by James Agee
The social relations among the three families are limited. During easy parts of weekdays Mrs. Fields, with her children in tow, may visit Mrs. Burroughs, or vice versa, and they sit on the porch and drawl at each other. When the men are at work away from home, or looking for work, they have a somewhat richer social exchange than this: more people are seen in more variety; there is a loosening of tongues under the sunlight and searching, and in the reflection of a morning’s events during a lunch period. At home, most of the family talk is during meals. There is just the hard substance of the day and direct future in it. Junior went out to the cotton house and there was a ratsnake jist a-dabbin at him, or, that black kitten went and had fits and he died … The children, especially the little girls, sometimes spend overnight together: and the presence of a guest cheers everyone a good deal, though usually the pleasure is scarcely articulate. Very occasionally whole families will visit each other overnight. There was a good time two years ago the Burroughses still like to remember, when Bud was still living over in the swamp and his daughter Mary was home (one of the two times she has left her husband for good). They all went over and all of them but Allie Mae and Lily got drunk. Mary, she was just sloppy-drunk, she was so drunk she didn’t know she was in the world. That same sort of party mixed with nonrelatives and with a fiddle and dancing added, is called a frolic. Frolics are not frequent among the white people, even when a good many of them live near together, and out this lonesome road none of the families has been on one for years. Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July are always big times. Last Fourth of July all the white people out that road had a picnic, and it was a good time for everyone until Mr. Peoples’s nineteen-year-old idiot epileptic son throwed a fit and spoiled the fun.
It must be remembered of course that the six months of nominal leisure are somewhat qualified: they offer the derelict leisure of unemployment.
The two big leisure days, dependably, each week, are Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, everyone goes to Moundville.
Whether Moundville need be “described” is a problem. It is a town on the small side of small and the mean (not tough, just mean) side of mean. Such towns have been nailed into the reading lobe of the American brain perhaps beyond need of further hammering. Barring church, however, it offers the people we are speaking of their total experience of what social students like to call communal life: it is market place and metropolis to them and to miles of country side. Moreover, it is that swatch of civilization which people of that countryside directly support: for nearly everyone—that is, Everyone—in town owns at least a little piece of land, and most landowners have some business interest in Moundville. So perhaps a few notes are in order.
Population around 500. Autoplates bearing the legend: “Heart of the Cotton Belt.” A quarter of a mile off a State Highway. Hard by the biggest Mounds in Alabama, within which are the bones of diminutive Mongolians 3,500 years dead, now being exhumed at bargain cost by the boys in CC Camp Baltsell. Served by the Southern Railway. Three big corrugated tin gins owned and operated by combines of landowners. Low tin shed: cotton warehouses. A planing mill run by Joseph Mills, who has been prematurely logging in the vicinity for the past fifteen years and for whom Floyd and Tingle work. Mrs. Wiggins’s Hotel and Café. Out front, a Negress jouncing the Wiggin baby in an elastic swing or, of a Saturday afternoon, middle-class (but not quite Class) housewives in clean best ginghams, watching the crowd, commenting, pulling their dresses loose from their skins. Two drug stores, run by the town’s two senior doctors, serving gigantic quantities of Coca Cola and selling sadistic pulps to the men, ovarian pulps to the women, and patent medicines to all comers. Three general stores owned by the landowners in combine, their wares general as only the wares of Southern country stores can be. A Yellow Front store, one of a chain, specializing in groceries. A hardware store. A filling station. (Others out at the highway.) A mule market. A biggish new clean brick church with saintless windows that resemble an amalgam of oysters in need of fresh air: a landowners’ church: Methodis or Babtis, what difference does it make. The homes of landowners: squarebuilt, in fair trim, set in bushy lawns on which are wooden animals; graded down to muggy houses which, if women, would not have shaved their underarms. Nothing Greek-revival. A colossally filthy, or in fairer words perfectly ordinary, Niggertown.
