Cotton Tenants: Three Families

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is James Agee's and Walker Evans' famous book about white sharecroppers* in Hale County, Alabama during the Great Depression. It was the outgrowth of a report they did for Fortune magazine, a report which was not published, for reasons that are not certain, and that had long been thought lost. This is that report. It is blunt and unsparing. It is an indictment of the agricultural, social and political systems of the South that kept hard-working people living in appalling conditions, poorly nourished, undereducated, and eternally in debt to those whose land they tilled.

This is a straight-forward telling. It is not prettified or fictionalized. In this report, unlike their book, the families are given their show more true names. The descriptions of their daily lives, the rhythm of their months and years, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the work they do, are terse, almost list-like, but all the more compelling for that.

Yet Agee's words still astonish. Read his description of the cotton fields ready for picking, look how he juxtaposes an image of light with an image of ugliness : "Late in August the fields begin to whiten more rarely with late blooms and more frequently with cotton and then still thicker with cotton, like a sparkling ground starlight; and the wide tremendous light holds the earth beneath a glass vacuum and a burning glass. The bolls are rusty green, are bronze, are split and burst and splayed open in a loose vomit of cotton . . . There is a great deal of beauty about a single burr and the cotton slobbering from it and about a whole field opening." The same is true of Evans' photographs. These faces lined with hardship, with work and starvation, still have in them a delicacy, a reflection of all that is human. Look at the photos of Floyd Burroughs and his wife, Allie May, look at their eyes. There is a sadness in his, a worn-out-ness, while hers still have a hint of the beauty she must once have been, a hint of humor, too.

We mustn't read this as history, though it was written more than 70 years ago. Things have improved, no doubt, for people like the Burroughs and the Fields and the Tingles. But our cities could use a team like Agee & Evans to document the social and economic injustices that have not been eradicated, but seem only to have become urban rather than rural. I call this "uncomfortable reading" because, if we are honest, we know that we cannot say "that's over and done with", and we must confront the failures of our current age.

* a note on this. Agee & Evans deliberately chose to focus on white families, because, as Agee says, "Any honest consideration of the Negro would crosslight and distort the issue with the problems not of a tenant but of a race . . ." show less

Beautiful.
Visceral.
Astonishing and courageous, and so timely.

You wanna crab about the wi-fi being down? Try living without window screens, on a sub-nutritious diet of sorghum, field peas, and coffee, playing the losing, desperate economic roulette of the barely-literate Alabama cotton sharecropper in 1936, and see how your priorities might change.

A heartrending eyewitness account of the desperate plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers of Alabama during the 1930s. A very important piece of American history told in stark, elegant prose and photographs. It is a companion piece to “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”. I think the legacy of exploitation affects us today.