Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  The second, this too is true of any place, yet it is most powerful where all the materials of structure are bare before one, as they are here. It is, having examined scientifically or as if by blueprint how such a house is made from the ground up, in every strictly sized part of its wood, and in every tightening nail, and with nearly every inch of this open to the eye as it is within one of these rooms, to let all these things, each in its place, and all in their relationships and in their full substances, be, at once, driven upon your consciousness, one center: and there is here such an annihilating counterpoint as might be if you could within an instant hear and be every part, from end to end, of the most vastly spun of fugues: and this first essence of one of the things a bare house is, the plain shell, in which the fates of successive families shall live as they may, can best be realized in this dark room in front of the kitchen, for it is scarcely used, and is never opened to the open daylight, and is nearly empty, and there reside there mainly the mere walls, and floor, and roof, facing one another and one center as pine mirrors.

  But of this room I can only make these suggestions, and can tell very little about it, of another kind.

  In the room

  The way in is by the kitchen door. The hall door and the shutters are nailed shut. Because it is so constantly closed, the heat and darkness and wood odor are different here from elsewhere in the house; and because it is so little used the silence is so powerfully impacted and compounded upon itself that it is almost a solid block, stretching the walls apart. What light there is comes in by the gap above the hall, and by the eaves, and through the many imperfections of the walls and roof, splintering on the floor. There is an odor of sackcloth and a dry odor of storage and of a vault or tomb. Along the north wall there are long shelves with jars on them. From a nail by the kitchen door hang four or five cobs of red and yellow popcorn, years old. Toward the middle of the floor are several sacks, some full, some empty. Up in the high roof a wasp cruises, stricken now and then by sunlight; at such instants he is an electric spark. There are dim smoky cobwebs on beams in corners. Excepting a path along the shelves and to the sacks, it is a floor of gentlest, rat-trailed dust, so full the grain of wood is hardly visible. Nothing else is in the room. One of the sacks is heavy, its head nodded above its belly, it is two-thirds full of cornmeal. Another is part full of dried peas. Another is light, full of unshelled peas. Several he empty. They will hold peas and meal for the winter. Out at their left are scraps of shattered leaves and twigs. They are peanut leaves, a good feed for stock. There is also a floursack nearly full of dried peaches. Along the shelves, using very little of their space, stand perhaps three dozen mason jars of which about twenty are empty, and fifteen or twenty jelly glasses, of which six or eight are being used: apple and wild beny jellies and jams, and canned peaches, tomatoes, string beans: One or two have already begun to fester. There is almost none of last winter left here now, but at this time of summer, the shelves are beginning to be banked against next winter. By cold weather, every jar here will be used, and every other that Mrs. Gudger can get.

  In the Front Bedroom: The Signal

  I lie where I lay this dawn.)

  If I were not here; and I am alien; a bodyless eye; this would never have existence in human perception.

  It has none. I do not make myself welcome here. My whole flesh; my whole being; is withdrawn upon nothingness. Not even so much am I here as, last night, in the dialogue of those two creatures of darkness. What is taking place here, and it happens daily in this silence, is intimately transacted between this home and eternal space; and consciousness has no residence in nor pertinence to it save only that, privileged by stealth to behold, we fear this legend: withdraw; bow down; nor dare the pride to seek to decipher it:

  At this certain time of late morning, then, in the full breadth of summer, here in this dark and shuttered room, through a knothole near the sharp crest of the roof, a signal or designation is made each day in silence and unheeded. A long bright rod of light takes to its end, on the left side of the mantel, one of the small vases of milky and opalescent glass; in such a way, through its throat, and touching nothing else, that from within its self this tholed phial glows its whole shape on the obscurity, a sober grail, or divinity local to this home; and no one watches it, this archaic form, and alabastrine pearl, and captured paring of the phosphor moon, in what inhuman piety and silent fear it shows: and after a half minute it is faded and is changed, and is only a vase with light on it, companion of a never-lighted twin, and they stand in wide balance on the narrow shelf; and now the light has entirely left it, and oblates its roundness on the keen thumbprint of pine wall beside it, and this, slowly, slides, in the torsion of the engined firmament, while the round rind of the planet runs in its modulations like a sea, and along faint Oregon like jackstrewn matches, the roosters startling flame from one another, the darkness is lifted, a steel shade from a storefront.

