by Walker Evans
I took the car out the Madrid road, and soon the excessive heat was breezed out of it that had assembled in it while it stood frying, and I was lifting a line of dust again while the sun leaned to my left with all its heat still in it and stood like a poultice on my left face and shoulder. All these houses I hurried past were familiar, uhuh; uhuh; on a few of the front porches there were people. They looked after me and the car, turning their heads very slowly, too far gone even subconsciously to be grateful even for so small and meaningless a variant. God damn such a life. I began thinking of the girl again. She was all right but what the hell, fantast. Where was I going to get her and would I want her if I had her. If I was ever in my life going to do one page of decent writing or one good minute of movies that was all in hell I wanted and I knew I wouldn’t; not by any chance; and that didn’t make much difference either. Who the hell am I. I don’t even want a drink, and I don’t even much want to die. I wish there was no one in all my life I had ever come close enough to to harm, or change the life of, the least little bit, and what is there to do about that. There is nothing that exists, or in imagination, that is not much more than beautiful, and a lot I care about that, and existence goes on under pressures more terrible than can ever be done a thing for, and a lot I care again. I could put my foot to the floor right now and when it had built up every possible bit of speed I could twist the car off the road, if possible into a good-sized oak, and the chances are fair that I would kill myself, and I don’t care much about doing that either. That would do Via some bad damage, just as continuing to live with her is bound to, and just as leaving her is bound to. My father, my grandfather, my poor damned tragic, not unusually tragic, bitched family and all these millions of each individual people that only want to live in kindness and decency, you never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and—ing yourself everlastingly and only the hard bastards come through, I’m not born and can’t be that hard apparently and God—Genius and Works of Art anyway and who the hell am I, who in Jesus’ name am I. This is a beautiful country. You can take that and good art and love together and stick them up your—. And if you think da dialectic is going to ring any conceivably worthwhile changes, you can stick that and yourself up after. Just an individualizing intellectual. Bad case of infantilism. And—you, too.
As soon as I got on the slag above Madrid, I started watching for the church. It turned up a couple of miles later. I slowed down and turned to the right between the two peeled posts and took the sharp little hill in high. The man on the porch of the relatively prosperous little farmhouse on my right turned his head after the car. I had wished for better luck, but all right.
The one I wanted to see was Gudger, to himself, or anyhow just with his family. His yellow eyes and very slow way of talking had stayed with me most and some of the things he had said made it possible that he had at least heard of the union. He was the most direct talker and seemed the sorest and most intelligent and I wanted to learn more about him; but I didn’t know where he lived. I wanted to avoid involvement today with the Ricketts and with Woods, and if possible I would be glad if they never knew I was there, for any one of the three families was pretty sure to be sensitive and jealous. If I had to see Gudger at the price of involvement with them or of setting them against me I was not at all sure I wanted to, today.
I went on past the row of gray houses and up the second hill and was on the nearly flat top. Out at a distance I could see Ricketts’ house. I went on quietly, not very fast, looking at the cotton and the side of the road and the road, and checking on the thunderheads that now stood up all over the sky on my right.
Some woods ran by on my left and I saw Woods’ house, back from the road about a hundred yards; nobody in sight except one of the babies on the porch.
I didn’t know about this at all. I didn’t feel like meeting people, talking, bothering anyone or myself a bit. I wanted to look around and keep quiet.
Woods’ low, dry cotton went by and then his corn. His house fell away behind as I took the curve and reappeared a moment in my mirror, and here was the Ricketts’ house right by the road only a hundred yards off, and now, its side porch and all the filthy lard cans and the hard dirt scattered with hen turds; nobody there. I would drive on out the road farther than I had been and see what I could find. I slowed the car a little and lifted my foot and tried to coast by quietly.
Out of the bum, low potatoes on my left one of the Ricketts boys stood up fast and grinning and shouted Hello, grinning with joy all over his face, and sure I had come to see them. The other boy and one of the little girls stood up waving and grinning. I waved and smiled and put on the brakes. They floundered out fast through the plants and ran up to the car close to me at the window, feet on the running-board and quick bodies clamped close against the hot flank of the car, panting with the grinning look of dogs, their eyes looking straight, hard, and happy into mine. (Jesus, what could I ever do for you that would be enough.) For a second I was unable to say anything, and just looked back at them. Then I said, taking care to say it to all three, Is your Daddy around? They said nawsuh he was still to meetnen so was Mama but ParlLee was yer they would git her fer me. I told them, No, thanks, I didn’t want to make any bother because I couldn’t stay any time today; I just wanted to ask their Daddy would he tell me where Mr. George Gudger lived. They said he didn’ live fur, he lived jist a piece down over the heel I could walk it easy. Not wanting to leave the car here to have to come back for, I asked if I could be sure of the path. They told me, You go awn daown the heel twhur Tip Foster’s haouse is ncut in thew his barn nfoller the foot paff awn aout thew the corn tell ye come to a woods, take the one awn the right nanexunawn a liyuf nye come aout at the high een un a cotton patch, cut awn thew the cotton patch, you’ll see the foot paff, ngo awn daown na heeln he’s rat thur, the only haouse. I pretended to be confused more than I was and said, Is they any way of getting an auto in? The other little girl had come up on the other side of the car; she was leaning in the window on her folded, slender arms and looking at me smiling gladly but furtively. They said, Shore, ye tuck it a way awn back most t-tha high way twhur they was a ole gravel pit awn my left that wasn’t used no more (I remembered it), turn to the left in round the gravel pit and a-past the nigger haouses and keep on a-goin’ tell I couldn’ go no furdern I would be thur. I thanked them a lot and told them to tell their Mama and Daddy hello for me and that I hoped I would git up and see them all soon; the little girl on my right was giggling and the other one started to giggle, neither of them in at all an unfriendly way. The towhead of the two boys shook his head and laughed snortily like a horse with pleasure; the other kept his eyes on mine and smiled steadily, and suddenly they all yelled, Yer’s Daddy, Dad Dy! (O Christ!) and ran to meet him.
He was swinging up the road behind us limping on both his equally sore feet and saw who it was and came faster, and I opened the door and lounged one leg out, waiting to get his eye to nod and grin and say hello. He came on up already talking and we shook hands, and I told and asked him what I had told and asked his children (suddenly and vividly remembering how when I was a child that had been repeated over me, taken out of my hands, and how I had known my childhood was mistrusted; and now knowing the children must feel I mistrusted their efforts to be accurate). Ricketts was giving me back five words for every one, grinning and gleaming his eyes and wrinkling his forehead like a house afire and, from behind his eyes, watching for his effect and for my true intention, which he feared. He said he would go along in the car and show me, in such a way, and so many times, that I knew I risked the complete loss of any possible confidence or liking, and of any access to his family, if I should refuse, so I exaggerated the size of the favor he was doing me and thanked him in proportion, and opened the door on his side and turned the car around, waved at the children, and started on back down the road. No distance down the road his wife came toward us barefooted in a black cotton sunday dress. I put my hand up as if to the hat I did not have on a
nd smiled, slowing the car. She saw who I was and made a small smile over a face that had doubt, a little hostility, and two degrees of fear, the tremulous and the dreadful. I told Ricketts how sorry we had been the way it had turned out awhile back, getting her and the children all lined up and taking pictures without giving her any explanation, and keeping them all from their dinners, and he said she didn’t keer nothn about none of that, in a tone which without unkindness meant that she didn’t have a right to, so if she did it made no difference. I told him I couldn’t be a bit sure yet just where our work was going to be taking us, but I hoped we would be seeing them all some more. He said, any time, they were always right there. Then he said, any time, they were always right there. Then he laughed very loudly and said, yes sir, any time at all, they was sure God always right there. Then he laughed very loud and long and said, yes sir, they was always right there all right, any time at all, and kept on laughing while, out of the back of his eyes, he watched me. That is the pattern of almost anything Ricketts says.
