Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  Gudger has three; it is perhaps four changes of overalls and work-shirts. They are, set by set, in stages of age, and of beauty, distinctly apart from one another, and of the three I remember, each should at best be considered separately and at full length. I have room here to say only that they represent medium-early, middle, and medium-late stages, and to suggest a little more about these. The youngest are still dark; their seams are still visible; the cloth has not yet lost all of its hardness, nor the buttons their brightness. They have taken the shape of the leg, yet they are still the doing as much of machinery as of nature. The middle-aged are fully soft and elegantly textured, and are lost out of all machinery into a full prime of nature. The mold of the body is fully taken, the seams are those of a living plant or animal, the cloth’s grain is almost invisible, the buttons are rubbed and mild, the blue is at the full silent, greatly restrained strength of its range; the patches in the overalls are few and strategic, the right* knee, the two bones of the rump, the elbows, the shoulders are quietly fledged: the garments are still wholly competent and at their fullness of comfort. The old: the cloth sleeps against all salients of the body in complete peace, and in its loose hangings, from the knee downward, is fallen and wandered in the first full loss of form into foldings I believe no sculptor has ever touched. The blue is so vastly fainted and withdrawn it is discernible scarcely more as blue than as that most pacific silver which the bone wood of the houses and the visage of genius seem to shed, and is a color and cloth seeming ancient, veteran, composed, and patient to the source of being, as too the sleepings and the drifts of form. The shoulders are that full net of sewn snowflakes of which I spoke. The buttons are blind as cataracts, and slip their soft holes. The whole of the seat and of the knees and elbows* are broken and patched, the patches subdued in age almost with the original cloth, drawn far forward toward the feathering of the shoulders. There is a more youthful stage than the youngest of these; Ricketts, in his photograph here, wears such overalls; there are many median modulations; and there is a stage later than the latest here, as I saw in the legs of Woods’ overalls, which had so entirely lost one kind of tendency to form that they had gained another, and were wrinkled minutely and innumerably as may best be paralleled by old thin oilskin crumpled, and by the skin of some aged faces.

  Shoes

  They are one of the most ordinary types of working shoe: the blucher design, and soft in the prow, lacking the seam across the root of the big toe: covering the ankles: looped straps at the heels: blunt, broad, and rounded at the toe: broad-heeled: made up of most simple roundnesses and squarings and flats, of dark brown raw thick leathers nailed, and sewn coarsely to one another in courses and patterns of doubled and tripled seams, and such throughout that like many other small objects they have great massiveness and repose and are, as the houses and overalls are, and the feet and legs of the women, who go barefooted so much, fine pieces of architecture.

  They are softened, in the uppers, with use, and the soles are rubbed thin enough, I estimate, that the ticklish grain of the ground can be felt through at the center of the forward sole. The heels are deeply biased. Clay is worked into the substance of the uppers and a loose dust of clay lies over them. They have visibly though to the eye subtly taken the mold of the foot, and structures of the foot are printed through them in dark sweat at the ankles, and at the roots of the toes. They are worn without socks, and by experience of similar shoes I know that each man’s shoe, in long enough course of wear, takes as his clothing does the form of his own flesh and bones, and would feel as uneasy to any other as if A, glancing into the mirror, were met by B’s eyes, and to their owner, a natural part though enforcement of the foot, which may be used or shed at will. There is great pleasure in a sockless and sweated foot in the fitted leathers of a shoe.

  The shoes are worn for work. At home, resting, men always go barefooted. This is no symptom of discomfort, though: it is, insofar as it is conscious, merely an exchange of mutually enhancing pleasures, and is at least as natural as the habituated use and laying by of hats or of ‘reading-glasses’

  So far as I could see, shoes are never mended. They are worn out like animals to a certain ancient stage and chance of money at which a man buys a new pair; then, just as old sunday shoes do, they become the inheritance of a wife.

  Ricketts’ shoes are boldly slashed open to accommodate as they scarcely can the years of pain in his feet The worst of this pain is in stirrup corns, a solid stripe of stony and excruciating pearls across the ball of each foot; for two years, years ago, he rode mules all of each day. Recognizing my own tendency half-consciously to alter my walk or even to limp under certain conditions of mental insecurity, and believing Ricketts to be one of the most piteously insecure men I have ever known, I suspect, too, that nervous modifications in his walking have had much to do with destroying his feet.

  Hats

  It happens that not one of the three men uses any form of the farmer’s-straw which is popularly thought of as the routine hat; and this may well be, in part (and in many other men), in reaction against a rural-identifying label too glibly applied to them. It is certain of Gudger, anyhow, that his head-covering, like his sunday belt and the pull-over sweater he wants, are city symbols against a rural tradition: indeed, it is industrial, or is the symbol almost of a skilled trade: a handsome twenty-five-cent machinist’s cap made of ticking in bold stripes of blue-white and dark blue, drawing all possible elements of his square-chopped, goodlooking, and ineradicably rural face into city and machine suggestions.

