Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  General habitability

  It is very easy, by mention of, for instance, a fireplace, to make a home or room seem more or less well-appointed than it actually is: also, in my enthusiasm for certain aspects, I have neglected others. I want here briefly to review the houses in terms of their function as shelter.

  Even when a wall or roof passes the ‘daylight’ test, i.e., if, in a darkened room, no light leaks through seams, it is a very poor protection indeed against the weather, particularly the wind wet and coldness of winter: for it is only one thin thickness of wood, surrounding a space which cannot be properly heated. Moreover, a tenant house is open to the weather from all six sides, for the floor is raised, and there are seldom protection boards between floor and earth; and ceilings are not at all common. Holes and broken windows are stopped as well as may be with rags, papers, ropes, raw cotton, and cardboard, but none of this is more than a fraction effective. Only the Ricketts have double walls and, in their bedroom, a big enough fireplace to heat the room. The others are large enough only to heat their immediate vicinity; their chimneys are badly made and do not draw well; the fires cannot be kept going at night; the bedding is ragged and inadequate; the uncarpeted floors are very cold. * The warmest and best-protected room at the Gudgers’ is the kitchen. It is too warm in summer. The worst room at the Woods’ is the kitchen. It is too cold in winter. The Ricketts’ kitchen is too large for comfort in winter. The only screen on all three farms is one at Gudger’s. Aside from this, windows and doors are shut tight at night, in winter against cold, in summer by custom, and against ‘the night air,’ and against fever mosquitoes. As I have pointed out, two of Gudger’s four rooms are so badly made as to be uninhabitable. There is no possibility of privacy at any time for any purpose. The water facilities are such as to hold laundering and personal cleanliness at or beneath its traditional minimum; to virtual nullity during the cold months of the year, and, in the case of the Ricketts and Woods, the water is very probably unhealthful. The beds, the bedding, and the vermin are such a crime against sex and the need of rest as no sadistic genius could much improve on. The furniture in general and the eating implements are all at or very near the bottom of their scale: broken, insecure, uncomfortable, ill-smelling, all that a man without money must constantly accept, when he can get it, and be glad of, or make do. Since I have talked of ‘esthetics’ the least I can do is to add a note on it in their terms: they live in a steady shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities, piecing these together into whatever semblance of comfortable living they can, and the whole of it is a stark nakedness of makeshifts and the lack of means: yet they are also, of course, profoundly anesthetized. The only direct opinion I got on the houses as such was from Mrs. Gudger, and it was, with the tears coming to her eyes, ‘Oh, I do hate this house so bad! Seems like they ain’t nothing in the whole world I can do to make it pretty.’ As for the anesthesia: it seems to me a little more unfortunate, if possible, to be unconscious of an ill than to be conscious of it; though the deepest and most honest and incontrovertible rationalization of the middle-class southerner is that they are ‘used’ to it.

  ‘Sanitation’ and Lighting

  I cannot unqualifiedly excite myself in favor of Rural Electrification, for I am too fond of lamplight. Nor in favor of flush toilets, for I despise and deplore the middle-class American worship of sterility and worship-fear of its own excrement. Yet I will grant or for that matter insist it as important that kerosene light is to electric services what foot and mule travel is to travel by auto and airplane, or what plowed clay is to pavement, and that these daily facts and gulfs have incalculably powerful and in many respects disadvantageous influences upon the mind and body. Because it is part of a similar gulf and lag, the lack of a flush toilet is also of great importance. But here I need not be quite so qualified. These families lack not only ‘plumbing’ but the ‘privies’ which are by jest supposed to be the property of any American farmer, and the mail-order catalogues which, again with a loud tee-hee, are supposed to be this farmer’s toilet paper. They retire to the bushes; and they clean themselves as well as they can with newspaper if they have any around the house, otherwise with corncobs, twigs, or leaves. To say they are forced in this respect to live ‘like animals’ is a little silly, for animals have the advantage of them on many counts. I will say, then, that whether or not The Bathroom Beautiful is to be preached to all nations, it is not to their advantage in a ‘civilized’ world to have to use themselves as the simplest savages do.