  Here also, his noise a long drawn nerve behind him, the violin wasp returns to his house in the angle of the roof, is silent a half minute, and streams out again beneath eaves upon broad light.

  But he: he is not unwelcome here: he is a builder; a tenant. He does not notice; he is no reader of signs.

  The return

  But now on that hill whose mass is hung as a wave behind us I hear her voice and the voices of her children, and in knowledge of those hidden places I have opened, those griefs, beauties, those garments whom I took out, held to my lips, took odor of, and folded and restored so orderly, so reverently as cerements, or priest the blessEd cloths, I receive a strong shock at my heart, and I move silently, and quickly.

  When at length I hear the innocence of their motions in the rear of the hall, the noise of the rude water and the dipper, I am seated on the front porch with a pencil and an open notebook, and I get up and go toward them.

  In some bewilderment, they yet love me, and L, how dearly, them; and trust me, despite hurt and mystery, deep beyond making of such a word as trust.

  It is not going to be easy to look into their eyes.

  On the Woods’ and Ricketts’ houses I must be much more brief. Do not, through the relative brevity, presume that they are more sparsely furnished, or that they seem to me of less significance, than the Gudgers’ house.

  The Woods’ House

  The Woods’ house is set quite far back from the road as I have described. It faces south: first a short yard of tough thick grass and weeds, next its garden plot, whose palings are half down, and beyond this a long deep field of very moderately good cotton. Out at the right of the house there are a log corncrib, a small and rotted barn, and a large convulsed apple tree whose yield is small and sour. It is a three-room house: two rooms built end to end and a kitchen leaned-to the far room from the barn. The single, west room had an opening for a front door and the marks of steps which no longer exist. In front of the door into the far room, there is a porch. It is of soft pine, broken through in one place, and ragged at all the outward ends of the boards. During the afternoon a quilt is hung across nails between two of the posts to guard off the sun. There are two windows in the west room, glassed, and with thin white curtains, and three in the east room, glassed, with no curtains, and one glassed window about eighteen inches square in the kitchen, whose main light and ventilation comes through two opposite doors, one into the yard, the other into the front room. The west room is a bedroom, about ten by twelve feet, empty of floor furniture except for a small tin trunk, a broken hickory-bottom chair, and a three-quarter bed of florid iron spread with a mainly white quilt of uncommonly talented pattern.* On the wall beyond this bed hangs a blunt officer’s sword in a rusted scabbard; it was used by an ancestor of Mrs. Woods. Next the door there is a mirror in an early to middle nineteenth century frame of pressed and rusty tin: stars, and an eagle grasping crossed thunder javelins. Along the back wall from nails hang overalls, shirts, and a dirty dress, and a clean dress on a wire hanger.

  The east room, about ten feet square, is
the combined bedroom and sitting-room. The iron bed is so weak in its joints that Woods has nailed it into the wall. It is unmade and is flung over with a wrecked quilt nearly dead-gray with dirt, the dark, crudded cotton leaking from its wounds. Though none of the outside of the house has ever been touched, the walls of this room and of the kitchen have been whitewashed and between the resinous streakings of the grain, the wash still thinly shows. There is an iron ice-cream chair here with a homemade seat of fresh bright pine: and on one table, next the lamp, a pot of paper flowers stemmed with still bright tin; and above this, on the wall, ‘Just a Prayer at Twilight,’ and on the rear wall, a photograph with caption, cut from some inexplicable magazine, of Barbara Drake, aged three, and of John B. Drake III, aged perhaps six, of Chicago, who has already perfected the poisonous expression which in due time will serve him so well in his social-financial-sexual career. The caption is The Little Drakes,’ and they sit beside water.

