by Walker Evans
Above the head of this nearer bed, suspended on two forked sticks nailed to the wall, is a light-gauged shotgun.
On a nail just beside the window hangs the white summer union suit George sleeps in.
There is a trunk beneath the side window, very similar to the trunk in the front room.
The fireplace
All the frame and mantel of the fireplace and the rather dark, blank wall, to a squared-off height of perhaps five and a half feet, and some of the wall beyond the frame, are whitewashed, long enough ago that the wash is scarred with matches and the grain is strong through it, yet a very cold and fine white, the edges of the work carefully labored and inexpert. Up by the right of the fireplace, and not balanced on the other side, is a wide vertical board, creating between its structural dominance and the centrality of the fireplace a not wide yet sharp dilemma of symmetries. The whitewash, with bold and fine instinct, is applied to follow the symmetry of the wood, so that the fireplace is sprung a few inches off center within its large white framing; yet, since it still has so strong a central focus in its wall, a powerful vibration is set up between the two centers.
The mantel
On the mantel above this fireplace:
A small round cardboard box:
(on its front:)
Cashmere Bouquet Face Powder
Light Rachel
(on its back:)
The Aristocrat of Face Powders.
Same quality as 50¢ size.
Inside the box, a small puff. The bottom of the box and the bottom face of the puff carry a light dust of fragrant softly tinted powder.
A jar of menthol salve, smallest size, two thirds gone.
A small spool of number 50 white cotton thread, about half gone and half unwound.
A cracked roseflowered china shaving mug, broken along the edge. A much worn, inchwide varnish brush stands in it. Also in the mug are eleven rusty nails, one blue composition button, one pearl headed pin (imitation), three dirty kitchen matches, a lump of toilet soap.
A pink crescent celluloid comb: twenty-seven teeth, of which three are missing; sixteen imitation diamonds.
A nailfile.
A small bright mirror in a wire stand.
Hung from a nail at the side of the fireplace: a poker bent out of an auto part.
Hung from another nail, by one corner: a square pincushion. Stuck into it, several common pins, two large safety-pins, three or four pins with heads of white or colored glass; a small brooch of green glass in gilded tin; a needle trailing eighteen inches of coarse white thread.
Above the mantel, right of center, a calendar: a picture in red-brown shadows, and in red and yellow lights from a comfortable fireplace. A young darkhaired mother in a big chair by the fire: a little girl in a long white nightgown kneels between her knees with her palms together: the mother’s look is blended of doting and teaching. The tide is Just a Prayer at Twilight.
The closet
On nails on the inside of the door of the shallow closet:
A short homesewn shift of coarse white cotton, square beneath the arms and across the chest and back: a knot in the right shoulderstrap.
A baby’s dress, homemade. The top is gray denim; the collar is trimmed in pink; the skirt, in a thinner material, is small yellow-and-white checks.
A long homemade shift of coarse white cotton, same rectilinear design as above. A tincture of perspiration and of sex.
On the closet floor, to the left, a heap of overalls, dresses, shirts, bedding, etc., ready for laundering.
On a shelf above, three or four patchwork quilts of various degrees of elaborateness and inventiveness of pattern, and in various degrees of raggedness, age, discoloration, dirt absorption, and sense-of-vermin, stuffed with cotton and giving off a strong odor.
On nails along the wall, overalls, dresses, children’s clothing; the overalls holding the shape of the knee and thigh; an odor of sweated cloth.
On the floor to the right, folded one on the other, two homemade pallets for children: flat rectangular sacks of thin white cloth thinly padded with cotton.
On the floor at center, two by two, toes to the wall, a pair of women’s black slippers, run-over at the low heels. A pair of workshoes, very old, molded to the shape of the feet A pair of girl’s slippers, whited over scrubbed clay and streaked again with clay. A pair of little-boy’s high black shoes, broken at the toes and worn through the soles, the toes curled up sharply; looped straps at the heels: thick clay scrubbed off. A pair of little-girrs slightly narrower and softer high tan button shoes, similarly worn and curled, similarly scrubbed. A pair of little-boy’s high black button shoes, similarly worn, curled, and scrubbed. One infant’s brown sandal. These shoes, particularly those of the children, are somewhat gnawn, and there are rat turds on the floor.
The beds
The children’s bed in the rear room has a worn-out and rusted mesh spring; the springs of the other two beds are wire net, likewise rusty and exhausted. Aside from this and from details formerly mentioned, the beds may be described as one. There are two mattresses on each, both very thin, padded, I would judge, one with raw cotton and one with cornshucks. They smell old, stale, and moist, and are morbid with bedbugs, with fleas, and, I believe, with lice. They are homemade. The sheaths are not ticking, but rather weak unbleached cotton. Though the padding is sewn through, to secure it, it has become uncomfortably lumpy in some places, nothing but cloth in others. The sheeting is of a coarse and beautiful unbleached but nearly white cotton, home-sewn down the length of each center with a seam either ridged or drawn apart. It is cloth of a sort that takes and holds body heat rapidly, and which is humid with whatever moisture may be in the air, and the fabric is sharp against the skin. The pillows are store-bought, the cheapest obtainable: thin, hard, crackling under any motion of the head; and seem, like the mattresses, to carry vermin. The pillowcases are home-made, of the sheeting; one is a washed, soft, fifty-pound floursack. The striped ticking shows strongly through the cloth. The beds are insecure enough in their joints that motions of the body must be gentle, balanced, and to some extent thought out beforehand. The mattresses and springs are loud, each in a different way, to any motion. The springs sag so deeply that two or more, sleeping here, fall together at the middle almost as in a hammock. The sheets are drawn tight in making the bed, in part out of housework ritual, in part, I believe, in the wish to make the chronically sagged beds look level. Sometimes this succeeds. At other times the bed, neatly made though it is, looks like an unlucky cake.
