Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  Gudger and Ricketts, during this year, were exceedingly lucky. After they, and Woods, had been turned away from government work, they found work in a sawmill. They were given the work on condition that they stay with it until the mill was moved, and subject strictly to their landlords’ permission: and their employer wouldn’t so much as hint how long the work might last Their landlords quite grudgingly gave them permission, on condition that they pay for whatever help was needed in their absence during the picking season. Gudger hired a hand, at eight dollars a month and board. Ricketts did not need to: his family is large enough. They got a dollar and a quarter a day five days a week and seventy-five cents on Saturday, seven dollars a week, ten hours’ work a day. Woods did not even try for this work: he was too old and too sick.

  Shelter

  I will go unto the altar of God

  SHELTER : An Outline

  A home in its fields

  The spring: the garden: the outbuildings

  The Gudger House

  The house is left alone

  In front of the house: its general structure

  In front of the house: the façade

  The room beneath the house

  The hallway

  Structure of four rooms

  Odors

  Bareness and space

  I. The Front Bedroom

  General

  Placement of furniture

  The furniture

  The altar

  The tabernacle

  II. The Rear Bedroom

  General

  The fireplace

  The mantel

  The closet

  The beds

  III. The Kitchen

  General

  The table: the lamp

  IV. The Storeroom

  Two essentials

  In the room

  In the front bedroom: the Signal

  The return

  The Woods’ House

  The Ricketts’ House

  Notes

  Beauty

  Relations and averages

  Further comments on relations and averages

  Age

  General habitability

  Sanitation and lighting

  Recessional and Vortex

  Shelter

  A home in its fields

  George Gudger has of Chester Boles a little over twenty acres of open farm land, a few more acres of woods and of hillside ravines, a house, a barn, a smokehouse, a henroost, a garden, and a spring, all suspended and emplaced in solitude out at the end of a mile of dwindled branch road, and not within sight nor within a half-mile’s walk of any other inhabited house. A little of his land is on the flat crest of the hill; the rest is broken into large patches among ravines and woods along the falling shapes of the hill and into little patches along the road that leads him out. The house and outbuildings, the garden and the spring, stand about midway in the main pieces of this land, and about halfway down the hill.

  The top three acres are a long flat rectangle of keenly red clay and are planted in cotton. Between the edge of the hill and his barnyard there is nothing planted, only wild weeds and briars on a scrubbed-looking set of rounded and trenched surfaces, and a narrow path slid winding among them, but from this edge, standing at the edge of the cotton, you see the house and barnyard, resembling a large museum model or an establishment for large dolls, set at the middle of the slope, back-to-you, facing due west, and the two large fields in front of it and on its left which make up most of the rest of the farm, the whole bound in by a bluff horizon of trees. Now and then a faint windy noise of speed or a noise of grinding, sweeping a western crescent beyond the trees and through one thin sector of trees, for two seconds, the uncertain glimpse of a gliding bulk: and these are the thinly spaced sedans and trucks which use a minor artery between two county seats profoundly distant to a walking man.

  One of these fields begins very deep behind the house on its left, and along its left flank the cotton plants nearly touch the wall; it is nearly all in cotton. Back beyond it and beneath it, in a clearing in the tall woods, is a smaller patch of corn. The field that falls away two hundred yards in front of the house is all in adolescent corn, softly flashing, ending at tall forest whose leaves run like quicksilver wheat in the lesions of heated air. Out at the right of the house is the rough stretch of mid-hill, partly bare, fluted with rain, not planted, sprung with tall weeds and smoky grasses and with berry briars, young pines and little runs and islands of young trees, seeming open, yet merged before long in a solid coastline of well-grown woods. Out along the road that, beginning just below the house, leads out to the right and north, there are further small floors and slivers of farm land, all but one less than an acre, and lying much within the moistures of trees during several hours of the day, in cotton, in corn, in sorghum cane, in peanuts, in watermelons, and in sweet potatoes. Some of this land of Gudger’s is sandy clay, dullorange to a dead sort of yellow; some is dark sand; a little is loam. He has in all about eleven acres in cotton, nine in corn, a quarter in sorghum cane, about half an acre divided among the melons, peanuts, and potatoes, and there are field peas planted in the corn rows.