  The kitchen, eight feet square, contains chiefly a small and heroic wood stove which has already served the lifetime of one family and is well into another. It falls a little further beyond adequate repairing, however, each time they move, and Woods is sure that the rigors of one more moving will end its usefulness for good. In the opposite side of the kitchen is a small bare table from which they eat; and on the walls, what you may see in one of the photographs.

  The Woods’ spring

  Out behind, ten feet or so of scarred red yard, then the dirt is sharply bent and goes steeply down sixty feet to a near-level: and a little out beyond the lower edge of this bank, a small warm spring, guarded in wooden walls. The bank is steep enough that much of it must be climbed on the hands and knees: but that is necessary only when the device for getting water breaks down. This device, which stands close at the edge of the yard, is called a lazyboy. It consists in a windlass, a rope, a bucket, and a heavy rock. The bucket, which is battered nearly shapeless, is let fall rapidly, for the fun of it; the stone ballast insures that it will strike the water right and fill itself. The rope is sectioned together of pieces of sheeting, small rope, and clothesline, and is frayed in several places to parts of a single strand and is knotted and reknotted where it has broken almost in every foot: the windlass is so insecurely mounted that on the uphill winding it is necessary to guard it against collapse with one hand while you wind with the other: and even so, a third to half the water is sloshed out by the time the bucket comes within reach. Sometimes it will go without much trouble as long as two or three days on end; then, as if it had taken it into its head to be contrary, the rope slips its pulley at the far end, or the crank slips loose under the guarding hand, or the rope breaks in mid-climb, and the whole bucket goes banging to hell and has to be gone down after, as many as one trip in any two.

  This water, as I have said, is warm and has an ugly, feathery, sickening taste; they believe it is full of fever. And they strongly attribute this sickness of the water to the fact that the spring is also used by a family of negroes who live beneath them in the hollow. For this reason Pearl will hide in watch at the top of her bank and, when the negro children appear (they always come as a pair; they’re afraid to come alone), or even the father and mother, pelts down rocks at them which she has collected, and chunks of wood. And in retaliation, the children have a few times had the courage to slip the rope from its pulley, or once, even, to stand there and empty the bucket three times in a row before, coming to their senses, they stopped laughing and ran as hard as they could go into the woods below. But mainly they know better than to fight back, and try simply to come for their water at times of day when they will be least expected.

  The Ricketts’ House

  The Gudgers’ and Woods’ houses are solidly of the tenant type and were that when they were new and first built The Ricketts, living in sight of Woods a few hundred yards further up the road, occupy an entirely different sort of place: that is, a house which was originally the property of the man who lived in it, a small-farmer, not a tenant, and designed and constructed in the order of his class. Whereas, for instance, their houses are of the simplest kind of expanded crate construction imaginable, and are low in proportion to their ground space, and are made of knotty lumber which has never been painted or even whitewashed, this Ricketts home is built as an ordinary lower-middle-class frame house is, and simulates both solidity to the earth and the height and bulk of a second floor which it lacks, and the exterior wood is still rubbed with the last dust and scalings of a dull yellow paint with chocolate trim. Moreover, and again as they are not, it is overhung by two strong large shade trees, and there is a flowering bush in the rubbed, bare, and large though shapeless yard; the barn, though it is now shattered into the look of makeshift and weathered white silver, is barn-size, with actual stalls and a hayloft; and beyond the far side of the house there is a wide pit of rocks and rotted planks surrounding a narrower shaft,...at the bottom of this shaft, the scummed and sullen glitter of a former well, and behind the house another pit and other rotted planks and a sudden violent spume of weeds where there was once a privy: in fact, a very different and at first glance more prosperous type of establishment; but this man, whoever he may have been, evidently lost his house and land, however much he may have cared for and tried to keep it, and probably by foreclosure, and in all probability to the Margraves brothers, who now own it, and who drew most of their twenty-six hundred acres from beneath the feet of just such families and by just such careful observation of the letter of the law: and this regardless of the fact that it was from just such a family of small-farmers that they themselves came: so now the house and land are let to tenants; and for four years the tenants have been Fred Ricketts and his family.