Very often, Burt cannot get to sleep except in his mother’s arms. During nearly all the year, the whole family sleeps in this one room. The youngest of them never sleeps elsewhere. Even when they are in the next room, the partition is very thin. Even if there were no children, such parents are limited enough that they are deeply embarrassed and disturbed by noises coming of any sexual context and betraying it. Even if there were no noises, the bed frames are insecure, the springs sag weakly, the mattresses are thin and lumpy, the sheets are not very pleasant.
On these beds, however, and among their children, they get whatever sexual good they ever have of each other, as noiselessly and with as little movement as possible; and on these beds, after spending two thirds of their life in hard wearying work and in conscious living in every way hurtful and distortive of the ‘mind,’ ‘emotions,’ and ‘nerves,’ they spend a third of their lives getting the refreshment and rest of sleep.
III. The Kitchen
General
There is a tin roof on the kitchen. It leaks only when the rain is very heavy and then only along the juncture with the roof of the main house. The difficulty is more with heat The room is small: very little more than big enough to crowd in the stove and table and chairs: and this slanted leanto roof is quite low above it with no ceiling, and half the tin itself visible. The outdoor sunlight alone is in the high nineties during many hours of one day after another for weeks on end; the thin metal roof collects and sends on this
heat almost as powerfully as a burning-glass; wood fires are particularly hot and violent and there is scarcely a yard between the stove and one end of the table: between the natural heat, the cumulated and transacted heat striven downward from the roof, and the heat of the stove, the kitchen is such a place at the noon meal time that, merely entering it, sweat is started in a sheet from the whole surface of the body, and the solar plexus and the throat are clutched into tight kicking knots which relax sufficiently to admit food only after two or three minutes.
This is a leanto room. The forward wall is the former outside of the house. The hall door is at center of its wall; there is another door just beyond the head of the table, about four feet from the far end of the room, leading into the front room; at center of the rear wall is a window; there is another at center of the side wall. These windows are glassed, thin rippled and dimpled panes, and are in two parts, but lacking weights, are held open with stovewood. The stove stands in the corner between them, the ‘cupboard’ stands against the front wall beyond the door to the storeroom, the table along the front wall between that door and the hall, the meal bin and foot basin in the corner made between the rear and hall walls; the woodbox stands along the near side of the stove; under the stove is the dishpan; the coffee-pot and a kettle stand on it, set back; pots are hung on nails along the walls of the stove-corner; lids are stuck between the walls and a two-by-four; one of the skillets stands out nearly level; its handle is stuck through a rift between two boards of the wall and through this rift a small piece of the outdoors is visible. The broom stands in the corner at the foot of the table and above, on nails, hang the round crockery head of the churn, and the dasher. It is pleasantly bright here, with no sunshine, but an almost cool-looking, strong, calm light, of the sort that takes up residence in any piece of glass without glittering in it.
The room is a little small for comfort, and here, as is unnecessary in the other rooms, everything that can be is blocked back hard against the wall. There are no chairs on the wall side of the table, but a long and quite narrow bench, close against the wall, and the table is brought up close against it so that the children have to climb to their places with a fair amount of difficulty: and in spite of this economizing, the table juts out beyond the hall door, the chairs along that side a little more, and when everyone is seated the room is pretty nearly blocked. The chair at the foot is crowded in close, too, for there is just enough room between the hall door and the storeroom door. The stove has to be set well out from the walls of its corner, a couple of feet from each at least, and this leaves just room and no better between the stove and the corner of the table. In spite of all the open air, the kitchen smells powerfully of the cooking, for the walls are saturated with it.
The ‘cupboard,’ a carry-all for kitchen implements, china, eating-tools, and the less perishable of the chronic cooking supplies, is never known in the rural south as a cupboard, but always as a safe.* The ordinary safe is a tall, dark, flimsy wood cabinet with several shelves, with double doors faced in rusted tin pierced in ventilative patterns of geometry and of radiant flowers, and smelling stuffily yet rather sweetly of hens, butter, and fried pork and of the cheap metals of its forks. I speak of this because the Gudgers’ safe veers so wide of the ordinary as to seem comic or even surrealist in this setting, as a frigidaire might It is of bright yellow shellacked pine and the doors are white enameled metal in narrow frames, and the door-latches are not buttons shaped like jazz-bows, as in the ordinary nineteenth-century-type safe, but are bright nickel, of the sort used on refrigerators; and it is more capacious than the oldfashioned safe. There is a metal-lined bin for flour, and there are enameled and labeled cans for SUGAR, COFFEE, SALT, TEA, which look to have come with the house. It is a really good piece of furniture; and has a sort of middle-class lovenest look to it which connects it to advertisements in women’s magazines and to the recipe voices of radio women, so that it is here peculiarly insulting and pathetic; and already it has picked up tenant-kitchen redolences for which it was never intended.
