Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  Clothing

  Clothing

  Sunday, George Gudger:

  Freshly laundered cotton gauze underwear.

  Mercerized blue green socks, held up over his fist-like calves by scraps of pink and green gingham rag.

  Long bulb-toed black shoes: still shining with the glaze of their first newness, streaked with clay.

  Trousers of a hard and cheap cotton-wool, dark blue with narrow gray stripes; a twenty-five-cent belt stays in them always.

  A freshly laundered and brilliantly starched white shirt with narrow black stripes.

  A brown, green, and gold tie in broad stripes, of stiff and hard imitation watered silk.

  A very cheap felt hat of a color between that of a pearl and that of the faintest gold, with a black band.

  The hat is still only timidly dented into shape. Its lining is still brilliant and pearly, with only a faint shadow of oil. The sweatband, and the bright insole of the shoes, will seem untouched for a long time still, and the scarred soles of the shoes are still yellow.

  The crease is still sharp in the trousers.

  If he were an older man, and faithful in the rural tradition of dressing well rather than in that of the young men in towns, he would wear, not a belt, but suspenders, striped, or perhaps decorated with rosebuds.

  These are the only socks he owns.

  He does not wear or own a coat and would not want one. What he would like to wear is a pull-over sweater.

  He has two suits of the underwear. He will sleep in this suit tonight and during the rest of the week. The other suit will go into the wash and he will put it on next sunday.

  His neck seems violently red against the tight white collar. He is freshly shaven, and his face looks shy and naked.

  He wears the hat straight awhile, then draws it down a little, but conservatively, over one eye, then pushes it far back on his head so that it is a halo, then sets it on straight again. He is delicate with his hands in touching it.

  He walks a little carefully: the shoes hurt his feet.

  Saturday, Mrs. Gudger:

  Face, hands, feet and legs are washed.

  The hair is done up more tightly even than usual.

  Black or white cotton stockings.

  Black lowheeled slippers with strapped insteps and single buttons.

  A freshly laundered cotton print dress held together high at the throat with a ten-cent brooch.

  A short necklace of black glass beads.

  A hat.

  She has two pairs of stockings. She sometimes goes barelegged to Cookstown, on Saturdays, but always wears stockings on sundays.

  The dress is one of two she would not be ashamed to wear away from home: they are not yet worn-down or ineradicably spotted. In other respects it is like all her other dresses: made at home, of carefully selected printed cotton cloth, along narrow variants of her own designing, which differs from some we saw and is probably a modified inheritance from her mother: short sleeves, a rather narrow skirt several inches longer than is ordinary. No kind of flaring collar, but in some of them, an effort to trim with tape. They are all cut deep at the breast for nursing, as all her dresses must have been for ten years now. The lines are all long, straight, and simple.

  The hat is small and shallow, crowned with a waved brim. She must have taken care in its choice. It is a distant imitation of ‘gay’ or ‘frivolous’ ‘trifles’ It is made of frail glazed magenta straw in a wide mesh through which her black hair shows. It has lost its shape a little in rain. She wears it exactly level, on the exact top of her small and beautifully graven head.

  No southern country woman in good standing uses rouge or lipstick, and her face is colorless. There are traces of powder at the wings of her nose and in the seamed skin just in front of her left ear.

  She is keenly conscious of being carefully dressed, and carries herself stiffly. Her eyes are at once searching, shy, excited, and hopelessly sad.

  Saturday is the day of leaving the farm and going to Cookstown, and from the earliest morning on I can see that she is thinking of it. It is after she has done the housework in a little hurry and got the children ready that she bathes and prepares herself, and as she comes from the bedroom, with her hat on, ready to go, her eyes, in ambush even to herself, look for what I am thinking in such a way that I want to tell her how beautiful she is; and I would not be lying.

  She will carry herself in this stiff, gravely watchful, and hopeful way all during the day in town, taking care to straighten her hat, and retiring as deeply as possible behind the wagons to nurse her baby. On the way home in the slow, rattling wagon, she will be tired and drooped, her hat crooked, her eyes silent, and once she will take the smallest child intensely against her, very suddenly.

  Sunday: it is not very different from Saturday, for she has no really ‘sunday’ dress, no other dress shoes, no other hat, and no other jewelry. If she is feeling happy, though, she will set into her hair the pink celluloid comb I have spoken of, with the glass diamonds.

  George, on Saturday, dresses not in his dress clothes but in the newest and cleanest of his work clothes; if there is time, if he is not working until noon, away from home, he shaves that morning and washes his feet When there is no work to do, in winter and midsummer, he shaves twice a week.

  Ricketts, on Sunday:

  No socks.

  Old, black Sunday shoes, washed off with water, and slashed with a razor at the broadest part of the feet.

  Very old dark trousers with the compound creases of two ironings in them; nearly new white suspenders with narrow blue stripes down the sides and brown dots down the centers, the strap at the right attached to the trousers by a rusty nail.

  A nearly new blue work shirt, worn perhaps twice before since laundering; the sleeves rolled down, the cuffs buttoned, the collar buttoned; no tie.

  An open vest, too wide and short for him, of heavy, worn-out, gray-and-black wool; his watch and chain joining it across the waist.

  A very old and carefully kept dark felt hat with a narrow band and a delicate bow.

  A pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

  The spectacles are worn only on sunday and are perhaps mainly symbolic of the day and of his dignity as a reader in church; yet, too, they have strong small lenses. He bought them at a five-and-ten-cent store in Cherokee City.

  Woods, on sunday:

  Of the head covering I have no certain memory, yet two images. A hat of coarse-grained, strongly yellow straw, shaped by machine as felt hats are by the owner’s hands, with a striped band. And: a nearly new, sober plaid, flat cap, of the sort which juts wide above the ears, and of a kind of crackling cheapness which one rain destroys.

  Shoes: the oxfords which at one time were his dress shoes, and in which his wife has worked during the week.

  Trousers such as seventeen-year-old boys of small towns select for best who can spend no money and want what flash they can get: a coarse-meshed and scratchy cotton-wool, stiffened with glue, of a bright and youthful yellow-gray crossed in wide squares by horizontals of blue-green and verticals of green-blue, and thinly pebbled with small nodules of red, orange, and purple wool. They are a little large for him. The original crease is entirely gone at the knee and is very sharp from knee to cuff. The suspenders are printed with spaced knots of small blue flowers; are worn out, and have been laundered.

  A white shirt, starched; thin brown stripes. The sleeves have been cut off just above the elbows and coarsely hemmed. There are rust marks all over it, and the image of a flatiron is scorched just beneath the heart. An originally white piqué detachable collar, blue-gray from laundering, the fray scissored clean. A white cotton tie with two narrow black lines along each edge; about an inch wide throughout; both ‘ends’ out; the end next the body much longer than the outside end, and showing three or four inches of knitting-wear.

  One day’s beard; the mustache trimmed neat and short; the temples and the slender, corded, behind-head, trimmed nearly naked and showing the criss-cros
sed, quilting work of the scissors, and the meekness of the pallid scalp; scraped toast.

  The children, washed and combed, barefooted, with clean feet and legs; clean clothes on: I will tell more of them later; so, too, of Mrs. Woods, and Mrs. Ricketts, and of the Ricketts girls: at present, more of the daily clothing.

  On monday Gudger puts on cleanly washed workclothes; the other two men, whose laundering is done less often, change their clothing in a more casual cycle, two to several weeks long: I want now to try to describe these work clothes: shoes, overalls, shirts, head coverings: variants, general remarks: and to speak here perhaps, not of these three men only, but a little more generally as well.

  On all the clothing here to be spoken of there are, within the narrow range of availabilities, so many variants that one cannot properly name anything as ‘typical,’ but roughly align several ‘types’ I could say, for instance:

  Of shoes: ordinary work shoes, to be described later, may be called ‘typical’; but only if you remember that old Sunday shoes, tennis sneakers, high tennis shoes, sandals, moccasins, bare feet, and even boots, are not at all rarely used: it should be known, too, that there are many kinds of further, personal treatment of shoes. Mainly, this: Many men, by no means all, like to cut holes through the uppers for foot-spread and for ventilation: and in this they differ a good deal between utility and art. You seldom see purely utilitarian slashes: even the bluntest of these are liable to be patterned a little more than mere use requires: on the other hand, some shoes have been worked on with a wonderful amount of patience and studiousness toward a kind of beauty, taking the memory of an ordinary sandal for a model, and greatly elaborating and improving it. I have seen shoes so beautifully worked in this way that their durability was greatly reduced. Generally speaking, those who do this really careful work are negroes; but again, by no means all of the negroes are ‘artists’ in this way.

  Of overalls, you could say that they are the standard working garment in the country south, and that blue is the standard color. But you should add that old Sunday pants in varying degrees of decay are also perhaps half as much used: that striped and khaki overalls sometimes appear and mechanics’ coveralls, and dungarees, and khaki work pants:

  And again, speaking now of shirts, that though the blue workshirt is standard, there are also gray and brown workshirts; and besides these, old Sunday shirts (white or striped), and now and then a home-made shirt, and undershirts, polo shirts, and jerseys:

  And again of these categories of body covering, that, though all the variants appear among whites, they are a good deal more frequent among negroes; and again, too, that among the negroes the original predilections for colors, textures, symbolisms, and contrasts, and the subsequent modifications and embellishments, are much more free and notable.

  And of hats, you could say that the standard is the ordinary farmers’ straw sold at crossroads stores: but here you would be wrong for several reasons. Perhaps half the tenants wear these straws, but even in that category there are many differences in choice of kind at the same price, ranging from hats as conservative in size and shape as the city felts they imitate, through the whole register of what is supposed to be ‘typical’ to the american farmer, to hats which are only slight modifications of the ten-gallon and of the sombrero. And besides these straws: again there are all kinds of variants: old sunday hats being one whole class; another, caps emulous of small-town and city and factory men: baseball caps, the little caps which are the gifts of flour and paint companies, factory caps; imitation pith helmets imitative of foremen imitative of landowners imitative of the colonists in pith-helmet melodramas; occasionally, too, a homemade hat or cap: and here again, both in choice and in modification, the negroes are much the richer.

  There will be no time, though, to go into these variants beyond their mention, nor any time at all to talk of negro work and sunday clothing, which in every respect seems to me, as few other things in this country do, an expression of a genius distributed among almost the whole of a race, so powerful and of such purity that even in its imitations of and plagiarisms on the white race, it is all but incapable of sterility.*

  But now having suggested varieties, I want to lay out and tell of ‘types,’ speaking of the white race.

  In general, then: the shoes are either work shoes of one age or another or worn-out Sunday oxfords. The body garments are blue overalls and blue work shirts; again, with a wide range of age. The head coverings are straw hats or old Sunday hats, or occasionally some more urban form of cap. These things have been bought ready-made, so consistently that any homemade substitute calls for a note to itself. Now a few further notes, on overalls and work shirts.

  So far as I know, overalls are a garment native to this country. Subject to the substitutions I have spoken of, they are, nevertheless, the standard or classical garment at very least (to stay within our frame) of the southern rural American working man: they are his uniform, the badge and proclamation of his peasantry. There seems to be such a deep classicism in ‘peasant’ clothing in all places and in differing times that, for instance, a Russian and a southern woman of this country, of a deep enough class, would be undistinguishable by their clothing: moreover, it moves backward and forward in time: so that Mrs. Ricketts, for instance, is probably undistinguishable from a woman of her class five hundred years ago. But overalls are a relatively new and local garment.

  Perhaps little can be said of them, after all: yet something. The basis: what they are: can best be seen when they are still new; before they have lost (or gained) shape and color and texture; and before the white seams of their structure have lost their brilliance.