  The long side lies along the road. First the side porch and kitchen; next the bedroom, connected with the kitchen by a windowless hall bedroom just wide and long enough to hold a three-quarter bed and still allow passage: this bedroom is the front of the house, which is at right angles to the road. All across the front of it is a wide porch, the roof so deep and overhanging that little light can get in by the window on this side: beyond this porch another large square room built in a unit to itself; and between this and the main house, the porch is extended fifteen feet or so back along the side of the house, where in the last five feet its rotted boards are broken beneath a broken roof, and above a shallow and evil-smelling pit which was once a basement; and beyond this, an open stretch of high weeds, and the garden palings, and forward and swept wide on the left, a large field of cotton which joins the Woods’ land; and living here, a man and his wife and seven of the fifteen children they have brought into existence.

  The front porch is the social and resting place and is kept nearly clear of junk. The floor gives very noticeably, with sounds of warning, under the legs or rockers of any chair an adult weight sits in, and is caved in in a number of places; yet in general it is still safe, and the unsteady hickory-bottom and the kitchen rocker, its broken seat stopped with a cushion, which are not needed at the kitchen table, are always there, along with Clair Bell’s infant-size chair.

  The side porch along the kitchen is utilitarian: it is littered and in one corner stacked high with lard tins, muleshoes, broken pieces of machinery and tools, all such things as cannot properly be called junk because they are here in the idea that a use will be found for them; and the washstand and cistern are also here. The wash basin is an old and dented hub-cap of the wide disk kind, and there is no soap because it is foolish to waste money that can be eaten with on soap when any fool knows there is nothing cleaner than water. The drinking and cooking water is caught off the roof and routed through crumpled gutterpipes into storage beneath the porch. How sound the walls of this cistern are seems to me of possible importance, ‘esthetically’ at least, because the wide hole in the hall porch above the former basement, about fifteen feet away, is used for nocturnal convenience. Because this cistern water must be used as sparingly as possible even for drinking and cooking if they are to avoid using the fever
-water the Woods have to use, and even so is usually exhausted during the hot part of the summer, the laundry is always done at the Woods’ spring, a third of a mile and a steep hill away: and because of this, and because, too, degrees of dirt and the bearable or proper are in a sense so highly relative and social in conception, the laundry is almost never done, and beyond their faces and hands the people, and their clothing and bedding, and their pans and dishes, and their house, are generally by standards other than their own insanely or completely dirty, or almost beyond possibility of being dirtier, short of a deliberated or cult-like acquisition of dirtiness.

  Here again as at the Gudgers’ there are four rooms; but here again that does not mean what it appears to. The room built independent of the house, though it is quite large, and is the best lighted part of the house, is not used to live in. Several of the windowpanes are broken out and though some of these are stopped with rags and with squares of cardboard, that is not enough: for the whole rear wall of the fireplace is burst through, letting in a large hole of daylight, and the stone chimney has fallen in on itself; and so this room is of no use for living, and there is no furniture in it, but only the odor of apples and the nearly fainting munificent odor of warm muskmelons, in their time, or during picking season the terrible ether odor of hot stored cotton. At the center of the stone chimney, between two windows, and in line above the stove-in tunnel of bright gasping country, hang a hat and a sign. The hat is round, and is homemade of brilliant cornshucks. The sign is made on the smooth side of a rectangle of corrugated cardboard, in blue crayon, part in print and part in a lopside running hand, and reads: