Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Page 10
Born otherwise, he would break his shell upon other forms of madness: he might, for instance, have sprung up in the sheltering and soft shame and guilt of money, which in this earth at present is had at the expense of other spirits and of human good, and which brings on its own diseases, so ghastly that one cannot in wisdom and honesty either envy or hate the image, say, of the landowner whom I suggest beside this child: Or otherwise again, in the guilty sheltering even of a little ease, the mind, the spirit, the heart, which in him shall all so swiftly be killed or obtunded, this might have grown its fight, and would discover, and have to bear, something of the true proportions of the savageness of the world, and something of the true weight of responsibility which each human being must learn to undertake for all others, and something of the true magnitude of the terror and the doubt in which in each human being this responsibility must be searched out and undertaken; and might easily have deceived himself, and become an instrument of poison, or, less deceived, have sustained those further agonies of perception so great that one may very doubtfully feel any glad or guiltless embrace of the joys and lacerations of this consciousness short of the whole uncompromised and seldom piercing and intention of ‘genius’ itself: see, in this ‘consciousness,’ what a swarm and slime of monsters he would encounter, whose skill, pain, disease, deceitfulness is multiplied in proportion to the reach and edge of this same ‘consciousness’ which is our one hope, this monster world’s one sure, most shriveling enemy: of this particular world of hope and of smile-masked horror he is nearly free, for in his world few such beasts exist, and the instruments whereby he might see them if they did, or of his own born doing; the lenses of these are smashed in his infancy, the adjustment screws are blocked; his is more nearly purely a tactile, a fragrant, a visible, physical world, wherein through his deep isolation these plainfeatured physiques drive and impose their stresses all the more keenly upon him; and should he by faint and most irregular chance make his little, terrific, faithful struggle to escape, into a sphere how much less tortured shall this escape be made: for this human sphere is all one such interlocked and marvelously variegated and prehensile a disease and madness, what man in ten million shall dare to presume he is cleansed of it or more so than another, shall dare better than most hesitantly to venture, that one form of this ruin is more than a millionth preferable to another?
Here then he is, or here is she: here is this tender and helpless human life: subjected to its immediacy and to all the enlargEd dread of its future: out of a line, weight, and burthen of sorrow and poison of fatigue whereof its blood is stained and beneath which it lifts up its little trembling body into standing, wearing upon its shoulders the weight of all the spreaded generations of its dead: surrounded already, with further pressures, impingements: the sorrow, weariness, and nescience of its parents in their closures above and round it: the ghastly influence of their lovelessness, their lack of knowledge hope or chance, how to love, what is joy, why they are locked together here: his repeated witness of the primal act, that battling and brutality upon a bed which from his pallet on the floor of the same room he lifts his head and hears and sees and fears and is torn open by: their hopeless innocence how to ‘raise’ him, an ignorance no less enormous than in the parents of the rest of the world, yet not less relevant nor less horrifying on that account: the food which is drawn out of his mother distilled of the garbage she must eat; and the garbage to which he graduates: the further structures of psychological violence, strangling, crippling, which take shape and stress between him and his brothers and his sisters and between all of these and their parents; for of all these all are utterly innocent, totally helpless: the slow, silent, sweet, quiet yet so profoundly piercing enlargement of the physical sensual emotional world whereof, as we have said, not the least detail whose imposure and whose power to trench and habituate is not intense beyond calculation: all such that in the years of his very steepest defenselessness, who shall always be defenseless, and in the years of his extremest malleability, by the time he is five or six years old, he stands at the center of his enormous little globe a cripple of whose curability one must at least have most serious doubt: and now new worlds open upon him in the manifold swift unfoldings of a great flower, and in each opening he is the more firmly shut upon, his first wounds the more salted, the little slit graves of angelic possibility the more savagely danced on and defiled beyond memory of their existence: all accepted, all taken in, all new burdens taken on, the early laboring, subservience, acclimation to insult and slendering of forms of freedom, the hideous jokes of education and their sharp finish into early worse, the learning of one’s situation relative to the world and the acceptance of it, the swellings and tremblings of adolescence, the bursting free from home into wandering, the fatal shining and sweet wraths of joy in love and the locked marriage and the work, the constant lack of money, need, leanness, backbroken work, knowledge of being cheated, helplessness to protest or order this otherwise, clothes worn, landlords imposed on one, towns traded in—
This is all one colon:
Here at a center is a creature: it would be our business to show how through every instant of every day of every year of his existence alive he is from all sides streamed inward upon, bombarded, pierced, destroyed by that enormous sleeting of all objects forms and ghosts how great how small no matter, which surround and whom his senses take: in as great and perfect and exact particularity as we can name them:
This would be our business, to show them each thus transfixed as between the stars’ trillions of javelins and of each the transfixions: but it is beyond my human power to do. The most I can do—the most I can hope to do—is to make a number of physical entities as plain and vivid as possible, and to make a few guesses, a few conjectures; and to leave to you much of the burden of realizing in each of them what I have wanted to make clear of them as a whole: how each is itself; and how each is a shapener.
We undertake not much yet some, to say: to say, what is his house: for whom does he work: under what arrangements and in what results: what is this work: who is he and where from, that he is now here; what is it his life has been and has done to him: what of his wife and of their children, each, for of all these each is a life, a full universe: what are their clothes: what food is theirs to eat: what is it which is in their senses and their minds: what is the living and manner of their day, of a season, of a year: what, inward and outward, is their manner of living; of their spending and usage of these few years’ openness out of the black vast and senseless death; what is their manner of life:
All this, all such, you can see, it so intensely surrounds and takes meaning from a certain center which we shall be unable to keep steadily before your eyes, that should be written, should be listed, calculated, analyzed, conjectured upon, as if all in one sentence and spread suspension and flight or fugue of music: and that I shall not be able so to sustain it, so to sustain its intensity toward this center human life, so to yield it out that it all strikes inward upon this center at once and in all its intersections and in the meanings of its interrelations and interenhancements: it is this which so paralyzes me: yet one can write only one word at a time, and if these seem lists and inventories merely, things dead unto themselves, devoid of mutual magnetisms, and if they sink, lose impetus, meter, intension, then bear in mind at least my wish, and perceive in them and restore them what strength you can of yourself: for I must say to you, this is not a work of art or of entertainment, nor will I assume the obligations of the artist or entertainer, but is a human effort which must require human co-operation.
That steep withdrawal and silence and meditation of whose need I spoke; we are now drawn back at the peak of in quite silence: whence let me hope the whole of that landscape we shall essay to travel in is visible and may be known as there all at once: let this be borne in mind, in order that, when we descend among its windings and blockades, into examination of slender particulars, this its wholeness and simultaneous living map may not be neglected, however l
ost the breadth of the country may be in the winding walk of each sentence.
Part Two: Some Findings and Comments
Money
You are farmers; I am a farmer myself.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Woods and Ricketts work for Michael and T. Hudson Margraves, two brothers, in partnership, who live in Cookstown. Gudger worked for the Margraves for three years; he now (1936) works for Chester Boles, who lives two miles south of Cookstown.
On their business arrangements, and working histories, and on their money, I wrote a chapter too long for inclusion in this volume without sacrifice of too much else. I will put in its place here as extreme a précis as I can manage.
Gudger has no home, no land, no mule; none of the more important farming implements. He must get all these of his landlord. Boles, for his share of the corn and cotton, also advances him rations money during four months of the year, March through June, and his fertilizer.
Gudger pays him back with his labor and with the labor of his family.
At the end of the season he pays him back further: with half his corn; with half his cotton; with half his cottonseed. Out of his own half of these crops he also pays him back the rations money, plus interest, and his share of the fertilizer, plus interest, and such other debts, plus interest, as he may have incurred.
What is left, once doctors’ bills and other debts have been deducted, is his year’s earnings.
Gudger is a straight half-cropper, or sharecropper.
Woods and Ricketts own no home and no land, but Woods owns one mule and Ricketts owns two, and they own their farming implements. Since they do not have to rent these tools and animals, they work under a slightly different arrangement They give over to the landlord only a third of their cotton and a fourth of their corn. Out of their own parts of the crop, however, they owe him the price of two thirds of their cotton fertilizer and three fourths of their corn fertilizer, plus interest; and, plus interest, the same debts on rations money.
Woods and Ricketts are tenants: they work on third and fourth.
A very few tenants pay cash rent: but these two types of arrangement with local variants (company stores; food instead of rations money; slightly different divisions of the crops) are basic to cotton tenantly all over the South.
From March through June, while the cotton is being cultivated, they live on the rations money.
From July through to late August while the cotton is making, they live however they can.
From late August through October or into November, during the picking and ginning season, they live on the money from their share of the cottonseed.
From then on until March, they live on whatever they have earned in the year; or however they can.
During six to seven months of each year, then—that is, during exactly such time as their labor with the cotton is of absolute necessity to the landlord—they can be sure of whatever living is possible in rations advances and in cottonseed money.
During five to six months of the year, of which three are the hardest months of any year, with the worst of weather, the least adequacy of shelter, the worst and least of food, the worst of health, quite normal and inevitable, they can count on nothing except that they may hope least of all for any help from their landlords.
Gudger—a family of six—lives on ten dollars a month rations money during four months of the year. He has lived on eight, and on six. Woods—a family of six—until this year was unable to get better than eight a month during the same period; this year he managed to get it up to ten. Ricketts—a family of nine—lives on ten dollars a month during this spring and early summer period.
