Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  Junior: ready-made overalls, one pair old, one not far from new, the newer cuffs turned up; a straw hat; bare feet, which are one crust of dew-poisoned sores; a ready-made blue shirt; a homemade gray shirt; a small straw hat On Sunday, cleaned feet, clean overalls, a white shirt, a dark frayed necktie, a small, frayed, clean, gray cap.

  Burt: two changes of clothes. One is overalls and one of two shirts, the other is a suit The overalls are homemade out of pale tan cotton. One of the shirts is pale blue, the other is white; they are made apparently, of pillowslip cotton. The collars are flared open: ‘sport’ collars, and the sleeves end nearer the shoulder than the elbow. The suit, which is old and, though carefully kept much faded, is either a ready-made ‘extravagance’ or a hard-worked imitation of one. It is sewn together, pants and an upper piece, the pants pale blue, the upper piece white, with a small rabbit-like collar. There are six large white non-functional buttons sewn against the blue at the waistline.

  Valley Few: In making inventory of the contents of a table drawer I described a number of Valley Few’s dresses. I would now wish to remind you in particular of one decorated with homemade rabbits, and that most of the others are either plain white or in small utility checks. He also had one of a dark solid blue with red trim at the collar. Relative to the clothing of the rest of the family, there are a great many babies’ dresses, I believe for two good reasons. One is that they are kept on for the use of one child after another. The other is that there is so little money to spend. Because there is so little; none at all really for clothes except by luck in the fall; clothes have to be an afterthought, and because of that, in turn, they can be a steady undertone of desire: so that from month to month, with now a dime and now even a quarter to spare, the first thing to come to Mrs. Gudger’s mind would be what is to her the most immediate need secondary to food: decent clothes and enough of them. And because there is so little to be had for that money, she is best likely to satisfy herself in the purchase of the materials for one complete garment If this is so, it is of the pattern of her particular care for clothes; it turns up in neither of the other families.

  Valley Few’s dresses are like Ellen Woods’ and those of most babies here. There is ordinarily no genital genteelism. The dress hangs just to the crotch; it is fastened by one button at the nape of the neck and is open down the back. Often there is some attempt to make it pretty with a collar or pockets or both, or a belt; about as often, it is completely plain. Crawling along the floor, trailing the whole cape to one side, a baby has the comic and foolish look of a dog who has been dressed up by children.

  Pearl has a dress made of flour sacks, another made of a fertilizer sack, and a third made of brown-and-blue checked gingham. This is properly her sunday dress, but she is fond of clothes, and is allowed to wear it a fair amount on week-days, along with her brown glass beads, her ring and her white slippers. There will be no time in this volume to tell much of personalities, but I think I will say a little briefly, here. Pearl is much more conscious of clothes than are Louise, Flora Merry Lee, and Katy, who are all near her age, and her mother’s casualness is also significant. Mrs. Woods and her mother are of the sexually loose ‘stock’ of which most casual country and smalltown whoredom comes; and the child, already showing the signs, is effortlessly let drift her own way. I would not suggest that any ‘attitude’ towards this, on your part or mine, is sound enough to be worth striking; I am merely remarking a detail of the childhood of Pearl’s mother and grandmother, who I may add appeared to be by far the best satisfied and satisfying women, of their class or of any other, whom I happened to see during this time in the south.

  At home her younger half-brother Thomas goes naked some of the time. More often he wears a wornout undershirt which about covers his ribs, or a dress made by cutting off one end of a broadstriped pillowsack and cutting in the other end holes for his head and arms.

  Mrs. Gudger has exceedingly little money and an intense determination to hold her family’s clothing within a certain level of respectability; Mrs. Woods has exceedingly little money and is relaxed into a level of improvisations, perhaps more fully, with less mixture of calicos, than is average; Mrs. Ricketts, with exceedingly little money as compared even with them, has done still otherwise.