  These fields are workrooms, or fragrant but mainly sterile work-floors without walls and with a roof of uncontrollable chance, fear, rumination, and propitiative prayer, and are as the spread and broken petals of a flower whose bisexual center is the house.

  Or the farm is also as a water spider whose feet print but do not break the gliding water membrane: it is thus delicately and briefly that, in its fields and structures, it sustains its entity upon the blind breadth and steady heave of nature.

  Or it is the wrung breast of one human family’s need and of an owner’s taking, yielding blood and serum in its thin blue milk, and the house, the concentration of living and taking, is the cracked nipple: and of such breasts, the planet is thickly and desperately paved as the enfabled front of a goddess of east india.

  The fields are organic of the whole, and of their own nature, and of the work that is poured into them: the spring, the garden, the outbuildings, are organic to the house itself.

  The spring

  The garden

  The outbuildings

  The spring is out to the rear of the house and above it, about a hundred and fifty yards away to the right, not a short distance to walk for every drop of water that is needed. The path lifts from the end of the back hall between the henroost and the smokehouse to just below the barn, swings left here, parts from the hill path, and runs narrowly, but slick as a scalp, among thick weeds under sunlight and toward trees whose greenbrown gloom and coolness is sudden and whose silence, different from that of the open light, seems to be conscious and to await the repetition of a signal. Not five feet deeper, a delicate yet powerful odor of wetness in constant shade, a broad windless standing-forth of a new coolness as from a refrigerator door, and a diminutive wrinkling noise of water: and ten feet deep within the roof of leaves, low, on the upward right, the spring, the dirt all round dark and strong-rooted and fragrant, tamped smooth as soap with bare feet, and a mottled piece of plank to kneel to water on. The water stands forward from between rounded strata of submerged dark stone as from between lips or rollers, in a look not of motion yet of quiet compulsion, into a basin a foot deep floored with dead oakleaves and shored up with slimy wood. On a submerged shelf small crocks of butter, cream, and milk stand sunken to their eyes, tied over with pieces of saturated floursack. A sapling next the spring has been chopped short to make a stob, and on it hangs a coffee can rusted black and split at the edges. The spring is not cowled so deeply under the hill that the water is brilliant and nervy, seeming to break in the mouth like crystals, as spring water can: it is about the temper of faucet water, and tastes slack and faintly sad, and as if just short of stale. It is not quite tepid, however, and it does not seem to taste of sweat and sickness, as the water does which the Woods family have to use.

  Ten feet below, in a little alcove cleared at t
he edge of the woods, the water lets out through a rusted pipe and rambles loose. There is a brute oak bench here for washtubs,* and burnt stones are squared round the bright ashes of wood fires, and, next these stones, is one of those very heavy and handsome black iron kettles in which people one remove more primitive still make their own soap.

  So, at the end of a slim liana of dry path running out of the heart of the house, a small wet flower suspended: the spring.

  The garden plot is close on the right rear of the house. It is about the shape and about two thirds the size of a tennis court, and is caught within palings against the hunger and damage of animals. These palings are thin slats of split pine about three and a half feet tall and an inch and a half wide, wired together vertically, about their width apart from each other. The erratic grain and cleavage of this pine have given each of them a different welter and rippling streaming of surface and pattern structure; the weather has made this all as it were a muted silver and silk, exquisitely sensitive to light; and these slats closely approximate yet seldom perfect their perpendiculars; so that when the sun is on them, and with the segments of garden between each of them, there is here such a virtuosity as might be watched by speechless days on end merely for the variety and distinction of their beauty, without thought or any relevant room for thinking, and without possibility of absorbing all that is there to be seen. Outside, the frowsy weeds stand halfway up these walls: inside, the planting is concentrated to the utmost possible, in green and pink-veined wax and velvet butter beans, and in rank tomatoes, hung low, burst against the ground, in hairy buds of okra, all these sprung heavy with weeds and smothered in textured shades of their leaves, blown like nearly exploding balloons in the full spread of the summer, each in its shape and nature, so that the whole of this space is one blowsy bristling pool and splendor of worm- and insect-embroidered plants and the savage odors of their special lusts that sting the face in gathering, nuzzling the paling as the bars of a zoo: waist-deep to wade in, so twined and spired and reached among each other that the paths between rows are discernible only like steps confounded in snow: a paling gate, nearest the kitchen, is bound shut against their bursting with a piece of wire.

  Behind the house the dirt is blond and bare, except a little fledging of grass-leaves at the roots of structures, and walked-out rags of grass thickening along the sides. It lifts up gently, perhaps five feet in twenty yards: across the top line of this twenty yards is the barn, set a few feet to the right of center of the rear of the house. Half between the barn and house, symmetrical to the axis of the house, the henroost and the smokehouse face each other across a bare space of perhaps twelve feet of dirt.

  These, like the house, are all made of unpainted pine. In some of this wood, the grain is broad and distinct: in some of it the grain has almost disappeared, and the wood has a texture and look like that of weathered bone.

  The henroost is about seven feet square and five high, roofed with rotted shingles. It is built rather at random of planks varying in width between a foot and four inches, nailed on horizontally with narrow spaces between their edges. On the uphill side a short pole leans against the roof with chips and sticks nailed along it for steps and a box nailed at the top with straw in it; but most of the eggs are found by the children in places which are of the hens’ own selection and return. Inside the roost, three or four sections of saplings, so arranged that the hens will not dirty each other; these poles rubbed smooth by their feet; the strong slits of light between the boards; the odor of closured and heated wood; and the nearly unbearably fetid odor of the feathers and excretions of the hens.

  The smokehouse is about eight feet square and about seven tall to the peak of the roof. It is built of vertical boards of uniform width. The door is flush to the wall without a frame and is held shut by a wood button. On the uphill side, at center of the wall and flat to it, hangs a nearly new washtub, the concentrics on its bottom circle like a target Its galvanized material is brilliant and dryly eating in the sun; the wood of the wall itself is not much less brilliant. The natural usage of a smokehouse is to smoke and store meat but meat is not smoked here: this is a storage house. Mainly, there are a couple of dozen tin cans here, of many differing sizes and former uses, now holding sorghum; four hoes; a set of sweeps; a broken plow-frame; pieces of an ice-cream freezer; a can of rusty nails; a number of mule shoes; the strap of a white slipper; a pair of greenly eaten, crumpled workshoes, the uppers broken away, the soles worn broadly through, still carrying the odor of feet; a blue coil of soft iron wire; a few yards of rusted barbed wire; a rotted mulecollar; pieces of wire at random:* all those same broken creatures of the Ricketts’ porch, of uselessness and of almost endless saving.

  It should hardly be called a ‘barn,’ it is too thin an excuse for one: a long low shed divided into three chambers, a wired-in yard, a hog wallow and the hog’s dirty little house. One room is made of thick and thin logs, partly stopped with clay, and this is the stall for the mule when he is there: the rest is pine boards. The next partition is for the cow. In one corner of the small wired yard which squares off this part of the barn, in somewhat trampled and dunged earth, is the hogpen, made of logs; beyond that, a room used, in turn, as a corncrib and as a storage house for cotton prior to ginning. There is no hayloft. The whole structure is about twenty feet long and not more than seven high and seven or eight deep. The floor, except of the corncrib, is earth.

  Here I must say, a little anyhow: what I can hardly hope to bear out in the record: that a house of simple people which stands empty and silent in the vast Southern country morning sunlight, and everything which on this morning in eternal space it by chance contains, all thus left open and defenseless to a reverent and cold-laboring spy, shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence, as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, far less impart to another: that there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishings on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: that this square home, as it stands in unshadowed earth between the winding years of heaven, is, not to me but of itself, one among the serene and final, uncapturable beauties of existence: that this beauty is made between hurt but invincible nature and the plainest cruelties and needs of human existence in this uncured time, and is inextricable among these, and as impossible without them as a saint born in paradise.

  But I say these things only because I am reluctant to entirely he. I can have nothing more to do with them now. I am hoping here only to tell a little, only so well as I may, about an ordinary* house, in which I lived a little while, and which is the home, for the time being, of the Gudger family, and is the sort of home a tenant family lives in, furnished and decorated as they furnish and decorate. Since it is so entirely static a subject, it may be slow going. That is as it may be.

  The Gudger House

  The house is left alone

  Slowly they diminished along the hill path, she, and her daughter, and her three sons, in leisured enfilade beneath the light. The mother first, her daughter next behind, her eldest son, her straggler, whimpering; their bare feet pressed out of the hot earth gentle explosions of gold. She carried her youngest child, his knees locked simian across her, his light hands at her neck, and his erected head, hooded with night, next hers, swiveled mildly upon the world’s globe, a periscope. The dog, a convoy, plaited his wanderings round them through the briars. She wore the flowerlike beauty of the sunbonnet in which she is ashamed to appear before us. At length, well up the hill, their talking shrank and became inaudible, and at that point will give safe warning on the hill of their return. Their slanted bodies slowly straightened, one by one, along the brim, and turned into the east, a slow frieze, and sank beneath the brim in order of their height, masts foundered in a horizon; the dog, each of the walking children, at length; at last, the guileless cobra gloatings of the baby, the mother’s tall, flared head.

  They are gone.


  No one is at home, in all this house, in all this land. It is a long while before their return. I shall move as they would trust me not to, and as I could not, were they here. I shall touch nothing but as I would touch the most delicate wounds, the most dedicated objects.

  The silence of the brightness of this middle morning is increased upon me moment by moment and upon this house, and upon this house the whole of heaven is drawn into one lens; and this house itself, in each of its objects, it, too, is one lens.

  I am being made witness to matters no human being may see.

  There is a cold beating at my solar plexus. I move in exceeding slowness and silence that I shall not dishonor nor awaken this house: and in every instant of silence, it becomes more entirely perfected upon itself under the sun. I take warmed water from the bucket, without sound, and it brings the sweat out sharply and I wipe it away, remembering in shame his labor, George, at this instant, hard, in the strenuous heat, and upon the tanned surface of this continent, this awful field where cotton is made, infinitesimal, the antlike glistening of the sweated labors of nine million. I remember how in hot early puberty, realizing myself left alone the whole of a cavernous and gloomed afternoon in my grandfather’s large unsentineled home, I would be taken at the pit of the stomach with a most bitter, criminal gliding and cold serpent restiveness, and would wander from vacant room to vacant room examining into every secrecy from fungoid underearth to rarehot roof and from the roof would gaze in anguish and contempt upon the fronded suffocations of the midsummer city; trying to read; trying to play the piano; ravening upon volumes of soft-painted nudes; staring hungrily and hatefully into mirrors; rifling drawers, closets, boxes, for the mere touch at the lips and odor of fabrics, pelts, jewels, switches of hair; smoking cigars, sucking at hidden liquors; reading the piteous enthusiasms of ribboned letters stored in attic trunks: at length I took off all my clothes, lay along the cold counterpanes of every bed, planted my obscenities in the cold hearts of every mirror in foreknowledge, what unseen words and acts lurked ambushed in those deep white seas before the innocent fixtures of a lady’s hair: I permitted nothing to escape the fingering of my senses nor the insulting of the cold reptilian fury of the terror of lone desire which was upon me: