by Walker Evans
We can’t have all things to please us,
Our little Daughter, Joe An, has gone to Jesus.
It is not likely for her; it is not likely for any of you, my beloved, whose poor fives I have already so betrayed, and should you see these things so astounded, so destroyed, I dread to dare that I shall ever look into your dear eyes again: and soon, quite soon now, in two years, in five, in forty, it will all be over, and one by one we shall all be drawn into the planet beside one another; let us then hope better of our children, and of our children’s children; let us know, let us know there is cure, there is to be an end to it, whose beginnings are long begun, and in slow agonies and all deceptions clearing; and in the teeth of all hope of cure which shall pretend its denial and hope of good use to men, let us most quietly and in most reverent fierceness say, not by its captive but by its utmost meanings:
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name: thy kingdom come: thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven: give us this day our daily bread: and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us: and lead us not into temptation: but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom: and the power: and the glory: for ever and ever: amen.
The last words of this book have been spoken and these that follow are not words; they are only descriptions of two images. One is of Squinchy Gudger and his mother as they are in the open hall; one is of Ellen Woods as she lies sleeping at the edge of the front porch: both in a silent, white hour of a summer day.
His mother sits in a hickory chair with her knees relaxed and her bare feet flat to the floor; her dress open and one broken breast exposed. Her head is turned a little slantwise and she gazes quietly downward past her son’s head into the junctures of the earth, the floor, the wall, the sunlight, and the shade. One hand lies long and flat along her lap: it is elegantly made of bone and is two sizes too large for the keen wrist With her other hand, and in the cradling of her arm and shoulder, she holds the child. His dress has fallen aside and he is naked. As he is held, the head huge in scale of his body, the small body ineffably relaxed, spilled in a deep curve from nape to buttocks, then the knees drawn up a little, the bottom small and sharp, and the legs and feet drifted as if under water, he suggests the shape of the word siphon. He is nursing. His hands are blundering at her breast blindly, as if themselves each were a new born creature, or as if they were sobbing, ecstatic with love; his mouth is intensely absorbed at her nipple as if in rapid kisses, with small and swift sounds of moisture; his eyes are squeezed shut; and now, for breath, he draws away, and lets out a sharp short whispered ahh, the hands and his eyelids relaxing, and immediately resumes; and in all this while, his face is beatific, the face of one at rest in paradise, and in all this while her gentle and sober, earnest face is not altered out of its deep slantwise gazing: his head is now sunken off and away, grand and soft as a cloud, his wet mouth flared, his body still more profoundly relinquished of itself, and I see how against her body he is so many things in one, the child in the melodies of the womb, the Madonna’s son, human divinity sunken from the cross at rest against his mother, and more beside, for at the heart and leverage of that young body, gently, taken in all the pulse of his being, the penis is partly erected.
And Ellen where she rests, in the gigantic light: she, too, is completely at peace, this child, the arms squared back, the palms open loose against the floor, the floursack on her face; and her knees are flexed upward a little and fallen apart, the soles of the feet facing: her blown belly swimming its navel, white as flour, and blown full broad with slumbering blood into a circle: so white all the outward flesh, it glows of blue; so dark, the deep hole, a dark red shadow of life blood: this center and source, for which we have never contrived any worthy name, is as if it were breathing, flowering, soundlessly, a snoring silence of flame; it is as if flame were breathed forth from it and subtly played about it: and here in this breathing and play of flame, a thing so strong, so valiant, so unvanquishable, it is without effort, without emotion, I know it shall at length outshine the sun.
Let us now praise famous men.
Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.
The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning.
Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, men renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and declaring prophecies:
Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and eloquent in their instructions:
Such as found out musical tunes, and recited verses in writing:
Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habitations:
All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times.
There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.
And some there be which have no memorial; who perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.
But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten.
With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance, and their children are within the covenant.
Their seed standeth fast, and their children for their sakes. Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out.
Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.
Notes and Appendices
1.
Suggested:
Detail of gesture, landscape, costume, air, action, mystery, and incident throughout the writings of William Faulkner.
Many passages in Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and Erskine Caldwell.
Sketches made in Georgia by David Friedenthal.
Stark Love, a motion picture, by Karl Brown.
Photographs in Pellagra, by Dr. A. Marie; The State Co., Publishers, Columbia, S.C.
