In the depths of the Great Depression when the Farm Security Ad-ministration was hastily established along with many other NewDeal bodies such as the NRA, the WPA, and the CCC, the FSA wasstaffed with men and women who worked for the most part in ruralareas among farmers and others who made their living off the land.

Usually these staffers were chosen for their familiarity with theregion where they were sent to work, and most of them were nativeto those areas. Many had gone to school with the impoverishedpeople they worked among, knew them from childhood, knew whohad married whom and how they were faring in those hard times.They shared the same prejudices and the same suspicion of outsidersfrom the big cities.

But more than anything else they were knit together by lan-guage. They differed slightly in their speech from region to region,but within each they all talked the same way—not just using the

xii Foreword

same native words and phrases, but with the same particular lilt andswing. An outsider was marked at once by the way he talked.

There was, however, one exception to this careful selection ofFSA field people. It was in the choice of FSA photographers to travelaround the country to tell in pictures what the Depression had doneto America.

None of us photographers came off the land. We all had rootsin big cities and had college educations. But other than that, and ourexperience with the camera, there was no common link. We did notknow each other very well. And because there were so few of us andwe were not assigned to regions near each other, we rarely saw eachother or came together to compare our experiences. Moreover, wewere all distinct individuals with strongly held opinions and differ-ing backgrounds. There was no sure way to predict how we wouldreact to the plight of the people whom we were sent to photograph.

So the wonder is: How could all of us, with so many differentviews and personalities, produce such a powerful collection of im-ages of America and Americans with such a common and unifiedimpact? The answer lies in the presence and brilliance and drive ofone man: Roy Stryker, whose vision of a documented story in pic-tures of the people and the land in those Depression years inspiredus and propelled us all with the power of his dream.

He was a man of strong feelings and often unpredictable re-sponses, but he was consumed by one central enthusiasm: he lovedAmerica and the people who made it what it was. And he sent us allout to record this vision, imbued by his excitement. He was a cata-lyst of such power that, for me, he was and still is the strongestsingle force in my life as a photographer. And sometimes, even now,some fifty years later, when I am looking through my cameras I stillhear him talking to me.

Looking back on those years when I was taking pictures inthose rural areas, I remember what I came to call the spell. When Iwas photographing people, especially when there were several talk-ing or working together, I was continually aware that I and mycameras were an intrusion. And sometimes, when the possibilitydeveloped into that decisive moment that would record the essenceof what I saw and felt, I would tense up nervously and keep mymouth closed for fear my outsider’s voice and words might breakthe spell.

^Through the years as I have looked at the pictures of the other

Foreword xiii

FSA photographers, I see in them also much of the quality that Ihave come to call the spell: the essence of a moment caught in thosedays in America in the thirties which so marks the FSA picture col-lection.

There are only three of us from Roy Stryker’s original FSA staffleft now: Jack Delano and Marion Post Walcott and I. And that iswhy I am so delighted—so moved—to find Michael Williamson andhis pictures of America in this new book, with text by Dale Mahar-idge: And Their Children After Them. For he has shown very muchthe same eye and feeling that marked the pictures of the FSA pho-tographers.

I first met Michael Williamson when I found myself shootingbeside him in 1986 in the streets of Manila, covering the fall of Mar-cos, and there in the middle of that revolution he talked to me abouthow much the FSA photographers and their pictures had influencedhis life. In fact he said that he and Dale Maharidge had been soinfluenced by the book that FSA photographer Walker Evans andwriter James Agee had published in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Fa-mous Men, that when this revolution in the Philippines was over hewas going back to Alabama to finish the pictures for his book,bringing up to date wherever he could every picture Walker Evanshad taken fifty years earlier for his Famous Men book.

And now, in their new book, And Their Children After Them, Isee that Michael Williamson has done it. And as I look through hispictures I follow him in my mind’s eye, working with his camerasamong the very people we photographed half a century ago. And Isee him strained and intent, careful not to intrude—not to break thespell. And looking back, I know that Roy Stryker would have wel-comed him aboard.

Carl MydansJanuary 3,1989New York

To J.A. and W.E.,

those of whom the record was made,and those whose journey continues

PREFACE

. / .

For three years, Michael Williamson and 1 spent a considerableamount of time in the Deep South. We made many trips, the longestin July and August of 1986. By 1988, our work was finished. Wewere involved in an endeavor that seemed at the start odd, laterfoolish, but ultimately rewarding.

The product is this book. The idea was born in 1982, whenMichael and I were finishing another project about the new poor,riding freight trains and visiting hobo jungles across America. In themiddle of that undertaking, a friend gave me a book that had afamiliar title but that I confess I had not yet read—James Agee’s LetUs Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans. Itdescribed the lives of three Alabama families who grew cotton as

tenant farmers during the Depression and with whom Agee lived fora while in 1936.

Many in the general public know James Agee as the screenwri-ter of the Bogart-Hepburn-Huston film classic, The African Queen,and as the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Death inthe Family. After his death, Agee emerged as a major cult figure, andLet Us Now Praise Famous Men, which had had a short and un-spectacular publishing history, was reissued, this time with phenom-enal success. It may have become Agee’s best-read work, at leastamong the most dedicated of the cultists, selling many tens of thou-sands of copies. As a consequence, those familiar with the work aregenerally surprised to learn the extent to which the book remainsrelatively unknown to much of the population.

In turn, I lent the book to Michael. One night, about oneo’clock in the morning, he phoned to say he had just read some ofit. He was quite excited. Agee had stayed with and collected infor-mation about the three families in the summer of 1936, and Michaelthought it might make a good story for our newspaper to go backover the same ground on the fiftieth anniversary to learn what hadhappened to these people in the half century since Agee’s visit.

The prospect was intriguing, but in the press of other projects Iput it out of my mind. Over the next few years, I learned certainthings that caused me to become as enthusiastic as Michael.

I found there had once been nine million cotton tenant farmersin the South; virtually all of them lived under the most brutal con-ditions, often not too much better off than slaves. They worked fromsunup to sundown, raising cotton with their own strong backs andmules as their only help. These nine million workers added one bil-lion dollars of wealth annually to the world economy. Yet mostended each year further in debt.

That their condition resembled that of slaves was no accident.The cotton tenant system was devised by plantation owners afterEmancipation at the end of the Civil War. Unlike most food crops,cotton required a large pool of cheap, exploitable labor. Thoughcertainly not nearly as brutal as slavery, tenantry became almost aform of indentured servitude.'-^

My first trip to the South was made when I was a child, some-where around 1967, when I traveled through the region with myparents. I remember seeing old black men selling watermelons frommule-drawn wagons. My mother told me they were sharecroppers.

As we drove away, I stared—fascinated by the shacks they lived in.That was my first image of the South, and, like most first images, itdominated my perception for a long time to come.

In the early 1980s, the time Michael and I first went to Ala-bama, I somehow assumed that a few of these sharecroppers werestill around. But none were left. The last of them had vacated theland or died off more than a decade earlier when the cotton tenant“j <1 system had gone through the last of its death rattles. There may stillhave been—in fact, there may yet be as I write this—a holdout fam-ily or two that still plow with mules or pick cotton by hand the oldway, but if so we were unable to find them in our wide travelsthroughout the region. The only cotton handpicked these days is fora special and rare grade called Sea Island cotton. The vast majorityof today’s cotton crop is planted and harvested by machine, just likecorn or wheat. Agricultural mechanization has belatedly freed cot-ton from its notorious history as a crop of exploitation.

Neither did I know then that of today’s domestic cotton croprelatively little is raised in the old Cotton Belt. Texas and Californiacombined have nearly six million acres in production, almost doublethe current acreage in eight of the old-time cotton states combined,according to the Cotton Council. Most of the cotton still raised inthe Southeast is grown in Mississippi. Alabama now has just one-third of a million acres devoted to cotton; in 1936, it had two andone-third million. Most of the onetime cotton lands have become awilderness covered with pine trees. Yet the dominant image of theSouth retained by many Americans is that of a cotton region.

Cotton, as it was once grown, vanished for myriad reasons:synthetic fibers replaced cotton as king of the market for light-weight, easy-care fabrics; imports encroached on what was left ofthe cotton market; boll weevils chased production westward. Mostimportant, however, may have been these two: in the 1950s and1960s cotton-picking machines finally displaced strong backs andtough hands; and the advent of the civil rights movement changedthe social mind-set of southern blacks, liberating them from fieldlabor. Market competition drove down prices and the boll weevildecreased yield, but the social, economic, and psychological servi-tude built into the old system would have commanded the tenantsto stay put and work the land, at whatever reduced profit, had ma-chines and the civil rights movement not combined to free them.

The old cotton empire of the rural South was slow to die. By

xviii Preface

the 1950s, when the wealth of postwar prosperity had begun tofilter down, many whites were able to give up tenant farming, leav-ing mostly blacks in their place. For those who hung on, the 1960sfurther elevated expectations and showed blacks and whites alikethat they could really have better lives.

Seldom in our nation’s history have so many people in so widea region had their lives so dramatically altered by so definitive atechnological change. The demise of cotton transformed millions oflives in the Old South, but I found little written about the death ofthis system; as it was happening, newspapers and magazines eitherwrote nothing about it or ran occasional and mostly inconsequentialshort pieces. The story of the people who went through this transi-tion has been largely ignored.

Later, fractions of the story were recorded. The movement ofblack sharecroppers to the North has been documented. Manybooks and researchers have studied the urban impact on blacks whofled the South, a great number from the imprisonment of tenantfarming. I could find little said about the actual system itself, thewhites under it, or the postcotton rural South. Most people think ofblacks when tenant farming is mentioned, because blacks were thelast to do it in large numbers. But whites were actually a majority oftenants in 1936, and for years before and afterward. So if this bookseems to focus on whites, it is because of their long-dominant posi-tion in tenant farming, because it was with three white families thatAgee lived, and because we were attracted to the project by curiosityabout what had happened to these three families. But we’ve triednot to ignore the existence of black tenant farmers. We visited ablack family of ex-tenants during our several years of research forthis book, to explore the special experience of at least this onefamily.

I also will not delve into the history of the Civil War, Recon-struction, or the civil rights movement, which all had importantroles in the birth, life, and death of tenant farming, for these greatevents have been better covered elsewhere.

If we understand the death of cotton, we understand manythings about modern America. Agee and Evans’s book was about aseemingly eternal system that oppressed millions. If we now countthe children born to the nine million tenants in 1936, we find severaldozen millions in our nation who are first-generation casualties ofthe debilitating mind-set of that system. The problem of these disen-

franchised masses, both black and white, has never been fully dealtwith. Our project is about what has happened to a few of thesemillions since that system perished.

Of course, on the surface, it seemed fascinating to find out whathappened to the lives with which Agee had become so intimatelyentwined. There were, however, larger questions I thought might beanswered at the same time.

Long before I became acquainted with Let Us Now Praise Fa-mous Men, I had read The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s fa-mous work that chronicled a fictional Depression-era family of DustBowl cotton farmers who fled to California. Being somewhat a stu-dent of the so-called underclass of society, I always wondered whatwould have happened if the Joad family had been real. Would Roseof Sharon have married a career man and had children who went tocollege in the prosperous 1950s and grew up to become profession-als? Or would she and Steinbeck’s other characters have lived outtheir lives in some backwater county of California’s Central Valley,on the edge of bleakness, where a number of their kind did indeedj/ end up? Was there even more to learn about poverty from followingthe generations to come than Steinbeck had taught us in his snap-shot of this one family?

Agee’s three families, and a few others we found, were a win-dow on this past and could perhaps provide some clues.

n .

By the first day of this project, we’d come to suspect it was jinxed.More than once, we almost abandoned it.

We’d spent the early part of that first day at the home of Mar-garet Ricketts and were reeling from horrors, too numerous to fithere, that we discovered and that we’ll describe later. That night, wehad to cover a civil rights meeting in Cherokee City for our news-paper. It was a fiery gathering that ended late, and I was sick fromheat, lack of sleep, and confusion.

Michael was driving. A mist sat in the road’s low spots, toothick for the lights to cut. We accidentally struck a stray dog thathad leapt into our path. It wandered off, wounded, and we didn’tknow its fate; with a considerable amount of anguish, we drove on.The next sight to emerge from the night’s mist was a sign on a Bap-

tist church alongside the road. It announced, “The key to happinessis a clear conscience.”

Soon we were in Centerboro, a town we’d later come to de-spise. We made a wrong turn and found ourselves driving up the oldmain street for the first time, the town’s center that had been by-passed by the modern road that led to our hotel.

Michael shouted, slamming the brakes. He pulled out our copyof Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, turned to one of Evans’s pic-tures, and studied it. His memory had served him correctly. We’dstumbled onto the same street that appeared in the photograph. Weran up and down it into the night, book in hand, searching for thevery window in which Evans stood and from which he took thepicture.

We reached the courthouse and saw, right in front, that we werebeneath the very same Civil War statue under which Agee had firstmet the men of the three families he lived with. Its identity was con-firmed by another Evans picture, and even though it was one in themorning, the discovery caused us to holler and read aloud from thebook.

Our jubilation was halted by a serious voice in command. Itbelonged to the sheriff, who emerged from the shadow of a magno-lia, and we froze, afraid of being shot by this southern sheriff in anowhere town on a hot night. I blurted out our business, and herelaxed. Sheriff Carver exhibited two bars sawed from his jail byprisoners who had just tried to escape—he thought we were accom-plices. Reporters often find one utterly unbelievable moment thatseems to happen in the pursuit of so many stories, and this was oursfor the Alabama project. Sheriff Carver, a bone-faced man, invitedus inside, telling us what he knew about the three families; hisknowledge was considerable. He lit a cigarette and told us they stillsing a song about Ivy Woods, and he smiled, blowing smoke—big-gest whore in the county, he said, legendary even by modern-whorestandards. We begged him to sing the song. He said he was up forreelection and couldn’t do that. We promised off-the-record confi-dence. Again he smiled, smoking away, feet on his desk, the airgrowing thick. Three o’clock came, and we had to go. Still, the sher-iff had not sung. Maybe next year, he said, when ya’ll come back.

Sheriff Carver easily won reelection. He is as popular as he isrepresentative of the character of Centerboro—curious and friendly,

but friendly only to the point of cordial neighborliness, beyondl/which the code of small-town suspicion takes over.

The sheriff never did sing us his song. But that was okay. Thatday set the tone for the many to follow. In later trips, we becameintimately involved in numerous lives, to the point that we felt likevisiting family.

At other times, we were almost archaeologists. We seldompassed shacks, abandoned schools, or empty plantation mansionswithout stopping to dig through rubble. We looked for and foundmany documents and records that told of the cotton days. Wesearched for every trace. On Hobe’s Hill, where most of the peopleI write about once lived, the jungle of vines and brush was so thickwe had to crawl on hands and knees for two days seeking the re-mains of the Gudger house. Later, a few miles distant, I found thehouse their daughter Maggie Louise last lived in, in 1958, the lastyear she farmed cottop^/laggie Louise and her family were the finaloccupants, and thirty years later the vine-covered dwelling still con-tained Maggie Louises shoes and other objects. It was, for us, some-thing like locating the log cabin, still intact, of Abraham Lincoln,complete with a few of his schoolbooks. I brought back from Ala-bama several large boxes of torn wallpaper, scraps of leather, rat-chewed letters, books, documents, waste from dumps.

. iii.

There are three reasons why I described our work as odd, evenfoolish.

First, it should be noted this undertaking was marked by diffi-culties. On one level, it was a simple act of journalism, an exercisein investigative research, work we had been trained to do. This im-plies indifference, and no word could be less accurate in character-izing our attitude. Agee remarked that he and Evans were “spies,”that they had been sent forth to learn of their subjects by infiltratingtheir lives in a somewhat secretive manner. It seems to me Agee alsosometimes felt he was a figurative rapist. And now we were return-ing to the scene of the crime, so to speak, coconspirators in the eyesof some, not just to inquire of the deed but to demand seconds,reopening old memories of private things they’d been induced toyield to Agee, probing new ones.

As will be explained later, a few wanted nothing to do with us.But most of the 128 survivors and offspring of the original 22 familymembers were quite willing to tell their stories. As for those whodesired to be left alone, we honored their wishes and stayed faraway. To respect the privacy of all, we, like Agee, chose not to usethe real names of any characters and of most places. We used thesame pseudonyms he gave the families and small towns. To thepeople born after 1936, we gave new names.

The second reason I termed this a foolish endeavor has to dowith the nature of American society. Books about the poor, as thesyndicated columnist Bob Greene said of our first book, do not ex-actly fly off the shelves into readers’ hands—especially not in the1980s, if ever. Telling people about the troubles of others is not away to get rich. We are fortunate to have found a publisher willingto print our findings. In the unlikely event that any profits beyondour expenses come our way, we will set up a trust fund that willreceive a majority of our royalties. We desire a perpetual endowmentthat can be used to educate the children of the descendants of thetenant families written about here. We hope in this manner to givesomething back to those who have been so gracious to us. If readersare interested in how this works out, or have any other thoughts onthis or any other matters included here, we invite correspondence tothe authors in care of the publisher.

Third, there is the thorny problem that we’ll be criticized bysome for following two legends of journalism. When beginning this,I was not aware of the cultlike status of Agee. Evans, one of the topFarm Security Administration photographers, is equally revered inother circles. While this book is in no way intended to imitate, par-ody, or otherwise denigrate the work of Agee and Evans, there maybe those who will be upset that we seem to be tampering with, orexploiting, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

A conscious decision was made to treat Agee and Evans as char-acters as important as the families they lived with and reported on.Their actions, their style, and even their motives must thus be opento comment. This book certainly starts from the study on which LetUs Now Praise Famous Men is based, but its purpose and scope aredifferent. Agee, beyond being a journalist, was a poet; I am not.Agee’s study not only was a report of a major period of our historybut became itself an important event in that history. My effort is

Preface xxiii

offered as the report of a journalist who struggled to retain his de-tachment. At the risk of being accused of oversimplifying the differ-ences between the two works, I offer that I saw my proper role asstanding back and observing and that Agee saw his as jumping inand experiencing.

I believe the two works can coexist.

. iv .

I should mention the source of our title, which was given to us in aroundabout way by James Agee. It comes from Ecclesiasticus, thesame biblical chapter in which he found the name for his book.

As for the pictures, in keeping with the form and spirit of ourpredecessors, they’re meant as a separate but equal statement to thetext. Michael has with his camera taken an approach somewhat dif-ferent from mine. I believe this does not detract, but instead adds tothe fullness of the work.

All dates, ages, and events are tied to 1986, unless otherwisenoted.

We were not the first to seek out these people; certainly wewon’t be the last. A few magazine writers and filmmakers who pre-ceded us have provided insight into the lives of people now dead orreclusive, and their work is occasionally quoted.

A technical note: A sharecropper can be called a tenant farmer,but all tenant farmers were not sharecroppers. I may occasionallyuse the term “sharecropper” and “tenant farmer” interchangeably.There is an important difference, as will be shown, but the twowords have entered the language as to mean the same thing to mostAmericans.

This is a book about how people change. It is about how somedo not. It is about how some persevere, only to end staring at handsworn from a lifetime of labor, realizing nothing—an absolute defi-nition of defeat. It is about others, who, through hard work andhope, have achieved varying degrees of success, along with anunderstanding of who they are and where they came from. It isabout a group of men and women who long ago told us somethingabout America that we, as a society, do not readily want to face, andwho today have something else to tell us about ourselves.

Unlike that of a novel, the story of these families is not static.

xxiv Preface

The lives Agee wrote about had already changed by the time theirbook was published in 1941. Some things we found have certainlychanged as you read this. People continue to evolve. The final wordof this book is not a conclusion. It is a story without end. We hopethe reader approaches it with this in mind.

Dale MaharidgeSacramentoFebruary 14, 1989

AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM

If we could fly backward on the Magic Carpet of Time to the cityof Babylon in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar, many strangesights would greet our eyes.

On a sight-seeing tour we would want to see the hanging gar-dens and other unusual marvels of this rich and noted metropolisabout which we have read in history.

But in ancient Babylon nothing that we might see would beso economically significant as the stocks of rare merchandise of-fered for sale by the traders.

Perhaps there would be jewels; exquisite pieces of handicraftwould catch our attention; and there would be beautiful, delicate,fascinating pieces of cloth the like of which the world had neverseen. It is this cloth with which we are concerned.

Where did these matchless pieces of cloth come from? Bywhom were they made? . . .

Although it is not known exactly where the treasured fabricsof the ancient traders were first made, it is more than likely thatthey came from India. . . .

We know that reference is made to cotton cloth as early as1500 B.c. In fact, from 1500 b.c. until an equal number of yearsafter the beginning of the Christian Era, India was the center of thecotton industry. . . .

Writers describe the cloth purchased in ancient India as being“so fine you could hardly feel it in your hand.” Is it any wonderthat poetic authors of the Orient spoke of these fine fabrics as“webs of woven wind”?

—from ’Round the World with Cotton, a textbook published in1941 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for schoolchildren, dis-covered in 1988 amid debris on the floor of an abandoned schooleast of Centerboro, Alabama.

. i.

Cotton is a member of the mallow family, genus Gossypium. It is abeautiful plant, rich green and vaguely purple in color, with oddlystar-shaped leaves, each with three to five lobes. There are twentyspecies of the genus, some of which grow to heights of over eighteenfeet, though a range of one to seven feet is more common. The plantproduces a white flower that is fertile only a few hours, then turnscolor and falls away, the fruit maturing into a green pod the size ofa golf ball. This pod, or boll, dries as it grows and after about twohundred days splits open along four or five lines, each section con-taining eight to ten seeds. At this stage the pod is called a bur. Theseeds are protected by lint, in an arrangement similar in a way tothat of the fluffy dandelion head, except that the cotton fibers arelong, strong, and securely wrapped in the chambers.

Cotton has hundreds of uses beyond being material forclothes—from the seed is squeezed oil for food, paint, and cosmet-ics, and the fiber is used for paper, explosives, and linoleum. Earlyon, cotton was referred to as “white gold.”''

Cotton was an American fabric long before Europeans ar-rived—woven cotton has been found in Utah cliff dwellings and inexcavations in Mexico dating to 2400 b.c.; Columbus found itbeing cultivated in the West Indies when he landed. Cytogenetical

studies have shown that the cotton of today is a cross between old-and new-world species.

Cotton was native to all temperate continents except Europe; itwas introduced to Europe by the army of Alexander the Great in300 B.c. In the 1600s, the English began weaving cotton, at first asa home cottage industry, and soon transformed the use of the fiberas far as modern man is concerned. In 1767, the British inventorJames Hargreaves created the “jenny,” a machine that could spinyarn cheaply and in large quantities, replacing home spinningwheels. A few years later, two other British inventors devised the“water frame” and the “mule,” which further mechanized the spin-ning process. The appearance of the “power loom” in the late 1780ssimilarly mechanized the weaving process. These inventions spurredthe Industrial Revolution, which had begun around 1760, and gaverise to a new industry and a new type of exploited factory laborerin Britain.

But common people still wore linen or wool, for no matter howcruelly effective the production of the fabric became, cotton goodsremained costlier than those made from other fibers, because theraw material was still expensive. The bottleneck limiting wide, pop-ular use was the difficulty in separating the seed from the fibers;without this “cleaning” the cotton was unusable. It took one longday for one person to deseed by hand four pounds of cotton andproduce one pound of clean cotton for the new British machines.

That’s where Eli Whitney came along and changed the courseof American history—economic, political, and sociological. Aftergraduating from Yale College in 1792, he took up an offer to tutorthe children of a rich family in Savannah, Georgia. On the boatjourney to that job, he met Mrs. Nathanael Greene. When the tutor-ing job didn’t pan out, he began working at Mrs. Greene’s MulberryGrove plantation. The story goes that three planters visiting Mul-berry Grove one night in January 1793 got to talking about howmuch they wished they could grow more cotton, for that region ofthe South was perfect for its cultivation. The problem was that pro-ducing cotton was made so uneconomical by the deseeding processthat most planters grew tobacco, rice, and indigo, instead. Whitney,who had a knack for inventing, began work in Mrs. Greene’s base-ment and, with some advice from his patron, came up with a devicethat used two rollers to remove the seed from the cotton. With his

machine, one person could clean in one day an amount of fiber thatused to take fifty workers. At the end of 1793, Whitney joined inpartnership with Mr. Miller, Mrs. Greene’s new husband, to pro-duce the device they called a cotton gin.

“Miller and Whitney, as the firm was called, made a mistakeoften made by young men,” reported another children’s textbookfound on the floor of the Centerboro school, Great Inventors andTheir Inventions, published in 1918. “They wanted to make a lot ofmoney, and they wanted to make it quickly.” This desire to makefast money led to others’ stealing the basic idea and not paying roy-alties for its use.

In the end, though the two never made the big money they en-visioned, the cotton gin placed the United States at the forefront oftechnology in the production of cotton. Had the machine been in-vented elsewhere, the United States might never have been thrustinto its role as the world’s number-one supplier of cotton, a positionof dominance that lasted well over a century.

“By reason of his invention, the United States is to-day thegreatest cotton producing country in the world,” said the textbookin 1918. It added:

Production of cotton in the South increased by leaps and bounds.

In 1792, the year before the invention of the cotton gin, there were

raised and sent out of the United States 138,000 pounds of cotton.

In 1793, about 487,000 pounds were exported. In 1794, about

1,000,000, and in 1800, about 17,000,000 pounds.

. ii.

Before the advent of the cotton gin, much of what is now known asthe Deep South was frontier land, settled and worked by veterans ofthe Revolutionary War. Some were German, but a majority wereScotch-Irish. They moved into the South as the Indians were drivenout, setting up farms on amazingly fertile lands. According to onereport, forty thousand people from Ireland had moved into theCarolinas by 1760. In educational background or customs, theywere not much different from the settlers who went into the Ohioterritory in the North. They cleared land, planted crops, and wouldnot have been expected to evolve a society much different from theone established by their northern counterparts.

But cotton could not be grown in the North. In the UnitedStates, it can be grown only in a region sixteen hundred miles eastto west by roughly three hundred north to south, starting in south-eastern Virginia and reaching to western Texas. It can also be grownin Arizona and California, but these regions were not yet a meaning-ful part of American culture or commerce. The South, with its estab-lished ability to produce cotton, a commodity valued throughoutEurope, suddenly grew in importance to the young country. To saythat near-mania took over is not to overstate the haste with whichthe big-money men moved into the lands of the South occupied bythe Scojch-Irish. The quest to grow cotton was the South’s goldrush. ^

Cotton was a curious crop, however. It demanded long hoursof heavy labor at the start and the end of the season, labor thatcould be idle at all other times. The Anglo-Saxon busy-hands ethicwas not geared for that. It was quickly recognized that an exploita-ble labor pool would be necessary for cotton cultivation—the workof slaves.

By bidding up the price of fertile land, by intimidation, and bycontrolling the new gins and thereby strangling attempts of smallfarmers to market their cotton, these money men drove the frontiersettlers from the most fertile bottomland and established themselvesas the beneficiaries of the new plantation system. A few of the orig-inal settlers were able to cross over and become plantation ownersthemselves. Others took the profits from the sale of their land andleft the South. But most were forced by these changes, over whichthey had little control, to leave the fertile bottomland and resettletheir families on far less desirable lands in the shale hills. This mi-gration created a new breed of American and a special Americansociety that would survive for more than a century, the communityof white southerners that came to intrigue James Agee and WalkerEvans.

Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled throughout the Southobserving life in the 1850s, gave this view of a typical region reset-tled by the big planters in his book The Cotton Kingdom:

Suppose it to be of twenty square miles, with a population of sixhundred, all told, and with an ordinarily convenient access by rivernavigation to market. The whole of the available cotton land inthis case will probably be owned by three or four men.

Cotton growing started near the coasts. In Alabama, when cot-ton first entered the state, the big-money men set up plantations nearthe gulf, and the Scotch-Irish moved inland. Alabama: A Guide tothe Deep South, written under the Work Projects Administration,stated,

Dispossessed small farmers were among the first settlers in thelowland Black Belt. When it was discovered that Black Belt cottongrew to great size and fruitfulness, wealthy planters began movingin from the Gulf Coast. So much land was planted to cotton thatcorn, other staple farm products, and work animals had to be im-ported.

The Black Belt, so named not after the skin color of its residentsbut after the rich soil, saw a typical forced movement of these poorwhites.

No one knows exactly how many of these Scotch-Irish wereforced off their land by spreading plantations, but at a minimumthey numbered in the many thousands. One estimate put their num-ber at one million. It is clear that the lives of these descendants ofthe original Scotch-Irish southern frontier settlers quickly degener-ated into a relentless struggle for survival. Despite all their hardwork, they could barely grow enough food on the inferior mineralsoil in the hill country across the South to feed themselves, much lessproduce a surplus to sell. In time, in other ways as well, the qualityof their lives spiraled down, as the wealth of the new cotton baronsin the lowlands increased.

This period was studied by the Presbyterian Banner, a news-paper printed in Pittsburgh. In a booklet entitled The MountainWhites, published in 1893, this process was described.

In 1792 [s/c] Whitney invented the cotton gin. Cotton landsbecame more valuable. Those . . . trying to hold their lands had tosell out; and thus an increased number had to betake themselves tothe mountains.

The present generation is greatly deteriorated, industriously,socially, mentally, morally and religiously, as compared with theirenlightened and heroic ancestors of 1775-1782. The present con-ditions of these people is directly traceable to slavery; for, in mak-ing the slave the planter’s blacksmith, carpenter, wheelwright, andman-of-all-work, slavery shut every avenue of honest employment

against the working white man and drove him to the mountains orthe barren sand hills. . . .

The first generation of children were much more illiteratethan their parents. Each succeeding generation was more illiteratethan the preceding one.

The establishment of a southern cotton culture was well underway by the time of the War of 1812. When the war closed the Britishmarket for cotton, many planters may have wished they hadn’t in-vested everything in a one-crop livelihood. After the war, however,demand not only caught up to prewar consumption but rose to un-precedented levels. With these record demands for cotton came newdemands for slave labor. In 1820, the people of Alabama numbered125,000, and 31 percent were slaves. By 1830, the number of Ala-bamians had grown to 300,000, and 38 percent were slaves. Pro-duction continued to increase geometrically—it doubled between1849 and 1859.

Reasons for the regression of the poor whites included morethan the infertility of the land. Isolation was also a factor. The hillswere closed to the outside world, for the roads were poor to non-existent. And the schools were substandard. Public schools were rid-iculed by big planters, who hired tutors to educate their ownchildren. The poor whites came to be called “sand-hillers” and “clayeaters,” scorned not only by the new plantation lords but even byhouse slaves.

A northern traveler in this period, quoted by a Mr. Gilmore inAmong the Pines, had this conversation with his black guide:

“Are there many of these poor whites around Georgetown?”

“Not many ’round Georgetown, sar, but great many in de up-country har, and dey’m all ’like—pore and no account; none ob’em kin read, and dey all eat clay.”

“Eat clay!” I said; “What do you mean by that?”

“Didn’t you see, massa, how yaller all dem wimmin war?

Dat’s ’cause dey eat clay. De little children begin ’fore dey kin walk,and dey eat it till dey die; dey chaw it like ’backer. It makes all darstumacs big, like as you seed ’em. It’m mighty onhealfy.”

According to another contemporary observer, quoted by PaulH. Buck in an article that first appeared in the American HistoricalReview, these people by the middle 1850s were “lank, lean, angular,

and bony, with flaming red, or flaxen, or sandy, or carroty-coloredhair, sallow complexion, awkward manners, and a natural stupidityor dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.”

Many characterizations of hill whites from this period are sim-ilarly brutal. It was not until 1902 that a medical basis was found—a disease caused by hookworms—for a pattern of behavior that crit-ics ascribed to innate stupidity. Dr. Charles Warded Stiles, who dis-covered the illness, said the clay eating was due to an abnormalappetite created by the hookworm parasite, which also robbed itsvictims of energy and made them anemic. The disease was called the“poor man’s malady,” for the worm was found to prey only onpeople with inadequate diets and bad housing.

This disease and others—combined with the mind-numbinganguish of being unable to find a productive role in a society domi-nated by the master-slave relationship—served to reduce the moun-tain whites over several generations into a class that was renderedimmobile and listless.

Those who profited from the commerce of cotton, seeing onlya gleaming future in the fiber, tended to discourage new industry inthe South. Apparently they were unwilling to encourage nonagricul-tural job opportunities for white laborers that could easily turn intotemptation or encouragement for blacks to flee slavery.

Regarding this failure to do any planning for these white hillpeople, Buck says, “The planter justified his neglect by declaring thepoor whites irresponsible, lazy, and dishonest, attributes renderingthem valueless as laborers. This contempt of their capabilities wasshared by the middle classes and the slaves.”

To complete this paradox, these impoverished whites supportedthe institution of slavery. Olmsted remarked, “From childhood, theone thing in their condition which has made life valuable to the massof whites has been that the niggers are yet their inferiors.” Olmstedwas told by one hill white, “I wish there warn’t no niggers here.They are a great cuss to this country, I expect.” Another man said,“Now suppose they was free, you see they’d all think themselves justas good as we.”

Meanwhile, as the sixth decade of the displacement of thewhites from their land neared, cotton cultivation continued tospread. In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolinasaid in the senate chambers, “You dare not make war on cotton. Nopower on earth dares to make war on it. Cotton is King.”

Of course, the Civil War forever changed what the South hadseen as an unchangeable world.

The close of the war left the South and the cotton culture inruins. Land lay unplowed, unused, empty of value. Southern farm-land, worth $226 million before the war, had shrunk in value to $78million by 1870. The cotton system was in shambles with Emanci-pation. Those blacks who could leave the South did so. Others leftplantations to try to find work in southern cities and towns rebuild-ing the destroyed infrastructure. Cotton, abandoned through wantof labor and lack of capital to underwrite new production methods,seemed defeated.

There was much talk among planters about how they wouldrebuild their farms. The first problem to be addressed was the newrelationship they would have to establish with potential farm work-ers, who were expected to come almost exclusively from the ranksof the former slaves, now all freedmen. In a series of letters thatappeared in 1869 in The Southern Cultivator, a David Dickson ofGeorgia proposed a new contractual basis. A copy of this book wasdiscovered in 1986 in the attic of an abandoned plantation mansioneast of Centerboro, Alabama. Dickson said,

The best method of hiring, I consider to be ... a contractsetting forth the duties of each party. The policy of managing freed-men is, to act firmly, and truly, and honestly with them, and requirethem to do the same; and as a good stimulus to do this, never paythem more than half wages till the end of the time for which theycontracted to work. On plantations of any considerable size, theactual necessaries should be kept, and sold to the freedmen at aprofit sufficient to pay risk and interest on the money. The rent ofthe land should be one-third of all the crops gathered; anotherthird should pay for the horse-power, machinery and tools. Thelaborer should have one-third. In hiring laborers, a man shouldnever allow less than fifty percent profit on the labor, for he istaking the risk.

Soon after the end of the war, proposals such as these becameincorporated into what came to be known as the tenant-farm, orsharecropping, system. But if Dickson thought only in terms of theuse of black laborers to pick the cotton of the South, others werestarting to look elsewhere. Some were calling for immigration fromEurope to fill the new labor needs; still others began to look withmore interest at the hill whites.

In support of the idea of employing the hill whites, RobertSomers, in The Southern States since the War, 1870-71, noted thatthe hill whites had produced a little bit of cotton on their inferiorlands for years and had some knowledge of the crop. In attempt.' ngto advance his idea of turning to white labor, Somers, reflecting aswell as playing on the racism of many planters, suggested that blackswere being treated like royalty and guarded by “agitations extend-ing from Washington.” Others claimed that many blacks workingfor wages wanted the right to take their earned cash wages and leavea crop in the middle of a season. Of the whites, Somers said,

These small hill farmers come down occasionally into theplain, looking for land to rent or buy; and it is not improbable thatmany of the better and more industrious class of families in “themountains” will eventually come down altogether, and help to ren-ovate the waste places, and build up the agricultural prosperity ofthe Valley. The negro, all in all, is the best labourer in the cottonfields the south is ever likely to have; but if the resources of theplantations are to be developed, and cotton is to be produced withprofit at such a price as the world will give for it, the labour of thenegro must be largely reinforced by the labour of white men. . . .

By 1877, a little more than a decade after the end of the war,cotton production once again equaled what it had been in 1861.Later, Rupert B. Vance, in The Human Geography of the South, saidof the evolving sharecropping system,

In what must have been an era of primitive barter, a system wasarrived at whereby labor was secured without money wages andland without money rent. Up and down the Cotton Belt southernstates after 1865 vied with one another in passing crop lien laws.Accepted as the temporary salvation of a wrecked economic struc-ture, the system has increasingly set the mode for southern agricul-ture. . . . The crop lien system was developed to readjust the Negroto cotton production on terms more fitting a modern economythan slavery. Its success was so great as to be disastrous. Congre-gated on its original fringes, the unpropertied poor white farmerspoured into the new scheme and helped to make temporary expe-diency a permanent arrangement.

Quite simply, and with no small bit of irony, the hill whitesflocked into tenantry in far greater numbers than even Somers couldhave expected, working for the descendants of those same men who

had forced their forefathers off the land decades earlier. John W.Johnston, a U.S. senator from Virginia, saw tenant farming as sal-vation for these iower-class whites. His article “The Emancipationof the Southern Whites and Its Effect on Both Races,” published inthe Manufacturers’ Record, quotes the following figures on thechanging racial makeup of tenant farmers in the years after the war.

Year	White	Colored
1880	44.0%	56.0%
1884	48.4%	51.6%
1885	50.2%	49.9%

Johnston claimed that the whites who replaced blacks weremore productive. He said, “The emancipation of the whites willmake the South great, rich and prosperous.”

The numbers of whites continued to increase after the turn ofthe century, said The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy, a book publishedin 1935 by the University of North Carolina Press. It found,

In the decade from 1920 to 1930, white tenants in the cottonstates increased by 200,000 families—approximately a millionpersons. During the same decade Negro tenants decreased by2,000 families as a result of mass movements to the cities.

James H. Street, in his book The New Revolution in the CottonEconomy, saw the system as not much different from slavery:

The arrangement between planter and tenant took the formof an enforceable coVftract, though it was rarely reduced to writing.

The legal device which was most frequently used to prevent thecropper from leaving his crop in mid-season, and when desirable,to prevent him from moving to another farm after the annualsettlement was reached, was systematic indebtedness. Some ofthese arrangements were scarcely distinguishable from peonage,and they were often reinforced by the complicity of local law en-forcement officers. Several states adopted “alienation of labor”laws which were designed to protect landlords from having theirlabor hired away from them by other farmers. . . . Farm hands whowere attracted to new jobs by such offers were subject to forciblereturn by peace officers.

By the turn of the century, the system had firmly established itsorder. There came to be three types of tenant farmers.

The first kind of tenant paid the owner straight rent for the useof the land and kept the entire crop he grew, in an arrangementmuch like that of farmers who lease land these days. This type wasrelatively uncommon.

The second group included those who worked on what werecalled “thirds” and “fourths.” These tenants had to provide theirown mules and farm implements, as well as their labor. In a typicalarrangement, in exchange for use of the owner’s land, the tenantfamily might give over to the landlord one-fourth the corn they grew,one-third of the cotton. Out of the remaining share of the crop,they’d owe the landowner for most of the cost of seed and fertilizer,plus interest. They’d also owe on rations money advanced, plus in-terest as high as 40 percent. Often, they were not advanced cash butinstead had to purchase their rations at a company store. This op-pressive debt and the strict enforcement of lien laws ensured thattenants would stay through harvest and be there to work the nextseason. And this was not a job through which a man alone mightsupport a family. Entire households were expected to work, childrenstarting around the age of six or seven.

Sharecroppers were the third and lowest kind of tenant farmer.(The word “sharecropper” is sometimes used generically, to describeall of tenant farming, but we’ll try to restrict it to this one subset oftenant farmers.) Unlike those who worked thirds or fourths, share-croppers didn’t own their own mules or tools. All they had to offerwas their backs. The owners provided the “furnish”—land, tools,and mules. In return, the sharecroppers had to give over a muchgreater proportion of the crop than tenants did—half their corn andcotton, an additional amount to cover their portion of the fertilizer,and an average of 40 percent interest. For this reason, they were alsocalled half-croppers, or said to be working on “halvers.” Bad years,or bad luck, could mean no credit, which in turn meant disaster forthe farm family.

The boll weevil, a worm that eats developing bolls of cotton,threatened the tenant system around the turn of the century. For awhile, it seemed that this little worm might be able to achieve whateven Emancipation had not—finally do in cotton. The people ofEnterprise, Alabama, erected a monument to the boll weevil, “whichhad freed them from the tyranny of cotton.” But the optimism waspremature—the weevil was soon controlled, and cotton survived.

The environment in which this tenant system existed was de-

King Cotton IS

scribed by Robert H. Montgomery as a “whole miserable panoramaof unpainted shacks, rain-gullied fields, straggling fences, rattletrapFords, dirt, poverty, disease, drudgery, and monotony that stretchesfor a thousand miles across the cotton belt.”

The Great Depression exacerbated an already bad situation, asfalling prices made it impossible for farmers to get out of debt withthe sale of their crops. It seemed the only people making moneywere not the landlords but the town merchants and bankers. By1936, blacks were driven to utter despair, and whites outnumberedthem five to three on tenant farms. In that same year, there werenearly twice as many tenant farmers raising cotton as there had beenslaves in 1860.

In an address to Congress in the middle of the Depression, Pres-ident Franklin D. Roosevelt said:

Half a century ago one of every four farmers was a tenant.Today, two of every five are tenants. While aggravated by theDepression, the tenancy problem is the accumulated result of gen-erations of unthinking exploitation of our agricultural resources,both land and people.

. iii.

In the spring of 1936, the situation of tenant farmers caught the eyesof some New York editors at Fortune magazine, part of the Time-Life magazine empire of Henry Luce. These editors thought theirreaders might be interested in a “sociological” article on the situa-tion. They chose to send James Agee, a twenty-seven-year-old writerwho had graduated from Harvard College and had since been withFortune three and a half years. He was a little strange, fiery—butideally suited, it seemed, for the task.

Agee, however, was on a leave in Florida, trying to salvage ajtortured marriage and rethink his future. He had been contemplat-ing quitting Fortune, where, according to his later biographer Lau-rence Bergreen, he had been dealt “mind-numbing assignments” onsuch subjects as butter, orchids, and colonial Williamsburg. Ageewas a poet—he had just published a book of verse—and these werenot topics to excite him. He was filled with worry that he’d neverbecome a “great writer.”

On his return in mid-May from that five-month Florida trip, he

16 And Their Children . . .

learned of the tenant-farmer assignment. According to his friendRobert Fitzgerald in his 1968 book, he was “swallowing with ex-citement . . . stunned, exalted, scared clean through and felt like im-pregnating every woman on the fifty-second floor.”

Picked to photograph the project was Walker Evans. Evanscame from a wealthy Chicago family and had been taking picturesfor eight years. At the time, he worked for the Resettlement Admin-istration, later to become the Farm Security Administration, whichhired photographers to illustrate the effects of the Depression andpromote President Roosevelt’s New Deal. He also did free-lancework for Fortune. Agee was the more outgoing of the two. Theawkward-looking photographer, thirty-three, was much more re-served.

“Best break I ever had on FortuneAgee wrote on Thursday,June 18, 1936, to a priest who had taught him in his native Tennes-see. “Feel terrific responsibility toward story; considerable doubtsof my ability to bring it off; considerable more of Fortune's ultimatewillingness to use it. . . .”

On that note, Agee and Evans headed south on Saturday after-noon, June 20. They reportedly went first to Oklahoma, where theyfound no sharecroppers of the kind they wanted. They then turnedeast, back toward Alabama.

1 9 3 6 - 1 9 4 0

. i.

It’s unclear what exactly James Agee and Walker Evans did thosefirst weeks in Alabama before they found the three tenant families—the Gudgers, the Rickettses, and the Woodses—whose lives theywould observe and describe.

It is certain that they had narrowed their focus to what isknown as the Black Belt of Alabama. This region and the Missis-sippi Delta were the two most important cotton areas of the South,but of these two, the Black Belt had more of what they had beensent to find—white tenant farmers.

To help them find subjects, Agee had contacted a landownerand New Deal executive named Harmon. Harmon did try to help,taking Agee and Walker to a number of plantations. But his effortswere of little assistance.

At least one of these visits was not only unproductive but pain-ful. Agee writes with some disgust of an occasion when Harmontook them to a plantation where the landlord interrupted a familyreunion of some black sharecroppers and had them sing for the em-barrassed journalists, while the landowner stood by with his flydown, scratching his scrotum.

Once it was clear that Harmon did not understand what theywere after, Agee and Evans went off on their own, but they did notfind immediate success. Years later, Harmon recalled to filmmakerMort Jordan that some days after they left him, Agee’s anxious andpuzzled editor at Fortune telephoned asking if Harmon knew wherehis writer was. Harmon had to respond that he had no idea.

In fact, Agee and Evans were getting desperate on their ownand needed no prodding from an editor. They had used up nearlythe entire month they had been allotted and had still failed to inter-view anyone they thought fit for the study. Agee guessed that heprobably had around two hundred unpromising encounters, or atleast it seemed that way.

Finally, one afternoon they came to the courthouse in Center-boro and saw three men gathered at the base of the Civil War statueout front—George Gudger and two of his relatives, Bud Woods andFred Ricketts. Woods was Gudger’s father-in-law. Ricketts was mar-ried to Woods’s half sister. The three farmed near each other, aboutfifteen miles north of town.

They had come to Centerboro, the county seat, to seek govern-ment relief or, if that was not available, then relief work. Their debtswere high, and the cotton crop wasn’t expected to bring in much.But by the time Agee and Evans arrived, the three farmers had al-ready been told that they did not qualify either for straight relief orfor relief work, because technically, as tenant farmers, they were em-ployed. They were ruminating on their rejection as Agee and Evanstentatively approached. When Evans told them he worked for thegovernment as a Resettlement Administration photographer, Rick-etts and Woods heard the word “government” and jumped to theconclusion that he might be someone who could help them solvetheir problem.

It’s not known if the journalists did anything to correct thismisconception. All Agee reports is that small talk was made and thatthe three men invited Agee and Evans to come back with them to

Hobe’s Hill, where the men lived with their families. Though Agee’saccount does not say so, it appears that the two journalists drovethe three farmers home that day to the house of Fred Ricketts;George Gudger’s ten-year-old daughter, Maggie Louise, came later,with her two brothers.

For Evans the photographer, the scene was apparently irresist-ible. Some of the more memorable shots from Let Us Now PraiseFamous Men were those taken that day against the backdrop of theRicketts shack. Though the two men did not linger at the Rickettshouse after Evans had taken his photographs, their actions in thedays that followed suggested that neither could put the day out ofhis mind.

Indeed, they came back often, driving up Hobe’s Hill, talkingto Bud Woods. Agee described how a father-son relationship soondeveloped with this man. Agee asked if he could pay room andboard and live with the Woods family. Woods declined, saying hecouldn’t trust two young men with his wife.

In the middle of this, Agee writes that he and Evans, exhaustedand eager to talk to people who weren't tenant farmers, decided todrive to Birmingham. Evans also wanted to develop some negatives.The two decided, furthermore, that they each needed some timealone. Agee left Walker in the Birmingham hotel and drove backtoward Cherokee City. Agee wrote about how badly he needed sex,but he drove by a whore they’d seen. His desires then led elsewhere,drawing him back to Hobe’s Hill.

But when he got to the hill, it was not to the Ricketts shack thathe headed. Of the people he’d met the first day, it was two of theGudgers—George and ten-year-old Maggie Louise—who had leftthe strongest impression on him. Both seemed more intelligent thanthe others, and both had been more talkative. His problem was thathe didn’t know precisely where they lived. As he drove up the Hobe’sHill road, a Ricketts child spotted his car and flagged him down,and then Fred Ricketts directed him up a small branch road.

The Gudgers—George and Annie Mae—worked twenty acresof land at the end of that remote muddy road, hardly better than atrail, passable to mules but just barely to cars. The twenty acres satat the top of a small rise on the south of Hobe’s Hill. It supportedeleven acres of cotton, nine of corn. It was not good ground forgrowing either crop.

Geographically, Hobe’s Hill is a low plateau at the southern endof the Appalachian Mountains, the final thrust of that great chaininto the plains of central Alabama. It is about seventeen miles northof Centerboro and about a seven-mile drive south of Cookstown,the town serving the northern end of the county.

The Gudgers’ portion of this hill was a lonely place—theirhouse sat two miles from the main road and half a mile from itsnearest neighbor. The neighbors to the north included Annie Mae’sfather, Bud Woods, and his family, and Woods’s half sister, SadieRicketts, her husband, Fred, and their kids.

The counties north of Hobe’s Hill were much higher and stillwild, home to many of the “hill whites” and “clay eaters” who hadfled to the high ground when the big cotton growers took over thefertile lowlands more than a century earlier. The Woodses andGudgers knew something of at least one of these hill whites—a manwith a long white beard that came to his waist. Bud Woods de-scribed to his children how when this man rode his horse, the beardbounced and blew in the wind. This is the last image Bud Woodshad of his father. Some time in the 1880s, when Bud was about eightyears old, the man with the long white beard rode that horse out oftheir mountain town and never came back.

As for George Gudger, Agee said his father had once ownedland, but lost it. There is no family memory of how it was lost.

No one knows for certain what other ethnic backgrounds werebrought together in 1924 with the marriage of Annie Mae Woodsand George Gudger. The Gudger children and grandchildren knewonly that there were a variety of Scottish, Irish, and English namesamong their grandparents and great-grandparents, and at least onerelative believed there was also some Indian blood mixed in frompioneer days. (In some notes Agee said Annie Mae had traces of aScottish accent.) A more precise accounting of the roots of theWoodses and the Gudgers is not possible. Alabama, always a littlebehind the rest of the nation in these matters, did not start keepingbirth certificates until 1908. By 1936 the Woodses and Gudgers hadbeen in Alabama a long time. According to Emma, Bud Woods’sdaughter and Annie Mae Gudger’s younger sister, family memoryhas it that some time soon after the white-bearded man rode off inthe 1880s, members of the family came down out of the mountainsto work cotton in the vicinity of Hobe’s Hill.

. ii.

That day in August as Agee followed the trail to the Gudger house,a fierce storm threatened. Agee described the trail as a “broken littleroad,” requiring some skill behind the wheel to negotiate. As heneared, a wind had kicked up, and just as he arrived, it brought oneof those hard Alabama rains, a “gray roar” with “water like traysthat bursts four inches wide in a slapping of hands.” There was alsoplenty of thunder and lightning. George Gudger opened the door tohim and invited Agee inside the dark bedroom where the rest of thefamily was gathered. Storms were feared in the Gudger family, andAnnie Mae was curled in fright on the bed.

Agee was fascinated with their house, which he was seeing forthe first time, and he describes the strong emotions awakened in himas he stood inside the dark, lamp-lit bedroom trying to adjust hiseyes to the lack of daylight.

Maggie Louise sat in a hardback chair, holding her babybrother, Squinchy, and her eyes fell upon Agee. There was somethingabout the eyes of Maggie Louise that caught him the first time theymet. They were “temperatureless, keen, serene and wise and puregray eyes,” Agee said, and they seemed to look everywhere and seeinto things. To look into the eyes of Maggie Louise was “scary ashell, and even more mysterious than frightening,” said Agee. Sheknew she’d like him and he her.

Agee would live with the Gudgers for about three weeks fromthat night on, sleeping in the room adjacent to this one, trying notsimply to record what life was like for the Gudgers but to live it asa part of their family. This was not an agreed-upon plan, but whenhe left that night after the storm, he crashed his car nearby, in eithera quasi-suicidal frenzy or a subconsciously planned accident, andwalked back up the mud-soaked road asking to stay.

There were those in the county who thought the Gudgers werecrazy even to talk with these strangers, let alone let one live withthem in their house. “I saw him come in—he was a bum!” remem-bered a woman who was twenty-eight when Agee strode down thestreets of Cookstown. Fifty years later, her voice still had a sharpedge when she spoke of that time. Word had spread around town ofthe Yankees nosing around, and that had set off a campaign of whis-pers. The Civil War was still fresh in the minds of many—some

old-timers had lived through Reconstruction, and hate towardnortherners was strong. At best, the people in the county seat ofCenterboro said to each other, these two northerners had comedown to make fun of impoverished southerners, to “low-rate” them,in local parlance. Some even said they were Russian spies, sent tomake America look bad.

Others had more practical worries—this part of Alabama wasa major moonshine center, and many thought the strangers wereagents poking around in search of stills. Though forbidding alcoholin his own home, George Gudger was one of those who ran a still.He ran it with some other men back in the remote woods of Hobe’sHill to pick up extra money. If Agee knew about the still, he nevermentioned it.

But the Gudgers did let Agee stay, and in the days and nightsthat followed, Agee pieced together the special story of these livesand surrendered to the poet in him the job of describing the personalaspects of their struggle, while the journalist’s eye recorded the eco-nomic facts. Agee’s description of the Gudger house would be in-credibly detailed. —^

It was a typical sharecropper structure, of split design—thehouse had an open hallway runing down the center, so the housewas cut in half by a corridor, with “weatherboard facing one an-other in walls six feet apart.” This kind of home was known locallyas a “dog-run” house, for a dog could run through it, in the frontand out the back. More important, the wind could run through andcool the house on hot nights. It was of “expanded crate construc-tion” and the roof leaked in the front rooms of each half, and theholes in the walls were so vast they let in too much wind, so thoserooms were left uninhabited. “The floors are made of wide planks,between some of which the daylighted earth is visible.” It was sur-rounded by outbuildings—a barn, a chicken coop, a smokehouse, agarden.

The house, like the coops, was constructed “out of the cheapestavailable pine lumber,” which had never been painted, and lackedinsulation. Only a “skin of one thickness” of boards separated thefamily from the rain and wind, and, Agee said, “there are screensfor no windows but one, in the rear bedroom.” Closing the shutterskept out the weather, but not the summer heat and the mosquitoes.Most windows were anything but square, and only one contained

glass. It was Annie Mae’s eternal frustration that no matter howmuch she swept and fussed, she could never get the house pretty.

Yet this was hardly the worst sharecropper house around. Infact, it was only eight years old, younger certainly, and in bettercondition, than the many tenant homes that dated to slave times.

Cotton was the sole business of the central Alabama countywhere they lived. It was the primary business of the state—64 per-cent of all farmers were tenants just like them, according to the 1935report of the President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy. The Gudgerswere among the nine hundred thousand Alabama men, women, andchildren who grew cotton in 1936.

Economically, the Gudgers were half-croppers. To be a half-cropper was to be one of the least-advantaged tenant farmers. Thisgroup was largely black; though the majority of tenant farmers inthe South were white, two and a half million of the four millionsharecroppers were black, according to an article in the magazineSouthern Exposure.

Because of this, the Gudgers were looked down on by some oftheir fellow whites. “None of these people has any sense, nor anyinitiative. If they did, they wouldn’t be farming on shares” was howAgee described the attitude of the townsmen to those on half shares.Clearly, to be on halves meant you were just working to survive, ifyou were lucky.

For the Gudgers, it hadn’t started out that way.