  Recessional and Vortex

  Near Woods’ barn on the way to the road there is a small wired enclosure of sloping grass, and during this quiet time of the summer three mules, two of them Ricketts’, spend most of their time pasturing there. They are bony, very tough, and badly scarred, and have in their eyes and slanted heads the Mongolian look which is common among cruelly used animals. All three show the galled frames of their harness, and large deep red and green sores are eaten against their more prominent bones: one is afflicted all over his back with some festered eruptive disease peculiarly attractive to the largest of the flies, whose stinging is almost as painful as that of hornets, and every three minutes or so, during hour after hour, after trying first to eat, and to walk under low branches, then, after standing twitching all his hide, slashing with his tail, throwing his head around, and stamping and kicking, still trying to chew the sulphur-colored mash, and finally tightening up, trembling all over, with all his strength he bangs himself against the ground in a shock which you think you feel fifty and which you hear two hundred yards away, and hoofs striking loose and wriggling, belly up, grinds his back so hard that the grass in that space is ripped bare.

  There is also a cow named Mooly, who, according to Mrs. Woods, would as soon kill the young ones as not, and who one day last winter knocked Mrs. Woods down and stomped on her, cutting her shins badly, the scars still show, and bruising her from head to foot. She is a young cow and has had one calf, and has been crazy in this way ever since she lost him.

  There is also a starved, red young hog, and I remember well how one morning he stood by the front steps fumbling, with his jaws, at the tail of a black kitten, who crouched while this happened, and looked back over his shoulder in apprehension, but who was himself too dazzled with hunger to move or to do more, at length, than spread his red mouth in a scratchy, nearly soundless mew; or even very well to understand that he was being tried out for eating. After a little, though, the hog lost interest and went on, and the kitten sat where he had crouched and licked his thin rat’s tail smooth of the jaw slime.

  In fact each of the families owns and is drawn-round with animals, for work, for food, or by more vague functions: a mule as one kind of center and leverage, a cow as another, a hog as still another, a dog in different meanings of his own, the tolerated tramp’s and robber’s life of the cat, the three generations of chickens, the peripheral or parasitic or almost unmagnetized spheres of rats, vermin, insects, and serpents, all in turn sprung round with tended and with random vegetation, and finally, those which lounge in the fields, and the many birds, and those who are hunted; and in any proper account it would be necessary to give such a full record of all these in themselves and in their mutual and human meanings and relationships as is impossible here: for, taking even a single center, the human animals alone, they live in an immediate and most elaborate texture of other forms of existence, of the whole need and fear and spread of nature on their part of the surface of the earth; and this fact is of a significance no less powerful and shaping through the mere impossibility of measuring it. Yet here I can make only the briefest sort of tally.

  Gudger: the heavy, deranged yellow rooster of whom I have spoken. A clutter of obese, louse-tormented hens whose bodies end dirtily, like sheaves of barley left in rain. Several neat broilers, and a few quilly, half-grown chicks whose heads are still like lizards’. A pair of guineas whose small painted heads and metal bodies thread these surroundings like the exotic
glint of naturalistic dreams. A sober, dark-brown, middle-sized dog named Rowdy, who, though he is most strictly suggestible in his resemblance to André Gide, is nevertheless as intensely of his nation, region, and class as Gudger himself. A puppy named Sipco. Two highlegged, rusty, flat-sided young hogs for whom Gudger paid his landlord nine dollars when they were shoats. A cow, tethered from spot to spot in the green stretches, and her calf. A half-grown reptilian cat named Nigger,* so black he is iridescent in the sun. A nameless adolescent tiger cat who just took up with them. And a rented mule, who was not on hand during our time there.

  Gudger got the cow in exchange for a grafanola. She has never been much good for milk The hogs will be fattened and killed in the fall, for next winter. The hens furnish eggs in season and one of them is eaten every now and then. Once in a while they find guinea eggs but guineas are wild and crafty in hiding their nests. In the fall, Gudger usually affords a box of shells for the possibility of fresh meat and goes out to kill it: rabbits, squirrels, or possum. Rowdy is a fair rabbit dog when he puts his mind to it, but good for nothing else; he is kept because dogs are a habit. Sipco is Louise’s pet. She picked him up from some people down across the highway. The cats are good for nothing at all; it isn’t often they even kill a rat.

