by Walker Evans
But it is now Sunday morning; late; we sit high in the Hotel Tutwiler; behind the gray of an opposite screen two floors beneath us a woman is shifting from nightgown through nakedness to day clothing but the sun is spread strongly enough on that tall windowed wall that we can see scarcely anything; little pennons and serpents of black smoke and white steam wave like handkerchiefs above the complex roofs of the lowspread city; it is transferred to us how hot the tar-paper roofs of these buildings are beneath the sun by a special sort of pallor on their blackness; our fan is drilling a steady hole and column of relative coolness straight from the center of the ceiling to the center of the floor:
We found out what train Walker would follow me down on and drank some more sloe gin tepid while we finished reading the Spanish news and the funny papers. I decided to shave and put on a clean shirt We tried the radio and all we could get was church services. Down beneath us on the nearly smokeless hot sunlight, some tower of bells was still belting out a hymn tune. I had intended to get away by the middle of the morning but it was hot and we talked a good deal, and by the time we got downstairs I saw that I might as well eat first and get one more good meal inside me before resuming the bad ones that were all I could get where I was going back to.
In the bright Sunday noon the airconditioned coffee shop of this business-men’s big hotel had the deaf horror of a vacuum. Two sunday-clothed middle-class southerners and their adolescent daughter ate at a hard black table in the dead middle of the room, talking very little. When they spoke it was as if they were embarrassed at the loudness of their quieted voices; and their silver was sharp and loud in the brittle cold of ugly air. Waitresses stood at the walls in pastel-shaded brittle dresses and hard, fresh makeup, useless and resdess but restrained, their restraint making them still more angry at spending a Sunday this way. We ate a large, cold, expensive lunch slowly and with sick gentleness, the way you might unbandage treat and dress some complicated wound on your body, and it was one-forty before I finally got going.
Twenty-four hours of every day for weeks now I had been in the company of another person, and now I was alone, driving in this bright day. I knew now how much greater the strain had been than I had been able, while under it, to realize; for I have never known more complete pleasure and relief at being alone. Thinking over the good day and night Walker would be spending alone in Birmingham, I was almost equally glad on his account. The heat and the pleasure together softened me all over and made me drowsy and I lay down into the driving as if into a hot bath, paying very little attention to anything except the road in front and in my mirror, and pleasurably holding the car, along these first sixty miles of narrow and twisted concrete, up against the thin margin of danger. Except for tobacco and the pleasure of speed, almost none of my appetites were awake; I was just watching the road disinvolve itself from the concealing country and run under me with its noise and the tires and the motor. From time to time I would go over some part of some piece of music I knew, and I enjoyed it, but without any real edge. I knew I very badly wanted, not to say needed, a piece of tail, and remembered the place ahead of me where we had talked with the whore; but neither the want nor the need nor her proximity much impressed me: I felt only that it is too bad so seldom to feel the want of a thing at its keenest when it is available. As I got nearer the filling-station-lunch-house where we had seen her, my mind ran on ahead and slowed around her. It lounged around and talked dialect with her and made out what it could about her and where she had come from; then it took her out to an iron bed in one of the pine log cabins out back. The sun stenciled an astronomical chart on the drawn, cracked windowshade and slivered through chinks in the logs, and in the odor and shade of heated pine a wasp aligned his nervous noise. I found her body heavy, sour, and wet with the heat on the squealing bed, spongy and so discouraging I was good for nothing, while she grunted lines like got it in good, honey, and, sock it to me, shugah. So, as the place came in sight, sooner than I had expected it, I slowed the car only a little, watching out for her with the tagends of sharp but sleepy appetite on the chance that my eyes would tell me different from my imagination. She was loafed up heavily against the flank of a Plymouth, one thick thigh lifted, lowheeled slipper on the running-board, loosening out like hair her thick whore’s dialect upon the white-hatted driver as he drank his dope, and I was glad for good and all that I was not going to move in on that piece of head-cheese in such a guy’s tracks, and stepped up the car again. It was the same with Estelle, thinking of her now: not worth the sacrifice of this solitude however well it probably wouldn’t work out, and in spite of the vapor-lamp quality of her lavender and inappeasable eyes. I didn’t even slow and go through the street her store was on but went straight on through the middle of town and cut south; and as I drew out fast along the road south of Cherokee City, began to realize where it was I was going in such a hurry and what day it was, and slowed down a little, and then I really did begin to realize it Of all the christbitten places to spend a few free hours alone, and of all the days to do it on. I thought of driving on back to Cherokee City and putting up at some hotel there, for any town is a pleasure until you know it well enough to hate it or like it, and I knew neither of these towns that well; but I knew I was going to Centerboro and no further, and kept right on going there, on road and through country now that I knew by heart, raising a long ruche of orange dust behind me, and wondering what I might read or write in the hotel room, or whether to get hold of some liquor, or whether I might not go deep enough down into the Prairie to make it safe and manage to get into some negro church meeting; and by now here I was, much sooner than I expected, god knows much sooner than I wanted, already piercing the shallow outskirts of Centerboro, and a little ahead of me would be the main street and all the narrow, mean white faces that turned slowly after me watching me and wishing to God I would do something that would give them the excuse,* and the sun blistering down on the business block: I brought the car down to a slow float and swung into it.