Saturdays: On the depot platform and the porch of the refrigerator shed lounge two identical groups: town boys of fifteen to twenty in the light pants, light shirt, and eyeshade or new straw which make the uniform of their kind and class; twitching with curbed sexuality and a less curbed violence: tinder for every crime from the seduction of Negresses to lynching. In front of the hotel: the fat-sterned mamas of the hamlet, sweating their sour cosmetics into dough. At the curbs enjoying curb service, or coursing the two blocks of business street quietly, over and over, in daddy’s chivrolet coach, daughters of the landed gentry, girls who can only be described as bitchy. In the stores or threading the walks: the landowners and merchants, shirtsleeved, hatted, sweating with extreme busyness or taking time off for a stroll and a dope. In vacant grounds behind the low buildings, crowded and silent, the empty wagons, the mules twitching their hides against the flies. In the stores and on the walks and all over the streets: the tremendous shy and nearly silent swarm of whites and of Negroes drawn in out of the slow and laborious depths of the country, along the withered vine of their red roadsteads and along the sedanswept blue slags of highway, on mule, on mule-drawn wagon, and by foot hanging together, each family, like filings delicately aligned by a hidden magnet, doing their scraps of trading, meeting acquaintances and relatives otherwise seldom seen and jawing a little, with no demonstration even of pleasure, far less of fake effusiveness; shy even here and even here a little stunned by the urbanity of it all: alien to it: not at all of it: looked down on, a little contemptuously, by it: threaded steadily by a man upon whose belt-sustained overdose of bowels perches, toylike yet businesslike, a pistol in a black holster.
Among all these are the Burroughses and the Fieldses and a quota and sometimes all of the Tingles: They have come in crowded in one wagon, usually Tingle’s. They buy their lard and flour and light groceries and, if there is money left, some gingersnaps or some peanutshaped, bananaflavored candy for the children; or a couple of yards of printed cotton; or, very occasionally, the men will sneak into a blind tiger and buy half a pint of corn, which they drink swiftly in the blinding heat and under whose influence their conduct is unpredictable. (They have a sense of guilt about drinking and consequently a viciously kiddish sense of joy about it; though they drink far less badly than the acned young men on the depot platform.)
Once in a great while a movie is shown on Saturday, in the Moundville School. That is all that need be said, because few of the parents and none of the children we are speaking of have ever seen one. Of course to many tenants, near the next bigger size of town, movies are less unfamiliar. Their Saturday fare may as well be mentioned, then: A Western always; a serial imitative of the adventures of Tarzan; a short comedy or musical about middle-class city life or Times Square. Occasionally a problem drama about the difficulties of being rich and looking like Miriam Hopkins, or a comedy of manners with dialogue which is a bad imitation at fourth remove of the dialogue of Philip Barry.
Every so often, Gypsies come through. It causes a certain amount of interest out in the country because they are mistaken for Injuns.
Last summer a merry-go-round (pronounced with the accent on go) set up in the vacant lot next the combined mayor’s office and jail: beautifully sculpted horses painted in delirious colors; good primitive oils concealing the core of machinery; a jim crow sign in gold letters on red; mechanized Wurlitzer horns gaily blowing tunes of fifteen years old. Burroughs and Tingle got drunk and took rides. (Many adult Negroes, perfectly sober, rode, too.) Maybe there will be another one next summer. There is one running all the time up in Tuscaloosa but that is so far off (twenty-five miles) that, for instance none of the Burrough
s children had ever seen it until last summer.
Sunday is the day of rest. Children are welcome to play, and sometimes a man gets quietly drunk, but it is a day of rest. People go to church some, less regularly perhaps than you might think, and pay each other visits, kin-to-kin mostly. A chicken is killed, in honor. While the women are fixing it and getting dinner ready, the men sit on the porch and talk or smoke or chew; the little girls retire into a lowvoiced and mysterious semi-privacy; the boys jab at the dirt with sticks or knives. While the men are eating dinner, the women wait on them and brush flies away. While the women and children are eating, the men sit and talk. Later they get up and go quietly around the fields, or examine a bee-gum, or lean over the rail of a hogpen. The women drift away in pairs, or with a child, into the woods, and come back quietly to sit on the porch and talk. When the men come back and take the chairs they go in and sit on the bed. There is no point in recording the talk. It is endless, unhurried, unembarrassed by silence, of neighbors, crops, stock, sickness, cooking, scandal, hunting, death, fortune, misfortune, types of fertilizer, a leaking roof, government jobs, the chance of a job, childbearing, the weather, all depending on the sex of the talkers and the length of distance and time they have been apart. There is very little communication between the women and the men.
