by Walker Evans
You realized what the poor foolishness of your husband had let you all in for, shouting to you all to come out, children sent skinning barefooted and slaver-mouthed down the road and the path to corral the others, the Woods and the Gudgers, all to stand there on the porch as you were in the average sorrow of your working dirt and get your pictures made; and to you it was as if you and your children and your husband and these others were stood there naked in front of the cold absorption of the camera in all your shame and pitiableness to be pried into and laughed at; and your eyes were wild with fury and shame and fear, and the tendons of your little neck were tight, the whole time, and one hand continually twitched and tore in the rotted folds of your skirt like the hand of a little girl who must recite before adults, and there was not a thing you could do, nothing, not a word of remonstrance you could make, my dear, my love, my little crazy, terrified child; for your husband was running this show, and a wife does as she is told and keeps quiet about it: and so there you stood, in a one-piece dress made of sheeting, that spread straight from the hole where the head stood through to the knee without belting, so that you knew through these alien, town-dressed eyes that you stood as if out of a tent too short to cover your nakedness: and the others coming up: Ivy, blandly, whom nothing could ever embarrass, carrying her baby, her four-year child in a dress made of pillowsack that came an inch below his navel; he was carrying a doll; Pearl, with her elegant skin, her red-brown sexy eyes; Miss-Molly: and Walker setting up the terrible structure of the tripod crested by the black square heavy head, dangerous as that of a hunchback, of the camera; stooping beneath cloak and cloud of wicked cloth, and twisting buttons; a witchcraft preparing, colder than keenest ice, and incalculably cruel: and at least you could do, and you did it, you washed the faces of your children swiftly and violently with rainwater, so that their faces were suddenly luminous stuck out of the holes of their clothes, the slightly dampened hair swept clean of the clear and blessed foreheads of these flowers; and your two daughters, standing there in the crowding porch, yielding and leaning their heads profound against the pulling and entanglements, each let down their long black hair in haste and combed and rearrayed it (but Walker made a picture of this; you didn’t know; you thought he was still testing around; there you all are, the mother as before a firing squad, the children standing like columns of an exquisite temple, their eyes straying, and behind, both girls, bent deep in the dark shadow somehow as if listening and as in a dance, attending like harps the black flags of their hair): and we, the men meanwhile, Woods and George and I (Fred was in the lineup, talking over and over about being in the funny papers and about breaking the camera with his face, and laughing and laughing and laughing), we were sitting at the roots of a tree talking slowly and eating one small peach after another and watching, while I was spreading so much quiet and casualness as I could; but all this while it was you I was particularly watching, Mrs. Ricketts; you can have no idea with what care for you, what need to let you know, oh, not to fear us, not to fear, not to hate us, that we are your friends, that however it must seem it is all right, it is truly and all the way all right: so, continually, I was watching for your eyes, and whenever they turned upon me, trying through my own and through a friendly and tender smiling (which sickens me to disgust to think of) to store into your eyes some knowledge of this, some warmth, some reassurance, that might at least a little relax you, that might conceivably bring you to warmth, to any ease or hope of smiling; but your eyes upon me, time after time, held nothing but the same terror, the same feeling at very most, of ‘if you are our friend, lift this weight and piercing from us, from my children’ (for it was of them and of your husband that you had this care, at all times; I don’t believe one could ever persuade you such a thing can exist as a thought for yourself ); and at length, and just once, a change, a softening of expression; your eyes softened, lost all their immediate dread, but without smiling; but in a heart-broken and infinite yet timid reproachfulness, as when, say, you might have petted a little animal in a trap, beyond its thorntoothed fierceness, beyond its fear, to quiet, in which it knows, of your blandishments: you could spring free the jaws of this iron from my wrist; what is this hand, what are these kind eyes; what is this gentling hand on the fur of my forehead: so that I let my face loose of any control and it showed you just what and all I felt for you and of myself: it must have been an ugly and puzzling grimace, God knows no use or comfort to you; and you looked a moment and withdrew your eyes, and gazed patiently into the ground, in nothing but sorrow, your little hand now loosened in your dress.
If I were going to use these lives of yours for ‘Art,’ if I were going to dab at them here, cut them short here, make some trifling improvement over here, in order to make you worthy of The Saturday Review of Literature; I would just now for instance be very careful of Anticlimax which, you must understand, is just not quite nice. It happens in life of course, over and over again, in fact there is no such thing as a lack of it, but Art, as all of you would understand if you had had my advantages, has nothing to do with Life, or no more to do with it than is thoroughly convenient at a given time, a sort of fair-weather friendship, or gentleman’s agreement, or practical idealism, well understood by both parties and by all readers. However, this is just one of several reasons why I don’t care for art, and I shan’t much bother, I’m afraid. There was an anticlimax. The picture-making was still going on when your children, George, came along, you, Louise, and you, Junior, and Burt. You had been sent for; there were going to be pictures taken; and you came so late, not only because your house was so far and because Burt was so slow, whimpering and crying trying to keep up with you; but also because your mother had taken time to wash you all and to put a clean dress on you, Louise, and a ribbon in your hair. It was the best dress you had, a prettier one than I was to see you wear again; it looked almost though not quite like the ‘party-dress’ of a little girl your age in town, of people whose mothers are so nice they would never speak to yours unless about putting less starch in the cuffs, please: white, and standing-out, and so soft, and translucent in the sunshine like your own soul, and one could only tell it from a really good party-dress by the intense sleaziness and fragility of the cloth, through which your body was visible, and the safety-pinned floursack you wore for a clout; and by the ribbling hard narrow cheapness of the ribbon, and meagerness of the sash which was trying to look like a great blown sunlit bow at the small of your back and yet to save five or ten cents: and by the stitching, which was done partly by a sewingmachine with the gallops and partly by hand: and by a sort of uncertain embarrassedness in which this whole sweet artifact set itself around the animal litheness of your country body. And then, too, you yourself gave it away, Louise, for your skin was a special quiet glowing gold color, which can never come upon the skin of nicely made little girls in towns and cities, but only to those who came straight out of the earth and are continually upon it in the shining of the sun, active and sweating, and toughening into work that has already made your clear ten-year-old mouth resolute and unquestioning of personal desire: your skin shines like a sober lamp in outdoor noon in all this whiteness; your feet and legs are bare, they were washed, but already they carry the fine orange pollen of the clay; it is entirely obvious that you are not what this dress is pretending you are, Louise, and that the whole thing is a put-up job. But as a matter of fact I am noticing all this less than your eyes. Again, as with the Ricketts children, I am slow, but even so, it would be hard to see them at all and not have lost at least half your soul to them, even before you knew it: and already, though as yet I scarcely realize it, we have begun this looking-at-each-other of which I am later to become so conscious I am liable to trembling when I am in the same room with you. It is scary: scary as hell, and even more mysterious than frightening; and so tentative as L who am a painfully tentative person, have never been before: yet somehow there is nothing shy about it, in either of us: it is frequent and, through all its guards, wide open: but what it is o
pen upon, Lord only knows: there is no other blankness like you, like these temperatureless, keen, serene and wise and pure gray eyes of yours, set so wide, between your square young temples: and this as I said I am beginning only very faintly to realize now; so that I have become quiet in your presence and watchful, yet hardly know this beyond some feeling: here is a good child, here is a damned thoroughly good child. And so you three stand there, out at the side, near me, and near your father; Junior flickering glances at me which I fear in another way, shooing the flies from the scabs of one foot with the other foot, which is also scabby; Burt sniffling and beginning to talk to himself a little; and you, Louise, between them solid and stolid, looking straight ahead of you (I can rarely tell where your eyes are focused, save when they look at mine), and; well, and there you all are, in good order, under the shade of the tree. Your father will not let you get into the pictures on the porch: your picture will be later, to yourselves. ( He is not unfriendly or ‘pointed’ about this, just open, and quiet.) And Mrs. Ricketts has seen you prepared as you are, and separate from those on the porch, and she is all tightened up again, and I know I have lost whatever shameful little I had gained for her, and it is now hard for me to meet her eyes at all, the whole thing has become so complicated and so shameful. (It occurs to me now as I write that I was as helpless as she; but I must confess I don’t want to make anything of it.)
So in the course of time the work is done; they drift apart along the porch and break loose along the dirt of the yard, in a sort of relaxation and loudness after tension: the children, that is; Mrs. Ricketts goes directly into the house; and now George has begun to set things in motion for his picture. He doesn’t want it around here at the side of the house where everything is trashed and ugly, but with a good background; and in this and in the posing of the picture he gets his way. It is perfectly in one of the classical traditions: that of family snapshots made on summer Sunday afternoons thirty to forty years ago, when the simple eyes of family-amateurs still echoed the daguerreotype studios. The background is a tall bush in disheveling bloom, out in front of the house in the hard sun: George stands behind them all, one hand on Junior’s shoulder; Louise (she has first straightened her dress, her hair, her ribbon) stands directly in front of her father, her head about to his breastbone, her hands crossed quietly at the joining of her thighs, looking very straight ahead, her eyes wide open in spite of the sun; Burt sits at her feet with his legs uncrossing and his mind wandering ( Louise had helped him cross his legs, but no one can keep either them or his attention in place); and there again they are; the three older of them thoroughly and quietly serious, waiting for the shutter to release them: and it is while I am watching you here, Louise, that suddenly yet very quietly I realize a little more clearly that I am probably going to be in love with you: while I am watching you in this precious imposture of a dress, standing up the strength of your father and looking so soberly and so straight into the plexus of the lens through those paralyzing eyes of yours, and being so careful to hold perfectly still, and under sufficient tension of behavior that twice, and then again, I see you swallow, and your mouth twitch a little, trying very hard first not to do this, then to manage it without appearing to move: and it is this sobriety, and stolidity and resolute dutifulness in the sunshine, and the way your mouth and throat worked, which has done the job on me:
And this was the last we had any particular reason to think we would see either of you or any of these others: yet at the very last, just as we left, the unforgiving face, the eyes, of Mrs. Ricketts at her door: which has since stayed as a torn wound and sickness at the center of my chest, and perhaps more than any other thing has insured what I do not yet know: that we shall have to return, even in the face of causing further pain, until that mutual wounding shall have been won and healed, until she shall fear us no further, yet not in forgetfulness but through ultimate trust, through love.
Second
Gradual
And so it was that during the next days, the next weeks, we found ourselves coming back and back while we worked: it was so that we could not drive along the highway past those wandlike posts between which your road leads off along the hill without during the next mile feeling in our chests a pulling eastward alongside and behind us where you were, and a silence or some comment or questioning upon you: this is not a time to tell of this fully as it happened, and I shall here say only, how several times we visited you, Woods, learning you to be the shrewdest and the wisest, to talk to you, to explain ourselves, to seek your help through others to whom you might direct us in this country, and at length to lay ourselves fully before you and to ask you whether among you all, wherever it might be best convenient, we might live, paying our room and board, but with nothing at all changed because we were there: this is not the place to tell of these negotiations, nor of their subtlety and slowness: of how, long before you ceased to mistrust us, you were liking us, and were looking forward to our visits; nor of how very much we came to like and to look forward to you, so that you became in what our whole lives were then involved in a sort of father to us, with this half-recognized yet never made open among the three of us; nor of how a strange sort of community and understanding developed among us which we had with none of the others, in that we were all three of a reflective and skeptical cast of mind, and more particularly in our recognition of one another as criminals: neither these, nor the long and guarded, ironic yet friendly slowdrawling talks we held along the afternoons where you sat half naked on your unmade bed and scratched your body and spoke seditious truths in naïve elaborations of irony and glittered your eyes at us: none of these things are to be developed here; I can only say here how at length it was you who helped us arrange it, that we were to stay, not with you but at your son-in-law’s, where there was room, and also because, well, you fellers know, got me this woman, here, not that I don’t trust yuns (glittering merrily) but some way don’t look right, couple young fellers, old man like me; don’t know’s I could stick up fer my rights, as you might say, if they turned out any funny-business, you might say. You understand, taint I don’t trust yuns, but I know, young feller git too nigh a womurn, may not know hisself what he’s lible to do next. Don’t want to take no chanstes.—Sure; sure: we understand that: lot rather have it that way ourselves. And meantime Ivy is sitting on the scrapheap ice cream chair with her hands in her lap and her thick bare ankles crossed, one foot bent under along the floor, and she is smiling to herself, wearing also the face of one who would say, I am not hearing a word: and indeed we are all smiling back and forth, cautiously and respectfully, and yet openly: There has really been no need in his putting it so delicately: Ivy is a strong, young, goodlooking woman, he is a weakening and nearly old man, and she knows and he does, and we do, and we all know of the knowledge of each other, that she is also a serenely hot and simple nymph, whose eyes go to bed with every man she sees; and of how he has guarded her (but of that more in its place). So now, this is all quickly and simply spoken-of and agreed-upon: we and her husband understand each other in a thoroughly amused and almost affectionate way: and it is as if to seal the agreement, and the needlessness of talking further of it, that he purses his mouth, cocks his body, and baptizes with tobacco-amber the pink half-naked spine-feathered little abominable subpullet who eight feet away is scratching the stone fireplace full of trash and the sourness of dead fire: who, startled, shakes herself squeaking, lets out a wet weak nervous turd, calms, and goes on eating quids and meat rinds.
Reversion
But before this there has occurred an incident which helped determine it: that which I spoke of saying, ‘I remember so well, the first night I spent under one of these roofs,’ when ‘We knew you already, a Utile, some of you, most of you’: it was in a time about at the most intense, the most nearly insane, of our frustrations; a time by which already, according to our employers’ standards of speed, I should have been back at my typewriter and Walker at his tanks, and when we were still involved to suffocation in
the inanities of the ‘contacts’ and obligations they had wished on us, and were under the nearly incommunicable weight of paralysis which constant dissimulation, and slowing to alien pace, beneath the white grates of that summer sky, can bring upon one: and had not as yet found anything which could satisfy our hope, our need, our determination to do truly: so that for the moment we had broken all but entirely and had prescribed ourselves a medicine, a day or two in Birmingham, where, we said to ourselves and to each other, there would be a hotel bathroom black enough for Walker to develop some test interiors; and where we might get help from a New Deal architect whose goodness and understanding Walker felt some certainty of in advance; and where we might get help through some communists I had seen in Tarrant City; but we knew well enough that it was less for these things we went than that we might have the infinite relief of talking more nearly in our own language to others, to those who at least were also spies, and enemies of our enemies; and that we might at the same time use rooms and beds and bathrooms and eat foods and walk through lobbies whose provincial slickness we could simultaneously rest upon and ridicule and in both ways delight in; and that we might walk in the dynamic and heartening streets of a populous city, a relatively condensed and sophisticated civilization, whose ways we might stroll by the hour without the pressure upon us, the following, the swerving, of the slow blue dangerous and secret small-town eyes. We went, we sought out and talked with these people, a regular hemorrhage of talking which must have alarmed them but which also stimulated their own terrific loneliness as well as ours, and which was otherwise useless, we ate bloody foods in chilled rooms and drank liquors, we ate up the streets, their façades, their show-windows, the distributions of traffic and people along these troughs, their lights at night, their odors of soft coal and auto exhausts, the faces and forms of their women, as men starved or dried to husks in a desert might eat and drink, and this cruel great spread-out country town was so grateful a metropolis to me as I had never known since New York was virgin before me at fifteen, and I first walked in the late brilliant June dusk into the blinding marvel of Times Square, watching the Covered Wagon cross the river Platte in electric lights, over and over and over, my heart nearly breaking for joy here where all the shows of every kind on the otherwise rural round planet were spread at once before me, a giant tray of choiring diamonds.