  Woods’ animals, excepting the chickens, I have mentioned. He has no dog, and this alone would set him apart in that country as an unconventional man. The Ricketts, besides their mules, have a good cow and a bull calf, three dogs, very few chickens in ratio to the size of their family, a cat, and a kitten. The dogs are all mongrel rural hounds with the sycophantic eyes and hula hips of their kind in that country, more hopeful and more pleasantly treated than Rowdy, though hungrier. Indeed, they are almost alarmingly rickety: yet they are fatted to blandness as compared to the black kitten, not much bigger than a beetle, whose motions along the vast floors are those of an impaired clockwork toy, and whose hide is drawn open red along the entire skeleton. The names of two of the dogs are Sport and Queenie. The cat, whose name is Hazel, which perfectly identifies her, is big enough to get what food she needs. Two of the roosters are named Tom and George. Two of the hens are named Ivy and Annie Mae. This naming of poultry is not common and indicates, if you like, the relative ‘primitivism’ of the Ricketts; though it also indicates less sociological and more attractive things about them; though these in turn are more difficult to define, or even to understand, and would be merely tiresome to those whose intelligence is set entirely on Improving the Sharecropper, and who feel there’s no time to waste on petty detail. These same rapid marchers* in the human vanguard will be equally uninterested in the fact that Mrs. Woods’ mother calls babies coons and baby chickens sings, or worse still will nod patronizing ‘howsweet’ approval or somehow manage to capitalize it politically or against landowners as the unvanquishable poetry of the oppressed, but I will put it on record all the same, and will venture to say that it is more valuable than they think it is, or, for that matter, than they are.

  Children are strictly trained not to use cows too roughly: not, for instance, to kick their udders: it is liable to damage the milk supply. A mule is another matter. Even in harnessing him his head is knocked around some, and in all his motions relevant to his users he is used with the gratuitous sort of toughness an American policeman uses against anyone (except the right people) who happens to fall into his power: and this in part for the same ‘reasons’: get hard before the victim does; or before, in the case of the mule, he gets stubborn or tricky. And in fact mules are in general balky and tricky; I think they are probably in part extremely intelligent and in part insane, and are far less pliable to the reaction of the white, which is to beat, than to that of the negro, which, though with its full share of cruelty, is to converse. In any case if a mule gets tricky, or still worse if he balks, he is in for a physical contest and for hell with any average white farmer; and this farmer is liable to be an expert within the whole range of bullying, battering, and torturing this particular animal, and to have peculiarly urgent egoistic and sexual need to exert full violence and domination over something living, preferably something at least as large and strong as himself. It should be added, in further suggestion, that the mule stands readier victim than any other animal because he is used in the main and most hopeless work, because he is an immediate symbol of this work, and because by transference he is the farmer himself, and in the long tandem harness wherein members and forces of a whole world beat and use and drive and force each other, if they are to live at all, is the one creature in front of this farmer. But any proper set of suggestions, far less statements about this, and about the causes and kinds of sadism in the South, would require more space, time, and understanding than I have at present. Here I can only say that in the people of this country you care most for, pretty nearly without exception you must reckon in traits, needs, diseases, and above all mere natural habits, differing from our own, of a casualness, apathy, self-interest, unconscious, offhand, and deliberated cruelty, in relation toward extra-human life and toward negroes, terrible enough to freeze your blood or to break your heart or to propel you toward murder; and that you must reckon them as ‘innocent’ even of the worst of this; and must realize that it is at least unlikely that enough of the causes can ever be altered, or pressures withdrawn, to make much difference.

  I could tell you details, most of them casual enough, in extension of what I am speaking of, and I could a good deal further explain and guess at the causes, but I think I had better defer all of that until I have more room and understand it better, and here will add only a few short notes.

  Animals are fed and cared for in proportion to their usefulness: the cow and mule and hogs first, then the dogs, et cetera. Cats are casually but thoroughly disliked and are given nothing; they are never fed, far less caressed; yet their presence and certain forms of theft are tolerated. Or again: dogs are never kindly touched by adults, unless they are puppies; the children play with them in the usual mixed affection and torture; the Gudgers feed Rowdy rather irregularly from their plates, seldom with a floor plate of his own; the Ricketts put down a plate for their dogs; the cats grab what they can at the end of a meal or from the dogs’ plate. Children are very casually reproved, after the screaming has become noisy enough, for mistreatment of kittens; dogs, if they blunder into the way or are slow in obeying an order, are kicked hard enough to crack their ribs, and, in that manner which has inspired man to call them, in competition only with his mother, his best friend, offer their immediate apologies; the sickness or suffering in sickness or death of any animal which has no function as food or power goes almost unnoticed, though not at all unkindly so.

  The snakes are blacksnakes, garter snakes, milk snakes, hoop snakes, bull snakes, grass snakes, water moccasins, copperheads, and rattlers. Milk snakes hang around barns and suck the cows’ tits; hoop snakes take their tails in their mouths and run off like hoops; bull snakes swell up and roar like a bull when they are cornered; grass snakes are green, small, and pretty; rattlers are used as amulets by whites as well as negroes; copperheads are the worst snakes of all. None of these are common in the sense of daily appearance, but they are by no means rare, and during the hot months of the year everyone is reasonably watchful where he walks—But it is unhappy to write of animals when there is no time to write of them properly; so likewise with the plants: and so, in only a few more words, merely the suggestion of what is textured within any one of these silent and simple-appearing horizons and of what in and around even one of these blank wood houses is sewn into these human lives: on the leather land, and sleeping of swamps, and sliding of streamed water, in light and deep shade, are poured up hickories, red oaks, cottonwoods, pines, junipers, cedars, chestnuts, locusts, black walnuts, swamp willow, crabapple, wild plum, holly, laurel, chinaberry, May apple, arbutus, honeysuckle, trumpet vine, goldenrod, all kinds of wild daisies, many ferns, corn, cotton, sorghum cane, watermelon vines, muskmelons, peanuts, yams, sweet potatoes, irish potatoes, three kinds of
bean, field peas, okra, tomatoes, turnips, fennel, ragweed, jimpson weed: and these are netted through with the traffic and simmering of bees and of wasps and hornets and snakedoctors, and with the needs and the leisures of rabbits, red squirrels, gray squirrels, opossums, raccoons, wild razorbacks, wildcats, perhaps rare foxes, and spiders spread ghosts of suns between branches and start along water, and tadpoles and frogs are in the water and frogs on the earth and trees, and arrowy minnows, and mud turtles, and land tortoises with their curious odor, and the trees are glanded with the nests of birds and the air is streamed and sparkled with their singing, and ribboned and streamered with their flight, the sparrows, ricebirds, thrushes, catbirds, mockingbirds, jays, red-winged blackbirds, cardinals, and groaning and flauting doves, the robins and the sharp wrens, the diamond hummingbirds and their wincing song, sustained in their vibrating spheres, and by night the screechowl and the whippoorwill, the crickets and the roaring frogs, the luna dozing in the daylit swamp, the monarchs and the fields flown low with yellow paper twinkling in the sun, and at the house, the hens who dab and thud at the mealy dung which the puppy or, weightily, the littlest child has disposed on the porch floor, and who, finished, clean their beaks against the oak, their eyes blue with autoerotism, the clatter of the swift and afric guineas, the wasps lance in the eaves and the dark, hot roof, the corn and the trees move as if a great page were being turned, the cat stalks a horned toad who will be too swift, the flies do what they can between now and dinner time, the bedbugs sleep, and so do the rats who tonight will skitter and thump and gnaw and fight the cats, and the dog dozes in shade, and the white puppy, his bowels bursting with petrified food, waddles along the shaded back yard close against the house, his nose to the bare clay, and out toward the spring the cow stands in the shade, working her jaws, and suspending upon creation the wide amber holy lamp of her consciousness, and at a gap in his pen next winter’s meat hopefully dilates his slimy disk: and dinner, and they are all drawn into the one and hottest room, the parents; the children; and beneath the table the dog and the puppy and the sliding cats, and above it, a grizzling literal darkness of flies, and spread on all quarters, the simmering dream held in this horizon yet overflowing it, and of the natural world, and eighty miles back east and north, the hard flat incurable sore of Birmingham.