by Walker Evans
PLEAS!
be
QUITE
and is the relic of a religious effort I will speak of later.
So the living is done in three rooms, the kitchen very spacious, perhaps fifteen feet long by twelve wide, so that in its meager and widely spaced furnishing and empty floor it seems larger than it is; and the front bedroom twelve feet square, filled up thick, mainly with two beds; and the third connecting room so small, dark, and stifled that it seems hardly honest to count it as a ‘room.’
But all these three rooms are dark, for that matter. It is partly because of the set of the windows, but it is still more that the once whitewashed walls are so dirty. They have in the course of years absorbed smoke and grease and dirt into a rich dark patine so labored into the wood that sweeping and scrubbing affect it as scarcely as if it were iron; so that even in the kitchen, where two windows are not shaded with porch or trees, but are free to the sky’s whole blaze, the brightness though powerful is restricted, fragile and chemical like that of a flash bulb, and is blunted or drowned in the iron blackness of every wall.
These faced surfaces also compel upon the room a steel-hard fragrance of their own and in this air amorphous and hairy as Spanish moss, as slab as old wet garments and corrupted meats, hang the odors of the bedding, and of the cooking, and of the people in the sweating and sleeping between whose hands their living is cradled: but this becomes bearable and generalized, indeed nearly unnoticeable, so that the odor of the eating-table, in the kitchen, is a thing in itself: for here the oilcloth is rotted away into scarcely more than a black net, and the cloth and the wood have stored up smoke and rancid grease and pork and corn and meat to a degree which extends a six-foot globe of almost uncombatable nausea thick and filming as sprayed oil.
In the front room, parallel, heads opposite the fireplace, and filling all their part of the room except the path to the door between them, are two beds not of iron but of wood. One of these beds is of simply designed and not very heavy wood; the other is of dark, heavy and ornate Victorian wood, high and florid at the head against the dark plank wall, and scarred and chopped with many years of use, and these are spread with nearly black gashed quilts, considerably further gone than are ordinarily found on dump heaps, and at the heads are pillows, some bare and some in slips, in either case the ticking or slipcloths torn and reduced to a festered gray and the urine yellow that is the stain of hair.
The Ricketts’ fireplace
The fireplace opposite these beds is broad and high, and handsome in its Greek panelings.
The Ricketts are much more actively fond of pretty things than the other families are, and have lived here longer than they have, and in obedience of these equations the fireplace wall is crusted deep with attractive pieces of paper into the intricate splendor of a wedding cake or the fan of a white peacock: calendars of snowbound and stag-hunting scenes pressed into bas-relief out of white pulp and glittering with a sand of red and blue and green and gold tinsel, and delicately tinted; other calendars and farm magazine covers or advertisements of dog-love; the blessed fireside coziness of the poor; indian virgins watching their breasts in pools or paddling up moonlit aisles of foliage; fullblown blondes in luminous frocks leaning back in swings, or taking coca-cola through straws, or beneath evening palmleaves, accepting cigarettes from young men in white monkey-coats, happy young housewives at resplendent stoves in sunloved kitchens, husbands in tuxedos showing guests an oil furnace, old ladies leaning back in rocking chairs, their hands relaxed in their needlework, their faces bemused in lamplight, happy or mischievous or dog-attended or praying little boys and girls, great rosy blue-eyed babies sucking their thumbs to the bone in clouds of pink or blue, closeups of young women bravely and purely facing the gravest problems of life in the shelter of lysol, portraits of cakes, roasts of beef, steaming turkeys, and decorated hams, little cards by duplicate and a series depicting incidents in the life of Jesus with appropriate verses beneath, rich landscapes with rapid tractors in the foreground, kittens snarled in yam, or wearing glasses, or squinting above pink or blue bows, white bulldogs in tophats wearing monocles, girls in riding-habits making love to the long heads of horses, color photographs of summer salads, goateed and ruddy colonels smiling over cups of coffee or receiving Four Roses whiskey from vicariously delighted negroes, slenderly drawn little girls, boys, adolescent girls, adolescent boys, and young matrons in new play frocks, rompers, two-part playsuits, school frocks, school suits, first-party dresses, first long suits, sports sweaters, house frocks, afternoon frocks, and beach slacks, dickensians at Christmas dinner, eighteenth-century gentlemen in a tavern, medievalists at Christmas dinner, country doctors watching beside sick children, three-quarter views of locomotives at full speed, young couples admiring newly acquired brown and brocade davenports: all such as these overlaid in complexes and textured with the names and numberings of days months years and phases of the moon and with words and phrases and names such as —’s Shoes; — Furniture, Hay, Grain and Feed, Yellow Stores, Gen’l Merchandise, Kelvinator, Compliments of, Wist ye not that I am about my Father’s Business, Mazola, Railroad Age, Maxwell House, They Satisfy, Mexico Mexico, The Pause that Refreshes, Birmingham, The Progressive Farmer, After Six, Congoleum, Farm and Fireside, Love’s Gift Divine, You Can’t Afford NOT, Soft, Lovely Hands, You Owe It to Her, You Owe It to Him, You Owe It to Them, Country Gentleman, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but for your children, and your children’s children, Energize, Save, At Last, Don’t Be a Stick-in-the-Mud, et cetera.*
The connecting room is entirely furnished and filled by an iron three-quarter bed and, on the facing wall, by clothes very thickly hung from nail-heads. The two eldest daughters sleep here; four of the younger children sleep in the simpler of the two other beds. Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts and Clair Bell sleep in the large bed. The children sleep either in short shirts or entirely naked.
The kitchen contains the table I have spoken of, surrounded by chairs and a bench; another chair stands out in the middle of the room; near the corner opposite the table is a large, very old, nearly unmanageable, and almost inconceivably foul stove, stacked with unwashed pans; and next this a broken table whose unpainted wood surface is coal black and on which the biscuit dough is made. These are the entire contents of the kitchen.
Notes
These notes, which might well be the proper device for any amount of expansion, redefinition and linkage, must be just as brief as I can make them. It will probably be necessary to make unsupported statements, and to raise problems rather than to try to answer them. Of the unsupported statements, please know that I have considered their backgrounds as scrupulously as I am able; and of the problems, that I want to ‘answer’ or at least to consider them as fully as possible in the course of time.
‘Beauty’
It is my belief that such houses as these approximate, or at times by chance achieve, an extraordinary ‘beauty.’ In part because this is ordinarily neglected or even misrepresented in favor of their shortcomings as shelters; and in part because their esthetic success seems to me even more important than their functional failure; and finally out of the uncontrollable effort to be faithful to my personal predilections, I have neglected function in favor of esthetics. I will try after a little to rectify this (not by denial); but at present, a few more remarks on the ‘beauty’ itself, and on the moral problems involved in evaluating it.
The houses are built in the ‘stinginess,’ carelessness, and traditions of an unpersonal agency; they are of the order of ‘company’ houses. They are furnished, decorated and used in the starved needs, traditions and naiveties of profoundly simple individuals. Thus there are conveyed here two kinds of classicism, essentially different yet related and beautifully euphonious. These classicisms are created of economic need, of local availability, and of local-primitive tradition: and in their purity they are the exclusive property and privilege of the people at the bottom of that world. To those who own and create it this ‘beauty’
is, however, irrelevant and undiscernible. It is best discernible to those who by economic advantages of training have only a shameful and thief’s right to it: and it might be said that they have any ‘rights’ whatever only in proportion as they recognize the ugliness and disgrace implicit in their privilege of perception. The usual solution, non-perception, or apologetic perception, or contempt for those who perceive and value it, seems to me at least unwise. In fact it seems to me necessary to insist that the beauty of a house, inextricably shaped as it is in an economic and human abomination, is at least as important a part of the fact as the abomination itself: but that one is qualified to insist on this only in proportion as one faces the brunt of his own ‘sin’ in so doing and the brunt of the meanings, against human beings, of the abomination itself.
But consider this merely as a question raised: for I am in pain and uncertainty as to the answers, and can write no more of it here.*
Another question comes up, of course: are things ‘beautiful’ which are not intended as such, but which are created in convergences of chance, need, innocence or ignorance, and for entirely irrelevant purposes? I can only answer flatly here: first, that intended beauty is far more a matter of chance and need than the power of intention, and that ‘chance’ beauty of ‘irrelevances’ is deeply formed by instincts and needs popularly held to be the property of ‘art’ alone: second, that matters of ‘chance’ and ‘nonintention’ can be and are ‘beautiful’ and are a whole universe to themselves. Or: the Beethoven piano concerto #4 IS importantly, among other things, a ‘blind’ work of ‘nature,’ of the world and of the human race; and the partition wall of the Gudgers’ front bedroom IS importantly, among other things, a great tragic poem.
Relations and averages
Briefly again, I want to relate these houses to ‘the tenant average’ (or averages), so far as I know it, and to other relevant southern houses.
By location or setting in the land, the Gudgers’ house is far false to the average: the land is much too uneven, the house is too remote, the cultivated land of one farm is closely walled in by thick woods. By all this appearance it better suggests a frontier house in 1800 in newly cleared country, or a ‘mountaineer’s’ home, than a tenant’s.
The Woods’ and Ricketts’ setting is better. A lonely two miles of low hill road, among a dozen used and three or four abandoned houses, it meets very well one important ‘average’: that of the inhabitants of the little back roads in the rarely traveled, deeply populated and huge country which lies between the inconceivably narrow horizons of the highways. Yet I must emphatically mention that by still another and perhaps more common ‘average,’ tenants live in nearly flat and much less timbered country, enough houses in sight of one another to give a sense of a world: so that there is, in a two-mile horizon, or the fledging of a lonely road, the ‘feeling’ of seeing a large yet little part of an enormously populated yet as enormously attenuated one-trade and monotone city: i.e. a city of nine million, stretched thin against a cottonfield which in turn is drawn over earth three hundred miles one way and sixteen hundred the other.
Again, in certain respects of outward frame and appearance, none of these houses meets an average.
The ‘averages’ might briefly be described thus:
The one-room shack is of vertical planks, a door at center front and center rear, square shuttered glassless windows, a chimney of clay and sticks; the house is, save for the roof, an almost perfect cube.
The two-room is more often than not a three-room, the third being a leanto. This house is most often made of vertical planks, yet quite often of horizontals, clapboards, or even weatherboards or matched edges. Fairly often a small glass window in the kitchen leanto; the others are square and shuttered. The two doors are at center front and rear, and there is usually a small roofed front porch. The rooms, all end-to-end so that the façade is two rooms wide.
All tenant houses have pretty strongly in common these characteristics: wood unpainted and weathered or once whitewashed and weathered; raised off the ground so that earth and daylight are clear under the whole of them; one of two or three of the simplest conceivable designs; hard bare dirt yard; either no shade or that of a bush; no trees near, the low house is much the tallest thing in sight; no flowers or very few; other very similar or even identical houses visible, several at once, yet in each a look of deep remoteness and solitude; the outbuildings small and low beyond proportion to a ‘farm’; the house very clearly an enlarged crate or box, scarcely modified to human use; in the whole establishment the look of the utmost possible extreme of flimsiness and nudity.
Such a house can be mistaken for nothing else in its country except, occasionally, the home of the weakest and poorest sort of small-owner. In turn, what you think of as his ‘type’ of house can easily turn out to be inhabited by a tenant.
By first appearance Ricketts’ place is that of a sloppy but by no means hopeless small-farmer. Seen more clearly, it could still as easily as not be the home of an owner at the bottom of the owning class.
Neither the Woods’ nor the Gudgers’ house would at all likely belong to a small-owner, no matter how small.
On the other hand, and though they fulfill any number of the ‘average’ tenant characteristics, they differ seriously in this respect: that they lack the rigid and mass-produced look which comes of the near-identities of the most usual forms. The Gudgers’ double-house type, with the open hallway, which incidentally is one of the finest designs I know of, is rare, and must be derived of the double houses of square logs which were the homes of the more substantial frontier and mountain farmers.* The Woods’ house by outward shape, shallow, with broad façade and leanto, is nearest the standard or class in tenant type; but having begun as a one-room shack it has two front doors, neither of them at center in the purest boxlike fashion: and I could wish, too, that its walls were of verticals and that it was less closely neighbored by trees.
As against other houses in the vicinity: almost no one in the rural and small-town south lives ‘well’ or ‘handsomely’; the houses aren’t even ‘kept up’ as they are, for instance, in Ohio or New England; and by general it would be said that everyone lives in homes equivalent to the homes of those a full category worse off in the economic-social scale than in the north: with the rare splendor and size of the pre-war plantation mansions vanished, and with the tenant-style home emerged beneath the scale of northern analogy; and, by lack of upkeep or a tradition or fear enforcing upkeep, with each category looking a full grade ‘poorer’ again than it was by original design.
Further comments on relations and averages
The tenant house as a shell is, then, a thing to itself, created by the tenant system, but having much in common with southern company houses in general. But beyond that, to talk as if tenantry as such were responsible, as is often done or seldom guarded against, is dishonest or ridiculous or ignorant, or in any case deceptive and dangerous. It is dangerous because by wrong assignment of causes it persuades that the ‘cure’ is possible through means which in fact would have little effect save to delude the saviors into the comfortable idea that nothing more needed doing, or even looking-to. It is deceptive because, in point of fact, by furnishing, by decoration, by crudeness of physical function as shelter, by nearly all that is held to be ‘disgraceful’ or ‘disadvantageous’ in the tenant homes, these homes have any amount more than less in common with the homes of the whole poorest class of the owning cotton farmers, and with the whole tribe and twinned race of the poorest human beings in the rural and small town and in considerable degree in the urban south; the economic source is nothing so limited as the tenant system but is the whole world-system of which tenantry is one modification; and there are in the people themselves, and in the land and climate, other sources quite as powerful but less easy to define, far less to go about curing: and they are, to suggest them too bluntly, psychological, semantic, traditional, perhaps glandular. I may as well add here that this spread beyond responsibility
of the tenant system is true also of every other aspect of disadvantage in their physical and mental living. Pardon so much repetition of what must be obvious to anyone of any semblance of intelligence, but I understand that this particular subject of tenantry is becoming more and more stylish as a focus of ‘reform,’* and in view of the people who will suffer and be betrayed at the hands of such ‘reformers’ there could never be enough effort to pry their eyes open even a little wider.
Age
None of the tenants and few landlords have any clear idea of the age of any of the houses, nor can this easily be guessed of the houses themselves, for they have been built in exactly the same patterns and of the same materials for generations: Jesse James’ birthplace, for instance (1847), is indistinguishable from tens of thousands of houses all over the south today, Gudger’s house is very new (1928), and, excepting the hardness of its wood, is already, in the sense of scale that country imposes, tunelessly ancient The oldest part of Woods’ house is I would judge forty to sixty years old; Ricketts’, about fifty. But former slave quarters are still used here and there, and from the beginning the tenant types have held a primitive common denominator which has had no reason to change.