by Walker Evans
The bed, between the hall door and the front wall, in the angle of the two walls, the head toward the wall, about six inches out from each wall, the foot at the window.
On the other side of the hall door, at center between this door and the angle of the partition wall, a ‘settee.’
Directly before the fireplace, but not touching it, a small table. Above the fireplace, a mantel.
Again out from the walls, symmetrically across the right angle made by the partition wall and the side wall, its tall mirror erect above it, a bureau.
Exactly beneath the window of the side wall, again a little out from the wall, a trunk:
Exactly across the angle of the side and front walls, and still again, not touching these walls, a sewing machine.
Exactly at center behind and beneath the sewing machine, on the floor, a square-based and square-bowled lamp of clear heavy glass, dusty, and without its chimney, the base broken and the broken piece fitted but not mended into place:
Exactly beneath the center of the table, on a shelf just above the floor, their toes pointed parallel into the center of the fireplace, a large and still nearly new pair of men’s black sunday oxfords, the heels clayed and the shining black upward heels narrowly streaked with clay of the color of angry gold.
On the bureau shelf, the mantel, the table and one wall, objects; small, simple and varied: which, the only adorned or decorated creatures of this room, bestow upon its nakedness the quality of an altar.
The furniture
The dark castiron treadle of the sewing machine spells out squarely, in the middle of its curlings, the word CONQUEST. This is repeated in gold on the split wooden hood, but most of the gold has been rubbed off.
The ‘settee’: rather fancily bent out of thin canes; loud and broken; too uncomfortable to make much use of. The seat is badly broken through. A thin homemade cushion, stuffed with raw cotton; the slip is the frailest and cheapest kind of cotton cloth, dirty white, splotched with wide pink roses.
It is a small, elderly, once gay, now sober, and very pretty trunk, the lid shallowly domed, somewhat tall and narrow, and thus bearing itself in a kind of severe innocence as certain frame houses and archaic automobiles do. It is surfaced with tin which was once colored bright red and bright blue, and this tin, now almost entirely gone brown, is stamped in a thick complex of daisies and studded with small round-headed once golden nails; and the body of the trunk is bound with wood and with two recently nailed ribbons of bluish iron. The leather handles are gray-green and half-rotted, the hinges are loose, the lock is wrenched. Opening this light trunk, a fragrance springs from it as if of stale cinnamon and fever powders and its inward casket is unexpectedly bright as if it were a box of tamed sunlight, in its lining of torn white paper streaked with brown, fresh yellow wood grained through the torn places, the bright white lining printed with large and bright mauve centerless daisies. In this trunk: an old slightly soiled cotton slip; a little boy’s stiff cheap gray cap; a baby’s dress; a gray-white knit shoe for a baby; a pair of ten-cent hard thin mercerized bold-patterned electric-blue socks, worn through at the heels, with a strip of green checked gingham tied through the top of one, for a garter, and a strip of pink gingham through the other. In one corner of the floor of the trunk, staring blue with black centers, waxed to the ends of a wire wishbone whose juncture is a light lead weight, the eyes of a small doll.
The bed-frame is not tall or at all ornate, as many iron frames are. Its former surface of hard white paint is worn almost entirely away to the bare, blue-brown iron. It is a three-quarter bed, which means a double bed so far as tenant usage is concerned. Because it is the guest and parlor bed, and little used, it is covered with a thin, brittle, magenta spread of chemical silk.
The bureau was at some time a definitely middle-class* piece of furniture. It is quite wide and very heavy, veneered in gloomy red rich-grained woods, with intricately pierced metal plaques at the handles of the three drawers, and the mirror is at least three feet tall and is framed in machine-carved wood. The veneer has now split and leafed loose in many places from the yellow soft-wood base; the handles of the three drawers are nearly all deranged and two are gone; the drawers do not pull in and out at all easily. The mirror is so far corrupted that it is rashed with gray, iridescent in parts, and in all its reflections a deeply sad thin zinc-to-platinum, giving to its framings an almost incalculably ancient, sweet, frail, and piteous beauty, such as may be seen in tintypes of family groups among studio furnishings or heard in nearly exhausted jazz records made by very young, insane, devout men who were soon to destroy themselves, in New Orleans, in the early nineteen twenties. The surface of this bureau is covered with an aged, pebble-grained face towel, too good a fabric to be used in this house for the purposes it was made for. Upon this towel rest these objects: An old black comb, smelling of fungus and dead rubber, nearly all the teeth gone. A white clamshell with brown dust in the bottom and a small white button on it A small pincushion made of pink imitation silk with the bodiced torso of a henna-wigged china doll sprouting from it, her face and one hand broken off. A cream-colored brown-shaded china rabbit three or four inches tall, with bluish lights in the china, one ear laid awry: he is broken through the back and the pieces have been fitted together to hang, not glued, in delicate balance. A small seated china bull bitch and her litter of three smaller china pups, seated round her in an equilateral triangle, their eyes intersected on her: they were given to Louise last Christmas and are with one exception her most cherished piece of property. A heavy moist brown Bible, its leaves almost weak as snow, whose cold, obscene, and inexplicable fragrance I found in my first night in this house.
I shall not fully list the contents of the bureau drawers. They contain, among other things, schoolbooks; and in one drawer there are a number of pieces of wrapping paper, each folded separately and very carefully to make no more new creases than is necessary. Some of this paper is dark blue with large gold bells and stars and small gold houses on it Some is red and green holly on a white ground. Some is plain red or white or green or blue tissue. One is plain brown wrapping paper but has glued to it several seals of santaclaus and of scotch terriers and of bells in holly garlands. These papers are now torn in a number of places, rather somber and faded, and are intricately seamed and ridged over all their surfaces with years of wrapping and unfolding. They smell stale and old. There are also red, frayed gold and silver strings here, wound some on spools, some on matches or nails.
And, centered one upon another and at center of their square-spread partition wall, all squarely opposite the square window, the table and the fireplace and the mantel which, with the wall, create a shrine and altar:
The altar
The three other walls are straight and angled beams and the inward surfaces of unplaned pine weatherboards. This partition wall is made of horizontals of narrow and cleanly planed wood, laid tightly edge to edge; the wood is pine of another quality, slenderly grained in narrow yellow and rich iron-red golds, very smooth and as if polished, softly glowing and shining, almost mirroring bulks: and is the one wall of the room at all conducive to ornament, and is the one ornamented wall. At its center the mantel and square fireplace frame, painted, one coat, an old and thin blue-white: in front of the fireplace, not much more than covering the full width of its frame, the small table: and through, beneath it, the gray, swept yet ashy bricks of the fireplace and short hearth, and the silent shoes: and on the table, and on the mantel, and spread above and wide of it on the walls, the things of which I will now tell.
On the table: it is blue auto paint: a white cloth, hanging a little over the edges. On the cloth, at center, a small fluted green glass bowl in which sits a white china swan, profiled upon the north.
On the mantel against the glowing wall, each about six inches from the ends of the shelf, two small twin vases, very simply blown, of pebble-grained iridescent glass. Exactly at center between them, a fluted saucer, with a coarse lace edge, of pressed milky glass, wh
ich Louise’s mother gave her to call her own and for which she cares more dearly than for anything else she possesses. Pinned all along the edge of this mantel, a broad fringe of white tissue pattern-paper which Mrs. Gudger folded many times on itself and scissored into pierced geometries of lace, and of which she speaks as her last effort to make this house pretty.
On the wall, pasted or pinned or tacked or printed, set well discrete from one another, in not quite perfected symmetric relations:
A small octagonal frame surfaced in ivory and black ribbons of thin wicker or of straw, the glass broken out: set in this frame, not filling it, a fading box-camera snapshot: low, gray, dead-looking land stretched back in a deep horizon; twenty yards back, one corner of a tenant house, central at the foreground, two women: Annie Mae’s sister Emma as a girl of twelve, in slippers and stockings and a Sunday dress, standing a little shyly with puzzling eyes, self-conscious of her appearance and of her softly clouded sex; and their mother, wide and high, in a Sunday dress still wet from housework, her large hands hung loose and biased in against her thighs, her bearing strong, weary, and noble, her face fainted away almost beyond distinguishing, as if in her death and by some secret touching the image itself of the fine head her husband had cared for so well had softly withered, which even while they stood there had begun its blossoming inheritance in the young daughter at her side.
A calendar, advertising—’s shoes, depicting a pretty brunette with ornate red lips, in a wide-brimmed red hat, cuddling red flowers. The tide is Cherie, and written twice, in pencil, in a schoolchild’s hand: Louise, Louise.
A calendar, advertising easy-payment furniture: a tinted photograph of an immaculate, new-overalled boy of twelve, wearing a wide new straw hat, the brim torn by the artist, fishing. The tide is Fishin’.
Slung awry by its chain from a thin nail, an open oval locket, glassed. In one face of this locket, a colored picture of Jesus, his right hand blessing, his red heart exposed in a burst spiky gold halo. In the other face, a picture by the same artist of the Blessed Virgin, in blue, her heart similarly exposed and haloed, and pierced with seven small swords.*
Torn from a child’s cheap storybook, costume pictures in bright furry colors illustrating, exactly as they would and should be illustrated, these tides:
The Harper was Happier than a King as He Sat by his Own Fireside. She Took the Little Prince in Her Arms and Kissed Him. (‘She’ is a goosegirl.)
Torn from a tin can, a strip of bright scarlet paper with a large white fish on it and the words:
SALOMAR
EXTRA QUALITY MACKEREL
At the right of the mantel, in whitewash, all its whorlings sharp, the print of a child’s hand.
The Tabernacle
In the table drawer, in this order:
A delicate insect odor of pine, closed sweated cloth, and mildew. One swooning-long festal baby’s dress of the most frail muslin, embroidered with three bands of small white cotton-thread flowers. Two narrow courses of cheap yet small-threaded lace are let in near the edge of the skirt. This garment is hand-sewn in painfully small and labored stitchings. It is folded, but not pressed, and is not quite clean.
One plain baby’s dress of white cotton; a torn rag: home-sewn, less studiously; folded.
Another, as plain, save for pink featherstitching at the cuffs. Torn, not folded.
Another, thinlined gray-blue faded checks on a white ground. The silhouettes of two faded yellow rabbits, cut out at home, are stitched on the front, the features are x’d in in pink thread.
A nearly flat blue cloth cat doll, home-made, a blue tail, nearly torn off, the features in black thread.
A broad and stiff-brimmed soft-crowned hat, the brim broken in several places, the fabrics stained and moldered. The crown is gold, of thin plush or the cheapest velvet The ribbon is wide plaid woodsilk weltering lights of orange and of pearl. It is striped white at the edges and the stripes are edged in gold thread. The brim is bordered an inch wide with gold brocade. The underbrim is creamcolored mercerized cotton, marked in one place by an indelible pencil. Through a tear the pasteboard brim is visible: it was cut out of a shoe-box. The stitching throughout is patient devoted, and diminutive. The hat is one broken, half-moist, moldered chunk.
A blue foursided tall box of Dr. Peters Rose Talcum Powder, empty save for some small hard object which rattles. The odor of the powder, a little like that of perfume-machines in theater toilets.
One smallchecked pink and white baby’s dress.
One baby’s dress, a rag. Blue featherstitching in mercerized thread.
One child’s brown cotton glove, for the right hand. The index finger ends in a hole.
A scissored hexagon of newsprint:
GHAM NEWS
hursday afternoon, March 5, 1936
Price: 3 cents
in G
(else
Thousa
are on d
througho
cording its
for the Birm
(over two photographs:)
Glass and night sticks fly in strike
(caption:)
between police and strike sympathizers now
York. A cameraman was right o
venty-second St.
(the photographs, both flashlighted night scenes:)
1. A man in civilian clothes including gloves, back to, is doing something unidentifiable to what may be an elevator door.
2. A street. TWo policemen. One is balanced in recoil from an action just accomplished. The face signifies uh-huh. The other, glasses, a masterful head, his nightstick just rebounding from the palm-clenched skull of a hatless topcoated civilian whose head is level with his hips. Flashlighted pavement, spotted with grease or blood. On the black background hands, a shirtfront, watch, poised ready to run, beneath a faint oval of hatface bisected by dark hatband.
(To the left:)
NEW STRIKE MOVE
EARED AS PEACE
NFAB SPLITS UP
fer to Arbitrate is
Down by Real
e Group
s Owners
f Parley
Labor
reat
ANY EXPANDS ARMAMEN
HASES
MPLETION
Program planned
Keep Pace with
Greater Army
(caption above small photograph:)
Veteran Chinese War
Lord Prepares For
Communist Conflict
(below:)
Marshal Yen Hsi-Suan
An impending threat of 10,000 Chinese Communists against TaiYuan, Shensi Province, China, led Marshal Yen Hsi-Suan, veteran war lord, to declare an emergency and mobilize an army to halt their approach. Twenty-six American missionaries may be in danger. (Associated Press Photo.)
SHAW CONFESSES
HE’S A ‘WASHOUT
British satirist admits he’s
a failure, since world
won’t mind him
(Above photograph:)
TINY TOT FACES
(below:)
Altho 4 months old Kenneth House, Jr.
physicians with X-rays are watching progres
which he swallowed six days ago, to date
operation will be necessary to remove it.
its mother, Mrs. Betty House, at Denver, C
National Whirligig
continued from page 1
T O U
Held against the light, the contents of both sides of the paper are visible at once.
The two parts of a broken button.
A small black hook, lying in its eye.
Another small black hook.
In the corners of the pale inward wood, fine gray dust and a sharp-grained unidentifiable brown dust.
In a split in the bottom of the drawer, a small bright needle, pointed north, as the swan above it is.
II. The Rear Bedroom
General
It is half as bright and opened-seeming (and see
ms more so) as the room we left was and remains dark: all but the window of the side wall, whose shutter is laid back flat, and which is nailed over with a square of fresh gray screening: yet after a minute it seems somewhat somber too; or thus: the floor from the window in a wide fan and all the opposite wall is clearly lighted, none of it in direct sun: but the rear wall and the corner to the right are much less lighted.
There are two beds here, both three-quarter size, set parallel, their heads near the rear wall, their sides near the two side walls. One is directly opposite this partition door, its foot frame comes just short of the kitchen door: the other is directly opposite the door of a very shallow closet built out from the partition. The fireplace, in the partition wall, faces the closed rear shutter down the bare aisle of transverse planks between them: and the two of them together almost fill their side of the room. These beds are both sheeted in tightly drawn white sheets, and at the central head of each, a hard thin white-cased pillow is slightly tilted from the mattress case. On each of these surfaces is a thin constellation of perhaps a dozen black flies. Once in a while several at once will move a sharp inch or two in straight lines, or one will suddenly spiral off and butt the windowscreen: but for minutes on end they all stand still together. Both these beds are iron. This one we face, which is George’s bed, and his wife’s, the iron is dark and smooth and the pattern is plain, a few round verticals, and taller verticals at the head: the other is of more slender, white rods, bent into balanced curves.