Frontier, a motion picture, by Alexander Dovschenko.
Married Woman Blues, by Sleepy John Estes; Decca.
New Salty Dog and Slow Mama Slow, by Salty Dog Sam; Oriole.
Who Was John and My Poor Mother Died Ashouting, by Mitchell’s Christian Singers; Decca.
American Photographs, by Walker Evans; Museum of Modern Art
All southern city and small town newspapers and postcards.
Road maps and contour maps of the middle south.
2.
BEETHOVEN SONATA
HELD NO DISTURBANCE
San Francisco, Dec. 6 (A.P.).—’Beethoven,’ said Judge Herbert Kaufman, ‘cannot disturb the peace.’
So he freed Rudolph Ramat 69 years old and blind, of a charge of disturbing the peace by playing his accordion on Market Street
‘Your honor,’ Ramat pleaded yesterday, ‘I have worked
—from the New York Sun.*
3.
A Note on the Photographs
Margaret Bourke-White Finds
Plenty of Time to Enjoy Life
Along With Her Camera Work
—
Famous Photographer Who Took Pictures for You Have
Seen Their Faces Discusses Experiences
Among Southern Share-Croppers
—
By May Cameron
(Herschel Brickell’s reviews of books appear in this space five days a week.)
It’s difficult to know where to begin on Margaret Bourke-White, because she is so many people rolled into one.
“You can’t possibly miss her,” Miss Bourke-White’s secretary told me, “because she’s wearing the reddest coat in the world.”
A superior red coat, Miss Bourke-White called it, and such fun. It was designed for her by Howard Greer, and if you’re as little up on your movie magazines as I am, Fd better explain that the Greer label is some pumpkins. You’d find it, if you could look, in the more glamorous gowns of Dietrich and, among others, Hepburn.
This famous photographer, just past
thirty, can well afford Hollywood’s best. In less than eight years she has climbed to the top of the heap in her profession and is now—movie actresses barred—one of the highest-paid women in America. Hying to imagine this made me a Utile dizzy, but here it is: for every minute—minute, mind you—of her working time today Margaret Bourke-White commands quite a few dollars.
And this is the young lady who spent months of her own time in the last two years traveling the back roads of the deep south bribing, cajoling, and sometimes browbeating her way in to photograph Negroes, share-croppers and tenant farmers in their own environments. Seventy-five of these photographs appear in You Have Seen Their Faces, a book for which Erskine Caldwell wrote the text.
SNUFF, ‘RELIGION’ AND PATENT MEDICINE
Ingenuity such as she was never called upon to use in her years of industrial photography went into the making of many of the photographs included in the book The striking photograph of a Negro preacher caught at the very height of his emotion and oratory Miss Bourke-White took on her knees right in front of the pulpit, the preacher’s own emotion making him entirely oblivious to exploding flashlights. Her rare photographs of the “coming through” ritual, if it could be called a ritual, in a white Holiness church were possible only because the minister had never before had a photographer to deal with and he didn’t know what to do about it.
The small-town orator-politician had already started talking when Margaret Bourke-White set up her tripod and went to work on him. She is certain that he wouldn’t have posed for her, but, once he had started to orate, nothing, not even a strange photographer, could stop him. And to one of the last couples pictured in the book, Miss Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell had to pay a bribe.
“So far as we could telL they hadn’t any food, but they begged for snuff, two kinds, Buttercup and Rooster snuff,” Margaret Bourke-White explained. “They hoped we’d throw in a little coffee and maybe some chewing tobacco, but snuff came first. They tell you snuffs good when you are hungry or when you have a toothache or when you’re just feeling generally low. They seem to live on snuff and religion—which has no real relation to religion—and patent medicine.
“Caldwell’s new play, Journeyman, is concerned with one congregation of a white Holiness church. The Negro churches are not, somehow, so shocking, because you think of Negroes as being actors and emotional, but with the white people the whole business is so sordid and desperate and out of place. It isn’t as though their church played any role, as we know religion. It’s just a place where people go to shout and scream and roll on the floor. They are so beaten down and their lives are so drab and barren and lonely that they have nothing. This terrible thing every Sunday is their only emotional release.”
THE PICTURE OF TODAY’S SETUP
Miss Bourke-White, whose beautiful photographs of dynamos and cranes and turbines and girders and industrial fine points are known to every one, made several trips to Russia and, in observing an agricultural nation being turned into an industrial one, became tremendously interested in the man behind the machine.
“I loved the industrial photographs for their pictorial value and all the excitement of machinery, and I still do; but a couple of years ago I began to feel that if I was worth anything at all I wanted to do something really worth while, something lasting,” she said. “In Russia I got the first glimpse of figuring out man’s relationship to the machine and to his employer, and my eyes were opened tremendously. It’s more complicated in America, of course, but now I am most interested in taking pictures of what’s going on, not necessarily news, but just man’s place in the whole setup of today.
“I’m tired of glorifying big business, tired of photographing beautiful, empty-headed models stepping into beautiful automobiles. I do only the industrial photographs that are interesting now, as, for example, my trip to Brazil last year to photograph coffee plantations, which had never been done, and to do airplane pictures, of which I do a great many.
“I believe, too, that photographs are a true interpretation. One photograph might lie, but a group of pictures can’t I could have taken one picture of share-croppers, for example, showing them toasting their toes and playing their banjos and being pretty happy. In a group of pictures, however, you would have seen the cracks on the wall and the expressions on their faces. In the last analysis, photographs really have to tell the truth; the sum total is a true interpretation. Whatever facts a person writes have to be colored by his prejudice and bias. With a camera, the shutter opens and it closes and the only rays that come in to be registered come directly from the object in front of you.”
In the eight or nine years since she started selling photographs, while still in Columbia, Margaret Bourke-White has had the energy and made the time to find an awful lot of fun in just living. She’s a tango expert; crazy about the theater; loves swimming, ice skating, skiing, and adores horseback riding. Sometimes, she explained, when she knows that the light will be right only a few hours of the day for whatever pictures she is taking, she has her horse brought around to “location” and rides until the light is right Movies occupy whatever week-ends she spends in New York, often as many as five a day. Aside from a photographer’s interest she just likes the damn things.*
4.
A Definition
The generic word for tenant is tenant In the vicinity of which we tell, however, and, it appears, generally throughout the south, the word is used to designate only one of the two chief classes of tenant, that is the man who, as distinguished from the man who owns nothing save, perhaps, some furniture, one or two eating or hunting animals, and the clothes on his back, owns a mule and some farm implements and who, not needing to be furnished these, can arrange to yield less of his two major crops in payment of rent to the landowner.
One name for the other chief sort of tenant, the man who, owning neither mule nor implements, must be furnished these as well as land and shelter, and must pay the landowner half his cotton and a third to half his corn, is sharecropper. He is also called a halvers-hand and is described as working on halves, or halvers. In the vicinity of which we tell and, it appears, generally throughout the south, the word sharecropper and its synonyms are used only of this class of tenant.
These usages do not differ from class to class, but are common to the language of landowner, tenant and sharecropper alike.
Of all the words which may be used to designate any sort of tenant, the word we heard used least frequently throughout our investigation, by landowners, storekeepers, townspeople, small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers, and all local human beings white or black, save only new dealers, communists, and various casts of liberal, was the word sharecropper.
In the north, however, and particularly in the seaboard north, where most of the writing and printing and reading of the United States is carried on, sharecropper has, through the agencies of print and the lectured word, become the generic term. Literally, of course, it describes both sorts of tenant, for each sort shares his crop: and it may be that through constant usage it will establish itself as generic At present, however, it is in this generic spread unavailable to the mouth of anyone who would speak at all seriously of cotton tenants, and such a person will use it hesitantly if at all even in its specific and proper sense. For not only is the word inaccurately used save where it is indigenous, and not only is it a dialect word, to which a conscientious ‘educated’ person knows he has forfeited the right, even should he know its meaning accurately; and not only is it a dialect word inaccurately used by those who have no right to use it; but it has very swiftly, and within a very few years, absorbed every corruptive odor of inverted snobbery, marxian, journalistic, jewish, and liberal logo-machia, emotional blackmail, negrophilia, belated transference, penis-envy, gynecological flurry and fairly good will which the several hundred thousand least habitable and scrupulous minds of this peculiarly psychotic quarter of the continent can supply to it: and is one of the words a careful man will be watchful of, and by whose use and inflec
tion he may take clear measurement of the nature, and the stature, and the causes, and the timbre, of the enemy.