Agee had studied a picture that hung over the fireplace of theirHobe’s Hill home. In that photograph, Annie Mae’s mother, Lulla,was standing with Emma, Annie Mae’s sister. Not long after thatpicture was taken, Annie Mae married George Gudger. He and An-nie Mae were married April 17, 1924, according to courthouse re-cords. Their first child, Maggie Louise, was born February 2, 1926.Annie Mae was eighteen, George twenty-two. Three sons followedMaggie Louise, and one daughter, but the daughter died at birth.Agee believed that George and Annie Mae lived for the children.

They began married life with hope and a will to work hard, butAgee found a metaphor for their altered lives in a hat that wascrushed in a table drawer. He said,

It is of such a particular splendor that I am fairly sure it was her

wedding hat, made for her, perhaps as a surprise, by her mother.

She was sixteen then; her skin would have been white, and clear ofwrinkles, her body and its postures and her eyes even more purethan they are today . . . she was such a poem as no human beingshall touch.

The passage of a dozen years had changed everything, thoughat first, Gudger told Agee, it looked as if he might succeed. In Gudg-er’s best year he cleared $125. “He felt exceedingly hopeful andbought a mule.” With a mule, you could get off the halvers and goon thirds. Then you could save more money and, with some goodcrops, maybe in a few years, buy land. Then you’d owe nothing toany man. Perhaps when Maggie Louise reached her teen years they’dbe among the landed people and she’d have a secure future. “But,”Agee wrote, “when his landlord warned him of how he was comingout the next year, he sold it [the mule].” From then on, no matterhow hard Gudger worked, he was working not only against weatherand the usual vicissitudes of farming but also against the systemitself. Unless you had a fair landlord the chances of escape were notgood.

Gudger’s problem was described in The Collapse of Cotton Ten-ancy; published in 1935:

The industrious and thrifty tenant is sought by the landlord.

The very qualities which might normally lead a tenant to attain theposition of renter, and eventually of owner, are just the ones whichmake him a permanent asset as a cropper. Landlords, thus, aremost concerned with maintaining the system that furnishes themlabor and that keeps this labor under their control, that is, in thetenancy class.

But the Gudgers never learned whether or not in the normalcourse of events they might have prevailed and worked their wayout of the trap of tenancy, for another problem, one over which theyhad absolutely no control, soon doomed them. That problem wasthe onset of the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, the cottonmarket had long since collapsed and the government had moved tocontrol it.

. iii.

When Maggie Louise was six, the Gudgers were half-cropping forsixty-three-year-old T. Hudson Margraves. Margraves lived in a bighouse in Cookstown; he and his brother had title to twenty-six hun-dred acres in the county. He also owned the store at which his ten-ants bought their supplies and rations.

In 1934, George Gudger went eight dollars into debt to Mar-graves. The next year, Gudger went twelve dollars into debt. Mar-graves would advance them no more money, only food, the value ofwhich he would deduct from the proceeds of the next crop.

Each Saturday, Annie Mae would dress up in a print dress andgo by mule into Cookstown, seven miles away, to Margraves’s store.She would later tell a reporter from the Tennessean magazine whovisited her in 1978, “They’d cut us down at the mercantile—justgive us enough to live on every month. We’d get twenty-five poundsof flour, eight pounds of lard and some green coffee. Every year,them Margraves would strip us out of everything.”

In the cotton-tenant South, most people ate what was called the3-M diet—meat (salt pork), meal, molasses. They weren’t allowedto have a large garden, because it would have taken away fromspace for planting cotton and because landlords understood thattending it would compete for their limited energy.

The tenants didn't have much, but many landlords saw it differ-ently. To sum up their attitude, Agee quotes an unnamed landlord:“Tell you the honest truth, they owe us a big debt. Now you justtell me, if you can, what would all those folks be doing if it wasn’tfor us?”

Agee sensed turmoil in this family, indicated by a few notionshe loosely attached to the Gudgers: “How were we caught?; What,what is it has happened?; What is it has been happening that we areliving the way we are?; There’s so much work it seems like you neversee the end of it; . . . How was it we were caught?”

The Gudgers changed landlords for the 1936 season, hoping anew landlord would be better. That was how they moved onto Ches-ter Boles’s place on Hobe’s Hill. Boles owned part of the hill, andthe Margraves brothers controlled most of the rest. Right off, how-ever, George Gudger had to borrow fifteen dollars from Boles to getthrough the winter. By the time Agee came along, midway throughthe cotton year, the money situation was even worse. Agee reported,

“Gudger—a family of six—lives on ten dollars a month rationsmoney during four months of the year. He has lived on eight, andon six.”

At the end of the 1936 season, the Alabama cotton crop wasworth 87 million hard-times dollars, according to the Handbook ofAlabama Agriculture. If you take that figure and divide it by thetotal number of farm families, you get an average of $435 producedby each Alabama family who farmed that year.

The Gudgers saw none of their share. They went further intodebt.

Despite their impoverished heritage, George Gudger held hishead up, and Agee was to write as much about the strength of char-acter of these people as about their economic hardships. In particu-lar, he wrote about the tenacity of George Gudger and Annie Maeand the aspirations of the young Maggie Louise.

George said it would get better. His family would just have towork harder and do more. Times would improve; they would get alittle ahead. The Bible told him that, and he lived by the Book. Heindoctrinated his children with this belief. Annie Mae had to keepher hair long, at his wish, and was forbidden to wear any makeup.No one could drink alcohol. Everyone in his house was expected tosubmit to dark-to-dark work, relatives said years later. As soon asMaggie Louise could walk, she had to contribute. Kids becameadults quickly.

Maggie Louise was trained to thin the plants, called “chop-ping,” and to weed, spread soda, dust arsenic to kill the worms andweevils, and be ready in late August, when picking time neared.

Agee described the whitening fields, the “enlarged bolls . . .streaked a rusty green, then bronze, and are split and splayed openeach in a loose vomit of cotton.” The process begins slowly, Ageesaid, but in “a space of two or three days ... a whole field seems tobe crackling open at once.” Experienced tenants, said Agee, wouldthen wait more days, so that picking was worth the effort. MaggieLouise took well to her teachings and became an expert at cotton.“Louise is an extraordinarily steady and quick worker for her age;she can pick a hundred and fifty pounds in a day,” Agee said. Herindustry and ability made her parents proud.

George was a quiet man, though he’d grow angry if his childrenweren’t working hard, his children later said. But he didn’t expectany of them to push as hard as he did—George was always first out

Gudger 29

and last in from the fields. Sometimes, he’d come in late and hischildren would all be in one room, scattered on pallets laid upon thefloor, sweating from the heat that never lessened into the humidnights. George would sprinkle water on the floor and softly pace,waving his hat to create a breeze and lift the moisture to help coolthem until they were lulled asleep, said several of his children.

The Gudgers had to depend on each other. Though thingsseemed dismal, they would not sink into living like some other half-croppers. Annie Mae felt the pressure of her mother’s upbringing,Agee said, dressing the family by reaching to buy “materials of a‘higher’ class.” Agee was struck by the fact that though she had “ex-ceedingly little money” she had “an intense determination to holdher family’s clothing within a certain level of respectability.”

Each of the children had to keep scrubbed like city kids—everynight before going to bed, Annie Mae required them to wash theirfeet in cold water before stepping into their bed pads.

When Agee stayed at their home, he slept in the inferior frontroom. Maggie Louise slept with her brothers and parents in oneroom at the rear. That room had the screen on the window. It con-tained two iron beds, and the children slept on pallets laid on thefloor. At night, Annie Mae and George lay on one of the iron beds,and Agee speculated that if they made love, it had to be done withthe utmost care so that the children wouldn’t hear. They would liestill in the last moments before sleep, Annie Mae clutching George’ssun-reddened body, characterized by Agee as tight and alreadyshrinking at thirty years from the load of work, hers alreadywrinkled at twenty-seven.

. iv .

September came, and the picking season blended with the start ofschool. As usual, Maggie Louise started late to school, Agee said,because of the need to finish gathering the crop. It was hard, beyondthe normal vagaries of learning, for her to go to school even after allthe cotton was in and the fields were shiny beneath the winter rains.

Those frequent rains made it difficult. In dry weather, she hadto walk three-quarters of a mile down the dirt lane to catch the buswhen it sidetracked up the Hobe’s Hill road. In wet weather, themud made it impossible for the bus to go that far, and she had towalk “a mile and a half in clay which in stretches is knee-deep on a

child” to catch the bus on the main graveled road to Cookstown.Agee made much of these difficulties and felt it might hamper herchances.

In the 1935-36 school year, Maggie Louise had missed fifty-three days, much of it on account of bad weather, Agee learned fromlooking at her report cards. Most of the missed days were in Marchand April, the wettest months and the ones that demanded a lot ofwork to plant the cotton. Even though Maggie Louise had some ofthe best grades in her class, she missed a critical examination, wasnot given a chance to retake it, and so “had to take the whole yearover.”

In spite of the handicaps, Agee said, “Her father and muchmore particularly her mother is excited over her brightness andhopeful of it: they intend to make every conceivable effort by whichshe may continue not only through the grades but clear throughhigh school. She wants to become a teacher, and quite possibly shewill; or a trained nurse; and again quite possibly she will.”

Agee found her a “magical” person—“one of the stronger per-sons” he had ever known.

Many landlords, however, didn’t want children in school asthey grew older. They wanted them on the farms they owned to helptheir parents grow more cotton. The general attitude among theleaders of their county was that the tenant children were born “in-capable” of learning. As a result, Alabama schools were among thepoorest in the nation. The children were educated accordingly,learning little, remaining ignorant, creating a never-ending cycle ofdefeat.

The worth of school for children versus their worth as creaturesof work became an issue when Alabama passed a law limiting chil-dren to working an eight-hour day. In 1894, the act was repealed.By the 1930s, Alabama had started to pass child-labor laws similarto those passed in other states thirty years earlier. Under Alabamalaw, no child under fourteen could be employed, with an exemptionfor “agriculture or domestic service.VTnere was a provision thatsaid children under fourteen couldn’t be employed in those twoareas unless they had completed the sixth grade or had been inschool more than 120 days. But it was routinely ignored. As if thisweren’t enough, problems were compounded when the state of Ala-bama reduced allocations for schools by 10 percent. Many schoolswould have closed, according to Alabama: A Guide to the Deep

Gudger 31

South, a Work Projects Administration book, except that teacherstaught for months for little or no pay.

Annie Mae went to school, but learned most from her mother.Agee reported that Annie Mae could “read, write, spell, and handlesimple arithmetic,” unlike many barely literate tenants. Many couldonly sign their own name. George Gudger never made it past thesecond grade and could do little more than scrawl his signature ona document. Annie Mae taught Maggie Louise just as her motherhad educated her. For this reason, Maggie Louise was not totallycrippled by all that was negative about the educational system.

Landowners like Margraves and Boles, though, had little doubttheir own children would inherit the land and become landlords toMaggie Louise and the children she would bear. Annie Mae prayedthat wouldn’t come to pass. She felt that her children, especiallyMaggie Louise, would have things better. She had to believe that.Before he left, Annie Mae said years later, Agee told her she mightnot live to see it, but that it would happen. But as for now, AnnieMae could barely think about the future. “I’m so tired it don’t seemlike I ever could get rest enough,” Agee reported as her sentiments.“I’m as tired when I get up in the morning as I am when I lay downat night. I tell you I won’t be sorry when I die. I wouldn’t be sorrythis minute if it wasn’t for Louise and Squinchy here.”

The time Agee spent with the Gudgers in 1936 was intenseemotionally. Annie Mae later said he left, seemed gone forever, butcame back after a week, to say good-bye. His final visit was in 1937.Of course, Agee didn’t know what happened to them as 1940neared. Left to the future were his two predictions for the Gudgers:that Maggie Louise would reach success and that her baby brother,so sickly, would die in youth.

Fed up with Boles, the worn land, and its hard mineral soil, theGudgers worked off their debt and left the Boles place before thestart of the 1938 season and headed down to a farm near the river,working shares for another landlord they hoped would be better,their children said. Tenants were constantly moving to find the ideallandlord. Landlords were always seeking ideal tenants. It seemedevery cropper worked for every owner at one time or another. AnnieMae gave birth to another girl, Gretchen, in 1938, and life contin-ued the same for them on that farm.

The Gudger home on Hobe’s Hill was next occupied by a maneveryone nearby called Pretty Boy, because he was so ugly. His wife

and child moved in to work on the shares for Boles. These blacksharecroppers had no better luck on the harsh and barren land. In1939, Pretty Boy rode a mule wagon to Cherokee City to seek reliefhelp to keep his family from starving. On his return, where thebranch road met the main highway at the bottom of Hobe’s Hill, hestepped off the wagon, was struck by a car, and was killed.

At the Gudgers’ new tenant farm, a young man started comingaround to see Maggie Louise. His name was Abraham Jones. He’dknown the family for a long time. He was seven when MaggieLouise was born. He later described how he’d wait in the woods atthe end of the cotton rows and how, when she was finished pickingin the harvest season, they’d run off together.

George Gudger did not like that boy.

. i.

Growing cotton didn’t require particular brilliance—just care, pa-tience, dedication, and endurance in the face of long hours of tedi-ous and often painful work. To get people to do such work,antebellum planters and, later, landowners had two choices—eitherhold out the prospect of a clear and sure reward at the end of theline or create a credible threat of terrible consequences should thework not be completed.

Rather than change the basis of their control and offer a morehumane incentive to the cotton worker, some landowners devoteddecades of their lives to finding a replacement for people. In 1820,an imaginative if not too practical Louisiana planter imported ashipload of Brazilian monkeys with the idea that he’d train them to

pick cotton and put an end to his labor difficulties. The monkeys,however, acted as monkeys would and got little picking done.

Some visionaries invested their hopes in machines. In Septem-ber 1850, the first patent was issued on a mechanical cotton picker,but it proved a failure. No machine seemed able to solve the specialproblems of harvesting cotton. Crops like corn and wheat weremechanized, but cotton, because of its peculiar nature, seemed todefy the advance of technology. In 1936, the Bureau of AgriculturalEconomics said it took thirty-seven hours of labor to raise an acreof corn, twenty for wheat, fifteen for oats, but eighty-five for cotton.“Cotton’s hitherto successful defiance of the [cotton-picking] ma-chine has kept the cost of production extremely high and has draftedwomen and children to work in the field,” wrote Rupert B. Vance,in The Human Geography of the South (1932).

Cotton treated some of these people as nothing more thantrained human monkeys.

Margaret Ricketts was born into such a family.

Like the patriarch of the Woods family, her father, Fred GarvrinRicketts, was born, in 1872, into one of the white hill families thatgenerations earlier had been displaced by slavery, driven up into thenorthern mountains of Alabama, where they settled in the coalcountry of Northfork County, living, as Agee said, in “shacks onshale, rigid as corn on a cob.” The Rickettses were of Scotch-Irishdescent, tracing their roots first to Scotland, later to Ireland, accord-ing to Margaret’s recollection. To this day, the residents of North-fork County have a reputation among central Alabamians forzaniness. If a crime is committed and it turns out that the perpetra-tor is from Northfork County, Birmingham people roll their eyesknowingly. Old man Ricketts also had Miller blood in him, Ageesaid, referring to a long-ago notorious family, and that apparentlymade things worse for all the Ricketts people to follow.

At some unknown point, Fred Ricketts decided to come downout of the hills and settle in the Hobe’s Hill area. He then marriedSadie, the half sister of Bud Woods, who was the father of AnnieMae Gudger. Margaret Ricketts, born in 1916, was the first child ofFred and Sadie Ricketts to survive. But all the family hope that Ageedescribed as having attended the birth of Margaret’s second cousin,Maggie Louise Gudger, ten years later, in 1926, he found absentfrom the Ricketts family.

The Rickettses never expected Margaret to finish school. Onthe contrary, Fred encouraged her to drop out. She quit in fifthgrade, she told Agee, “because her eyes hurt her so badly every timeshe studied books.” It seems, from reconstructing that period manyyears later, that Fred applauded the decision, for books didn’t helpraise cotton or bring in money. Cutting off dreams meant cutting offoptions, and this meant that she would in fact devote her life tocotton. Everyone expected Margaret to mule farm the next sixty orso years until she died.

Margaret had “forgotten a good deal how to read,” Agee said.But she learned to farm. By the cotton harvest of 1936, when Ageemet her, Margaret had grown into something less than an attractivewoman. Agee described her sister Paralee wearing a dress that shehad seen “no sense to wash” in a year. She had “manure-stained feetand legs.” But he said that Margaret looked worse, and she “was ayear and a whole world more hopeless.” She hardly ever bathed.This is how Agee found everyone in the Ricketts family. The odorsat the Ricketts house were “hard to get used to or even hard tobear,” he said, and the family had “a deliberated or cult-like acqui-sition of dirtiness.” Their yard was littered with debris, and the in-terior of the house had “absorbed smoke and grease and dirt into arich dark patina,” Agee wrote; the kitchen work area was so coveredin filth that it was as “thick and filming as sprayed soil.”

Fifty years later, Agee’s observations about the family’s sanitaryhabits were confirmed by the recollections of others.

The son of a Centerboro merchant remembered an incident inwhich his father said to Fred Ricketts, “Mr. Fred, I can see by theegg on your mustache what you ate this morning.”

“That wuz frm br’kfast a week ago,” Ricketts answered.

A former neighbor recalls Sadie Ricketts’s telling her, “Theworst thing for children is for ’em to wear drawers ’n’ atake a bath.”Decades later, the neighbor was still baffled.

Another neighbor repeated a story that has become part of theRicketts legend. A doctor went to deliver one of the Ricketts chil-dren back in the 1920s, and he asked for a bar of soap to wash upbefore he examined Sadie. Fred said they had none. Worried aboutsuch unsanitary conditions, the doctor returned after the deliveryand gave them a bar of soap and a lecture on the health benefits ofcleanliness. A year and a half later, the doctor came back to deliver

another child. He asked for soap. Fred Ricketts smiled and pro-duced the same unwrapped bar of soap the doctor had brought afterthe last birth. Fred Ricketts, according to Agee, felt that “It is foolishto waste money that can be eaten with on soap when any foolknows there is nothing cleaner than water.”

The whole county heard these stories.

All of Margaret’s six brothers and sisters were brought up thisway, and most were quiet about it. “The Ricketts are spoken ofdisapprovingly, even so far away as the county courthouse, as ‘prob-lem’ children,” Agee wrote. In school, “they are always fighting andsassing back,” said Agee, and their attendance record was “ex-tremely bad.” He said they always got into fights because of thepeasantlike clothes they wore.

They come of a family which is marked and poor even among thepoor whites, and are looked down on even by most levels of thetenant class. They are uncommonly sensitive, open, trusting, easilyhurt, and amazed by meanness and by cruelty, and their ostracismis of a sort to inspire savage loyalty among them.

Margaret had vague dreams, but hers were not at all like thoseof Maggie Louise Gudger. Margaret, it was apparent years later,didn’t look at the stars and wonder about her future. She knew whatit would be.

Agee speculated that her dreams were “of a husband, andstrong land.” But by 1936, although already twenty years old, shestill had not engaged in any of the precourting activities youngpeople of that time and place did; she was putting all that off. “Mar-garet has already the mannerisms and much of the psychic balanceof a middle-aged woman of the middle class in the north,” Ageesaid. He added that girls, “by the time they are eighteen, if they areunmarried, . . . are drifted towards the spinster class, a trouble totheir parents, an embarrassment to court and be seen with, a dryagony to themselves.”

Family problems may have had a lot to do with her remaininghome. Sadie was chronically sick from pellagra, a disease caused bypoor nutrition, and Fred couldn’t afford to lose Margaret’s labor inthe field.

Margaret later would brag of her manlike strength and energy.She was the first up in the morning, stoking the stove and cooking

breakfast by lamplight, then starting a full day of field work. Shewas proud she could handle a double team of mules, even turningthe big steel plow at the row ends and wrestling it free of dirt clods.

In August 1936, Margaret’s only concern was about gettingthrough each day’s work on the way to getting the crop harvested,looking forward each day only to the time when the sun would dropand she could head into their house on Hobe’s Hill, about half amile across the fields and a forested ravine from the Gudger house.

The differences between the Gudger and the Ricketts homes in-trigued Agee. The Ricketts home, he observed, now more run-downthan that of the Gudgers, was “built as an ordinary lower-middle-class frame house.” In the beginning, the house belonged not to amere tenant but to Mr. Hobe himself, the man who owned most ofthe land on this hill. According to Agee, T. Hudson Margraves prob-ably was the one who foreclosed on Hobe and who in 1932 rentedthe Hobe house to Fred Ricketts.

Though the Rickettses lived as badly as half-croppers, theywere in fact doing better than the Gudgers in some respects. Theyowned two mules and farm tools and thus worked on thirds andfourths, rather than on halves.

Ricketts averaged six bales of cotton, earning some fifty-fourdollars a year, Fred told Agee.

“Years ago,” Agee wrote,

the Ricketts were, relatively speaking, almost prosperous. Besidestheir cotton farming they had ten cows and sold the milk, and theylived near a good stream and had all the fish they wanted. Rickettswent $400 into debt on a fine young pair of mules. One of themules died before it had made its first crop; the other died the yearafter; against his fear, amounting to full horror, of sinking to thehalf-crop level where nothing is owned, Ricketts went into debt forother, inferior mules; his cows went one by one into debts anddesperate exchanges and by sickness; he got congestive chills; hiswife got pellagra; a number of his children died; he got appendi-citis and lay for days on end under the ice cap; his wife’s pellagragot into her brain; for ten consecutive years now . . . they have notcleared or had any hope of clearing a cent at the end of the year.

Bad luck always had a way of striking down any advances ofthe Rickettses.

. ii.

If Agee was attracted to the intelligent and voluble George Gudgerand his family, he was put off, if not repelled, by the dullness of Fred/Ricketts. But he clearly sensed that Ricketts believed that Agee hadthe ability to see through other men’s pretensions, including hisown. This is not to say that Fred gave even a minute’s thought to thefact that Agee also had the talent to put those observations into well-chosen words that would reveal to a country who Fred was.

In his first descriptions of Ricketts at the steps of the Confed-erate statue in Centerboro, Agee wrote of Fred,

.. . you did the talking, and the loudest laughing at your own hy-perboles, stripping to the roots of the lips your shattered teeth, . . .the glittering of laughter in your eyes, a fear that was saying, “olord god please for once, just for once, don’t let this man laugh atme up his sleeve, or do me any meanness or harm.”

Fred gave five words for each given, and Agee said Ricketts had“flashing, foxy, crazy eyes,” watching for Agee’s “true intentions,which he feared.”

More than with either Bud Woods or George Gudger, Ageesensed that Fred Ricketts was seeking Agee’s approval and did notwant Agee to speak harshly of him for the way he and his familylived.

To make sure that Agee did not see him as someone with whomeducated people could trifle without cost, Ricketts told Agee abouta time when he was in school and the teacher told him the earthspun on an axle. Ricketts challenged the teacher, arguing that if thatwere so, everyone in hell would be trying to chop the axle and de-stroy the earth. The earth was still here, so it had to be false. Rickettssummed up his triumph for Agee: “Teacher never did bring upnothn bout no axles after that. No sir, she never did bring up nothinabout no durn axles after that. No sir-ree, she shore never did brangup nufn about no dad blame axles attah dayut.”

When the three men left the courthouse on the day of their firstmeeting with Agee and Walker Evans, it was to the Ricketts housethat they returned. Fred’s was the closest of their three homes to aroad that a car could easily reach. The Ricketts children saw themcoming and ran scared into the woods. They “started out from be-hind bushes and hid behind one another and flirted at us and ridi-

culed us like young wild animals,” Agee wrote, fascinated with thisprimitive display.

Evans saw a good picture.

The Ricketts children were in retreat through the brush, head-ing up the road, when Ricketts called them back with shouts andthreats, Margaret recalled later. They emerged with reluctance.Margaret took in the groceries they’d bought. Then Fred orderedthe family to stand before Evans’s camera. Agee wrote that SadieRicketts looked at her husband with eyes “wild with fury and shameand fear,” but Agee felt she obeyed the man because “a wife does asshe is told and keeps quiet about it.”

Evans didn’t talk with them. He didn’t even talk down to them.He talked at them, as if they were objects, Margaret said later. Ininterviews he gave in the 1960s and 1970s, Evans seldom referredto any of the people he had photographed in 1936 as people, butalways as “rich” material. This was nothing new. Evans mentionedin a later interview that he was “shy” and didn’t like to photographanyone. A study of many interviews with him showed he consideredhimself an artist. He preferred to shoot barns and buildings. Usually,when he photographed people, it was done in secret. In New Yorksubways, he later took pictures with a hidden camera. In otherplaces, he used a “side-angle” camera that could take pictures atright angles, so the subjects thought he was shooting in another di-rection. The first pictures of the three men at the courthouse weretaken with such a camera. This way, he escaped having to face themwith what he was doing.

Fifty years later, Margaret recalled the arrival of Agee and Ev-ans and seemed not to have forgotten a detail. Paralee, the secondoldest of the Rickettses’ offspring, at age nineteen, she remembered,didn’t want to cooperate with all this, in spite of her father’s de-mands to please the photographer. She was forced to, but rebelledby keeping her eyes closed while the picture of their family wasbeing made. A study of that picture reveals that terror filled the eyesof the smaller children.

“Those men wore monkey suits and talked funny,” Margaretsaid when she was older. In fact, she’d never before really seen any-one from outside the area, so once her own initial terror subsidedher natural sense of adventure took over and she grew more andmore curious. The strangers soon became a source of great amuse-ment. Margaret came to like Agee, who seemed friendly, but recoiled

from Evans and his indifference to them as people and his obviousloathing for the way they lived.

That Evans wanted nothing to do with any of these tenants isclear. While Agee grew closer to the farmers, Evans preferred tospend most of his nights in a hotel in town, even after Agee startedliving with the Gudgers. Evans stayed some nights, but not many,said family members who are old enough to remember. ^

Agee favored the Gudgers. He came around less frequently tothe Rickettses and wrote that he didn’t really want to see more ofthem. Once in a while, he did show up, such as the time he andEvans came to play a game of “poison oak,” a form of tag playedby southern children. During their play, one of them—it is not clearwho—accidentally knocked down four-year-old Clair Bell, theyoungest child of the Rickettses. Her head struck a rock supportingthe front porch.

That day Clair Bell went into a coma, an event Agee’s literatureverite did not encompass. Indeed, it seems that neither Agee norEvans ever told anyone of the incident. That it had indeed occurredcame out in an interview fifty years later with someone who wasthere that day. Before leaving to go back to New York, Agee cameback one more night. He brought with him a tea set as a present forthe injured child, assuming that if she died they would place it onher grave as an ornament, which was the local custom.

As Agee was saying his good-byes, wondering how he’d writehis Fortune article and describe the poverty he had witnessed onHobe’s Hill, an event over in the Mississippi Delta threatened torock the cotton South.

iu .

It was August 31, 1936. i/

Hundreds of curious people were gathered that day at the DeltaExperiment Station in Stoneville, Mississippi, to watch a demonstra-tion by John D. and Mack Rust, two brothers who were about tounveil an invention they billed as the first practical cotton-pickingmachine.

The brothers were the sons of a man who had fought in theCivil War on the side of the South and, after the defeat, had movedto Necessity, Texas, to raise cotton. The boys worked with their fa-ther, much as the Gudger and Ricketts children labored with their

parents. While out in the fields picking cotton, John Rust contin-ually complained. It had to be the worst job in the whole world, hesaid to his brother. A picker on poor land could do only about ahundred pounds a day, and it took fifteen hundred pounds of seedcotton to gin down to a standard five-hundred-pound bale. He fan-tasized about inventing a machine that would forever end the gruel-ing task.

The Rust brothers’ parents died when John was sixteen. Johnbegan living as a migrant farmhand, picking and chopping cotton.On the side, he took a mail-order course in engineering, which hecompleted in 1924. Then he set out to realize his dream of develop-ing a cotton picker.

He faced numerous problems that had defeated dozens of otherinventors before him. Cotton bolls do not all ripen at the same time,for instance, and most fields must be picked three or four times overa two-month period. A machine would have to pick ripe bolls with-out destroying the plants, so that they could be gleaned later. Itwould also have to pull the lint from the boll without crushing thedelicate shell and adding waste material that would destroy the cot-ton for ginning, the post-harvest process that removes the seeds. Ontop of this, a successful machine would have to pick cotton lowerthan a man’s knee in Georgia, cotton that was bushy and head tallin the Delta, and cotton on skeletonlike plants in Texas.

Men had tried suction tubes, threshers, and other fanciful RubeGoldberg devices, and none really worked.

One night, while lying in bed, John remembered how cottonclung to his fingers in the early morning dew. Water attracted thefiber. That was the secret! He sprung to his feet, got a nail, wet it,and applied it to some cotton in the medicine cabinet. It held thecotton, and the fiber fell off after the moisture was absorbed. Hewrote down the plans for a machine using moistened steel spindlesthat would brush the plants and reach into the bolls to pluck thelint, which would quickly fall off and be collected. They were differ-ent from the barbed spindles others had tried that would not releasethe cotton.

Success, however, eluded him as years went by. He built modelswith the help of tens of thousands of dollars borrowed from familyand friends. His wife divorced him, and he conducted his experi-ments in his sister’s garage. None of the prototypes worked as wellas he hoped, but finally, in 1936, he felt he could invite the public to

witness his completed machine. That device was preceded by four-teen hundred patents on other machines that had ultimately failed.International Harvester itself had spent three million dollars over thepreceding forty years on doomed designs.

Reporters came from all over to see this machine that day inAugust 1936. While skeptical spectators stood in the hot sun anddrank endless sodas, the machine set out and picked four hundredpounds of cotton in an hour, as much as one average man couldpick in four days.

Exclamations of amazement came from the plantation ownersin their white shoes and hats, and from the bankers, ginners, dealers,and government men. One writer said the invention of such a devicewas akin to the discovery of a perpetual-motion machine. »./

“Now we won’t have to beg for help to pick cotton,” W. H.Hutchins, a grower who watched, told Time magazine.

Excitement quickly turned to fear and scorn. Some said the ma-chine added a lot of trash to the cotton, and others wondered if sucha device could be commercially manufactured. The Rust machinewould not chop, hoe, or plant. People were still needed for that, sowhat good would it do to have a machine that picked when you stillneeded manpower standing by to plant and grow the next crop?

Within weeks, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal printed a car-toon of a black man with an empty cotton sack. The man was say-ing, “If it does my work—whose work am I going to do?” TheJackson Daily News suggested the machine be sunk in the Missis-sippi River. A prominent political boss in Tennessee predicted hisstate would pass a law against mechanical pickers.

The Luddites were having a field day, but ’Round the Worldwith Cotton opined,

The trend in all production processes in the United States—bothagricultural and industrial—has been toward the universal use ofpower and machinery. ... If not used in cotton production, ulti-mately those who grow the crop will be laboring under a handicapfrom which all other large classes of workers have been liberated.

Some saw the machine as capable of freeing farm laborers notso much from that most noxious of farm chores as from the tyrannyof their bosses.

Professor W. E. Ayres, the head of the government experimentstation, said to John Rust, “I sincerely hope that you can arrange to

market your machine shortly. Lincoln emancipated the southern Ne-gro. It remains for cotton-harvesting machinery to emancipate thesouthern cotton [tenant] planter.”

An article in Readers Digest predicted the death of sharecrop-ping within two years. Sharecroppers, the magazine said, “do notrealize that their narrow little world of corn and cotton and sowbelly is already tottering.”

Liberals viewed the machine as salvation—with it, the Southcould be transformed from an alien and feudal society into one thatmight finally join the rest of America. ^

. iv .

The death of the cotton-tenant-farmer system sounded painless tothese optimists. But John Rust knew different. During his migrantdays, he’d become associated with the agrarian socialist movement,and he had a deep interest in the plight of the working man. Rustwas aware how dangerous his machine was to the nine million ten-ant farmers of the SoutnT He pictured hundreds of thousands oflandless farmers crowding like war refugees into the cities or beingleft starving and forgotten on the land. Cotton work might be hor-rible and repressive, but it was the only work some of these peoplehad. He didn’t know Fred Ricketts, but Ricketts was the kind ofman Rust had in mind. What would Ricketts do if the picking ofcotton were suddenly mechanized? Rust knew about the characterof men like Margraves, Ricketts’s landlord. That kind of landlordwould embrace the machine and discard Ricketts, not thinking twiceof the family’s fate.

“We are not willing that this should happen,” Rust declared inan interview. “How can we prevent it?”

The question seemed to have two possible answers.

First, the Rust brothers refused to sell their invention to a largecompany to merchandise. They could have become rich instantlydoing so but feared that a corporation would market it to largegrowers, who would outcompete and destroy small farms. Rather,they would try to develop a smaller version of the picker that thelittle farmer could afford and that would help the little farmer com-pete better. This, of course, is the opposite of what normally hap-pens when new farm equipment is invented and introduced.

Their second idea was to lease rather than sell the machines,

44 And Their Children . . .

and to do so to large growers under restrictive rules. Those rulesrequired the lessee to pay his workers minimum wages, to set a max-imum number of work hours for all adult workers, and to eliminatechild labor altogether. ^

They had other ideas, according to James H. Street in his 1957book, The New Revolution in the Cotton Economy: Mechanizationand Its Consequences:

Community farming projects organized as cooperativesaroused considerable interest during the thirties. . . . The Rustbrothers made their machine rather freely available to such com-munities, in the hope that a cooperative pattern would emergewhich would make possible the collective ownership and operationof farm machines too large and expensive for widespread individ-ual ownership.

Unfortunately, most of these collectives failed. Still, it is possiblethat at least for a limited period of time—that is, until someone elsedeveloped a machine that could do what theirs did—the Rustsmight have been able to get some large planters to agree to theirterms, had they not been hampered by serious design flaws in theirmachine. In constant use, the machines broke down more times thanthey worked and, when compared to the cost of cheap labor, werenot economical. Under real farm conditions, the machine did notwork well enough to make any significant dent. The skeptics seemedright. No machines were bought under the rules they imposed. Infact, in the years following the introduction of the Rust cottonpicker, more tenants were employed than ever before in the historyof cotton farming. This increase was due to forces unrelated to themachine. Families sought to return to the land to escape th^Depres-sion, reversing what had been an outflow to the citiesyfhat trendcreated an even greater pool of willing and cheap labor for landlordslooking for tenant farmers. Given this kind of labor market, it is notsurprising that, as one writer estimated, it took between nine andfourteen dollars to cover all costs of raising a bale of cotton by handand, under ideal conditions, about thirteen dollars by machine.

The cotton system was also facing other problems besides thethreat of a machine that seemed to have so many bugs. *Round theWorld with Cotton said,

For almost 100 years following the invention of the cottongin by Eli Whitney, the United States was the only nation produc-

Ricketts 45

ing any significant quantity of cotton for export. . . . There was noother important source of supply.

By the year 1891-92, the United States was producing threetimes as much cotton as all other countries of the world combined.Twenty-five years after this date, in 1916-17, we were still growingthree-fifths of all the world’s cotton.

But in the year 1933-34, the combined crop of foreign coun-tries exceeded that of the United States.

Never again would the United States dominate. The export marketwas destined to continue shrinking and with it the pool of farmerswho grew the cotton.

There was another threat to those dependent on cotton for theirmeager livelihood. An artificially produced fiber, not in commonuse, but something that showed promise as a substitute yarn forclothing, had just been developed. It was called rayon!^

The Rickettses ended the 1930s still farming by mule and handon the thirds and fourths on top of Hobe’s Hill for Margraves. Leftto the coming years was a prediction by Agee that these childrenwould “draw their future remembrance, and their future sorrow,from this place,” and that most applied to the future of Margaret.

Margraves wasn’t about to buy any silly machines. The growersin the county believed that the old ways were the best ways, whichneither would nor should end.

As for the Rust brothers, they went back to their shop and triedto perfect the machine, holding to their dream that their machinewould improve not only the picking of cotton but also the lives ofthe men and women who picked it.

WOODS

. i .

In the last days of the three intense weeks Agee spent on Hobe’s Hill,his thoughts were very much focused on one woman in particular—Emma, daughter of Bud and Lulla Woods and sister of Annie MaeGudger. He was physically attracted to her and wrote about thisattraction with little embarrassment, indeed with a certain pride ofconquest in winning over her affections. Like Agee, Emma wasabout to leave Hobe’s Hill in September 1936 and did not seemlikely to return.

Agee wrote about her in part to illustrate further what he calledthe “iron anguish” of the lot of women as daughters, wives, andmothers of tenant farmers. He described the work of a cotton tenantwoman as one that “will be persisted in in nearly every day to comein all the rest of her life.” This “accumulated weight,” he wrote, will

take a toll not only on her body, but be part of “her mind and of herheart and of her being. . . . The woman is the servant of the day, andof immediate life, and the man is the servant of the year, and of thebasis and boundaries of life, and is their ruler.”

Emma was about eight years younger than her sister Annie Maeand so had been a small child in 1924 when Annie Mae marriedGeorge Gudger. The Woods household that remained after AnnieMae’s marriage comprised father and mother—Bud and LullaWoods—Emma, and Emma’s two brothers—one older, who soonleft home, and one younger, Clayton. The bond between the tworemaining Woods women—Emma and Lulla—grew strong in thefew years they had remaining together.

Bud Woods didn’t value book learning, but Lulla encouragedEmma to sing, read, write, and believe in dreams, as she had withAnnie Mae.

Emma recalls looking forward to school with a passion thatfully equaled her distaste for the boredom of field work and for thelife of uninterrupted hard labor she seemed destined for. “I was realgood in school and I realy liked to go,” Emma wrote of her youthmany years later. After turning sixty, she began to keep a secret diaryin a calendar datebook given to her as a birthday gift by a grandson.Each night, alone in her room, lying across her bed, she added moreof her life story in her crabbed writing, both recounting recentevents and putting down moments from her youth called up bymemory. " “

“I was going to be a nurce when I finished school,” anotherentry tells us; “that was always my dream.” The diary records manyof the familiar details of a country childhood: the three-mile walk toschool, her mother tying strings around her pencils and then puttingthe strings around Emma’s neck so that she wouldn’t lose too many(“they was hard to get”), her brother Clayton having trouble keep-ing up with her on their walks to school because she “was just atome boy,” and their being chased on the way to school by an oldgray mule, so she and Clayton would be late for class and then inpunishment be kept after school (“we would have to stay in thatafternoon and some time it would be dark when we got home”).

Other entries tell of more troubled memories:

When I was just 13 years old my mother died and left us.

Dady, Clayton and myself. Oh I can rember that day. You see she

was in the hospitle. It dont seem like that she was there many days.

I know me and Clayton went to see her once. That is all I rember.

But she know us that day and we was so glad for we just knew shewas better and would soon be back at home with us. But that didnthappen. She died. And left us. Clayton 10 and me 13. Poor olddady. There he was left with two little children and a big field ofcotton to gather.

Thus were Emma’s dreams snuffed out at 11:30 the night ofJune 7, 1929, when Lulla Woods, then aged fifty, succumbed to livercancer. After that, Emma remembers, her father worked hard tokeep the family afloat. “Dady was a real cotton farmer,” she wrotewith pride.

Of course, Bud Woods was not the only victim of this turn offate or even the worst affected. Emma, just thirteen, was suddenlyexpected to take over the duties of the woman of the house. It wasnothing like the situation a suburban child of today might face—there were no microwaves, dishwashers, or washing machines.

I had to do all the cooking and washing on a old wooden rubbord. I can rember I would just cry and rub them close and prayfor the Lord to come and get me and carry me where mama was. Ididnt know how to do any thing and I needed her so bad. And Ihavent for got yet that no one came in to help me and teach mehow to do any thing.

When I would get throu then I had to go to the field and helpdady and Clayton pick cotton.

Still, there was not one word of criticism for her father, and asheavy as the burdens were, there were memories as well of a fam-ily of love. “That poor dady of mine done his best,” she remem-bers, and

he was always kind. And I know now that his poor old heart wasso heavy. And I know he felt so alone. And didnt know what todo. He did not make fun of nothing I tryed to do. I dont see howhe ate the food I cooked and worked as hard as he did. I can seehim now siting on his cotton sack eating the slop I cooked. Hedidnt stop long enough to come to the house and eat and rest alittle while. He ate in the field and went right on picking cotton.

It was at this time, when the family needed him so much, thatEmma’s older brother “got in some kind of truble” and had to leave

Woods 49

home. Emma and Clayton went into the field daily to help, but therejust weren’t the hands or the strength to do all the work. “We neverhad any more Christmas. We didnt have any thing but one another.We just worked hard from year to year.” There are also ominousnotes: “But I know dady was lonsom. Now I can look back and seewe was a pitiful 3. Me, dady and Clayton.”

This was the time that Emma was forced to quit school. Shedoesn’t set out the details of the decision, if indeed she recalls them.She merely says, “I dont gess he could send us to school any more. Ijust know we didnt go any more. I had passed into the 6th grade. Iwanted to be a nurce so bad but that didnt work.”

Boys were attracted to Emma by this time, and she already hadplenty of suitors. She fended them off, not willing to enter matri-mony so young. Annie Mae was already married and had a child ofher own—Maggie Louise—by the time their mother died. AnnieMae had waited until she was sixteen to wed George, not reallyyoung for an Alabama country girl of that period, but Lulla hadwanted Emma to wait even longer, and Emma was not going toviolate her mother’s wishes.

But it soon became difficult for her to remain at home. BudWoods was lonely, and his desire for a wife caused the family prob-lems. Emma recalls,

... in 3 years after mama died dady married again and he marrieda woman that didnt suite our famly. You see I wouldnt stay withhim after he married this woman that he had tote me aganst all mylife. But I loved my dady. So then I set in to seprate him + her. Iliked to done it to one time but then they fixed things up and stayedtogether.

The woman of Emma’s scorn was Ivy Pritchart, just the kind ofwoman Bud had long held up to his daughter as a model of whatevery decent girl had to avoid becoming. Annie Mae apparentlycame to share Emma’s sentiments, for when Agee arrived in 1936 heobserved that neither could stand Bud Woods’s second wife. Thiswas more than the usual resentment of children toward their father’ssecond wife. When Agee asked about her among the townsmen, heheard her described as “one of the worst whores in this whole partof the country.” The only one thought worse was her mother, MissMolly, of whom the men of the area sang a song when they werealone and snickering, a song that recounted her exploits. The

women, mother and daughter, were described as “about the lowesttrash you can find.”

Until the lonely Bud Woods came into their lives, Ivy and MissMolly lived back in the swamp. The man Ivy had lived with haddied, and Bud Woods courted her. After they married on December9, 1931, they first lived back in the swamp; then he moved Ivy, MissMolly, and Ivy’s eight-year-old daughter, Pearl, into his three-roomshack on Hobe’s Hill. An older daughter of Ivy’s was given away toa family in Cherokee City. Emma was fifteen years old when herfamily was expanded.

Little Pearl was sexual beyond her years, according to Agee,and aggressive. She delighted in throwing rocks at the black childrenwho came to fetch the warm, fever-laden water from the communalspring at the bottom of the hill behind their house. Like many poorwhite families in the Cotton Belt, the Woodses were racist towardblacks, who were equally poor, if not poorer. The Woodses attrib-uted the feverish qualities of the water to the nearby black familythat lived in the hollow, somehow believing that the blacks werecontaminating it simply with their use. The black children wereforced to come for the water when they were least expected by Pearl.

Pearl also hated Bud Woods. She felt he was responsible forforcing her mother to give away her older sister. In 1933, soon afterthe marriage, Ivy had a son, who was called Buddy. Ivy becamepregnant again and gave birth to Ellen, who was twenty months oldin the late summer of 1936. Pearl became jealous of her new sister.Ivy was again pregnant when Agee was visiting. That child was notdue until 1937. That Bud Woods was having so many childrentroubled his daughters. Emma and Annie Mae felt he should nothave started a new family at his age.

He was fifty-nine, not terribly old for a city man, but ancientconsidering the labor required of a one-mule tenant farmer. In 1936,Woods worked on thirds and fourths for Margraves, who owned theland on both sides of the Hobe’s Hill road. In many ways, Woods hadit tougher than the families of his stepsister Sadie Ricketts, whosehouse was in sight of his, and his daughter Annie Mae, who livednearby. He seemed smarter than Fred Ricketts, but didn’t have a largenumber of children of working age to help him, as Ricketts had.

The last really good year Woods had had was during the FirstWorld War, when cotton prices were at record highs and he had thehelp of Annie Mae and his older boy. With the onset of the Depres-

Woods 51

sion years, and the loss of Annie Mae and this older boy, he gener-ally wound up clearing $50 or less annually. But he was strong for aman his age and worked extra hard, and this allowed him to endeven these bad years in the black, though often just barely. In 1935,he told Agee, he had made $150, a considerable feat; one studyfound that in the crop year 1935 only one out of ten tenant farmersin one southern county had made any money at all.

The achievement is even more noteworthy because by 1935Woods had long since lost the help of Emma, who had decided shedid not want to live in his Hobe’s Hill house any longer. The quar-ters were too close with that woman. To get away, Emma at firstwent half a mile through the forest and fields to live with Annie Maeand George Gudger.

Though Emma got away from her stepmother, she did not es-cape her other nemesis, field work. “I started staying with my sisterand her husbun,” she writes in her diary. “And he was a hard work-ing man and he belived in every body working from day light tilldark and that is what we done. I was so tird of the way I was living.Work work. That was all any body wanted with me.”—

Emma saw few options. The only proper states for a tenant-farm woman were too young to be married, about to be married,and married. A woman worked for her parents until some time intoher teens, when she had to do what she could to find a man whomshe could bear serving as wife, and then went to work for her newhusband. In the South of the 1930s, a woman could not simply gooff and live alone without local tongues painting her as a whore orspinster—a whore being someone who had put herself under thesuspicion of having slept with a man not her husband; a spinster, awoman who had too little womanly appeal to attract any man andhad to live on the largess of her family. The only way a womanmight hope to live alone with some respect was to have a job. Em-ma’s dilemma was that the only careers open to women at that timeand in that place were in nursing or education, fields closed to herbecause of her limited formal schooling. What was left to her wasto cook for, clean up after, and in other ways serve men—her hus-band, her sons, and any other men, friends or kin, who happened tobe with her husband—laboring in the kitchen while the men ate,cleaning up while they sat on the porch and relaxed after dinner. Forall the love between George and Annie Mae, this is the way it wenteven at the Gudgers’.

Emma didn’t oppose marriage. She wanted love, though shehad little idea what the word might mean, and simply accepted ser-vice as the price women paid for it. The social pressure to acceptthese roles as they were was extreme.

At the same time, Emma went through that tumultuous periodof sexual awakening that all teenagers go through, and she was evenmore vulnerable than most because of her basically romantic dis-position. She was “young and loved to sing”; when she wasn’t“talking and laughing,” she was singing. She also reports, “All thetime I was realy lonly still surching for something. I didnt knowwhat.” She met a boy named Wilson Sharps, and in reporting thisepisode, the diary of a sixty-year-old woman becomes almostschoolgirlish in its entries:

We was so happy when we was together. And had so mutchfun. You know I bet me and him was realy in love. And didnt havesence enough to know it. Some nights we would set in the middleof the road till mid night and after and try to count the stars andmake wishes by the stars.

She said, “He didnt think I would marry Lonnie.” Lonnie, the manshe would indeed marry, was twenty years older than she. He wasdivorced and was pushing her to marry him. She may have beenusing Lonnie to play a lover’s game with Wilson Sharps, a gamethat went wrong. Or she may simply have been no match for theolder man.

[Lonnie] began to talk to me about marrying him. I didnt want to. . . but any way I had ben tought that you was not soposed tomarry any one that had ben married. And had a living wife orhusbun. So I told him that but he went an showed me where itwould be alright in the sight of God for me and him to get married.

But any way he got the lisens and came after me and I ranaway when I saw him coming. I went about 3 miles to Mrs. Sharpshous. That was Wilson mother. I stayed all the rest of the day andI got a curl of Wilsons hair and tide a string arond it and put itarond my neck. I did not tell him what I was up aganst tho, so itwas about dark when I came back home. I thought he would begone. 1 knowed that I would have.

Lonnie was there waiting, and he finally persuaded her. Theymarried on February 20, 1934. Emma’s diary tells us nothing of the

Woods S3

ceremony, not a word about what she wore or who attended. Com-pare this with the way that Annie Mae had kept the very hat shehad worn on her wedding day, as well as with the way that herfamily had shared her joy. Emma remembers only,

I didnt know what love was really. I was like the old bo wevle. Iwas just looking for a home. But any way I failed on that. Hecarried me to his mothers house. I just couldnt stay there. ... Istayed with him 3 weeks and ran away. Well to make a long storyshort we was married over 3 years and I stayed with him 7 weeksin the 3 years.

Lonnie was unemployed most of that time. He eventually got ajob as a carpenter in Cherokee City, about twenty-five miles northof Cookstown. By July of 1936, Lonnie insisted on reclaiming hiswife. Though Annie Mae did not like Lonnie, the counsel Emmaseems to have gotten from her family was that she’d have to livewith her husband. Emma agreed to go along, without ever quiteknowing why.

Lonnie decided to leave Alabama, probably, Agee said, to getEmma away from George and Annie Mae Gudger, “so near a homeshe can return to.” Lonnie had met an older man, a Mr. Jacobson,who persuaded him he should take Emma and go do what theycalled “bull farming.” Jacobson told Lonnie he would set him up ona bull farm on a plantation in the red hills of Mississippi. Emmathought Jacobson had too much influence on her husband. “He wasold but he made Lonnie think that money growed on trees in Stone-wall Mississippi,” Emma wrote of him.

Before leaving, Emma decided to return to Hobe’s Hill and seeher sister one last time before she left to go so far away. In sevendays, Lonnie would come down with Mr. Jacobson to pick her up.Emma writes, “So I went to stay a week with her befor I left andthat is when I met them to men that has wrote books about us andof the south.”

. ii.

Emma was now twenty, and the two men, of course, were Agee andEvans, who had arrived to do their story on tenant farmers just afew weeks before Emma came back for her final visit. Agee wastaken with this peasant woman and became quite fond of her. “She

is a big girl, almost as big as her sister is wiry, though she is not atall fat,” Agee wrote; “her build is rather that of a young queen of achild’s magic story. . . He saw Emma as “a big child, sexual be-yond propriety to its years.” She looked younger than she acted. Infact, he got her age wrong, believing she was 18 when she was reallytwo years older.

Agee seemed frustrated that the role of a cotton-tenant womanhad been thrust upon Emma. His sexual longing for her grew inintensity, and he described great sexual tensions within the group,himself, Evans, and the family. Agee said it appeared George wantedto make love to Emma, his sister-in-law, and wrote, “If only Emmacould spend her last few days alive having a gigantic good time inbed, with George, a kind of man she is best used to, and with Walkerand with me. . . .”

There were flirtations, but they appeared not to set Emma’sheart aflutter. She disliked Evans. She saw him as a cold, rude boreand avoided him. Years later she said there were never any thoughtsbetween her and George. She considered Agee cute and admits thatshe did secretly wonder what it would have been like to becomeinvolved with him. “If only I could stay around longer,” she said inan interview, admitting years later to feelings she had never told any-one about. But it could never have been. We have to remember thatas all the world has changed since 1936 in regard to sexual mores,so too has Emma changed. Reasonable as such feelings may seemtoday, this was a fantasy impossible to talk about with her family atthe time, certainly impossible to act upon. And contrary to Agee’sbelief that there was a kind of man she was “best used to,” she hadprobably experienced sex only a few times. But though shyness andreligious constraints prohibited the thoughts from going beyondfantasy, she flirted back with gusto and loved every minute of it. AndAgee, who had all the women, monied and refined, whom hewanted in New York, could not have this peasant girl who enticedand teased him.

Like a scorned lover, Agee found his competition in the form ofher husband not worthy of the pure heart he’d won. “He is jealousand mean to her and suspicious of her,” he wrote. “He has given herno pretty dresses nor the money to buy cloth to make them. Everyminute he is in the house he keeps his eye right on her as if she wasup to something, and when he goes out, which is as seldom as he

can, he locks her in. . . Whenever Emma left him in the early days,Agee pointed out, Lonnie would come down to Hobe’s Hill, “beg-ging, and crying” for her to come back, and the only reason she everwent back to him was that she hated the woman who had marriedher father. —'—*

Emma’s final week on Hobe’s Hill went too fast. Agee watchedEmma begin “withdrawing into rooms with her sister and crying agood deal.” She sank into a deepening depression two days beforeLonnie was to come back with Mr. Jacobson and his truck loadedwith their furniture. Annie Mae was “strong against her going, allthat distance, to a man who leaves her behind and then just sendsfor her.” She’d miss the company of Emma.

In the middle of all this emotion and sexuality, real or imagined,there was another secret interaction between the Gudgers, Emma,James Agee, and Walker Evans. One day, when the family was outworking, Agee stayed behind. He wanted to learn more about them,so for several hours he rifled through all their drawers. He had a“cold beating” in his “solar plexus,” tight with apprehension, andhe listened for their early return, yet still he probed the bedroom andevery nook, replacing all papers and things as he found them. Whenthey did come home, he hurried to the porch and sat writing notes,as if nothing had occurred. “It is not going to be easy to look intotheir eyes,” he wrote of the moment.

What Agee didn’t know was that Emma, too, was curious.

The same week Agee did his snooping, Emma did hers. Oneday, when Agee was out driving with Evans and Maggie Louise,Emma decided she’d find out more about the tall stranger and hisrude friend. She went into the front room, where George and AnnieMae had put up Agee and Evans. Their things were a mess andstrewn in piles. Emma dove into them.

“Look—aren’t these the biggest and floppiest pajamas you everseen?” Emma said to Annie Mae, who stood outside the door, handsto her face in horror.

“Emma, you’d better come out of there!” Annie Mae warned

her.

Emma laughed and ignored her sister’s worries. She donnedAgee’s pajama bottoms and came prancing out. Annie Mae almostfainted. “What if they come back?” said Annie Mae. Emma wentback in and got down to business—she wanted to see what Agee

had been writing about them. She pulled out his notebooks, butfound the writing so tight she couldn’t read it. Frustrated, she care-fully replaced everything so that he wouldn’t find out.

There was also money lying around in plain sight.

“I’ll bet they’re trying to test us,” said Emma. Each day themoney was left out, and none was touched. There is no indicationthat Agee and Evans had indeed left money out as temptation; it ismore likely that they had done so out of sloppiness. Nor is there anyevidence that he ever suspected that Emma had gone through histhings.

As much as the writer had been prepared to learn about thetenants, Emma, at least, was as curious to know more about him.The two cultures were locked in intrigue. Agee didn’t want to looklike a big-city Harvard intellectual, which he was. That would haveturned them off. While Agee was in Alabama, his accent “veeredtowards country-southern,” Evans later wrote, suggesting, “I maysay he got away with this to the farm families and to himself.” Ageedid not do this with malicious intent—he truly liked these peoplewho would become his story—but because he wanted them to likeand trust him and not see him in the same, bad light he saw thosewho had sent him.

The families played along with this game, prepared for theirown part to let him believe they were something they weren’t. Ageewas convinced, or convinced himself, that he was seeing them forwhat they really were, that they could not hide themselves from him,but at least in some respects they proved smarter than he admitted.There was a lot they didn’t show and he never learned.

