fifty cents. In a day, one of the older girls can construct a hat out of cornshucks which will do just as well and which is, in fact, bright-fibered as platinum in the sun and thoroughly beautiful. Wearing one places you low in the social scale, though.
So much for the clothes.
CHAPTER 5
Work
Food: Clothing: Shelter.
The Lives of most men on the earth are spent in getting these things.
Few tenants have any strong or hopeful interest in the cotton they raise: they raise it because that is what they were rented their land and their home for. The greatest good it can do them is small against the work they have put into it. What they care more about is the corn they raise and the peas, the produce of the garden, and such little strips of sorghum, yams, peanuts, as they may (or may not) be permitted to plant: for these mean not doubtful cash and possible debt and another’s profit in which they can have no heart, but life itself. We shall detail none of the task and process of raising these crops. Raising cotton is what they are there for, what they must pour most of their lives into, and why they are alive at all. We shall not exhaustively detail that work either, for you can find it well covered many times elsewhere. But you should realize that it is at the dead center of their existence. They lean the weight of their lives on one end of a crowbar, that lifts such life as they have on its far end: and cotton and hard land is the crude bight. So here is a short account of the job it is for a tenant to raise cotton.
In the late fall or middle February he takes down the brittle forest of last year’s crop with clubs or a cutter. In fulfillment of an obligation to his landlord he borrows a second mule and with a two-horse plow, runs up the levees, that is the terraces. Then the actual work begins, with what is planted where and with what grade and amount of fertilizer determined by the landlord, who will also criticize, advise, and govern his methods of cultivation. But this is the tenant’s job, on which he has spent ten or forty years: back to the tenant.
He takes a twister, which is about the same as a turning plow, and, heading the mule concentrically, broadcasts; breaks the land broadcast; laying open as broad and deep a ribbon of stiff earth as the mules’ strength and his own strength of guidance can manage: eight wide by six deep with a single-horse plow, twice that with a double, is good.
If you have two mules or like Fields and Tingle can double up, it is best to broadcast. (Then you lay out the furrows three and a half foot apart with a shovel plow; put down fertilizer; then by four furrows with a turning, plow, twist the land back over the fertilized furrow.) But if you have only one mule you break what you have time to and for the rest, bed, that is, start the land. There are two beddings. The first is hardbedding: breaking the hard pan between the rows.
Set the plow parallel of the line of stalks and to their right: follow each row to its end and up the far side: the dirt lays open always to the right. Then set the plow close in against the stalks and go around again. The stalk-stubble is cleaned out this second time round and between each two rows is a bed of soft dirt. That is the first bedding.
Then drop guano along where the stalks were, by machine or by horn. Most tenants buy a horn, or make it as Fields has done. It is a long tin cone, small end low, with a wood handle. Hold it in the left hand; take the guano in rhythmic fistfuls from the incipient frock slung heavily at your right side. After you have strowed the gyewanner you turn the dirt back over with two plowings just as before: and that is the second bedding. Pitch the bed shallow, or you won’t be able to work it right.
If you have done all this right you haven’t got a blemish in all your land that is not broke: and you are ready to plant.
There are three harrs you might use but the springtoothed harrow is bes
t. The longtoothed section harrow tears your bed to pieces; the short-toothed section is better but catches on snags and is more likely to pack your bed than loosen it. The springtooth moves lightly but incisively with a sort of knee-action to the modulations of the ground, and it jumps snags. You harr just one row at a time and right behind the harr comes the planter. It is rather like a tennis court marker. A little plow slivers open the dirt; just at its heel the seed runs out in a spindling stream; a flat wheel flats the dirt over: a light, tender, iron sexual act entirely worthy of settling beside the die-log, and the sweep of the broadhanded arm.
Depending on the moisture and the soil it will be five days to two weeks before the cotton will show. Cultivating begins as soon as it shows an inch.
The first job is barring off. Set a five to six inch twister, the smallest you have, close in to the stalks as possible, as close as the breadth of a finger if you are good at it, and throw the dirt to the middle. Alongside your plow is a wide tin defender, which doesn’t allow a blemish to fall on the young plants.
Then comes the first of the four sweepings. The sweeps are blunt stocks shaped like stingrays. Over their blunt foreheads and broad shoulders they neither twist nor roll but shake the dirt from the middle to the beds on either side. For the first sweeping you still use the defender, and you use a little stock but the biggest you dare to; probably the eighteen inch.
Next comes the chopping, with which the whole family down through children of eight of seven helps, or rather, works all day. Chopping is a simple hard and hot job. It is simply thinning the cotton to a stand, hills a foot to sixteen inches apart, two to four stalks to the hill; done with an eight- to ten-inch hoeblade. You cut the cotton flush to the ground, with a semi-blow of the blade that aches first the forearms and in time the whole spine.