by Walker Evans
But from where I say, The shutters are opened,’ I must give this up, and must speak in some other way, for I am no longer able to speak as I was doing, or rather no longer able to bear to. Things which were then at least immediate in my senses, I now know only as at some great and untouchable distance; distinctly, yet coldly as through reversed field-glasses, and with no warmth or traction or faith in words: so that at best I can hope only to ‘describe’ what I would like to ‘describe,’ as at a second remove, and even that poorly:
The room was all shut-in, full of shut odors. The door let in light, but only across one end of this room; so that as I have told the faces were held in two lights at once, in two temperatures also, and in two kinds of air. With even this amount of the light and odor of day there was change; we were all widened apart, and more aware of each other, in the diminished storm: our ordinary egoism and watchfulness of a curious human situation was somewhat restored in each of us, and with this, something happy that came of the air itself, not very different from the venturing and resumed loudness of small birds on the barnyard air, whose pleated flight and song were brash as with dawn: The letting-open of the blinds in two of the four blind walls then let the room full of this cooled and happy light, wherein each piece of furniture stood completed in its casual personality within these blockaded boards, and where we found ourselves and saw each other hovered, no longer with any reason here to be huddled, and sat a few moments as if blinking, and as if embarrassed to be sitting; so that it was in part this embarrassment which, after those moments of shy glancing at one another, broke us and brought us standing and strolling, chairs drawn back, and broken apart along the porch: and I would wish most deeply to say, how strange the natural day in a room can be, and how curiously, how secretly, it can disturb those who find it broken upon them, and who find themselves resumed each into his ordinary being, before he is quite ready to reassume it, in a room whose walls have widened, have opened once more their square eyes, upon sectors of country, in steadily thinning satin rain:
But the music of what is happening is more richly scored than this; and much beyond what I can set down: I can only talk about it: the personality of a room, and of a group of creatures, has undergone change, as if of two different techniques or mediums; what began as ‘rembrandt,’ deeplighted in gold, in each integer colossally heavily planted, has become a photograph, a record in clean, staring, colorless light, almost without shadow, of two iron sheeted beds which stand a little away from the walls; of dislocated chairs; within cube of nailed house-wood; a family of tenant farmers, late in a sunday afternoon, in a certain fold of country, in a certain part of the south, and of the lives of each of them, confronted by a person strange to them, whose presence and its motives are so outlandish there is no reason why any of it should be ever understood; almost as if there were no use trying to explain; just say, I am from Mars, and let it go at that: and this, as well as the lifted storm, the resumption of work in lack of fear, is happening in these minutes; each mind disaligned, and busy, in a common human timidity or fear; the fear in which a new acquaintance begins to be made. I wish I might remember the talk, or even the method and direction, the shape of the talk, but I can remember this scarcely at all. I explained myself a little, this single visit, that is, as simply as I might: such as it was it was not difficult to believe, and was well enough accepted; neither I nor either of the other men said much directly to Mrs. Gudger, nor she much to us; though, so far as I felt it would be allowed as proper, I turned what I said or replied to include her, and a few times directly her way. She became able to say a little how frightened she was of storms, but without apology and in next to no humor, just statement, a sort of implied courtesy of explanation to me, if I had thought it strange at all: I gave her indirect reason to know I did not in the least think it strange: I spoke a little to the two older children, as if it were natural to speak to children; they were puzzled by this but appeared rather to like it Mrs. Gudger was very quietly courteous toward me in a deeply withdrawn way: as a wife, as a woman, it was not her place to show or even to feel any question who I was, why I might be there; that was the business of the man and her greatest courtesy lay in this observance: the children, though, I felt their eyes on me all the while. Nothing that was said made any difference of itself, but in each thing that was said there was all the difference in the world in the way I should meet or say it: I relied on quietness and occasional volunteering, and improvised on whatever seemed best to hand, and began to have the pleasure of realizing that though I remained inevitably somewhat mysterious, I was in each few minutes a little more comfortably accepted as friendly, as respectful toward them, as candid of my ignorance, my motives, and my regard, and as a person who need not at all be feared nor dealt toward in any lack of ease.