The stove is of baroque rusting iron, with an oven. It is small, and low enough that it must be leaned above at a rather deep angle. A large black iron kettle stands at the back of it; on nails behind it, in its corner, a few dark pots and flat baking-pans are hung, and a heavy black skillet; the skillet is stuck by its handle through a rift in the wall and extends its round hand flat toward the center of the room.
The mealbin is a fifty-pound lard can half full. It is topped off by a sifter, homemade of windowscreen which is broken, and three trapped flies, covered with meal, brain themselves against the lower side.
The broom is of the cheap thirty-to-forty-cent kind and is nearly new, but do not be misled: the old one, still held in limbo because nothing is thrown away, was well used before it was discarded: it has about the sweeping power of a club foot.
The dasher is made deliriously mild and fragrant by milk and butter, and glows as ivory might against the raw wall.
The chairs sit in exact regiment of uneven heights with the charming sobriety of children pretending to be officers or judges.
The table: the lamp
The table is set for dinner.
The yellow and green checked oilcloth is worn thin and through at the corners and along the edges of the table and along the ridged edges of boards in the table surface, and in one or two places, where elbows have rested a great deal, it is rubbed through in a wide hole. In its intact surfaces it shines prettily and bluntly reflects the window and parts of the objects that are on it, for it has been carefully polished with a wet rag, and it shows also the tracings of this rag. Where it has rubbed through, the wood is sour and greasy, and there are bread crumbs in the seams and under the edges of the cloth, which smell of mold, and these odors are so mingled with that of the oilcloth that they are in total the classic odor of a tenant eating-table.
There are two stainless steel knives and forks with neat black handles which would have cost a dime apiece, and against what Utile we could do about it these are set at our places: but by actual usage they belong to the two parents.
Aside from these the forks and knives and spoons are of that very cheap, light, and dull metal which seems to be almost universal among working-class families, and in the more charitable and idealistic kinds of institutions, and which impart to every ounce of food they touch their peculiar taste and stench, which is a little like that of a can which has contained strong fish. The tines of nearly all the forks are bent, then rippled back into approximate order; the knives are saw-edged.
Almost no two of the plates, or cups, or glasses, or saucers, are of the same size or pattern. All of the glasses except one are different sizes and shapes of jelly glass. One of the cups is thin, blue, Woolworth’s imitation of willow plate: the handle is gone; two others are thick and white, of the sort used in lunchwagons, but of lower quality, flinty, and a little like sandstone at their brims; one of these is chipped; the fourth is a taller cup of the same sort, with a thready split running its full height. TWo of the plates are full dinner size, of the same thick lunchwagon china, another is translucent white of a size between saucer and dinnerplate; another, deep cream-colored, netted with brown cracklings, is pressed with a garland of yellow corn and green leaves. The children eat mainly out of saucers and bowls. The food will be served in part out of pans, and in part out of two wide shallow soup plates and a small thick white platter. At the middle of the table is a mason jar of sorghum, a box of black pepper, and a tall shaker of salt whose top is green, all surrounding the unlighted lamp which stands in the bare daylight in the beauty of a young nude girl.
IV. The Storeroom
Two essentials
Two essentials, I cannot hope to embody even mildly but must say only, what they are, and what they should be if they could be written: one is of the house as a whole; one may be realized in terms of any single room. The first is true of any house of more than one room. The second is the privilege only of houses such as this o
ne I am talking of.
The first is this: In any house, standing in any one room of it, or standing disembodied in remembrance of it, it is possible, by sufficient quiet and passive concentration, to realize for a little while at a time the simultaneity in existence of all of its rooms in their exact structures and mutual relationships in space and in all they contain; and to realize this not merely with the counting mind, nor with the imagination of the eye, which is no realization at all, but with the whole of the body and being, and in translations of the senses so that in part at least they become extrahuman, become a part of the nature and being of these rooms and their contents and of this house: or in a kind of building-dream, a disembodied consciousness stands in an open platform of floor, no walls nor roof: and in a fluttering of hammers and with wide quiet motions from all sides of this consciousness, at the edges of the platform there are swept up the wide cards of the wooden walls like the sped closing of the petals of flowers, and their edges join in a stitching of nails, and beginning vertical and matched against one another along the ridgepole like the closed wings of a butterfly, the great wings of the roof are spread open and sweep downward either side in darkening, to come to rest at length along the upward edges of this squared wooden pit: and where these walls are risen and clasped, their square surfaces face one another two and two and make an inward square, a chamber, and all the four rooms of this house where the Gudgers live are here at once each in its space and each in balance of each other in a chord: and it is the full bodily recognition of this chord that I speak of particularly, which can so arrest the heart: and of how all these furnishings and objects, within these rooms, are squared and enchanted as in amber.