by Walker Evans
Over to the left the brass padlock hangs loosened on the new pine shed of tools and slung harness, and in a barked enclosure behind it are the mules, and along the fence the wagons are ranged in a line, their tongues in the air like a salute of elephants. They are long, low skeleton wagons of tough beams, no sides, for hauling logs; some of them auto-wheeled and rubber-tired; and their oak wood is now blanching with warmth, and their details of metal already warm to the touch. The mules loiter in a hooved muck of tattered water in a tract of brownlighted shadow slivered with sun, a sapling grove licked leafless within their reach, the trunks rubbed slick: very naked-looking and somehow shy without harness, as if they had not quite the right to nature, they stand, they drift, they wait, they glide among the vertical wax saplings in the camouflaging light, and lift back their cynical heads like flowers as the men who master their days lift open the gate and advance toward them: some stand docile, and accept the halter with a kind of sneering meekness; others quietly lift their hoofs in the chopped earth and drift, as a matter of decent form rather than rebellion; two or three draw themselves back as deep among the narrow trees as the squared sharp wire will allow them, and abide a close approach, then slither away, and these are kicked in the belly and slashed along the jaws and across the eyes: there is among these negroes a scarred yet pure white mule, whose presence among them in this magic light is that of an enslaved unicorn: and these are led out and stood along the shafts and harnessed in teams in geometries of leather, rope and bird-jingling metal as sweet in their stresses as the rigging of sloops; and the men now wait quietly and in a casually tense listlessness, talking a little, rolling damp cigarettes, and adjusting the iron violence of their breakfasts inside them; and a negro, harnessing his mules, lifts forth wet-throated, joyfully, three times into the embla zoned morning the long black sorrow-foundered and incompleted phrase of anarchaic mode in whose glorying he begins each day; and the men still wait; and the trapped mules, twitching the metal flies, conniving their long heads: and though the air is still cool, there is now the cutting odor of grass and weeds, and a cool sweat starts out and faintly stings in patterns upon the forehead, the wrists, the beam of the shoulders, and the spine; and down in the shortening and uncooling shade at the black altar of machinery, the negro stands with one hand hung in a triangular wire and with time like a lake in the palm of the other, into whose surface he gazes, and on the second, he pulls down on the wire; and in a stiff standing-out of steam, the air is one rich reeking shriek through which the sunlight is vibrated: and the mules tighten; and the negro slides the watch, which is tethered to him by a still new black shoestring, back into the small pocket at the center of his chest; and the whistle is cut off like a murder, leaving the aquarium clearing weak with silence from all sides of which are reflexed in diminishment the noise like a weltering, withering flat of the contour waves from a center: they are spread on the hills like the explosive sudden flowering of a steel rose and it is retracted to the root: and there is a tightening of strength against harness under slashing of sharp leather and they move, the long clattering wagons, in a drawn line round the stacked pine lumber and down the far side of the clearing and on, past the machinery and uphill to the right along a wide broken trough of stumps rank weeds iron shade and iron and splendid light, and are deployed along the ragged and stump-spiked woodlands into the resumption of yesterday’s work: chopping, sawing, snaking, hauling, the shearing surflike shriek of the saw: and it is now thirty-two minutes past six, and among these men are George Gudger and—
Colon
Curtain Speech
Colon
But there must be an end to this: a sharp end and clean silence: a steep and most serious withdrawal: a new and more succinct beginning:
Herein I must screen off all mysteries of our comminglings—all these, all such, must be deferred—and must here set in such regard as I can the sorry and brutal infuriate yet beautiful structures of the living which is upon each of you daily: and this in the cleanest terms I can learn to specify: must mediate, must attempt to record, your warm weird human lives each in relation to its world:
Nor may this be lightly undertaken: not lightly, not easily by any means: nor by any hope ‘successfully’:
For one who sets himself to look at all earnestly, at all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life: what is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart? What is it, profound behind the outward windows of each one of you, beneath touch even of your own suspecting, drawn tightly back at bay against the backward wall and blackness of its prison cave, so that the eyes alone shine of their own angry glory, but the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings, or however else one may faintly designate the human ‘soul,’ that which is angry, that which is wild, that which is untamable, that which is healthful and holy, that which is competent of all advantaging within hope of human dream, that which most marvelous and most precious to our knowledge and most extremely advanced upon futurity of all flowerings within the scope of creation is of all these the least destructible, the least corruptible, the most defenseless, the most easily and multitudinously wounded, frustrate, prisoned, and nailed into a cheating of itself: so situated in the universe that those three hours upon the cross are but a noble and too trivial an emblem how in each individual among most of the two billion now alive and in each successive instant of the existence of each existence not only human being but in him the tallest and most sanguine hope of godhead is in a billionate choiring and drone of pain of generations upon generations unceasingly crucified and is bringing forth crucifixions into their necessities and is each in the most casual of his life so measurelessly discredited, harmed, insulted, poisoned, cheated, as not all the wrath, compassion, intelligence, power of rectification in all the reach of the future shall in the least expiate or make one ounce more light: how, looking thus into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other and whose existence is all measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I to speak of you as ‘tenant’ ‘farmers,’ as ‘representatives’ of your ‘class,’ as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends and as I ‘know’ you? Granted—more, insisted upon—that it is in all these particularities that each of you is that which he is; that particularities, and matters ordinary and obvious, are exactly themselves beyond designation of words, are the members of your sum total most obligatory to human searching of perception: nevertheless to name these things and fail to yield their stature, meaning, power of hurt, seems impious, seems criminal, seems impudent, seems traitorous in the deepest: and to do less badly seems impossible: yet in withholdings of specification I could but betray you still worse.