Each side thought it understood the other, but time proved thatneither side was as right as it deemed itself. And so they spied oneach other, put on false faces, the North meeting the South, eachside unaware of the comic farce it was acting out with the other.

. m

Soon, the morning came for Emma to leave.

There was no conversation at breakfast that day. Everyone wasdepressed. Agee was out on the porch. Emma came up to him. Shepaused. It was hard for her to say what she wanted to tell him. Shestumbled over her words. She said it was easy to be around him.

Emma said it was like being around her own people, that they didn’thave to worry about what he thought of them, that they could actnatural, that all of them cared for him a great deal, and she wishedthey never had to part.

Their eyes met for a time that went beyond comfort. Emmastood three feet from him and listened. “I went on to say,” Ageewrites, “that whatever might happen to her or that she might do inall her life I wished her the best luck anyone could think of, and notever to forget it, that nobody has a right to be unhappy.”

Half an hour later, Agee was driving Emma, Annie Mae, BudWoods, Maggie Louise, and some of the other children down thedirt road off Hobe’s Hill, to Gallatin’s.

It had been decided that Emma would meet Lonnie at the houseof Gallatin, her oldest brother, aged thirty-six, about seven milesaway in Cookstown.

Gallatin had met Agee once before. He had little use for thewriter.

Agee told everyone he and Evans had chanced upon theGudger, Ricketts, and Woods families by accident when the threemen had gone together to seek relief help in Centerboro. But in factGallatin had pointed Agee in their direction some days before thatfirst meeting. Agee was not interested in Gallatin. “You’re aboveaverage,” Gallatin recalls Agee saying.

“They didn’t want anything to do with me,” says Gallatin. “Itold him where daddy and his family lived. I told them they wouldbe average. Daddy was poor enough for them. I was making a living.They didn’t want to talk to anybody who was making a living.”

And so now Agee was unexpectedly meeting this brother onceagain, forced to be an uninvited guest on his property. The brotherserved Agee weak lemonade without any ice and never took his eyeoff him.

Finally, Emma was helped into the truck and Lonnie drove offwith her. The truck, laden with household goods and an iron bed,crawled down the dirt road and vanished.

“I dont believe 1 went,” Emma writes. “I thought I would neversee sister again.”

Agee believed that, too. He felt Emma was doomed to “yearson years of her cold, hopeless nights” with Lonnie.

Bud Woods went home to his shack on Hobe’s Hill. Agee leftto go back to New York.

. w .

After Emma left, things turned even worse for Woods. He did notend the 1936 crop year in the black, as he’d been able to do in theearly years of the Depression. He was sick, and the doctor told himnot to do the hard work, but Woods persisted. He carried over a bigdebt into the 1937 season, which also ended in disaster.

By that winter, just six months or so after Agee left, the Woodsfamily was starving. Margraves, the landlord, had decided he wasnot going to furnish any more credit.

Cut off by the landlord, the Woodses could not get governmentrelief help. In the eyes of state and federal law, Woods was techni-cally employed and therefore ineligible.

Those were the rules. There had been a move to help tenantfarmers, but after the 1936 election, southern Democrats—who un-til then had supported the New Deal and whose support continuedto be important in Congress, especially in the Senate, where south-erners held many important committee chairmanships—turnedPresident Roosevelt down when he tried to institute reforms to ex-tend relief to tenant farmers. Southern politicians, acting at the be-hest of cotton landlords, blocked efforts to add tenants to the

welfare or unemployment rolls. *—- ,

In 1935, the authors of The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy saidthe landlords had important reasons for their opposition:

The share tenant’s situation is the impossible one of beingforced by the inadequacies of the present system, on the one hand,to seek relief as the only means of keeping alive; and, on the otherhand, of having this relief opposed by the landlord because it mayspoil him as a tenant, if and when he can be used again. There areother fears back of the landlord’s attitude: the fear that the tenantwill be removed from the influence of the landowner and learn thathe is not entirely dependent on him; and the fear that the relief willraise the standard of living to the extent that bargaining on the oldbasis will be difficult.

An old joke told among tenants illustrates just how dependenton the landlord the tenant was. A tenant takes five bales of cottonto the gin. The landlord comes over and weighs it. He carefully

Woods 59

looks it over this way and that. After some serious head scratch-ing—figuring what the tenant owes him for rent, fertilizer, and soon, and what price the cotton would bring—he tells the tenant theybreak exactly even for the year. The tenant’s eyes widen happily atthat news. He still has one more bale at home that he hadn’t beenable to fit on his wagon, he tells the landlord. “Shucks,” says thelandlord. “Now I’ll have to figure it all over again so we can comeout even.”

With welfare, a tenant could have told his landlord he wouldn’twork for a year to end up in debt or just to break even. Some land-owners privately admitted that if a decent and fair wage were paidfor all labor, cotton could not be economically grown in the South.

Because of such attitudes, and the politics they controlled, theWoodses had no one to turn to. One might wonder about his family,but the code among tenant farmers, it seems, as among all thosewho live on the edge of survival, was that each man had to lookafter his own immediate family first, and in hard times there wasseldom anything left after that for other kin.

Joe Bridges, Sr., heard about the Woodses’ plight. It botheredhim, and unlike Bud’s kin, he wasn’t right on the edge. Bridgesowned six hundred acres at the bottom of Hobe’s Hill and had sixfamilies sharecropping for him. He didn’t need any more croppers,especially in a depressed cotton market, but he felt compelled to helpthe Woods family.

Bridges and a hand drove a wagon up the muddy road. It wasa rainy December afternoon, and the family had gone without foodfor three days. Ellen was barely three years old, and Ivy was holdingMarion, their baby boy less than one year old. Bridges and the handfound the family wasted and quiet. There wasn’t much to load. Theyowned a rusted-out wood-burning stove that had to be carefullylifted for fear of its falling apart. A homemade table, nail kegs usedas chairs, an iron bed, a mirror, a Civil War sword that belonged tosome relative of Mrs. Woods. Besides a few knives and forks, that’sall they had. It all fit in one load down the hill.

Bridges put them up in an extra house where the Hobe’s Hillroad met the gravel highway. In addition, Bridges may have been alittle smarter about how to get around the system. That summer,rather than give Woods his own acres to work, Bridges gave him daylabor hoeing cotton. Now, technically no longer a self-employed

contractor, Woods could get a little relief help. At the arrival of1940, the Woodses were surviving mostly on charity.

Emma was having her own problems over on the bull farm inMississippi.

BRIDGES

. i.

Soon after the Woods family moved to the Bridgeses’ land at thebottom of Hobe’s Hill, Mr. Bridges had a talk with thirteen-year-oldJoe, Jr., about their new neighbors. “Those are a different kind ofpeople,” Mr. Bridges warned his son. The son was perplexed. Theydidn’t seem that much different from himself and his own parents.

James Agee noticed this family each time he turned to go up theroad to the top of Hobe’s Hill. In some unpublished notes for a draftof Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that were published in a specialcommemorative issue of the Harvard Advocate dedicated to JamesAgee, he wrote,

Just at this first brow or brim of hill, and fully visible to thehighway, is a small and most . . . pleasing yellow painted house

whose inhabitants fully own it and this land they farm. Exceptingtheir curious and somewhat uneasy watchfulness of us, and thefact of their existence in this place, they have nothing to do withwhat I write of.

It’s unknown whether Agee ever stopped to talk with theBridgeses. If he did, he would have found a landlord quite differentfrom Margraves.

Though the Bridgeses were landlords, they didn’t have the largeholdings of other landowners, such as the Margraves brothers, whohad title to twenty-six hundred acres in the county, including mostof Hobe’s Hill. T. Hudson Margraves wore a tie and suit coat. Mr.Bridges, then forty-six, wore overalls. Bridges had no ambition torun a store and manage his holdings from town, as Margraves did,or even to buy more land. He worked hard, just as the tenants did,and didn’t seem unhappy with his lot. The entire family acceptedthat the economics of the Depression forced them to live much asdid the six sharecropper families working for them.

Bridges preferred it that way. He didn’t like the way Margraveshad accumulated his money. Margraves’s specialty was makingcrop-planting loans to landowning blacks; the loans were securedby the farmer’s land. If there was a crop failure, he’d immediatelyforeclose on the family, not granting any extension to the credit, andtake title to their land. That’s how he had built his empire.

Well as it had worked for Margraves, it just wasn’t Bridges’sway. “Son,” he said to Joe, Jr., more than once, “if you can’t helpsomebody, for God’s sake, don’t hurt them.”

The six families on Bridges’s land worked one hundred acres.Bridges and his children worked eighteen. Unless there was adrought or a huge price drop, people who sharecropped for Bridgesmade money; at the very least, they came out clean at the end of theyear. There was an overproduction of cotton during the Depression,so the government instituted the “set-aside” program to reduce theacreage planted in cotton. The amount of the payment not to planteach parcel was based on the value of the crop that land had yieldedpreviously. Many landlords, when land they had title to came up fora set-aside allotment, kicked the tenant off the land and kept thefederal money for themselves. The drafters of the law had put inprovisions designed to prevent just this substitution of the land-owner for the farmer as the beneficiary of the program, but the pro-visions were rarely enforced. Bridges, on the other hand, turned the

money over to the tenant whose earlier harvest had established theamount of the payment. “They made the allotment; I didn’t,”Bridges said.

Several black families bought their own land after accumulatingearnings working Bridges’s land. They’d come back and ask permis-sion to hunt. Bridges let them. Some of the white townsmen frownedon all this; they felt Bridges was too permissive with local blacksand spoiled them, causing them to expect too much from their whiteneighbors.

“The blackest nigger can come piss on your grave, and youcan’t do anything about it,” Bridges said, in explaining his philoso-phy of neighborliness to one townsman. “Or they can come plantflowers. You can’t take nothing with you.”

And so they lived a frugal life. Mrs. Bridges carefully savedflour sacks after they were empty, sewing them together to makeshirts and underwear for her children. They had oil lamps for lightand an outhouse in the back. The couple had nine children, fiveboys, four girls. Joe, Jr., was right in the middle—he was born June8, 1924—with four siblings on either side.

It had not seemed at first that Bridges and his wife would findthemselves landlords in the tenant-farming system of the South.They met while attending college in Texas, and both became teach-ers; for a time, in fact, Joe, Sr., was a high school principal. He tookfull control of the farm in 1937, when his father, then ninety-one,died.

The land meant a lot to the Bridges family. The farm comprisedsix hundred acres, the same number the family had started off within the early 1800s. Mrs. Bridges’s grandfather was born on a wagontrain that came down out of Kentucky, their home in the early1800s. Four other families journeyed with them to this wilderness inorder to homestead and plant cotton. Mrs. Bridges’s forebears werenot as self-conscious about the mistreatment of blacks as the son-in-law who would later marry into the family; they owned about halfa dozen slaves.

Mrs. Bridges’s family was lured by the huge new worldwidedemand for cotton after the development of the gin and wanted toprofit from it. The grant deeding the land to the family was signedby John Quincy Adams when he was secretary of state sometimebetween 1817 and 1825.

. ii.

Those were Indian times and Indian lands.

The main route of travel out of Kentucky for settlers like theBridgeses’ ancestors was the Natchez Trace, purchased by the fed-eral government in 1801 from the Chickasaw and the Choctawtribes. In 1819, Alabama was granted statehood. By 1820, manywhites were entering the state, according to Alabama: A Guide tothe Deep South, compiled by the workers of the Writers’ Programof the Work Projects Administration. It said,

In the summer months the roads were thronged with settlers,ox-drawn wagons, and herds of livestock. A pioneer newspaperrecords a fairly typical case of “a man, his wife, his son and hiswife, with a cart but no horse. The man had a belt across his shoul-ders and drew the cart. The old woman was walking, carrying arifle and driving a cow.” . . . Other settlers . . . “rolled them [thewagons] hundreds of miles to the new homestead.”

When the whites first arrived in Alabama, they adopted the In-dian name for the land, which meant “Here we rest.” It was thickwith forests, except for the central prairies where the Bridgeses’ fore-fathers were headed. Herds of buffalo and elk grazed on these grass-lands, and there were bear and deer.

The first inhabitants of the area arrived two thousand years be-fore the whites. They were crude, Stone Age people and were laterreplaced on the land by the Mound Builders, pre-Columbian Indianswho eventually constructed elaborate cities and earthen monumentsas part of a complex society.

By the early sixteenth century, the first white men had come. In1540, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto set the tone for laterrelations when he greeted the Choctaw Indians with a hail of bullets.Some reports say eleven thousand Indians were slain in his marchthrough Alabama. Another hundred years passed before other whitemen followed. They were the French from the South and the Englishfrom the North.

The French won over the Choctaw, whereas the English gainedthe allegiance of the Chickasaw. A great fur war was waged in theearly 1700s. The English won, and Englishmen began filtering intoAlabama, buying land from Indians and marrying into the culture.In 1802, the first cotton gin was constructed in Alabama. In 1805,

with the new interest in cotton, the Chickasaw and Choctaw cededcertain lands in Alabama to the whites, but much of Alabama stillbelonged to Indians of the Creek Federation. In 1813, the Creek Warerupted, and Andrew Jackson was sent in to lead the whites to vic-tory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Soon afterward, the influx ofwhites began.

White settlers hungry for cotton land ignored treaty bounda-ries. No Indians were exempt, including the Cherokee, who hadadopted white ways to such an extent that they owned black slaves.The states’ response to the conflict was to start moving the Indiansoff the land. For instance, in violation of treaties they had enteredinto with the federal government, the Cherokees were ordered tovacate their land. The Indians took their case all the way to theUnited States Supreme Court, where their position was upheld, butAndrew Jackson, who by the 1830s was president, refused to en-force the Court’s decision, which required protecting the Indiansfrom state and local authorities. The Great Removal began in thesummer of 1838. By the end of this mass deportation, most Alabam-ian Indians had been resettled in the dry plains of Oklahoma. TheSouth was safe for cotton.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Alabama was consideredthe center of the Cotton Belt. Cotton extended itself farther westwith each passing decade, until it filled in the entire swath of Amer-ican real estate in which it could grow, stretching about sixteen hun-dred miles from the eastern seaboard into Texas, jumping far westinto California soon after.

A need to satisfy a growing demand for cotton was not the onlyreason for this rapid push west. Cotton is not kind to the land thatgrows it. The crop requires heavy loads of nitrogen, consumes soilnutrients^neKquickly leaves marginal land barren. As the soil wasburned out and demand continued to increase, it was easier for thecrop to move west to new land than for growers to try to reinvigo-rate the old land.

In 1880, one scientist estimated that an area the size of Belgiumhad been ruined by this de facto slash-and-burn mentality in theSouth. In 1920, a majority of cotton production had for the firsttime shifted west of the Mississippi River.

These new cotton lands were tough competition for Alabama—western farmers on huge open tracts had begun to use tractors toplant and Mexican migrants to pick, and so could produce cheapercotton.

As world markets drove cotton prices up and down, Alabamaremained at the mercy of these markets and of the traders who ma-nipulated them. The region had nothing to replace cotton, and thehuge built-in infrastructure created great pressure to continue withthe crop—no one seemed to want to challenge it by introducing newcrops for farmers and new ways to use the land and people of Ala-bama. Industry didn’t want to move into the area, for fear that thevolatility of cotton prices would create an unreliable labor pool, onethat would be tempted to move to the land when cotton prices werehigh, and back toward factory jobs when they fell. Cotton had en-joyed its best time in recent memory during the First World War,when prices had jumped dramatically. But then the Depression low-ered prices. Still, clinging to their old beliefs, Alabama farmers werecertain that cotton prices would rise again and everything wouldwork out.

In spite of the general westward movement of cotton, and nomatter what happened to prices, the Bridgeses weren’t about toleave Alabama. In 1936, they had about as much land as they hadstarted with more than a century before—roughly one section. Theland that had been in the family so long was expected to be turnedover to young Joe and perhaps some of the other children to con-tinue the tradition of raising cotton.

That the Bridgeses had good land helped them stay put. Thesoil in the immediate vicinity was considered some of the richest inthe South outside of the Mississippi Delta. As a consequence, theregion was heavily peopled, by rural standards. All the remote forestsprings had paths leading to them where children walked to gatherwater after the field work was done. The forests near the outbackhouses were scoured clean of deadwood that could be burned instoves. The county seat of Centerboro, with a population of fifteenhundred, was prosperous by country standards in the 1930s—itsbusiness block was lit by electric lamps, and the street was paved. Ithad a theater, a motel, and several blocks of two-story brick build-ings full of shops filled with goods. The seat of the adjoining county,Waynesville, was similar. These were tight, gossip-ridden towns with

Bridges 67

established orders, leaders exalted by the local press, all others ig-nored as if they didn’t exist, and eyes that scornfully watched therare strangers who came through. Saturday was the big day, whenall the wagons would range in from the surrounding country, as ifthey had materialized magically on the suddenly people-swollenmam street.

When the people left town, they seemed to vanish, swallowedby a land that was vast and terrifyingly silent. It was hard to drivethrough the countryside and imagine where all those Saturdaytown-goers spent the rest of the week.

This corner of Alabama, which seemed eternal to young JoeBridges, was not an endless plain of unbroken fields, as those whohave never seen these cotton lands might imagine them to be. Mys-terious ravines thick with trees split off open tracts planted in cottonand corn, and eroded hillsides of poor soil worn out from slavetimes had already been turned over to forests of young pines plantedby huge lumber conglomerates that had bought up the ruined landat low prices. These new stands of pines and deciduous brush hadgrown into tangles so thick that green snakes could slither alongthrough the branches for hundreds of yards, three feet off theground. The wooded tracts and gullied, snake-infested wastelandbroke the earth into segments and subworlds that isolated familiesone from another. There were no paved roads in the county, outsideof the Centerboro main street. The best artery was the highway fromCookstown to Centerboro—the road the Bridgeses lived on—for itstwenty miles was graveled and usually passable. The side roads werea web of red dirt that fingered without rhyme between large emptyspaces on the map. A lot of real estate separated families from oneanother and from distant big cities. Twenty miles in those days wasnot like twenty miles today. A man on a mule or foot was locked ina small world that did not extend much beyond the patch of cottonhe raised, especially during the rainy months when the lanes wererendered ribbons of mud. In the best of weather, it was an all-daytrip to get into town and back. The pine-board shacks lining the dirtroads seemed inconsequential in the face of this rolling dark land,especially after the dinner hour, when the oil lamps burned in bed-room chambers filled with bodies shrunk against the blackness.

People were drawn to each other and to family. The tenants onplaces such as the Bridges farm spent a lot of time around the land-

owners. Even the black families were drawn close to their whitelandlords. Joe did not like young Pearl, who lived right across theroad from the Bridgeses. She could play rough, Joe found, and bythe end of the 1930s she stood as tall as a young woman.

Far to the south of Hobe’s Hill, in a region even more isolated, an-other group of people were struggling with cotton.

Parson’s Cove was different from the counties a hundred milesnorth. The area was flatter and hotter. It was also near the river, andSpanish moss hung from the trees. Of course, there was cotton, lotsof it, but it provided work almost exclusively for blacks. In manyother areas of Alabama during the Depression, whites who had lostjobs in the cities of the South were allowed by landowners to replaceblacks as tenant farmers. With no one further down the ladder toreplace, blacks were left in desperation. But Parson’s Cove was aworld apart. It never had many whites to begin with, so blacksweren’t displaced.

They certainly weren’t treated any better than white tenantfarmers. In fact, by every measure, blacks fared worse than theirwhite counterparts. Their houses were more run-down and their

schools inferior to the whites’ already substandard schools (twice asmany white tenants as black tenants could read and write); half thewhite tenants owned cars, whereas virtually no blacks did; blackswere paid far less, and whatever they earned was seldom paid incash. One 1930s survey of blacks in the Parson’s Cove regionshowed that about 64 percent “broke even,” 26 percent owedmoney at the end of the year, and about 10 percent made someprofit. For those who came out ahead, that meant an annual netincome of less than ninety dollars per household. ^

Their plight was mostly ignored. When the Fortune magazineeditors sent James Agee to do his story on tenantry, they made clearthat they didn’t want it to include blacks; blacks had always beenpoor and were expected always to be poor, so their plight was notconsidered newsworthy. Their poverty was seen as a dog-bites-manstory. Besides, poverty is unpleasant. Indeed, few editors wanted topublish stories about white sharecroppers.

That this was so was borne out when Agee returned to Fortunein September 1936. While he was gone, publisher Henry Luceousted Ralph Ingersoll, Agee’s liberal editor, and Fortune took on adecidedly more conservative tone. Nevertheless, Agee went aheadand wrote his article on the abject poverty of white tenant farmers.It was killed by his new bosses. The magazine wanted more “up-scale” and “upbeat” stories.

It’s not hard to imagine, then, that black croppers were not con-sidered proper subjects of study for the northern press. Black familyfarms in the cotton South, when they were written about at all, weredescribed with more contempt than compassion; a story in BusinessWeek magazine referred to them as “nigger and mule” farms.

Parson’s Cove was full of such unnoticed farms. The culture ofthe area harked back to slave times. Residents like Sherman Parsonhad lived there all their lives, as did their ancestors who werebrought over as slaves. Sherman carried the name of the white fam-ily that had owned his grandfather, the same family after whom theCove was named.

Parson’s Cove was under little pressure to change. The Covewas surrounded on three sides by water, located within a wide, arc-ing bend of a river. A visitor had a difficult time getting there, havingto negotiate a series of poorly maintained dirt roads, past a store inthe town of Magnolia, which was constructed from salvage takenfrom a ship that had sunk in the river, through a swamp, up a hill,

Gaines 71

past the community spring bubbling out of mud on the east side ofthe road and a mile beyond, past the shack of Frank Gaines, a blackman who was working the surrounding land for C. B. Gumbay, awhite landowner. A little farther, the road dead-ended at the river.That’s all there was to the Cove. So outsiders seldom came to passthrough Gumbay’s land, a wide-open place where cotton wasplanted everywhere.

In spite of his being a landlord and having a handful of blacksgrowing cotton on shares, Gumbay found the year 1936 very diffi-cult. People called Gumbay a “little country fella.” He had marriedsome years earlier and started out in the relationship with fifty dol-lars and a desire to work and succeed. He ran a small country storein the town of Destiny, which was no more than a shack with a fewtin goods and other staples, just like hundreds of others that dottedrural Alabama counties. It was over the hill from Parson’s Cove anddidn’t provide a living for the Gumbays, just a part of a living. Tofill out his income, he delivered the mail and ran a trap line in thewinter. His wife minded the store in his absence.

One day in 1935, while out on his mail route, he met a manwith whom he’d earlier become friends. The friend told Gumbayabout a bankruptcy auction on eleven hundred acres over the hill inParson’s Cove. Gumbay’s friend was acquainted with the man whowas in bankruptcy and knew that he wanted an honest bidder likeGumbay present, for he feared the local bigwigs would conspire tohold down the bidding and get the land for a song.

Gumbay agreed. He went home and talked the matter over withhis wife. The more he thought about it, however, the more he wor-ried, afraid that if he were the successful bidder, he’d be incurring alarge debt. He’d never been in debt before. After a sleepless night,he decided he’d better not bid. On Friday morning, Gumbay wentto tell his friend that he was withdrawing his promise. The friendwas outraged and said he couldn’t back out. He was needed. Thefriend begged. So Gumbay went to the auction, not at all sure hewanted the land he’d be bidding on.

The bidders already gathered didn’t expect an outsider.

“You shut up, and I’ll pay you five hundred dollars,” the mannext to Gumbay whispered.

Such attempts to get rid of Gumbay apparently backfired. Hekept on bidding. It became very hot in the room. In the end, Gum-bay walked away with title to the land for seven thousand dollars.

72 And Their Children . . .

The year following the purchase was one of hard work andsome good fortune. Gumbay lumbered the land, and timber priceswere such that he was able to earn back most of his investment.

He inherited the future of Parson’s Cove, of Frank and UrlineGaines, of Sherman Parson, and of dozens of others. Some of theland he purchased was already planted in cotton, being worked bysome of these families, and Gumbay hired more to farm the newlycleared land, so he soon had three hundred acres in cotton pro-duction.

By the late 1930s, tractors were commonly in use on mostfarms outside the South, but Gumbay would not embrace even thattechnology. He laughed at the prospect of the new cotton picker. Onhis land, they raised cotton the old way, with mules and backs.

Frank Gaines had a strong back. He was six foot two, a strongyoung man of about twenty with a triangular head and strainedeyes. He was a powerful sight to watch as he walked behind a mule.It seemed he could pull and manage the stubborn creatures asthough they were dogs on leashes.

In spite of his physical power, Gaines was a man quiet in hisways, full of proper manners, especially around Gumbay and otherwhites. He didn’t look them in the eye when he talked with them.That was how blacks got along, especially blacks whose physicalsize might be threatening to whites. You never said anything but“Yes sir” to the man, and Gaines lived by that well-known rule.Because he was compliant and worked hard, Gaines rose in the re-spect of Gumbay, who sank all his profits back into buying moreland.

Of course, no matter how much Gaines’s desire to work andsucceed might have matched Gumbay’s, he could not have donewhat Gumbay had done for himself. Had he tried to join the landauction, no one would have offered to buy him off with five hundreddollars. He would have been given another message—that he wasout of the bidding.

The Gaines family couldn’t have subsisted if it hadn’t been fortheir garden of corn, okra, peas, and sugarcane, which they raisednext to their house, built in the 1880s. In 1936, he and Urline begantheir own family, having the first of their ten children.

1 9 4 0 - 1 9 6 0

. i .

It had just rained, a terrible downpour, and the fields were deep withmud. At the woods along the edge, shadows had grown black, butthe eighty acres of open field still held the disintegrating light of day.The cotton was knee high to an adult, engulfing the waists of twosmall children. The children, Debbie and her brother, Sonny, randown one of the long rows, their young blond heads bobbing alongabove the cotton. Even in her haste, Debbie noticed how pretty andstraight the cotton was. Mud clung to their heels. Sonny sank to hisknees from the weight of it all. Debbie pulled him up. At a low spotat the end of the field, a broad puddle separated them from the treeson the other side. They had come far enough that they were just outof sight of their house.

“If we can get across, we'll be free,” Debbie told her brother.

Being six—a year older than Sonny—made her the leader in theirrunning away from home.

And so they started wading to freedom.

They didn’t know where they were going. They just wanted toget away. They were headed into the unpeopled lands of deep gulliesand dark forests.

Debbie could look on the young cotton and find it so hand-some. There were other memories. She recalled her mother, MaggieLouise, all torn up over things she couldn’t understand, at the timewhen the cotton was all white and as tall as Debbie’s head. They’dall be out there, in that sun, and they’d never stop picking; hermother always stooped, with that vacant face rising over the cotton,those gray, lined eyes, looking, looking—at her, at Parvin, at Sonny,at Mary Ann. These were the eyes that had startled and fascinatedJames Agee. They had been changed little by twenty more years ofplanting, chopping, and picking cotton. Those eyes would stalkDebbie the rest of her life, in the night, in that fraction before sleep,the corner of time when it becomes impossible to buttress yourselfagainst the dreams.

This place was so silent. So big. So dark. After the work wasdone, Debbie and her family would sit on one of their two unlitporches, the damp breath of the night encasing their bodies—dead,thick air tasting of the sweet rot of all things no longer living, thesweat of all things doomed. It caught in their throats, like a sentencenever meant to be completed. Debbie was taught to be afraid of theblackness, forbidden to be outside and off the porch after the sunwas gone. She would crawl into bed and hear nothing but the whis-per of her parents, fading to the click of night bugs and sometimesthat distant train working its way up the valley. It was almost pos-sible to hear the cotton growing. Many nights, it was what you sawin those last half moments between the time your eyes closed andwhen sleep engulfed you. From planting time to picking, it was theonly thing you noticed changing. Cell by cell, it climbed, a fractionof an inch each day, until it topped out in that August sun.

Then they’d go out amid the whiteness and “do their thing.”

“Do your thing” is what they called it, long before the phrasebecame part of the slang of the 1960s. Debbie was expected to hoein the summer and to pick in the fall. She and her siblings would beout there when her mother and father sprayed all those smelly chem-icals, and sometimes they’d look up as airplanes swooped down and

applied more, enveloping them in misty clouds. Debbie despised thebig green worms that crawled over the cotton, which the chemicalswere meant to kill but never quite did. She was told to pick whatshe could. She did, but hated it. Sometimes, she’d pretend to be sickand then sit on the back of the nine-foot cotton sack that trailedbehind her mother, riding down the row as Maggie Louise pickedalong. Parvin was very small, but she picked, too. Parvin would filchbolls from Debbie’s sack when she wasn’t looking, to fill her own,and it caused more than a few sisterly squabbles.

All the cotton they picked was hauled up to the barn near thebig house. As the pile gained in size day by day, Debbie couldn’twait to go there after supper and jump into it from a rafter, losingherself in the softness. She liked the barn. Inside was an old-timejunker car that the children could sit in and pretend to drive.

At a very young age, Debbie Franks started to understand thather family was peculiar. She’d been to Cherokee City and saw howother people lived. Her father occasionally took them to see big-screen movies. The children up in town weren’t like her. They rodearound in cars. They dressed differently and acted differently. Afterall, it was 1956, modern times.

Down in Madrid, Debbie knew it was old times. They rodearound the farm on a mule-drawn wagon. They finally got a televi-sion in their shack, and it further pointed up the difference betweenwhat they had and what the outside world offered. Even with elec-tricity in the house, they still used oil lamps on occasion. Theirs wasa four-room house, built at the edge of a hill and supported by pil-lars of rocks. Through the cracks in the floor, they could see chick-ens walking under the house. It was bitter cold in the winter. Theirbathroom was an outhouse, and toilet paper was a Sears, Roebuck& Company catalog placed on the ledge near the door.

The children seldom left the immediate area of the farm; onlyonce or so each month they borrowed Mrs. Burgandy’s car to gointo Cookstown, a dozen miles distant, though they went to anearby church twice a week, on Wednesday and Sunday.

Debbie and Sonny managed to get across to the other side oftheir freedom puddle. They looked back and saw the yellow head oftheir father coming across the cotton. He’d followed their tracks.He shouted in a voice that might have sounded odd to many peoplebut was just their father’s familiar voice to them. Floyd was deaf,from a childhood accident in which a swing he’d jumped from

struck his head, and his voice was slightly off kilter, not like that ofmen who hear. He could read lips well, and Debbie and the otherkids got used to turning and facing him when they spoke to him. Atnight, when he lay in bed with Maggie Louise, she talked to him byspeaking soundlessly with her mouth against his bare arm—and bythe movement of her lips he understood what she was saying. He’drecently traveled a great distance to see a preacher who worked outof a tent. The tent preacher held out the promise of being able torestore Floyd’s hearing. But Floyd came back from Oral Roberts justas deaf as when he’d left.

Tonight, his special voice promised the children ice cream ifthey came back across the puddle. He wasn’t about to go into thatmud after them if he could tempt them to come out of it. Debbielooked at Sonny—ice cream was a powerful lure—and they wadedback across. They got to have ice cream only once a month, whenthey churned it themselves, so they hurried. Once they were on theother side, Floyd grabbed them and took them home, to a goodspanking.

But after that was done, the children got their ice cream. Floydnever broke his word.

He never asked why Debbie had run away with her littlebrother. If he had any notion why, he never let on.

. ii.

Maggie Louise’s dream of going on in school, the dream she hadshared with James Agee in 1936, survived for a while and then diedits quiet death. Her farm chores just took her away from too muchof each school year. In 1941, another option presented itself. Hisname was Abraham Jones, the boy her father never quite liked.

Jones had been eyeing Maggie Louise for a long time, and hadintentions. George Gudger, her father, did not want his daughtermarrying that boy. She was too young. Annie Mae, her mother, sawthe inevitable. Whether she and George agreed to it or not, it wasgoing to happen. Unknown to George, Annie Mae sewed MaggieLouise a yellow dress. It was not as fine as the dress in which sheherself had been married, but it would have to do under the circum-stances. Jones went to the Centerboro courthouse on December 20,1941, and took out a license. He told the registrar he was twenty-one and his bride eighteen, thus adding three years to the age of

Gudger 79

Maggie Louise. Her occupation was listed as “school girl.” That wasthe last association she would have with schooling.

Jones came from a family of tenant farmers, and he’d left to goon his own, at what was called “public work.” That meant he didnot have his own acreage on which to plant, grow, and harvest, butwas chopping, hoeing, or picking cotton for hire at fifty cents a day.It was a hard way to earn a living. One Saturday, Maggie Louisesneaked away, and they were married by a minister.

George was furious and threatened to kill Jones. The newlywed couple fled to a farm owned by James Black, east of Cooks-town. The 1942 season was the first time Jones sharecropped on hisown. He and Maggie Louise were halvers. They had twenty-oneacres, a mule provided by Black, and a lot of love. They made fourbales of cotton and picked every bit of it themselves.

World events caught up with them. Late in 1942, Jones receivedhis draft notice. He was off to boot camp in Virginia, then to servicein North Africa. He fought his way across France with the Seventy-eighth Division of the U.S. Army. At first, the letters between himand his wife were frequent and full of passion.

But the letters from home started coming less often. In 1945,right after the end of the war, but before the army brought Joneshome, he got a letter that looked different from the others. He knewit was bad news. He could not bear to open it, so he went to hiscommanding officer and begged him to read it. The officer obliged.Maggie Louise wanted a divorce.

“We lived together until our final seperation in Dec. 1942,”Maggie Louise’s signed complaint read.

Several times prior to the date of final seperation I was forced toleave my husband and return to the home of my parents becauseof my husbands cruel treatment to me. In Dec. 1942 my husbandwithout any provacation on my part struct me with a board on mybody particularly on my thigh and leg leaving bad bruises and con-tusions and lacerations. . . . Since it was reasonable to anticipatefurther violence on the part of my husband I was forced to leavehim and since such seperation we have not lived together.

Even though it appears the document was prepared by an attor-ney, it contained misspellings. Her father, George, signed an affidavitstating that he saw the bruise and that in fact Jones was cruel.

The court papers left unsaid that Maggie Louise was pregnant

by another man. Jones, through his own lawyer, denied he hit her.The divorce was effective in Cherokee City on October 30, 1945.She had been married in one county seat, divorced in another. OnNovember 20, 1945, in a third adjoining county seat, she wed FloydFranks. Five months later, Maggie Louise gave birth to Mary Ann.

Franks, because he was deaf, had not been drafted and hadremained sharecropping in Alabama when most of the young menof that time went off to war. Maggie Louise had struck up a friend-ship with him, and one thing had led to another. She was nineteenand he twenty-eight when they married. Floyd and Maggie Louiselived with George and Annie Mae for a while, before moving to theBurgandy land.

Jones was wild with jealousy. After the war, he rushed back toAlabama. He came around with a gun several times, but soon real-ized it was over. He left the county and moved south, where he tooka job in a yarn mill and later became a truck driver. Raised to pickcotton, he sharecropped only one season, that summer with MaggieLouise.

. iii .

By the 1950s, Maggie Louise, her husband, Floyd, and their fourchildren were on the Burgandy farm, one of the few families left inthis corner of the cotton lands. They were the only white family onthe tiny branch road about four miles south of Hobe’s Hill. Manyhad already moved out. Not they. They ran this farm for Mrs. Bur-gandy, a silver-haired woman who seemed very old to young Deb-bie. Mrs. Burgandy lived in the big white house a quarter mile upfrom their shack. It was not one of those antebellum homes, withwhite columns and such, for the Burgandys were not of that high aclass, but it was large enough all the same, with five bedrooms andtwo and a half baths. You couldn’t have called the Burgandys trulywealthy. The family, by modern standards, would have been consid-ered barely middle-class. But such things are always relative. Mrs.Burgandy never used a Sears catalog for anything other than mail-order shopping. So Mrs. Burgandy seemed absolutely rich toDebbie.

Maggie Louise and Floyd’s four-room shack, with one fireplaceand set back a quarter mile in the country, was inferior to the tall,white-sided home of Mrs. Burgandy, but a good deal better than the

tiny shacks near them, the quarters for some of the black handswho’d been placed in Floyd’s charge.

The Burgandy land had once had as many as ten tenant familiesfarming its acreage. That was before and during the Depression. Mr.Burgandy had inherited this land and, in 1922, married a teacherfrom Mobile. They built the big white house that year. In 1923, theyhad their only child, Elizabeth. Elizabeth did try once to pick cottonone afternoon when she was young, to supplement her five-centweekly allowance, and found she just couldn’t do it. Her hands andback hurt so badly that she never tried again.

The Burgandys survived the Depression without losing anyland. In 1937, their tenants harvested forty-nine bales—more thantwenty-seven thousand pounds, at a market value of $2,354. Soonoutside forces they didn’t understand would begin to transformeverything they knew.

The conclusion of World War II was the start of this new age.When the men first came home, they went back to what they’dknown—the land. Many were afraid the prewar economic malaisewould resume. But the city lured them with jobs—an outflow thatgrew as men took their families to the towns, looking for new jobopportunities in the postwar consumer society.

Many were like Abraham Jones. They didn’t want to cottonfarm. Jones had drunk schnapps in Paris and seen the world, and atwenty-acre cotton patch seemed like another kind of death. Warhad taught him to take chances, that you weren’t always safe hold-ing to what you had. Of course, there were others, like Franks, who,because of handicaps or fear of the outside world, or because theyknew no better, remained under the old ways.

At this time, the cotton-picking machine proved it could workand started coming into its own. By the early 1950s, it was still arelative novelty in the Old South, but in Texas and the Far West itwas taking over. Mules could no longer keep up.

The Burgandy family responded in a manner typical of manycotton lords. They could not afford to buy a cotton-picking machineto combat western growers. They heard that some small farmerswere doing that, then charging their neighbors a fee to harvest withit, in a sense creating cooperatives that spread out the investment. Itsounded like a good way to stay in the cotton business. But they alsoheard that it didn’t work on the small tracts that dominated in Ala-bama. By the time the machine worked its way around to farmers

far down on the list, heavy winds or rain often came and ruined ripecotton, or knocked it down a grade. The machine worked best onlarge, flat arid tracts, harvesting cotton belonging to just one personor a corporation.

The Burgandys, though they did not acquire the picking ma-chine, felt that if they mechanized in part they might be able to com-pete. They bought a tractor, giving up on the mules. Rather thanhave half a dozen sharecropper families work the land, Floyd andMaggie Louise were kept on to run the place. In 1952, Mr. Bur-gandy died. His wife decided to continue.

Floyd became a tractor man. With the tractor, Floyd plowed134 acres of corn and cotton, five times the amount of land a mancould plow with a mule. He’d mount the tractor in the spring, sittingin the shade beneath a big red umbrella given to him by MaggieLouise. At noon, Maggie Louise would bring out his “dinner”—sweet tea in a jug and cornbread—and he’d stop raising dust to eat,then go back to plowing.

Of course, the problem was still raising and picking—althoughFloyd could plow fives times as much acreage, his family couldn’tchop, hoe, and harvest that much cotton.

Because blacks were being forced out of tenantry, there was apool of hungry people willing to work for any wages. The roadsaround the Burgandy farm were lined with old tenant houses re-cently abandoned. They looked ready for the people to return anyday. The old store run by Mr. Burgandy, across the street from thebig house, was closed just after the war, when it became clear noteveryone was coming back to the farm and things would never re-turn to what they’d been.

Mrs. Burgandy left the store just as her husband closed it, amuseum to what was. At the age of sixty-six, Mrs. Burgandy wastrying to hang on to what she’d known and understood her entirelife. She ran things as her husband had, but had Tom Dixon, anotherlandlord, to watch over Floyd and Maggie Louise while she was inMobile visiting her daughter. Mr. Dixon often came around in hispickup truck to check on things. The big house was also kept thesame. Mrs. Burgandy lived alone in it, and Debbie would sometimespeer in and see the piano, the hardwood furniture, the things theydidn’t have in their house. She seldom entered. Under the old rulesMrs. Burgandy lived by, tenant children were not allowed in the bighouse. Tenant children could not enter the apple orchard out back,

either. Debbie thought that was silly. She’d sneak up through thefield and climb the trees to snitch apples when they came ripe. WhenMaggie Louise caught her, she’d be furious—you didn’t get any-thing off Mrs. Burgandy’s land without her knowing—and wouldpunish her. Mrs. Burgandy had many rules, and Maggie Louiseforced her children to obey them.

Once a month, when they drove to town for shopping, Debbiewatched Maggie Louise approach the big white house with herhands held together in front of her, asking to borrow Mrs. Burgan-dy’s car, a late 1930s Plymouth.

Maggie Louise was terrified of driving. She gripped the wheeltightly for the entire dozen miles into town. Her driving ability wassuch that if Debbie sat in the backseat, she got sick from swaying,so she always climbed to the front. On the return trip, MaggieLouise would have to negotiate the climb up Wobbly Hill. She hatedWobbly Hill. It seemed so steep. Maggie Louise would gun the carto a full thirty miles an hour, but then lose her nerve with the speedshe needed to climb the hill, and she’d stall from slowing. The kidsdidn’t like that, because the car would always stop near the aban-doned hotel at the top, a vine-covered house everyone said washaunted, and they’d urge her to restart the engine fast and get away.

Maggie Louise was thirty years old, and seemed much older—she weighed nearly two hundred pounds, filled out by the constant3-M diet. She’d turned into exactly what she hoped to have escaped,changing in all ways except her eyes. When hoeing or picking cot-ton, she might have been able to see herself in the children and toimagine them standing as she had before Walker Evans's cameratwenty years before, holding her picking sack, looking at him withthe same gray, sad eyes that some of her children inherited.

James Agee had encouraged Maggie Louise in 1936, but henever knew what happened to his favorite little Alabama girl muchafter that. Agee came back to Alabama in 1937, with Alma, whowould become his second wife. They’d gone to New Orleans and itsjazz clubs and were on their way home to New York. He decided tostop in for one afternoon, to visit the Gudgers and the Rickettses.He told them Alma was his wife, knowing they wouldn’t understandhis traveling around with a girlfriend while he was still married toanother woman, said biographer Laurence Bergreen. The Gudgersoffered to put them up, but they declined to stay the night.

That was the last the Gudgers saw him. He did keep in touch

with the Gudger family for several years, writing letters and sendingChristmas presents, but as the Second World War began, the lettersslowed.

By the time the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, he’dstopped writing to the family. His career had changed. He hadswitched to Time magazine, writing an eloquent piece on August 20,1945, about how the globe would never again be the same after thebombing of Hiroshima. “With the controlled splitting of the atom,humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, wasbrought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and thingswere split—and far from controlled,” Agee wrote.

The words could have measured his own life. The man who hadseemed so innocent to the people of Hobe’s Hill was moving awayfrom those basic values of the Gudgers that had attracted him and,according to Bergreen, toward a steadily more destructive existence.He was drinking more and engaging in bizarre sex, some of it in-volving him, his wife Alma, and Walker Evans, Bergreen said in hisbook. In an interview, Evans said he once saw Agee smash a chairover a woman’s head because he believed she had faked an orgasm.

Some of his troubles seemed to date to his time on Hobe’s Hill.After Fortune magazine killed his story, he started writing a book onthe Alabama experience and did obtain a contract from a publisherfor the work. He felt he could transform his observations into aliterary turning point in his life, but encountered great difficultywriting. It consumed Agee. He finished the book in 1939, and thepublisher rejected it. He then sold it to another house, whichreleased it in 1941. At first it was called Three Tenant Families,but before publication he changed its title to Let Us Now PraiseFamous Men.

It seemed the book was too late. It was beaten into print by YouHave Seen Their Faces, a now relatively little-known book on cottonsharecroppers by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White and thewriter Erskine Caldwell, famous for his novel Tobacco Road. Somecritics said CaldweJPs writing was strained and contained made-upquotes, that the photographs were almost purposefully brutal. In itsbehalf, others say it caused Congress to pass laws and awakened thenation to the plight of sharecroppers. It was well known and earnedits authors a lot of money. The other bombshell came with JohnSteinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Though truth may be strangerthan fiction, it is seldom as well crafted dramatically, and this novel

soon epitomized for most Americans the Depression suffering ofpeople of the land. Furthermore, the worst effects of the Depressionhad already ended by 1941, and the country was gearing up for itsnext national crisis, another world war. By the time Agee reportedthe story of the poverty of tenant farming in Alabama, poverty wasold news and only war was hot.

Agee’s book, written in a highly personal, opaque style, waspublished to mixed reviews. The New York Times called it “arro-gant, mannered . . . gross,” but others gave it raves. The New Re-public praised its “superior, highly original, accurately poeticwriting.” However its artistic merits may have been debated, it wasnot a commercial success. It sold a little more than six hundred cop-ies by the end of the year, going out of print in 1948. It passedquickly into a temporary obscurity.

The families went about their lives in Alabama, unaware of thebook’s existence. Agee never sent them even one copy of the workthat contained countless raw observations of the personal secretsthey had shared with him. It appeared for a long while that theymight never know of it.

Agee spiraled out of control as the 1940s wore on. He gravi-tated toward Hollywood, writing screenplays—including the scriptfor The African Queen, directed by John Huston and starring Hum-phrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. The lead character, Charley,was written as a boozing loner—mirroring the writer, said Bergreen.Agee’s teeth began to rot—he had never had them treated—and hewas on a third marriage, womanizing, neglecting his children, thefirst born in 1940, who were left behind in New York while he wasin Hollywood. Increasingly, he lived the Hollywood life—drinkingmore, sleeping less, declining in health as he approached his fortiethbirthday. He suffered his first heart attack before completing the Af-rican Queen script. The Alabama project still preyed on his mind,but he didn’t talk about it much, his friends say. “It was like a deadchild,” said Mary Newman, a friend of Agee’s third wife, Mia. Ageewas desperate to complete a novel about his childhood and the ac-cidental death of his father, fearing that his own death was nearing.

So Agee never learned what happened to Maggie Louise. Heleft her future frozen as it was in the pages of his book, bright,happy, full of promise.

It’s clear that he never forgot the families and that he felt a hugesense of guilt over his role in studying them. Perhaps he was glad the

book was a flop. He called it and himself a failure, devoured bythose thoughts during drunken stupors, sometimes raging and car-rying on wildly.

Maggie Louise also became a failure, at least according to theexpectations of worldly success Agee’s work created for her.

If success is measured solely in terms of dollars, or the kind ofhouse one lives in, yes, it is true that Maggie Louise was a failure.But if Agee had returned to Alabama in 1946, or later, as the chil-dren grew, he might have envied her. She was in a love-filled mar-riage, raising her children and, unlike Agee, doing right by them.But that was not all. It seems Agee projected himself on the little girlhe saw in 1936—both were bright, energetic, inquisitive. There was,however, a fundamental difference—namely, that Maggie Louise, atleast at that point in her life, had the ability to be satisfied, which,while different from being happy, is essential in finding contentment.In this regard, there may be two kinds of people, or perhaps, moreaccurately, two extremes, and if so, Agee and Maggie Louise repre-sented them.

Ten years after Agee left Maggie Louise, she and Floyd settledinto a routine, simple country life—hard work, few luxuries. Theirfirst child, Mary Ann, was born on May 5, 1946, when MaggieLouise was twenty.

Maggie Louise’s first husband had moved away from theircounty and was having the first of his children. Abraham Jones re-alized he was blessed to be out of the fields. Floyd and MaggieLouise had no comprehension of the kind of world Jones was livingin. But they were, by all accounts, happy.

Big times for the Franks family meant going fishing. They wentwith their poles to the river and sat on the bank, watching barges gopast. They took Mary Ann, spending as much time with her as theycould. They went fishing twice in June and twice in July of 1947,months when the cotton crop required less work. The last time theywent fishing that summer was in August, on the eighteenth, just be-fore the bolls came ripe. That day, they stopped by the home of BudWoods, Maggie Louise’s grandfather. Mary Ann was his first great-grandchild. On other Sundays, they remained closer to home, al-ways going to Maggie Louise’s parents, not far away.

At George and Annie Mae Gudger’s home, the ritual was thesame each Sunday. The men would take a stick and scratch a line at

either end of the yard, in the dust, and then pitch coins. Whoevergot a coin exactly on the line won all the money thrown. It was agame for men only. The women cooked, usually chicken, a once-a-week Sunday treat. About once a month, the children would get icecream. Debbie and the other girls played at jumping rope.

George was always seeking ways to pull pranks. Debbie lookedup at her grandfather one day, his teeth already vanishing, the onesremaining stained brown like wood, and he told her he had a treatfor her, if she would only close her eyes and hold out her hand. Shedid. She felt something moist in her palm. When she looked shescreamed. He’d placed a wad of his chewed tobacco in her hand.

Maggie Louise hugged Floyd a lot. Their home was one wherelove was shared and constantly expressed. She loved him in the wayshe could never love any other man. After the birth of Mary Ann,they waited four years for their next child, Debbie, but after herbirth, Sonny and Parvin came in quick succession.

The children were wild in the well-mannered innocent waycountry children are, running barefoot and half-naked through thefields. Debbie and Sonny would go out to the fencerows, wadinginto the soft-green vines of sweet honeysuckle, plucking the delicateand diminutive horn-shaped flowers, bringing enough back forMaggie Louise to place in a vase that brightened the shack. She’dkeep them until they were wilted and crisp. They became her favor-ite flower, even more cherished than her cultivated roses.

In the fall, when the honeysuckle was wilting from the frostsand all the cotton was gathered, Debbie started going to school. Theschoolhouse was a white frame building in Madrid Junction, and itcontained all the early grades, one to four, in a single room. Therewere thirty boys and only one other girl besides Debbie, and thatgirl was her aunt, Catherine Annette, the eighth and last child bornalive to Annie Mae and George Gudger. One child was stillbornbefore 1936, another after.

Debbie had to walk about one mile to get to the first and thesecond grade, down the dirt road that ran due west to the mainhighway, which by 1956 had been paved from Cookstown to Cen-terboro. In warm weather, she went barefoot, but had a pair ofboots for the many wet months. She was plagued by the same prob-lems that had faced her mother twenty years before—it was difficultto wade through the mud on rainy days. And she had to remain out

of school during the cotton harvest. She missed many classes. Andthe school was not much different from the one her mother hadentered back in the Depression—it was understaffed, overcrowded,and used fifty-year-old textbooks. One teacher taught all fourgrades; even if the woman had been the state’s best teacher and hadthe best materials, neither of which was true, it would have been animpossible job.

Debbie walked down the dirt road many times, across thebridge, going through forest, open clearings, past the “Negro”shacks up near the main highway. She was taught by her mother notto call them “nigger” shacks, a term almost universally used by localwhites. She came back in the cold of winter afternoons, and thesmell of the woods and fields after a fresh rain was something shethought she’d never forget, like the face of her mother looking at herover the ripe cotton.

. iv .

Although Debbie’s education was lacking and their standard of liv-ing still far below that of city people, their lives were much better,in many ways, from what they had been when Agee had visited.Maggie Louise’s parents, the Gudgers, had come a long way in ashort period. The end of the Great Depression and the changingnature of tenant farming that came with that end put a little moremoney into their hands—not much, but enough to pull them upfrom the hardscrabble bottom. By the mid-1940s, they were actuallygetting part of the crop they worked to produce, farming for Mr.Dixon. The use of tractors, which allowed larger tracts to be farmedand made the farmer a more productive economic asset, contributedto this new situation.

After the 1930s, as the modern world started to force itself onthe Alabama countryside, George and Annie Mae Gudger tried toadjust. George gave up on the mule-drawn wagon and bought arusted “A-model.” In the early 1950s, according to a picture takenby their son, Burt Westly, who’d just come home from the KoreanWar, when they drove to town they gussied up for the trip. In thephoto they resemble a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde, he in a wrinkledtopcoat, bell-bottom wool pants, fedora on his head, she in a blazerand store-bought striped skirt.

George never quite caught on to the machine. Invariably, when

driving into town, they encountered chickens in the road. Instead ofusing the horn, George would yell, “Shoo! Shoo!”

When electricity finally came to their farm down by the river,about 1949, George was eager to put it to use and hastily hooked a.pocket to the ceiling. When darkness fell, the family assembled forthe ceremony. George threw the switch. The bulb burned harshly.

“George, cut the light off,” said Annie Mae. She was crying.

“Why are you crying?” asked George, bewildered.

“Because now you can see all the dirt,” she said, pointing to thewalls. The stains upon them had been nearly invisible in the dullglow of oil lamplight.

As soon as they could afford it, George had to have a refriger-ator. He and Annie Mae went out and bought the biggest they couldfind, figuring it was best, but when they got it home, it was just toolarge—it wouldn’t fit through the door of their tiny house. They hadto return it and buy a smaller one.

Although they had some amenities, they still worked hard,nearly as hard as they had in 1936. George’s skin had withered andcracked beneath the successive seasons of sun, and sometimes, whenthey went into town, Annie Mae stopped at the store after a hardday of work and bought a cold RC Cola. Often, she’d cry. One ofher children asked her why. She told them because it tasted so good.

Annie Mae still washed all their clothes on a wooden rubboard, and it was hard to get George’s “overhauls” clean (that’s howthey said overalls), and George was particular about his “uni-form”—it had to be starched below the knees, not up in the chestarea, and if any starch got up there, he would have a fit. George wasstill strict with Annie Mae, and he ordered her to keep her hair long,even though she was nearly fifty years old.

Their children were all coming of age, and the shrinking of thecotton world forced some of the boys out of farming. Burt Westlycame back from the service and began working in a meat-packingfactory in Cherokee City. The wages weren’t great, and it wasbloody work, but it was far better than laboring under the Alabamasun for an uncertain income.

But some couldn’t leave cotton. Gretchen, the girl Annie Maehad been pregnant with when Agee was in Alabama, was having aworse time than her sister Maggie Louise.

In 1956, Gretchen was nineteen and freshly married, to “Boy”Ricketts, a young man unrelated to the Ricketts family on Hobe’s

Hill. Gretchen dropped out of school young and could not read, norcould Boy. Boy was afraid to go to the city and look for a job, be-cause he couldn’t fill out an application.

Gretchen and Boy started sharecropping, and after their firstcotton crop, the landlord gave them a load of corn in payment. Theytraded that corn for an old car, their first.

They worked their own cotton as well as the fields of others.They got two bucks a day for hoeing, two and a half for picking ahundred pounds. On average, they made about fifteen dollars aweek. They had two children and often ran low on money.

One day, Boy came in and sat before Gretchen. He startedcrying. Gretchen thought he was crying just like a baby. She askedwhat was wrong. He said they had no money. There was no food inthe house. And no prospect in sight for getting either. It was theworst they’d seen. He looked at their young children. He couldn’tstand to see them hungry.

Boy was a man who read his Bible, and his belief was strong.He didn’t tell Gretchen where he was going when darkness came.He didn’t like what he was about to do.

A little while later, Gretchen heard a strange noise outside. Itsounded like the squawk of a chicken. She opened the door, andBoy was standing there with a big fat hen. He wouldn’t say where itcame from. They rushed into the bathroom and killed it, buryingthe feathers to destroy the evidence. They ate off that bird for oneweek.

It was very hard. A family couldn’t make it any more by farm-ing. But there was little choice for people who were illiterate andhad never known anything but cotton, other than to continue tryingto make a living at the only thing they knew.

The youngest boy of Annie Mae and George, Walter (“Sonny”)Gudger, grew up watching the struggles of Maggie Louise,Gretchen, and his brothers. He knew he couldn’t let cotton destroyhim the way it was ruining others. (Sonny became a popular nick-name in these families, and there soon were half a dozen spreadthrough four generations.)