Somewhat unusually isolated, these three families have less “company” than the average. Bud Fields sees his two sons fairly often; Burroughs, his mother and a sister in Moundville on Saturdays (she is married to Fields’s son Edward); Tingle, less often, his brother, who lives four miles back of them out the road: but the radius is small, and seldom exceeded.
There aren’t enough white people in the neighborhood to support a church, so these three families are deprived of what in another place would be the only full-blown social spiritual and esthetic event in their lives. The meetings in deep country go on for hours and intensify, during the dead weeks before picking, into revivals.
So they make it up the best way they can. Up till the year before last they held meetings in Tingle’s home, in the spare room where he stores his cotton. Everyone looked forward to the meetings and everyone came, including a number of tough and scornful outsiders. As time wore on the meetings got too rough. Finally the Tidmores gave them permission to use an abandoned one-room nigger-shack a little piece down the road. For no reason that anyone understands, there has been no trouble since.
The meetings are held Wednesday and Friday evenings except when work is at a rush, and every Sunday right after early dinner. No one specially regrets missing a weeknight meeting, but everyone looks forward to the Sundays except Fields, who is “not a religious man.” None of them are especially religious for that matter, except over the weather and in fear of death, but they would all be deeply shocked if you expressed any doubt about the existence and nature of God; they care a great deal about the singing and, to a person who has nothing on earth and is done with hoping, it is an obvious and, when necessary, a profound and cathartic comfort to be sure that in the long run all is for the best and the poor man will be taken care of. They are of different sects but the depth of country and tradition makes them all much alike in action and tone. These meetings are non-sectarian, and it causes no one any apparent discomfort.
After a certain amount of preliminary singing, Tingle or a neighbor named Peoples asks each person present to quote a verse of the Bible. “The-LordgivethandtheLordhathtakenawayblessedbethenameoftheLord.” One child said “Let not your heart be troubled” (a favorite verse); the next said “Jesus wept”: and well he might.
After that the leader reads a chapter from the New Testament and expounds it, verse by verse; and after that the singing resumes in good earnest, everyone crowded behind the torn forty-year-old hymnal. The hymns are of the Moody-Sankey tradition crossed with the subtler and more swinging intervals and rhythms of the Southern poor whites or mountaineers. They are sung with violence by the leaders; hummed or growled by the more shy. The leaders are Frank Tingle and his two eldest daughters. Tingle picked up sight-reading in one night at singing-school and has a somewhat fallible talent for harmony and improvisation. His voice is a loud bugling bay and it brackets the whole male register. His daughters, who have learned the tunes and most of the words by heart, strain and tighten their naturally pleasant voices continually, in hopeless competition with him. They are expert and responsible in starting off the new verse the instant the old one is done with. His two boys likewise break their unchanged throats. His two smaller girls sing slenderly like violins, and fall into silences of shyness over the sound of their own voices. All the hymns are long, five and six verses plus chorus; they all have a pitch and roll to them; the words are emotional, full of guilt, self-pity, and the certitude of ultimate love and rest: and wiry and shrill and lacking in the massiveness it needs, the singing nevertheless achieves the beginnings of its purpose. Nearly everyone gets warmed up and sings louder, the lilt and swing and improvisation become less inhibited, and a kind of ticklish, intensely sexual laughter and triumph begins to work at the mouth and to shine in the eyes.
Only it never quite breaks loose even from the shame that poisons it, and it leaves them shy or mask-like or concealing in jokes.
