by Walker Evans
This calling continued, never repeating a pattern, and always with what seemed infallible art, for perhaps twenty minutes. It was thoroughly as if principals had been set up, enchanted, and left like dim sacks at one side of a stage as enormous as the steadfast tilted deck of the earth, and as if onto this stage, accompanied by the drizzling confabulation of nocturnal-pastoral music, two masked characters, unfore-told and perfectly irrelevant to the action, had with catlike aplomb and noiselessness stept and had sung, with sinister casualness, what at length turned out to have been the most significant, but most unfathomable, number in the show; and had then in perfect irony and silence withdrawn.
It was after the ending of this that we began a little to talk. Ordinarily we enjoyed talking and of late, each absorbed throughout most of the day in subtle and painful work that made even the lightest betrayal of our full reactions unwise, we had found the fragments of time we were alone, and able to give voice to them and to compare and analyze them, valuable and necessary beyond comparison of cocaine. But now in this structure of special exaltation it was, though not unpleasant, thoroughly unnecessary, and obstructive of more pleasing usage. Our talk drained rather quickly off into silence and we lay thinking, analyzing, remembering, in the human and artist’s sense praying, chiefly over matters of the present and of that immediate past which was a part of the present; and each of these matters had in that time the extreme clearness, and edge, and honor, which I shall now try to give you; until at length we too fell asleep.
About the Authors
JAMES AGEE (1909-1955), a poet, screenwriter, and journalist, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Death in the Family. His other books include a volume of poems, Permit Me Voyage, the novel The Morning Watch, and several collections of correspondence, reviews, and film scripts.
WALKER EVANS (1903-1975) is best known for his striking Depression-era photographs. He served as an editor for both Fortune and Time and was a professor of graphic arts at Yale. His other books include American Photographs and Message from the Interior.
Footnotes
* Evans was on loan from the Federal Government.
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* These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them. They mean, not what the reader may care to think they mean, but what they say. They are not dealt with directly in this volume; but it is essential that they be used here, for in the pattern of the work as a whole, they are, in the sonata form, the second theme; the poetry facing them is the first In view of the average reader’s tendency to label, and of topical dangers to which any man, whether honest, or intelligent or subtle, is at present liable, it may be well to make the explicit statement that neither these words nor the authors are the property of any political party, faith, or faction.
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* These are the opening sentences of Around At World With the Children, by F B. Carpenter (published by The American Book Company), a third-grade geography textbook belonging to Louise Gudger, aged ten, daughter of a cotton tenant.
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* Money
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* Une chose permise ne peut pas être pure.
L’illégal me va.
—Essai de Critique Indirecte
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* There was also a split, mended washboard whose ribblings were homesawn out of a thick section of pine plank.
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* Invention here. I did not make inventory; there was more than I could remember. I remember for certain only the sorghum cans, the sweeps, the hoes, the workshoes, the nails; with a vaguer remembrance of random pieces of harness and of broken machinery there may also have been, for instance, a ruined headlight and a boy’s soggy worn-out cap. Many of the sorghum cans, by the way, were almost the only bright and new-looking things on the farm Gudger may have bought them. If so, they are notable, for tenants seldom buy anything new.
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* The whole problem, if I were trying fully to embody the house, would be to tell of it exactly in its ordinary terms.
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* And many of the most complex, and not many between.
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* More accurately, it would have been a lower-middle-class imitation of a middle-class piece, mimicking weight, bulk, gloom, ornament, and expense.
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* If the Gudgers realized that this is Roman Catholic, they would be surprised and shocked and would almost certainly remove it It is interesting and mysterious to me that they should have found it anywhere in their country, which is as solidly anti-catholic as the Province of Quebec is roman.
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* I don’t know how this got started, but it seems to me of some interest that farm families, whose most urgent treasures are the food they eat, use for its storage-box the name used among middle-class people for the guardian of money, ledgers, and Valuable papers’
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* The work of Mrs. Woods’ mother. She also excellently embroidered a pair of pillowcases, in pinkish-brown thread, following out only the simplest lines and dots a child would draw One was the head of a man, and a balancing flower, the other, with a flower, the head of a woman
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* These are in part by memory, in part composited out of other memory, in part improvised, but do not exceed what was there in abundance, variety, or kind. They are much better recorded in photographs for which there is no room in this volume.
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* The ‘sin,’ in my present opinion, is in feeling in the least apologetic for perceiving the beauty of the houses.
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* I remember such square-log double houses in mountain parts of Tennessee. Subsequent to writing this I find them mentioned by Victor Tixier, a Frenchman traveling in Missouri in the 1830’s. If I remember rightly, Huckleberry Finn describes one, too
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* Now that we are busy buttering ourselves as the last stronghold of democracy, interest in such embarrassments has tactfully slackened off
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* I speak here in part by deduction, in part by winter experience of analogous houses.
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* My apologies to the more strict left-wingers: the name is Negro.
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* Wearing Enna Jettick and W. L. Douglas shoes by day, Liggett sandals (made in U.S.A.) and Russian Gift Shop Peasant Pantoufles by night.
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* As I have been told is basic to Chinese art.
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* And for many other still more powerful and less ‘useful’ reasons
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* Looked at in this way a page of newspaper can have all the wealth of a sheet of fossils, or a painting.
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† Why not.
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* Failure, indeed, is almost as strongly an obligation as an inevitability, in such work: and therein sits the deadliest trap of the exhausted conscience
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* Cocteau, writing of Picasso and of painting, remarks that the subject is merely the excuse for the painting, and that Picasso does away with the excuse.
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* Or even if it is scornful of every such effort.
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* Every deadly habit in the use of the senses and of language; every ‘artistic’ habit of distortion in the evaluation of experience.
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* I am no longer so sure of this.
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† This is more complicated now
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* It still may, but not in this volume
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† I have still to attempt proper treatment of this sort.
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‡ The forms of this text are chiefly those of music, of motion pictures, and of improvisations and recordings of states of emotion, and of belief.
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* The three sections of On the Porch were written in 1937.
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* I may as well explain that On the Porch was written to stand as the beginning of a much longer book, in which the whole subject would be disposed of in one volume. It is here intended still in part as a preface or opening, but also as a frame and as an undertone and as the set stage and center of action, in relation to which all other parts of this volume are intended as flashbacks, foretastes, illuminations and contradictions.
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* Night is, for some, this shaded room; and in this room these talk of themselves to themselves in silence, and may sometimes profit of it, and may somewhat break the paralysis of their parentage. The analyst is the perception toward enigma. Enigma may be called Cod.
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* On the Porch is used without revision. Discussion of this and other issues is projected but postponed
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* Or should it.
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* There is a large class of sober, respectable, pious, mainly middle-aged negroes who in every way react intensely against the others of their race, and as intensely toward imitation of the most respectable whites. Their clothing, for instance, has no color in it anywhere, but is entirely black-and-white; and the patterns are equally severe. But even here, the whites are so blazing and starchedly white, and the blacks so waxed-ironed dead, and the clothes are borne in so profound, delicate, and lovely a sobriety, that I doubt the white race has ever approached it.
In all this on negroes, by the way, I am speaking strictly of small towns and of deep country. City negroes, even in the south, are modified; and those of the north are another thing again.
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* The textures of old paper money.
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* The left knee is rubbed thin and has absorbed irreducibly the gold shadow of the blended colors of the clays of that neighborhood.
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* Much of the time the sleeves are rolled high and tight at the height of the biceps; but not always. Enough that these patchings are by other comparisons slight, but not so little but that there are large and manifold patches.
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* Certain of their sculptures in their native continent seem to me to habitually embody this reverence toward the head as other human work does only sporadically, and more confusedly: and this seems to give background and impulse to the beauty of headdress and head-bearing in american country negroes.
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* Fertilizer sacks are used a great deal in place of calico. Since our visit at least one company is making its sacks in calico patterns
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* It is worn over a slip.
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* Active ‘understanding’ is only one form, and there are suggestions of ‘perfection’ which could be called ‘understanding’ only by definitions so broad as to include diametric reversals The peace of God surpasses all understanding; Mrs Ricketts and her youngest child do, too; ‘understanding’ can be its own, and hope’s, most dangerous enemy.
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* It may be that the only fit teachers never teach but are artists, and artists of the kind most blankly masked and least didactic.
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* This is not to suggest there is a ‘right person’ or that punishment can ever be better than an enhancement of error
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* So well shown forth in low-cost’ housing.
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† Aside from discomfort, and unhealthfulness, and the difficulty of concentrating, this means of course that several ‘grades’ are in one room, reciting and studying by rotation, each using only a fraction of each day’s time. It means hopeless boredom and waste for the children, and exhaustion for the teacher.
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* Their parents would have walked to one-room wooden schoolhouses. I’m not sure, but think it more likely than not, that many of the white children still do today
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* One of the researches most urgently needed is into the whole problem of compromise and non-compromise. I am dangerously and mistakenly much against compromise: ‘my kind never gets anything done.’ The (self-styled) ‘Realists’ are quite as dangerously ready to compromise. They seem never sufficiently aware of the danger; they much too quickly and easily respect the compromise and come at rest in it I would suppose that nothing is necessarily wrong with compromise of itself, except that those who are easy enough to make it are easy enough to relax into and accept it, and that it thus inevitably becomes fatal. Or more nearly, the essence of the trouble is that compromise is held to be a virtue of itself.
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* These farms are the width of a state and still more from the river. Is levee originally a land or a river word? It must be a river word, for terracing against erosion is recent in America. So the Mississippi has such power that men who have never seen it use its language in their work.
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* I am unsure of this planting machine, I did not see one there, but what Woods described to me seemed to tally with something I had seen, and not remembered with perfect clearness, from my childhood. The die-log is still used, Woods says, by some of the older-fashioned farmers and by some negroes. I’m not very clear about it either, but I am interested because according to Woods its use goes a way on back. My ‘impression’ is that it’s simple enough: a hollow homemade cylinder of wood with a hole in it to regulate and direct the falling stream of seed as would be more difficult by hand.
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* If I remember rightly, people never learned any successful method against him, and it is some insect, whose name and kind I forget, who holds him in check.
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* On the big plantations, where a good deal of the picking is done by day labor and is watched over by riding bosses, all the equations of speed and unresting steadiness are of course intensified; the whole nature of the work, in the men and women and their children, is somewhat altered. Yet not so much as might at first seem. A man and his family working alone are drawn narrowly together in these weeds even within themselves, and know they are being watched, from the very first, in town, their landlords are observant of which tenants bring their cotton first to gin and of who is slow and late, also, there is nearly always, in the tenant’s family, the exceedingly sharp need of cottonseed money
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* Mrs. Cudgels word. Her saying of it was, ‘rats likes it to make nest-es in.’ It is a common pluralization in the south. There is no Cuteness in it, of speaking by diminutives, and I wonder whether this is not Scottish dialect, and whether they, too, are not innocent of the ‘itsybitsying’ which the middle-class literacy assumes of them Later. On the proof-sheets is the following note, which I use with thanks: Isn’t it the Middle-English plural? Chaucer used it for this same word and as a usual plural ending.’
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* I would now (fall of 1940) have to add to this a belief in non-resistance to evil as the only
possible means of conquering evil I am in serious uncertainty about this belief; still more so, of my ability to stand by it I also uncertainly question whether a draft—or even registration—should not be resisted on still other grounds: Le, whether the State can properly require the service, or even the registration, of the individual Or, put more immediately, whether an individual can in good conscience serve, or register, by any requirement other than his own.
April 1941: lb leave this whole question so tamely and inadequately dealt with is shameful, but I hope less so than to do in haste what I see no immediate prospect of having time to attempt properly.
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* The excuse to make me trouble, as a northern investigator.
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* A conservative newspaper.
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* Reprinted by courtesy of the New York Past, a liberal newspaper.
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* The essences of anguish and of joy are thus identical- they are the explosion or incandescence resulting from the incontrovertible perception of the incredible.
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* I would presume this to be quite as possible, and of no less dignity and valor, in homosexual as well as in heterosexual love.
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