by James Agee
That happens as many times as you have picked a bale; the field is gone over three to five times; the height of the ginning season, when wagons are on the road before the least crack of daylight and the gin is still racketing after dark, in early October. After this comes hogkilling; and the milling of the corn and sorghum you have planted to come ready late; and specific consideration of whether or not to move to another man; the sky descends; the air becomes like dark glass; the ground hardens; the clay honeycombs with frost; the odors of pork and woodsmoke sharpen all over the country; and winter is on.
*Deeper in the Southern mountains these lines are proportionally more sternly drawn. Southerners of twenty years back can remember vividly how, along the millhouse streets, deep country couples who had raised a brood to working age and brought them to market sat on their sterns on porch after porch while their children, at the spindles, brought in the bacon or, rather, sowbelly.
CHAPTER 7
Education
In spite of much that could be ventured to the contrary it would seem overwhelmingly certain that any fulness of the good which human existence is capable of must come in a clarity and health of brain and of feeling, of self-knowledge and of knowledge of the world, as well as in any clarity of physical action: and could be arrived at only through education or self-education, using those words in senses much broader than their common ones. It is not for us to invent a system of education which would have any relevance to what we are talking about: we wish merely to point out a few facts. One is that the intellect and the emotions are quite irrelevant to lives such as our three families are leading; so that education is likewise irrelevant to their lives. Another is that such education as they are exposed to is capable of doing them more harm than good. Another is that they are peculiarly ill-equipped for self-education. Still another is obvious: the damages of circumstance are peculiar by no means to the cotton tenant or, indeed, to any single class such as the working class: the thriving business done by bughouses highpriced enough to get by as sanitariums is one proof of that which is superfluous to anyone interested to look about him, and into himself. Still another is likewise obvious: if by education can be meant not mere schooling in facts but a profound clearing and cleaning of the mental air, a real qualifying of a human being for existence, then education is all but nonexistent, and what passes for it is merely a more or less organized dispensary of poisons which may or may not take.
We are not therefore leveling any special attack against the Alabama school system, which to all intents and purposes is neither better nor worse than any other. Like others it fails to come within miles of essentials; like others it is almost inspiredly unintuitive and ineffectual in teaching even what it purports to teach. A few notes can suffice us, and will indicate plenty.
School runs from middle September to the first of May. Country schoolchildren, with their lunches, are picked up by buses at seven-thirty in the morning, dropped again towards the early winter dark. The children of the families we speak of—it is the same of most children living off the highways—have a walk anyhow. In dry weather the bus gets up the side road as far as Tom Elliott’s house. (Tom Elliot is a white-skinned, red-haired, ill-witted Negro who has nothing to do with our story.) The Tingle children walk half a mile to meet it. The Burroughs three-quarters. In wet weather the bus can’t leave the highway; the Tingles walk two miles, the Burroughs a mile and a half (and back in the afternoon) in sometimes knee-deep clay.
There was talk last summer of graveling the road up further; though most of the fathers of families were beyond road age (forty-five). They can ill afford to do such work for nothing, though, and they and their Negro neighbors are in no position to pay taxes. Nothing had come of it within three weeks of the start of school; and probably nothing has.
Southern winters are wet, but the children keep pretty well: Junior was absent only sixty-five and Lucile only fifty-three days out of a possible 150-odd, and they were unexcused only eleven and nine times respectively. Twenty-three of Junior’s and a proportionate number of Lucile’s absences fell in the last two months, which are dedicated to work as well as wetness. Needed at home, Lucile missed several schooldays late in her second year, including the final examinations. Her marks had been good but no chance was given her to make up the examination and she had to take the year straight over: reasonably criminal treatment of an intelligent child but not peculiar to Alabama and perhaps made up for in Junior’s case. He is now in the second grade for the second year. He is there at all thanks to the law which automatically passes a pupil after three years in a grade. It is true of public schools that bright pupils are held back by the others. It is true also that slow pupils are smothered beneath the others beyond any hope of the sort of help they need.
The school itself is a windowy, healthful, brick structure in Moundville which perfectly exemplifies the American genius, so well shown forth in “low-cost” housing, for sterility, dullness, and general gutlessness in seizing any opportunity for reform or improvement. It is the sort of building a town such as Moundville is proud of, and a brief explanation of the existence of such a building in such a country will be worthwhile. Of late years Alabama has Come Awake to Education. Its counties have received appropriations in proportion to the size of their school population. The school population of Hale County is five black to one white, and since not a cent has gone into Negro schools, such neat buildings as this are possible: for white children. Negroes still sardine themselves, 100 and 120 strong, into stoveheated oneroom shacks which would reasonably house a fifth of them if the walls, roof, and windows were tight. But then as one landlord said and as many more would agree: “I don’t object to Nigrah education, up through fourth or fift grade maybe, but not furden nat: I believe too strongly in white supremacy.”
The bus service and the building the white children are schooled in, even counting the muddy walk, are downright effete, of course, compared to what their parents had. The schooling itself is a different matter, too: much more Modern. The boys and girls alike are exposed to Art and to Music; and the girls learn the first elements of tapdancing. The art of course has nothing to do with art, if the children’s favorite drawings are any indication: nor has the music anything to do with music, unless the piping of Cute children’s songs composed by dehydrated spinsters and child psychologists be taken as such. Moreover, though the sight of a gawkily graceful sharecropper’s daughter clogging out abysmal barefoot imitations of Eleanor Powell is a pleasure, of some odd sort, it is not an unmingled pleasure. Not that any vote for fingerpainting, rhythms, and morris-dancing is in order. We mean only to observe that the problem of esthetic eye-opening and training has reached no solution, either rarefied or practical, in Moundville’s public school.
Textbooks are so cheap almost anyone can afford them; though it must be added that Floyd, a couple of years back, had to sell a hog, badly needed for winter meat, to afford them. A few titles and a few quotations, thought over just a little, will suggest to you how much more thoughtful of The Child Mind textbook writing, and teaching, is today than yesterday; will suggest also just how effectual chance is. Let us also remember, while we are about it, that few tenant children get beyond grade school, and that even here we shall imply the far reaches of the book-knowledge of the average. Here are some that were kicking round the Burroughs house last summer:
The Open Door Language Series—First
Book: Language Stories and Games.
Trips to Take. Among the contents are poems by Vachel Lindsay, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Robert Louis Stevenson, et cetera. Likewise a story titled: “Brother [sic] Rabbit’s Cool Air Swing”; and subheaded: Old Southern Tale.
Outdoor Visits: Book Two of Nature and Science Readers. (Book One is Hunting.) Book two opens: “Dear Boys and Girls: in this book you will read how Nan and Don visited animals and plants that live outdoors.”
Real Life Readers—New Stories and Old. A Third Reader. (With color photographs about as real-life as color ph
otographs get.)
The Trabue-Stevens Speller. Just another speller.
Champion Arithmetic. Five hundred and ten pages: a champion psychological inducement to an interest in numbers. Final problem: Janet brought 1 ¼ lb. of salted peanuts and ½ lb. of salted almonds. Altogether she bought ___ lb. of nuts.
Floyd Burroughs can spell, read, and write his own name: beyond that he mires up. He got as far as the second grade. By that time there was work for him and he was slowminded anyway. Allie Mae can read, write, spell, and handle simple arithmetic: and even at this late date grasps and is excited by such matters as the simpler facts of astronomy and geology. Bud Fields quit school at twelve when he ran away and went to work in the mines. He can read, write, and figure. So can his wife. Frank Tingle got as far as the fifth grade. He was bright, too. When his teacher said the earth turned on an axle he asked her was the axle set in posts, then. She said yes, she reckoned so. He said well, wasn’t hell supposed to be under the earth and if so wouldn’t they be all the time trying to chop the axlepost out from under the earth? But here the earth still was so what was all this talk about axles. Teacher never did bring up nothing about no axles after that. No sir, she never did bring up nothing about no durn axles after that. No sirree, she shore never did bring brang up nuthn about no blamed axles attah dayat. Tingle reads a little less like a child than the others and is rather smug about it: “I was readn whahl back na Progressive Farmer rr.” Mrs. Tingle can neither read nor write. She went to school one day in her life and her mother got sick and she never went back.
Elizabeth quit school when she was in the fifth grade because her eyes hurt her bad ever time she studied books. There was no thought of glasses: if there had been they would have come from the five-and-ten like those her father wears, purely decoratively, of a Sunday. She has forgotten a good deal how to read. Flora Bee quit when Elizabeth did because she was lonesome. She still reads and quite possibly will not forget how. Newton and William are in the fourth grade. In another year or two they will be big enough for full farm work and they will be needed for it. Laura Minnie Lee and Sadie are in the second grade. Sadie, though she is so shy she has to write out her reading lessons, is brighter than average; and Laura Minnie Lee, her mother says, is brighter than Sadie, reads and writes smoothly, and “specially delights in music.” Ida Ruth is too young for school.
The Tingles are known of and listed as “problem” children: their attendance record is extremely bad; their conduct is not good. Besides their four-mile walk in bad weather here is some more explanation. They have to wear clothes and shoes which make them the obvious butts for the better-heeled brats in town. Among the poorest even of poor whites, they are looked down on even by most levels of the tenant farmer class. They are uncommonly sensitive and easily hurt, and their loneliness is of a sort to inspire savage loyalty among them. They are Problems all right; and the problem won’t be simplified as these wild and oversexed children grow into adolescence. The girls in particular seem inevitably marked out for incredible cruelty and mistreatment.
Ruby Fields may have started to school this fall: probably not, for it was to depend on whether the road was graveled so she would not have the long walk to the bus alone or with the Tingle children. She has a bloodlipped, weasel-like intelligence that might or might not find engagement in the squarehead cogs of public schooling.
Junior Burroughs is probably hopeless so far as schooling is concerned. Perhaps he has inherited his father’s slowmindedness and perhaps, also, his father’s disease, of which more in its place. Lucile likes school, especially all about the history of our country. We have already remarked on her parents’ intention to send her on through school, and on her desire to become a teacher. In view of what education is, it is perhaps needless to point out that should she become a teacher, that would hardly be a change for the better.
CHAPTER 8
Leisure
Possibly the most important thing to a human being, once he is alive and possessed of the means of sustaining life, is that he should do the work he cares most to do and is best capable of doing. If there is anything else of quite such importance to him (always barring the Higher Affections) it would fall under the head of Leisure, and how best to use and enjoy it. Every detail of circumstance and nearly every detail of so-called education reduces freedom in choice of occupation to an all but nonexistent margin, for people such as the Burroughses. Thanks to the same circumstances and education they have about the least chance imaginable of so much as dreaming what work they would be capable of, and would best like to do, if any breadth of choice were possible. It is therefore comfortable to realize that they have, anyhow, a great deal of leisure. Six months of the year there is little farm work to do; every Saturday, except in a rush, work stops at noon and everyone goes to Moundville; Sunday is always a day of rest, and often even during work time, as we have seen, there are eases in the day.
But when we say leisure we are thinking of all social relations, and of the enjoyment of life. We would be the first to admit that taking America by and large the leisure of its people is if anything more grim than the work, but our subject here is the leisure of the tenant farmer: a subject difficult to write of journalistically, since it is so nearly an abstraction.
There are virtually none of the narcotics to which almost any more prosperous class is addicted. There are very, very few newspapers or magazines. What there are, are saved. The covers and pretty pictures are pasted on the walls; the children save and look at the comic sections over and over. Frank Tingle alone among them enjoys reading. He reads pulps, when he gets them, from kiver to kiver, and he sometimes reads a copy of the Progressive Farmer. Some years back, Floyd bought a fifty dollar Grafanola on the installment plan. (Judging by the music played at five-and-ten counters in the county seats, the white preference is for sweet as against hot, disliked as nigger music, and still more for whines like Lonely Days in Texas.) There are no radios. There are few cars, and they are invariably Model-Ts. None of them has the famous rustic pleasure of hewing closely to the Party Line. The infiltration of all that has to do with the outside world is slow, verbal, and distorted in transit.
Perhaps we may as well mention here what we lately referred to as the Higher Affections. It is almost but not quite safe to say that there is no such thing in that vicinity except, occasionally, in the phases of courtship and the early phases of marriage. We must make these qualifications. The Tingles, much more cut off from people than the others (by their “lowness” in the scale) appear to have an actual and active, mutual and fully distributed affection at least and sometimes love for each other. Fields and his wife, though he refers to her in her presence as this-woman-here, show signs of really enjoying each other. Mrs. Burroughs is very fond of her father and of her sister Mary, proud and fond of her daughter, and devoted to her youngest child as if he were the only thing that kept her alive, which perhaps he is. Floyd is fond and proud of his eldest son. But lovelessness is nevertheless overwhelmingly the impression you would get, and your impression would be confirmed in detail in the course of time. You can find the same, you may say, almost anywhere you look. We say only that the chances for good are at their slenderest in contexts such as we are here speaking of.
Friend is a word you will hear seldom, too. People don’t have friends: they have kinfolks, and neighbors, and former neighbors, and acquaintances, many of whom they would without reflection make great efforts and sacrifices for; they get along with them more or less amiably.
The habitual expression of face and of gesture is serious, slow, and somewhat sad.
Children play routine games of marbles, crack-the-whip, hide-and-seek. There are also spontaneous games with dogs. A solitary such as Charles makes up gibberish by the hour that shows an idiot genius for rhythmic variety. Older children begin to show the painful restiveness of a maturing mind that has nothing to mature on, and of a sexual hunger that has no way to feed itself. The leisures of adolescence are particularly disturb
ing to watch; and their power alone to bore to frenzy would explain early marriages if nothing else did.