This debt is paid back in the fall at eight per cent interest. Eight per cent is charged also on the fertilizer and on all other debts which tenants incur in this vicinity.
At the normal price, a half-sharing tenant gets about six dollars a bale from his share of the cottonseed. A one-mule, half-sharing tenant makes on the average three bales. This half-cropper, then, Gudger, can count on eighteen dollars, more or less, to live on during the picking and ginning: though he gets nothing until his first bale is ginned.
Working on third and fourth, a tenant gets the money from two thirds of the cottonseed of each bale: nine dollars to the bale. Woods, with one mule, makes three bales, and gets twenty-seven dollars. Ricketts, with two mules, makes and gets twice that, to live on during the late summer and fall.
What is earned at the end of a given year is never to be depended on and, even late in a season, is never predictable. It can be enough to tide through the dead months of the winter, sometimes even better: it can be enough, spread very thin, to take through two months, and a sickness, or six weeks, or a month: it can be little enough to be completely meaningless: it can be nothing: it can be enough less than nothing to insure a tenant only of an equally hopeless lack of money at the end of his next year’s work: and whatever one year may bring in the way of good luck, there is never any reason to hope that that luck will be repeated in the next year or the year after that.
The best that Woods has ever cleared was $1300 during a war year. During the teens and twenties he fairly often cleared as much as $300; he fairly often cleared $50 and less; two or three times he ended the year in debt During the depression years he has more often cleared $50 and less; last year he cleared $150, but serious illness during the winter ate it up rapidly.
The best that Gudger has ever cleared is $125. That was in the plow-under year. He felt exceedingly hopeful and bought a mule: but when his landlord warned him of how he was coming out the next year, he sold it Most years he has not made more than $25 to $30; and about one year in three he has ended in debt. Year before last he wound up $80 in debt; last year, $12; of Boles, his new landlord, the first thing he had to do was borrow $15 to get through the winter until rations advances should begin.
Years ago the Ricketts were, relatively speaking, almost prosperous. Besides their cotton farming they had ten cows and sold the milk, and they lived near a good stream and had all the fish they wanted. Ricketts went $400 into debt on a fine young pair of mules. One of the mules died before it had made its first crop; the other died the year after; against his fear, amounting to full horror, of sinking to the half-crop level where nothing is owned, Ricketts went into debt for other, inferior mules; his cows went one by one into debts and desperate exchanges and by sickness; he got congestive chills; his wife got pellagra; a number of his children died; he got appendicitis and lay for days on end under the ice cap; his wife’s pellagra got into her brain; for ten consecutive years now, though they have lived on so little rations money, and have turned nearly all their cottonseed money toward then-debts, they have not cleared or had any hope of clearing a cent at the end of the year.
It is not often, then, at the end of the season, that a tenant clears enough money to tide him through the winter, or even an appreciable part of it More generally he can count on it that, during most of the four months between settlement time in the fall and the beginning of work and resumption of rations advances in the early spring, he will have no money and can expect none, nor any help, from his landlord: and of having no money during the six midsummer weeks of laying by, he can be still more sure. Four to six months of each year, in other words, he is much more likely than not to have nothing whatever, and during these months he must take care for himself: he is no responsibility of the landlord’s. All he can hope to do is find work. This is hard, because there are a good many chronically unemployed in the towns, and they are more convenient to most openings for work and can at all times be counted on if they are needed; also there is no increase, during these two dead farming seasons, of other kinds of work to do. And so, with no more jobs open than at any other time of year, and with plenty of men already convenient to take them, the whole tenant population, hundreds and thousands in any locality, are desperately in need of work.
A landlord saves up certain odd jobs for these times of year: they go, at less than
he would have to pay others, to those of his tenants who happen to live nearest or to those he thinks best of; and even at best they don’t amount to much.
When there is wooded land on the farm, a landlord ordinarily permits a tenant to cut and sell firewood for what he can get. About the best a tenant gets of this is a dollar a load, but more often (for the market is glutted, so many are trying to sell wood) he can get no better than half that and less, and often enough, at the end of a hard day’s peddling, miles from home, he will let it go for a quarter or fifteen cents rather than haul it all the way home again: so it doesn’t amount to much. Then, too, by no means everyone has wood to cut and sell: in the whole southern half of the county we were working mainly in, there was so little wood that the negroes, during the hard winter of 1935–36, were burning parts of their fences, outbuildings, furniture and houses, and were dying off in great and not seriously counted numbers, of pneumonia and other afflictions of the lungs.
WPA work is available to very few tenants: they are, technically, employed, and thus have no right to it: and if by chance they manage to get it, landlords are more likely than not to intervene. They feel it spoils a tenant to be paid wages, even for a little while. A tenant who so much as tries to get such work is under disapproval.
There is not enough direct relief even for the widows and the old of the county.