The yard dirt had no shape left to it at all; or had the shape the rain had given it; it looked like a relief map. The hens were out to their threshold or staggered out from under the house, talking worriedly, trembling, diy and sopping wet in patches. The hog was grunting and water swashed in his wallow; the cow let out a comment like a giant wooden flute: I looked, and saw her stretched head. Out in the edge of the cotton one of the three peach trees had been torn in half: we got pieces of wire and lifted its drenching weight and wired it together: the grass under these trees was Uttered full of the whole crop of peaches; hardly a dozen hung surviving; they were broken apart and bruised beyond any use. We collected them in buckets and a tub and with Mrs. Gudger and the children sorted apart those ripe and sufficiently whole to be used for eating and for drying, and those fit only for the hogs. Gudger was concerned that I should not muddy my sunday shoes, and (in re-erecting the tree) that I should not drench my clothes.
While we sorted peaches, the whole storm sank and the sun spread above its horizon and sank toward it: you know well enough how cleansed, and glad, and in what appearance of health and peace, every twig and leaf and all the shape of a country shine in such a light, and can fill you with love which has no traceable basis: well, this beyond such had come at the end of a long and cruel drought, and there was a movement and noise all round me of creatures and meanings where at length I found myself; and that I was not crying for joy was only that there was so much still to watch, to hear, and to wonder before, while we stood on the front porch and talked, George saying, over and over, while we looked out upon the resplendent country, how good a season it had been, a real good season, and how it seemed sure enough to have been an answer to prayer, for they had been praying for rain all these weeks now, more and more: and over to the left where the hill sank, there stood up among the tops of the thick woods a long thin wall of white and curving mist above loud water:
And he invited me, several times, to stay the night; of course the cooking was pretty plain, but stay the night; and each time in some paralyzing access of shyness before strong desire I thanked him and said I had better not, knowing even while I said it how strongly I risked his misunderstanding, and his hurt, yet unable to say otherwise: and at length, and sure, and sick to hell, that I had hurt him, that I had seemed in my refusal to set myself above him, no matter how ‘politely; I told them good-bye and that I wanted to see them soon again, and Ricketts and I got into the car; and, dangerous in every moment of bogging in the clay, we took our way across the changed surface of his front yard and out of sight.
(I take Ricketts home. On the way back toward the highway, short still of the branch road that leads to the Gudgers’:)
Third
Second Introit
Ricketts had shown me tricks of driving I shouldn’t have dared or imagined along the clay, and now retracing it, alone, with the dark coming on, I followed my own ruts most of the time, often with my hands off the steering-wheel, holding the car in a light and somewhat swift second gear so that it seemed more to float and sail than to go on the ground, catching it lightly as possible in the instant of slewing and putting on speed rather than slowing and guiding beforehand, as I should have b
een more likely to do of myself. Half a dozen places we had come very near bogging, and here the clay was so wrought-up it was necessary each time to guess again. You can’t afford to use brakes in this sort of material, and whatever steering you do, it must be as light-handed as possible; about the only thing to say of speed in such situations is to go a full shade faster most of the time than you can imagine is at all safe to go. It is different from snow and from any other mud I know of, and it holds a dozen sudden differences within itself, all requiring quick modifications of technique and all more or less indescribably hidden among one another: driving, you feel less like an ‘operator’ than like a sort of passive-active brain suspended at the center of a machine, careful to let it take its own way, and to hold it at all in restraint only by Utile ticklings of an end of a whip: your senses are translated, they pervade the car, so that you are all four wheels as sensitively as if each were a fingertip; and these feel out a safe way through rather by force of will or wish than by any action. The joke of this was that my forces of will or of wish were crossed on themselves between the curiosity to manage this two miles of road, out of amateurish pride, and the regret that I was not at the Gudgers’ and the desire to be there and to have a good excuse for being there: so that each time I got through a particularly tough stretch, it was in about as much amused regret as pleasure: so that at length, feeling the right rear wheel slew deeply toward the ditch; well, I didn’t know then, and don’t now, whether the things I was doing to save it were ‘correct’ or not, and whether or not it was by my will that I wrung the wheel and drove so deep that there was no longer any hope at all of getting it out: but I do know that as I felt it settle it was a thorough pleasure to me, an added pleased feeling of, well, I did all I could: I sat in the steep-tilted car maybe a full minute with the motor idling, feeling a smile all over the bones of my face as strange to me as greasepaint: set it in low, shifted the steering, gave it all modulations of power and of steering I could think of; they only foundered it deeper as I had begun to hope they might: and abruptly shut off the engine and the lights and lighted a cigarette and sat looking out at the country and at the sky, while the vanquished engine cooled with a tin noise of ticking.