  Overalls

  They are pronounced overhauls.

  Try—I cannot write of it here—to imagine and to know, as against other garments, the difference of their feeling against your body; drawn-on, and bibbed on the whole belly and chest, naked from the kidneys up behind, save for broad crossed straps, and slung by these straps from the shoulders; the slanted pockets on each thigh, the deep square pockets on each buttock; the complex and slanted structures, on the chest, of the pockets shaped for pencils, rulers, and watches; the coldness of sweat when they are young, and their stiffness; their sweetness to the skin and pleasure of sweating when they are old; the thin metal buttons of the fly; the lifting aside of the straps and the deep slipping downward in defecation; the belt some men use with them to steady their middles; the swift, simple, and inevitably supine gestures of dressing and of undressing, which, as is less true of any other garment, are those of harnessing and of unharnessing the shoulders of a tired and hard-used animal.

  They are round as stovepipes in the legs (though some wives, told to, crease them).

  In the strapping across the kidneys they again resemble work harness, and in their crossed straps and tin buttons.

  And in the functional pocketing of their bib, a harness modified to the convenience of a used animal of such high intelligence that he has use for tools.

  And in their whole stature: full covering of the cloven strength of the legs and thighs and of the loins; then nakedness and harnessing behind, naked along the flanks; and in front, the short, squarely tapered, powerful towers of the belly and chest to above the nipples.

  And on this façade, the cloven halls for the legs, the strong-seamed, structured opening for the genitals, the broad horizontal at the waist, the slant thigh pockets, the buttons at the point of each hip and on the breast, the geometric structures of the usages of the simpler trades—the complexed seams of utilitarian pockets which are so brightly picked out against darkness when the seam-threadings, double and triple stitched, are still white, so that a new suit of overalls has among its beauties those of a blueprint: and they are a map of a working man.

  The shirts too; squarely cut, and strongly seamed; with big square pockets and with metal buttons: the cloth stiff, the sweat cold when it is new, the collar large in newness and standing out in angles under the ears; so that in these new workc
lothes a man has the shy and silly formal charm of a mail-order-catalogue engraving.

  The changes that age, use, weather, work upon these.

  They have begun with the massive yet delicate beauty of most things which are turned out most cheaply in great tribes by machines: and on this basis of structure they are changed into images and marvels of nature.

  The structures sag, and take on the look, some of use; some, the pencil pockets, the pretty atrophies of what is never used; the edges of the thigh pockets become stretched and He open, fluted, like the gills of a fish. The bright seams lose their whiteness and are lines and ridges. The whole fabric is shrunken to size, which was bought large. The whole shape, texture, color, finally substance, all are changed. The shape, particularly along the urgent frontage of the thighs, so that the whole structure of the knee and musculature of the thigh is sculptured there; each man’s garment wearing the shape and beauty of his induplicable body. The texture and the color change in union, by sweat, sun, laundering, between the steady pressures of its use and age: both, at length, into realms of fine softness and marvel of draping and velvet plays of light which chamois and silk can only suggest, not touch;* and into a region and scale of blues, subtle, delicious, and deft beyond what I have ever seen elsewhere approached except in rare skies, the smoky light some days are filmed with, and some of the blues of Cezanne: one could watch and touch even one such garment, study it, with the eyes, the fingers, and the subtlest lips, almost illimitably long, and never fully learn it; and I saw no two which did not hold some world of exquisiteness of its own. Finally, too; particularly athwart the crest and swing of the shoulders, of the shirts: this fabric breaks like snow, and is stitched and patched: these break, and again are stitched and patched and ruptured, and stitches and patches are manifolded upon the stitches and patches, and more on these, so that at length, at the shoulders, the shirt contains virtually nothing of the original fabric and a man, George Gudger, I remember so well, and many hundreds of others like him, wears in his work on the power of his shoulders a fabric as intricate and fragile, and as deeply in honor of the reigning sun, as the feather mande of a Toltec prince.