Yet all this city-business, you can see; you can see how it was not really satisfactory: it was as alien, indeed as betraying, of the true and only possible satisfaction of our need and purpose as when, unable to sustain any instant longer of the effort, the pain, the loneliness, to do the piece of work you would give all your blood to do, and aside from which no hope of peace can reside, a would-be ‘artist’ breaks down, plays it out by the hour on a piano, sees a movie, takes sex or alcohol as if an enemy by the throat to devour it, seeks out friends and talks them half dead before they crawl to bed, and the bore, trembling and half crazy with need, self-recrimination, sorrow of what he has betrayed and of the persons he has used, begins that awful stoneheeled peripatation of the enchanted streets, watching lights in unknown windows tall in walls, grieving for an open bar, beating his thigh or the sides of buildings with his fist as he walks, doping himself with memories of music, which ends only in an exhaustion final beyond the lifting of one foot before the other, sometimes still in darkness, sometimes in breaking of the dawn, sometimes in clean full-swollen morning stare with the lamps long shut, or a subway ride, in barrenness of gold straw seats, among those tin-pailed, each lonesome soldiers, gentle and as if sorrowful still with sleep, who have lifted once more the burden whence they drooped it in the water, with night still streaming from it to the floor: and so, cold, cold, to coffee and the daylit bed:
All it had brought me, was this terrible frustration, which had in its turn drawn me along these roads and to this place scarce knowing why I came, to the heart and heart’s blood of my business and my need: and so was I satisfied, as how can I dream to tell you, first in one incident, so fully it seemed there could be no more, then in a second so rich, so plain and fair, so incalculably peaceful, that the first in retrospect seemed of the ordinary body of events: it was quite as if again as of Birmingham it was thirst: as if in some inconceivable thirst and blaze of aridity, you had been satisfied twice over, twice differently, with the first not in the least detracting from the second; two ‘dreams,’ ‘come true,’ true like those that tortured my adolescence, and as if then some one of them for whose shadow I gnawed at my wrist, had quietly, within the next few moments, materialized before me, smiling gently yet gaily, abolishing all fear save that which is in wonder and in joy, that I might behold and touch and smell and taste her, speak to her, worship her, and hear her words, show her places I had found in walking, music I knew and loved, find that she, too, in a distant city had seen that movie whom few others had noticed and no one cared for; and that by some cause inexplicable to her as well as to me, she too as well as I could never hear in our heads the words and the music of ‘tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching, cheer up comrades they will come,’ without breaking apart inside, I suppose where the heart is, into a shuddering of sweet tears, though our images were disparate; hers, she being enough younger, of the World War, and of the poor soldiers who, imprisoned far from home, among those who did not even speak their same language, heard their brothers marching in a band, and could not go out and march with them, play with them, die with them; mine of that last war in which there was much nobility, the Civil War, the War Between the States, when dark-bearded, coal-eyed, narrow-featured men of it seems a different race, yet who were our grandparents, whose broken old gentleness still trembles along the flagged streets of late spring, were meeting in glades in a level sleet of lead to take each other’s souls out: of a camp, a prison camp, Andersonville whose pictures I had seen, a great stiff clay in winter, closed in a stockade, tents smoking, the ground striped with shallow snow, the feet, the joints, bandaged in pitiful rags, the eyes like skulls; the guards pacing, meeting, pacing, the odors of southern winter, and all centered upon these captives that slow, keen, special, almost weeping yearning of terror toward brutality, in the eyes, the speech, which is peculiar to the men of the south and is in their speech; and beyond this, north, a continent: a continent of southern clay, stiffgrassed, thin-housed, deep-frozen, down which from sheeted snows advanced a blackness and brave string, earnest and gallant, bugles blithing, the bravery of whose feet is known advancing, a hundred, a thousand miles, oh, kind, brave, resolute, oh, some day, some time, dangers braved, all armies cut through, past, to the rescue: cheer up; comrades: they will come: and beneath the starry flag we shall see our homes again, and the loved ones we left so far away: so far away: whom also I know, my soldiers, and their homes, those delicate frames, white in the white light snow, the beaded women, whose jaws like eggs are rounded next the hair, their serious eyes, creatures of a nation which has never learned loving and happy living, seated there waiting in the deepskirted secret whiteness of their sex; and the softmouthed children, dark-clothed and ruffed, whose dark jelly eyes regard the camera so mildly, so severely; and thou, deepcrafted, rude-boned, mistaken Christ, who sank in an incongruous pieta before a Good Friday farce, those reins left loose whose raving runs six decades nor shall ever cure: we shall treat them as if they had never been away: ‘we have lost our best friend’: ‘I laugh because I must not cry; that’s all; that’s all.’
I must excuse myself this apparent digression because you of whom I write are added to the meaning of this song, and its meaning to yours: for here, here, in this time; on this vast continental sorrowful clay it is I see you, encamped, imprisoned, each in your pitiably decorated little unowned ship of home, ten million, patient, ignorant, grievous, ruined, so inextricably trapped, captured, guarded; in the patience of your lives; and though you cannot know it you like these prisoners are constantly waiting; and though you cannot hear it yet like them you do hear; how on the stone of this planet there is a marching and resonance of rescuing feet which shall at length all dangers braved, all armies cut through, past, deliver you freedom, joy, health, knowledge like an enduring sunlight: and not to you alone, whose helpless hearts have been waiting and listening since the human world began, but to us all, those lovable and those hateful all alike. And whether this shall descend upon us over the steep north crown I shall not know, but doubt: and after how many false deliverances there can be no hopeful imagining: but that it shall come at length there can be no question: for this I know in my own soul through that regard of love we bear one another: for there it was proved me in the meeting of the extremes of the race.
But this refreshment was as if, to this thirsting man, without warning or teasing of gradualness the sky became somber and opened its heart upon him, and stood itself forth upon the earth, and more rain fell than heaven might carry, and he stood beneath the roaring of its streaming, head back, eyes on the falling wheaten sky, mouth wide to take its falling, and all the earth yielding up that sound of applause which is beyond politeness, beyond reward, beyond acclaim, beyond all such vulgarity, and is the simple roaring of all souls for joy before God, as I have seen occur a few times when Beethoven through Toscanini has imparted his full mind (he who truly hears my music can never know sorrow again).
And secondly, quite different, quite so
silent, and so secret, as the other was wild, it is in this same thirst the sudden transport, the finding of one’s self in the depth of woods, beside a spring: a spring so cold, so clean, so living, it breaks on the mouth like glass: whereto I prostrate myself as upon a woman, to take her mouth: and here I see, submerged, stones, the baroque roots of a tree, fine dust of leaves, gray leaves, so delicate, laid and laid among this dust a quilt, the feathering of a bird, whose plumage I cherish nor shall in my drinking disturb: and standing from the heart, a twindling, slender, upward spine (it is a column of gnats at evening, the column of the stars of all universes), that little stream of sand upon whose stalk this clean wide flower has spread herself: or better, since this joy is human, it is not in a wood land I stand, but in a springhouse, of plain boards, straddling a capacious spring, a place such as that which was at my grandfather’s farm, with the odor of shut darkness, cold, wet wood, the delighting smell of butter, and standing in this spring, the crocks, brimmed with unsalted butter and with cream and milk; the place is shut behind me, but slit through with daylight, but the lighting comes as from a submerged lamp, that is, from the floor of the spring of which half is beyond shelter of the house: and here on this floor, too, I see these leaves, drifted and deep like snow, and driven, even beneath the house: and between two sweating stones, sitting there, watching me, shining with wet in the dark, with broad affronted eyes, the face and shoulders and great dim belly of a black and jade and golden bullfrog, big as a catcher’s mitt, his silver larynx twitching constantly with scarcely controllable outrage.