  Woods wears an exceedingly old felt hat, in which some holes are worn ragged and others cut in diamond shapes for ventilation and in respect for one of the sporty traditions among certain, usually younger, working men—negroes in particular—who reduce hats of a good color to a kind of improved and dashingly worn skullcap, or cut them into the shapes of crowns.

  There is greatly among negroes,* and considerably, too, among working-class whites, an apparent reverence for the natural and symbolic dignities of the head (which is generally lost in the softer classes of white): so that, perhaps even more than the rest of the body, it is dressed according to symbolic and imitative enforcements. All symbolisms in clothing are complex and corrupt in this country; they are so specially so in the matter of hats, and the variety of personal choice is so wide, it can easily seem pure casual chance and carelessness, which I am sure it is not In any case an absolute minimum social and egoistic requirement of a man’s hat in this class and country is that it be ready-made and store bought. And so the fact that Ricketts is willing to work and to appear in public in a home made hat is significant of his abandonment ‘beneath’ the requirements of these symbologies, both toward himself and toward his world. A hat could be bought for fifteen cents. But he, and his family, all wear identical hats, which they casually exchange among themselves. They are made of cornshucks. These are plaited into a long ribbon; the ribbon is then sewn against its own edges from center outward in concentric spirals. Margaret or Paralee can make one in a day. They are the shape of very shallow cones, about eight inches in diameter, light enough in the crown that they do not stay easily on the head. They are not only unmistakably homemade, and betraying of the most deeply rural class; they suggest also the orient or what is named the ‘savage.’ The shucks are of a metal-silk brilliance I have never seen in other straw, and in this, its painstaking but unachieved symmetries, and the cone and outward spiral, each hat is an extraordinary and beautiful object: but this is irrelevant to its social meanings, as are nearly all products of honesty, intelligence, and full innocence.

  Gudger, then: conventional, middle-aged unslashed work shoes; three suits of overalls and work shirts, all blue, in more uniformity to begin with and in more distinction apart through what is done with them, than any tailor would or could create; a machinist’s cap; a modification of the Leyendecker face, brick red, clean shaven; a medium-height, powerful, football player’s body modified into the burlings of oak and into slow
square qualities blending those of the lion and the ox:

  Ricketts: overalls too, I think not more than two suits, one youthful, and one very old; in shirts, a confusion of blues with torn white shirts of sundays ten years foundered; slashed, crippled shoes, standing on the outward rims of his heels; long matted hair on the low forehead, flashing, foxy, crazy eyes, a great frowning scoop of dark mustache; a dirty platinum halo; in all his clothing dirtier; a somehow willowy and part feminine yet powerful body, seeming a little soft at the hips as if he might be girlish white there:

  Woods: an old man with a lightly made, still vital and sexually engaging body, the beautiful and light-boned, pleasingly carried, skeptic’s unconquered head of those men whose ancestors are birds, not mammals: clothed in fine saggings of blue and flangings of white or, as I will now further indicate:

  At home and at leisure, barefooted and naked to the waist, the feet narrow and almost fastidious, showing their bones, the elbows sharp like pulleys, the bones sharp at the peaks of the shoulders, and the ribs; strong clearly made and nearly hairless breasts of the form that seems common in men of India; the muscles of the upper arm weakening; the forearms shaped in ovals; a bandana hung on his sore shoulder; the body freckled and white and firm, then abruptly, at the neck, seamed as a turkey; the weathered face, and the sweated, candy hair, delicate as a baby’s, laid on his forehead, and the eyes, glittering with narcotics and intelligence like splintered glass, to which the fringed lashes, which his daughter Emma inherits, give a sleepy look of charming innocence:

  At work, he puts on his shoes and shirt and hat.

  An overall strap would continually torment this sore which has developed in his shoulder, and may indeed—for in this garment this shoulder is the area of greatest stress and friction in the body—have helped to create it there: and for this reason Woods has cut off the bib of his overalls and holds them up at the waist with a piece of tied harness-leather. They are very old, and hang in a delicateness of wrinklings I have spoken of, and appear to be the only work clothes he owns.

  The shoes are of the Gudger type: but of a lighter leather, perhaps two years older, worn through in the soles, and tied up with snaggled and knotted twine, tight on the ankles, for they are big for him.

  The hat I have spoken of.

  The shirt is home made out of a fertilizer sack. The cloth, by use and washing, is of a heavy and delicious look: as if pure cream were pressed into a fabric an eighth of an inch thick, and were cut and sewn into a garment. The faded lettering and branding is still visible, upside down, in red and blue and black. It is made in earnest imitation of store shirts but in part by heaviness of cloth and still more by lack of skill is enlarged in details such as the collar, and simplified, and improved, and is sewn with tough hand stitches, and is in fact a much more handsome shirt than might ever be bought: but socially and economically, it is of like but less significance with Ricketts’ cornshuck hat.

  The men’s clothes are all ready-made. Any deviation from this is notable.

  The women’s and girls’ clothes and those of the children are made at home, excepting boys’ overalls and school clothes, shoes, and head coverings; and with these exceptions all deviations are notable too for one reason and another.

  There are standard cloths, cheap cotton prints mainly, and thin white cottons, woven and on sale specifically to make clothing of.

  Because there is so exceedingly little money, some wives make use of still other materials in dressing themselves, their children, and less commonly their men, at least for the weekdays, when they are sunken far back in their own country, to be seen by none who differ from themselves. Mrs. Woods has one sort of solution, and Mrs. Ricketts another. It is hard to say what is ‘normal’ here and what is not. By a general common denominator of memory throughout the summer, I would say it was most nearly ‘normal’ for there to be about an even mixture, in the week-day clothes, of non-clothing with clothing materials: so that Mrs. Woods, dressing herself and her family in so little that was ever intended for human beings to wear, is ‘below normal,’ and Mrs. Ricketts ‘below’ and far aside from it On the other hand, by the almost complete absence of such adapted materials in her family’s outfitting, I am sure that Mrs. Gudger feels intense social and perhaps ‘spiritual’ distinctions between the kinds of cloth in their meanings: and that with as little money as Mrs. Woods and hardly more than Mrs. Ricketts has, her success in keeping to one side of this line is the result of an effort and strain as intense as her feeling. In this she differs from and is ‘above’ the ‘normal,’ as she is too in the designing of the clothes, and in various symbolic reaches into the materials of a ‘higher’ class.

  Three women’s dresses

  Mrs. Gudger: I have spoken already of her dresses. I think she has at most five, of which two are ever worn further away from home than the Woods’. Three are one-piece dresses; two are in two pieces. By cut they are almost identical; by pattern of print they differ, but are similar in having been carefully chosen, all small and sober, quiet patterns, to be in good taste and to relieve one another’s monotony. I think it may be well to repeat their general appearance, since it is of her individual designing, and is so thoroughly a part of the logic of her body, bearing, face and temper. They have about them some shadow of nineteenth century influence, tall skirt, short waist, and a little, too, of imitation of Butterick patterns for housewives’ housework-dresses; this chiefly in the efforts at bright or ‘cheery,’ post-honeymoon-atmosphere trimming: narrow red or blue tape sewn at the cuffs or throat But by other reasons again they have her own character and function: the lines are tall and narrow, as she is, and little relieved, and seem to run straight from the shoulders to the hem low on the shins, and there is no collar, but a long and low V at the throat, shut narrowly together, so that the whole dress like her body has the long vertical of a Chartres statue.

  Mrs. Woods: IWo work dresses. They are both made of fertilizer* sacks, one in one piece, the other in two. Except that the one-piece dress hangs unbelted, they are much alike: no sleeves; wide hemmed holes cut for the arms; no collar, a wide triangle cut for nursing, and hemmed, in coarse stitching like the armholes; a broad skirt reaching about two inches below the knee, and falling in thick folds: the grain of the cloth defined here and there in dark grease, the whole garment clayed and sweated; the faded yet bold trademarks showing through in unexpected parts of the material: a garment very little different in some respects from those of the women of the ancient Greeks, and probably very closely matched in Thessaly or on Euboea.

  Mrs. Ricketts: I am not sure that she has more than one work dress: in any case there was no change of it during the time that I knew her, and it seemed even at the first to have been worn for a long time. Excepting for the clothes of babies, it is the most primitive sewn and designed garment I have ever seen. It is made of a coarse tan cotton I will speak of later. It is shaped like a straight-sided bell, with a little hole at the top for the head to stick through, the cloth slit from the neck to below the breasts and held together if I remember rightly with a small snarl of shoelace; the bare arms sticking through the holes at the sides, the skirt ending a little below the knee, the whole dress standing out a little from the body on all sides like a child’s youngest cartoons, not belted, and too stiffened perhaps with dirt to fall into any folds other than the broadest and plainest, the skirt so broad away from her at the bottom that, with her little feet and legs standing down from inside it, for all their beauty they seem comic sticks, and she, a grievous resemblance to newspaper drawings of timid men in barrels labeled John Q. Public.

  Mrs. Ricketts wears one of the corn-shuck hats when she is working. I have never seen her with shoes on.

  Mrs. Woods wears a big broken straw when she is working and, occasionally, her husband’s oldest shoes.

  Mrs. Gudger may have no work shoes; more likely, she uses something cast off by her husband. She worked barefooted most of the time, sometimes in her slippers. She was enough embarras
sed to be barefooted that she may well have wished to conceal or avoid the indignity before us of using very old and broken shoes which were twice too big for her. She was shy also of our seeing her in a sunbonnet. I doubt that many headgears have ever been as good or as handsome.

  Louise: the dress she wore most was sewn into one piece of two materials, an upper half of faded yellow-checked gingham, and a skirt made of a half-transparent flour sack, and beneath this, the bulk of a pinned, I presume flour sack, clout; and a gingham bow at the small of the back, and trimming at the neck. She has two other dresses, which are worn to Cookstown or for sundays, and are, I imagine, being saved for school. They too are made painstakingly to be pretty, and as much as possible like pattern and ready-made dresses. During the week she is always barefooted and wears a wide straw hat in the sun. Her mother dresses her carefully in the idiom of a little girl a year or two littler than she is. On sundays she wears slippers and socks, and a narrow blue ribbon in her hair, and a many times laundered white cloth hat.