Let me say, then, how I would wish this account might be constructed.
I might suggest, its structure should be globular: or should be eighteen or twenty intersected spheres, the interlockings of bubbles on the face of a stream; one of these globes is each of you.
The heart, nerve, center of each of these, is an individual human life.
We should first meditate and establish its ancient, then more recent, its spreaded and more local, history and situation: how it is a child of the substance and bowels of the stars and of all space: how it is created forth of an aberration special to one speck and germ and pollen fleck this planet, this young planet, on that broadblown field: how on the youth of this planet it is youngest, scarcely yet breathed-upon yet born, into its future growth: how it is blossomed forth upon that branch most sportive, most precarious, most propitious, potential and most frightful in known creation, of human existence, of human consciousness, of human possibility to build itself ruin or wonder: how it is the bearer of whatever the future shall be: how in itself, no matter which in
dividual mote it is, it is in its beginning capable, in its terms, of health, which is perfection, which is holiness, which is simple and salted, blooded functioning of each animal in his own best: and is capable likewise of all harm to itself and to others: how all that is to make all this difference is circumstance, physical and mental: how there is nothing within consciousness and the receiving of our senses which is not incorporate of this bulk and strength to shape of circumstance, and nothing so minute but that it impounds more power, more importance, more meaning of impingement upon this human life, than most exact or violent words might ever tell:
At this center we set this seed, this flower, whose genealogy we have suggested and whose context in eternal history, his royalty, his miraculousness, his great potentiality: we try at least to suggest also his incomparable tenderness to experience, his malleability, the almost inimaginable nakedness and defenselessness of this wondrous fivewin-dowed nerve and core: the size, the pity, the abomination of the crimes he is to sustain, against the incredible sweetness, strength, and beauty of what he might be and is cheated of:
Never relaxing the simultaneity of his ancestral and brotherly stars, we bring his sources into a more near convergence in local place of time: how he is brought forth of a chain and weaving, a texture of sorrowful and demented flesh, which in all previous centuries has scarcely in few meaningless hundreds wrought up a head from the blind bottom of the human sea and breathed one cup of brightness and plain air, and in these disadvantagings were drawn up and woven upon the crookedness of one continent and were drawn upon seas and upon a newer to no better faring, and here a few generations have dwelt in the woodlands and dead clays in bestial freedom or in servitude, shaken with fevers, grieved and made sick with foods, wrungout in work to lassitude in the strong sun and to lack of hope or caring, in ignorance of all cause, all being, all conduct, hope of help or cure, saturated in harm and habit, unteachable beliefs, the germens they carry at their groins strained, cracked, split, tainted, vitiate to begin with, a wallet of cheated coinage:
Here we have two, each crucified, further crucify one another upon the shallow pleasure of an iron bed and instigate in a woman’s belly a crucifixion of cell and whiplashed sperm: whose creature is our center, our nerve we spoke of; in this instant already his globe is rounded upon him and is his prison, which might have been his kingdom: it is begun in a redblack cherishing of a blind and beating of hurt unvanquishable blood and is informed entirely of the ferment of this blood, of whom likewise hard work is done, indecent diet is taken, there is fright and sorrow in dream, and not much or no love at all, a weaponless mind is meditating as it may; this creature, the motive even of his creation, is sprung, is sprained, is slaved and ordered by a crimesoaked world: for he is made for work, for a misuser, not his own even illusive master nor even mere slave of his parents or a healthful state, but of misuse without which he shall not live at all: and it is in obedience to these pressures that the marriage was made and that he was conceived, and that he is nursed and emboweled among the discouragements of this beating of beaten blood; and it is toward this bondage that the germ unfurls and flowers, climbs from that soft and floated sea through darkness and petting blood the steep ladder through all shifts of nature and, low helmet huge and cowering mild, hands covering lightless eyes, knees, feet drawn tight as if he were receiving the blow of a bayonet in his solar plexus, he floats steadily upward in balance upon his deafness and at length, like the bursting beating of the lungs of a deep diver, is broken forth on gladness of the air
to find himself:
how should he know it, how should these poor parents who so earnestly wish him well, ever suspect it better than a little, how in their ignorance and skinned sadness shall they ever learn, how all the help they would do him is but harm
to find himself:
weakened, internally hurt already beyond all use of estimate, yet still amenable of all goodness were it there:
and defenseless and unknowing, without choice, without knowledge for choice if he had it, without power of choice if he had knowledge
to find himself.
Ahh, so set about so pressed upon, so searched to the very soul already by poisons, monsters, all shapes of ruin, smiling jaws of traps, that that true-mythic natural man of racial dream, that self-venturous hero, that strong young man were much more fortunate who at the end of so steep and arduous a journey and flight from the floor of creation revisited, his lungs ready to burst his heart breaking, his body naked, his primal weapons lost that he might swim at all, bursts bleeding into freedom of his breathing element to find, surrounding him, not just in circle on a floor in closured den as Daniel, but in such complex of such circle as blows round him one bubble and sutureless globe, his grinning grincing machinearmed scorcheyed lovetaloned raving foes:
For this man is aware; he may have skill; it is by skill; by consciousness by innocence by intelligence by love, by magic we shall win and only thus; this skill he may have and by this skill may speak; may talk or flute such mild commodious language that these beasts dissolve their brows, yearn sweetly in quaverings and sobs of ardor toward and upon him, roll down before, and undefend their gold inhuman bellies at his feet in all heaven’s astonishment:
and if he lack; or if he fail; his death is soon, is done, as a shock of lightning:
whereas this other: his death, his destroying, it is quiet, subtle, continuous, very slow, in quite great part deluded, in some part the doing of most tenderly intended love, his foes being of this silent, insinuous, and masked kind, and he void of all skill against:
This creature, this center, soul, nerve, see he is now born, and I have said, how he is globed round, with what shall make and harm him: what are the constituents of this globe? What are the several strengths of their forces upon him?
It was beyond all use of hoping to say, while yet he was in his mother’s blood scarce conscious, when this globe was at its simplest and least: how then should we say more now, when with a few hours’ wrenching he is wrung out of this haven through such cataclysmic change to take forever, no retreat, his uprooted, root-cut and human place in so immane and outrageous, wild, irresponsible, dangerous-idiot a world: how still shall we better than blankly suggest, or lay down, a few possible laws?
Our five or twenty known human senses: there is no reason to assume but they are few, are crudely woven, that swarms of immediacy slide through these nets at best, assisted though they be by dream, by reason, and by those strictures of diamond glass and light whereby we punch steep holes in the bowels of the gliding heavens, taste out the salt small of the earth, step measurements upon the grand estate of being: nevertheless: nevertheless and at their weakest, weakest and most weaponless of these instruments, their taking is titanic beyond exhaustion of count or valuation, and is all but infinitely populous beyond the knowledge of each moment or a lifetime: and that which we receive yet do not recognize, nor hold in the moment’s focus, is nevertheless and continuously and strengthfully planted upon our brains, upon our blood: it holds: it holds: each cuts its little mark: each blown leaf of a woodland a quarter-mile distant while I am absorbed in some close exactitude: each of these registers, cuts his mark: not one of these is negligible: and they measure, not only by multitudes within each granular instant, but by iteration, which is again beyond our counting not alone but as well the remotest realization of our flesh and even brain: and with each iteration the little cut is cut a little distincter, a little deeper, a little more of a scar and a shaping of a substance which might have taken other shape and which in each re-registration loses a little more and a little more the power to meet this possibility: and more and more inexorably and fixedly is drawn and shaped into that steepest-sunken of all graves wherein human hope is buried alive, the power and blindness, stiffness and helplessness of habituation, of acceptance, of resignation so totally deep it has sailed beyond memory of resignation or thought of other possibility: a benumbing, freezing, a paralysis, a turning to stone, merciful in th
e middle of all that storm of torture, relatively resistant of much further keenness of harm, but always in measure of that petrifaction obtusèd ten times over against hope, possibility, cure:
Moreover, these globular damagements are of many kinds and degrees and colors and of an infinite talent for deceit: being of as many kinds as that particular set of senses and that particular intelligence at their heart can perceive and can receive and can react to and reflect upon: all that is ‘physical,’ all that is of the ‘mind,’ all that is of the ‘emotions,’ all that is of the ‘economic’ and the ‘mental’ and the ‘glandular’ and the ‘medical’ predicament, all that is of ‘belief? and is of ‘habit,’ and is of ‘morality,’ and is of ‘fear,’ ‘pride,’ need of ‘love,’ ‘warmth,’ ‘approbation,’ all that is attached in the ‘meanings’ of ‘ideas,’ ‘words,’ ‘actions,’ ‘things,’ ‘symbols’: all these apart, all these in orchestral complex wherein they interlock, interform one another, and conspire in their companionship still sharper fiercer stricter subtler more bonebiting traps and equations of destruction than is in the power of any one or five of them independent of one another:
Here, again, in the midst of all these, is this human creature, born, awaiting their touch:
We specialize him a little more: yes, he is of the depth of the working class; of southern alabamian tenant farmers; certain individuals are his parents, not like other individuals; they are living in a certain house, it is not quite like other houses; they are farming certain shapes and strengths of land, in a certain exact vicinity, for a certain landholder: all’ such things as these qualify this midge, this center, a good deal: