And their children after them : the legacy of Let us now praise famous men, James Agee, Walker Evans, and the rise and fall of cotton in the South

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t is nearly half a century since the publi-cation of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,that classic portrait in words and pictures inwhich writer James Agee and photographerWalker Evans froze a month-long moment inthe lives of three white sharecropper familiesin the Depression South. But even greatart cannot freeze time for real people, andquestions remain: What became of thesepeople with their hardscrabble poverty ofrotting shacks and work-worn faces? Whatbecame of those stubborn dreams theydreamed in the face of relentless despair?

And Their Children After Them is thepoignant, real-life multigenerational sagaof the Rickettses, the Gudgers, and theWoodses, their children, and their children'schildren in the years after they became asymbol of all that was once wrong with theSouth. Their story —as disquieting as it isriveting —is the story of all those millions ofpeople, white and black, who lived the unre-lenting hardship of picking cotton by hand,for the profit of others.

Here, then, is the rest of the life of MaggieLouise, the magical ten-year-old Ageeencouraged to dream her dreams, who wouldat age forty-five give up believing in themand take her own life.

Here, too, is the story of Sonny Gudger,who as a seventh-grade schoolchild simplycrossed his arms and in one great moment ofdefiance told his father "to hell with cotton,"thereby saving at least this one member ofthe family from the dead-end life of share-

Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2017 with funding fromKahle/Austin Foundation

It was August 1936, and the parents of ten-year-old Maggie Louisehad a visitor, a stranger, a writer from New York who had comewith a photographer friend to do a story on sharecroppers. The vis-itor was James Agee, who, during his short stay in Alabama, wouldbecome much more than a stranger to Maggie Louise.

If Agee wanted to know something about what it meant to bean Alabama sharecropper, he had come at a good time of the year,when the Alabama sun is at its hottest, attacking any head left un-protected out in the field even for a moment, when your hair isquickly matted and wet through, as if you had just been swimming,sweat not just dripping into your eyes but washing down over yourface.

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the classic report of thatvisit, Agee tells us that Maggie Louise was vaguely aware that thingsweren’t this miserable for ten-year-olds everywhere. He told her so

himself, but she had learned it even earlier, from her favorite third-grade geography textbook, Around the World with the Children.The book talked about distant lands where most of the year wascold and snowy and even the hottest summer sun didn’t make yousweat as you did in the Alabama summers. It told her about Ikwa,an Eskimo boy near her age, and his sister Too-kee. They wore thickfurs, lived in a house made of ice, and played under a sun “so palethat we can look at it without blinking.”

Still, such places must have seemed a little like cruel fiction toMaggie Louise in that late summer of 1936. All of her ten years hadbeen dominated by that August Alabama sun. Its arrival meant thecotton was ready for harvest. She’d look out on fields bursting withcotton and not question what she would have to do next.

Before the sun cleared the top of the pine and hickory forest atthe end of the field behind her house, she’d put on her handmadecorn-shuck hat and start in on the rows. She’d stay out with herfamily all day, bent at the waist, hands ceaselessly moving, until thesun went down behind the trees on the other side of the cottonpatch. Or, as they said, “from can to can’t.” She was an excellentpicker, one of nine million sharecroppers in the ten southern cottonstates. On a good day she’d fill her sack with 150 pounds. Therewere many adults who couldn’t do that much upland cotton in aday.

A good picker’s hands have to know the way past the sharp,thorny sheaths the low-lying cotton plant grows to protect the lint.They reach into the bur with all fingers, aim at a point deep in thefive-celled chamber, and pull. Some come easy. Most don’t. Therecan be no hesitation. Fingers have to move fast, as if snatching atflying bugs all day from a stooped position. For the worst twomonths of every cotton season, Maggie Louise’s fingers were rawfrom going into burs as rough as splintered wood. The first days,they were simply red and sore. After a few weeks, they bled. Someolder croppers soaked their hands in turpentine each night to softenthem for the next day of picking. If you’ve ever lifted a fluffy plasticsack of the medicine-cabinet variety of cotton balls, you can easilyimagine how many thousands of strokes it must have taken to makeup those 150 pounds that Maggie Louise picked every day.

“They are used to it. Those people are different than us,” thecotton buyers said of the sharecroppers. Maggie Louise didn’t know

about being different from other folks. She just did it. Because that’swhat you were supposed to do.