It was different from what I had foreseen, for I had thought of it in terms of weekdays, and this was Sunday. There was no one at all in sight in the block, and no cars moving, only two parked cars so cooked in the sun they looked as if they might take fire of it any minute. There are no trees in that block, and not even the shadow of the low buildings even partially shut the wound; the sun was hitting every surface in sight and all of them were bare and hard, and the street and walks were white. The light shrank my eyes half shut, and in the street between the two lines of buildings it was like lime working in a trough. A small hound took the street trying to go slow because he felt slow and was born slow, but using his feet staccato because the pavement hurt them. It was as hot as all the days of the week piled one on top of another, or as if they were a series of burning-glasses through which this Sunday struck. As soon as I slowed and swung into this street the sweat sprang out and ran on me, and I suddenly knew what a terrible event a summer sunday is in a southern small town, and how strongly influential on its victims and their civilization, and that for miles and hundreds on hundreds of miles all around me in any direction I cared to think, not one human being or animal in five hundred was stirring, nor even the leaves of the trees and the crops except in the slow twisting of some white and silent nightmare. There was nothing in the air that could be called a wind or even a breeze: the air lay all over this land like flesh, and when it moved at all the movement was senseless, without direction and frightening, like the flexions of an amoeba. The sun had lost its edge and size and occupied half the sky with a platinum light that shriveled the eye, and at any horizon along the road I had traveled I now remembered the dry, thin steam that had been drawn in toward the sun.
The wind of the plain speed of movement had walled me away as though with the glass of a bathysphere from the reality of this heat; but now the glass was broken and the deep sea stood in upon me; I was a part once more of the pace and nature of this country.
Slowed a long way down into this n
early noiseless floating at five miles an hour I went both ways the whole length of the main street in the shade of the trees that overhung nearly all but the business block and there was not a stir of life anywhere: every last soul in all these shaded, jigsawed, wooden houses must be dead asleep under the weight of the hot greasy Sunday dinner in shaded rooms, not even a sheet over them, whose added weight would break them open; and the houses themselves, withdrawn in their dark green, half-bald, twiggy lawns, were numb with sleep as ruins in the dappling and scarce twisting of their tree shade. All the porches were empty, beyond any idea of emptiness. Their empty rockers stood in them; their empty hammocks hung in them. Through windows could be seen details of rooms furnished twenty to forty years ago, and at the same time the window surfaces gave back pieces of street and patterns of leaves on light. Not even a negress cook stole out delicately by the back way in her white slippers on the lawn and her hat and her white sunday dress; she was gone long ago, or asleep by the simmering of the kitchen range. It was silent as the crossing of an old-fashioned ferryboat, where no motor was used and the flat barge, attached to a rope, is swung on the bias of the flat stream’s relaxation. On the cool, gray-painted, shaded boards of one of these middle-class porches my body stretched its length and became the loose and milky flesh of its childhood who listened, hours long in the terrible space and enlargement of silence, while the air lay in the metal magnolia leaves asleep, once in a while moving its dreaming mouth on the shapeless word of a dream or lifting and twisting one heavy thigh and creating in the leaves a chaffering and dry chime, and I, this eleven-year-old, male, half-shaped child, pressing between the sharp hip bone and the floor my erection, and, thinking and imagining what I was able of the world and its people and my grief and hunger and boredom, lay shaded from the bird-stifling brilliance of the afternoon and was sullen and sick, nearly crying, striking over and over again the heel of my bruised hand against the sooty floor and sweating and shaking my head in a sexual and murderous anger and despair: and the thought of my grandfather, whose house this now was, and of his house itself, and of each member of his family, and of all I knew so keenly and could never say and of those I too did damage to, and of the brainless strength and mystery behind all that blaze of brightness, all at once had me so powerfully by the root of the throat that I wished I might never have been born: and then this passed, all this, as quickly as it had come, and I was again in Centerboro driving on the slow flotation of silence, door by door and yard by yard in all its detail home by home in a town I hated that was drained, drenched, drowned in the desperateness of sunday. It held even those who were awake under its power, the few, the few, stragglers in the shaded quarters of the street, whose feet dragged in the rich boredom as if in flypaper, making a loud shuffle or swinging scrape on the silence and whose voices here in the open, white-hot air, were subdued and sick to hear. There was no more reason to be walking than to be on beds in the square shadow of screened and blinded rooms. There was not only nothing to do but nothing to talk about and nothing to think about or to have the vitality to desire; there was not even any reason to exist, nor was there enough energy to care that there was no reason. I knew that miles out the red road at the swimming pool there would be girls whose bright legs, arms and breasts in the thick clay water warmth would be comforting to look at as they lolled or lifted, but I knew too that they would be inaccessible, and that I would hate them, and myself, if they were accessible, and that even in their laughter and flirtation there would be the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south, everything between Birmingham and the smallest farmhouse, and the whole of a continent, and much of the earth. It was like returning several thousand years after the end of the world, when nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth as it twisted up, like a drowned body swollen light and lifted to the surface, the surfaces of its body and the exactitudes of those scars and lesions it had sustained in the course of its active life. But it was worse. For this was not the end of the world, it was contemporary, the summer of nineteen-thirty-six, and this dread was imposed by sunday, only for a space, and this was what life was like, the only world we have. Tomorrow of these millions each single, destroyed individual would resume the shape of his living just where he had left off; and there was nothing pleasing in the memory of that sure fact.
I went into Gafíhey’s Lunch. It was nearly cool and its fan drowsed. At the far end of the counter three hard-built, crazy-eyed boys of eighteen lounged in a slow collapse like dough, talking low in sexual voices and sniggering without enthusiasm; sick and desperate with nothing to do and with the rotting which the rightborn energy of their souls could by no chance have escaped. They looked at me with immediate and inevitable enmity. I looked back impersonally, almost wishing there might for their sake and mine be a fight, though I was unable to hate them and am not yet fully over my physical cowardice. They resumed their talk, glancing at me once in a while. I could not hear what they said but by its tone I knew it had nothing to do with me. I decided to assume no disguise in mannerism, but to be just as I was, which was what they would hate, and to let them make what they wanted of it and to take whatever might come. I ate a tomato sandwich as slowly as I possibly could and then another and drank three coca-colas fast and one slow and smoked three cigarettes, while I looked at all the no-credit wisecrack signs, extinct dance announcements, ads, tobacco cans, and packages of tobacco and candy and fig newtons and cigarettes that I could see in front of me and in the mirror. The tone of the talk was not changing and did not change. I was just as glad as not and then I knew I was a little gladder than not. I had nothing against them, I would have got hell beat out of me by even one of them, to say nothing of three, and after such a fight I could have got nowhere with work from this town. I bought two packs of cigarettes and went out into the silent sun again. There was in the bright light a sensation of shadow and I looked at the sky and it was unchanged, stark naked, and I looked lower. Huge thunderheads were barely lifted on the horizon, their convolutions a scarcely discernible brain-shape of silver in the strength of the light They were no use; they were a trick a drought sun likes to play; and gets away with over and over again. They ride up looking rich as doom, and darken; the look of the earth is already dark purple, olivegreen and wealthy under their shadow and the air goes cold and waits. They let loose drops as big as teacups, about a dozen to the square rod, of which you hear the palpable splash and break; and list off to one side. The sun, which has meanwhile lowered a very little, shines again and the dirt is hard and blue where the drops have hit it; it steams and stinks as if you had spit on a stove. I got on into the car. It had collected such heat while it stood that my eyes were almost immediately blind with sweat and I could feel the tickling of the sweat like rapid insects as it ran on my belly, but I didn’t start the car; I was unable to move. I sat looking out through the windshield at the white concrete in the sun, and did not light the cigarette that grew wet and weak between my fingers. There was nothing in the world I wanted so much as a girl, but she must not be a whore or a bitch, nor any girl I knew well either, but a girl nearly new to me. Between us we had only newly established physical understanding and confidence and much was still exploratory, and she would know enough to be quiet and to talk lazily. We would not try anything drastic but would he in the shade where the grass was short and cold, and perhaps drink weak drinks slowly, fully clothed but without many clothes on in all this heat, and very lazily meddle around with each other’s bodies, and talk some. It would be pleasant if we were in the course of becoming in love with each other, so long as that wasn’t too strenuous, and this fact would from time to time overtake our cool and lazy, semierotic talk with its serious and honorable joy. This girl would have a good body in a thin, white cotton dress, and her flesh would have the talent for being cool no matter how closely you touched it, in this hot afternoon, and she would feel as much as I did the seaweight of broad leaves the summer had brought out
above us and how they hung on the air, and the sense of the damned south spread under and around us, miles and hundreds of miles, millions and millions of people, in this awful paralysis of Sunday, and the sense of death. And if, putting my forehead against her cold throat and feeling against my face through her dress the balance and goodness of her breasts, knowing suddenly my weakness and the effort and ugliness and sorrow of the beautiful world, I should almost in silence cry the living blood out of myself, this girl would not only know what it was about but would know that in the only way I would stand for anyone to know it, and we would still be companions in the fall of the afternoon, though we might never find such good of each other again.