I like reading anything that sheds a little more light on the farming culture of my Haywood County, Tenn. ancestors, so high on my summer reading list was “Cotton Tenants: Three Families” by the late James Agee.
Produced in a hardbound book format and released a little over a month ago, this is the original, recently-discovered article Agee wrote for Fortune magazine but that was never published.
He used the research he did for the article to write his 1941 book, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” which was published in 1941 along with photos taken by his friend and now iconic photographer, Walker Evans.
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Walker Evans photo from |
The two were given an assignment to do an article on the conditions of white sharecroppers in the south in 1936 around the time of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.
They spent eight weeks with three cotton-farming families in rural Alabama and recorded the experiences of these very poor people who farmed other men’s land.
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Walker Evans photo from |
The publishers at Fortune didn’t feel his article was worthy of inclusion in the magazine but the book continues to be included on many lists of the most influential books ever published and “a landmark of literary nonfiction” according to The Washington Post.
I was interested in the book less for the actual quality of the writing and more for the insight into the lives of my farming ancestors and I was not disappointed. There are many instances of cultural or lifestyle behaviors included in the book that I recognized.
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Walker Evans photo from |
In fact, the above photo of one of Agee’s subjects reminds me of this photo of my mother around that same age:
Although certainly not wealthy, my post-Civil War southern ancestors farmed land they owned, could read and write, and from stories I was told as a child, seemed to enjoy a better quality of life than the subjects in Agee’s article.
“Cotton Tenants” is broken up into sections that mimic what I would be looking for if I could go back in time and spend a summer on the farm of any of my great-grandparents: Business, Shelter, Food, Clothing, Work, Race, Health, etc.
It seems my ancestors were blessed with access to more fruits, vegetables and meat than the families in the article but I did recognize a great deal from the descriptions of their diet.
“There is always coffee; coalblack, crudely bitter, silty, scorching hot, and very heavy. When there isn’t any biscuit there is warmed over cornbread. There is fry more often than not: a saucer floating in their grease, six or eight small patches of salt pork, fat almost untainted by any hint of pink fiber…
In season, in the middle of the morning, a melon is cut and divided and everyone eats by wet hand or knife while the hens stab at the slippery seeds…
The constants for the middle of the day are cornbread, peas and molasses. The peas are not the green ones you may be thinking of, which are rarely raised and are called English peas: these are field peas, small, oval, colored a dirty mauve.”
I am fortunate to have great memories of both my grandparents’ gardens and to have eaten entire meals from the results of their hard work. One smell of the inside of a just-sliced watermelon or a warm tomato and I am instantly transported back 40 years ago to their backyards.
Of course, they also took me to the Dairy Queen at Exit 56 off I-40 so it wasn’t all home grown.
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Walker Evans photo from |
For me, many sections of the article offered some clarity and explanation for things I only experienced as a slight echo or occasional story from my parent’s and grandparent’s individual but very similar childhoods on Haywood County cotton farms.
“The split bolls are now burrs, hard and edged as chiseled wood, pointed as thorns, three-, four-, and five-celled. There is a great deal of beauty about a single burr and the cotton slobbering from it and about a whole field opening. The children and once in a while a very young or old man, are excited and eager to start picking. It is a joy that scarcely touches most men and any women though.
Picking is simple and terrible work. Skill will help you; endurance will come in handy; but neither makes it a bit easier.
Meantime, too, you are working in sunlight that stands on you with the serene weight of deep seawater, and in heat that makes your jointed and muscled finestructured body flow like one discriminate oil, and the brilliant weight of heat is piled upon you heavier and heavier all the time and the eyes are masked in a stinging sweat and the head perhaps is gently roaring like a private blowtorch, and less gently pulsing with ache.”
I never picked cotton but I know from those family members who did that there are few things they hate more even now, all these years later. If you happen to run into my Dad, ask him about picking cotton.
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Walker Evans photo from |
It remains a great irony that the very crop that resulted in the settling of an entire section of the United States, evolved into a back-breaking burden generations had to bear.
From the deaths of multiple children and health problems left untreated to how their houses were built and the clothes they wore, many of the descriptions included in the article could easily be applied to many of the facts and situations I’ve encountered while gathering genealogy research.
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Walker Evans photo from |
“Cotton Tenants” is an especially great read for anyone who is interested in early twentieth-century southern culture or genealogy.
For more about the book, check out this article in the New York Times or visit the page offered by the publisher.
For more blog entries, visit my Blog Home Page or to check out the genealogy research about my specific family lines, go to my Haywood County Line Genealogy Website.