But that August was a little different from the prolonged same-ness that made up the cotton seasons of a sharecropper’s life. Ageefilled Maggie Louise’s head with exciting ideas, things she had neverthought possible. He stretched and challenged her intellect, and asMaggie Louise came to like him more—after taking rides all overthe county with him in his automobile, so much more exciting thanher father’s mule-drawn wagon—she began to wonder about theoutside world, questioning whether there was more to life than cot-ton farming.

One night, Maggie Louise and Agee were sitting on the porch,her sister Gretchen later recalled from stories Maggie Louise told.The two rose to walk in the darkness among the chicory weedsgrowing in the packed earth behind the house. He lifted and perchedher on the roof of the chicken coop that stood to his shoulders, herlegs dangling over the planks, white and cracked as beached drift-wood, so that she was looking down at him as they talked. MaggieLouise always spoke fondly of that moment to her sister. She lookeddown at this man who knew about so many things outside theircounty and asked him about eternity, the stars in the heavens. It wasone of those clear Alabama nights, a sky weighing on them as if theywere suspended at the bottom of a black ocean, the bright shimmer-ings of the Milky Way floating on the surface. Crickets and the callof distant whippoorwills were the only voices besides theirs. MaggieLouise questioned many things. Agee tried to explain. She wonderedabout her future. He later wrote she might get her wish and becomea nurse or teacher, getting away from this life. He told her aboutcity life in New York, and it all seemed wonderful.

Maggie Louise was full of expectations. Her grades wereamong the best in her school. Her parents supported her. It seemedthe possibilities for her were as vast as the sky.

In the years that followed, she’d recall that night to friends.She’d speak warmly of Agee. He had confirmed for her that theworld was bigger than Alabama cotton. She liked what he had said.

But she never did become a nurse or a teacher. That was okay,she decided. In her twenties, she was still picking cotton, and eventhat didn’t seem so bad—she had her children and the love of agood man, and she could still dream, though on a lesser scale. She

went from great expectations to hopes, entirely different matters,and then even those simple hopes never seemed to work out. Eachpassing year mocked the dreams she had dreamed with Agee, reduc-ing her a little each year, so that at the end of each year the vacantspot inside her took up more and more of the space that defined herto herself. Maggie Louise finally discovered she could no longer as-pire to anything, because the part of her that used to aspire was nolonger there.

Thirty-five years after Agee encouraged her to go on in schooland make something of herself, she reached a decision that seemed,to her, quite logical.

It came on an unusually warm February afternoon in 1971,when she, her mother, and her sister Gretchen went to the storetogether. Maggie Louise said there was something she had to get,according to Gretchen. The first store didn’t have it. At the second,they all stood together outside at a pay phone, and Maggie Louisecalled her youngest brother, Sonny, in Georgia. He told her he wasgoing to send her some money so she could fix her hair up realpretty, just the way she liked, and that he looked forward to her visitin the coming week. He told her he loved her. She cried, but didn’tlet on. She made it sound like laughter. The brother was happy tohear his sister laughing, he later said.

While her mother continued the conversation on the phone,Maggie Louise went into the store. She came out and was smiling.They had had what she wanted.

Once back home, Maggie Louise went into her room andclosed the door. From her purse, she lifted a bottle, unscrewed thelid, tipped the bottle back, and calmly started drinking.

The bottle fell to the floor with a loud noise, and her sister andmother rushed into the room. They saw the skull-and-crossboneswarning on the label and the words “rat poison.” The active ingre-dient was arsenic.

Gretchen tried to force saltwater down her throat to makeMaggie Louise vomit the poison. Maggie Louise clenched her teethin refusal. They pushed her into the backseat of a car and rushed tothe hospital. Maggie Louise cursed the doctors who tried to saveher. She ripped the tubes from her arms.

“I don’t wanna live,” she said. “I wanna die. I’ve took all I cantake.”

By the time she drank the arsenic, cotton fields were a memoryin most of the Old South. Maggie Louise’s life had transcended thedeath of cotton, but not by much. Over her four and a half decades,she and most of the other nine million cotton tenants were forcedoff the land. The journey was harder for some than for others.

Maggie Louise stopped breathing just after midnight, February21, 1971. Her last words were “Tell Mama I’m happy now.”

They buried Maggie Louise at the edge of a hill, two miles upthe road from where she had sat on the chicken coop that night anddreamed the stars.

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