  Several years ago, judging by appearance, she bought a quantity of a cloth which, though not intended or ordinarily used for clothes, seemed feasible to her: a great many yards of coarse and unbleached cotton, the cheapest available material of which sheets and pillowcases are made at home: in a color somewhere between ivory, pale gray and white: and of this sheeting nearly all the clothes are made, varied only once or twice in its own designing, and by a few worn-out home-made Sunday clothes, and by a few equally worn-out store clothes. It seems worth noticing that the old Sunday clothes are much more than ordinarily talented, careful, hopeful and ambitious, and that with one or two exceptions the sheeting clothes are almost as if vindictively plain. All this sheeting is deeply grained in the colors and maculations of clay, dark grease and sweat and is stiff with this dirt, and is a good deal patched, in more sheeting, in floursack cloth, and in blue shirttail.

  Clair Bell wears a short dress, halfway down the thighs, made of a plain straight sack of this sheeting, frayed holes for the arms and head, and alternate with it, a dress of the same material more tenderly made, with a flared skirt, a belt, and an effort at tucking at the throat, abandoned midway. On sundays, or when she is being taken to town, or sometimes when there is ‘company,’ she is taken aside and a closefitting pair of pink rayon drawers are drawn onto her. These are among the only three garments which give any evidence of recent purchase: everything else seems at least three or four years old.

  Katy and Flora Merry Lee are of the same size and use each other’s clothes. They have between them perhaps three dresses made of the sheeting, with short sleeves and widened skirts, and shirts or blouses made of thin washed flour sacking, and each has a pair of sheeting overalls. They wear what I presume are floursack drawers, pinned as a diaper is. They sometimes wear the shirts with the overalls; at other times, excepting the overalls, they go naked. They have no ‘sunday’ clothes; for sunday they wear the least unclean of these dresses, and a few cheap pins, necklaces and lockets. During the week as well as on sunday they sometimes tie dirty blue ribbons into their hair, and sometimes shoestrings.

  Richard and Garvrin have between them a pair of very old ready-made overalls, and three or four shirts made some of sheeting and some of floursacks. Each has a pair of sheeting overalls, and a pair of corduroy pants from which the nap is almost entirely rubbed and washed. They fairly often wear the shirts; more often, they go naked except for the overalls or corduroys. On sundays the corduroys are brushed off and the week’s damages are mended, and they wear these with frayed nearly clean white shirts which are saved from week to week, and with frazzled ties.

  Paralee, for daily work, usually wears what was once her sunday dress. It is a transparent* blue cotton covered with white and faded gold circles, with a carefully made collar, torn, narrow lace at the sleeves, and at the breast a destroyed ruffle of curtain lace and dirty blue ribbons. The dress is torn at the shoulders and along the sides of the back.

  Margaret at her daily work wears sometimes a long wide dark skirt and floursack or sheeting blouse, sometimes a sheeting dress. This latter was, I am quite sure, designed as a ‘best’ dress. It is carefully made throughout to hand and to fit well, and at the left breast and shoulder and across the back of the shoulders, hanging half down the back, is a broad sort of combined collar-and-cape of faded blue cotton.

  Paralee sometimes wears black glass beads on weekdays as well as on sundays. Margaret seldom does.

  Their clothing too is I presume interchangeable, though there was no overlapping during the time I knew them.

  Margaret has two sunday dresses. One was made at home. It is of thin and very cheap white cotton, unskilfully gathered at the breast to a nakedly plain, round, very carefully hemmed t
hroat. It is belted, but does not fit her or hang successfully, and the coarse and somewhat dirty undergarment shows through. Her other dress must I am sure have been bought ready-made and at terrible expense in their scale of money. It is an imitation of the elaborate sort of dress a ‘well-preserved,’ dark-haired, elegantly well-to-do, middle-aged woman might at some uncertain time during the past twenty years have worn formally: black transparent crepe, sewn over thickly with a coruscation of small jet beads. But the elaborations are worn down into an almost indistinguishable chaos; the black undergarment is torn in several places; many of the beads are lost, or hang loose on their threads; and the cloth is sweated open irreparably and alarmingly at the armpits, so that when the arms are raised, there is in this somberness the sudden bright dreadfulness of twin yawning cats.

  Paralee is much more fortunate. She has a new dress, and it is fully and exactly of the kind which middle class girls of her age wear in town on Saturday afternoons. And yet it isn’t exactly of that kind. In the wish for brilliance and emphasis and propriety, everything is overstepped. The orange and blue and white stripes are far more anxiously bold than any worn by town girls, save now and then a negress, and the fit is almost too sharp and sporting, and the strength, deftness and flexibility of her body betray her, and the dress, and her deeply tanned, rural, strongly freckled face, her too-carefully-done hair, the use with this garment of all the jewelery she has, and above all the excitement, the blend of confidence and terror, and the desperately searching hope which blaze in her eyes, all these betray her still more hopelessly, so that she would inspire the fear inspired by all who are over-eager or who would ‘climb,’ and seems almost as if she had stolen the dress.

  These are the clothes which these girls must wear to attract men and to qualify as marriageable. Many girls marry at sixteen, not a few at fifteen or even fourteen; nearly all are married by seventeen; by the time they are eighteen, if they are unmarried, they are drifted towards the spinster class, a trouble to their parents, an embarrassment to court and be seen with, a dry agony to themselves: Paralee is nineteen; and Margaret is twenty. Margaret has already the mannerisms and much of the psychic balance of a middle-aged woman of the middle class in the north.

  Mrs. Ricketts, sunday:

  A long and full skirt of dead black cotton held at the hip by a safe-typin. A blouse of the same material, plain at the throat, sleeves to the elbows. No trimming nor any kind of surplus cloth. Spots and streaks, reasserting themselves through the drying moisture with which she has tried to erase them. The hem fallen in a part of the skirt. No ornaments of any kind. No hat, or a straw hat (ready-made). It is thus also that she dressed to ride to Cookstown when cotton was taken to gin.

  Mrs. Woods, in Cookstown:

  She stands a little apart from everyone in the dark drugstore waiting until the doctor shall be ready to attend to her abscessed tooth, while the men at the soda fountain are turned and watch her. She wears no hat, nor stockings, nor shoes. Her dress is made at home of thin pillowslip cotton, plain at the throat, cut deep for nursing, without sleeves, reaching a little below her knees, belted in with a belt of narrow glazed cracked scarlet leather, all edges of the material frayed, a deep tear along the back, another through which her right knee shows, the design of the whole very much that of the plainest sort of nightgown, the whole fabric a welter of sweat and dirt. She rests her weight on one foot and studies the other while they look at her. She is noticeably though not yet heavily pregnant. She wears a ‘slip’ beneath this dress but the materials of both are so thin that her dark sweated nipples are stuck to them and show through, and it is at her nipples, mainly, that the men keep looking. It is thus also that she is dressed on sundays.

  Mrs. Woods’ mother:

  A wide short striped skirt, the stripes blue and white: thick-ribbed black cotton stockings, wrinkled on her legs: Keds, the ankles patched, the soles worn through: a man’s work shirt, so exceedingly old it is almost white: a red bandana tied at the throat: a man’s large new yellow straw hat.

  Past:

  Mrs. Gudger has, besides the magenta straw she wears at present, two other hats.

  One: an omelet shape of crimson straw slanted through with a thick stripped white quill, the coloring ruined with rain. It is at fifteenth remove an imitation of those ‘smart’ hats which set off ‘smart,’ incisive, leisured, vicious faces.

  Two: this I have formerly described. It is the great-brimmed, triumphal crown I found ruined yet saved in a table drawer, which had been so patiently home made. I will remark now that in its breadth and elaborateness it is reminiscent of the hats which were stylish around 1900, and that it is of such a particular splendor that I am fairly sure it was her wedding hat, made for her, perhaps as a surprise, by her mother. She was sixteen then; her skin would have been white, and clear of wrinkles, her body and its postures and her eyes even more pure than they are today; and she would have been happy, and confident enough in her beauty, to wear it without fear: and in her long white home made marriage dress and in that glory of a hat, with her sister Emma, seven years old, marveling up at her, and her mother standing away and approving her while her image slowly turned upon itself on blank floor and in a glass, she was such a poem as no human being shall touch.

  Education

  Education

  In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again: and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility towards human life; towards the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of error, and of God.

  Every breath his senses shall draw, every act and every shadow and thing in all creation, is a mortal poison, or is a drug, or is a signal or symptom, or is a teacher, or is a liberator, or is liberty itself, depending entirely upon his understanding: and understanding,* and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world’s bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.

  This is no place to dare all questions that must be asked, far less to advance our tentatives in this murderous air, nor even to qualify so much as a little the little which thus far has been suggested, nor even either to question or to try to support my qualifications to speak of it at all: we are too near one of the deepest intersections of pity, terror, doubt, and guilt; and I feel that I can say only, that ‘education,’ whose function is at the crisis of this appalling responsibility, does not seem to me to be all, or even anything, that it might be, but seems indeed the very property of the world’s misunderstanding, the sharpest of its spearheads in every brain: and that since it could not be otherwise without destroying the world’s machine, the world is unlikely to permit it to be otherwise.

  In fact, and ignorant though I am, nothing, not even law, nor property, nor sexual ethics, nor fear, nor doubtlessness, nor even authority itself, all of which it is the business of education to cleanse the brain of, can so nearly annihilate me with fury and with horror; as the spectacle of innocence, of defenselessness, of all human hope, brought steadily in each year by the millions into the machineries of the teachings of the world, in which the man who would conceive of and who would dare attempt even the beginnings of what ‘teaching’ must be could not exist two months clear of a penitentiary: presuming even that his own perceptions, and the courage of his perceptions, were not a poison as deadly at least as those poisons he would presume to drive out: or the very least of whose achievements, supposing he cared truly not only to hear himself speak but to be understood, would be a broken heart.*

  For these and other reasons it would seem to me mistaken to decry the Alabama public schools, or even to say that they are ‘worse’ or ‘less good’ than schools elsewhere: or to be particularly wholehearted in the regret that these tenants are subjected only to a few years of this education: for they would be at a disadvantage if they had more of it, and a
t a disadvantage if they had none, and they are at a disadvantage in the little they have; and it would be hard and perhaps impossible to say in which way their disadvantage would be greatest.

  School was not in session while I was there. My research on this subject was thin, indirect, and deductive. By one way of thinking it will seem for these reasons worthless: by another, which I happen to trust more, it may be sufficient.

  I saw, for instance, no teachers: yet I am quite sure it is safe to assume that they are local at very least to the state and quite probably to the county; that most of them are women to whom teaching is either an incident of their youth or a poor solution for their spinsterhood; that if they were of much intelligence or courage they could not have survived their training in the State Normal or would never have undertaken it in the first place; that they are saturated in every belief and ignorance which is basic in their country and community; that any modification of this must be very mild indeed if they are to survive as teachers; that even if, in spite of all these screenings, there are superior persons among them, they are still again limited to texts and to a system of requirements officially imposed on them; and are caught between the pressures of class, of the state, of the churches, and of the parents, and are confronted by minds already so deeply formed that to liberate them would involve uncommon and as yet perhaps undiscovered philosophic and surgical skill. I have only sketched a few among dozens of the facts and forces which limit them; and even so I feel at liberty to suggest that even the best of these, the kindly, or the intuitive, the socalled natural teachers, are exceedingly more likely than not to be impossibly handicapped both from without and within themselves, and are at best the servants of unconscious murder; and of the others, the general run, that if murder of the mind and spirit were statutory crimes, the law, in its customary eagerness to punish the wrong person,* might spend all its ingenuity in the invention of deaths by delayed torture and never sufficiently expiate the enormities which through them, not by their own fault, have been committed.