People come in and go out as they like; smoke at the doorway. There is no formal end to the service. The children and men drift out, then the wives: for the last half hour only Tingle and his two girls and Mrs. Tingle (moved, serious, and nearly silent in her deep black) are left in the shack.
It is seldom they have a sermon. A year ago last fall a Nazarene preacher named Mr. Eddie Sellers, from up above Tuscaloosa, preached them two in successive days, and taught them a new hymn he had written. He really satisfied them, and they still remember him with deep gratitude.
CHAPTER 9
Health
How late in her pregnancy a woman works around the house and in the fields and how soon she gets back to work again depends on her health and how much grit she has. Since that is the code she believes in and lives up to the answer is, she works as late and soon as she can stand to, which is likely to mean later and sooner than she should.
A granny-woman charges five dollars for delivery, a doctor twenty-five. The Burroughses are flat-footed in their preference for doctors. The Fieldses and Tingles have used both: which, depending on haste, state of mind, and the willingness to take on the debt. (With no phones and town seven miles off, getting a doctor takes a while.) Fields prefers a doctor though: you never can tell when things will go wrong. The Tingles don’t much believe in doctors for anything; they prefer woods-cures.
Of the seven children the Tingles have lost, one lived to be four, and pulled a kettle of scalding water over on him. (Such accidents, with milder results, are not infrequent in large families with distracted mothers.) One lived to be five and ate some bad bologna sausage one night and was dead before morning. The rest died within their first year. One died of colitis. From what people said of it another must have died of infantile paralysis. The rest, they don’t know what they died of, the doctor never told them. William Fields’s twin died winter before last, of pneumonia. Last winter William was very sick, too. He got choking spells and his face got as black as a shoe. The doctor has told them that unless his tonsils are removed he may not live through another winter. They don’t know whether or not to believe him; meantime there are other expenses already incurred that they can’t afford as it is. The Burroughses’ daughter Martha Ann was six months old when she died. The doctor found out what it was but there was nothing he could do about it. It was an abscess behind the eye.
Floyd says, “You ain’t never seen trouble till you lose a youngun.”
If you bring a child through its first year or two though, its chances are a lot better. Charles had a terrible siege of pneumonia last winter; his skin is still the color of skimmed milk; but he lived through it. He also lived through the chills that came on in the spring, but that was easier. Everyone gets the chills. You know when one is coming on
when your back feels like it is going to break. The best thing to break a chill is quinine. Three Sixes is good, too, and if you haven’t got the money for quinine or 666 there is bitterweed: make a tea of nine of the yellow flowers and drink it. Elizabeth boiled up twenty-seven of them in a dose and it done her might a good. There are three kinds of chill, the dumb chill, the shaking chill, and the congestive chill. The dumb chill is mildest; that’s what you generally get. The shaking chill is much worse. Mary Fields had such a bad one that even when she was held down on the bed the bed rattled on the floor. The congestive chill, Frank Tingle has had. His face got as black as a wool hat and everyone, including the doctor, thought sure he would die. A man only lives through three of them, and he has had two.
Nobody escapes malaria and its returns; and in its milder forms, such as diarrhea, nausea, headache, dizziness, sudden departures of strength, and retching of bile, everyone takes it for granted. Every so often, though, you get such a bad spell of it you mighty nigh have to quit work. Soda and Calotabs are the common remedies. The Tingles like this one, to begin a meal: a pinch of Epsom salts three times a day for nine days; skip nine days; resume; go on until relieved. About a pound generally fixes you up.
Or if you are constituted luckily, the various poisons with which your system is loaded will assemble themselves into the safety valves locally known as risings and more widely known as boils. After a while, the valve blows off. That is the signal for another rising. Ruby, late last summer, was developing one in the fold of the elbow the size of a dollar watch. Her mother had had nine in the past month. Their arms and legs were leopardlike with violet scars. The doctor was quite jolly about it, in a way doctors have. He told them every rising was worth five dollars to them.