There was the very darkest kind of daylight which can be called daylight at all, still on everything, and aU through the air, a cold, blue-brown Ught of agate; and I was stationary in the middle of a world of which all members were stationary, and in this stasis, a sour odor of the earth and of night strengthened into me steadfastly until, at length, I felt an exact traction with this country in each twig and clod of it as it stood, not as it stood past me from a car, but to be stood in the middle of, or drawn through, passed, on foot, in the plain rhythm of a human being in his basic relation to his country. Each plant that fluted up in long rows out of the soil was native to its particular few square inches of rootage, and held relationship among these others to the work and living of some particular man and family, in a particular house, perhaps whose lamp I saw beneath this field; and each tree had now its own particular existence and personality, stood up branching out of its special space in the spreading of its blood, and stayed there waiting, a marked man, a tree: as different as the difference between a conducted tour of a prison and the first hours there as a prisoner: and all the while, it grew darker.
I took off my shoes and changed to sneakers (there was no sense in this, and I don’t understand why), rolled the legs of my pants to the knee, took out an extra pack of cigarettes, two pencils, a small notebook, rolled up the windows, and locked the car: looked how deeply to the hub the wheel was sunk, and started off down the road, looking back at the car frequently from changed distances as if at a picture of myself, tilted up there helpless with its headlights and bumper taking what light was left. I began to feel laughter toward it as if it were a new dealer, a county dietitian, an editor of Fortune, or an article in the New Republic; and so, too, at myself, marveling with some scorn by what mixture of things in nature good and beneath nausea I was now where I was and in what purposes: but all the while I kept on walking, and all the while the bone center of my chest was beating with haste and hope, and I was watching for landmarks, less by need (for all I needed was to follow this road to a branching and the branch to its end) than for gratification in feeling them approach me once more in a changed pace and purpose and depth of feeling and meaning: for I now felt shy of them yet somehow as if I newly possessed or was soon to possess them, as if they silently opened and stood quiet before me to watch and evaluate and guard against me, yet at the same time, in a kind of grave aloofness of the defenseless, to welcome me: and yet again in all this I felt humble, and respectful, careful that I should not so much as set my foot in this clay in a cheapness of attitude, and full of knowledge, I have no right, here, I have no real right, much as I want it, and could never earn it, and should I write of it, must defend it against my kind: but I kept on walking: the crumpled edge of the gravel pit, the two negro houses I twisted between, among their trees; they were dark; and down the darkness under trees, whose roots and rocks were under me in the mud, and shin-deep through swollen water; and watched the steep-slanted corn, all struck toward me from my left, and nearly motionless now, while along my right and all upon me there was the rustling second rain of a trillion leaves relaxing the aftermath of storm, and a lithe, loud, rambling noise of replenished branches; thinking, how through this night what seepage in the porous earth would soon express this storm in glanded springs, deep wells refreshed; odors all round so black, so rich, so fresh, they surpassed in fecundity the odors of a woman; the cold and quiet sweating of hard walking; and so at last to the darkness of that upward ravine of road beyond which the land opens in a wave, and floats the house:
Up this ravine, realizing myself now near, I came stealthily, knowing now I had at least half-contrived this, and after a misunderstood refusal, and for the first time realizing that by now, a half-hour fully dark, you must likely be in bed, through supper, done with a day, so that I must surely cause disturbance: slower, and slower, and two thirds ready to turn back, to spend the night in the car, and out into the cleared yard, silently, standing vertical to the front center of the house; it is dead black; not a light; just stands there, darker than its surroundings, perfectly quiet: and standing here, silently, in the demeanor of the house itself I grow full of shame and of reverence from the soles of my feet up my body to the crest of my skull and the leaves of my hands like a vessel quietly spread full of water which has sprung from in the middle of my chest: and shame the more, because I do not yet turn away, but still stand here motionless and as if in balance, and am aware of a vigilant and shameless hope that—not that I shall move forward and request you, disorder you—but that ‘something shall happen,’ as it ‘happened’ that the car lost to the mud: and so waiting, in doubt, desire and shame, in a drawing-back of these around a vacuum of passive waiting, as the six walls of an empty room might wait for a sound: and this, or my breathing, or the beating of my heart, must have been communicated, for there is a sudden forward rush to the ledge of the porch of bellowing barking, and a dog, shouting his soul out against me: nothing else: and I think how they are roused by it and feel I have done wrong enough already, and withdraw a little, hoping that will quiet him, and in the same hope hold forward my hand and speak very quietly. He subdues to a growled snarling of bragging hate and fear and I am ready to turn and leave when a shadow heavily shuffles behind him, and in a stooped gesture of peering me out, Gudger’s voice asks, who is it: ready for trouble. I speak before I move, telling him who I am, then what has happened, why I am here, and walk toward him, and how sorry I am to bother them. It is all right with him; come on in; he had thought I was a nigger.
I come up onto the porch shamefacedly, telling him again how sorry I am to have rousted them out like this. It’s all right. They were just got to bed, none of them asleep yet. He has pulled on his overalls over nothing else and is barefooted. In the dark I can see him stooping his square he
ad a little forward to study me. There is still antagonism and fear in his voice and in his eyes, but I realize this is not toward me, but toward the negro he thought I was: his emotions and his mind are slow to catch up with any quick change in the actuality of a situation. In a little more this antagonism has drained away and he is simply a tired and not unkind man taking care of a half-stranger at night who is also an anomaly; and thus he does as he has done before without any affectation of social grace: people plain enough take a much more profoundly courteous care of one another and of themselves without much if any surprise and no flurry of fussiness and a kind of respect which does not much ask questions. So it was there was neither any fake warmth and heartiness nor any coldness in his saying, Sure, come on in, to my asking could he put me up for the night after all, and he added, Better eat some supper. I was in fact very hungry, but I did all I was able to stop this, finally trying to compromise it to a piece of bread and some milk, that needn’t be prepared; I’m making you enough bother already; but no; Can’t go to bed without no supper; you just hold on a second or two; and he leans his head through the bed room door and speaks to his wife, explaining, and lights the lamp for her. After a few moments, during which I hear her breathing and a weary shuffling of her heels, she comes out barefooted carrying the lamp, frankly and profoundly sleepy as a child; feeling disgusted to wake her further with so many words I say, Hello, Mrs. Gudger: say I want to tell you I’m awful sorry to give you all this bother: you just, honest I don’t need much of anything, if you’d just tell me where a piece of bread is, it’ll be plenty, Fd hate for you to bother to cook anything up for me: but she answers me while passing, looking at me, trying to get me into focus from between her sticky eyelashes, that ‘tain’t no bother at all, and for me not to worry over that, and goes on into the kitchen; and how quickly I don’t understand, for I am too much occupied to see, with Gudger, and with holding myself from the cardinal error of hovering around her, or of offering to help her, she has built a pine fire and set in front of me, on the table in the hall, warmed-over biscuit and butter and blackberry jam and a jelly-glass full of buttermilk, and warmed field peas, fried pork, and four fried eggs, and she sits a little away from the table out of courtesy trying to hold her head up and her eyes open, until I shall have finished eating, saying at one time how it’s an awful poor sort of supper and at another how it’s awful plain, mean food; I tell her different, and eat as rapidly as possible and a good deal more than I can hold, in fact, all the eggs, a second large plateful of peas, most of the biscuit, feeling it is better to keep them awake and to eat too much than in the least to let them continue to believe I am what they assume I must be: ‘superior’ to them or to then-food, eating only so much as I need to be ‘polite’; and I see that they are, in fact, quietly surprised and gratified in my appetite.