Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  ( (?) ) :)

  How were we caught?

  What, what is it has happened? What is it has been happening that we are living the way we are?

  The children are not the way it seemed they might be:

  She is no longer beautiful:

  He no longer cares for me, he just takes me when he wants me:

  There’s so much work it seems like you never see the end of it:

  I’m so hot when I get through cooking a meal it’s more than I can do to sit down to it and eat it:

  How was it we were caught?

  And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain; and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

  And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

  Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

  Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

  Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

  Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

  Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

  Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

  Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

  Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

  III:

  Nevertheless:

  Oh, nevertheless:

  Spired Europe is out, up the middle of her morning, has brought her embossed cities, her front of country snailed with steel;

  the Atlantic globe is burnished, ship-crawled, pathed and paved of air, brightens to blind;

  shoulder clean shoulder from their hangar, Brazil and Labrador; flash flame;

  from stone shore, bluff-browed tree, birds are drawn sparkling and each plant: erects upon his root, lifts up his head, accepts once more the summer:

  and so must these: while the glistening land drives east: they shall be drawn up like plants with the burden of being upon them, their legs heavy, their eyes quiet and sick, the weight of the day watching them quietly from the ceiling, in the sharpening room; they will lift; lift—there is no use, no help for it—their legs from the bed and their feet to the floor and the height of their bodies above their feet and the load above them, and let it settle upon the spine, and the width of the somewhat stooped shoulders, the weight that is not put by; and are drawn loose from their homes a million upon the land, beneath the quietly lifted light, to work:

  And here:

  Watch from the crackling mattress how the stars, through the roof, though strong, are yet so tired.

  The night has dried.

  Nothing is yet visible in the room, but one begins again to be aware: of the walls, and their odor and lightness, facing each other; and of the postures of the furniture. The bureau, squared on a corner, and its blind mirror receiving, reflecting, the blindness of the bed. The iron of the bed. The sewing machine, the tin trunk, and the wicker chair. The beauties on the walls.

  Outside, from near, there is a new sound. It happens every night, and it is most sorrowful. It is the voice of a blond, fat, and craven rooster, a creature half-frightened of his own wives; and in this poor voice of his, lugubrious, almost surreptitious, he is making a statement he so misbelieves that it is rather a question that expects no answer save the utter scorn and denial of silence; and it gets none: but serves only to remind one of the noises of the night, which perhaps have not at any time ceased.

  They have perhaps at no time ceased, but that will never be surely known, they are, after a while, so easily lost: and one hears them once again with a quiet sort of surprise, that only slowly becomes the realization, or near certainty, that they have been there all the while:

  They are still there, they still convey to one no merely intimate vicinity, but the whole blind earth dispread: they chainlike stream like water violins, a straight and upward rain extracted from the world: yet they are in this hour so profoundly retired upon themselves, they are scarcely the echo of an echo, music’s remembrance in a dying dream, lashed through with weltering whippoorwill, the mourner and genius of great summer night: and even that weeping bird now twice has faltered, and on blurred bark-hued flight has taken his song more deeply among the groves. And the land:

  The land, pale fields, black cloudy woodlands, and the late lamps in the central streets of the rare and inexpiable cities: New Orleans; Birmingham; whose façades stand naked in the metal light of their fear:

  the land, in its largeness: stretches:

  is stretched: it is stretched like that hollow and quietness of water that is formed at the root of a making wave, and it waits: not a leaf, not a grass blade, trembles even: but is stretched: stretched: stretched: and waits (the blood stream stridence meanwhile coursing): waits (the whippoorwill has established in a much nearer tree; one almost knows the feathers that work at his larynx; but he is uncertain):

  not suddenly, nor with fright, but certainly with no line of crossing, no beginning, there has been a change in the air, a crisis passed in sleep; for now, that in the same instant it seems was so enchanted still, there is a nearly noiseless trembling of every leaf of the vegetation of all this part of the world, so delicate a turning in fright of sleep as that needle which records a minute disturbance on the far side of the thick planet, and so nearly noiseless, yet so unanimous, it is the indistinguishable and whispered sigh of all the generations of the dead, the crumbling of a world-long wave so distant, that one yard more removed, could not be audible:

  yet that shuddering: that of a body hopeless standing, though the air is mild: does not break, but rather intensifies the waiting (this is happening not only here but in a stripe, a few miles wide, straight up through Canada, and down the Andes): the air darkens to black violet, and the stars refresh:

  and casually, and with rending triumph, the signal is delivered on the dusk: the sure wild glittering yell of a rooster; light on a lifted sword.

  He is some long distance away, it seems infinite miles, the utmost ledge of the universe, to the east. He has a little while ago awakened, full awake immediately, and intensely aware, as one wakes and is aware, in the total darkness, of someone alien in the room, and his round eye has sharpened on the dark a fierce button, the head cocked, and whole being listening; what is it: what is it; tightening with excitement and premonition, a sort of joyful fear, the hackles roughed with it:

  And with the brusqueness of an epileptic seizure a power much stronger than himself has taken him whole; it must be the voice of another rooster, who received it from another, and so to the brim of the continent, where the first, their bright backs warm and splendid in the light, are stabbing at corn; he is taken whole; he clenches the whole strength of his body and his fiery soul deep into one fist, and strives it at the sky, all his strength shuddering:

  and it is heard: and distant though it is, it cleaves in its full fortissimo: so valiant a noise as rescuing bugle, or tenor broke his throat for: and no answer:

  and then the answer: deep, steep back behind beneath my prostrated head:

  (the violet grays; the gray walks through the walls)

  silence: the whippoorwill; pleading; deploring:

  the first again, much fiercer:

  and, almost interrupting him, a third, beyond the woods:

  (‘whip-pawill! whipp-awilll!)

  The second again; at last, our blond, his androgynous voice chortling with fake confidence: a fourth: the first (the country is taking shape): another: now the third (it is emerging like a print in a tank; I see distinctly the walls of the room, and on the earth the medallioned cities): three new ones now: another: now another: strain on their horn toes and
shout.

  By now it is full glass light, clean, whitening gray, without shadow, and the air is cold, with an odor of pork and damp earth, and the spiring of the roosters has become a commonplace. The whippoorwill has stayed it out long beyond the last ditch, whispering almost visible from among the distinct gray leaves of a near tree; now he is sunk and gone, and the air is brisk with small and skillful birds, who whistle, and beat metals with light hammers; and a dog comes casually though somewhat stiffly round the corner of the house, and smoke sprowls up from chimneys: and the light still whitens:

  But much earlier, while it was not yet light at about the crowing of the second cock, Annie Mae woke, on her back, and watched up at the ceiling; and at this time Margaret Ricketts is already a half-hour up, and the stove crackling, and she is cooking by lamp before the windows are even pale, for her father suffers from stirrup corns, and has four miles through the woods to walk to wort And Fred, and his wife, and Paralee, he in their beds collecting their strength, and the children still sleep:

  Annie Mae watches up at the ceiling, and she is as sick with sleep as if she had lain the night beneath a just-supportable weight: and watching up into the dark, beside her husband, the ceiling becomes visible, and watching into her eyes, the weight of the day. She has not lacked in utter tiredness, like a load in her whole body, a day since she was a young girl, nor will she ever lack it again; and is of that tribe who by glandular arrangement seem to exhaust rather than renew themselves with sleep, and to whom the act of getting up is almost unendurably painful. But when the ceiling has become visible there is no longer any help for it, and she wrenches herself up, and wriggles a dress on over her head, and shuffles barefooted across the porch to the basin, and ladles out two dippers of water from the bucket, and cups it in her hands, and drenches her face in it, with a shuddering shock that straightens her; and dries on the split flour sack that hangs from a nail; and is capable now of being alive, to work:

  Her first work being, to build the fire, and to cook biscuits and eggs and meat and coffee:

  With the noise at the stove, George wakes. Without having to look for it, he reaches on the floor by the bed and finds the book of cigarette papers and the tobacco, and the sweatproof matchbox he has made of a truncated Prince Albert tin. In a skillful and beautiful collusion of his stiff, thick fingers he rolls a cigarette, and he props his head, and smokes it, staring through the ornate iron at the wall, while the birds whet and sweeten:

  (Ivy is meantime up: she was wakened in the serene quietness of a woods animal, neither tired nor rested, but blank and fresh like water; her fine big feet soothe and seethe the floor, and Bud comes to, lifting his sardonic-gentle, innocent, dimly criminal, birdlike, little-boy’s head a little from the pillow, the sheet drawn to his chin: the cleaning light is cool: the children sleep; Pearl, pale, adenoidal, already erotic; and Thomas like a dance, frog-legged, his fists in his eyes; and Ellen, like a baby, fish-mouthed between her enormous cheeks:)

  The cleaning light is cool; the older Ricketts are hurrying through breakfast. There is a rapid smattering of feet and Clair Bell sprints in affrighted: that her father has left for work before kissing her good-bye. They take her on their laps assuring her that he would never do no such a thang, and help her drink her coffee:

  I used as a child in the innocence of faith to bring myself out of bed through the cold lucid water of the Cumberland morning and to serve at the altar at earliest lonely Mass, whose words were thrilling brooks of music and whose motions, a grave dance: and there between spread hands the body and the blood of Christ was created among words and lifted before God in a threshing of triplicate bells, and from the rear of the empty church stole forward a serene widow and a savage epileptic, softly blind, and knelt, and on the palms of their hands and at their mouths they took their strength and, blind, retired: and the morning was clangorous with the whole of a roused school when we were done, and out, and that was the peace of a day: and it is in no beauty less that the gestures of a day here begin; and in just such silence and solitude: the iron lids are lifted: the kindling is laid in the grate: and the lids replaced: and a squirting match applied beneath: and the flour is sifted through shaken window-screen, and mixed with lard and water, soda, and a little salt: the coffee is set on the stove, its grounds afloat on the cold water: more wood laid in: the biscuits poured, and stuck into the oven: all these things with set motions, progressions, routines and retracings, of bare feet and of sticklike arms, stick hands, contractions of the sharp body: and the meat sliced and sliding, spitting, in the black skillet; and the eggs broken, and their shells consigned; and the chairs lifted from the porch to the table, and the sorghum set on, and the butter, sugar, salt, pepper, a spoon straightened, the lamp set at the center; the eggs turned; the seething coffee set aside; the meat reheated; the biscuits looked at; the straight black hair, saturated with sweat and smoke of pork, tightened more neatly to the head between four black pins; the biscuits tan, the eggs ready, the coffee ready, the meat ready, the breakfast ready:

  and they come in, by order of age, masked with the chill of the water that holds them together, and silent with sleep; and the animals raise themselves out of the floor and establish themselves beneath the table, lifting open heads:

  and breakfast is too serious a meal for speaking; and it is difficult and revolting to eat heavily before one is awake; but it is necessary, for on this food must be climbed the ardent and steep hill of the morning, steadily hotter, up to noon, and for Fred and George then a cold lunch only, and resumption, and hours more of work: so that your two halves are held together and erect by this food as by a huge tight buckle as big as the belly, giving no ease but chunk, stone, fund, of strength: endurance in it, or leverage on the day, like a stiff stone: this slowly thaws and is absorbed more evenly throughout the body, and the strength becomes easy leather:

  it is much the same at the Woods’, a little different; Ivy drawls and chaffers like water, her loose hair lays around on her head; and Pearl’s face at the edge of the table is a solemn pouch with swampy eyes; and Woods, his body is elderly, not strong, he must draw it together like strings into a knot; and his eyes look out at the morning, from his intelligent unequipped brain, with a sort of sour part-smiling, hopeless speculation, while he talks a little:

  and at the Ricketts’, more vivacious, for there are many people; the father talks continuously, and though he has now gone, walking as if barefoot on a field of burrs, there are accidents to food and to children, and enough confusion over who is at what task, to keep them going;

  and the breakfasts ended, the houses are broken open like pods in the increase of the sun, and they are scattered on the wind of a day’s work.

  (How was it we were caught?)

  IV:

  Four miles back into the northeast, on a relaxation to flatness in the middle of the low, roiling, and tree-mantled hills, there is a long rectangle cut clean of timber, and beyond it, standing pine.

  The rectangle is stacked along the middle with fresh lumber that stands in a yellow nimbus. The road splits round it between tall drenched weeds and meets itself at the far end where, still close within the cold, dark, early shade, are the soot-black scaffolded structures of sawmill machinery and of power; the tall black candle of stack torched-off with clear curling heat beneath the stained flag of rust-lighted smoke; and a negro waiting, glancing frequently at his watch with a little left in him, after years of habituation, of a child’s excitement in responsibility and in power: and the space is meanwhile struggling full of more and more men, not really many, yet in this woodland and keen morning quietness they seem a crowd, drawn in on rattling wagons and by truck and afoot through the chill hickory smell and fronded shade of the morning forest; and the sun is strong.

  It is strong already, and steadfastly strengthening like the held note of a horn. It is lifted square in the middle of the far end among the tops of the black pines and burns a whorl of cobwebs through them, and the pines are sheeted and shredde
d, carded wool, in a keen mist its brightness refracts among and burns and brightens, so that they are lifted slowly and splendidly in long planes and slashed uncoiling streamers, and there is a sheen on the whole of the clear air of such intensity that it all but hurts the eyes.