One day, Sonny went out by the levee and applied soda to thecrop. He carried it in a big bucket, tripping and falling down overthe clods of dirt, burned by the caustic dust, faint from the sun.When he came home, a heat rash was burning his legs. He was justmiserable.

In 1954, Sonny was only in the seventh grade, but he made adecision about cotton. He crossed his arms and refused to do it anylonger. He said to hell with picking, to hell with helping his fatherplow, to hell with hoeing under that sun. He told his father cottonwas a dead end.

George became angry. He told his son he had to help work thefarm. George had learned only to sign his name. Hard work, that’swhat got you ahead, George believed. Not education. He orderedSonny not to start school on time that year, and instead to help withpicking, as all seven other children had done or were doing. InGeorge’s house, as his sister-in-law Emma had learned so long be-fore, you had to work hard.

“But I have to learn typing,” Sonny told him. “If I start late, I’llhave to wait until next year.”

George scoffed. But Annie Mae intervened. Annie Mae hadfailed Maggie Louise. It had been impossible to help her little girlescape in 1936. It was the Depression, and she was a girl, and theodds were just too great. The other six children didn’t care muchabout school, but Sonny was like Maggie Louise. If he wanted it forhimself, she wanted it for him. She encouraged Sonny to study.It was the 1950s, and maybe he could make something of himself.She talked with George. She convinced him it was important. Hegave in.

Sonny went into Cookstown and got a part-time job in the Yel-low Front store, bagging groceries. That was the kind of work for aboy who dreamed of going to college. The owner was Mr. Hill.Sonny loved the job and was a good stock boy. He worked afterschool and on Saturdays.

Word of Sonny’s refusal to work the cotton reached back to theGudgers’ landlord, Tom Dixon, a big man around town, as big asthe Margraveses. No one set lightly to interfering with the largelandlords. They ran Cookstown and this whole county. If you hiredtheir labor away, it was as bad as coveting the landlord’s wife, andindeed acting on such thoughts. These men felt that it disrupted thedynamic between landlord and tenant if the tenant was ever paidwages by another or in any other way removed from their control.

Dixon, outraged, went to Mr. Hill to remind him of the waythings were supposed to be. Mr. Hill apologized. He said he’d takecare of it.

That evening, when Sonny reported to work, Hill told him he

was fired. When George heard about this, he went to see Mr. Hill.George would have been just as happy to get the help of Sonny back,but Annie Mae’s influence was strong. Sonny never knew what wassaid or promised between George and Mr. Hill, but Sonny was hiredback in the store the next day. It took a lot of courage for George tofly in the face of the landlord that way. In the old days, George couldnever have prevailed in this. Much was the same, but a few things atleast had changed in rural Alabama.

Sonny studied, all the while hating the work his father did, theirway of life. Sonny tried to act as if he were from a higher economicclass, and he associated with students he felt were of this upper class.He didn’t want to admit he came from a family of sharecroppers.Sonny’s brothers resented him for this.

While Sonny was in high school, George and Annie Mae leftMr. Dixon and moved to a new landlord. The tenant house on thisland was back in the swamp, raised about eight feet off the groundto avoid the spring floodwaters. When Sonny first saw it, he com-mented that it was ready to fall down. The walls of his room weremade of bare pine boards, and the floor was bowed. A big familyfight ensued. Sonny said he wouldn’t move into such a dump. Hesaid he’d take an apartment in Cookstown.

George shrugged. He went and purchased wallpaper, pastingover the pine boards, trying to make the room look like one fit for acity boy. Sonny moved in.

When the day that Sonny was to get his diploma approached,he was ready to grab it and escape Cookstown, moving on to collegeand whatever big time the city, and the greater world outside cotton,held in store for him.

Sonny desired to graduate in style and wanted a class ring, butcouldn’t afford one on the wages of his store job. Annie Mae didsome outside work that fall of 1958, above and beyond what shehad to do on their own farm. She picked thirty-seven dollars’ worthof cotton to buy the ring for him. “I don’t want you giving this tono girl,” she told him as she handed over the money.

She picked some more, to pay the rent for his gown, and for theinvitations. She was extremely proud. If only Maggie Louise couldhave worn a gown and flashed a high school ring.

If Sonny’s sister Maggie Louise was jealous, she never showedit. She and Sonny were close. She encouraged her youngest brother.They were known for their “cutting up” when they were together.

They were always joking and couldn’t go anywhere together with-out breaking out in laughter. In all ways, they were the two mostalike of all their siblings.

While Sonny was poised to escape, the cotton world appearedas though it would never change for George and Annie Mae, andfor their daughter Maggie Louise and her husband Floyd. Georgewas only in his early fifties as the 1950s neared an end, and Floydwas even younger. They were still able to make a living, no matterhow bare, from cotton, in spite of all the problems associated withgrowing the crop. They were making it without those picking ma-chines that were talked about so much. But machines weren’t theirreal worry.

. v .

It was 1958, the third week of June. The crop was in the groundand growing. Floyd didn’t have to hear the thunder—he could see agray mass of clouds stalking the western horizon. He eyed the cloudsin the way all farmers do. Too much rain would make the cottongrow all green and thick, but throw no bolls. Too little would parchand stunt it. This rain was a strong one, and Maggie Louise and thechildren ran to the storm pit, a cavern carved in the red bank ofearth about a hundred feet to the east of their home on the Burgandyland.

Ever since she could remember, Debbie had been rushed byMaggie Louise into that pit to wait out storms that came frequentlyto these tablelands. It was cut in the bank, about waist high to anadult, and ten feet deep, a dark and cold place that Debbie imaginedto be full of snakes lurking beneath the benches on which they sat.She felt that the danger of getting bitten outweighed the chance ofbeing struck by lightning or buried under their house by a tornadothat might level it, but the fear of storms instilled in Maggie Louiseby her parents remained strong. As the door closed behind and theysat in the pit, Maggie Louise’s face was probably similar to what ithad been that day twenty-two years earlier when Agee sat in thebedroom with them during the storm.

The rain came, pounding the metal roof covered by a skin ofconcrete, and the baby, Parvin, was crying. Floyd decided to make arun across the road and ditch to the house, to get her bottle, whichthey’d forgotten in haste.

Big round drops were falling. When he returned, climbing upthrough the entrance, between the dark forms of his family on eitherside of him, they were amazed that he was absolutely dry. They wor-ried that it might have been some kind of omen. That seemed silly.But they kept talking about it.

One week later, on June 29, about four in the afternoon, Floydwas out by the barn, working with a hand they had hired from thecounty home for the retarded to help out during cotton-hoeing time.It seems he suffered an aneurysm, a weakened blood vessel that rup-tured, probably a congenital defect. They said it appeared his headexploded, with blood coming from everywhere. The death certificatesaid he died from an intraventricular hemorrhage of an “unknowncause.” No autopsy was performed.

Floyd died at one in the morning on June 30, 1958. He wasforty-one. Cotton sharecropping was over for Maggie Louise. Shecould not continue with four young children, the oldest twelve. Shegathered the children and closed the door on the shack, forever leav-ing cotton behind.

Life as a cotton landowner also changed for Mrs. Burgandy.Since the death of her husband, in 1952, she’d been spending sometime in the winter down in Mobile, at the house of her daughter,Elizabeth. For a few summers beyond the death of Floyd Franks,she’d go back and live for several months at a time in the big, silenthouse, trying to cling to memories and to a life that once had been.Over the years, she came to spend less and less time there.

Maggie Louise went north, to Cherokee City, into a publichousing project on the rough south side, occupied by many otherswho, like her, were refugees from the land.

Later, they moved a little way out and lived in a duplex. Theother half of the duplex was rented to Maggie Louise’s brotherSquinchy, the baby whom Agee saw in 1936 and whom MaggieLouise had held in her arms the day they sat in the bedroom duringthe storm. They still had no inside toilet, only an outhouse and ametal tub to wash in. There was little she could get in the way ofpublic help, and she didn’t want anything for nothing, anyway. Shetold Sonny, her son, that you never get anything free, that the onlyway you get ahead is to get off your ass and go work for it. She wasto repeat that piece of philosophy many times.

She got a job as a waitress at Gas Island, a crossroads joint onthe road south of Cherokee City. She worked eleven hours a day, six

Gudger 95

days a week. The wages were low, and tips were her mainstay. Bythat time, her brother Sonny had just graduated from high schooland was working in a shoe store as a salesman. Maggie Louise wentto visit him one day. He gasped when she entered, walking in on hertiptoes, because she couldn’t use the balls of her heels, so blisteredwere they from constant standing. She had lost all her excess 3-Mweight, turning almost gaunt. She didn’t complain to Sonny, or toanyone else. Work was what she was supposed to do.

Meanwhile, the sun still burned down on Cookstown and itsenvirons, and George Gudger labored harder, minus many of hissons who no longer were around to help him. He seemed old as heneared his fifty-fifth birthday. In the off season, he and Annie Maewere borrowing forty bucks a month from their landlord to survive.George seemed to become crazed with work, worse than anythingAnnie Mae had ever seen. One afternoon after a day in the fields, hecame home and started rubbing the liniment he always applied tohis skin to sooth his aching muscles. Annie Mae saw that he’d begunto drink it and was now out of his head and wild. She fought torestrain him, and he didn’t recognize her or anyone else. They forcedhim down with pillows until he stopped thrashing. It was the begin-ning of a series of nervous breakdowns.

Not much later, George fell ill, unable to recover from exhaus-tion, and Annie Mae was worried. Her son Sonny drove her andGeorge to the doctor in Cookstown. George had been there before,and the doctor said he was fine. But Annie Mae knew deep downsomething terrible was wrong. During that last visit, she dropped toher knees and begged the doctor to do something or to send Georgeto a specialist. The doctor looked down at her and told her to getup off her knees, to go back home. George was just tired, he said.

George dismissed her concerns, but finally, when he continuedto decline, they talked him into seeing another doctor. That doctorfound cancer in his throat. But it was too far along now for anythingto be done. George’s sickness worsened just before the cotton wasready for harvest. Sonny went to the landlord and told him he couldkeep the crop. That more than settled the debt George had incurredat the start of the season—they didn’t want to pick or have anyshare of the cotton George had planted. They were done with cot-ton. The last cotton George Gudger ever picked was after his son-in-law had died the year before, when he helped Maggie Louisegather their crop.

George Gudger died on December 27, 1959, in the time of yearwhen the withered, brown, and beaten stalks born of the seeds hehad put into the earth the preceding spring were plowed deep be-neath the frost-covered ground, and the land he last farmed waitedfor a fresh season, a tractor driven by another man, the green linesof new cotton, new life, a new decade, the return of another Augustsun and another field of white to be gathered.

Annie Mae moved north, toward Cherokee City, nearer her sis-ter Emma and her daughter Maggie Louise, who had also beendriven out of cotton by the loss of her man. Emma helped her getwork at a nursing home. Sonny helped support his mother whep hehad to on the thirty dollars a week he made in the shoe stor^x

. i .

The two decades before 1960 were critical to cotton, marking aquiet revolution in the old cotton South. Finally coming to pass wereall those predictions made when the inventors John and Mack Rustdemonstrated their cotton-picking machine in the Mississippi Deltathat hot August day in 1936.

In 1936, the total U.S. production of about fourteen millionbales of cotton was almost entirely raised by hand and mule onforty-three million acres.

By 1960, the same amount of cotton was being sent to marketeach year. But because of machines and improved cultivation, it wasgrown on just seventeen and a half million acres. Fewer people wereneeded. One million farms had vanished since 1940, representing aloss of a majority of the nine million cotton tenants.

Machines were on the march.

Most cotton in 1960 was planted with tractor power. Evenmore significant, for the first time in history, better than 50 percentof the U.S. crop was harvested by mechanical pickers. In 1955 just25 percent was machine-harvested, according to James H. Street inhis book The New Revolution in the Cotton Economy (1957). Itwas a trend that would accelerate even more in the few years after1960.

Even though many farms were phasing in machines, some handlabor was still used. This was so, said Street, because a

factor in the preference of planters for hand labor over machines isthe genuine concern some of them feel for loyal employees of longstanding who remained on the farm during the difficult war yearsand who are now too aged or untrained to find adequate employ-ment elsewhere. Some of the larger operators, of whom a few haveas many as one hundred cropper families, are introducing fullermechanization only on that land from which the tenants have de-parted. They reorganize the plantation by stages, pulling the emptyhouses down where necessary, and begin a new system of farming.

Most of the old-time cotton farmers left on the land were black.Whites had vacated the farm first, after the war, taking the relativelygood jobs in new factories that had moved south—three whites quitcotton in the first years after the war for each black who did. By1960, only the hard-core poor—and that most often meantblacks—were left on the land living under the old ways. But a fewwhites remained.

Fred Ricketts was one of these few.

it.

Fred Ricketts was eighty-eight. His wife, Sadie, was seventy-three,still sickly. They lived with their daughter Margaret and herfourteen-year-old son, Garvrin Arlo. Margaret had never left home.She lived her life within that clannish family that refused to changeits ways.

They were still planting by mule, still using the same old equip-ment, including the animal-drawn seeder used on Hobe’s Hilltwenty-four years before, and, of course, picking by hand.

Ricketts 99

But there was a critical difference—Fred Ricketts now ownedthe land he cultivated. He kept all the crop he grew. There were nomore thirds and fourths to share with any landlord. He alone,among all the relatives who had farmed near him back on Hobe’sHill, could boast of having achieved the dream of all cotton ten-ants—title to his own farm,

Back about 1940, Fred bought 149 acres under a New Dealloan program designed to turn cotton tenants into landowners. Heapparently got the land through the Bankhead-Jones Tenant FarmAct, administered by the Farm Security Administration, though rec-ords in Atlanta were incomplete and exact details are skimpy. Thegovernment loan at 3 percent interest enabled him to buy the prop-erty, about three miles due west of Hobe’s Hill, near the river. Afterhe signed the lease, a storm came and knocked down many trees onthe property. He sold the lumber, which had been felled at no costto him, and with the proceeds was able to pay off the loan and keep$1,300 for himself.

It should have been a time to rejoice. But his family had falleninto bitter factionalism and hate, something many of them wouldnever get over.

Most of Fred and Sadie’s seven children wanted to escape. Fast.John Garvrin was only fourteen when he struck out. He was thefirst. The rest left as soon as possible. After the youngest, Clair Bell,who had been just four years old when the writer James Agee vis-ited, took off about 1950, only two remained—Margaret and herbrother Richard.

Margaret and Richard were different from the others, trappedin their father’s world. They could not escape the old man. The oth-ers were upset with all the things Agee hadn’t seen, things that werejust beginning about the time of his visit. Fred was crafty and con-cealed them well from the outsider. Oddly, Agee observed that Fredalways stared at him in a funny way, as if hiding his fear. There isno suggestion that Agee knew anything about the special secretsFred Ricketts kept from him.

Ricketts took delight in the use of a horsewhip on the kids, andthis would have saddened and maybe shocked Agee. But it was thoseother things, whispered by townsmen, that would have intriguedAgee. It was all seen by Bea, the wife of John Ricketts, the first ofFred’s sons to leave. She was astonished at the family she had mar-ried into.

There was the time Fred held Margaret out on the porch, justas the Foster men were passing. The Fosters were black landownerson Hobe’s Hill. Fred unfastened her flour sack dress, so as to exposeher naked front. “How would you niggers like some of this?” heasked, according to Bea, and then he laughed crazily.

Fred once came after Paralee. She wouldn’t put up with whathe did to Margaret. To escape her father’s wrath, she jumpedthrough a window, shattering the glass. Paralee soon married andleft.

Margaret did try to get away. She married once, to a mannamed Jones, but Fred broke that up. He made her come backhome, to plow behind a double team of mules. He let no one datehis Margaret after that.

On June 6, 1946, Margaret gave birth. Margaret said Mr. Joneswas the father. The child was named Garvrin Arlo, taken fromFred’s middle name. His last name was Ricketts. Fred and Sadie andMargaret raised him, and Margaret would call him both brotherand son. Seven years later, she had another child, but she could notput that off on Mr. Jones. That boy died from disease within a yearof his birth. Margaret would walk to the cemetery behind the tallwhite pine-board church to visit the grave, marked with a plain rockthe size of a basketball.

Their house wasn’t much different from their previous place. Itwas just as nasty as the house on Hobe’s Hill, and inhabited byrattlesnakes to boot. They once killed one in the bedroom that hadseventeen rings on its rattle. That was a lot of snake. The homethreatened to collapse from rot beneath its own weight. Neighborswho stepped inside could not believe the foulness they witnessed.

John Ricketts, repulsed as he was by what was going on, feltsorry for his mother. He entered the service and went to Korea. Ac-cording to Bea, he sent money to his mother, so she could finallybuy some nice things. Bea, who, like many in the family, hated Mar-garet, said Fred and Margaret never gave Sadie the money her sonsent her, but used it instead to buy things for themselves.

One of the many people shocked by the unsanitary living con-ditions of the Rickettses was Annie Mae Gudger. Fred Ricketts wasrelated to her only by marriage, Fred having married her father’shalf sister. Fred had a brother, Tommy, who was a favorite of AnnieMae’s. He was ill and quite old, eighty-nine in 1950. Though thekinship was far removed, Annie Mae could not let Tommy live in

that house. She took him in, letting him stay with her family forone year.

Annie Mae’s daughter Gretchen said Tommy was in sad shape.He had a huge and ugly sore on his leg and was emaciated.

“They was just that kind of people,” said Gretchen. “Mama feltsorry for him ’cuz they just dragged him around. She babied him.We kept him about one year. Then Daddy, he just didn’t want tokeep him no more. It really hurt Mama. She cried and cried. Daddywouldn’t back down. He was in good shape when he went back.”

Tommy had put on weight and looked healthy under the careof Annie Mae. But once back in that soiled home, he quickly degen-erated into a pale and ghastly shadow. Gretchen visited him. “Isquatted down in front of him,” she recalled, “and he didn’t knowme.” Tommy died right after that, in 1952.

The next to fall ill in that house was Fred and Sadie’s son Rich-ard. For years, a violent cough had been his trademark. One day, hecoughed up blood. They were reluctant to take him to see a doctor.He had a fever for two days, then died in their home at 10:50 thenight of April 27, 1956. Richard was thirty-three years old. He wasin awful shape—the death certificate listed the cause as pneumonia,“probably tuberculous with pulmonary abscess.”

James Agee never met Tommy—so of all those he wrote aboutand knew on Hobe’s Hill, Richard was the first to die. In his book,Agee hazarded a guess as to when some of those in the familieswould perish, that “in two years, in five, in forty, it will all be over”for most of them, that one by one they’d all “be drawn into theplanet.” He predicted a few of them would be dead within monthsafter his departure.

But in a strange twist reality put on the story, Agee was the veryfirst to die, a year before Richard. Agee collapsed in a New Yorktaxi on May 16, 1955, from a heart attack, brought on by a hard-lived life. He was forty-five. He’d just barely finished a novel thatwould posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize.

The Rickettses didn’t know anything about Agee’s death. Theywere concerned with the loss of Richard’s labor. Richard was astrong cotton hand. Without him, it was much harder for Fred tofarm. But they went on. After the death of Richard, Fred and Mar-garet put aside the pretense that may have served to protect a shredor so of Sadie’s dignity and took to living in the same half of thehouse. Sadie was made to live in the other half, according to Bea.

By that time, Garvrin Arlo had permanently dropped out ofschool. Although his mother never made it past the fifth grade, hedidn’t even get that far. He left in the fourth grade.

It happened one afternoon, when the teacher told him to writedown an answer to some school problems. He refused. The teacher,frustrated with the child, sent him to the office. The principal toldhim to bend over his knee. He was going to spank him.

“Over my damn daid body,” said Garvrin Arlo. “You maht runa-this school. But you ain’ wuppin’ me! I ain’ stayin’ and you can’tdo anything!”

Garvrin Arlo went to his homeroom to pick up his book. Hestarted to walk out the door. The principal and two teachersblocked him. “You can’t walk out,” said the principal.

“I ain’ walkin’ out. Ahm knockin’ my way out wit my haid.The one I hit with my haid is the one that’s gonna hit the ground.”

They parted. The boy ran home. Margaret was enraged—notat Garvrin Arlo but at the principal. No one whipped a Ricketts.She pocketed a .32 semiautomatic and went off to the school. Mar-garet told the principal he’d never threaten to hit her son again,because her son was done with school. Garvrin Arlo stayed homeafter that, working the cotton, withdrawing further into the worldof Fred Ricketts. She bragged about her deed, constantly retellingthe story of how she showed those know-nothing teachers.

While Fred Ricketts captured the loyalties of his daughter andher son, he inspired fear in some of his grandchildren. Nancy Ann,one of his granddaughters, recalled a visit as a child. One of hercousins was playing behind the rocker in which Fred sat. Fredrocked back, unknowingly crushing the cousin’s finger beneath thewood stave. Her cousin was too terrified to yelp, for fear the oldman would go into one of his rages. Finally, an adult noticed thecousin turning purple. But the cousin never cried.

Four years after the death of Richard, Sadie’s health began todegenerate. Sadie needed medical help, as had her child, but itwasn’t made available to her, either. The family believed that thedoctor who had come to visit Richard when he was spitting upblood killed him with the shot he administered. Bea felt that some-thing could have been done for Sadie, but little was. She died at 2:30the afternoon of February 7, 1960.

“Sadie used to come to me and just cry her heart out,” said Bea.

“I held her hand when she died. I was glad she died. It was betterthat way.”

Meanwhile, not all the Ricketts children were living like Mar-garet. John had moved north to Cherokee City, working as a me-chanic for the city, and led a normal life in a clean house with abathroom. Clair Bell was the only one to finish high school, and shehad good grades. She moved to Illinois with her husband, living in asuburban-style home. To distance herself from the memories, sheshortened her name to just Bell. She never liked Clair Bell—she wasgiven that name by Fred, after his favorite mule.

Fred Ricketts could ignore what was going on in the outside worldby controlling his own world so tightly. But many cotton tenantscould not.

The impetus for change came from several fronts. World WarII, of course, altered American expectations and the economy of theworld. Here was what is called a “pull” factor, inducing cottonsharecroppers to leave the land. The enticement was better jobs thanhad ever been available to them.

Then there were the machines, a “push” factor to force themoff the land. The machines came, and the tenants had little choice inthe matter. Some had nothing to go to.

John Rust retained his vision of helping them. He and hisbrother, Mack, worked frantically in the early 1940s to perfect theirmechanical cotton harvester, but continued to have problems. Theirsuccessful demonstration in 1936 must have sent fear through thehuge companies that manufactured agricultural equipment. Inter-national Harvester had spent $3 million since the turn of the centuryto do what the Rusts seemed to be perfecting.

No matter what its merits, nobody was buying the Rust broth-ers’ contraption, with all those rules they had imposed to help thesharecroppers. So they sought their own financing. They managedto convince a group of liberal New Yorkers that the machine couldliberate the tenant farmer and be the salvation of the South. TheNew Yorkers invested $43,000.

Their new company sold two machines to the Soviet Union.John Rust went to the USSR to set them up, believing they’d be used

“to lighten man’s burden rather than to make a profit at the expenseof the workers.” They also sold models in Argentina and Australia.

Still, no Americans were buying. The Rusts decided to changecourse. They would not impose any rules on the use of their ma-chines, selling them on the open market for $4,800. To hold faith inhis earlier dream, John Rust said the company would set up a trustfund from which the profits would be drawn to assist farmers forcedoff the land and to encourage cooperative farming. The brothersalso announced they would not earn more than ten times theirlowest-paid employee.

Financing was a problem during the early years of the war—the New Yorkers’ money was not enough. And the machine con-tinued to break down. Also, the small new company had troubledistributing the device. All the Rusts had was a development shopand no plant to manufacture their picker commercially, no market-ing people, no sales force. By 1942, they had sold the shop tools topay debts. The moribund company was then dissolved.

Mack Rust was finished with the dream. He took a few of themachines and moved to California, setting up a custom cotton-harvesting business for Central Valley farmers.

John Rust was left alone, heavily in debt. Forty-nine years old,with no property except a company with no net worth and a househeavily mortgaged, he had nothing to show for fifteen years of work.He remained undaunted. He decided the machine was just not goodenough for the market. He went back to the shop, to redesign it andeliminate the problems.

Meanwhile, his largest rival, International Harvester, was put-ting more money and manpower into perfecting its own version.

All this activity had been spurred by the news in 1944 of thefirst cotton crop ever to be produced totally by machine, in the Mis-sissippi Delta, which proved that the mechanical picker was not onlypossible but even inevitable.

International Harvester finally broke through when its engi-neers decided to put the cotton intake at the front of the machinerather than the rear, as Rust had. That eliminated the destruction ofcotton plants by being run over and made the machine easy to op-erate by one man. International Harvester turned out twelve ma-chines in 1941 and 1942 and, by 1947, was producing seventy-fivea year.

In 1948, that company announced it was going into commer-

cial production. The firm completed a plant in Memphis, producingmore than one thousand machines that year, each costing $7,600.

John Rust saw only disaster ahead if he continued to try to gohis own way. He decided he had to turn to another large corpora-tion, and in 1944 he signed with the Allis-Chalmers ManufacturingCompany. But the firm was plagued with problems and was produc-ing only forty-nine machines by 1950. Allis-Chalmers lost its exclu-sive rights when it failed to live up to its contract, so Rust also soldthe rights to Ben Pearson, Inc., a small company in Pine Bluff, Ar-kansas. Ben Pearson agreed to give Rust 10 percent of the gross saleson each of the first thousand machines sold and 5 percent on eachafter the first thousand.

In the fall of 1952, the International Harvester Company saidit had produced more than eight thousand cotton harvesters, fourtimes the number produced by Allis-Chalmers and Ben Pearsoncombined.

Even so, in 1952, Rust reached a milestone—paying back morethan $250,000 in debts to 125 investors who had given him moneysince his quest began in 1927.

He had an additional $200,000 in earnings that he put into thefoundation he had formed a decade earlier. Fifty percent of all roy-alties were to go to that foundation. Furthermore, he assigned allpatent rights to the foundation, taking a salary of just $25,000 ayear.

Rust dreamed the trust would grow and help former tenantfarmers. He continued to try to make a cotton-picking machine evenmore affordable to a small farmer. He also set up an experimentalfarm near his home in Pine Bluff.

Just as this next stage of his dream was under way, John Rustsuffered a heart attack. He died on January 20, 1954.

Rust’s was one of the few voices calling for help for the share-croppers through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The media and pol-iticians of the 1950s almost totally ignored the millions of cottonexiles who were being driven into the cities, some to poor jobs, withno retraining. Few wrote about them or spoke in their behalf. Amer-ica was preoccupied by the wealth of the postwar years; not untilthe 1960s would it see the start of the War on Poverty. A significantpart of that poverty, particularly in the urban areas of large northerncities, was a result of cotton tenants’ fleeing the land.

When Rust died, his dream was a failure. The trust fund didn’t

106 And Their Children . . .

amount to enough to help many sharecroppers, said G. E. Powell,president of Ben Pearson.

Most of the market was eventually taken by International Har-vester. What royalties that did come into the Rust estate were neverseen by tenants. After his death, Rust’s second wife took much ofthe money to invest in a chain of hotels, according to Powell. Shehad never shared his vision, Powell said, and before he died, Rustwould often vanish for days at a time to escape her. Rust’s daughtersaid she and her uncle Mack sued to keep the wife from getting theestate. Eventually, the fund was depleted. The hotel chain nevprcaught on, and all that remains today is one hotel in Pine Bluff.

Even if Rust had lived and earned many millions of dollars inroyalties for his fund, it probably wouldn’t have been enough toextend any kind of real help to all the families hurt by the introduc-tion of technology to cotton farming. It was a job so huge only thegovernment could handle it—and the government did very little.The Ricketts children and millions like them who were trying toassimilate into society were ill equipped. They had to contend ontheir own.

. iv .

Fred Ricketts didn’t want to meet the modern world, but he couldnot forever insulate himself and his family against the realities of thecotton market and the national politics that controlled it. Hisshrunken family was about to be forced to face reality. By the 1960s,Fred, Margaret, and her son were already living on borrowed time.

A Readers Digest article summed up the predicament throughthe lens of economic Darwinism:

The trouble in cotton began in the 1930s. At that time, the UnitedStates supplied nearly half of the world’s requirements, selling anaverage of 6,300,000 five-hundred pound bales of cotton overseasannually, at a profit. Then, to help the small, depression-riddenfarmer survive, the U.S. government started propping up the pricesof cotton with public money. . . . This kept poor marginal farmersin business. But it also raised U.S. cotton prices so high that ourcotton began to lose buyers in the world market.

By 1956, the government subsidy of about one thousand dol-lars to each cotton farm cost U.S. consumers more than one billiondollars.

Ricketts 107

Just when this subsidy program was being established at thislevel, cotton’s share of the fabric market was shrinking. In 1960,cotton provided the material for only 66 percent of all clothes sold.In 1930, the comparable figure was 85 percent. Rayon becamecheaper than cotton in 1944 and soon established a place for itselfwith the clothes-buying public.

The export market for cotton was virtually lost by 1956—onlya little more than two million bales were shipped overseas. The gov-ernment kept buying up the extra cotton that American farmerswere producing. Finally, in the late 1950s the United States started“dumping” cotton overseas. U.S. textile mills had to pay $167 a balefor the same cotton the government was selling to its overseas com-petitors at $129. This gave foreign textile manufacturers an insur-mountable advantage over domestic manufacturers and helped ruinthe domestic textile industry. ^

All this was done mostly to save some small southern farmerslike the Rickettses. If that one billion dollars had been used to edu-cate and train them to enter more useful professions, it would havebeen money better spent. But that would have smacked of socialengineering and been politically unacceptable.

A spokesman for the world’s largest private cotton dealer toldTime magazine that the expensive price-support system tended tokeep cotton production in the old, uneconomical mule-power farmsof the Southeast, retarding a shift to the more economical big farmsof the West. A loss of subsidies would make the large western grow-ers better able to compete in world markets.

It was inevitable as the 1960s began that those subsidies wouldsoon have to end, radically lowering the price, making it impossiblefor anyone to earn a living on thirty acres of cotton. The last of theRickettses would then be forced to give up on cotton, no matter howhard they worked or how much they feared the modern world.

WOODS

. i.

Much had happened since that summer day in 1936 when Emmaleft Cookstown in a pickup truck, looking back over her shoulder atthe shrinking figures of her sister Annie Mae Gudger, her brother,Gallatin, the writer James Agee, and the piercing eyes of her nieceMaggie Louise. The truck crawled and rumbled along, carrying herand that iron bed—all there was to her marital property—to theplace where she would lie upon it with her lawful husband. Shereally didn’t understand why they had to travel so far to make theirhome, but Lonnie had been told that Mississippi bull farminglooked promising, and so they were on their way to Mississippi.

By the time they arrived in Mississippi it was too late in the yearto plant a crop, but Emma and Lonnie found work here and there

Woods 109

to earn money until the spring season, when they’d be able to put in

cotton as tenant farmers. „ —

Emma was used to seeing in front of a plow. But even in thissmall way of going to the bull farm, Emma was not to see anythingnew in cotton farming. “They called it bull farming,” she wrote inher diary. “But he got a mule instead of a bull.”

Emma learned that the Mississippi sun was no kinder than theAlabama sun had been. The cotton wilted beneath the numbing ad-vance of late summer, just as it had in Alabama; the fields, theirhouse, lay yellow in the heat. And then soon after the last cottonwas gathered, the winds of winter came, shaking to its primitivefoundation that mausoleum for the living to which her husband hadbrought her. But it was not all the same. Missing were those sightsand smells and sounds of family that had sustained her backhome—her father, Gallatin, Annie Mae and George, little MaggieLouise—now all miles removed. In their place were signs of marriedlife new for her, the soft cries of her own babies, the early jealousstares of Lonnie, later becoming bored glances—ever reminding herof the deathly loneliness that was growing between them. Somenights he was in bed next to her, often not.

It was easy for Emma to believe that the wrath of God had beenvisited upon that house. Her burdens were harsh, but in more waysthan those of the tenant farming that she had known all her life.When she had left Cookstown, Alabama, she had not known—or ifshe had, she hadn’t told Agee—that she was already pregnant. Afterher first daughter, Judith, the others came fast. She remembers thatRuby, who was the third, born in 1941, was from the beginningsmall and sickly. Ruby’s poor health was to be a special trial in Em-ma’s life.

What made it more difficult was that over time her worst fearsabout Lonnie were realized, though she would have trouble admit-ting this even to herself. Her diary tries to put the best face onthings:

Now dont misunderstand me. I growed very close to Lonnie andwe had a lot of good times together. With his toung he was realgood to me. ... I know he loved me and the children with all hisheart. I wont try to write about how and the way we lived but wewas happy. I followed him arond like a child would there dady andhe treated me like I was a child.

But other entries, those dealing more with the facts of the rela-tionship, clearly reveal he was not as committed to the survival ofthe family as Emma was, and amid all the rosy memories that fillher journal she does concede this. Mi he couldnt find a job like hewanted,” she writes, “he just wouldnt have one. If he couldnt makegood money he just wouldnt work. Now that is the truth.” Her hus-band also thought it his right to come and go as he pleased. If hewanted to go off somewhere, the fact that he was a married manwith a family did not stop him.

Bless his heart. In his way he was good to us and I cared a lot forhim but when he wanted to go some where he went. If he wantedto stay a month or 2 or 3 he did, then come home when he gotready.

When Lonnie was home, he spent much of his time tryin^toperfect a waterwheel from which he hoped to make electricity! Butthe stream was flat and shallow, unable to drive a turbine, and it wasa doomed dream from the start. In a pattern very different fromwhat she had known in the homes of both her father and herbrother-in-law, where everyone had to work in the fields, and thefather of the family the hardest, it was Emma who wound up work-ing the cotton crop most of the time, contributing not only thatgreater half of the marriage bargain that was the woman’s part butalso the burden of what she had always known to be the man’s part.

When Judith was homed I tryed hard to be a grown woman but Ididnt know how. I still wanted Lonnie to pet me just as mutch ashe did Judith. Then in 17 months Missy was borned. 1 worked inthe field right up till she was borned. I put out soda with Judithin my arms. ... I picked cotton all the fall. Oh it was hard but Idone it.

In fact, she not only did most of the field work, she made thecontract with the landlord and pledged her own credit.

I dont meen to be braging for it is nothing to brag about, but wefarmed on the halves and I had to be the one that had to get a placeand I had to give my word and they looked to me for them cropsto be made.

In addition to working their own crop, Emma hired herself outto hoe other farmers’ cotton. The pay for this work was poor—

either four pounds of lard or fifty cents for a full day’s work. Lonniewould never reduce himself to work for fifty cents a day.

In the middle of this period of toil, the event that would be boththe joy and the tragedy of her life—the birth of Ruby—was not faroff. She was alone when it happened.

The day before she was borned I washed for the children my selfand 3 men on a rub bord. I can rember I was so tird the nextmorning. About 8 oclock Ruby was borned befor the Dr. got tome so me and Ruby done that.

Ruby grew, but before the end of the decade, she fell seriouslyill with rheumatic fever. Emma felt terribly guilty forever afterwardabout Ruby’s illness because, having been on the farm withouttransportation, she had not been able to get Ruby to a doctor at thefirst fever. By the time she was able to do so. Ruby’s heart had al-ready been permanently damaged by the infection. This was 1950,just about the time that rheumatic fever in children was starting tobe treated with penicillin, with a dramatic change in the long-termcourse of the disease, but we have no way of knowing for sure thateven if Emma had been able to get Ruby to a doctor promptly, shewould have been given this treatment. As it was, Ruby was con-demned to the life of a near invalid.

Ruby she tuck sick when she was jut a little girl of 9 year old. Shehad just went into the third grade. ... 1 rember when they told usshe would have to stay in bed for 6 months to a year. She was sohappy for she wouldnt have to go to school. But what we didntknow was that she would never be well again. Of corse the Dr. toldus after the first year that she couldnt last long. He told us her lifewas like a candle. We could just look for it to go out any time.

When with all Emma’s work they still found it hard simply tosurvive, Lonnie responded not with greater commitment but by fall-ing back on his mother. They went back to Alabama, and Emma,who had once been unable to remain in her father’s house becauseof the presence of his new wife, was forced to go back to Alabamaand move in with her mother-in-law. It is not clear whether Lonnie’sfather was still alive or, if alive, whether he continued to have anycontact with his wife and son.

Emma had three children at the time, but was treated like achild in her mother-in-law’s house. “It was dont do that dont do

this,” she recalls. She also says her mother-in-law didn’t want hersinging in the house, and after all those years of marriage, Lonnie,too, suddenly found it objectionable. It wasn’t the musical qualityof her voice that bothered them, but the messages in those songs oflove and hope. They especially objected to the love songs. She wasdiscouraged but not defeated:

Oh my nerves. ... I sung love songs and all kind of stuff and theywould say that was what my mind was on. Well I stoped singingmy songs out loud but I sung in my hearts—-—

With the volatility of the cotton economy in the years right afterthe war, it was sometimes possible for a tenant family to surviveeven with only one reliable, full-time contributing member. Emmaand Lonnie managed to get themselves a mule and a cow, some pigsand chickens. But better times, as short-lived as they were, meantthat she and Lonnie got close again, and that led to where it hadoften led before:

I was the happiest woman arond. And then I got pregent withSonny. And that year I planted the cotton seed with my hands.Lonnie covered them. Sonny was borned the 20th of April andbelieve it or not I choped cotton. I could see the house and I wouldcall to Judith and tell her what to do. When Sonny got to cryinghard I would tell her how to pick him up and bring him on to theporch and rock him. Then every once in a while 1 would run to thehouse and feed him and then go back to work. It was hard but Idone it and we got by.

More forgiving times or not, Emma and Lonnie managed tolose it all—mule, cows, hogs, chickens. Lonnie left for a job at ashipyard in Mobile, and Emma’s worst fears for herself came true:“Then back to his mother we went, me and the children.” As Emmaremembers it, in all the time that she and the children were at hismother’s, he sent her money only once—thirty dollars. “The rest ofthe time,” she reports, “he always got robed.”

Emma tried not to be a freeloader. She worked in the field anddid all she could to help. Apparently some kind of truce was workedout with her mother-in-law because her diary entries for this periodreflect not much more than usual and familiar family tensions. Ju-dith, Emma’s oldest, was her grandmother’s favorite. “Ruby andSonny was mine,” Emma writes, “with the help of God we made it.

Well I had 4 of the sweetest children I thought in this whole wideworld—so I just built my world around them.”

Lonnie got a job as a guard at North Hospital near Cookstownand moved Emma and the kids to an old Civilian ConservationCorps camp close by. Soon afterward, Emma’s last was born, a ten-pound baby girl they called Sister. The next year, they were back incotton, farming as tenants for a man named Ed Jones.

How could they have been tempted to return to a life that onthe whole had treated them so poorly, and that at its best required alevel of work and commitment Lonnie seemed incapable of provid-ing? Emma does not let us know.

Unlike some other tenant farmers who were leaving the farmsfor postwar jobs in town, Lonnie could not make the transition topaid work. He was simply too unreliable to be hired. Emma, too,was trapped. While today, women in her situation would go out towork themselves, in the early 1950s few women considered such anoption. And Emma and Lonnie were acclimated, to put it kindly(brainwashed, to put it bluntly), to a cotton lifestyle; if not overtly,subconsciously, at least for Emma. With that crop, she could providefor the family and herself and not rely on Lonnie to dole out what-ever portion of his paycheck he chose to share with her. Whatevertheir true reasons, they were back in cotton.

It was in 1950 that Ruby fell illLln those early months of hersickness, little Ruby lay in bed each day. At night, Emma would peekin at the girl’s empty eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then Emma would goto her own room and take the Bible into the bed. Every night shewhispered the same question: God, did you bring this upon me,because I married a man who bad a living wife? In her heart, shewas sure she knew the answer, and that God was not through withher yet, that other, even worse fates would befall her for her sin. Butwhy make Ruby pay the price for her transgression? Many diaryentries confirm her anguish over this.

Poor thing.

She just had to suffer so mutch.

God do have mercy on her.

Of corse there was a lot of praying going on. I have shed enough

tears to do a washing and God seen me and I bet he felt sorry for

me for I prayed as I worked so many times. I cant help but believethat he heard my prayers and saw my tears.

What hurt me so bad and know one realy knew but God but Iwould have to go to the field and leve her and some time she cryedfor me just to stay home with her. But believe it or not I couldnt.We all had to eat. I have left Ruby a lot of times with my heartbraking and the tears runing down my face.

While she was a child she never complained. I know she wanted togo and play with others but she wouldnt say a thing. She just tuckthings as they was. And Ruby was such a good child she learnedto read the Bible and she belived in praying but she thought shehad to go in the closet to pray so she would slide of the bed andcrawl, for the Dr had told her not to stand on her feet. She wasgood to mind her Dr. but she had to go to that closet to pray.

. ii.

Emma’s best year as a sharecropper was 1953. Lonnie had run offto Florida the first day of cotton picking. He stayed away untilEmma and the children picked the last of it. Emma cleared nearlyone thousand dollars. Lonnie came back just as she was paid andremained until he’d spent all of it.

He continued to come and go as he pleased, and she wound up,as usual, shouldering much of the work. On the bright side, she wasat least close to home, drawn here at first by Lonnie’s job at theNorth Hospital, which in the end, like all the others, didn’t last. Shewas at least again near her sister, Annie Mae, and her father, BudWoods.

It was now the mid-1950s. She tried to continue to tenant farm,but fell into worsening health, debilitated by asthma/ We don’tknow what would have happened to Emma and her children at thispoint had an agency of the state of Alabama not intervened. We hearmany horror stories about governmental programs gone wrong,about their achieving ends opposite to what they were enacted toachieve: millions of people still below the poverty line years after theWar on Poverty was launched. It should provide some relief to knowthat there are people helped by state programs, and in just the waythe programs were designed to help people. Emma was one./^-^

One of the tasks of the state rehabilitation office in Alabamawas to help a few tenant farmers, especially women who were ill,

such as Emma. An official of that agency came to Emma’s house andtold her that she wouldn't have to suffer under the sun any longer,doing that heavy labor that aggravated her asthma. Not only wouldhe help her get medical care; he’d find her work she could do. Andhe did—a job in a nursing home. She was one of the few tenantfarmers to get any kind of assistance in freeing herself from the^ bondage of cotton. It brought her into the twentieth century.

I was working at oke knoll nurcing home making $35 a week. Itwas the first time that I got a pay day. The first job I ever had onlyin the cotton field. Rehab bought my glasses my teeth my uniformsmy shoes and what I made went to keeping a home. I was takingcare of all the expence. I even paid the rent. I never got to buy meanything new.

This last line tells us something about how Emma was pro-grammed to feel guilty about any good fortune she didn’t work hardenough to earn. It is almost as if she thought buying any small articlefor herself would be unfairly milking the system.

She worked for a couple named Clayton at the home and ap-pears to have gotten on quite well with them, especially consideringshe’d had no experience working directly under a supervisor. Theyboth liked her; she was particularly proud that they trusted her, re-porting in her diary, “Mr. Clayton belived any thing that I told himfor he found out I wouldnt tell him a lie.”

To complete her indoctrination into the American work-for-vvages scene, all she had left to learn was the art of engaging in alittle on-the-job goofing off.

All them old men just loved me. After lunch I would go in a roomand go to bed and one of the old men would set out side the doorand watch to see if any body was coming over there and if he seensome one he would call me. 1 had it so easy. ... Oh I had a goodtime. I was almost happy.^

Lonnie hated her going to that job, and she says he was jealous.He wanted her on the farm. He saw she was making easier moneythan he had ever made. But rather than be happy for her, he cameup with a scheme to continue to collect some of the state’s moneywithout even having to lose his wife for the workday. If it had beenso easy to get Emma certified as unable to work the cotton fields,why not get her certified as unable to work at all? Now that she had

been on salary for a while, she would qualify for state disabilitybenefits.

But Emma would have none of it. Lonnie did not lightly takebeing frustrated in his scheme.

The dr. wouldnt have said I was disable to work for I was in betterhealth than I have ben in for a long time and I was happy with myjob and the people I was with, but he got mad and left me andwent to Polly + Bill and he wrote me the meanest letter. He calledme every thing but a lady and I wasent doing any thing but work-ing. I got a nasty letter from him every day. Missy and ruby got towhere they would tear them up befor I got home.

Emma’s children started marrying and having children of theirown near the end of the 1950s. Sickly Ruby remained home, livingwith her mother, but had her eye on Warren, a boy she’d known asthe son of a tenant farmer in Cookstown. When he came home fromthe Korean War and started driving a truck, they became sweet-hearts.

After Annie Mae’s husband, George, died of cancer in 1959,Emma got her a job in the nursing home where she herself worked.The sisters helped each other through the trauma of leaving the landand starting new lives in the city. Emma believed the nursing-homejobs were the best things that ever happened to them. The jobs gavethem confidence and independence, showing them they could sur-vive on their own.

. iii.

While all this was happening to Emma, the years after Agee’s visitto Hobe’s Hill brought some improvement into the life of BudWoods and his new family.

The Woodses stayed on the Bridges farm until the middle ofWorld War II. As during World War I, the wartime demand for cot-ton increased dramatically, making it attractive to farm and puttingthe tenant in a better negotiating position, even with the less-than-scrupulous landlords. Woods left the Bridges land to once again ten-ant farm for T. Hudson Margraves, but this time on better land, atIndian Lock, where ships plying the river had to pass. He was farm-ing with two mules. His oldest boy still at home, Thomas, who hadearlier been called Buddy, was old enough now to help him, as were

his daughters Pearl and Ellen—Ellen was the one who had beenphotographed by Walker Evans as an infant on the lap of IvyWoods. Even Marion, born in 1937, could pitch in.

Prosperity of sorts reached down to cotton tenants, and BudWoods changed from the hardened, Spartan figure caught by WalkerEvans’s camera, standing alone with his picking sack in the cottonfield. A family picture taken after the war shows him relaxed, wear-ing a red-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt and tennis shoes, his hairslicked and tall on his head. It was hard to imagine he still stoodbehind mules and picked cotton by hand. Gone also were the flour-sack dresses worn by Pearl. She changed to store-bought clothes andstylish hats that raked over her forehead. Pearl, always precociousand large for her age even at eight, had grown to over six feet tall,with strong bones and sensual eyes that commanded the attentionof boys.

Pearl had large hopes. She was exploring many possibilities in1946 and into 1947, even writing a column for the Cookstownweekly paper. It featured small-town gossip and included manyfolksy items about her own family, her getting a job at the localhospital, the coming of harsh spring storms. The columns revealsomething about their life down by the river.

LOCK ROAD NEWS

By Pearl Woods.

January 10, 1947:

Mr. Clint Jefferson and Thomas Woods, son of Mr. Bud Woods,and Mr. Bud’s dog, Jack, ran a wild cat up a gum tree Mondayafternoon and Mr. Jefferson shot it with a 22 rifle. The cat weighedabout 25 pounds.

Mr. Thomas Woods and sister Ellen, visited their half sister, Mrs.Annie Mae Gudger, and family Thursday night.

Mr. Bud Woods and family killed hogs Friday.

February 7, 1947:

We sure were glad to see the river go back in its banks, for we wereso nervous we could not stand our own self. There were only 13of us in one 3 room house and only had 4 beds, but we made itokeh, no one got drowned.

Mr. Bud Woods is ill at his home and we hope him a speedy recov-ery.

The wind is blowing so hard it seems like a March wind.

We noticed some plum trees budding out on Indian Lock road andsome in bloom, but we are afraid they will get killed.

June 5, 1947:

Little Ellen Woods is suffering from a fish bone which she steppedon Thursday night and just got it out Friday morning.

July 17, 1947:

Miss Pearl Woods celebrated her 20th birthday Monday, July 4and received many nice presents.

Mr. and Mrs. Clayton Woods spent Saturday with his brother, Mr.and Mrs. Gallatin Woods and family of Route 1.

July 24, 1947:

The people have had so much rain until they can’t get throughhoeing their cotton and will be a week or more before they canplow their corn in the swamp.

August 7, 1947:

Mr. and Mrs. Bud Woods and family had an ice cream supper attheir home Monday night.

We are sorry to hear of Mrs. Floyd Franks being ill at the CityHospital. Our wish is for her a speedy recovery.

Mr. Bud Woods grieving over the loss of his mule, which diedThursday night.

Miss Pearl Woods was ill at her home Monday and Tuesday.September 26, 1947:

Miss Pearl Woods stepped on a black racer snake Thursday after-noon, but the snake did not bite her, only hit her ankle three orfour times with his tail.

Little Marion Woods celebrated his tenth birthday Sunday. A finedinner of chicken, cake, potato salad, peaches and banana puddingwas served to the family.

November 20, 1947:

Miss Ellen Woods celebrated her 13th birthday Tuesday, Novem-ber 11. As she was in school at dinner, she was served for hersupper, chocolate cake, potato salad, pineapple sandwich, hotchocolate, banana pudding, vanilla wafers, and fried chicken. Shereceived several presents and the present she was the proudest of

was a $5 bill, which her father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. BudWoods, gave her. She received lots of spanking, but she reports agrand time. After supper, home-made peanut candy was served.

November 27, 1947:

Mr. and Mrs. Bud Woods and family were on their way home fromCookstown Saturday when the wagon wheel broke down betweenMr. Dimes and Mr. Earps, but no one got hurt. Mr. Woods gotWillie’s wagon to carry his groceries and new stove home.

Mr. Bud Woods is 72 years old, having lived long enough to seetwo great-grandchildren, a great grandson of Mr. and Mrs. JuniorGudger, the little boy came in Sept, and has been given the nameof R. W. Gudger. The great-granddaughter is around two years oldand belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Franks of Madrid. The littlegirl was named Mary Ann.

December 5, 1947:

Miss Pearl Woods, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bud Woods, is work-ing at the Health Department in Cookstown now and is going towork in the Centerboro Hospital as soon as there is an opening.

Mr. Bud Woods and daughter are planning a business trip to Cen-terboro Friday.

December 11, 1947:

Mr. Bud Woods lost his other mule Monday. She died sometimeSunday night, so he will have to buy him another pair before hecan start another crop.

Many thanks to grandmother Miss Molly, for the pecans, candyand raisins which she sent to us Saturday.

It was the last quiet year the Woods family would have. Theloss of the two mules would become the least of their concerns.

. xv .

Pearl didn’t mention the biggest piece of gossip around Indian Lockand Cookstown in her column—that she was pregnant. On Decem-ber 31, 1947, she gave birth.

It was a boy, and they named him Bobby. There was a questionabout who the father was. The birth certificate filed with the countylisted a blank for the father’s name. In later years, she talked bitterly

120 And Their Children . . .

of men to New York Times reporter Howell Raines, who came call-ing at her house. “I always said when I got grown, no man wouldlay a hand on me without getting something back. And they haven’t.I don’t believe woman was put on earth to be abused by man.” Herdislike covered many men. Of her stepfather, she said to the re-porter, “That man would kill you in the blink of an eye.”

About the time she had Bobby, her world fell apart in otherways.

The trouble started in a nearby swamp and ended near the de-pot station in Cherokee City. It was a fight, and several men wereinvolved. One man crawled from a car bleeding profusely, and whenhe was taken to the hospital, health workers found he was castrated.The story has become part of the folklore in this rural Alabamacounty, retold again and again over the years. Some say the man lostonly one testicle. An assistant district attorney from that time saidthere was no prosecution.

One day, Ellen says, she watched as the castrated man visitedtheir house, looking for Pearl. In one hand he had a knife and in theother a salami, says Ellen. She heard the man say, “I want to fuckher with the salami, and then I want to kill her.”

Bud Woods turned the man away. Pearl boarded a bus, headedsouth. She would never again be seen in Cookstown. She left Bobbybehind, to be raised by his grandmother, Ivy. She wound up insouthern Alabama, in the town of Jefferson, not far from Parson’sCove and the Gaines family and others who lived there. She changedher name to Ruth Ann and met a man whom she married in 1951.

Bud and Ivy Woods farmed on. In the middle of the cotton-picking season of 1957, Bud stopped picking. A few days later, hedied.

Ivy felt compelled to move the rest of her family to Jefferson, tobe near her outcast daughter. Ellen had been going through her mar-riages. She followed her mother with her young children. Ellen wasreunited with her sister, but Pearl would fly into a rage wheneverEllen called her Pearl. She was Ruth Ann. So Ellen took to callingher Pearl, just to rile her.

Still, Pearl was the favorite of Ivy, and no one, not even Ellen,could speak against her. “I’d remind my mother of it when Pearlwould be fussin’. Yes sir, my mother would get real mad at me when-ever I would say somethin’ to her about it.”

Pearl was trying to get on with life. She would tell tales about

Woods 121

her past, to gloss over the bad years. When Bud Woods died, Ellensays, Pearl told all her friends that her stepfather was a cotton andtimber baron up in northern Alabama and that, now that he wasgone, she would be coming into great wealth.

BRIDGES

In 1940, the Bridges family gave up using mules and bought a trac-tor. The family was still using tenant farmers, producing about onehundred bales of cotton a year.

Joe Bridges, Jr., was going through school. He made it to theeleventh grade, but had to drop out to take care of the farm as hisbrothers went off to fight in the Second World War. His brotherBarney had terrible luck—he had three ships blown out from be-neath him in the Pacific. His luck wasn’t the very worst it could havebeen, however, for he lived through each one. He came home early,and they said he would never be the same again, though in thosedays they didn’t have the term “posttraumatic stress syndrome.”

In late 1944, Joe, Jr., was drafted, but the war ended before hewas sent overseas. Life on the farm went on as normal, and thecounty paved the main highway in front of their farm, leading fromCherokee City to Centerboro.

Bridges 123

In 1948, Joe, Jr., landed a job in a newly opened tire factory inCherokee City. He worked the farm in the morning, laboring nightsin the factory. He was making good money, and he fell in love. InDecember of 1951, he married Kate. Joe, Sr., sold his son ten acresof land on the highway, and Joe built a house for his new wife. Theyhad four children, and it seemed early on that Huey, born in 1955,would be the one to take the farm over from Joe, Jr.

Things were good on the farm—overhead was low, and prices,while not as high as they had been during the war, were such thatthey provided a farmer a fair profit. Joe, Sr., kept some of their oldertenants on his place through the 1950s, but phased them out as theydied or quit, renting their excess land on a straight cash-for-rentbasis, growing cotton on other of their land holdings, hiring laborto pick and chop on an hourly or price-per-pound-picked basis.

GAINES

After the Depression years, in the 1940s, and, to an even greaterextent, in the 1950s, whites left the land to take jobs in the manyfactories that were appearing in the South. Wages were up morethan threefold over prewar levels, creating an almost irresistible lurefor those who had not had great success farming, or were simply nolonger interested in putting in the endless hours and back-breakingwork farming required.

Many of these new jobs were closed to blacks. One study foundthat 27 percent of the whites left the farm after the close of the war,compared with 9 percent of the blacks. As a consequence, cottontenantry became a mostly black occupation. But with the perfectingof cotton-picking machines, local blacks, who had not been luredout of cotton, were soon being thrown out of it. Cotton-pickingmachines were entering the state, or other growers simply stoppedplanting cotton.

Gaines 125

Few studies exist documenting the change, but one conductedin seventeen Arkansas counties found 482 mechanical pickers in1952, but by the early 1960s, there were nearly 5,000. In the sameperiod, the number of black tenant farmers dropped from almosttwenty-two thousand to under seven thousand. Small farmers inAlabama seemed more reluctant to buy machines—only 2 percentof the Alabama cotton crop was harvested mechanically in 1954.

Blacks had nowhere to go but north. They flocked to Chicago,Detroit, Cleveland, and the industrial Northeast, a pattern of migra-tion among tenant farmers very much restricted to blacks. For ex-ample, among the three white families Agee lived with, none had toleave the region to find work, and census figures show that this wasnot atypical among white tenant farmers in the area. There was littlemigration of Deep South whites to the North during the 1940s and1950s.

There were some few pockets of resistance, however. The grow-ers of Parson’s Cove did not buy cotton machines; it seems the dirtroads, the remote hills, and the protective river that served as a nat-ural border for the region kept the outside world at bay. As a result,amid all the social dislocation beyond the river, an uneventful twodecades passed at Parson’s Cove.

This time marked the peak of Mr. and Mrs. Gumbay’s planta-tion—they employed thirty sharecropping families. Frank and Ur-line Gaines raised their ten children under conditions similar to the1930s.

In 1953, Sherman Parson became one of the few blacks of Par-son’s Cove to leave the area and go north. He went because he losthis job on the railroad and had never worked cotton. Parson wasamazed at what he saw in Washington, D.C.—many hundreds ofsouthern black men, roaming the streets like refugees. Some toldParson that they’d been up north more than five years, but that noone would hire them. They warned him never to say he was fromthe South; it would be the kiss of death, and he’d never get a job.Parson was luckier then most—he landed a job after “only” twoyears of searching. Many of the other men he came to know endedup in hopeless despair, drained of all drive by constant rejection;they eventually made up a large part of the mass of unemployedblacks occupying northern ghettos.

As for Frank Gaines, he continued raising cotton. Because of aspecial ability, and a willingness, to play the white man’s game,

126 And Their Children . . .

Gaines succeeded as well as any black man could. But he couldn’tdo it just by farming cotton. He got a job driving a log truck be-tween farm chores. He took hundred-foot logs down to Mobile,where they were putting in long docks. He drove the truck out onnarrow, shaking piers, sometimes a mile out on the water, unloadingthe timbers, which would be driven as pilings for the docks, comingback through the big city to his little shack. He got home at ten atnight, ate dinner, went to bed, and woke up before the sun, ready tostrap himself behind a mule and do his farm work. When his farmwork was finished, he’d do his truck run all over again. It was abrutally hard life, but it allowed his family to survive.

1 9 6 0 - 1 9 8 6

GUDGER

. i .

The Cookstown cemetery is south of the crossroads at the town’sonly traffic light, on the crest of a hill just off the main highway thatleads to Joe Bridges’s farm and beyond to Centerboro. Most resi-dents, at least the white ones, have some kin buried in this ground.

Blacks of the area, even in death, remain mostly segregated,excluded if not by racial restrictions then by financial considera-tions. Most cannot afford reserved, parklike sites for their final rest-ing places, and the after-care these places provide. Their tombstoneswill more likely be found clustered in small groups, in small forestclearings, discovered by surprise when one is looking for somethingelse, back in the old home places. Hearses still travel muddy roadsto these family plots, such as the one at the terminus of the Hobe’sHill road, several miles from the white graveyard in town, where

kudzu vines and tree roots are chopped away to make space for newgraves. Some of these grave sites have formal headstones—small,yes, but at least cast of concrete and properly engraved. The greaternumber, however, are more simply marked—with rocks, plasticsignboards, names painted in black on the surface.

In contrast, there are some grand markers to be found in theCookstown graveyard. The oldest monuments, nearest the highwayand under the canopy of three large white oaks, are of eroded sand-stone, honoring early settlers of the area and Civil War veterans. Farto the rear, where the sun is strong, is the new section for those whohave died in the 1980s.

At a point between the oldest and newest arrivals is a granitemarker in a treeless part of the cemetery. Between the chiseled imageof hands brought together in prayer is this inscription:

George Gudger Annie Mae GudgerSept. 11, 1904 Oct. 19, 1907

Dec. 27, 1959 Jan. 26, 1979

Sometime in the early 1970s, Annie Mae came to visit andkneel at George’s grave. A plot was already reserved for her to theright of where George lay, and now she noticed they’d recently bur-ied Mr. Dixon, their former landlord, in the site adjoining hers.

“Oh my,” she said to her son, Sonny. “Look who I’m gonna beburied by. He give me hell when I was livin’.” She paused, thinkingof all the things that landlord had done to hurt them. “I’m gonnarest when I’m gone,” she announced, taking satisfaction from thefact that she would lie down right next to him, that he could nolonger decide how hard she’d have to work and what she’d get paidfor it, that she and the landlord would finally be equals.

. ii.

To the northwest of George and Annie Mae Gudger’s stone, at thecorner of the graveyard nearest to town, you find a steep and thicklywooded ravine. The heads of the gums and water oaks jump withthe promise of a summer storm still far away, somewhere over in thepiney woods country of Mississippi. The advancing thunderheadsdeliver a cold wind into the face of the summer day, the sudden forceof it liberating a scatter of leaves yet green, dead before their time,

falling slowly to the bare earth at the foot of a granite marker bear-ing this inscription:

FRANKS

Floyd Maggie Louise

Jan. 19, 1916 Feb. 2, 1926

June 30, 1958 Feb. 21, 1971

The stone is near the edge of the hill, close to a wire fenceclimbed over with wild honeysuckle, star-speckled with flowers. Be-yond, the wooded slope is littered with discarded domestic flowersthat had once been brought into the cemetery to grace other stones.At various levels down the hill—depending on the strength of theperson who had pitched them—are dead roses amid the blacknessof the trunks, petals still red and white and yellow, and it all makesa path of color down to the thin line of the creek that flows into thebig river and on to the ocean.

The storm works its way north, over Cherokee City, leaving thetrees heavy, numb, the dry land cheated of its promised water.

To the right of the headstone, next to the side with MaggieLouise’s name, are several fragments of a broken red brick. Theyabut the marker, acting as a weight concealing some dusty object. Itis a piece of paper, yellowed from several months or more ofweather. The brittle pages unfold to reveal a street map of Orlando,Florida. Two roads are underlined. One is Alabama Avenue.

. iii.

In 1986, the public housing projects on the south side of CherokeeCity resemble military barracks. The forty-seven red brick buildings,now occupied mostly by blacks, are lined up in precise rows, sterileand worn, making that statement of defeat that taints so many at-tempts by the government to house the poor.

In 1960, when these projects were much younger and had notyet trampled the many souls they would in time crush, they lookedgrand to white cotton refugees who had never lived in anythingmore substantial than sharecropper shacks. There must have beenquite an army of these sharecroppers passing through these projects:by 1964, so many tenant farmers would have left the land that the

Census Bureau would decide that it was no longer worth countingthem.

Maggie Louise and her children, fresh from the pain of Floyd’sdeath, would live in this project for five years, until moving to theduplex with Squinchy. It was the first time any of them had lived ina city, crowded in tightly with other people. No longer could thechildren run through the fields and collect flowers for their mother,lose themselves among the cotton rows, the apple orchards, the se-crets of the barn. There was nowhere to be alone. It was not silentat night. There were new sounds, new people, new things to do, newideas about what one ought to do and what not. The children couldnot really measure the many ways they were changing, or under-stand why. Many years later, they’d look back and realize that thisworld was vastly different from the world that had made them whatthey were, that they were quite unlike the city children whose stylethey tried hard to imitate. They did not know the term “culture/ shock” back then. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have known pre-v/ cisely what it had to do with them.

Parvin, the youngest, was seven in 1960. The eldest, Mary Ann,was nearly fifteen.

It’s hard to say how long it took before Maggie Louise felt shewas losing control of the children. Those things happen on a scalethat defies measure. She was gone many hours at work in a roadsidecafe. She tried hard to earn the money they needed to survive, to bea good mother, to be there for them. Maggie Louise could not affordbaby-sitters on her thirty-five dollars a week. When she dated, oneof her brothers who lived nearby called her a whore. She went on insolitude. She received no welfare cash benefits, sometimes gettingcharity food, often not. As her family came apart, she became bitterbut full of self-determination.

Debbie: It is 1965. I am in love. He is a special man. My baby willsoon be born. Mother married when she was fifteen. I am fifteen. Iam a woman. I quit school in eighth grade. When I was thirteen,mother told me I should not shave my legs, wear makeup, but Idid. She got angry. I got so I put lipstick on after I left the house.

She made Parvin go with me on my dates. Why is mother so old-fashioned?

Parvin: It is 1968. There is a whole world out there. I want it. Iwant to make my own money. We never have any money. We neverhad anything. Why were my parents living that way back on the

farm ? I want to get away from this place. I hate Alabama. I havebeen robbed. My parents were robbed. I want to go to Florida. Iam fifteen. I look older. I feel older. Look at my eyes. They are ofan older woman. Everyone believes I am older.

Sonny: It is 1969. I am in a work-study program. This summer, Iwill graduate from high school. I will be the first in my family. Ihave a wife and child. I met her in tenth grade. Before then, I cattedaround, ever since the urge came to me. I learned blond hair, blueeyes, an innocent look works with women. 1 had many girls. Istayed out to all hours. Mother never cared. I could not get preg-nant. Mother worried about my sisters. I was the boy, the man ofthe house. I will be a house painter.

Maggie Louise’s brothers and sisters: The kids, they are so wild.

They are turning on their mother. She works so hard. They don’tseem to care. They go places and vanish. Why do they do this ?

Mary Ann was the first to leave. She married on March 28,1962.

Debbie gave birth to Andy in 1965 and ran off with the fatherto live in St. Louis. Maggie Louise raised Andy for several years.

Parvin married and went to Miami. She lied about her age andat fifteen became a waitress. Later, she moved to Orlando, whereshe worked at a K-Mart store.

Sonny stayed around with his new wife and son, working as anapprentice painter, eager to become a full tradesman.

. iv .

Maggie Louise felt alone. It was 1969. She was forty-three. She hadnever forgotten her Floyd. Floyd Franks was on her mind every day.Could it have been eleven years since he died?

What could I have done different? How could it be that 1 failed mychildren? My mother comes to visit me. I sit and refuse to talk withher. She talks with me. I don’t look at her. When she rises to leave,

I cry and make her stay longer.

The late 1960s found Maggie Louise drinking; the bottle nowfilled the hours of her life. Neighbors reported seeing her cominghome covered in mud after binges. She started hanging around witha man named Geeson and told people they were married. Her sister

Gretchen doubts they ever formalized the relationship, and no localmarriage records exist, though they could have wed elsewhere. Itwas a long way from a real marriage. What a far cry he must havebeen from the dedicated, loving Floyd.

Maggie Louise alternated between living in the Cherokee Cityduplex and living with her sister Gretchen and their mother, AnnieMae. She often would not talk. Gretchen recalls that she pulledknives on her and struck her mother. The first time she tried to killherself, she cut her wrists, says Sonny, her brother. The second time,she tried to swallow dry rat poison. They got to her before she drankthe water to activate it. She survived again.

They tried to get help for her, but Maggie Louise could not, orwould not, be healed. Not by any means any of them knew orunderstood. Nor apparently by any means known to the doctorswho examined her. The family put her in an institution, and whenshe was discharged she seemed better.

After she came out of the institution, Maggie Louise was as“innocent as a puppy,” says Gretchen. They felt better about her.Maybe the worst was over.

“I remember the last Christmas with her,” says Gretchen.

We was decorating the Christmas tree. And there was a little roundball, inside the ball was an angel, and she picked that ball up andsaid, “Well, this is me.” And she hung it on my tree. She stoodthere so bright. And for years, I kept that ball and at Christmas Ihung it in front. But one of the kids broke the ball and the angelin it.

Then came that February day in 1971.

“We was milkin’ the dairy cows,” says Gretchen.

Mamma called me from my house. She called me, she says, “Comequickly.” So I run and when I got to the door, Mamma was juststandin’ there screamin’ and telling me, “Gretch—do somethin’.”

Well, I looked into the bedroom, and she was standin’ in themiddle of the floor and she had the bottle—rat poison. I run toher, and I knocked it out of her hand. And she shoved me back-wards, and she had the rage in her that hurt me. Well, I kind ofmanhandled her and got her on the couch. And we tried to putsaltwater in her mouth to make it vomit back up. I told Mamma,

“Get me a spoon.” I tried to get that spoon between her teeth. I

couldn’t budge her teeth. She died that night about twelve o’clock.

She just tore apart.

When their attempts to get her to vomit up the rat poisonfailed, they rushed her to a hospital, but the doctors could not saveher. These are the notes Gretchen found in her purse after they gother to the hospital:

Maggie Louise Franksat my Death I want Mary Ann tohave my lot at Canton, Ala.at my Death my dis-ality lup—sum I want each child of mineto have $100.00 dollars eachthe other part of it in ahospitle insurance on Andy Jr. andAll the other thats left putpresants for nurces aid maids

just like roped just alike

(over)

2. Doctor cards just alike fixjust alik the one that gave memy x ray a card, a cardsomething real funnyMaggie Louise Franks Geesonat my Death the car of mine goes toDebbie

The support from Andy Jr.

In case of Death Andy Jr. goes to Burt

Westly Gudger, works at Southern

Mills Cherokee City, Ala.

But until my death Debbie get the supportfor Andy

(A page of squiggles.)

Fiow had that special, vibrant ten-year-old child of JamesAgee’s pages and Walker Evans’s photographs come to such an end?Maggie Louise’s life seems to recite clearly the old lesson that a life-vnot lived to its full potential, or close to it, will be destroyed by^bitterness. Why didn’t Annie Mae and George make sure that she

went to school? If it couldn’t be done by a family farming cotton onshares, why didn’t they just leave?

It’s easy to look back half a century later and see all the thingsthat could have been done.

Not long after the suicide, Annie Mae told Scott Osborne, awriter for the Tennessean magazine,

Every year, them Margraves’d strip us out of everything. Now, wewasn’t treated as dirty as the colored people, but it was somewherein the neighborhood of that. They didn’t sell us. But they would’vetried to sell us if they thought they could’ve got away with it. Howcan I begin to tell you what we was athinkin? We just didn’t knowno better. All we knowed was, we was barely livin. You know, Idon’t see where I could’ve helped out to make things any better. Ithink I done the best I knowed how.

Cotton killed Maggie Louise, Gretchen believes. It started withthe institutionalized cruelty with which the tenants were treated. Itwas drilled into her, and by the end “she didn’t care which way shewent,” says Gretchen.

Maggie Louise always wanted more, says her son, Sonny. If shehad only gotten one break along the way, instead of always beingcheated, always being denied, always put down. Everything alwaysseemed to go against her.

James Agee, the urbane writer, poet, man-about-town, andHollywood celebrity, and Maggie Louise Gudger, Alabama cottonpicker, lived strangely similar lives. They were both dreamers and,deep down, tragic people who yearned for something they could notdefine even as they came to know finally that it had irretrievably^escaped them. They died, though far apart in years and miles, at thesame age—at forty-five^as if defining a limit for the number ofyears of failed dreams a dreamer can be asked to endure. Neithercould journey any further, and so they ended their lives, thoughAgee chose an indirect route to self-destruction, defying doctorswho repeatedly told him to stop his drinking and smoking, andMaggie Louise took a direct path to where she chose to be.

Of course, the conflicts that defined the lives of each, the eventsthat chronicled the lives of each, were very different. MaggieLouise’s antagonists were real and exogenous; Agee’s were for themost part within his head, conjured up by his troubled and fertilemind.

Agee commented, after raving about Maggie Louise’s abilities,that bright as she was, serious and dutiful as she was, she alreadyshowed signs of a “special sort of complacency” that would even-tually “destroy all in her nature that is magical, indefinable andmatchless.” He hoped it would not. But he knew the cotton systemand the things such relentless oppression did to the human spirit.

Before her death, say her relatives, Maggie Louise saw the Ageeand Evans book, the copy owned by her mother. It is unclear howshe reacted to reading Agee’s prophecy of success for her in adult-hood. It is certainly reasonable that it may have provided for her acruel reminder of the dreams she had once dreamed, at the very timewhen she realized that they would never come to be. But she nevergave up her affection for Agee, say her aunt and son. She didn’t seemoutwardly upset over the book.

In a passage Agee seems to have written to apologize in advanceto her, he said, “Good God, if I have caused you any harm in this, ifI have started within you any harmful change, if I have so much asreached out to touch you in any way you should not be touched,forgive me if you can, despise me if you must. . . .” But she didn’tseem to blame him, or anyone else.

There were the landlords, but, though they took much frompeople like the Gudgers and gave little in return, there are many whowill remind you that they themselves were trapped in the system.Indeed, as the world turned against them, the landlords ascribedmany of their problems to their tenants. “Both are teamed togetherunder a yoke of debt,” observed a writer for the federal Work Proj-ects Administration in 1941. “Each lays the blame on the other,whereas the fault probably lies more with the system than witheither.”

An uneducated person who is simultaneously kept poorly nour-ished and physically exhausted, forever at the brink of personal andfinancial disaster, does not think in any logical manner. If people arerepeatedly told they deserve their fate, they’ll begin to believe it. Andwhy not? They have no frame of reference, no knowledge of thecommonality of their lot with many of those around them, and eventheir place among many of the oppressed people throughout history,no understanding that the mind games played on them create andnourish their feeling of guilt, turning it into an agent of the op-pressor.

Gretchen believes that it was the cotton system that killed Mag-

gie Louise, but that it would be difficult to point to specific culprits,that there is no one country teacher who failed her, no one landlord,one boss to hold responsible. And it may be so. The course her liferan was in the end the vector created by a balancing out of all theforces having acted upon her. If so, when Maggie Louise saw thatshe would never be able to control the direction of her life, she choseto escape from a world that had long and successfully conspiredagainst her. Agee’s personal guilt was very likely no more than aconceit. Much as there surely were demons he had tempted to life inher, or at least nourished, and fond as her memories of him re-mained to the end, he was no more than a moment in the long con-tinuum of her life.

If we look for the perpetrator of the crime among those whostood to benefit most from it, we will find that it was bankers andmerchants who really made the money. One-fourth of the expensesof a typical planter went to pay the interest. Even then, the WPAwriter said, it was obvious the tenant system was doomed. Bothlandlord and tenant were simply playing their assigned roles, as hadtheir fathers before them. Mrs. Burgandy, Maggie Louise andFloyd’s landlady, surely did not see herself as an evil person. Shewould have told you she treated her people kindly. And relativelyspeaking, within what she knew, she did.

What would have happened if Maggie Louise could have at-tended a decent school, become the teacher or nurse she had oncedreamed of becoming, if there had been real child-labor laws so thatcotton could not have robbed her of her childhood and kept herfrom the classroom all those days?

Of course, fate is never an equal-opportunity oppressor, andsome do find a small measure of success in situations where otherscan find only failure. All those factors having to do with cottonaside, Gretchen believes that if Maggie Louise had simply remainedmarried to Jones, rather than dumping him while he was off to war,she would still be alive and probably happy. Jones is married withseven children and has a wife with whom he attends week-long re-ligious camps. He escaped cotton. It isn’t that he became rich—hehas a modest home in a modest town—but that he probably wouldhave pulled Maggie Louise away from cotton with him. What doesJones think about this? He shrugs his shoulders and says, “She hada lot of ideas. None that turned out.” It is said in Cookstown thathe is still madly in love with her, but he would not exhibit any emo-

tion at all when asked about her. He barely acknowledged that heremembered her when first shown a picture of her in Let Us NowPraise Famous Men, though he can remember the brand of schnappshe drank in just-liberated Paris. It apparently remains a painful sub-ject for him.

It must be remembered Maggie Louise was not from a familylike the Rickettses. It can be said—maybe at the risk of cuttingthings too fine—that Gudger poverty is different from Ricketts pov-erty. Ricketts poverty is sometimes tragic, though more often simplypathetic. Gudger poverty is often tragic because of the element ofcrushed potential so often present.

From the weeks Agee was there to the time she divorced Abra-ham Jones and went to the arms and bed of Floyd Franks and to herlater years when she despaired over the course her children’s liveshad taken, there was one thing, Gretchen says, that was always cer-tain, one thing that always drove Maggie Louise: “She was justlooking for love. Searching for love.”

. v .

Defeat.

It is written across the face of the once great land, in all thebrittle shells of towns that once were, in all those little-town eyesthat wait (but for what?), and in the cemeteries, the abandonedsharecropper fields, the vine-covered shack on the Burgandy landwhere Maggie Louise and her children last grew cotton. That homestill stands, valiant and silver against thirty empty seasons of frostand sun, containing fragments—the last straw sun hat she ever woreout in the cotton, a pair of high heels—all rotting, rat-chewed,faded. It is going the way of the gin down the road, abandoned in1977, finally, to rust, pigeons, vandals.

It is no surprise some of these people react negatively to theoutside world, that Junior Gudger sat on his porch in 1969, evenbefore his sister committed her ultimate act of rebellion, and ventedhis fury. He was holding a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,the first he had ever seen, it is said. He fumed that it made them looklike slaves.

The Gudger family had at last learned about the book. It was along process to that discovery. They might never have known aboutit had Agee not posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A

Death in the Family; published in 1957, two years after his fatalheart attack. The award created an interest in his earlier, “lost”works. First to emerge was a collection of his film reviews. Theywere well received, and in 1960 Let Us Now Praise Famous Menwas reissued. It caught on and was instantly popular. It became re-quired reading in many college courses, and sold tens of thousandsof copies.

Word slowly drifted back to Alabama that some of their ownhad made up the cast of characters in a famous book. It was withsome shock that many of them first viewed its pages. Mostly, theywere upset with the photographs, which had a startling impact. Butthe text was brutal in its portrayal of some of them.

Junior was described as “jealous and lazy, malingering” byAgee, and so has special reason for anger. His anger has only height-ened with the passage of years.

In the late summer of 1985, we made a telephone call to hishome. He was not in. His wife said it would be okay to come talkabout the book. At that time—those were still naive days—we didnot know how he felt, for he was going to be only the second personwe interviewed for this project.

Later that afternoon, Junior was out on the road, waiting. Hehad a cracked and whiskered face, sun-formed triangular eyes, hard-ened after fifty-eight Alabama summers. He is the only one in theGudger family left farming, working for pay for a man who raisessoybeans. He so resembles his father that when a copy of Let UsNow Praise Famous Men was shown to townsmen, they wouldswear the Evans picture of George, Sr., taken in 1936 was a recentone of Junior.

As our car rolled to a stop, he spit out his lack of interest inbeing exploited again, as he thought had happened in the Agee epi-sode, for the profit of others. He started the conversation, andseemed prepared to end it, by saying, “Everyone gits rich offn us. Iain’t talking.”

He stood there, fists clenched. He mumbled some words abouthow they wanted to be left alone, unless they were paid some realbig money. He could not understand, even when told, that whenpeople do a newspaper story, they work for a salary, just as he does,or that when they do a book such as Agee’s, or for that matter suchas this one, they most likely will not earn back what they spent to

do it. He may not have known that Agee died before he had earneda nickel from the book, apart from the small advance he receivedprior to its first publication. His bank account had $450 in it whenhe suffered his heart attack; Evans had to borrow money in one ofthe last years of his life to throw a birthday party for himself. InJunior’s view, any words he might utter had to be worth many thou-sands of dollars, or else how could people afford to fly across thecountry and rent a car on credit just to talk to him? He seemed tobelieve that there were fortunes to be made.

That, too, was something newspaper people understand butwould have been virtually impossible to explain to Junior. It wouldhave been absurd, really, even to try. Agee could not have paid thesepeople, even if he’d wanted to and even if he’d had the money to doso, which he didn’t. It would have corrupted the process. Peoplewho are paid to stand before a camera, or to speak, are called ac-tors. It is not journalism when people perform for pay, because ac-tors, like others who get paid for their activities, will inevitably try—with their posture and with their words, their inflection, the mean-ing they put into things—to please those who pay them. Agee didgive the Gudgers some money for room and board, which was fair,for he did stay with them and eat their food, and he did send themsmall presents for four years after he had left them, including acheck with which they could buy other things. But he did not paythem for what they told him, and Evans did not pay them to pose.Such distinctions, real as they are to newspaper people, wouldhave sounded too convenient, no matter how carefully put. And nat-urally so.

Years later, Annie Mae Gudger, who did not harbor the bitter-ness her son did, told Ross Spears, a filmmaker who documentedAgee’s life,

I don’t care what they done with their books and things; if theygot rich off it, it was all right with me. It was the truth. But now,my oldest boy, he just don’t go for it. They even talked about suingthem when that book first came out, some of the kids did. Andthat’s when I told them ... I wouldn’t want to hurt ’em if I could,because they was so good to me.

Junior had obviously not changed his mind in the seven yearssince his mother spoke those words. His wife was there, a kind-

voiced woman, sitting by a roadside stand where she tried to sellsome used dresses to supplement their income. She tried not to lookat her husband and the men he was talking with.

Some fifty years earlier, journalists came and paraded his fami-ly’s poverty for all the world to see. It’s now in a famous book. TheGudgers got nothing out of it in real terms. Even if Agee never sawany real money out of the project, he did receive other rewards—professional, for sure, in terms of prestige and respect for havingwritten the book. The Gudgers were put down by the book, thistheory would go, but received nothing of substance in exchange forthe use of their private lives. Why didn’t anything ever come Junior’sway? If it was up to the Gudgers themselves to demand a biggershare of the pie, rather than wait appreciatively for whatever wasthrown to them, then they’d start right now.

On the other hand, he could have used our appearance, if hehad wanted to, to correct some bad impressions created by the orig-inal book, to make the point that some of the Gudgers, at least hisfamily, were certainly doing better than they had in the Depression.It was hard to say what Junior’s income was from working for thesoybean farmer, but in 1978 he had told a writer for Southern Ex-posure that he was earning $125 for a fifty-hour week working fivehundred acres of ground. He had finally come to own some land, apatch far too small, however, to farm. It’s a reasonable guess thathis income had gone up in the interval in proportion to the changesin incomes of others through the same period, which would stillplace his family in a very low income bracket, by national standards.Yes, it is true he is out of abject poverty, and that is a great improve-ment. But in this materialistic age, it is all relative. It was not thatJunior and his wife were dressed in rags; their clothes were old, yes,but nice and certainly still serviceable. The family also had cars todrive, owned a five-room house on half a dozen or so acres. Thehouse was adequate in size, and Junior’s family certainly had a tele-vision set and probably the normal American complement ofgadgets.

Yet many of the Gudgers are poor by modern standards, and,worse, they know it.

Tolstoy wrote that he often envied peasants for their illiteracyand lack of education. The closer he came to peasants in his laterlife, the more he said he came to know truth. In many ways, Agee

derived the same benefit from his Alabama experience—he found avision of religion and life through examining the simple lives of thethree families. Of course, it should be said that both Agee and Tol-stoy would have had far different attitudes had they been prisonersof poverty rather than simply visitors to it. At any rate, the povertyseen in Czarist Russia by Tolstoy and in Alabama by Agee was dif-ferent from the poverty under which many contemporary Alabami-ans now find themselves.

The kind of poverty Agee reported in 1936 exists in Americatoday only among the urban homeless, who make up their own cat-egory. It does exist outside our national boundaries—nearby in cer-tain places of Latin America and, commonly, in many other placesfarther away.

There is a village we once visited that comes to mind, locatedin the heart of guerrilla territory on the island of Mindanao, in thePhilippines. It is a day’s walk from the nearest road, across a white-water river and through a thick and roadless jungle. The peoplethere live in thatch huts, eat meager rations almost exclusively ofrice, and use oil lamps for lighting. They have nothing. But they area wonderful and seemingly happy people.

While they do not have color television sets, as do some of theirlow-income American counterparts, they are not in all ways moredeprived. All they know is poverty. Everyone they know is poor.Millions of others are in the same predicament. They have nothingelse to compare themselves with. There is no ever-present standardof acquisition against which to measure their status. It is a naturalstate and therefore one to which no stigma is attached. It can easilybe argued that Third World poverty has a harder edge to it thananything found in the United States, and this is surely true. Yet it isalso true that in America the word “poverty” labels losers, that tobe poor and to accept your poverty is to exhibit not stoicism but asense of defeat.

The poor of 1980s Alabama know that they have failed in theAmerican game of life. They’re reminded of it every time they watchtelevision. Junior Gudger, as he lives today, would have been rich in1936. The material things he has provided for his family by his ownwork would have been impressive in 1936. Today, they are nothingto brag about. He climbed heights his parents could never havedreamed for him, but the rest of the country around him moved up

at about the same rate, leaving him still near the bottom. Later, in1988, he could go to the store and pick up a copy of Life magazine,a special historical retrospective on photography, and see a pictureof his mother, with the title “Best Buy” over her head. Annie MaeGudger’s tight, worn face was backed up against their sharecroppershack, frozen in the microsecond it took the shutter of Evans’s cam-era to click that sweaty afternoon fifty-some years ago. Now shewas sandwiched between a smiling picture of the actress FarrahFawcett, showing plenty of breast and leg, and a nude EdwardSteichen entitled La Cigale that sold for $82,500.

What could he say? If everyone wanted to know about his fam-ily, what’s the harm if a little money were to stick to him?

Junior’s eyes remained on the rented car as it drove away, notquite fast enough, and his face, framed in the rear-window mirror,became smaller. It remained tense, his fists at his sides, on his hips,little balls of white against the tired blue of his overalls.

. vi .

The children of Maggie Louise had the greatest cause to be bitter. Ifanyone among the Gudgers had a chance to make it, it was MaggieLouise. Now that she had failed, what could be expected of them?

We had reservations—in going after them to hear what theyhad to say, we might be doing something dangerous: perhaps merelyto find them would be a violation. They were living anonymouslives. To uncover people who had run from their identities could noteasily be defended as an act of innocence. It could be seen as a cal-lous reopening of a very painful sore. It might not be without con-sequence.

Could it be that Maggie Louise’s children, like many of theyoung in rural Alabama, were still living within the mind-set of de-feat impressed upon them by the cult of the cotton system? Men likethe old landlord Margraves aren’t around any longer, but might thecurse live on in the attitudes men like him helped establish?

But Debbie, her brother, and one sister were quite unlike theirsour Uncle Junior. In fact, they were introspective, and used ourmany visits to seek answers to fill in their own blank spaces, as wellas to provide answers for the questions we had. It was as if they hadbeen expecting someone to come knock on their doors.

Vll .

Cherokee City is thirty miles and a lifetime north of the Burgandyplantation in Madrid Junction. This community has grown consid-erably from those 1936 days; it is now a real city, with all the attrac-tions that would draw one to live in a city.

This is where Debbie lives.

She left, for a while, but came back from St. Louis after divorc-ing her husband. She has since remarried, and this has been herhome.

Occasionally, she will drive south out of Cherokee City. And soit is today. She heads down a modern four-lane freeway, leading toCookstown. South of the town crossroads, the highway is two-lane,mostly unchanged from the time of her youth.

Debbie arrives in Cookstown and has a green light through theintersection. She turns into the cemetery to walk among the stones.

Parvin has her mother’s eyes, as does her brother, Sonny, andher sister Mary Ann. Debbie’s four boys also have the eyes of Mag-gie Louise, but Debbie does not. Hers are round, bright, swimmingbeneath a blond curl of hair.

She is familiar with the cemetery path. A winter has passedsince the discovery last year of the map of Orlando, and it hascrumbled, leaving only the broken brick paperweights. Debbie can-not understand why Parvin placed the road map and other icons onMaggie Louise’s grave. She does understand, in an obscure way, butthe meaning troubles her. A chickadee sounds a call. The hum ofworking bees comes from the honeysuckle.

Debbie stands at the foot of the stone of her parents, the white-ness of her lace blouse reflecting the sun. This cemetery is as farsouth as she has come on this road in many years. She has neverbefore gone back to the old place down in Madrid Junction whereshe and her mother and father and brothers and sisters farmed cot-ton together. The cemetery has been an imaginary line past whichshe has forbidden herself to travel. //

The line is crossed. She is back in the car, air-conditioning seton high, going a clean sixty-five, and she passes the Bridgeses’ farm-house and the dirt turnoff to the top of Hobe’s Hill, into the territoryof her past. Her hands are tight on the wheel, and she is quiet. Shecomes to Wobbly Hill, the slope that gave her mother so much

trouble in that old Plymouth of Mrs. Burgandy’s. Her car neverslows, and the grade now seems not at all steep.

After the top of the hill, her eyes scan the woods and fields oneither side of the road. She sees not what there is before her at themoment but a land as it was frozen in the mind of an eight-year-old

girl. ^

There is the turnoff for the worn dirt road leading to the Bur-gandy mansion—a slow mile bounces past, dust filling the road be-hind the car. Now everything is lost to her recollection. TheBurgandy house burned a few years ago. The land has been over-grown with kudzu. Only a few gnarled remnants remain of Mrs.Burgandy’s apple trees, the orchard from which she once used tosneak fruit. Little is left to tell her this was where she was born. Itall seemed so big and powerful in those days.

“I can remember the fun times,” she says. “A lot of it I haveblocked out of my mind, because some of it was so terrible.”

One field is left, the one her father used to plow in cotton, theone she ran through when she and her brother, Sonny, were attempt-ing their escape. Dust rises from the middle. It is now being plowedfor soybeans by the farmer Joe Bridges, who has taken over the land.

It is not hard to imagine Debbie as a little girl standing out inthat field two and a half decades ago, amid the cotton. MaggieLouise would be standing nearby.

Maggie Louise would be proud now, looking at Debbie parkedat the edge of the field, in a new air-conditioned car, dressed in whitelace. She certainly hadn’t wanted Debbie and Debbie’s children topick cotton. Some poverty can be beaten. Could she have imaginedhow far her daughter would come in the twenty-seven years afterleaving this place?

There was a bleakness after her mother committed suicide, andDebbie compensated by concentrating on her children. They camein succession, four of them, the last born in 1975, four years afterher mother’s death. She divorced the U.S. marine, later marryingRon, who is a painting contractor. Two of her children are youngenough to remain home. They live in a modern apartment complexin Cherokee City. Debbie recently quit a job she had held for a longtime. She started in a fast-food restaurant, at the bottom, flippinghamburgers, working her way up to being a manager and then totraining other managers.

By any definition, Debbie attained a middle-class life, and noth-

ing would differentiate her from others who make up what has beencalled Middle America.

The past remained, however, lurking. She decided early on todeal with it by covering it up with fun times. She has adopted aphilosophy of enjoying life, going about it with purpose, aggres-sively seeking good times. She enjoys water-skiing and going tocountry-music bars. When she feels depressed, she tries to findthings to laugh about.

Debbie lives life intent on not missing any part of it. She goesabout living as if tomorrow might be her last day, not with recklessabandon but aware that every action and word counts, that no mo-ment should be wasted, for she craves to feel, touch, and experienceit all. - -

Now that most of her children are older, she has come to faceherself again, and for the first time she wants to deal with the past.Looking for something to laugh about is no longer enough. Maybethis process started two years ago, when she became a grandmother,after Andy Lee, her eldest, and his wife had their first child.

Debbie has journeyed far enough away from those days whenthere seemed to be no answers and no hope. As recently as a fewyears ago, she was still dealing with survival. Now, she can wonder,Where did I come from? Who am I? What should I do with my life?

Debbie was robbed of her education by circumstances, just asher mother had been.

Don’t you think the people up North get a better chance ateducation than people in the South? I always say I wish I’d beenborn someplace other than Alabama. That may be it. I don’t know.Schools here are terrible. We’re so far behind. I wish we hadchances like a lot of people. Because considering the way we werebrought up, we’ve done fairly good for ourselves. I would like tohave gone to school. I feel too old now to do anything. I don’twant to spend the rest of my life in a fast-food joint, slingingchicken, even if I am the manager.

She asks, “Do you think I could go back to school?” She ex-plores the idea. It sounds ridiculous to her, a grandmother, trying togo back. I tell her it is never too late. Nothing is stopping her. Op-portunity is there.

True, she says, but it seems so improbable.

She blushes.

Debbie is different from many of her cousins. She has drive, ayearning to understand more, to be more. Many are content to livea little behind. Debbie inherited her ambitions from her mother. >—“Mama always made sure we kept up,” she says. “But some ofthem didn’t. Some haven’t changed in fifty years. Did you run intopeople down here who still live like that, have no teeth?”

Among these people, there are two classes: those with rottenteeth, with no sign of ever having had any professional dental care,and those whose teeth are perfect.

Debbie is a member of the latter class. She believes that therotten-teeth people use their mouths as a badge to prove they havenot joined the outside world. They tend to stick together, she says.She works hard to tone down any hint of backwoods drawl, whilesome of the rotten-teeth people have accents that set them aparteven from other southerners. When Debbie once talked about herfather’s wearing overalls, she said the word as it is written. Hercousins still say overhauls, a common pronunciation Agee notedamong the rural cotton farmers. The old-time rural Alabama voicehas a cadence exact and reassuring in tone. People still speak thatway in the rural places, but among the young ones like Debbie it ismuted. They have more generic southern speech patterns, like thoseof Atlanta people.

There’s still some of them dirty. All of them could be attrac-tive looking, if they took better care of themselves. But they don’t.They’re just stuck back in country living.

You can tell they’re self-conscious. They won’t associate withus, with me, Parvin, and Sonny. It’s because we look a little differ-ent, we act a little different. We don’t still talk country like theydo. Some think we think we’re better than them. But we’re not. Istill feel the same way inside. I just tried to better my appearance.

I’ll go down to Judith’s, like the wedding when I stopped off at herhouse, and I was in heels and a dress. I went in and her kids justwalked around looking at me strange, checking me out. Theythought I was rich. I’m not rich. Just different. I don’t want tosound like I don’t like them. We got out and explored the world,and they never left Cookstown. They seem defensive. If they movedthis way, they’d be better off. They’re set in their ways. They don’twant to change.

Two days after she went to the cemetery and the Burgandy landand said these things, Debbie decided to obtain her high school

equivalency degree. Then she enrolled in a two-year business school,the first among the forty-seven grandchildren and great-grand-children of George and Annie Mae Gudger to attend any school ofhigher learning. Of all her grown relatives on her mother’s side, onlyone uncle attended any college. She made her decision on the basisof the conversation that day and after reading a copy of Let Us NowPraise Famous Men that she was given. She said Agee’s words,coupled with talking to someone about them, had inspired her. Shewas getting B’s and C’s, with most of her trouble in English. But theletters she wrote were grammatically fine.

She eventually graduated and for a time became the office man-ager for a group of doctors. It took fifty years and a delay of ageneration, but the dreams a ten-year-old shared with a poet fromthe North are coming to something.

As for Debbie’s children, Roland, the youngest, is uncertain ofhis course after high schoolKwestly, in high school, is also not sureof college, but is leaning that way. Debbie’s other two boys havegood jobs but, for a variety of reasons, never went beyond highschool. It was hard on them. For much of the time that the two olderones were growing up, Debbie was struggling simply to exist, andthis may have limited their chances. But they will do well.KAll ofDebbie’s children have native intelligence and a gift for dealing withpeople, though the most hope lies with Roland, for he is watchinghis mother go back to school and is learning from what she hasdone. Also, her life is now more stable than it has ever been. Debbiewants Roland to have opportunities. He says college now, but he isyet young. She fears he’ll change his mind a dozen times. There arestill many distractions. But it seems he’s listening to her. Someonewill be able to look back at these boys and report they and theirchildren have done things.

. viii.

And so there is a chance for greater accomplishment among some ofthe children.

Among other third-generation children of the three families,there is a great mix of abilities. Most have the rudiments of educa-tion. None seem illiterate. If they are, they have hidden it well. Manywrite with pain, misspell, and butcher grammar. To more than a few,school was a chore to be escaped as soon as possible.

In the cotton years, for the tenants, literacy was not wide-spread. Among the adults in the families in 1936, according to Agee,Sadie Ricketts could not read or write; Fred Ricketts could, some,and was smug about it; George Gudger never made it past the sec-ond grade, could write his name, and no more; Annie Mae wasadept at language and perhaps the best among them. Bud and IvyWoods could both read and write, though it’s unclear how well. Thelandlords did not want their workers educated, for they might losethem to better jobs in the city.

Emma Woods wanted desperately to learn. When her motherdied, she had to quit school at thirteen. In other cases, educationwas rejected, as with Margaret Ricketts. That most in the third gen-eration are functionally literate is a vast improvement.

Or is it really so vast an improvement? One who thinks it is notis a young teacher from Cherokee City who instructs a first-yearcollege course for many of the youths who come from the highschools of Cookstown, Centerboro, and other nearby rural towns.She says she can tell where her students are from simply by lookingat the first papers they turn in. She has never failed in her assump-tion, she says, for the ones from these former cotton towns invari-ably do poorly. Many drop out or fail. She says the kids can’t helpit—many of their parents can’t read, or don’t care, and there is thuslittle home support for education. The schools they came out of areinferior, a holdover from the cotton days. So the kids grow up de-prived—of knowledge, of motivation, of a culture that places edu-cation in a prominent place. The parents are happy if the childrencan write a little, do some arithmetic. They enter college at the levelof seventh-graders, if they’re lucky, she says. Ignorance seems to behonored. Kids of this area look to go into the coal mines or otherbasic labor jobs. The goal, she says, seems to be to latch on to anykind of job so that they will not have to leave the region. Theteacher, from Florida, is terribly frustrated. She clenches her fistswhen talking about this.

The larger issue here is that the cotton society and the cultureit bred have left a legacy of an inferior educational system. At thistime, Alabama has the lowest property taxes of any state in the na-tion. There was a recent increase that raised howls from large land-owners, but the rates are still low. Property taxes could be elevatedby one-third, and Alabama would remain at the bottom in the na-tion. Low property taxes translate into meager allocations for

schools. The state is just beginning to recognize what this means. Aneditorial in the Montgomery newspaper told about a man from thestate economic-development department who went to Cleveland totalk with a large industrial firm about relocating in Alabama. Theofficial trotted out the glories of cheap labor and low taxes, luresthat worked well in the not-so-distant past. The industrialists toldthe Alabamian that what they now looked at most in areas theymight move to was the educational system. In today’s world, theyneed educated workers, not muscles. The old days are gone. If theyjust want low-cost labor, they can go to places overseas that evenAlabama can’t compete with. Company officials expressed disbeliefat Alabama’s taxes—they even snickered. They asked how theschools could be funded with such ridiculous rates.

Even if taxes were doubled, there would still be the problem ofa system in the rural areas that is set in its ways. How can there bean escape when ignorance is so institutionalized? The third-, fourth-,and fifth-generation children of tenant farmers have little chance ofchanging their fate as long as they remain in those rotting onetimecotton towns. Only those whose parents have escaped, such as Ro-land, have a chance.

. ix .

It would be wrong to stop and say Debbie has reached successthrough a good job, for that measure would ignore the deepest partof her life, her children. Her richness is her family and the love its Dmembers have for each other.

One warm spring night, in the middle of her schooling, Debbiedecides to have a cookout. The barbecue is scheduled for the eve ofMother’s Day, and her four boys are going to be there in her apart-ment, which is typical of the 1980s, with a microwave, a video re-corder, tasteful furniture. It is neatly arranged and freshly cleanedfor this occasion.

First to arrive is Andy Lee, Debbie’s eldest and the one raisedfor a few years by Annie Mae and Maggie Louise. He is twenty-three. His wife is quietly beautiful, and their son, just barely able towalk, is inquisitive. Wayne, twenty-one, is single and loudly pro-claims he will never marry. He is curious about all the places youcan travel in this world and asks a lot about them. Westly, the onein high school, is here with his wife-to-be. He is very bright and gets

straight A’s in school, but is not sure about college. It may be themilitary instead for him. Roland, twelve, is talking of baseball. Heis perhaps the brightest, but his report card shows B’s and C’s, notreflective of his ability. He could get A’s if he put in more effort—heknows his material—but does not want to. He is outgoing, takingthe offensive with visitors, sitting in on adult conversations andholding his own. He seems much older than his dozen years. This isnot unusual in the three families. The young even today grow upfast. Many of the twenty-year-olds appear to be in their thirties. Aten-year-old here is not like a ten-year-old in an average Americanfamily. This could be related to the fact that in days of cotton, theyoung were treated like adults early, beginning at about eight onthe farm. Much was expected of them—picking, chores, and so on.The adults today, because this is how they were raised, seem to ex-pect such maturity in their youngsters.

For Roland, at an age when girls are normally attracted to olderboys, this maturity, and a skill with words, means that he can seduceolder girls into liking him. It’s not that he’s some junior womanizer;this is his natural way. He has the problem of too many girls chasinghim. Debbie says he dates just one, a girl of fifteen. He has thoseMaggie Louise eyes, sandy hair, and this, too, is part of theattraction.

Roland is afflicted with the disease of youth—a sense of inde-structibility. He jumps bikes and skateboards over all sorts of ob-stacles. Showing off his bicycle tricks, he falls several times, but pickshimself right up, seemingly unhurt, to do them again. He won’t letfailure stop him, nor does he get flustered. He repeats them until hegets them right.

Everyone drinks beer, except for Roland and Andy Lee, whodeclines because he says that he still has trouble drinking in sight ofhis mother, that it makes him feel disrespectful. It is a habit he can-not break. Debbie does not understand this deference.

Ron, her husband, arrives from work. He is a traditional manof the house in many ways and takes over the duty of preparing thesteaks. He is a good businessman and has more work than he canhandle. He is a strong disciplinarian with the children and spendsmuch time with them. They seem genuinely to like and honor him.The marriage between Ron and Debbie is one of mutual respect.Debbie went through her troubles with Ron. They separated once,but found they couldn’t live apart.

Debbie is alone on the porch. It is an apartment balcony, look-ing down on a parking lot where children play. Across the asphaltare six other buildings just like this one and, behind, a thick band ofwoods where the bobwhite gossip from a convention of quail canbe heard. In the fading light, she discusses life. It is intimate talk,with all the others in the kitchen. Debbie’s voice is low. She covetsthe outside world and the travel a single man or woman can accom-plish. She wanted adventures and instead had children at an earlyage, and so feels she missed out.

But she looks too much at the good side of that kind of life, andnot enough at the down side. What about the world then missed,the love of children? Someone her age who is still single has lostsomething she takes for granted. She should cherish it. It is not toolate for her to have adventures, and she is doing well to start withher schooling.'She can do almost anything she wants to do, and herchildren will support her in it.

The solitude is broken by the entrance of Ron and of a fewother visitors. The grill is ready. The steaks cook. In the living roomare her sons and their women. They whisper, conspiring.

The boys and women march through the kitehen, crowdingonto this narrow band of cement. There is a look of a well-keptsecret. Andy Lee, being the oldest and therefore charged with suchduties, walks forward. Debbie is standing with her back against therailing. She turns red, awkward at being the focus of everyone’s at-tention. From his pocket he produces a tiny box wrapped in giftpaper. She has forgotten that tomorrow is Mother’s Day. The sons’eyes are expectant. Go on, open it, Andy Lee says. She picks at thepaper, seeming to want to make the moment last. Beneath the lid isa silver ring, exquisitely carved, of deep luster, set on a snowy puffof cotton, and she holds the box in hand, staring. She plucks it fromthe cotton and slides it on her finger.

Debbie has no words for all this and cannot control her tears.She hugs each of her sons. Andy Lee says she will get the bill for ittomorrow, and everyone laughs.

. x .

That same Mother’s Day, Debbie’s brother, Sonny, was also crying.

It is always that way on Mother’s Day, his wife says. He tellshis wife that if his mother were still alive, he could do a great dealfor her.

Sonny is the only one of Maggie Louise’s four children to com-plete high school when still a youth. He was in that work-studyprogram, which taught him a trade—house painting, hanging Sheet-rock. After he graduated, in 1969, he remained in Cherokee Citywith his wife and child, looking for work. He rushed over on theday when his mother drank the rat poison, driving her to the hos-pital with Annie Mae and Gretchen.

Sonny does not talk about it. He cannot even remember thedate his mother died. Everything before and after is sharp. It is as ifhe had been in a coma that day and the days that immediately fol-lowed.

After the funeral, he fled Cherokee City with his family, movingto the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. He could no longer live in Chero-kee City again. He took a job in the paint department of a shipyard.He remained there for six years. He and his wife have four children.They are grandparents. In 1980, he opened his own business, as apainting, drywall^and- wallpaper contractor. Sonny is thirty-fiveyears old.

The Gulf Coast of Mississippi lies at the end of roads travelingthe empty piney woods country of that state. The sharpness of anafternoon bleeds into night at the dank edge where a line of neonmeets the blackness of the sea.

It is a hot night. The home of Sonny and Susan Franks is setback from the old mansions along the shore, in a new suburbantract. It is one of those homes that resembles all others around it. Inthe 1960s, when it was popular to trash American culture and look-alike suburbia, it was said that if you came home to your develop-ment house drunk in the night, the only way to tell which home wasyours would be to go out back and smell the garbage. If it containedthe remains of your dinner, you had the right house. There is some-thing wonderfully comfortable about that idea, at least in the con-text of Sonny and the shack he once lived in, which did not haveeven running water.

The door opens, and Sonny is standing there. His is an instantlyrecognizable face. He has the eyes of Maggie Louise, mysterious,gray, kind.

Everything about this home is solidly in the middle, the furni-ture, the microwave, the Sesame Street swing set in the backyard,the parrot named Cowboy, two teenage children who peer at strangevisitors with curiosity and timidness.

It is nine o’clock, and he has just arrived home from a job. Heworks seven days a week. He is too modest to say he is an accom-plished musician—Debbie is proud of her brother for that. Helearned to play instruments by ear, with no formal training. Hestarted playing at fifteen, driven around to bars by an uncle. He oncemade a gospel album in Nashville, right after the death of MaggieLouise. Sonny talks for hours over the chatter of the parrot, late intothe night, drinking through several pots of coffee.

As far as Maggie Louise’s children, we’re doing great. We’vecome a hell of a long ways. You know where we changed? Whenwe came off of the farm and into the city. I’ll take the city any day.

After that, all the farming we did was a garden, you know.

You know I remember a lot of stuff from when I was seven,eight, ten years old. It makes me want to work hard. Back then itwas plain physical manual labor. If you’re a kid and you see thesepeople get up and go to work, it sticks with you. That’s the way Isaw a man made a dollar. My mother worked hard. She was asurvivor. We always made it. She never went for charity. Basically,the way we made it, the way my mother raised us, was workingour ass off. You do make a living, you do survive ... if you keepdoing it long enough and don’t give up.

We’ve been in this house for seven years. This is the secondone we’ve had. It’s middle-class. The rich are more on the southend. The houses there run from eighty to a hundred and fifty thou-sand. These run from thirty to fifty-five thousand.

I work from about seven until nine at night, twelve to four-teen hours a day. I don’t sleep much. I’ll work crazy hours for threeor four weeks, then I’ll take a weekend off, and I have slept fromSaturday morning until Sunday morning. Right now, we’re surviv-ing. Your bare necessities will tear you apart. If you’re in themiddle, you’re dog-paddling, you’re surviving, you’re staying ontop. In the middle, you’re paying both ways. You’re paying for thepoor people, which we need to take care of, but you’re also payingfor the rich man’s Cadillacs.

Unless you’re turning five hundred, six hundred dollars aweek, you’re not making any money. My minimum is four-fifty.

And I’ve got to make that every week, just to stay on even keel. Ican do it, but I can’t do it in a forty-hour week. I’ve got to stay outthere. A forty-hour week to me is gone, if a man’s going to survive.

Now it takes sixty.

I work for people who can afford it, an upper bracket. But

me, the people I associate with, are scrapping, are barely mak-ing it.

The way I do it now? If I can make one week at a time, I’mdoing good. People don’t have—what you call it?—any kind ofsecurity. Job security is gone. There’s no more of that. . . . The bigcompanies have got the upper hand right now on the averageworking man. Like this job I’m on at this hospital out here. I’d saytwenty-five workers are temporary part-time. You don’t get anybenefits out there, you don’t get the vacation, paid holidays, all ofthat. But if you want a job, you’ll stay there. Supply and demand.There’s not enough jobs out here.

They’re going to have to give the common man a break for achange. If a man is already rich, that’s good. I’m not saying takeall the money from the rich people and kill them because they’rerich. But you’re going to have to go back to giving the poor persona break because they’ll appreciate it, they’ll go on with it. If I madea million dollars, I would reach back and help somebody some-where. There needs to be a limit. If a person gets rich, makes amillion dollars, there should be a limit. The big bugs shouldn’thave all these breaks.

People making forty or fifty, they’re set. They got what theyneed. They don’t think about the people out there. If we don’t dosomething here in the United States, if we don’t correct this prob-lem one way or another, get it on an upward trend, we’re gonnafind things a lot more difficult. People’s gonna start taking whatthey want. . . . My son? I don’t know if he’ll do the same thing Ido. But he’s talented with going out and picking up money. He’sbeen through grass cutting, then he went through this aluminum-can thing. He’s just got it in him. I don’t worry about him at all. Iknow he’ll make a dollar somewhere. He’ll go out there and get itif it’s available. The availability of it is what I worry about.

His youngest boy enters the room. Sonny is looking at a pictureof his mother in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is the first timeSonny has ever seen the book.

The son asks, “Is this for real?”

Sonny’s eyes never leave his mother’s.

“This was the Depression, Son. It’s for real. Yeah.”

Several years later, Sonny was tracked down again. Things hadnot gone well. He and Susan had lost the house—work turneddown, and they had to sell it. And as bad as that was, it got worse.Since that first visit, his real wage fell another two dollars an hour,and he had to drive to Mobile to get any work.

“What can I do now?” he said. “From where I am, the Depres-sion is here. I make the same as I did ten years ago.” He’d like to getout of his field, go to school for three years to become a nurse. Buthe still has mouths to feed, and so that plan seems impractical fornow. Like Debbie, he is not complacent and is always thinking ofways to better himself. If only he can. Moreover, his oldest son—also named Sonny—dropped out of high school for a while. Thegood news was that the son started working with his father andrealized he had to do something else. He went back to school andnow plans on going to college to become an engineer.

Sonny and Susan were renting an apartment. Still middle-class.Clinging.

. xi.

The other two children of Maggie Louise are harder to understand.

Several years ago, when this project began, Mary Ann wasworking in Texas, managing an apartment complex with her hus-band and their five children. Like the other children, she had fledAlabama. In 1986, she returned home, just as Debbie and Parvinhad before her.

She came to take a job in the Cookstown Junior Mart, thatconvenience-store chain with a goofy-face logo of a kid, where theysell overpriced toilet paper and milk, reasonable gasoline, greasychicken, badly brewed coffee. The eldest of Maggie Louise’s off-spring, Mary Ann is five years older than Debbie. She saw a lot moreand had important family history to contribute. The first time weapproached her, she was withdrawn, though not nearly as hostile asher uncle Junior, and so we did not interview her.

I attempted a second approach. It came one evening, and MaryAnn was at work inside the Junior Mart. She was easy to watchfrom a car parked by the ice machine. She could not see who wasspying on her, for the brightness of the store interior made visioninto the dark night world outside impossible. She looked just likeAnnie Mae Gudger in 1936, or a picture of her mother just beforedeath. Her hair was pulled back tightly. She had the thin lips andgentle smile. And those eyes, lines sinking into the center of theirreflective whiteness, a look that runs in most all of the MaggieLouise line. She was working behind the chicken counter, dipping abatch of breaded parts into smoking grease. Then she was lost from

sight, behind a window sign that advertised two chicken pieces anda roll for ninety-nine cents. A customer entered and everyonelaughed. The customer was some good-old-boy type, and they wereprobably talking about some town gossip incomprehensible to anoutsider. The good old boy left. The store was empty of customers.

At that point, it seemed unnecessary to talk with her. It wouldhave been such an intrusion, it seemed, but weren’t our approachesto the others also intrusions? Who knows how such decisions aremade? She was left alone.

Perhaps Parvin should also have been left alone. How sweet,special, and fragile she is. She is much quieter than Debbie. Debbiehas dealt with the past by opening up; Parvin, by withdrawing.Parvin does not embrace new experiences the way her sister does.Parvin, the youngest child of Maggie Louise, is childless and, atthirty-three, on her third marriage.

How could she be asked about the map on the grave? It is im-possible for me to ask some things. The map was discovered by us afew months after she came back from Orlando. Could it have beenplaced there to tell her mother that she had come home? Parvinseems to want to atone for a past she cannot reclaim. She and Hub-bard, her husband, had driven their thirty-two-foot mobile homefrom Orlando to Cherokee City. Before she came back, she had acancerous breast removed. She also had a hysterectomy and an op-eration to remove the other breast.

Like many of her kin, Parvin is not in good health. Marion, theson of Ivy and Bud Woods, succumbed to cancer when still young,as did his brother, Thomas (Buddy); Thomas Woods and Ethel hada retarded son; Mary Lee was born premature to Ellen and is stillthin and small; Emma suffered her whole life from asthma and gen-eral weakness; Emma’s daughter Ruby had rheumatic heart disease;George Gudger died young from cancer; Squinchy Gudger’s heart isweak, as is that of his sister Gretchen, and both face shortened lives;the Rickettses’ boy died of tuberculosis. The list is much longer andequally sad.

It’s impossible to ascertain how much of the disease is relatedto genetics and how much caused by diet and other environmentalfactors. Debbie cannot help believing that some of this disease wascaused by exposure to chemicals: “The crop dusters would comeand spray, and it would go all over us. Before that, you had to go

out there on this machine and spray around, before the planescame.” Parvin can only suspect the cause of her cancers.

In that first meeting, Parvin talked about her earlier move toFlorida, how she worked her way up to become a bookkeeper:

I left home and didn’t know what an inside toilet was. I wasgoing on sixteen when I got married. Back then, that was the thingto do. Hurry up and get out. I did grow up fast. Quick, hard. Ilearned everything by just doing. I have learned nobody will giveyou anything. Waitress work, that’s all we could start at. I learnedtyping by common sense. I feel like I was cheated all my life. Be-hind the times.

With a bit of wistfulness, she adds, “We’re just different.”

Some relatives believe that the children of Maggie Louise, outof malice, turned against their mother and that this led to her de-spair. That does not seem to be true. They were confused teenagersfleeing from the brutal cotton days into life. Parvin later wrote aletter and addressed the issue:

I sure hope you know that my mother was a very beautiful lady.

When my father died, she had four kids to take care of and at thattime it was very hard on her. My father is the only man motherever loved. I have already talked to Gretchen about this. Don’t takeme wrong but I was her baby girl. I didn’t understand myself untilI got older. I realize it was very hard on her.

Many months later, after coming home, Parvin landed a job asa bookkeeper in Cherokee City.

Her husband, Hubbard, was not working. He had a bad backand said he could not work at his trade of repairing mobile homes.They were still living in the motor home, parked at the back of a lotwhere house trailers were offered for sale.

He is a jealous man, says Debbie. After the first meeting, he toldParvin that any men who come to Alabama talking about the olddays are up to no good, if they are talking to men’s wives. Debbiedoes not like Hubbard. She feels he rules Parvin’s life and manipu-lates her desires.

About a year after that first meeting, Hubbard was lured to ahealing church. He went to a service and was convinced that the

church would be their salvation, that it could physically restore hiswife to being the woman he had married.

“I went back to that church twice and watched what went on,”said Hubbard.

You see demons come out of people. There’s a woman who got abrand-new kidney. I’ve seen legs grow. It’d be hard to pull the woolover my eyes. I’m not from Alabama. I said, “I think you shouldcome with me and go to church.” I’d been praying for the Lord togive her back to me just the way she was when I met her.

Now they both belong to the Double Helping TabernacleChurch, run by Sister Wanda and Mr. Hainey. Sister Wanda is theone who heals people. Hubbard has told Parvin that God must ruletheir lives. All their radios are tuned to the Jesus station. Fifteenfaces of Jesus decorate their trailer. They go to the church five timesduring the week and twice on Sunday. They once went sixteen nightsin a row.

Parvin has stopped taking any medication for her health prob-lems. She believes she is cured.

I was of this world, but when I came here, my maker, JesusChrist, he just stopped me and showed me he is still alive. I’vetotally turned my mortal body over to him because he is now mydoctor, he’s my everything. I haven’t gone to a doctor since. I to-tally refuse. People talk about us, laugh, but I could care less. I’llreceive all my treasures in heaven. I can’t wait for the glorious daywhen I’ll see Maggie Louise Franks and Floyd Franks.

Many years before, Floyd Franks had once gone to see OralRoberts to get his hearing back, and Annie Mae had gone to a healerwhen she found she had cancer, but Parvin’s brand of religion is fardifferent from anything the Gudgers have ever practiced.

The night comes for one of their church services. The buildinggleams in a neighborhood of lower-class homes on the south side ofCherokee City. The raised voice of Mr. Hainey is heard a full blockfrom the church, the name of Jesus traveling through the night air.

Inside, Mr. Hainey is found to be a short and obese man, work-ing hard, running around behind the pulpit. He’s not as good assome—they say Sister Wanda has it down better—but he tries. SisterWanda sits on the side of the altar, quiet this night, a stern parrot-nose redhead. She sways, eyes closed, to the words of Mr. Hainey.

The congregation is a mix of black, white, old, young, thin,grossly fat, well-dressed, threadbare. The common tie is desperateu^'hope—a retarded woman, a bulb-nose alcoholic, and legless peopleare all trying to reclaim something. Mr. Hainey talks about howGod will take the last and make him first. Do you want a car? Prayfor it! He will see that you get material wealth. This assurance raisesthe level of interest. People sing, and Parvin is the first to walk for-ward on the altar call, eyes closed, arms raised. She falls forward,gripping the carpet. She repeats loudly the name of Jesus, her voicerising above the rest. A dozen others follow. A one-legged black manhobbles and falls next to her. Parvin shakes violently, as in a seizure,repeating, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

The service ends. Hubbard and Parvin decide to visit a wafflehouse for coffee. He drives the car, and she follows in his pickuptruck. He is enthusiastic. Wasn’t Mr. Hainey great tonight?

Hubbard arrives first, and Parvin enters the waffle house be-hind. He asks where she parked the truck. She says in a space. Wasit near any other car? He becomes frantic. Women don’t know howto park trucks, he says. He insists on going to move it and park it“properly.”

While he is gone, Parvin taps her hand to a rock tune on thejukebox. She says Hubbard forbids her to listen to rock music.When he returns, she stops tapping. He speaks twenty words foreach of hers.

The coffee gone, good-byes are exchanged. They walk off, thethin, still-sensual body of Parvin next to that man.

A year later, they separated. He sold everything she owned. Shewent back to Florida. Mary Ann also went back to Texas. After that,Parvin had another operation, discovered she had ulcers. Two yearslater, she was back living with Hubbard, in that trailer in CherokeeCity.

. xii.

The journey of the Gudger family is one of many paths and mixedsuccesses. Annie Mae took a job in a nursing home with her sisterEmma, and, Gretchen says, “she just blossomed like a rose.”

Her hair, always long and tied back on the orders of George,was cut. She started wearing makeup and even had an occasionaldrink, something George would never have tolerated. Her children

say she grew more youthful as she got away from cotton and thatwork-crazed life, and the pictures bear this out. A family photo-graph of her in the early 1960s shows her actually looking youngerthan when Walker Evans took his famous photograph in 1936.

The family revolved around and revered this woman, after alife so hard-lived. We found many who speak against some of theRickettses and Woodses, even against George Gudger and some ofhis children, but we found no one who will speak against AnnieMae.

Annie Mae met a man who visited the nursing home where sheworked, and later married him. She was with that man for six yearsuntil he died. She later said they were the best six years of her life.She finally found some joy in life. One day, she noticed her stomachbloating, and she didn’t feel well. She told Gretchen she didn’t haveto go to the doctor—she knew what it was. She believed it was thesame liver cancer that had killed her mother, Lulla, in 1929. AnnieMae held on long enough for her son, Sonny, to make the drive fromGeorgia. When he arrived, she said, “I love my boy.” Then sheclosed her eyes and was gone.

Many Gudgers today live on a few acres in a tiny group oftrailers south of Cookstown, forming a circle like some pioneerwagon camp. The place is about three miles from Hobe’s Hill. AnnieMae’s children Catherine Annette, Gretchen, and Squinchy live here,and they are surrounded by children and grandchildren. Squinchywas the baby in 1936 who Agee said would not grow. He didgrow—into a shy man with a bad heart. He has undergone surgeryseveral times and was recently laid off by a bankrupt meat-packingplant in Cherokee City.

Of her other children, Elizabeth Anne is married to a man whothreatens to kill people, especially reporters who come to Alabamaasking questions. Burt Westly, her brother, is shy and does not wantto talk. He learned his welding skills on the GI Bill after the KoreanWar. In 1978, Southern Exposure magazine said, “He is bitter aboutthe past and would not live in his home county.” According to themagazine, he abandoned welding after fifteen years because thefumes gave him serious sinus trouble, and he became a supervisor.He told Southern Exposure,

I helped organize the place that I’m working now. . . . This guy thatowned the place came from up north. He came down here looking

Gudger 163

for cheap labor. He was paying us two dollars and a quarter toweld. Now, they’re paying a welder about six or seven dollars, andsome good fringe benefits.

Junior, already mentioned, lives in a small house surrounded bya few trailers belonging to his children, in yet another compound,withdrawn into their own world. Gretchen says she has tried to gethim out of that world, but he refuses. He just doesn’t want tochange.

Sonny, the son who lives in Georgia (the uncle of MaggieLouise’s Sonny), is the most financially successful of all those de-scended from the three tenant families. This is the son who rebelled,who absolutely refused to go on picking cotton, who chose insteadto bag groceries for a living, the son in whose name George Gudgerchallenged Mr. Hill at the Yellow Front Store when Mr. Hill hadbeen told by the Gudger landlord that it wasn’t a good idea to begiving jobs to boys who belonged on the farm picking cotton. Helives now in Valley Town, Georgia, managing a jewelry store for theman he shares a home with. Twenty years ago, he and the manstarted working together, and they now own two jewelry stores.

The two men reside in a tall and spindly dwelling, its exteriorpeeling, interior ceilings water-stained, plates of plaster ready to fallin pie-size hunks. The seediness of the house stands in contrast tothe care lavished on its contents. The home is filled with untoldthousands of dollars’ worth of dark antiques—Victorian, Art Deco,Greek Revival, Chinese—splashed in red velvet, corners occupied bysilver urns and candelabra, fifteen-foot mirrors, a baby grand piano,statuary, oil paintings, a book turned to a favorite poem by EzraPound. This is the only child of George and Annie Mae to haveattended any college. The town in which he lives has three country-music bars and not much else for entertainment. The communitylacks the culture Sonny craved when growing up. But he is, appar-ently, here for good.

Sonny is a fine jeweler, proud and fair in his dealings, with anice way with his customers. He spends much of his leisure time inthe silence of his home, playing the piano for two tiny poodles. Hehas not gotten over the death of his mother, one of the few peoplewho understood him, and it seems he never will. He draws tearswhen talking about her. Since her death, he has spoken little to hisbrothers, Burt Westly and Junior, for whom he reserves contempt,an emotion he feels they return.

• • •

Debbie says her uncles hate their brother. For a man whodreamed of the big city as a boy, it’s hard to imagine how he man-ages in that small redneck town, a place of unenlightened isolation. ^Although many of the Gudgers are backward, some at leasthave progressed, and it is with this group that the greatest hope forthe future of the families lies.

. i .

Our very first evening in Alabama, every sensation was new andstriking.

There were the insects. It is still unclear what species comprisedtheir ranks—but it can be said in less-than-scientific terms that therewere two distinct types, day bugs and night bugs. Both made thesame racket. To imagine the quality and cadence of this sound, tunea radio until there is nothing but static, then turn the volume as highas possible, quickly lower it, and repeat the process in a rhythmicpattern that oscillates between extremes. At a roadside stand, weinquired what insect makes such noise. “What noise?” asked thewoman, who was selling ice cream. Attempts were made to call herattention to the chorus rising and receding from the kudzu across

the road, but she had grown up with the bug talk and simply didnot hear it. ^w

There was heat. It is another presence, unseen, alive, encom-passing, ever there, impossible to commit to words. It does notlessen much with the night. Again, only outsiders seem to notice orcomplain about it.

There was solitude. It would become very familiar: the mea-sureless land lying out, sleeping, between infrequent houses, the feel-ing of being lost even when in a known place, a succession of kudzuand pines stretching across all those endless miles.

There were things very “southern”—blood-colored earth,gleaming churches at almost every crossroad, Coca-Cola signs. Asfor the latter, it is in the nature of things that the poorer an area, thelarger and more ubiquitous these signs, and this holds true on theseAlabama back roads. The soda company promotes itself by provid-ing signs to store owners in exchange for the use of the store-owner’spremises as a permanent free billboard. In fact, the company oftenmakes it part of the deal—if the retailer wants to have the productto sell, the store has to display the sign. Back when Walker Evanstook his pictures, the signs were made of steel; the ones suppliedlater are larger and made of plastic. In places such as the outbackislands of the Philippines, the Coke signs are as large as barns, anda Coke costs a dime. In rural Alabama, sodas can be had for thirtycents from machines in front of little country stores, half the pricecharged in large American cities. It appears that consumption mustbe encouraged at whatever price local markets will bear.

It seemed necessary for us to feed one of these machines threedimes and drive on, past the Forks, on the road to Centerboro,caught by full darkness in Waynesville, a mostly black town, unlikemostly white Centerboro, a dozen miles west. Many homes withinthis black town are not much better than the country gray-boardshacks. There are some nice homes, to be sure, but they seem a mi-nority. All houses, regardless of soundness, have porches. They ar-en't decorative, but are a functional part of the architecture, for theinteriors of these small homes—whose owners are unable to affordair-conditioning—are uninhabitably hot most summer evenings.Summer life is lived on porches. The town pastime is to sit on rock-ers in the early shadows of night, all house lights extinguished, andthe best porches have banks of chairs lined six, seven strong, all

rocking with deliberation, to conversation or the silence amid con-versation.

A hot wind entering through an open car window conspiredwith the whirling voices of insects. In a nameless town in the countywhere many members of the three families live, everyone stared, andwe deemed it proper to drive slowly and stare back dumbly. RuralAlabama may have the most suspicious small-town eyes in America,though we later found there was nothing overtly violent or threat-ening behind them. The look is one of amazement at what businesswould bring anyone so far off the main path to their town. Never-theless, the eyes are disquieting, and one never gets used to them.The road led out of town, the eyes soon far behind, and the comfortof night returned. The course was uncertain and the road narrow.The beams struck a mailbox that contained a road number.

And there was the name: Margaret Pvicketts.

The chance discovery came one day earlier than Margaret wasexpecting our visit. She had been the most easily traced and there-fore the first to be contacted. We knew nothing about any of thefamilies that initial night, and we thought it important to try andlearn as much as possible, as fast as possible, as quietly and secretlyas possible.

We closed the car doors with great care, so that only a click washeard. In the distance two tiny squares of window light burned. Allhouses look the same in the night, and we couldn’t tell whether itwas a rich or a poor house. It looked rich. Our light steps failed tosilence the gravel of the driveway, alerting a counterspy, some caninethat put a halt to our reconnoitering with dog shouts of alarm.

it.

Daylight revealed a simple dwelling. As our car pulled up, the frontdoor opened. Margaret emerged, flashing gums studded withstumps of bituminous teeth. Her feet were naked, apparently a nor-mal state, as her toenails were split and ragged. A right finger wasthrust up her nose, pulling a hunk of whatever had dried up there,and she started hugging these visiting journalists, snot still stuck tothe finger, lips sinking tight around memories of molars in smile.

From behind Margaret came her son Garvrin Arlo, who also

hugged his guests. But his off-center eyes, distorted behind thickglasses, looked fearful. We later learned that the townsfolk talkabout him, as they have for the forty years he’s been alive. How hewanted to show them wrong, show just how smart and skilled hewas. He ran inside.

“Watch me! Watch me!” He clasped his hands behind his back,slamming his belly down on the floor with such force that the wallsof the shack shook.

“Think I can get up? Huh? Huh? Think I can get up?”

And he squirmed to his feet, hands still together, throwing backhis head, false teeth clicking out a stutter of words.

“I’m gonna call you Cous’n. You, Hoss. Hey Hoss, I butt headswith goats! See this head? C’mon. Butt it!

“Cous’, can you spell incomprehensibility? Betcha can’t. Lis-sen! I-N-C-O-M-P-Ree-E-H-E-N-Sss-I-B-I-L-I-T-Y. Hippopotamus?H-I-Pee-Pee-O-Pee-O-Tee-A-M-U-Ssssss.

“Ssss. Ssss. Huh? Huh?

“I’m a writer. I’m a photographer, too,” he said. He produceda cheap Polaroid and snapped pictures. He began adding wholestrings of numbers. “Yesssir, Cous’n, bet you never met anyonelike me.”

And Garvrin Arlo took his fists and slapped his head with aforce that knocked him backward, and he laughed and laughed andlaughed.

While Garvrin Arlo was involved in all this, a car came up thedrive. In it was Katy Ricketts, Margaret’s sister. Margaret mentionedthat Katy does not like talking about the past.

Katy entered, hair thrown like gray straw, and sat down.

“Tell how you’re in that book,” Garvrin Arlo said. “Tell them!Tell them!”

“I ain’t in that book!” she announced.

“Sure you are. That’s your picture in there!” Garvrin Arlo said,laughing some more.

“No it’s not,” she said, as if denying all the decades of her sorrylife. “Nothing in that book concerns me! I hate that book! I hatethem! I hate you people!”

She announced she had to go to church. She rushed out. Hercar threw gravel as it pulled away.

“She always gets that way about it,” said Margaret.

. iii .

Their house comprised four small rooms.

In Garvrin Arlo’s room, the bed was perched on crates. Next toit was a large zinc basin full of liquid. Urine! It had not been emptiedin a week. There is no plumbing. They defecate in the weeds outback and dump the piss buckets out there, too, when they getaround to it.

In Margaret’s room, bed sheets, once white, had matured toslate from lack of laundering. The living room contained a wood-burning stove, the sole source of heat. Next to it was a color televi-sion set. (“Didja know Garvrin figgers out them dee-tective shows?”Margaret said. “He could be one of them dee-tectives.”) There wereplastic flowers beneath a coat of dust, bottles of prescriptiondrugs—Margaret’s health is not good. On the walls, seven picturesof Jesus, the fourteen eyes, some looking left, some right, knowingall corners of this room. There was also a picture of Margaret’smother, Sadie, taken by Walker Evans, given to Margaret by film-maker Mort Jordan. Sadie is wearing a flour-sack dress, barefoot,sad-eyed, emotionally barren. This is the woman who was sent tolive in the other side of the house when she got older, so shewouldn’t get in the way of Margaret and Fred.

The kitchen was the worst of it. From there emanated a scalyblack crust of grease that found its way through the whole house,painting walls, floors, ceilings, the cup in which Margaret offeredcoffee.

The smell was a mixture. Unwashed flesh. (They bathe everyfew months by rubbing their bodies with a damp washcloth.) Staleurine. A blend of milk, vinegar, cheap sardines, stewed every fewdays on the stove, a recipe created by Garvrin Arlo (“I’m a chef,too!”) Wood smoke. Chain-saw fuel. Toxic chemicals bled from thefactory clothes worn by Garvrin Arlo. It combines, rushing the nose.Unlike some odors that grow less sharp with familiarity, until easilyignored, this one stays conspicuous. Each component takes its turnwelling to the forefront, depending on the part of the house in whicha person stands, but each smell is present every minute you're there.

. iv .

In town, they like to talk about Margaret and Garvrin Arlo. Oneman said that going to see them is better than watching televisionand that he’s been meaning to take his new wife up there just to geta look. Townsmen guffaw at every chance, a hideous small-towncruelty. The Rickettses were the butt of jokes all over the county in19^6, and some still are today.

v But how were the Rickettses supposed to turn out?

The reality is that Margaret and her son are the “worst” of theRickettses, in the sense of having never attained the “good life.”Those terms are relative, of course, and will be dealt with later. Fornow, it will suffice to say they are what people in the county thinkof when you say Ricketts. They do not think of those of Margaret’ssiblings who did not wind up living under such weird conditions.Margaret and her son have also been popular with occasional jour-nalists and filmmakers who have come this way the past fifteen orso years to do stories on these families. Why? They are easy to find.They cooperate, because they are ignorant of why any human wouldwant to cause them any harm, to hold them up to ridicule, to begawked at like zoo creatures. And they are convenient forconfirming an image of a South living in shacks, backward and un-educated. They make good copy. They make good pictures, goodstories—that is, they are easy journalism.

It’s much harder to examine and treat on film or in a few inchesof newspaper column how her four sisters dealt with their sick fa-ther, how the surviving brother, John Garvrin, retreated into hisown head after fleeing to Cherokee City. It’s not easy, perhaps it’seven confusing, to describe how he reacted to the pain of his boy’sbeing struck by a car and killed, how he became lost in his job as amechanic for the city, or how he lived his last year of loneliness,when the cancer was eating at him, still bitter at some in his familywho came around those last days for the sole purpose of trying toget a hold of what few possessions he acquired in the four decadesafter he left Hobe’s Hill. There is much more to the Rickettses, butmost of it is too complex to be useful for understanding; it’s mucheasier to focus on the surface truth as confirmation of a convenientstereotype; gawking at Margaret and Garvrin Arlo exposes an uglyand voyeuristic side in the townsmen, in journalists, in readers, in^this book, in society; these are human beings whose every action,

whose occasional offense, came out of their limited understandingof the world.

How do you capture the rage of Robert Allen, the son of Mar-garet’s sister Paralee? There were his years of combating alcoholism,his tour of duty in Vietnam, and now his struggle to make a livingin that furniture factory in Tulip City, Mississippi.

And there are the quiet struggles. There’s Paralee, who readsher Bible every day and listens to the “Gospel Hour” on the radio,secluded from the world. Or Nancy Ann, daughter of Flora MerryLee, whose husband left her. She raises a daughter afflicted withcerebral palsy, living in that cheap apartment outside Birmingham,working fifteen-hour days as a secretary to support the two of them.

Each of Fred’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildrenhas dealt with those Hobe’s Hill events in his or her own way. It is afamily divided by bitter factionalism dating to those days, so theyseldom get together, except for funerals, and there is much hatred.

Many exist in limbo, neither middle-class nor poor, carryingthis great weight of the past. Most are not as hard-pressed as Mar-garet and Garvrin Arlo, though many do the work that replaced thecultivation of cotton in the South—basic jobs in textile factories,mills, lumber operations. They had more to surmount than the chil-dren of the Woodses and Gudgers did, and such normality as isfound within their ranks should be viewed as success in itself.

Two of the five surviving children of Fred and Margaret Rick-etts would not talk for this book; a third was not approached forcomment. The motives of the two are different from those of JuniorGudger. They care less about someone’s getting “rich” writing aboutthem than they do about the wounds. They know everyone goes toMargaret, if not first then eventually, and the “worst” about theRicketts family will be learned. They know how townspeople talkand journalists act, and they know they have nothing to gain bymaking themselves part of confirming gossip. They have spent livestrying to forget the stories and the snickers.

. v .

Clair Bell is the youngest of the Ricketts children. She is fifty-four.She was four when James Agee and Walker Evans visited.

If a line were drawn on the map due east of Margaret’s home,it would cross the highway and head up Hobe’s Hill, where they

lived in 1936. Continuing past where the dirt road comes to an endnear the black cemetery, you find a tangled mile of forest, beyondwhich lies another dirt road, unconnected to the first, and a frown-ing green trailer. Clair Bell lives here.

This is a serious collection of dozens of ancient and unworkingcars, trucks, tractors, nameless wheeled and stationary objects.Kudzu has tried to cover this two-acre whorl of iron, steel, andwood, but not even that relentless vine can hide it. The trailer, withits cracked door, is lost in the center.

All this suggests that Clair Bell is another Margaret. It is trueshe’s a recluse who dislikes the outside world, but unlike Margaret,who has never left this county, Clair Bell has ventured out into mod-ern America. She was always a good student, the only Ricketts tofinish high school. For a while, she moved to Illinois with her hus-band and led a suburban existence.

After ten years, she and her husband decided to come home tothe South, as all in the thr^er families have eventually done, pulledback to these barren tablelands. None seems able to make a perma-nent break. This is unlike the pattern evident among many back-country southern blacks, who seem to stay away once they leave.Only one of the 128 members of the three families and their off-spring was living outside the South, and that one, a Ricketts, wasplanning to return home soon.

Many are afraid of the outside. They call it Alabama pride. ButAlabama pride is not like Texas pride, based on boosterism. Ala-bama pride has an inferiority complex at its root. Even other Ala-bamians, with college degrees, say that they feel put down, markedby their accents when living in the North or the West, that the in-stant association with Alabama is “stupid.” It follows that poor Ala-bamians will suffer even more from this same complex. They fearthat everyone is onto them, that they will be discovered and exposedas one-time cotton pickers. Even some South Carolina and Georgiapeople laugh at Alabamians as being “backward.” Whether real orimagined, this sense of the world’s scorn drives them to the haven ofsweet home Alabama, where they can live their lives unjudged andcomfortable in what they are.

Not long after Clair Bell and her husband returned, they weredivorced. Clair Bell came here to the forest after marrying AlbertMargraves—not one of the monied Margraveses but one whoworks the “logwoods,” lumbering trees. This Margraves has no

teeth. He is conscious of his badge and whom he shows it to. Whentalking with outsiders, he speaks through lips narrowed to a slit toconceal those blackened chops.

It is a strange couple. Clair Bell resembles a schoolteacher inappearance and manner, with wire-rim glasses, a face as round andsoft as the cotton balls she refused to pick as a child, hair the colorof seed. She has all her teeth, and they are in fine shape. She lookslike any average American. She fared better than some of her oldersiblings. The younger children were more advanced not only be-cause they came of age in better economic times but also becausethey learned early, by the painful example of their elders, that theyhad to reject absolute loyalty to their father to have any hope. ClairBell wanted to be a stenographer and would have become one, ex-cept that she married first. Now she is here.

Clair Bell was one of two children Agee said would not livemuch longer after he left at the end of summer in 1936. She was theone who was hurt in that playtime accident, the one Agee made anoblique reference to in his book, about her “six-month image” lyingsleeping, referring to her being in a coma. She would die, he pre-dicted, going on to envision even the form her parents’ grief wouldtake: the Ricketts family would place atop the grave of the four-year-old child the tea set Agee had given her as a present. His smallgift to the dying child, who had had so little in her short life, wouldbe a logical choice as a symbol of love of the family for their lostmember. It would be a poignant, beautiful act. Why else could hehave imagined that the family would choose to place this gift froma stranger on her grave?

Then we learned the secrets.

As it turned out, Clair Bell was not in a coma for long—shewas laid up for six weeks, not six months, and obviously did not die.

And it was revealed that it was either Agee or Evans who hadaccidentally caused her injury.

This information is not offered in Agee’s text; indeed, it is alsonot stated in the text that Agee found Clair Bell alive and well whenhe revisited the families in 1937, after his material had been rejectedas a Fortune article but long before he completed his manuscript andhad it published as a book in 1941. It’s unclear exactly why Ageeignored the facts regarding Clair Bell. It could be argued that theway he chose to describe her imminent death and the family’s griefhad too nice a sound to it to be altered just for the sake of historical

accuracy. Or it could be said he was dealing not with journalism,not simply with a setting down of facts, but with a creative enter-prise.

We cannot now hear Agee’s side of this. But there is Clair Bell’srecollection of the incident.

We were in front of the porch, playing “poison oak.” Theywanted to learn to play the games southern people play. It’s onewhere you hold your hands and run through people. Being a kid, Iwanted to play. One of them—I forget which one—ran betweenmy hands and sister Paralee. I fell down and hit my head on aporch rock. I was hurt real bad. I almost died. I had to lay flat onmy back for six weeks. I’m the one who was supposed to die. Well,here I am. That’s what makes me the most mad. I wonder if thisarthritis of the spine was caused by that. I had a big knot on myhead. A doctor took X rays of me, and told me I was in a badwreck. I was never in a bad wreck. That’s all that ever happenedto me.

They went to Birmingham, came back, and brought the teaset before they left. I never played with that tea set. Southern fam-ilies will let you in if you’re in need. That’s the way we are. Theytook advantage of that. If I saw them again, I’d tell them they werestupid, that’s what I’d say. They was nosing, sneakin’ around inbedrooms. They went under the house, crawling around. I wishhe’d got snake-bit under there. Somebody’s crazy to crawl under ahouse when folks is gone. The crazy idiots wouldn’t sleep on beds.

My father offered them a bed, but they slept on the cotton pile.

I don’t want to be splashed all over the newspapers. We triedto sue when some stories came out. The judge said we’re historicalfigures and have no right to sue. I don’t have no rights, because I’mfamous. If I’m famous, why ain’t I rich? We never got anything outof it. They never gave us any money, never sent us anything. Youcan take my picture the day when that tea set sets over my grave.

. vi.

It’s not surprising that Clair Bell didn’t want her picture taken.Evans’s original, signed photographs came to be worth many thou-sands of dollars after his death. Clair Bell once went to a show ofhis pictures in Birmingham. There was her face, bigger than life, the

tight shot of her as a wide-eyed, beautiful child. She told no one shewas the child in that photograph. She just wanted to see what it wasall about. She left after she believed that the head of the gallery be-gan staring at her, that he recognized her from the picture on thewall. She went home to a job in a textile factory that does not payin one month what the picture of her would sell for in that Birming-ham gallery.

Later, she was laid off and had no work.

The story of Agee and the Rickettses is one that deals heavilywith the practice of journalism, how one human views another andputs that impression into words.

There is no room in this volume to properly explore the role ofjournalism—indeed, there could be an entire book written on thesubject in relation to these families. Journalism practiced one daycan have an impact fifty years later.

Perhaps Mort Jordan said it best when he stated, “Walker Ev-ans later wrote that the families understood and applauded whatAgee was down there to do. It isn’t true. And now I wonder if Ageeunderstood the families any better than they understood him.”

Emma Woods later said, “He must have been drunk when hewrote it and got things mixed up. He shouldn’t have done that, nomatter how cute I thought he was. There’s a whole lot in there that’strue, and a whole lot that isn’t true. He was a mess. My goodness, Icould turn around and write a book on him.”

. vii .

In those last days before he died at age ninety on November 6, 1962,Fred Ricketts was given Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He wasnearly blind, but kept looking at Evans’s pictures. He was so happythat he was a famous man, Margaret recalls.

After he died, Margaret inherited all the land Fred bought usingthat federal government loan. That enraged her siblings. She waslater cheated out of it by a swindler. He told Margaret he wouldbuild her a new house, if she gave him most of the 120 acres. Hebuilt them a shack without plumbing, the one she lives in with Gar-vrin Arlo, and built himself a fine brick home next door. Margaretremains happy with the deal.

To most members of the family, Margaret and her son are a hub

of hate. The hate is explained on the basis of her gaining the landand not sharing it, and then giving it away, but the land is not theonly issue. The hate is by now institutionalized, sadly for Margaretand her son. The relatives cannot be entirely blamed. The memoriesare just too bitter. The way she continues to live reminds them all ofwhat they themselves were once forced to endure.

Margaret and Garvrin Arlo are starved for familial warmth andoutside friendship. In their isolation, they have been drawn to eachother. It is a curious existence. She talks, and he does not hear. Hehoots, and she smiles. Margaret dotes over her boy, treating him likea schoolchild. He returns the love with his form of care. A year afterthey were first interviewed, he was proud to have bought her a ker-osene heater to replace the wood stove, moving them one morenotch out of the 1930s. He talked about its technology for an hour.He says he is providing for his mama. He loves his mama and is nottoo shy to say so. He runs right home to her at night after work inthe chemicals factory, and she often waits up for him.

It’s true Margaret and Garvrin Arlo live in a shack withoutplumbing, but he drives a nearly new truck. He makes about $250a week at his job. It’s enough for them to spruce up the house, atleast put in a toilet, if they so chose. Garvrin Arlo’s net income ofabout $13,000 qualifies them as poor, or nearly so. But theirs is aqueer kind of self-imposed poverty. It is the way they know best.

Margaret has dealt with the early madness by simply blotting itout. She has created her own reality of the days under Fred Ricketts.She worships her father and calls him a great man. Indeed, it isstrange that many of the descendants of Fred Ricketts revere the oldman. In one breath, they condemn and whisper about his excesses,and, in the next, pledge undying love. It is probably related to howhighly southerners value loyalty, especially to superiors, to one’s fa-ther, to one’s cotton boss.

In the hearts of many, there is no room for the same forgivenesstoward Margaret. She is very near death and has seen little kindness.She and Garvrin Arlo are utterly alone. Nancy Ann, Margaret’sgranddaughter, is one of the rare ones who come to visit. Long afterthe day we first met them for this project, I made a return trip. Gar-vrin Arlo had just celebrated a birthday, and I had forgotten that wemade a loose promise the preceding year to visit on the day of theparty. “We must get together again soon” and “Let’s have lunch”are little more than social pleasantries in the urban and urbane

world. But in their world, such words really mean something. Theywere truly hurt, for no one else came—the birthday party was justthe two of them. They offered me some of their sardines, milk, andvinegar stewing on the stove. They dished out seconds and quicklyforgave the failure to show up for the party as promised. When itwas time to leave, Margaret hugged me tightly, not wanting to letgo, insisting on a promise to return and see them soon. She stood inthe door after she released her hold, her breath keen against the coldnight air.

It seemed Garvrin Arlo was doomed to a life of solitude. Whatwould he do after Margaret died? Be alone in that primitive house?He never came to find out. He was at a picnic some time later andsaw a man slap a big woman. He walked up and told the man neverto do that again. The man responded by slugging the womanstraight in the face. Bystanders had to haul Garvrin Arlo off to theside.

While Garvrin Arlo was held back, the man said, “He canprotect you all he wants, but you fat bitch, no one will take you!This is it, bitch! You’re out. You’ll have nothing. No one will takeyou in.”

Three weeks later, Garvrin Arlo and the woman were wed.

Jeannie Kay weighs well over two hundred pounds. She thoughtall men beat their wives. She had known nothing else her whole life.Garvrin Arlo would never hit her. They are happy. She moved inwith Garvrin Arlo and Margaret, insisting on fixing up the littlehouse, painting it, and having a modicum of sanitation. They livethere with Margaret, who is now bedridden most of the time, withthat Bible at her side.

Margaret was once asked how she felt about her life over thepast fifty years. The look in her eyes revealed that she understoodthe true question: How is it that you have continued over fifty yearsto be as poor as you were at the beginning? Some people start poorand work their way up. Others make money along the way but arewasteful and end up in poverty. But you have been consistently poor,through depression, three wars, the end of the cotton South, eco-nomic expansion and dislocation, through the War on Poverty andthe surrender to it, through the Reagan years and their let-the-devil-take-the-hindmost attitude.

“I’m rich-poor,” she said. “You see, I got my son. I got myBible. That’s all I need. I don’t treasure nothin’ on earth.”

. viii .

Outside the Ricketts home, rotting and rusting, is the horse-drawncotton seeder they used on Hobe’s Hill and, later, on their farmdown by the river. The Ricketts family last planted cotton in 1963.Garvrin Arlo tried to continue the farm one season after his fatherdied, but the world had finally caught up to small farmers like them.

The cotton-price-support program that propped up small farm-ers was at its nadir in 1963, a great scandal of a failure in what ithad done to the American cotton industry. In 1965, the governmentabandoned artificial price setting and started direct payments tofarmers, letting the market dictate the price of cotton. The new mar-ket conditions encouraged growers to get larger and larger—the dayof the small cotton farmer was closing. That made inevitable the factthat mechanized western growers on large open tracts would cometo dominate cotton growing. By the 1970s, the U.S. cotton markethad stabilized, and most production was in Texas and California.This nation’s share of the world market settled at a steady 18 per-cent, says the Cotton Council. The crop was grown totally bymachine.

In 1930, it took 270 hours of labor to produce a bale of cotton.Today, thanks to the cotton-picking machine and other improve-ments, it takes 23. Alabama was left behind in the technologicalrush.

It was hard on Garvrin Arlo those first years after cotton. Herecalls,

For a while I was traveling pickin’ up work here’n yonder ande’where else—North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, then farmwork down here. Shoot, I worked that about four year straight.

In 1977, he landed what he feels is the best job he’s ever had, ina nearby chemicals factory. He is essentially an expendable humanmule, lifting two fifty-pound sacks of toxic chemical onto a con-veyor belt each minute, sometimes fifteen hours a day.

I’m baggin’. Resin. I’m the fastest bagger they got there. Most’mcan’t keep up with it. Everybody’s tryin’ to get a job makin’ whatI’m makin’. I’m makin’ six-forty an hour. It’s fair, but not fair forthe danger to your health. There’s a fella, he retired up there. Hehad ’bout nineteen year. Shoot. No, twenny year. He done got

twenny year and retired. He lived ’bout six months. Cancer. It’snothin’ they can really prove. I’m not gonna stay there no twennyyear. I might stay fifteen.

This is the world the introduction of the cotton picker openedup to the Rickettses.

Slowly the benefits of a changing economy did reach formercotton tenants, even if it meant jobs like that of bagging resin. AfterWorld War II, jobs in rural areas such as the one-time cotton landswere on the upswing. The poverty rate in these areas dropped dra-matically from 1945 to 1973.

But then it reversed and started climbing, until it far surpassedthe rate for urban areas. At last count, eighteen million people inrural areas across the nation were considered below the povertyline—that is, one out of every five rural families—according to thePopulation Reference Bureau. Many in this book have been affectedby a meat-packing plant closing in Cherokee City and by textilefactories’ cutting back their work force.

The trend is worsening, especially for blacks: in 1979, some 46percent of young black families in the rural South were poor. Sevenyears later, the figure grew to 68 percent. There seem to be few cor-porate managers willing to go into the rural areas to create jobs, foreither blacks or whites.

Those few jobs that pay more than the minimum are often haz-ardous for the former cotton farmers. As Rust feared, the new ruralSouth has not been kind to many former tenant farmers, some ofwhom find themselves inadequate to the task of dealing with thenew dangers it presents. Within the three families, it seems that adisproportionate number have died or been maimed in car wrecks,industrial accidents, and freak occurrences, as if they had an inher-ited inability to deal with modern machines and the modern world.This is admittedly just an impression, and it is not offered as statis-tically compelling. A proper analysis of the pattern to see whether itindeed differs from the frequency of these occurrences in the popu-lation at large to a statistically significant degree is beyond this au-thor’s mandate and ability. Still, for whatever it’s worth, here’s aquick rundown of some: in the Woods family, one boy was blownup when an engine exploded on the barge he worked on, one boywas killed in a car wreck, and a girl was maimed in a car wreck, aswere a man and another woman; among the Rickettses, one mancut himself open by accident with a chain saw and died, and one

180 And Their Children . . .

boy was killed by a car; in the Gudger family, a brother was killedby a car, one boy was maimed in a wreck, one husband drowned,another husband was killed in a truck wreck, and so on.

Most of the cotton landlords would be happy if people werestill picking cotton by hand today, living under the old rules. Muchbitterness is expressed by former cotton landlords in rural Alabama.More than several of those interviewed felt theirs would still be aKing Cotton region if it weren’t for “them civil rights that caused usto lose our labor.” They blame civil rights because blacks were thelast to be freed from tenantry. Not one landlord interviewed everpointed to machines that put the region, with its small farms, at acompetitive disadvantage. When they’re not blaming the civil rightsmovement, they blame welfare, for causing their former help to be-come lazy and not want to work.

Welfare was not a cause of cotton’s downfall; it was a result.Continued dependence on welfare could have been minimized. Thetime to act was after the 1965 farm bill was passed that cut subsi-dies.

Paul Good said of that bill, in a 1966 article in the Atlantic,

Farmers, brokers, merchants, textile mills, and even the U.S. tax-payers are expected to benefit. Mississippi officials project a figureof 30,000 persons displaced in 1966. Yet in all the multibillion-dollar cotton legislation, not one cent was earmarked for workerrelief, relocation, or retraining!

Welfare was not easily accepted by southern bureaucrats. NewYork Times reporter Walter Rugaber found in 1967 that Mississippifailed to take advantage of $75 million in federal Welfare aid. Ru-gaber reported the situation the same across 'most of the cottonstates. The commissioner of welfare in Alabama said he was op-posed to welfare because it tended to make people “irresponsible.”

Many former cotton tenants could have benefited from trainingor otherwise been helped through a transition to a better life, to bemade productive in modern America. Instead, they were cast off andignored.

Of course, for the poorest and most backward of the familiesstill on or near the land, no government program could have donemuch to change things. It’s hard to imagine how any program couldhave altered the fate of Margaret and Garvrin Arlo. The governmentcould not have forced Garvrin Arlo and Margaret into a lifestyle

Ricketts 181

they did not want. In the 1960s, the goal was to end poverty for alltime. It was a noble goal, but some people just don’t want to besaved. At any rate, the Rickettses would not take anything thatsmacked of charity. No one in the Ricketts family is on welfare or,as far as has been determined, ever was on welfare. It’s a commonmistake to assume that those who live in shacks must be on the dole.However poorly they may be living, some people, such as the Rick-ettses, find welfare repugnant. If any job at all is made available tothem, they will take the job and perform its duties with blind fervor,no matter how they may be exploited in the job.

On first impression, it would be easy to laugh off people likeMargaret and Garvrin Arlo. It is even easier to be repulsed by them.But after visiting them over three years, one can plainly see theywere forced to devise their own survival plan in the face of mortalthreats, and who really has a right to say that they ought to havedevised some more elegant way to save themselves? The antics ofGarvrin Arlo are a defense. He calms down after he becomes famil-iar with people, and he is a genuinely honest man who would doany favor asked of him.

In absolute contradiction to what one would expect, the Rick-ettses are probably happier than those in the Woods or Gudger fam-ilies and than many upscale young Americans. When it is mentionedthat they have not attained the “good life”—that is, the materialtrappings of well-being—it must be considered that they also lackthe pressures of maintaining such a lifestyle. When Margaret saysshe is “rich-poor,” who can argue with her statement?

WOODS

. i.

It was raining hard the night of January 27, 1976, and Emma wasafraid, because lightning flashes filled her room, and thunder shookthe house. It was very late, but she could not sleep, because of thestorm and because it was a special day. So she put a pen to her diary.

Well to day is my birthday. I am 60 years old. How about that.

Now that seems like a long time ago. But sometimes I get to think-ing back and it dont seem long at all. I can soon get on the oldaged pension. That is if I live long enough. And I am just lonsomand I just write to have something to think about. I read the Biblea long time. I am lying across the bed all by my little self the Bibleon one side and my diary on the other. Damon gave it to me forChristmas. He didnt know it would mean so mutch to me whenmy heart is heavy and when I am so lonsom and feel so all alone.

The time before Emma wrote this had been one of mixed for-tunes. Six months earlier, she’d suffered a crushing personal loss, thedeath of her only son. On the bright side, her long journey from thecotton fields was about to yield a dream she’d dearly held for manyyears—the purchase of her very own home. It was a little house onthe east side of Cherokee City, its age about equal to hers, and shewas going to buy it with her son-in-law, Warren, who was marriedto Ruby, the daughter whose heart condition had long worriedEmma. Warren was a long-distance truck driver, often on the road,and Emma worried about Ruby’s being alone. The three had livedtogether for many years. The plan was that they would all continueliving together.

Emma had long since adjusted to city life and much preferredit to the hard existence that had to be coaxed and scratched off theland. With the help of a state employee charged with the rehabilita-tion of people whose poor health no longer enabled them to do theirformer work, Emma had moved to the city about fifteen years earlierand found work in a nursing home, her first nonfarm job ever.

From the beginning, Lonnie had little patience for the idea thatEmma might be happier off the farm than on it and expressed hisoutrage at her giving up cotton. Whatever it was that Emma learnedabout herself when she went to the city and got away from share-cropping, her husband neither liked nor understood.^.

This man whom James Agee loathed had turned out to be justthe kind of husband the writer had predicted he would be, andEmma had indeed spent years of cold and hopeless nights with him.In these later years, when he felt he was finally losing his grip on“his” woman, the level of his anger rose.

As he became more furious, Lonnie actually started makingthreats on Emma’s life. He even went so far as to put his threats ina letter to the police, apparently believing that they would be sym-pathetic to a man so driven to distraction by the refusal of his wifeto mind him that he was contemplating killing her. Emma says thatshe had never considered divorce, but now, with the policeconfirming for her what others had told her, she had no choice. Andshe believes that he continued to keep a girlfriend through thisperiod.

The last straw may have been his suggestion that she feign in-ability to work in her new job, so that she could get full disabilitypay and still be available for whatever Lonnie wanted her to do with

her time. When Emma vetoed the scheme, Lonnie became abusive.The way she looks at it, it was he who abandoned the marriage, notshe.

Quite naturally, Lonnie saw it differently. He blamed all theirtroubles on the move to the city and the new influences on Emma.Cotton enabled him to control his wife. In this new and strangeenvironment, free of bondage to a crop, Emma gained new strength,and Lonnie was unable to stop what he viewed as her insolence. Inletters he wrote to the judge hearing his case, he hints that it ispeople like Mrs. Clayton, Emma’s employer through this period,who must share the blame for what has happened to his marriage.On May 27, 1965, he wrote,

To the honorable judge in equaty Circuit Court Cherokee CityAla

Your honor. I want to state to you my side of the devorce suitagainst me. My wife Emma was a good and faithfull wife andmother up untill she went to work at Oak Knoll Nursing Home.

She gave all of her time, all of her talant, all of her love and devo-tion to the home. She gave me a devorce then. She neglected herchildren. And me. She had not time for home, husband, or chil-dren. Mrs. Clayton assured her of a home, a job, and security ifshe would get rid of me. And she began to make my life just asmiserable as could be. She did not drive me away in so manywords, but by her actions toward me. . . . The woman that is nowseeking to destroy me is a different woman than is the mother offive children. ... I have been treated about as dirty as a man couldbe treated. She posed as a friend to the wife of the man sheis devorcing me to marry. She is two faced a cheat and a liear.

God pity the man when he gets down and disable as 1 did tosatisfye her.

On June 5, 1965, Lonnie wrote,

Judge: your honor,

I am makeing a plea and praying that your honor will con-sider my status as is now existing and has been in existence forsome four years or more. Due to an accident while employed byState Highway Department as a carpenter, 1 was in StonehedgeCity Hospital for some 45 days or more and underwent surgery. Iwas totaly disable to do any work for a year or more . . . and wassolely dependent upon my wife Emma for support. But she fell inlove with another man who she is devorceing me to marry. I am

asking your honor to make some provision for my welfare in grant-ing the devorce which she is asking on false accusation.

Like many abusive husbands, Lonnie saw those who counseledhis wife to stand up for her rights as provocateurs, and he could notpass up the opportunity to excoriate Mrs. Clayton for her role inthis:

All of this deal I am getting Mrs. J.C. Clayton, supervisor of theOak Knoll Nursing Home was well aware of, and was very muchin favor of my wife getting rid of me in some way.

He closed his letter:

I thank you your honor for reading my plea. I will soon be 69 yearsof age looseing my wife to another man. Alone. Throwed awayforsaken.

Emma’s divorce was granted on June 22, 1965.

This apparently freed her to make a life with someone else. Shewas not yet fifty years old, but still haunted by her old guilty feel-ings. The man Lonnie claimed was her lover was nothing more thana friend at the time of the divorce; he later came around asking formarriage, but Emma refused, because, like Lonnie, he had been mar-ried before.

You see I lived 33 years with a man that had a living wife.

But he told me that he had that reson to put her away but I havewondered about that a lot. I have never said this before but the onetime I married I married a man that had a living wife. And I havethought so many times is that why we never prospered.

As for Lonnie after the divorce, Emma says, “He stayed madfor a while. But after a while he came back arond and we was thebest of friends. He ask me to take him back a few times.”

Several years later, Lonnie was admitted to Stonehedge Cityhospital, suffering from heart disease, which was exacerbated byasthma, bronchitis, and emphysema. Emma was not a hard personand helped make his last days easier.

I was taking care of an old Lady and she fell and got hurt 2weeks befor Lonnie died so they was on the same floor at the hos-pitle. So I got to be arond him them 2 weeks. I would go and feedhim. The day befor he died he laughed and said we should go back

together. We cant live with out each other. So we laughed and Imade him set up in bed and I rub his back.

The next day every chance 1 got I would go and see abouthim. ... I know he was going away. So I call his mama and helooked at me. I ran after a nurce. She said Lonnie will pull out. Isaid not this time. ... I hurryed back to him and tuck his hand inmine. He looked at me. I just prayed that the children would getthere. Sister just made it and I think Missy was a few minutes lateand the others came as soon as they got the word. I fed him lastand I held his hand until he was gone. Fed him about 4 and he diedat 6.45.

Lonnie died on November 17, 1972. He was seventy-six. Emmasays,

After all I was with him at the end. We had lots of up anddowns. I loved him but I always look up to him kindly like a DadyI think.

. ii .

Emma’s children had grown and prospered. Judith and her husbandbecame the most successful, running their own auto repair shop afew blocks from Emma’s house. Sonny had two children and wasworking as a riverboatman on the Mississippi. He worked with Ju-dith’s son, who was just entering the trade. Riverboats pushed cargodown to the gulf ports—barges of ore and timber, and coal that hadbeen strip-mined from the hills, the products of highest value com-ing out of the rural South. These jobs pay well and are difficult toget. They do require being away from home for two and three weeksat a time, and they involve some danger.

On September 20, 1975, a boiler exploded on Sonny’s boat,killing him.

Again, Emma wondered if God was punishing her. She had justvisited Sonny in Greenville, Mississippi.

We cant understand why these things has to happen so quick.

He was so big and healthy we thought and he went away like acandle blowed out or at least that is what we was told. But as forknowing we dont. I ask my self what did he think about last. . . .

And then he lay on the floor of that old boat burnt up and me heresleeping in my bed of ease. I wont never get over that. He had to

die all by his self. And the way he had to go is killing me. He wasso afraid of fire. He never liked for me to even burn trash in theyard. He was a sweet old boy to his mama and he knew that. Myheart is broke in a way that it will never heal. A part of it is in thegrave with my Sonny. God have mercy on us.

Emma wrote this a few months after Sonny’s death, duringChristmas of 1975. Then she remained silent about Sonny in herdiary until the following September. The loss of Sonny was particu-larly painful for Emma, and she had to rely on her faith to get herthrough the ordeal, her only consolation being the hope that theywould all eventually be reunited:

Sonny I read in a book the other day that when we wake upfrom the dead that we will look like we did when we went to sleepand have the same tone of voice and if we do what you going tosay? Good morning Mama—ore will you say hi Emma. What youdoing there, now that is what I am looking for you to say to methe very first thing and I will be so glad to see you. I can allmostsee us now. I want to be right close to him and put my arms arondhim and say Hi Sonny. Of corse I want all the rest of them to bethere to and I want us all to set down and just have a happy re-union. And Lonnie will say Hi Baby. All 4 girls be there. All theson in laws. And the Grand children and Mama and Dady. AndDawn be there to. Oh ever body. Not just mine. Then we all willbe hapy holding hands. I just want to take my little bunch and rundown to the river and gather arond them every green trees and justsing and prase God for ever and ever and then we wont have abroken heart. And there wont be no more tears.

In a poem, she expresses her desires for this place:

Just sing and playAnd be so happyJust see all themSmiles We wont getTird we wont hurtAny more we canGet out breath goodAnd clearThank God forThe hope he hasGiven us

Thank you GodThank you God

When I get to thinking about it I cant hardly waite. This life hasben kindly rugged here. I have never seen to mutch happines. Myroad has ben pretty bumpy. The happyest part was when I wastrying to bring my children up and I thought I done the best Icould. I dont know. But Mama tried.

The forty years since Emma had left the tall, dark stranger fromthe North standing in front of her brother’s house and gone off toraise cotton and a family with Lonnie had not been easy ones forher. There had been Lonnie’s periodic absences, and the many sea-sons she had been forced to work the cotton alone, with only thehelp of the little ones. There had been sickness, Ruby’s, hers, andLonnie’s. And now, when the family had finally broken free of cot-ton and she looked forward to her last years surrounded by herloving children, one had been torn from her in an ugly and seem-ingly senseless accident. But the human spirit is indomitable, andEmma was a survivor if nothing else. Over time, her diaries came tointroduce a new feeling:

Now I feel kindly alone. For a long time I looked for something real good to happen to me. Like a little home. A pretty yardof flowers and a garden. Even some chickens. And a good someone to be with to laugh and talk with. When things was good andwhen these trubles and heart akes come about some one to understand me and help me throu them. And let me be the same way tothat some one.

I found a some one that I love so very mutch. Some one thatunderstands me. We see so mutch alike. I belive we would behappy. Of corse it wouldnt be for such a long time for natchur tellsus so for now I am 60 years old. He is 67. But for some reson wedont have the chance we need.

Emma was in love again. Her man’s name was Bill.

. Hi.

In 1986, Emma lived in the house she’d bought with Ruby and War-ren. They’d been there about ten years.

The house has one story, with a foundation of brick, narrowsideboards painted white, windows trimmed in blue. It has no gut-ters but wide overhangs at the roof.

There is the obligatory porch and a screen door that opens intoa small living room, but not all the way, because it strikes an over-stuffed chair where Emma often sits. Across the room is a couchwhere Ruby always sits. Both will sit wordless in this room forhours, often doing nothing more than reclining with hands claspedat the waist, but one is uncomfortable if the other is absent. At threeo’clock, one will rise to turn on the television, the large console typepopular in the 1960s, to a favorite soap opera. Unlike many othersin the three families, Emma and Ruby have not embraced videotapes, stereos, or microwaves.

It’s a house that deceives. At first, it appears wealthier than itreally is because of the care put into it. It’s clean and organized;everything has a place. It takes several visits and a close eye to noticethe torn linoleum hidden by a strategically placed couch and thefrayed couch arms veiled by crocheted doilies.

In the center of a shelf is a heavily geared clock that goes aboutits business loudly, flanked by two dancing horses. The bedroomcontains family pictures—Emma with her sister, Annie MaeGudger; the Walker Evans portrait of their father, Bud Woods. Thelargest picture, a color photograph so faded that the skin is nowblue, is of Sonny. It is in a frame of gold that stands alone on thedresser. It is the picture they placed on the casket at his funeral.

James Agee devoted much of his book to the houses of thesepeople he was studying. The dwellings had something to say aboutthem then, and their homes have something to say about themtoday.

The old-time slope-roof shacks of the tenant variety are vanish-ing. One day soon, the last of them will be gone. As they burn orare pushed over, the preferred dwelling to replace them has been thehouse trailer. Trailers are more popular in the South than in otherregions and have been gaining in the total share of its housing stock,according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the 1980 census, 8 percentof the total number of the one and a half million Alabama homeswere trailers, compared with 4 percent in California and 2 percentin Illinois.

A slight majority of the descendants of the three families Ageewrote about live in trailers. A small minority still live in shacks; afew more than this, in fine suburban homes. In quality and marketvalue, the house Emma lives in lies between the house trailers andmodern city homes.

The most impressive middle-class home among those associatedwith the families belongs to Emma’s daughter Judith. Sonny Gudger,the youngest boy of George and Annie Mae, the one who is now inthe jewelry business, must also be said to have a fine home, judgingby the value of its contents.

The prize for the worst dwelling does not go to Margaret andher son Garvrin Arlo. It falls instead to Ethel, the wife of the lateBuddy Woods, who was the three-year-old naked little boy in the1936 Walker Evans photograph of the Woods family. Ethel lives ina shack that rents for ten dollars a month and has no electricity, norunning water. In thousands of miles of travel across the rural South,blacks were often found occupying such dwellings; it’s rare to findwhites in such “little country homes,” the preferred euphemismwhen whites occupy them.

Poor to middle-poor whites prefer mobile homes. These mobilehomes come in many kinds and styles, but they are generally definedas “single-wide” or “double-wide.” As one would guess, the double-wides are twice as wide as the single-wides. These homes are any-thing but mobile—they are intended to be moved only occasionallyand in practice are as immobile as a sharecropper shack or tracthouse.

As they age, they become tight little boxes of pitted aluminumthat burn hot in the sun. As families have grown, some have builtverandas supported on poles; others have tacked on porches onwhich to sit out and rock; others yet, wooden lean-tos. '

The daughter of Emma’s stepsister, Ellen Woods, lives in asingle-wide bought secondhand for $3,500. A new single-wide goesfor something like $10,000, only a fraction of the cost of a newframe home, and therein lies the practical attraction of trailers. It’sa dream among many to get themselves a nice double-wide someday, cash paid out.

Some of the double-wides, such as the one lived in by Gretchen,are nicer than a person who has never been inside one might imag-ine. They feature pressed foam made to look like carved wood, car-peting, air-conditioning, and good heat, but are far less durable thaneven the old shacks. Some floors shake with the burden of heavysteps. They are easily victimized by storms. It is a joke in newsroomsthat trailers attract tornadoes—the proof is that when a twisterstrikes, news photographers run to the trailer parks for the best pic-tures after the storm. Some who know the vulnerability of these

structures have storm pits nearby. The trailer-dwelling Gudgers haveone of these pits. They learned about them in their youth, when theylived in a sharecropper shack, but the pits are even more necessarywhen one lives in a trailer.

. iv .

Work centered on cotton and ruled the lives of all within the threefamilies in 1936. Today, the jobs held by the descendants old enoughto work are varied. Though none have jobs as grueling as that ofgrowing cotton, most work at jobs that require hard work and longhours. Debbie, Maggie Louise’s daughter, is a manager, and NancyAnn, the Ricketts grandchild, is a secretary, but the few among thedescendants who have such managerial or white-collar positions areoutnumbered by those who have jobs that still require back power,long hours behind the steering wheels of trucks, on the decks ofships, on factory assembly lines, in textile mills. These are a peoplebuilt for working, and they have adjusted to the new labor patternsof the rural South.

Warren, the husband of Ruby, is seldom home with Ruby andEmma, for he is on the road about three out of every four weeks. Inseveral years of visits, we never found him home, and he soonseemed suspiciously like a creation of Emma and Ruby. Then oneday we found him in the living room of the house he had boughtwith Emma, sitting in the overstuffed chair. His right black cowboyboot had a quarter-size hole worn through on the side, where theleather of the boot must rest against the gas pedal. He has eyes thatare recessed, as if they have evolved in that certain way to allow himto watch the road for hours on end with a minimum of strain.

Warren, who started in cotton with his father, talked aboutwork and about his journey from being a cotton farmer to being atrucker:

I was in cotton with my daddy. My daddy worked on halves.I always said when I was a kid that I wrasn’t going to be no farmer.I was going to drive a truck. I’d make my own trucks out of piecesof wood. Farming was a good life but it was hard work. You didn’thave no time off. All you did was work. The man you worked forgot one-half of you.

I was a farmer until 1951, down in Cookstown, when I went

into the service. I got out in 1953. I applied for a job. The manasked if I could drive a truck. I never did. I didn’t know it hadmore than one gear. I said yes. He said I had the job. Then I hadto drive the truck out of there, and you shoulda seen me. But Ididn’t get fired.

There wasn’t too much trucking then. It was just local haul-ing. Two years later, I went on the road. I have been to thirty-eightstates.

His first truck, he recalls, was a KB7 1947 International, a “gasburner.” He remembers every truck he has ever driven for pay. Heno longer does the local runs; most of the miles he puts in now arein the Midwest and the East. The week before, he had been to Cin-cinnati and Chicago. The next day he was to leave for Florida. He’snot entirely happy with how things have worked out for him as atrucker, but he has too much time invested to be able to changethings now:

Truckers used to be real respectable. Now, I hate to tell any-body I drive a truck. People now think truckers are low-class.

People think of dope when they think of truckers. Go sit at mosttruck stops for fifteen minutes, and watch what goes on. You turnyour radio on, and hear guys asking for dope, coke, hot parts,hollering for women. People think all truckers is that way. We gotsome nasty people out there. There’s more people now. The roadsare bigger. Freight is cheaper. There ain’t much money in it. Morepeople is saying I’m hanging it up. It’s a bad life, being out thereby yourself. Times come when you don’t want to go. It’s not a lifefor a married man. I don’t think I could do anything else. I got ninemore years to go.

. v .

The road south from Cherokee City is not a modern freeway, for theneeds of commerce and a sparse population in this part of Alabamahave not created a demand for one. The road tramps for two hoursthrough forests and occasional towns, finally arriving in Jefferson, acity with fifty storefronts, six gas stations, a hamburger joint. Thisis where most of the descendants of Bud Woods’s family by his sec-ond wife have settled.

Lulla, the first wife of Bud Woods, seems to have been respon-sible for instilling a special kindliness, sensitivity, and hope into her

children. These traits were passed on to Annie Mae Gudger andEmma, then to their children, especially to Annie Mae’s MaggieLouise, and then to the next generation, including her Debbie andthe others. A comparison of these descendants of Bud Woods andLulla with those who came out of his later marriage to Ivy isstartling.

Ivy died at one in the morning, on June 16, 1971, of a heartattack. She was sixty-five. The boys from her marriage with BudWoods were wastrels. Marion reached adulthood and lived off oddjobs. He married a heavy woman-child with a disease that ate herskeleton. They had a son, but Marion left wife and child early tobecome a wino roaming the streets of Mobile. He died homeless inthe summer of 1986, suffering from both tuberculosis and cancer.Marion’s son hates his father and plans to change his name fromWoods when he turns eighteen.

Buddy, who was three in 1936, worked dairy farms for twenty-eight years. He lived above honky-tonks and died one year beforeMarion, of a heart attack. He was an alcoholic who beat his chil-dren on his frequent binges and forced them to drink, says his wife,Ethel, so the county took the children away and put them in fosterhomes. The two oldest sons have just moved back home to Chero-kee City. They are in their twenties, one a mechanic and the other alaborer.

In The Human Geography of the South, Rupert B. Vance sumsup the attitude of many toward those whose worst sin was beingborn to the wrong parents: “In mountain parlance the povertystricken fall into three classes. There are the Lord’s poor, destituteby misfortune; the devil’s poor, stranded by their own follies; andpoor devils from worthless stock who never were nor could be oth-erwise.”

In terms of these categories, Ellen, the infant child of Bud andIvy Woods in 1936, must be classified as someone destitute by mis-fortune.

It was an evening when we first visited her, and she looked thatnight the same as she did on another evening several years later,when we bid her a final good-bye. She is on the porch of her single-wide, where she is always found, in a rocker, the timeless image ofa southern woman on her porch. One eye is fallen and her face issoft, lost to the senses of this world in the magic that is Alabamaporch evenings. Her good eye moves on the approach of visitors.

“Are you Ellen?” we ask.“What’s left of her.”

. vi.

Ellen does not live far from her stepsister Pearl, who is a child notof Bud Woods, but of Ivy from an earlier relationship. When BudWoods died, Ivy decided to come live closer to Pearl and persuadedEllen to come along with her. Ellen, between husbands at that time,had young children to care for and came along with her mother. Shenever did get along with Pearl, however. When Pearl changed hername to Ruth Ann, Ellen was the sister who enjoyed teasing her bypersisting in calling her Pearl.

Ellen is a pleasant woman, whose children lead lives that standin contrast to those lived by Ivy’s other grandchildren. Everyonespeaks kindly of Ellen. Neighborhood children call her aunt. Ellenloves the world and finds fault with no one but Pearl.

Ellen was married four times. Perhaps she was looking for herfather in her men. But the children of these men, as well as her ownchildren, loved her, and in them she found her role, somehow savingthem from the terrible influences to which they were subjected. Shemarried her second husband because she fell in love with his chil-dren. She had two girls of her own and three boys. One died longago in a car wreck, and she wishes God had taken her instead.

At the time we first interviewed Ellen, she was with her fourthhusband. The man had moved in his stepson and the stepson’s wife.During that first visit, this son’s wife came home, moving her obesebody up the stairs of the porch. Her puppy was in front of the door,and this woman kicked it broadside out of the way, slamming thedoor behind her. She often screamed at Ellen. On a later visit, welearned Ellen had finally decided it was better to be alone than putup with that and had divorced the man. She is alone now but thehappiest she has ever been.

Pearl, by the accounts of Ellen and other family members, triedto assume a new identity after she fled Cherokee City. She changedher name after arriving in Jefferson, afraid that the man with theknife and salami might come down to Jefferson asking after her.

Pearl’s son, Bobby, has had several marriages. He has left thearea and no one I talked to in the family knows where he is.

I approached Pearl for an interview. She answered the door of

her home, filling the entry with her six-foot-two frame. Her face hadturned from the soft beauty of youth to something that would havebeen unrecognizable from Walker Evans’s picture—tight, full ofemotion. It was a tense conversation.

Mere mention of the 1940s caused her to fly into an awesomefit, nearly shouting, so it seemed unwise if not inappropriate to pressfor details about her life.

“You don’t see no disgrace,” she said. “There’s no scandal. Ithink you better leave it alone!”

A year later, when we again approached for another interview,she screamed, slamming the door. So her side of what happened wasnot heard.

In most matters, Ellen tries to be a forgiving woman who looksforward, not back, trying to find the best in any situation. The roadto her hatred of Pearl came in late 1976, on an afternoon when Ellenand her daughter Diane were coming up the highway south of Jef-ferson. It’s a stretch of blacktop flanked by a swamp and trees hungheavy with Spanish moss. Ellen was driving. The car was bobbingin the many dips at a smart speed. At the top of one hill, a loggingtruck dodged a dog that came into its driver’s path and crossed overinto their lane. There was nowhere for them to go. The impactcrushed the side of Ellen’s car, pinning her in the rush of sparks andmetal. The car landed in the swamp. The medics who arrived lookedat Ellen, bloody and motionless, and gave her up for dead. Theypulled Diane from the wreckage. Then they detected life in Ellen andworked her free. Doctors told the family she would not live, butEllen found some way to hang on. She remained in intensive carefor months, in a coma, her life precarious the whole time. Duringthis period, Pearl called Ellen’s half sister Emma in Cherokee Cityand said Ellen was bleeding on the inside.

When Ellen overcame that, the same doctors said she would beparalyzed and have no brain function left. She again proved themwrong. First, she regained her mind. She began crawling, later walk-ing. It took years to reclaim the use of her body. She is limp on herleft side, but otherwise seems to show few effects. She has an occa-sional seizure, but the last one was several years ago. The settlementmoney from the accident paid for a trailer for her to live in. Therewas a little left over, which her last two husbands tried to take, butthey were thwarted by court orders obtained by her daughter Diane.

At the time of the accident, Ellen’s youngest daughter, Mary

Lee, was still a minor. Mary Lee had been born premature andweighed only two pounds, fourteen ounces. She had to undergomany operations to repair her underformed bones, so her childhoodwas one of pain. Ellen doted on and sheltered this daughter, therebyextending her childhood. Mary Lee was in her teens when the acci-dent occurred, but was like a small child.

At the time of the accident, Ellen’s third husband had left, andMary Lee had no one to care for her. Diane was too young in thisperiod to help and had her arms full with a new baby. Aunt Pearlseemed a likely choice.

Pearl stepped in, taking guardianship of Mary Lee. For almostthe next decade, Mary Lee lived with her. Little is known aboutthose years except that Mary Lee remembers doing a lot of house-work and many of the tedious chores; it also appears that duringthat time she almost never saw her relatives or boys. Pearl was giventhe support money for Mary Lee and essentially raised her.

Inside Pearl’s house, Mary Lee sat nearby, mistrustful but curi-ous. Other family members in the north of Alabama had mentionedthis “retarded” daughter, but the girl we saw responded in ways thatsuggested she was not retarded; indeed, she seemed brighter thanPearl.

Even after Ellen’s survival became first a possibility and then alikelihood, Ellen, it seems didn’t reclaim Mary Lee from Pearl. Atfirst she remained in the hospital, undergoing therapy, and could notphysically reassert control over Mary Lee’s life. Indeed, for morethan half a dozen years, Ellen was simply in no position to intervene,and by the time she was well enough to do so, Mary Lee was anadult.

About a year after we had first seen Mary Lee, she decided onher own to leave Pearl. As Mary Lee describes it, Pearl either sug-gested or in some more direct way communicated to her that sheshould not attend her own father’s funeral. She rebelled, runningaway to her sister Diane’s. A week later, she was in the living roomof Diane’s trailer, chain-smoking cigarettes. Pearl, she commented,had not allowed her to smoke.

Away from Pearl, Mary Lee seemed a different person.Clearly,Diane had been right all along, in insisting that Mary Lee was notretarded. Although Mary Lee spoke of the authoritarian rule shehad lived under in Pearl’s house, she clearly was looking forwardand not back. She talked with real excitement about life and its fu-

ture possibilities. In one area, however, Mary Lee clung stubbornlyto a view from her past. She said she would never marry.

A year later, however, Mary Lee was both married and makingup handsomely for the missing decade in her life. She had wed a truck-driver of Indian descent and was living in a nearby town. They hadfirst met as teenagers. He is gentle and understands the events in herlife.

Ellen is content, knowing that her daughter is now away fromPearl.

. vii.

Forty years after Emma’s flirtation with Agee, she was still lookingfor love. About to enter her seventh decade, she thought 1976 mightbe the last year she was going to have a real chance of finding it. Shewas dating her Bill, scratching for moments they could go out forsupper together and have long talks.

Her diary records the tensions in the relationship in this periodwhen she was grieving the loss of her son, as well as the joys therelationship brought her:

He tells me he loves me and I believe he does. And I know Ilove him. He has asked me to marrie him more than once. We haveso many times have wanted to get married but... we cant see howwe can do it. He loves my children. I dont know his. I have seenone of his girls a lot. I like her.

So Dear Aby what do you think will ever happen to us.

Signed Allice in Wonder Land.

By 1976, they had been seeing each other for three years. By heraccount, it was a tumultuous relationship—Bill’s long work hoursand Ruby’s sickness, which kept Emma home many nights, madeit difficult for them to see each other. Bill wanted marriage. ButEmma’s old tensions about religion made her stop short of sayingyes—she believed God had punished her for marrying the divorcedLonnie, and she felt that her wedding the twice-married Bill wouldincur even greater wrath.

I realy dont think that God wants me to love Bill, for you seehe has already ben married twice and both of his wifes is still livingnow. I have prayed hard for God to lead me the right way. . . .

I believe that is one of the bigest sin going on today is

ADULTER. So many people gets married and dont really love eachother and the way I see it they are not married. They are by thelaw of the people but they are not in the sight of God. For God islove.

I had a chance with him and I wanted very mutch to take it.

But I was afraid to. And now I can and will tell the reson. I didntwant to live the rest of my life in Adultry for I just couldnt belivethat both of his wives comited fornication. But now he did not saythat they did. But any way the Bible tells us if we put them awayfor other reson and marry again that we do commit adultry and hecomanded us not to do that. Now you might say that is old fogybut it is in the Bible.

This late in life, Emma was more uncertain of what love was,anyway. It is the curse of each generation to agonize, to rememberthe excitement of first love, that feeling of being unable to live with-out someone; that first pain is like no other to follow. By the second,third, and fourth love and beyond, the calluses grow; we are dulled,we wonder if it exists, if it has eluded us, and why. Many of us inour youth think we have the answer, only to find new realities as weage. Emma thought she was in love with Fred Bungy, a good-lookingboy from her youth. He was a navy man whom all the girls wanted.She confesses that she dreamed about him through thirty-three yearsof her marriage to Lonnie, until one day she finally ran into him. Itwas a shock.

And I would have never known him any more. He looked aful. Istill cant belive he is the man I thought I loved so dearly.

And so Emma found the answer, that for some childhood dep-rivations, for some lives lived in hope, a quest for love is not theanswer; maybe there is no answer. This truth was really at the heartof so many of her problems:

I am going to stop writing now. I may never write any more aboutthis. But good people I just want to say this. I think what I havemissed has ben a mothers tender love. I think that is the reson thatI have looked for something that I have never ben able to find.

The summer of 1976 wore on, and Emma’s relationship withBill continued at the same pace. Ruby was frequently in the hospitalthat summer, and Emma felt she had to spend a lot of time with her

Woods 199

daughter. This added to the tension with Bill and made it impossiblefor her to see him on weekends. There was another falling out, andEmma did not see Bill most of August, though her entries tell us shethought about him more often than she might have wanted to.

With all my heart 1 have tried real hard to stop loving himbut that is one love I cant shack a loose. But I am better than I wasthe first time he showed his ass with me. The first time it liked tohave run me nuts. You see he wont just go and get out of my life.

He will always call me. Tell me he knows he has done wrong buthe loves me. If he loved me he wouldnt do these things that heknows hurts me. I havent done him wrong. But every time he doesme wrong 1 catch him. . . .

We have ask one another just why couldnt we have met a longtime ago. We have set and talked about God and we have set andtalked about dieing so many times. We have went to church to-gether not just once. We have laughed and we have cryed together.

There was nothing I wouldnt tell him and he would tell me any-thing. We was just to close not to be man and wife. Now it is hardto give all these thing up. But I still say God will be done not mine.

But I am lonly. . . .

The next entry in Emma’s diary shows a resolution of sorts be-tween the couple:

Well 1 have got my book messed up. So today is the 30 dayof Aug but I have to write this. I have wrote a lot about Bill andmy self. But tonight we have talked a long time. He told me I wasthe best woman he ever went with. He told me he wanted me forhis own. Yess we have wanted to get married. We have talkedabout it so many times. But he said that he know that Ruby needme to and that he just couldnt ask me to leve her and he justcouldnt see a house big enough for 2 famlys.

He told me that he tryed to find another woman to take myplace but he could not find one. He said know matter how hard hetryed 1 was always there in his face and before he new it he wouldhave the phone up calling me for he was afraid of loosing me. Wetalked a long time. We both even cryed. It is bad to love some oneso mutch.

One of Emma’s entries after this date treats the reality that theywill never be married. She now devotes her time to Ruby and toreading her Bible and praying. Her entries reveal her solitude:

I am alone, and still I dont feel so lonly. I know it is my nearvesbut 1 have felt Sonny so close to me. I have just set so timed tonightjust looking for him to open the door and walking in smiling. Nowthis is true. I have realy ben looking for him for I feel him so close.

I cant hardly waite for him to open that door. I wonder why I feelhim so close. I havent had this feeling before. I wish some bodywould come and brake this spell. I dont feel like I can waite mutchlonger.

As the holidays come around, Emma starts to think less aboutbuilding a new life than about taking satisfaction from what she hasmanaged to accumulate over the course of her sixty years. It is all inthe love of her children and grandchildren.

To day is Christmas Day. Me my radio and little dog is spend-ing the day together. Now I dont have to but all the children hasthings to do and 1 dont. I dont know why I havent done any thing.

Didnt even get up untill one oclock. It is raining and so dark andgloomy, just such a good day to think. I have got so mutch to bethankful for and I am. I thank God for all my blessing and mychildren and my grand children is so wonderful and butful andloving and they all are so good to me. I am one of the riches womenin the world and I know it and I thank my God for all of this butto my sorrow part of me is gone.

I cant explan this to you. I gess the best way to explan is this.

I feel like a big bird with one of my wings broke. Can you under-stand. I might fly a little ways but then I fall.

We went and put flowers on Sonny + Lonnies grave. I wasnthappy at the way Sonnys looked. As for Lonnie he wouldnt care.

But Sonny would want his to be pretty. Very pretty. He has bengone 15 months today.

And then the year ends, as does her diary. She will not keep adiary in the coming years, because the arthritis in her hands makesit painful to write.

This is the 29th day of Dec. It has been cold all this week.

Kate and Damon is here tonight. They are asleep for it is after 12oclock. Warren has got home. I came in my room and I just stopedand looked at Kate sleeping. I looked over on my dresser at Sonnyspitcher. She looks so mutch like him across her mouth. It sad. I justlook at her and think.

I feel so bad. My breath is so short. The house is nasty. Thewater pipe froze and bursted. Of corse every thing will be alright

when the new year comes. I just know every thing is going to be

alright. After all I have a lot to be thankful for.

. viii.

The middle 1980s found Ruby increasingly ill. Two-month stays inCherokee City Hospital were not uncommon.

In 1987, Ruby suffered a heart attack. After many weeks in thehospital, she became pale and weak. When she simply stood to goto the bathroom, her heart rate jumped to 140 beats per minute. Sheran a fever for months from an infection in her chest.

Ruby had lived with this bad heart all her life, yet she enduredthe misery of her illnesses with an acceptance that was fearful in itspower. She is bitter about nothing.

Ruby’s room was in an old wing of the hospital, and the odorrevealed the great age of the building and a greater sense of sicknessthan is found in most hospitals. Cancer can be smelled, coroners say,when you enter the home of someone who has just died of the dis-ease. It gives off a special taste to the air as it eats flesh. If you haveknown this odor, sweet and half-rotting, you can imagine this ward.The cinder block walls were spiritless. The window was shuttered,and Ruby’s skin was like chalk in the half-light. Ruby couldn’t af-ford the three dollars a day it cost to rent a television set to distractherself from all this.

Sonny and Ruby were Emma’s favorite children back in the1940s, she wrote in her diary. The closeness to Ruby solidified withyears of living together; Emma became even more attached to Rubythan she ever was to Sonny.

Of course, Emma was ruined over Ruby’s failing health. Warrenwas, too, but his boss man was tough, and he was afraid to ask formuch time off. He couldn’t afford to lose his job now that he was soclose to retirement. His income was badly needed by Ruby andEmma. He was in Chicago when Ruby had the first attack, and to-day he was somewhere in Tennessee.

Ruby went home from the hospital. A year passed. She wasagain stricken, this time worse than before. Doctors operated andplaced a pacemaker in her chest. In the spring of 1988, she spent alot of time in the hospital. The second time she was admitted, shestayed for eleven weeks. In the eleventh week, Emma, nervous andworried, suffered a diabetes attack and blood pressure that soared

202 And Their Children . . .

off the chart. She was admitted to the hospital one floor below Ruby.She spent two weeks there.

Emma was sobbing one day in the hospital. “I took care of herforty years,” she said, “and now it’s out of my hands. There’s noth-ing I can do.” She went over her old guilt again. If she had justpicked up the girl and walked all those miles from their cotton farmto the doctor when Ruby fell ill at the age of nine, maybe the rheu-matic fever would not have damaged her heart as it has.

They gave Ruby three options: a transplant, life support, or atrip home to spend whatever time she had left with her husband andmother. She said no to the first two.

Emma got better the day after Ruby was released, and she inturn left the hospital. During all this, Debbie heard about her cousinRuby’s condition. Debbie had not seen her aunt Emma and kin sinceMaggie Louise drank the rat poison. Debbie had withdrawn fromthe family after her mother’s death, but things had changed enoughthat she could come to Ruby’s bed. She felt she had to come. Ruby’shead was turned, and she was asleep. Debbie simply said hello.Without looking, Ruby awoke and said, “It is you, Debbie.” Afterseventeen years, she knew her lost cousin by one word, and thiscaused Debbie’s eyes to well with tears. Ruby turned her head andsmiled. They hugged. Emma was happy Debbie had finally comehome.

It was another day when I visited. The living room clock wasticking loudly at Emma’s house. Warren was home from the roadthis time. He came to the door and was silent. He walked back totheir room, past the twenty-four-hour home-hospice nurse sitting atthe kitchen table, and Ruby labored to open her eyes to see me. Herface was paperlike, lacking contour, every muscle fallen. Warrenstared at his shattered wife. Ruby tried to smile, but met withfailure.

“It’s over,” Ruby announced. Then she was again sleeping.

Soon afterward, with Warren holding her in his arms, Ruby

died.

. ix .

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his greatpower from the beginning.

Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, men renowned for

Woods 203

their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and declaringprophecies:

Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowl-edge of learning meet for the people, wise and eloquent in theirinstructions:

Such as found out musical tunes, and recited verses in writ-ing.

Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their hab-itations:

All these were honoured in their generations, and were theglory of their times.

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, thattheir 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 hadnever been born; and their children after them.

But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath notbeen 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 blottedout.

Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth forevermore.

—Ecclesiasticus 44:1-14

BRIDGES

. i .

It’s a late summer afternoon, and a group consisting of Joe Bridges’sfamily and neighbors sit in the shade of a fruit stand constructed ofchicken wire and rotted planks, down by the main highway in frontof the Bridges house, waiting for customers who never seem to stopto buy the produce they try to sell. The thermometer reads well overninety degrees, and a waist-high industrial fan fails to soften theimpact of that temperature. It ruffles a rack of dusty out-of-fashiondresses Kate hopes to sell to the people who don’t stop to buy theireggs or vegetables.

Twenty hands furiously labor at unzippering peas. Tiny orbsrain into pails. Shelling peas has been a way of life for these people.Their parents grew peas and shelled them just like this in August, to

dry and be eaten in the winter. They freeze most of the crop now,but otherwise little in the practice has changed.

In this circle are the Bridgeses—Kate, her husband, Joe, theirson Huey, Kate’s mother, an octogenarian who lives in a trailer bythe pond down the road, a neighbor couple, a few others, Joe’sbrother, who lives across the highway. Barney is the one who hadthree ships blown out from under him in World War II and who hasnever been the same since. He is laughing, mouth agape, chewingtobacco, drooling on the whiteness of his shirt, the spot growing toresemble a map of Australia.

Beyond the shade of this stand, the land reclines, auburn, crisp,at the base of Hobe’s Hill, beneath the August sun in this year ofdrought, “drawth,” as Joe says.

Joe’s farm is showing the ill effects of the lack of rain. It’s toohot to walk the rows of soybeans Joe planted in the spring, when itseemed he might get the rain the crop needed. Now that the beansare so brown, Joe wonders how he could have had such hope backin April. It’s so warm, it’s even too hot to fuck, confides Huey, Joe’sthirty-year-old son, who works for the county and still lives athome. It’s even too hot for fucking down by the swimming hole,beneath the shade of that big oak tree, Huey adds. It has been a longtime since Huey has engaged in that pastime. He says that he likesto think of sex with his last fling, a woman now lost to marriagewith another man.

Barney overhears Huey whispering about sex and starts talkingabout butt-fucking in the barn. He loudly repeats his contributionto the conversation, but no one pays any attention.

To turn the talk in a new direction, Joe begins telling storiesabout the old days.

“It was hard times in the Depression,” Joe says.

We had to raise just about everythang. I mean, there just wasn’tnothin’ branging nothin’. When Roosevelt took office in thirty-three, thangs started pickin’ up. Before then, it was awful bad. Iwas just a kid, but Lord God, we was poor. Oh Lord yeah, hell,everybody come up from where they was back there.

The conversation inevitably finds its way to the families onHobe’s Hill and the book published by James Agee and Walker Ev-ans. The book is well known by just about everyone in this county.

One seventy-eight-year-old woman in the Cookstown City Halljumped to her feet at the mere sight of Let Us Now Praise FamousMen held in hand. “That book! We knew what he was up to! Comedown here to low-rate the South. I just resent it to death, himpicking those people! People up North are still eating that gar-bage up!”

It also upsets Joe’s neighbors. The man and woman put downfistfuls of peas.

“You have to remember those were very special people, and itwould not be fair to use them to represent what people in the Southare like in general,” says the man. His wife says the New Yorkerschose the strangest people, and now the outside world retains animage of their county based upon the Rickettses. She advises itwould be better to look at all the nice homes, as fine as those seenin any suburb, that dot the county today.

When reminded of all the shacks between those fine homes, shereplies, “But it’s not fair to look just at them.”

In 1932, Holland Thompson was quoted by Rupert B. Vance inThe Human Geography of the South as saying of the antebellumSouth,

There was a South of the plantation, and of the upland farm; . . .the South with lands almost incredibly fertile and the barren Southwhere living was hard; the civilized South, and nearby the South,ignorant and rude; the austere Calvinist South, and the South ofromance; the haughty aristocratic South and the democratic South.

Today, a visitor can still find any South he or she desires. Thereis the South of shacks, of fine restored antebellum homes, tracthomes, ghettos, shopping malls; the bastard un-south South of At-lanta, the frozen charms of Selma; the redneck South, yet ignorant,yet rude, alongside the mint-julep South of refined cordiality; theStyron South, the Faulkner South, the Hurston South.

Unlike his neighbors, Joe takes no offense at the Agee-Evansbook or even at the Rickettses. He says the book was about a timelong ago. He says there’s a reason for everything. A reason for thebook. A reason for the Rickettses. A reason for the bedbugs thatinfested their house.

You know what a bedbug is? It’s a bug that gets along on filth. Yaknow, when body bacteria come off a person on a sheet that ain’twashed and cleaned. It’s somethang God put there and had to be.

Let me tell ya somethang people don’t thank about. You look at itas being a bad bug. But if it weren’t for that bug, what do youthank woulda happened to that bed? God wanted somethang toeat up the filth. It’s just like the salt in the ocean. The salt in theocean purifies all the waste. All of the creeks, all of the branches,all of the rivers, all of the water that all goes into the ground, itgoes down streams back into the ocean into salt. The salt purifies.

The sun pulls it out and recycles the water, brangs it back over theland in the form of rain. That water we drank today was maybedrunk a million years ago, by the people, the animals. You can’tthrow water away. See, it’s a reason for everythang. Everythang outthere, God’s put there for a reason to make the world survive.

. ii.

Across the paved road from the fruit stand where the Bridgeses andtheir friends have congregated this afternoon, a dirt road enters themain highway, the road that leads to the top of Hobe’s Hill. Up thatroad five hundred feet, on the right, is the now abandoned framehouse where the Woods family lived for seven years after Joe’s dadtook pity and brought them down off the hill that day in 1937 whenthey were starving.

A little farther up the road are some shacks; two black cottonmen of old sit in weather-bleached rockers with wood as white astheir hair. They announce matter-of-factly they have nothing to doand are just waiting to ^ierThere is a house trailer nearby where adivorced woman lives. Up around the bend, a suburban-style brickhome. It’s the last inhabited home on this road. Streamers of reddust rise behind the rare vehicle that passes beyond this point. Theroad enters a forest, thick with vines, whose fingers creep into theroadway and strike the fenders of passing cars. The vines are kudzu,which infests all the South, an exotic visitor imported from Japan.It was planted in the 1930s to end erosion caused by improper cot-ton cultivation. It was also supposed to feed cows. Kudzu can growone foot a day—the southern poet and author James Dickey calls ita “vegetable form of cancer.” It now is considered useless, out ofcontrol, covering some six million acres of the South. It relentlesslyclimbs billboards, poles, and empty buildings, until they resemblegiant Halloween figures cloaked in acres of green blankets.

Two miles from the Bridges fruit stand, a hemlock tree growsnext to the dirt track. This is where the Ricketts home stood in

1936. Hidden beneath a tangle of kudzu is the cistern hole, a fewchimney rocks, charred boards. It was eventually handed down to ablack family. In the 1970s it burned.

Across the lane, a quarter mile distant, are the remains of theWoodses’ 1936 home. That shack was abandoned in the 1950s. Bythe late 1960s, it simply got tired of standing and fell down. It’sa well-hidden pile of lumber, the worm-eaten wood smelling ofgreat age.

No one lives on Hobe’s Hill today. Only a few abandonedshacks remain. The land has greatly changed. When Walker Evanstook his pictures, it was a grand, open place, full of cotton. Nowforest has reclaimed the land. There is still some field, planted insoybeans, and this provides some sense of how things once were.These soybeans, as well as those down by the main highway, wereplanted by Joe Bridges and his son Huey.

Amid the soybeans, the ground is stony, and the water-starvedbeans grow with more courage than success. This same dust wasbreathed by Fred Ricketts as he plowed behind the sweaty rump ofa mule fifty years ago. He and his children stared at this ground asthey chopped weeds and, later, hunched over the long rows to pick.They knew this same sun, this silence, the awful loneliness of thisred plateau.

The heat dulls the senses. Even sulfur butterflies, those neuroticfield strutters, are slothful. The whole South seems under a hot Au-gustan pause—all the highways blurry beneath the burden of heat,be they four-lane marchers, two-lane winders, single-track dirtpoems. From this hill, it’s hard to imagine life going on in this heatanywhere across the six hundred miles of the South, in any of thoseterrible little towns: in Fort Adams, McComb, or Newburn or evenin the biggest one, Atlanta—that Los Angeles of the “new” South,with its two million citizens populating suburbs and ghettos withouthope of redemption. ^

It takes faith to believe men and women once trod and workedthis land. It seems some terrible holocaust must have claimed them.Two abandoned houses at the end of the soybeans stand like ruinsfrom a war. The distant porch of one has long been silent of foot-steps, its chambers quiet of human utterance. The dwellings are theonly signs that men and women ever called this place home. All elseis gone, save for the road, the beans dying beneath the whiteness ofthe afternoon sky.

Those homes were the “negro houses” described by Agee. Theywere owned by Mr. Foster, the black landowner who farmed a smallpart of Hobe’s Hill just down from the Rickettses. Agee describedhaving to pass the buildings on his night walks from the Gudgerhouse to the Ricketts house. In the dark, dogs would bark, menwould stir, and he’d hurry on.

The porch of one of the kudzu-laden Foster homes leans on abended knee, collapsed to a forty-five-degree angle, with floor-boards that break away and swallow feet.

After the end of cotton, it didn’t take long for this home to die.When a house like this is abandoned, first to go are the windows,broken by a fusillade of rocks hurled shortly after the last occupantsmove on. All local kids are suspect, but no one sees the little guerril-las—they kick in doors, getting an excited chill from their fear ofbeing caught at their mischief, piss in the kitchen, vanish. And thenthrough the jagged open frames enter the rain and wind, which foryears gnawed at the house’s hide until it was left hoary gray, andrusted the tin roof the color of sun tea. Now homes like this areunder an occupation of rattlesnakes, and squadrons of violin waspsswarm when surprised by visitors.

Ever since people began fleeing the land, rumors have circulatedabout old farmhouses. The rumors have it that money and valuablesare stashed behind fireplace mantels, which in days of old were usedas safes. Treasure hunters have combed Alabama, ripping open fire-place fronts in empty homes in search of forgotten treasures. Thefireplaces of this home have been so ravaged, but left behind asworthless are hidden letters and objects that reveal its history, mosteaten beyond recognition by whatever creatures now inhabit thehouse.

Among the objects is a picture, vague from age, of a black manand woman, presumably Mr. and Mrs. Foster, she standing respect-fully behind. They are dignified, serious, perhaps too much so, as iftrying hard to look better than other nonlandowning farmers. Hewears a wool coat and tie. A mustache stands out under a recedinghairline. His eyes make it uncomfortable to gaze at him. She has hairparted in the center, hand on his buttocks, looking away and not atyou. Her ample bosom brushes his back.

The following letter is in the handwriting of a woman.

Cherokee City AlaOct 1st 1901

Dear Mr. Foster:

I arrived home safely yesterday morning. I found all well andglad to see me. They took my being hurt very well so I think youcan come to Cherokee City when ever you get ready with out anyfear. My arm is much better to day. It is still badly swoolen butpains very little. My school opened this morning I was able to gomyself by keeping my arm in a sling. I don’t feel at all at homeseemingly I am visting. Convention is going on and oh how I wishI had some of those turnip greens butter milk and “taters” to givethe “dele go ats.” Love to each one of the family and all the friendsthat inquire of me. All sends love.

As ever your friend,

Annie

This letter is difficult to read, with uncrossed fs and no periods(which have been supplied for clarity’s sake), full of rat bites andinsect holes.

Sept. 15, 1902

My dear Brother with such pleasure take to writting you.

I am well and hope that you are the Same. I am at work 6c am

I hope that you had a good rain last week. We had a good

one. Everything is getting along. There is some strang girls

and the boys is bout to go crazy about them. There are foor of

them. I was out last night with one of them alone is about

to go crazy with them. They is all right. Give my love to Miss Annieand all the familey. Tell Mama that grand mama is well and sendlove to her. Write and tell me all the news. Tell Miss annie that I

often thinks of her while 1 am in the mines By my Self I am

on the night shift. It is shure lonesome around there is get-

ting a long with his cotton. Tel me all the news. Write me soon.

From your devoted brother.

J.S.

Then there is this letter dated July 5, 1905, from the cousin of Mrs.Foster.

Miss Viola FosterMadrid, Ala.

My Dear Cousin

I have often thought of writing to you. And if I did would Ieven hear from you. Or would it be like the other time I wrote? I

am glad to say this leave me well and haveing a very pleasant time.Truelv. Hope you are enjoying the same sweet blessing of life. Whatare you going to do for a good time on the fourth? I received an

invitation to picnic. I have made a smile on a northern

peach. He is very gay. I wish you could meet some of the Indianapeople. When we were coming we stayed in Chattanooga andspent the after noon on the Look Out mt. Its qui— a beautiful—

—co ed see in different states. When you are in the

north the white and colord are just the same. All eat at the sametable. Some time I think am I white or col, from the way I am

treated. How are you and Lee? give my best regards to all

the neighbors. Viola write me 12 pages and tell me all the home

news. I hope I won’t get will come south in September. I

am coming home Xmas if nothing happen. You must be a sweetgirl and as soon as you get this letter, give my love to Lee when yousee him. I guess it’s miss Foster yes. Is it?

With this I’ll close, hoping to hear from you soon.

Your loving CousinLucy D. Ephus192 West BroadwayShelbyville, Indiana

The following letter, dated February 22, 1922, is from the H. E.Powell Lumber Company in Cookstown.

Mr. Foster:

You owe me the amount of $17.25 that has to be settled. Ihave waited on you as long as possible. You had better come upquick and do something. I will give you until Saturday to settlethis. If something is not done, I am going to turn this over to Mr.Wiggerly Saturday night. I am hoping you will do somethingthough.

H. E. Powell

And the final letter, from a brother to the one who took over theFoster farm, is dated December 3, 1941.

Dear Joe

How are you all getting alone?

How is Papa does he seems to be getting any better?

Did you get the box that I sent him? If so write and let meknow so that I can send him something else.

Listen Joe, I have enclosed in this letter a card addressed to

myself. All that you’ll have to do is to write on the front of it andit’s already addressed so that I’ll get it. Please let me hear fromPapa.

Love to all.

R. W.

The postcard remains unanswered in the envelope, never re-turned to R.W.

There is also a much newer photo, of a black couple being mar-ried outdoors, from the late 1960s. The bride’s face is veiled and thegroom’s serious. Were they related to the original owners? Did theyend up living here after the owners died, on rent and welfare, ascheck stubs indicate, the last to occupy this home?

Behind these two homes is a barn with an open middle, the oneAgee described having to walk through to reach the trail leading tothe home of George and Annie Mae Gudger, about half a mile southof here.

Nothing remains of the Gudger house on the twenty acres ofhill where it stood. What was then open pasture is now chigger-infested jungle concealed by a fog of brush that limits vision to afew feet. All that indicates the homesite is an old dump of tin cansthat crunch beneath feet passing over the thick blanket of pineneedles. Pretty Boy, the black man who in 1939 was struck andkilled by the car at the base of Hobe’s Hill, was the last man tooccupy the house. His was the final challenge to the futility of tryingto grow cotton at the end of that dwindling, muddy branch roadthat has long since melted into the landscape.

After Pretty Boy’s death, Chester Boles sold the ground to atimber company, which planted pine trees, maybe the best use forthis mineral soil. The home either fell or was pushed over, and thetrees have done well, growing thick.

. Hi.

Trees are everywhere. The only untreed land around Hobe’s Hill isthe fields planted by Joe Bridges. For two miles north of his fruitstand, all the wilted soybeans are his. The fields exist as patches ofopenness about to be swallowed by marching columns of expandingwoodlands. Four miles south of his fruit stand—all the way to Ma-drid and the dirt turnoff leading to the old Burgandy place, where

Maggie Louise’s children were born—ail the soybeans on either sideof the highway are also his.

Fair quantities of beans are scattered along these six miles ofhighway and on top of Hobe’s Hill, with some occasional fields ofwheat, raised to feed thirty-one brood sows. The Bridgeses sell a fewpigs to make money, keep the rest to eat. A small bit of corn grownfor a few cows is planted down in the riverbottom, where Indianarrowheads can be found amid the rows.

The county agriculture extension agent is no fan of Bridges. Hecautions that Bridges isn’t the type of farmer anyone should hold upas an example. The agent says that he’s not good at farming. Joeblames forces beyond his control—the weather, equipment trouble.That Bridges has filed for bankruptcy would seem to confirm theagent’s views, but he is trying to reorganize to save his farm.

The agent tries to direct outsiders to “better” farmers, but theyare wealthy weekend tractor men who own hundreds of acres andwork them more as a hobby than as a way of life. Like so manypeople around here, the agent is conscious of the image that theAgee-Evans book presents to the outside world. He wants to steeroutsiders to the “good” people of the county.

In spite of the agent’s derogations, Joe Bridges can make oneclaim to distinction: he is the last farmer left on this six-mile stretchof road.

It’s unclear just how many once farmed this same swath ofhighway, but they numbered in the dozens. When Joe’s father wasgoing strong, this farm alone supported six to seven sharecroppingfamilies. A dozen surrounding farms were populated the same way.It was a community.

They all left or died, and Bridges outlasted them all. His re-ward, if it can be called that, will be to become the last man ever tobreak ground on Hobe’s Hill. He’ll be the last to see its earth freshlyturned and smell its tired breath; the last to harvest a crop that risesfrom that clay; the last to watch the sky and hope for rain that nevercomes or to curse when too much falls.

He farms the remaining two hundred acres he owns. He leasesmore land than this, but the term “lease” is a misnomer. No oneother than Joe wants to farm, so there is no market for the land andhe gets to farm for nothing or next to nothing all the combinedacreage once worked by the tenant farmers written about by Agee.

For reasons of sentiment, the sons and daughters of the onetimecotton lords do not want the land grown in trees. They now pleadwith Joe to farm, a sharp turnaround from the days when their par-ents coveted every square foot of soil, extracting so high a price indollars and dignity from those who with their own blood and sweat,and that of their children, squeezed the South’s cotton crop out ofthe land.

It takes a lot of work to keep wild trees off this land. They’reeager immigrants, arriving on airborne seeds. Joe provides a protec-tive service with his planting, plowing back the saplings that emergeeach spring.

The daughter of the Burgandy woman, the one-time landladyof Maggie Louise and Floyd Franks, gives Bridges seventy acres; thegrandson of Boles, the Gudgers’ master, thirty acres.

On top of Hobe’s Hill itself, Joe actually pays a nominal fee offive hundred dollars for the land still owned by the descendants ofT. Hudson Margraves, the much-despised landlord of Ricketts andWoods in 1936. Margraves’s nephew, T. Wilson Margraves, inher-ited a 240-acre remnant of the vast spread once controlled by hisuncle, who died on June 25, 1958, at the age of eighty-nine. Until1970 or so, Margraves leased it to those two white-haired, just-waiting-to-die rockers. They were the last to plant cotton on Hobe’sHill. After they quit, the land sprouted sumacs, oaks, renegadepines. Margraves worried he’d lose the land to overgrowth, so hecontacted Joe and offered it at a pittance just to keep it open. Ifbankruptcy forces Joe out of farming, Margraves will have no oneto turn the soil, keep the land alive, as if cleared farmland here stillhas any value.

To rid himself of this worry, Margraves once put the land upfor sale, but no one wanted to buy, not even at a giveaway price.The land, once a grand measure of wealth, has now become a ter-rible bother.

Margraves has plans to plant the field in pine trees. When he isold, he can then sell the timber, perhaps making a profit. That hasbeen the pattern all over Alabama. As cotton was phased out andreplacement crops like corn and soybeans failed, field after field hassuccumbed to pines. Nowadays, weeks of searching in central Ala-bama will uncover just occasional cotton patches. Few want to growit any longer in this place, which was once the geographic heart of

the Cotton Belt. Pine trees are the last crop that will ever be plantedin much of Alabama.

Joe says of the Hobe’s Hill fields,

It would be grown up now if it wasn’t for me. It laid out for tenyears, and trees got as tall as that door there. We went up thereand bushed it all out. When 1 was a boy, I used to haul pickers upthere to pick cotton. It was as big as the fields I plow down here.

Now it’s all woods. A lot of this land will be planted in pines, offthe road, up there on the Margraves place. Well, what it is, when Iquit, there won’t be no one else to farm that land. I ain’t gonnafarm. I won’t be sorry. If you don’t make money, how the hell canyou miss it? Of course, we tried to hold out. I’ve done everything Ican do. All my land ’round here was paid for at one time. Now, Igot it all mortgaged up to my dick on account of bad years andhigh prices I pay out. We just ha’n’t made any money on the farmin the last five year.

In 1973, Joe’s father died. He was eighty-three. Joe gained titleto two hundred acres, and his brothers and sisters got the rest of theoriginal six hundred acres. Joe raised cotton one season after thedeath of his father. In the 1960s, the Bridgeses had invested in a usedcotton picking machine that cost $2,500. They still had to hirechopping hands, but the machine enabled them to farm cottonthrough the decade. But the price continued falling. That last sea-son, they grew one and a half bales to the acre and made eighteenbales. Small farmers couldn’t do that any more. So 1974 was thelast year the Bridgeses grew cotton, ending 150 years of family tra-dition.

Soybeans were going up in price. Joe had to make a decision.

The next season, he turned heavily to soybeans. Joe invested inmachinery, buying on credit. Those were the years when it seemedAmerican farmers were destined to feed the world. He was caught,like many other American farmers, when the bottom fell out. Soy-beans and not cotton led to Joe’s current crisis.

The golden era of farming was over. Joe talks about his fatherand how it was better back then:

He died before all this depression came on. Up to his death, youcould make it. My father, when he died, had over eighty-somethousand dollars in the bank, and he never did nothin’ in his life

but farm here. Back then, the money he got, he could buy some-thang with it. He raised wheat. He got two dollars a bushel for it.Wheat is two dollars sixty now. Remember this: he was payin’seventeen cents a gallon for tractor fuel. Today, diesel fuel is a dol-lar twenty-nine. Back then, fertilizer was twenty-five dollars a ton.

Now it’s two hunnert a ton. Everythang went seven or eight timesas high, except the price you got. That son of a bitch went downlower. I don’t know where you can make it. I was gettin’ seven oreight dollars a bushel for soybeans. It went down to four some-thang. You can’t make money there. Of course, in the Depressiondays, it was real tough. But Lord knows about now.

Time is running out for Joe.

His doctor tells him the outlook for his health is grim. His lungsare seared from farm chemicals sprayed on the crops and from toxicmaterials in the tire factory in Cherokee City where he worked forthirty years.

His lawyer tells him court protection from the bankers will lastonly so long. Joe would quit now, but he believes if he has one moregood year, he can pay off the credit and keep his two hundred acres.Soybeans are his only real cash crop.

Each year, however, has been worse for soybeans. He keepsplanting them, like a gambler pulling more money out of his pocketto lay on the table, hoping to break out and get back at least someof what he’s already lost.

See, last year, if I could have saved my crop, I would have been inno trouble. I would have come out and caught everythang up. Ifigure I lost at least twelve thousand dollars. So they call me andthreaten me. I wanna quit now. But I got to farm to pay on theland. If I can manage to pay for it, and they let me sell it, I couldmake some money on it, sell it to people to put homes on. That’swhat the man would do who would buy it from the bank. I gottaput a hold on them and let me work it. The other way I don’t havea durn option. They’d buy it cheap and make a big profit.

But he has been playing with ever-losing hands.

. iv .

For the younger members of the Margraves family, the land holdslittle value, sentimental or monetary. At least, that is how T. WilsonMargraves III feels. The son of T. Wilson Margraves, the nephewwho inherited the Hobe’s Hill land from the childless T. Hudson

Margraves, he is twenty-six and lives in California with his wife andnew baby. He was just transferred to Sacramento by the food con-glomerate for which he works.

He visited the Hobe’s Hill land only once, as a boy, when hisfather went to check property lines. He remembers little of the landand does not care about it. He is not a man of the land, but a suit-and-tie man, educated to fear office problems, not the vagaries ofweather. He deals in flow sheets and performance evaluations.When visited in Sacramento Margraves comes to the door of hisrented condominium, starched shirt freshly unbuttoned, physicallya youthful version of his granduncle T. Hudson, a high melon fore-head with small ears like airplane wings pinned to it. He knows littleof his granduncle, who was hated by the Woods and Ricketts fami-lies for robbing them of a fair return on their labors.

He’s found himself in a high-powered career as a director ofpersonnel, which fits into the pattern set by his ancestors in the sensethat he controls the opportunities of others to obtain work and theconditions under which they will work, but he doesn’t feel wealthyor powerful. He says California is like a fast-paced foreign land.There are many differences between where he is now living andwhere his people came from. He says,

Another thing in Alabama you don’t see out here are all theshanties. You’ll be driving along on a two-lane and all of a sudden,you’ll see a shack. Go a bit further, you see another shack. In sometowns, it’s the 1960s. We’re still trying to catch up. They can acceptchange, but they want change slow.

Alabama is different. You had—still have—dirt-poor people,but they think they have it made. You got a lot of simple-type,good-natured folks who just don’t understand a lot of things.They’re happy. They got their family, they got a roof overhead,they can put food on the table. Some of those people believe “theman” still exists—“the man” being the plantation owner. If I workfor “the man,” “the man” never lets me down, gives me food onmy plate, provides me a job, a place for my kids, all that. There’ssome of them who still believe in the way it used to be, the waythey were raised, that “the man” has been good to me, so whyshould I get out and try to make it any differently?

Poverty? Will it change? That’s the way they was raised, that’sthe way their fathers was raised, that’s the way their grandfatherswas raised. Again, the Old South. Maybe sometime down the road.Probably not.

. v .

The Bridgeses grow most of their own food and work hard at it.

During one spring visit, on a motionless April evening, theBridges house is found empty.

Lying recessed in a grove of red oak, the house looks muchbetter because of a new coat of paint. The usual tractor implementsare strewn across the deep-set yard. There’s the fruit stand out front,shuttered this time of year, the weeds, already out of control, thecrimson slash of harsh clay next to the road ditch.

Kate is found across the highway, partway up the Hobe’s Hillroad, in the garden plot near the empty house where the Woodsfamily lived after 1937. Kate is in charge of the gardens. It is nosmall job. Part of the Bridgeses’ religion is the faith they have inthemselves, nature, and hard work.

Three large gardens are scattered across their spread: one bythe main house; another, this one, at the base of Hobe’s Hill; yetanother by the pond down the road. These are not gardens, in theusual sense of backyard plots, but patches that cover many acres,critical to their food supply, especially since Joe retired from the tirefactory. Another source of food is the pond, which contains largebass and catfish.

Kate is on the small tractor, drinking a beer and driving hard.She has tight muscles for a woman in her fifties, a voice strongerthan the tractor engine. In a way, she is handsome, though not inany city sense. Kate seems to enjoy flirting, and her sense of humorat times takes on a robust, even crude, sexual aspect. She delights inannouncing when a visitor’s fly is down.

Kate is all business this evening as she jumps off the tractor andtakes up her shovel. Darkness is nearing, and storm clouds climb thewestern horizon, discharging serious bolts of lightning. The last pre-cipitation fell over a month ago, as a few inches of uncommon snow.The past five dry summers have devastated both the Bridgeses’ soy-beans and their gardens.

Kate wants a good garden this year. She is rushing to get in asmany tomato plants as possible before the hoped-for rain arrivesand darkness halts their efforts. Helping are her mother and herother son, his two blond girls watching from the cab of a rustedpickup. The work is a furious, beautiful act. The son follows Kate,dropping the plants into the holes she has made. The old woman

crawls behind, on her knees, pressing soil in place. Kate’s motherworries that she has to get back and skin the five catfish she caughtthis morning. She cannot work in the sun any longer, because of herpacemaker, but she is good at fishing, pea shelling, helping out withjobs like this. The thunder grows and voids most words; lightningflashes on forms hurrying down the rows. The air smells of earth—sharp, tasting of ozone.

There are those people who, in the 1960s, went “back to theland.” They bought farms in places like Vermont and the foothills ofCalifornia, subscribed to magazines that told them how to makewindmills, waterwheels, solar panels. In time, many of them soldout and went back to the city. They were from a different culture,raised in the prosperous 1950s and 1960s. Some who had rejectedtheir parents’ world found they couldn’t live without it.

People like the Bridgeses never have to go back—they’ve alwaysbeen there. Unlike some modern back-to-the-land people, they havethe cadence of spirit and style needed for this kind of life. Their livesnever attained the obscene speed of city people’s. When Joe went tohis factory job in the city, he worked the second shift. The factoryjob was his “public job,” as he calls it, and he never identified him-self by it. Joe always called himself a farmer. Mornings, before thesun came up, belonged to him. He did all his tractor work beforenoon, when he drove north and vanished inside the tire factory.—

When Joe was a boy, nearly half of all Americans lived like hisfamily. Now, about 2 percent of all Americans do. The Bridgeses areholdouts in a world that has gone on without them. Unlike Mar-garet Ricketts, they did not reject the new world out of hand—theychose to try and accommodate themselves to it, while retaining thevalues of their early years. Now they, like the tenants who had onceworked this farm, must face the reality of defeat. It appears the farmmight be sold. The man who buys it would break it up into houseplots near the road and plant the back land in pine trees.

What will happen if our country ever again plunges into eco-nomic chaos as it did after 1929? Many people like the Bridgeseswere able to raise their own food. They hurt, but did not starve.Now that 98 percent of all Americans are off the farm, any repeatof the past could result in scenes of starvation similar to those weare accustomed to seeing in other countries. Already, there is thisdifference between our time’s urban poor and farm poor, even withfood stamps and welfare. The farm poor do not have to go through

other people’s garbage to find their meals. If the country were everagain to go broke, the army of people looking in garbage cans fortheir daily bread would turn our urban centers into a string of NorthAmerican Calcuttas. The irony will be that some of our best farm-land will be planted in trees. The Bridgeses may have something toteach modern Americans. But for now, they have their own stormclouds to think about.

The garden is a little over one acre, a square of dark brownsurrounded by bright green. The son who helps Kate push tomatoesinto the earth asks why his mother is planting so much ground. Hehas a city job and buys most of his food from the store. Kate isplanting about a third more than in previous years. Kate reckons ifthe drought continues, they’ll need the extra ground to make up forany loss in production. Last year, for the first time in their lives, shesays, they had to buy greens at the store.

“I don’t want to do that again,” she adds.

In this patch are tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash of alltypes, beans, peas, peanuts, corn. Finally, it is not rain but darknessthat halts the work. Kate stands back and stares. They have plantedninety-two tomato plants, dozens of peppers.

The rain does not arrive, passing far to the north, over the dis-tant city. Kate goes back to wait for Joe, who is out plowing theBurgandy land. He is on the tractor in the middle of seventy acreswhere Maggie Louise and her family used to pick cotton, plowingby headlights, oblivious to the reports of farmers killed by lightning.He wants to get in another hour of breaking ground.

Joe always seems to be atop that old tractor. He starts in themorning and doesn’t stop until evening in peak season. His six-footbody, topped by a cresting wave of full whiteness rising owl-likeabove his forehead, appears to have grown up on the back of thattractor, but his early work was behind mules. He is sixty-two,though his body looks young, with a waist snipped in the middleand strong arms. His tight lips release words with precision, thoughthey often remain unclear because of his soft Alabama voice and awad of tobacco always held in his mouth.

Frequent bursts of lightning illuminate the crude beauty ofsome abandoned shacks on the dirt road leading back to the mainhighway. A rain falls, spotty, without lust, and soon ends. On themain paved highway, steam rises in wisps. Stars come out.

They may not be the best farmers, but they are honest and workhard.

They occupy just a niche in the sweep of mostly unpeopled vast-ness that has come to characterize modern rural Alabama. The landhas grown more frightening in its solitude over the past five decades.Each generation in time becomes the older generation, and soonthese people will be forgotten. Our generation will pass. Anotherdozen generations will walk this planet, be forgotten; more beyond.If the planet is not killed off with poisons, the land of Hobe’s Hillwill still be there after all this passage, waiting, beneath the forestcanopy, dripping in the wetness of winter, brittle under the yellowmonotony of summer, ready for men and women who will againneed to grow food and fiber.

They will not recall what happened with cotton and the dec-ades that followed. They will cut back the trees and introduce thesoil once again to the sun, and will not know of the struggles of thetenant families or the final desperation of Joe Bridges.

By 1988, Joe had restructured his loan, selling off fifty acres,still trying to stave off the bankers, living on fifteen hundred dollarsa month in retirement income. He had stopped planting Hobe’s Hill,but was again hoping to make a crop on the bottomland to pay offhis debt. A drought far worse than any he’d ever seen was killingthat chance.

. vi.

And what of the towns? For now, they remain basically unchangedfrom 1936, and they are likely to stay that way.

The downtown strip of Centerboro, a dozen miles south of theBridges farm, is just as it was before Walker Evans’s camera. A pic-ture taken from the same angle today reveals the alteration of onlya few signs and the style of cars. Waynesville, the seat of the neigh-boring county, was also photographed by Evans, and his pictures,never published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, show that thistown is also essentially unchanged.

The death of king cotton has left these towns bypassed. Butthey have two major points of distinction they did not have half acentury ago.

Waynesville is now largely controlled by blacks. Centerboro is

• • •

mainly controlled by whites. Therein lies the basis for a tension thathas existed since the 1960s civil rights days.

White leaders of Centerboro describe local blacks as satisfiedwith their lot and well behaved, and they point to Waynesville as anexample of what happens when whites drop their guard.

Though in a slight majority, Centerboro blacks are disorga-nized, and whites want them to keep them that way. To retainpower, whites are working to gerrymander voting districts. A towncouncilman explained this quite openly. He was working with otherleaders to disincorporate black housing areas on the city’s edge sothat blacks would be excluded from voting in town elections. In themore conservative environment twenty years after the 1960s, whiteleaders felt they could get away with this scheme, but it has beenlearned since that the federal government ultimately put a halt to it.

“We’ve been able to maintain the white majority so far,” saysthe town librarian. Federal regulators are empowered under the1965 Voting Rights Act to monitor these small towns to ensure thatno electoral fraud takes place. It will be a long time before the fed-eral regulators can stop this oversight in many small southerntowns.

In Waynesville, a few leaders, many behind Haskew, a longtimeblack activist, have led a 60 percent black majority in wresting ameasure of control away from whites. Most of the county commis-sioners and school board trustees are black, as is the sheriff, thoughthe council is still mostly white, as is the mayor. The white mayorfelt uncomfortable talking. He describes one of the two black coun-cilmen as “a good one,” meaning he often gives in to the wishes ofhis white brethren. It also means he is called “Tom” by Haskew andsome other blacks. All this should change, because the system ofvoting for the town’s city council was altered by a federal court or-der after local blacks complained. Officials will now be elected notat-large but by district. Whites used the at-large system to retainpower on the city level—they could dilute the vote in districts withlow voter turnout so that no blacks were elected. Now even thosevoting blacks in districts with low voter turnout will be able to electcouncilmen who represent them, rather than have their votesthrown in with those of all the other districts, where the whites, whovote in greater numbers, can be counted on to elect only their own.

But one liberal southern white newspaper editor says conserv-atives have actually gained from this, at least in larger cities. Before

the change, white officials elected at-large had to pay attention toblacks, who could not vote in blocks but could make a difference inwhich whites were elected. Now, with the district basis, officialsfrom all-white districts—and these are often the most powerful of-ficials—do not have to court black votes. As a consequence, morehard-line whites are being elected than before, polarizing towns andworsening conditions. A few districts, each drawn so as to includealmost only blacks, mean only a few token elected black lawmakerswho cannot buck the powerful white politicians. It seems blackscannot come out ahead in most towns no matter what is done.

Since blacks took control at a county level, Waynesville’s down-town has been largely abandoned by white businessmen. The deser-tion of downtown also reflects the death of farming.-There are manyempty storefronts and a sense of gloom. The departure of whites hasbeen hastened by blacks who gather each Saturday, led by Haskew,to picket the remaining white-owned stores to protest white controlof money in the county.

Whites, as might be suspected, are naturally upset by this. Notlong ago, Haskew’s house burned. Though the evidence is inconclu-sive, the cause of the blaze seems suspicious. At the urging of localwhites, Haskew was also arrested on federal charges of more thantwo dozen counts of tampering with the ballots that gave blackscontrol. Haskew was later found not guilty of any of the chargesagainst him. He proclaimed his innocence vigorously, both in courtand to us, and, to prove his point, produced some of the voters hewas accused of coercing. He took us to a blind woman, so old thatshe was the daughter of a slave. The woman was barely able torecognize that she had visitors. It’s hard to imagine, taking the pointof view of the other side, that she would be able to vote withoutguidance in filling out the absentee ballot. But there’s no other wayshe could vote, without Haskew’s help. It is a bitter fight.

Still, Haskew may be as power hungry as some whites to thewest in Centerboro. “We make the laws now,” he says, and he issmug about it. Some blacks not involved in the fray dislike what hehas done. They fear he is unwilling to compromise. At the least, theyworry there will be no place to shop. Concern over this has eruptedin warfare between him and other black leaders. One black politi-cian says just putting black faces in office will not solve the problemsof the county. Whites, who happen to have most of the money, arechoking the town off.

Haskew says whites began planting the land in pines, switchedto raising cattle or soybeans, and refused to create employment, inthe hope of driving out young blacks, leaving a county of aged ex-sharecroppers who would soon die off. After this, he says, whitesplanned to regain control.

“Soybeans and white-faced cows was supposed to replace theniggers,” says Haskew. But their plans after the disappearance ofcotton were foiled by the decline of black outmigration that coin-cided with the decline of northern industry.

“If the North was still absorbing all these people,” he says, “itwould be a ghost place now. But nobody’s going north anymore.”

While Waynesville is being destroyed, Centerboro is a museumof the past, not decaying like its nearby sister, but not moving for-ward either. Local whites in power loathe change of any sort. Someof the biggest controversies occur when someone wishes to repainta store sign. Ruling whites have regulated out fast-food chains andany business that competes with the monied men who run the poli-tics of the town. They seem to disdain poor whites along with poorblacks. Their policies have led to a closed marketplace where pricesare dictated and power is carefully handed down.

It’s doubtful these towns will do anything but continue a slideinto oblivion. Centerboro will probably look the same in anotherfifty years. Waynesville will be a populated ghost town, dividedalong white-black and black-black lines.

. vii .

At night in the end of a summer, Waynesville’s streets, quiet by day,are simply dead. The streets extend into the blackness from thecourthouse, which, as in all southern towns of any distinction, is thecenter of attention in the downtown district.

The courthouse stands bright in the night, pure in its whiteness,the painted brick chalky to the touch. The building is obscured bythree dripping magnolias. Beneath their darkness is a Civil War can-non, and it may not be an accident that it points north.

Near it is a knee-high wall that at noon hosts a row of agedblacks. Many wait for their friends visiting the welfare office in anold bank across the street. Welfare provides the largest means ofincome in this county. On the welfare office door are several an-nouncements. “Job Corps is the key to the door of opportunity.”

The words are printed in faded marker pen inside a crudely drawnkey. Below them is the following:

Job Corps . . . Provides job training. GED preparation. Medicaland dental care. Travel. Earnings. Job Corps gives young men andwomen 17 thru 21 the opportunity to find a brighter future. Helpyourself by letting Job Corps help you.

Half a dozen pay phones surround the square. All are well used,for many people cannot afford phones in their own homes. Awoman is arguing with someone on the phone at the corner of thewelfare office. She implores the person on the other end to tell herthe truth. Her husband sleeps in an old car. The argument continues,the best parts indecipherable, spoken in hushed tones.

At the hardware store, the window is filled with old-time goodssuch as washboards. The owner once said many local people stillclean clothes by hand with them. At City Drug, there is a back-to-school sale. This is one of the stores picketed by Haskew, the blackleader.

Last year, when being picketed, the owner refused to comment.He peered over the prescription counter and said outsiders shouldmind their own problems; Alabamians will mind theirs. He turnedback to his pills. It is sad he did not choose to share his views. Heassumed that anyone from out of town who asked about such thingswas a northern troublemaker who would make him look bad, nomatter what he said. His is a common reaction.

Just outside of town, a country store photographed by WalkerEvans is still run by one of the three large Depression-era plantationfamilies, who now, if combined, own about 75 percent of thiscounty. None of this family’s land is in cotton, and the gin across theroad from the store is rusted and falling down. Next to the gin is ashack still home to somebody. It lacks a door, and the porch leanslike the brim of an old straw hat. Nearly naked black children withdistended bellies sit on that porch. The man who runs the store isasked about poverty in this county.

“There ain’t no poor people ’round here,” he says. When theblacks across the street are pointed out, he shrugs. The faces of theblacks remain unchanged in the distance.

“I ain’t seen one ever go into the welfare office that wasn’t fat,”he says. “I wouldn’t say they was starvin’. They have it better now

226 And Their Children . . .

than they ever had it in their whole lives. They don’t gotta work nomore.” ^

He goes on to say it was civil rights that poisoned their mindsand made them want to stop working. That is what killed cotton,he says. If they had just kept on picking and kept their mouths shut,they’d be working today.

Then his friend nudges him, and it is like a switch has beenthrown, with the realization that these words spoken to strangersmight somehow be used against him.

Without missing a breath, he says, “I ain’t gonna answer an-other question.”

It is impossible to be an outsider and get honest views fromwhites. And most black officials are simply afraid. Some whites,when approached casually, say all the usual racist things one mightexpect. One white says that blacks are just as corrupt as whiteswere, but that whites at least kept the roads in good shape. Ofcourse, there are whites who aren’t racist, but they seem a minorityin this town

This night, there is no sign of conflict, just the faces of eighteenempty stores that surround the square of the courthouse. One is amonument to the 1960s. Shirts on racks rot on hangers, everythingthick with dust. The seed store is permanently shuttered, reflectingthe state of farmings There are no restaurants in the downtown dis-trict, just two on the outskirts. Few can afford to dine out.

Around the corner from the courthouse is the only tavern. Theblack owner once said he hates not only white leaders but most localblacks as well. He says he started hating fellow blacks after theystarted hating him for doing whatever it was they figured he musthave done to get the bar permit. The way he sees it, they becamejealous of his fortune. He’s angry that many refuse to patronize him.Groups of blacks will stand outside his tavern door, drinking boozebought up the street in the package store, laughing wickedly whenhe tries to chase them away.

It seems everyone in this town is full of some sort of hate. It isnot hard to understand, in a sorry place like this.

Tonight, the bar is closed, the inside dark. In the window is ahand-lettered sign, next to a drawing of a robot:

Welcome Lincolnites. City Lounge presents Friday-nite—9:00p.m. August 1, 1986, “Dr. Throwdown and Johnny Jive”

Bridges 227

Nearby, a church has located in an old storefront. On its win-dow is a rough drawing of a dead man, hands crossed on his chest,and a warning:

The living know they shall die. Regardless to race. Repent or per-ish.

Inside the outline of a tombstone, scrawled in blood-red water-color, are the words:

Rest in PeaceBorn 19

Died 19

Put yourself here

A church bell tolls a dozen times. Back in the square, thewoman on the phone is still emotional, and her husband sleeps on.At the jail, prisoners jeer at passersby in the night. The parking lotnear the jail—next to the church—was the site of a civil rights riotin 1965. Haskew was there. He and other demonstrators had beenprotesting county voting laws that excluded blacks, when somewhites showed up. Whites smashed newsmen’s cameras, policemarched on the crowd, and no one is certain what happened in theconfusion, but a shot was fired and everyone ran, leaving a youngblack man dead in a pool of blood at the center of the parking lot.

Waynesville—and Centerboro, to a degree—still lives with that

day.

Gaines

. i.

No one knows when the people of Parson’s Cove started using thespring. Sherman Parson is eighty-seven, and as a little boy he fetchedits water. His grandfather told him that when he was a child, he toohad filled his buckets at it. Sherman Parson and his kin are de-scended from slaves. They are named after the white family whoowned them and who also gave their name to the Cove. The whiteParson family is forgotten, but the black Parsons have been here along time, predating the road next to the spring whose water theystill drink. The spring is steady and has never gone dry, even in theworst droughts.

The spring lies several miles south of the crossroads stores andabout a mile up the road from the Gaines home, at the bottom of aswale, about ten feet east of the road. Its water emerges from a low

bank of earth that sprouts box elders and sassafras, red oaks thatrise far above lesser trees.

The water emerges not from a single hole but from a series ofseeps oozing faint hints bled from the length of the bank, and theymerge and merge again until collecting about five feet below in asolid rivulet thick as a strong man’s wrist, dammed by a bank ofmud into a shallow pool, where many residents of Parson’s Covecome to dip their buckets—still the sole source of water for them.Below the dam, rebuilt after each heavy rain, the water runs parallelwith the road, until it joins a nearby creek of no consequence.

At the edge of the pool, the mud is tightly packed from theimprints of many feet. The water is used not only by the men andwomen of the Cove but also by dragonflies that light upon its sur-face, crayfish that inhabit the bottom and keep it clean of insectsand debris lost by careless bucket dippers, and opossums that haveleft tracks. It is cold water that burns the lips. It absolutely lackstaste, unless the bottom is riled when a cupped hand is dipped toodeeply, and then it has the flavor of bark.

One evening during a conversation on the porch of FrankGaines and his wife, Urline, a group of residents decided that, afterall these years, the spring needed some improvement. Frank Gaines,Sherman Parson, his son Herman, and two other men took it uponthemselves to do something. Frank has a well, but he got caught upin the spirit to help his neighbors who don’t. Much serious discus-sion ensued. A week or so later, someone found a length of concretesewer pipe, four feet high, two and a half across. The pipe suppliernever said where it came from, and no one asked.

Their idea became this: they’d punch a hole in the pipe walland dig the pipe into the mud of the spring. The pipe would fill, andwater would gush from the hole.

Sherman Parson envisions getting all the cold water he’ll be ableto draw by simply placing his jugs at the base of a spigot, ratherthan by the cumbersome process of transferring it with pans, a chorehe’s endured the past eight decades.

. ii.

It is morning, and five men are gathered at the spring. Herman Par-son is the youngest, at fifty-six. He’s also the tallest, with shouldersas broad as the pipe that lies next to the truck. His face is like a box,

squared off by a flattop haircut. He has much lighter skin than theothers, except for his father, whose skin is the same tone, blendingperfectly with the earthen bank. Old man Gaines’s shirt is spottedwith holes, missing many buttons, open the length of his chest, heldtogether in a knot tied like a bone joint at the waist. His pants arerolled to the knees. He has a face hardened from a scar earned at apulp mill, when a chain licked him, leaving a lightning bolt acrosshis forehead. It seems the oversize bones of these men’s bodies are illfitted to match their tight skins, and the skeletons protrude at thejoints.

Sherman Parson goes to the bed of the truck, a 1966 Chevroletwith eight cracks in the windshield. He finds a hammer, handlesplintered, taped together, and a chisel. He strokes the concretegrain. Each man has an opinion of where the hole should be bored.Some want it in the middle and some right at the edge. The menstand back. There is talk. It cannot be described as an argument,because each man lets minutes pass before replying. The words aresaid with a slowness that gives the impression that no conversationis going on.

“’Bout here?”

The heat of day has already matured into sweat on their faces,and the long gaps are filled with the sound of locusts somewhere inthe treetops.

“Best put it there.”

“No, there.”

“There.”

At noon, chips have been flying off the pipe for well over anhour, stinging flesh, propelled by carefully driven blows. ShermanParson will hammer for ten minutes, stop, feel, resume. A thermom-eter in the cab indicates it’s one hundred degrees.

The men decided to bore two holes in the pipe. On one side, ahole about an inch wide has been chopped about a foot below thelip. On the other, Gaines is finishing one of the same diameter eigh-teen inches down. They believe that the water will enter the lowerhole and the force fill the pipe, driving it out the opposite and higherhole. It appears this theory defies the law of gravity, but it seemsproper not to mention anything.

The pipe chopping finished, Gaines wades into the pool, shovel

slung over a shoulder. The tool is as old as the bearer, handle wornto a pinpoint from years of rot and the abrasion of use. The steelblade is so unevenly worn that it seems to have teeth. Gaines wieldsthe frail instrument with power, driving it into the water and thrust-ing mud on the bank. It doesn’t take much to imagine him as astrong young man of six foot two some fifty years ago, standing firmbehind a team of mules, riding steel across the earth. His back isnow curved to a C from those early days behind a mule. It’s easy tosee why his landlord, Charles Gumbay, sold him the two acres be-fore he died. Gaines must have been a tremendous worker. Hemoves fast, defying the pace of the day for ten minutes, until a holeis sunk in the base of the pool so that water reaches his knees. Heslows, showing his age, and the scoops come only after long rests ofleaning on the pointed end of the shovel. The other four men standin the shade and watch. Gaines wipes his mouth.

“You sit there on yo’ ass,” he calls out. The men smile in re-sponse. Gaines goes back to digging.

Sherman Parson takes a turn, doing about as well as Gaines.

“Oh, things have changed,” says the elder Parson of the Cove.“Cotton? What you talkin’ ’bout? Used to be nothin’ but cottonroun’ here. Ain’ no cotton here now. They planted cotton year be-fore last. Jus’ a patch. They planted pine trees there last year. I askedthem, I said, ‘You ain’ gonna eat no pine biscuits.’ They didn’ havenothin’ to say ’bout not eatin’ no pine trees.”

The day is advancing, but all the work seems as if it could havebeen compressed into half an hour. The sun has journeyed to the topof the trees on the west side of the road; it now invades the shade ofthe red oaks that shielded the spring during the morning hours. Thewaist-deep hole is at last ready to receive the great pipe. It takes allfive men to roll it through the mud at the edge, now gelatin becauseof all the water being slogged over it. The bank swallows feet. Thepipe falls in, water welling around the outside, heading downstream,refusing to enter the center. The men recognize the flaw in theirtheory. To correct matters, they try damming the flow in an effort tobuild some pressure and convince the water to rise inside. It doesnot oblige.

The men stand back and contemplate. Herman takes an oldmayonnaise jar found in the mud. He rinses it with a slurry ofgravel, and the men use it to drink water taken from the head of the

pool, where it is still relatively clear. The water tightens the throatand satisfies better than any soda. They’ll have to try and fix it someother day.

The men are frustrated—not only by their failure but also be-cause none of the other residents who drove by have stopped andhelped. It seems the younger generation is not interested in giving ahand to the old men, that its work ethic is not as strong as theirs. Ofcourse, the young men lucky enough to have jobs were away atthem, such as Gaines’s son-in-law, who works at a distant lumbermill. But the half dozen young men who passed merely stopped totalk, not to help.

“They shore gonna use this,” says Gaines, shaking his head.

The men pack the tools and head home to their shacks lost inthe forest.

. Hi.

The Gaines home is a mile away. Ten youths dribble a basketball inthe dust near the road, shooting for a hoop hooked to a crudelyplanted log pole. Their bodies, bright with sweat, are shirtless andsleek ebony, like muskrats swimming in a pond. They seem tallerthan ordinary young men, with elongated arms bent in exaggeratedarcs, atlatls of flesh and bone. They are intent on the game, timedby the setting of the sun.

Two homes stand behind the hoop.

The crude house on the right is the newer one, a simple squareof three rooms, set across from the older house. This ancient homeis of the classic tenant style, with a steep-sloped roof of rusted tin, arock fireplace leaning away from the north wall at a queer angle.On the front and side of the old house are two porches. One is themorning porch. The other is for the evening, located to escape theshifting sun. The floor planks of both porches are rotted, and wherethe boards have broken through, they’re patched with tin skinsnailed in place.

The yard between the two houses is unfamiliar with the growthof grass. Whatever hasn’t been trampled by the shuffle of many feethas been scratched raw by free-roaming chickens. Exactly in themiddle is a large pecan tree, leaves soiled with dust kicked by threecars now parked at its base. Behind the tree is the Gaineses’ well, the

Gaines 233

old hand-dip variety with a wooden bucket dangling from a ropecrank. A low growth of pears and peaches rises behind the well,where a garden of shriveled corn, sugarcane, and peas is lost amid atangle of weeds and pig pens made of half-sawed logs. Off to theright is a black mule. Near the barn is the rusted and rotten skeletonof a mule-drawn cart, last parked sometime in 1965.

This late in the day, all members of the Gaines family are seatedon the evening porch, in homemade chairs. Frank Gaines delicatelybalances his buttocks atop the four-inch handrailing, wrinkledhands clasped to mouth, eyes gazing over his peaked fingers. Toeshook the splintered wood, and his pants are still rolled and muddiedfrom the spring. There is a young fat boy; a thin girl; an olderwoman, Frank’s wife, Urline, who is in a rocker, slowly waving acardboard hand fan with a picture of Jesus on it. Jesus is waving hishand and saying “Go to Church.” A bald man sits in a wheelchair.This is Frank’s son Joe, crippled at an early age by diabetes. His eyesare not on the game but on the sun, in the mist, lost in the treetops.

Joe Gaines sits tall in the wheelchair. The only hair on his bodyis the thin line of his mustache flowing around his mouth into thedark rim of a goatee. He talks about the cotton days as the ballplay-ers walk from sight. The night shadows darken the porch, extin-guishing the sharpness of faces belonging to still bodies. The onlymovement comes from Joe, who assists his words with motions ofhis stout arms, as round as the thighs of a thin woman. It seemsimprobable that his forty-year-old body should be wilted in thatchair. Frank comes off the railing to sit near his son.

“We get by,” says Joe. “We raise ’taters, corn, peas, all thatstuff. We kill hogs. We don’ need to buy no sto’ meat. Make ourown syrup from sugarcane. We go to the mill and grind wheat, makeour bread. The bread you get out of a sto’? That ain’ bread. We don’need nobody, nothin’.”

Frank and Urline are retired. Most of their ten children havemoved on. The parents still live with one young daughter and withJoe, who, when he fell ill, came back from Chicago, the city towhich he’d fled in 1963. One son who never left and his wife livenext door in the other house. That son works in the plywood mill.Frank and Urline’s income is from Social Security and disability pay-ments.

Of the Gaineses’ two acres, almost every square foot is planted

in food. Bill, the mule out back, is used to plow each spring. Theyhave to grow food so they can eat, says Frank. But they can’t growanything of value that could bring in money.

For this family, survival has an even keener edge than it doesfor the Bridges family. They must grow everything on a patch thesize of just one of the Bridgeses’ three gardens. Whereas bankruptcyis ruining Bridges, these people face an entirely different problem. —Frank points to twenty acres of tall grass across the road, anovergrown field between the pavement and the distant tree line. Bysquinting, one can faintly see finger pines poking through the mattedblades in the fading light of dusk.

“You see that lan’ over there? I was workin’ it. Now it’s ’n pine.They planted them a few years ago. That white woman won’ sell it.And she won’ rent it. She jus’ planted it ’n pine. It’s like that all roun’here. Them whites jus’ won’ rent the lan’, let anyone farm.”

They are landlocked by white landowners on all sides. Thoselandowners control vast holdings, and Gaines views them as theirlargest difficulty. That twenty-acre section is part of the cotton landhe worked for Mr. Gumbay long ago. It is still owned by Mrs. Gum-bay. He’d like to plow it again in order to raise food on it to feed hisfamily. If he could plant corn there, he says, they’d be able to survivebetter. “Me and my fam’ly can do it, but it ain’ ’nough,” says Frankof the farming they do to supplement their scant income. Now, insummer, a plane descends and sprays that land with herbicides, tokill the weeds that might compete with the pines.

The Gaineses are trapped in this bend of the river, still affectedby a plantation matriarch. In 1986, the cycle of change brought onby the collapse of the cotton empire is not complete. Rural blackslike Gaines are still trying to cope. The old ones are stuck here.Many of the young ones can no longer go north for jobs. That es-cape valve has been closed to them. The land, more and more of itnow forested, is off-limits and unavailable as an instrument of sup-port for them. There seems to be no easy solution in sight for peoplelike the Gaineses.

Frank continues,

I was plantin’ corn over there, but she jus’ stop me. She wastakin’ a fo’th. You know what a fo’th is. I’s where you git threebaskets of corn, she gits one. Well, in a way it was fair, in a way, itwun’t. You know, you got to buy the fertilizer, do the work. Why

Games 235

won’ they let anyone farm? We’d pay them. They jus’ don’ wantus roun’. They don’ want colored folks farmin’. They puttin’ allthe land roun’ here in pine. I got to have some corn, for feed. Theycan’ make nothin’ in trees. They think they can raise pines on itbetter’n you can farm it.

. iv .

Mrs. Gumbay lives some distance from the Gaines family, in a realtown across a range of hilly ground from Parson’s Cove. Her homeis on the mam highway north of Jefferson, where Pearl and EllenWoods live. It is set far back from the road, at the end of a longpaved drive, behind a grove of fourteen trees in a yard as large as acity park. The heavy oak door, in the center of the stretched brickhome, cracks an inch with a knock. Mrs. Gumbay is wearing whitetennis shoes and white slacks, her white hair freshly curled. She re-sembles the kind of woman who is a member of the library associa-tion. She is wary, but opens the door and makes tea. She sits in anair-conditioned room paneled with hardwood, next to a fireplaceflanked by squatting stone Buddhas holding logs.

Now, 1 don’t feel content to talk freely with you. You won’tunderstand. You know as well as I that when the South is men-tioned, people think of the nigger picking cotton for the rich plan-tation owner. There was so much talk about the black man pickinghis cotton for the white man. But the man who had the land hadto have something for it. Back then, the owner didn’t get anythingmuch out of it. We farmed until 1970. The old way ended about33370. We never owned a cotton picker. We had about thirty fami-v lies over there on our land. They picked by hand.

What would they have done for jobs if they didn’t have cot-ton? What would they do now if they didn’t live off the govern-ment? It all goes back to integration. That integration problem hitand tore farming up. When the integration problem came on, theywould not he’p you on the farm anymore. There’s a resentment.

The black people don’t want to farm anymore. Well, they do, butthey want to own the land.

You think I’m a segregationist? No. I believe in them havingequal rights. I raised a little black boy. He now works in a papermill, earning thirty-five thousand a year. He’s doing well. He staysloyal. He’s really better to me than my adopted daughter. He comesaround and still mows my lawn. Integration has done so much for

the blacks. But it’s been hard for them to get jobs. They haven’tbeen able to get up and go to work. They have outgrown share-cropping. Outgrown cotton-picking. But they haven’t grown intoanything else. Parson’s Cove is really a hurting area. But there is nocrime. People leave their doors open. A Nigra is afraid of authority.

They hate to be called nigger. But nigger comes from illiteratewhites who couldn’t say Negro. They made a bad term out of it.Just like they made a bad term out of picking cotton. But we allpicked cotton. We all hoed. I didn’t look down on people pickingcotton. My husband worked day and night. He didn’t ask them todo anything he wouldn’t do.

Right now, I’m not doing much farming. We rent some to thegovernment. Our taxes were real low. They upped the price of theland. Now, I can hardly pay taxes. They said all my land is worthsix hundred an acre. It’s not worth six hundred an acre for someof that land. Some of it is just holding the world together.

Would you want to live in Parson’s Cove? Yes, I’m plantingthe land in pines. I put sixty acres in pine last year. This year, I amgoing to put a hundred and eight acres in pine. Let’s reason. Yousee, I am seventy-five. I won’t live to see any of those trees cut. Imay have ten more good years left. I’m planting those trees for mygrandchildren.

Frank Gaines? My husband sold him two acres before hedied. He liked him. Charles sold several of them land. But now,Gaines couldn’t pay me to rent twenty acres of my land. Hewouldn’t make anything sharecropping. What would I do with afew bushels of corn he would give me? Some of them want to buysome more land. But you don’t want to sell them a little old twoacres. They think the landowner is holding out. But it messes upyour farm. They can’t afford it, and it makes it harder for you tosell the land later if it’s all broken up.

For the other ones, I rent them their little houses. They havelived there all their lives, and I could not run them off. It’s the onlyhome they know. I rent the homes to them for ten dollars a month.They don’t keep them up. They’re satisfied with those houses. Theyjust let them run down. I fix the windows, and they break again. Idon’t get enough out of those houses. A lot of them have burneddown over the years. They just keep burning. A poor old womanburned in one eight years ago on our place. It’s a sad situation. Idon’t know what to do about it.

You know good and well I can’t make anything on ten dollarsa month. I don’t get enough from those houses to pay the taxes.For ten dollars, they want hunting privileges. They want to go out

and cut wood. They don’t always pay the ten dollars. It is a painin the neck. Yet I love them to death. They’re just as sweet as canbe. As long as I live, all of them will have a home. My adopteddaughter doesn’t feel as close to them as I do.

. v .

Mrs. Gumbay blames welfare and civil rights for destroying cotton.

In 1965, two professors were well ahead of their time whenthey advanced a theory that the quest for civil rights was led by aneed for new jobs because of the mechanization of cotton.

Their theory was explained in a New York Times article byAustin C. Wehrwein:

CHICAGO, April 24—Mechanical cotton pickers, tractorsand chemical weed-killers that have driven hundreds of thousandsof Southern Negroes off the farm were cited today as an explana-tion for the civil rights movement that has erupted in both Southand North over the last decade.

This explanation, advanced by Profs. Harry C. Dillinghamand David F. Sly of Central Michigan University at the PopulationAssociation of America convention here, is a departure from theusual view.

Many observers contend that the current racial crisis stemsfrom the Negro’s rising hopes that segregation and discriminationwould soon be ended.

According to the Dillingham-Sly theory, mechanization ofcotton farming has displaced so many Negroes since 1950 that ithas affected Negro job opportunities throughout the nation.

The article went on to quote Sidney M. Wilhelm and Edwin H.Powell’s “Who Needs the Negro?” published in Trans-Action:

The tendency to look upon the racial crisis as a struggle forequality between Negro and white is too narrow in scope. Thecrisis is caused not so much by the transition from slavery to equal-ity as by a change from an economics of exploitation to an eco-nomics of uselessness.

The Times article ended by saying that blacks were being“pushed” off the land, not “pulled” by job opportunities, and thatblack political power did not seem strong enough to create new jobs

for these former sharecroppers. It accurately predicted a grim em-ployment future.

. vt .

Another evening on the porch: "

Joe Gaines’s wheelchair faces the setting sun.

“I’m gonna walk again,” he affirms. “I will.”

Joe does not do the therapy that might help him regain the useof his legs. He drinks many days, lost with his eyes to the west, as iflooking for something to happen on the horizon. Joe asks to bewheeled down the plywood ramp.

Frank is across the road, somewhere on that twenty acres ofMrs. Gumbay’s. He emerges from the weeds, leading Bill, the mule.Frank sometimes sneaks Bill over to graze on the grass amid theemerging pines, unbeknownst to Mrs. Gumbay.

Frank takes up his place on the porch railing. Joe settles hischair next to the trunk of the pecan tree. Sherman and Herman Par-son are visiting. Herman straddles a waist-tall propane tank as if itwere a horse, his mud-encrusted boots scratching slowly in the dust.Urline waves her Jesus fan. A parade of slow cars passes down theroad paved just three years ago. Those in the cars are all residents.

Parson’s Cove is at a point on the map that seems as far fromanywhere as any visitor to Alabama should be. Few come. It is equi-distant from the largest cities, at the terminus of a road that dead-ends at a bend in a large river. The road that leads here steadilyshrinks into a forest, until it reaches the crossroads stores that markthe “center” of Parson’s Cove, which is unlike anything that couldbe called a town. It has three stores, a church in a house trailer, aschool, also in a house trailer, one mansion, numerous lesser homesscattered unseen and hidden over many square miles. It’s one of theblackest places in Alabama, and none of the dozens of people seenwalking on the road are white. One white woman remains living inall of the whole Cove, and she runs the store, a silver buildingtwisted on its foundation; her husband is dead, and she is very old;she sits in the store, telling everyone who enters how lonely she is.

“There’s a gang of people live roun’ here, out back behindthere,” says Joe. “But you don’ do nothin’ roun’ here hardly. If itwun’t for the government givin’ you a little somethin’, this would be

in terrible shape here. If the government wun’t given them nothin’,they couldn’t live.”

All those on the porch say many of their relatives and friendswent north in the 1960s. Most of Frank and Urline’s children movedon, one as far away as California. A daughter remains home, as doesthe son employed in the lumber mill who lives next door. Anotherson, James, lives in Montgomery.

“Used to be, you could leave,” says Sherman Parson. “Lots offolks went no’th. Now, there ain’ nowhere to go. Ain’ no jobs upno’th. The kids, they’re jus’ stayin’, workin’ what they can. There’llbe more livin’ down here than there used to be. I don’ know whatfolks is gonna do.”

“They don’ fix the houses,” says Sherman of Mrs. Gumbay andsome of the other landlords. “They jus’ take the rent. The folks whogot the money jus’ run the sto’.”

Joe wanted to stay when cotton went down in the 1960s, butcouldn’t find work. That’s when he went to Chicago. He’d still bethere, if he hadn’t fallen ill from diabetes two years ago. He lived onthe eleventh floor of a building with no elevator, and there was noone to take care of him. So he came home six months ago. His lastjob was on a warehouse loading dock.

“It’s worse up north,” says Joe of the violence he found. “Dayand night somebody always gettin’ killed, raped, shot. Here youhave no problem with that. We can go away for a week and don’have to lock the house.”

In some ways, even the racism Joe found up north was worsethan what he says is now found in Alabama. But Urline still feelsthat nothing has changed in Parson’s Cove.

“They go their way. I go mine,” says Urline of the whites shesees when they journey to town. “They stay in their place. They don’come down here. I’m sure gonna stay in mine.”

Herman Parson says there’s a black sheriff in this county, butthat doesn’t mean anything regarding the rules of what a black mancan or cannot do. “In the city, down in Mobile, it’s okay. Roun’ here,in these country places, it’s different. You don’ want to do things likego with a white woman roun’ here.”

“Back then,” says Sherman of the tenant-farm days, “you nevergot out of debt. There were no cars. There was no place to go to besegregated out of, 'cause you couldn’ get away. You ride mules, yougo only to the grist mill, haul cotton.”

It’s gotten better, Sherman says, but the old ways endure insubtle ways.

“If you’re a black man,” Sherman says, “you don’ look at awhite man. They got an authority some of them want to use onyou.”

. vii.

For white men, blacks can be difficult to approach. Driving backroads lined with crumbling shacks at dusk, all eyes are on us, theresidents’ faces lined with mistrust, gazing from the dark of twisteddoors, windows with pulled curtains. Our usual ruses that workwell with whites often fail—Do you know how to get to such-and-such a place? Just how old is this town? and so on—questionswhose answers are known. The eyes of blacks seldom meet those ofinquisitors, feet shuffle, and the questions are answered politely,often concluding with “sir,” but no conversations are started.

This kind of reaction was addressed long ago just after the CivilWar in Robert Somers’s book The Southern States since the War,1870-71:

A negro servant hereabouts, on approaching “Massa” to announcesomething . . . turns round on his heels in the awful presence, andwith “bated breath and whispering humbleness” mumbles out hismessage in a jargon which nobody but a negro or a “Massa” canunderstand. The marks of servility are sometimes too deep to bewholesome betwixt one class of fellow-creatures and another.

This attitude of deference is a holdover from the cotton tenantdays, which inherited it from slave days. Gaines and the Parson mensay the way they got along was to play the game of subservience.Cotton is dead, but the game goes on.

Northern blacks don’t act this way. Men like Joe Gaines whohave gone north and come home act differently than do their broth-ers who never left. Joe took on the leadership role as spokesman forthe family the first few days, because he was used to dealing withwhites on a different level.

The cultlike brainwashing of the cotton system is slow to per-ish. It has been hard, ultimately fatal, for whites like Maggie Louise.But for the blacks, it seems even more intransigent. Racism against

former black tenant farmers continues in the “new” South. But howdoes it compare with the treatment of those who fled to the more“liberal” North?

As Joe found, racism seems to be more violent and confronta-tional in the North. In some Chicago neighborhoods, such asBridgeport, the Eleventh Ward district, whites emerge from theirhomes to throw stones or take baseball bats to a car of black menwho just happen to be driving through. In Boston, a black foolishenough to walk alone through Southie will receive similar treatment.In Howard Beach in New York City, a group of blacks whose carhad broken down were chased by a band of youths with baseballbats, one of them onto a nearby parkway and into the path of anoncoming car. In Cleveland, a white driving on East Fifty-fifth Streetmight find a brick sailing through his or her window. These kinds ofincidents are relatively rare in the South. Few neighborhoods are thisoff-limits in southern urban centers, and certainly none are in ruralareas.

In many ways, the North is now more racist than the South.Boston took a decade longer than much of the South to deal withschool integration, and when it occurred, it was violent. It has takenBoston twenty-four years after the long, hot summer of 1964 tostart integrating public housing. In some of these northern cities,blacks are more isolated by de facto segregation in ghettos than theyever were under the official segregation policies of Jim Crow.

The black-against-black crime of these urban northern ghettosis extreme. Drugs, murder, and a loss of hope are all too common.Black poverty can be traced to places like Parson’s Cove. It is some-thing that has been ill dealt with for decades. Yet many in the Northstill turn up their noses at the South for what they see as its primitiveracial attitudes. What they hold up as evidence of southern racialhate are those images of state troopers bullwhipping marchers onthe Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. But that South no longer exists.Its racism today is like the racism around the rest of the nation—clothed in other issues, rationalized in varied ways, much moresubtle but ever present.

After spending so much time in Alabama with rural blacks, wefound it interesting to have this perspective and be in Chicago justbefore the 1988 presidential election, doing a story based on therichest and the poorest suburbs in America, both of which happen

to be in this city. Ford Heights, the poorest suburb, with an averageannual family income of $4,523, was all black; this came as no sur-prise. The rich suburb, with an average annual family income of$48,950, was all white. They are at opposite ends of town, thirty-nine miles apart.

~ In Ford Heights, the only barber in town was sitting in front ofhis little shop, and it was also no surprise to learn he was an ex-sharecropper. Willie’s story could be that of any one of thousands ofother blacks.

Willie came north during what he calls the “flight” of the1960s. It wasn’t so bad then. He made enough money at a host ofjobs to enable him to buy this barbershop in 1978; that year, hesometimes grossed as much as $300 a day. And then everythingstarted retrenching. The day he was interviewed, he made just $17.Things for blacks have gone downhill, and no one has money to geta haircut any longer. Willie has tried to sell the shop so that he cango back to Tennessee, but banks have redlined and will not grantloans to buyers. Willie is trapped and angry. His story is not unique:we found blacks who feel just like this in Boston and other cities.

Up in the richest suburb, Kenilworth, on the North Shore ofChicago, everyone who came to the only barbershop was a Repub-lican. The clients spoke glowingly of the Reagan tax cuts; theywanted to find more ways to keep even more of their money. Itwasn’t so much that they were against people like Willie; nonewanted to openly hurt someone like him. It was their ignorance thatwas outrageous—they didn’t even know he existed. They knewnothing about the Willies of this world, or of his problems, or ofwhy he is the way he is, or how his problems might come back tobite them someday.

The first thing we noticed about Willie was that he talked aboutAmerica in the second person. He kept talking about “your” presi-v dent and “your” nation. He and his family have worked as hard asanyone can. He went from picking cotton, to trying everything else,to working hard to build his own business, and he wound up losingas if he’d never left the cotton patch. He could have just as wellstayed home like some of the Gaineses and been better off. NowWillie feels removed from this society. This loss of hope has bred abitterness this nation has not seen the last of yet. The rich Republi-cans in Kenilworth had better start thinking about these formersharecroppers and the way things remain stacked against them.

vin .

Also in 1988, several years after the day the men were at the spring,on a return visit, we found the pipe in place and working, finallyfixed so that jugs could be easily filled. The design, though originallyflawed, was adjusted so the holes in the pipe were at the same level;it just had to be tinkered with.

Down the road, all the Gaineses were on the porch, sitting justas they had last been seen, with the company of Herman and Sher-man Parson. Things happen slowly here. The only discernible differ-ence from our earlier visits was that Joe was no longer saying thathe would walk again. He still lived on that porch, slept in that hotroom with a bare bulb dangling overhead, staring at the walls of theshack wallpapered with cardboard and newspaper.

The legacy of the cotton system that continues to haunt Williein Chicago also still affects the people of Parson’s Cove. In Alabama,it’s the attitude of blacks that is the most scarring holdover of thecotton system. Even if a local man or woman can land one of therare jobs, there is £till the problem of “loyalty” to the boss man.

When Mrs. Gumbay talks about the black child she raised, andhow he remains “loyal,” she touches on the most important powerthe landlords had, the social contract of the South. You and “theman” (or the lady) have this deal. He will never let you starve andyou will always remember that you're his boy. In the old days, thespecifics of the deal were this: pick the cotton, don’t complain ormake waves, and the man will take care of you. Today, it’s definedthis way: The man has the only jobs, and if you want to be his boyhe’ll be happy to let you work in his factories. In exchange he asksthat no matter how dangerous the conditions, or how poor the pay,you don’t vote for a union.

The wage at most ofthe area jobs is the minimum or barelyabove. The Gaines son who works in the lumber mill and lives nextdoor to Frank and Urline is one of those who has traded a cottonmaster for a lumber mastervMany blacks still talk about “the man,”believing he exists as an inevitable part of their lives, just as in daysof old.

A few of the younger ones are somewhat freer of the effects ofcotton and can escape the system of “the man” under which theirolder brothers and sisters grew up. It barely touched them. For the

244 And Their Children . . .

children under twenty, cotton picking is history told by the old ones,as it will be for the ones yet to be born.

It seems maybe half the children in Parson’s Cove may yet makeit, if the Gaines family is a fair example. Their youngest girl is incollege in Montgomery, studying to become a social worker.

Then there is James Gaines, twenty-five. He is the last of thegeneration who picked Mrs. Gumbay’s cotton, doing so around1970, as a child. He went to Detroit, as did so many from the Cove,but he went to attend college, not to take a factory job. Now, helives in Montgomery and is working while continuing his schooling.He is seeking a business degree. For now, says James,

I work in a nursing home. But that won’t be for long. Farming? Ithasn’t been that long ago. 1 picked cotton. I hoed. I dreamed aboutgetting out of farming. Now, I work inside. When it’s hot, I got air-conditioning. When it’s cold, there’s heat. It’s my kind of work.

The only cotton I will ever handle again is the shirt on my back.

I’m saving my money. I drive a seventy-four Malibu. But I’m work-ing for a Z-28. Who don’t want to be rich?

James is going places. The days he spent in Parson’s Cove arenot a handicap. But many from the Cove have not been able to wrestthemselves free of the old self-destructive mind-set.

In some ways, Mrs. Gumbay is right. Some of the black menand women of the Cove were not prepared for the death of cotton.James and his sister will prove her blanket generalization wrong, butthe success ratio is not good.

For the half who break out financially, there will be liberation.But the half who “fail” will also be freed in a way. They will nolonger be bonded to Mrs. Gumbay or her daughter in any way. Theprison of psychological servitude will be destroyed as the cotton em-pire fades from memory. The young ones will grow out of Big Dad-dyism. The illusion that “the man” will always take care of themwill seem archaic. It will be unfortunate, however, if they end uphaving wrenched themselves free of the old southern social contractonly to pledge dependence on welfare benefits.

It may be a long time before all this plays out. Before it is over,the residents of Parson’s Cove will pay more of a price. Mrs. Gum-bay still owns ten shacks she rents out. Her largess encourages tenfamilies to hang on to a system that is only a memory and to a futurewithout hope. The shacks will soon fall down or burn, too worn to

Gaines 245

survive another generation. She will not improve the homes or letthe former tenants buy them. As for the homes still standing whenshe dies, no one knows if her daughter will continue to rent them.The daughter may evict them alk—

One way or the other, those ten families will have to move on.There is no place for them here. They will have to go into the slumsof Selma, Montgomery, or perhaps, belatedly, Chicago, where theywill join those who made that journey long before. Many of thelandowners like the Gaineses will remain. Their young will be un-aware of the price paid by their fathers and mothers. They don’tvote, don’t know why they came to be born in this wilderness.

Meanwhile, the pines will grow thick and tall, and this power-ful land will retract under the encroachment of the forest’s crushingsilence. Men and women who pass down the roads carved throughforests will not know what was.

For now, this night, the houses of Parson’s Cove are quiet, theinhabitants inside ensconced in front of their television sets. In awindow, the soft glow of an oil lamp burns across a distant field, thepane blurred from view by the heads of young pines coming of age.The pepper of wood smoke is in the air. A full moon arcs across thenight. The vast tracts between the occasional houses seem extradark, except down by the river, where it is still open, and the waterflows swift and shiny in the moonlight.

Coda

. i.

Winter comes to central Alabama slowly and deliberately. Thoughthe state is at the same latitude as northern Africa, winters there arenot at all as universally kind as in the Mediterranean. Yet they areseldom as brutally harsh as those of the more northern regions ofthe United States. Alabama winters would be more honest if theywent one way or the other.

Snow is rare. When it comes, it merely dusts remaining fields,filtering to the floor of growing forests. It soon retreats from theopen places beneath the advance of day, lingering in the shade ofvast linear tracts of pines, the needle-covered ground sealed by thecrystalline brown frozen mat broken only by fresh exclamations thatare the marks of deer that passed in secret.

More commonly, precipitation comes in the form of an in-between kind of rain, colder than snow but utterly unlike the re-gion’s summer showers, which are sharp, alive, quick.

During such onslaughts, the land is disoriented and silver: theleafless limbs of gum and oak stand naked and sharp against thesky; the fields, roads, the rooftops of the cities, all the same shinygray. Colors do not exist. The sole movement is the crawl of watercoursing this gorged land, rejected by the parking lots of shoppingmalls in Birmingham and Mobile, by the unchanged pavements ofCenterboro. The creeks are swollen in arousal, awaiting their turnto feed the big rivers that themselves seem too gorged to accept theofferings.

Yet more comes.

The rain falls all over Alabama. At the cemetery where MaggieLouise is buried it buffets the unyielding granite of her stone, rav-aging what is left of the map of Orlando, still held in place by thebrick under which it was left.

Brown runoff rushes down the rutted dirt of the Hobe’s Hillroad, now seldom traveled. Some who journey this way go to theend at the brink of a hill to cast off unwanted bed springs, sinks, tincans. Or they are lovers who park between the water-logged sofaand the television set with the smashed tube. They leave behind usedcondoms, now driven flat against the mud.

The rain-gorged air swallows the diesel horn of the train downin the valley that is working its way north through the drizzle. Thesound is faint against the steady beat of water on the tin roofs of theFoster place, nearly rusted through. In places, it sneaks inside inprecise streams that drill through rotting floors to seek out and useas a conduit back to the earth whatever remains of the structure’sfoundation, hastening the day when this shack, too, will succumb.

The barn behind this home is the one James Agee describedhaving to pass through on his walks from the Gudgers to the Rick-ettses. It’s a barn hollow through the center, with two large doorsopen at each end, smothered now by vines. At the west entrance,where a rotted mule collar hangs by a nail, water sheets down thetwo verticle jambs, framing the land, one of the last open fields. Thebrown stumps of soybeans are withered in death. Those beans arethe remains of the second-to-last crop ever planted by Joe Bridges,and soon they will be replaced with young pines.

. ii.

Farther east, over the crest of Hobe’s Hill, several miles through theland of unbroken trees and deep ravines, the Shady Grove churchexists foursquare in the forest, against all probabilities, a sharpnessof white against all that is wet and blurry, miles down a red dirtroad.

It’s not unlike thousands of houses of worship to be found allover rural Alabama, spindly structures cared for kindly when all elsehas been allowed to go to hell. It has a single bell tower, supportedby a foundation of eight hunched pillars of unmortared brick. Theexterior planks are buried beneath bonelike paint, a skin grown somuch thicker since that summer of 1865.

The road flows fuller now, darker, almost the color of blood,promising that it will bring no surprise visitor to disturb our prob-ing. It is easy to force a window and enter.

The chamber resonates the pelting of rain on the tin roof, andthe interior is sweet, the walls and crude pews glowing with the deeprichness found in century-old pine. It has a simple interior—a pul-pit, rows of plain benches. There is an organ, and two brooms hangby nails next to the front door. The floor is carefully swept. Somepeople, probably the old ones who have memories of long-ago wed-dings and funerals, still journey the back roads occasionally to wor-ship here, but they must be few in number now, judging by the scantnumber of hand fans kept in a box.

On the pulpit, a paper:

Prelude

Call to worshipHymn 2Pastoral prayerLords prayer

Responsive Reading “The Worth of Man”

Gloria

Announcements

Offering

Hymn 428

Scripture

Sermon

Hymn 287

Benediction

Coda 249

Postlude

Hand in hand

I need the prayers

Where could I go?

Lord I’m coming home

My Jesus

Behind the building: a cemetery of a few old stones, stout andpowerful granite among trees that have grown to surround thebuilding. The forest rises as high as the bell tower, with arms thatarch in long sweeps over the road, dripping concentrations of rain.On the forest floor, among the black trunks, are depressions wherewater gathers, most six feet long, some shorter ones that representthe resting places of children. Some are so old that large trees havegrown in the center of these pits. They are evenly spaced, and mostare now unmarked, the names and dates of birth and death oncenoted on standing boards of pine that have long since rotted. Theseare the people whose families couldn’t afford granite like somefew of their cemetery mates, likely the landowners among the con-gregation.

It can be guessed, by proximity and description, that this is thesame church broken into by Agee and Evans in 1936. Agee de-scribed a graveyard as one where both landlords and tenants wereburied. Most of the plots were then new, the graves adorned withofferings—photographs pinned to the boards, china plates, lightbulbs screwed into the earth, blue-green glass insulators, vases, abutter dish. All these objects are gone, but fragments of broken glassand china struggle against a permanent interment of their own inthe mud.

The ones with the wooden headboards that have decayed,whose depressions are now filled with water, are as if they had neverexisted.

No one knows their names, ages—anything about them. Thosegrieving relatives who placed the articles on the grave sites are them-selves likely all dead. It may be that the last children of these lostmen and women are also dead. So no one remembers them. There isno longer anyone to ask about them. And so they are as if they neverwere.

The rain falls with increased fury. It soaks hair dripping wet,then washes over the body, seeking and finally discovering under-clothes. It is a cold rain, soaking the earth; it can be imagined reach-

ing into those crushed caskets, washing arm bones clutching ribcages, mandibles agape. How is it that people can put in three scoreand ten years on this planet, and some ten more, and then be buried,mourned for a while, only in so short a time to have their lives socompletely erased, no monument left to mark the place or jog thememory?^.

Is this any indication of things to come for that other cemeterynot so many miles distant, where Maggie Louise and Floyd Franks,George and Annie Mae Gudger are buried? Soon now childrenwhose veins carry the blood of George Gudger will know nothing ofthe life of that man, nothing of the daily deeds that made up therecord of his life, nothing of his habits, nothing of the way he be-lieved that one redeemed oneself only by hard work, even if inevi-tably it would be others, not he and his own, who would mostbenefit by all his toil. They will have no cause to visit his grave site,for they will not know what it marks. So he, his wife Annie Mae,with all their hopes for her own children, his daughter MaggieLouise, who carried on the dream and shared it with a stranger frojnNew York, and Maggie’s husband Floyd, who filled his silent worldwith love for George and Annie Mae’s grandchildren—all will be asif never born, anonymous names on granite, read only by those cu-rious enough to visit old graveyards and stare at dates on stones andwonder. They will be as forgotten as those lying below the depres-sions in the churchyard of the forest. Their granite markers will nothave saved them from oblivion.

Of the original twenty-two family members Agee recorded, adozen still breathe, rocking on their porches, waiting their own dayto be drawn into the earth. But though they live on, their time haspassed. It is now the time belonging to the 116 others born of the22, the youngest, the baby in the womb of Anna, the daughter-in-law of Debbie, the granddaughter of Maggie Louise and the great-granddaughter of Annie Mae and George Gudger, not yet born.

The child will be part of the fourth generation descended fromthe Hobe’s Hill families, and will grow to walk this planet in themiddle of the next century, 120 years after Agee was in Alabama.Agee discussed what a damaged, dangerous world the Gudgersfaced back in 1936. What kind of world will their unborn heirsface? And what of the millions of others of this same generation whohave inherited the legacy of cotton sharecropping? Will they be freeof its effects by the time they reach adulthood? Will we as a nation

have done the right thing by them? Will they themselves have doneenough to purge their lives of the malignancy?

. Hi.

Many members of these families were not ready to face the worldthat challenged them after the cotton tenant system went down. Theurban middle-class belief system of hope and expectation that thingswill always be better had never been taught to them. The transitionhas been hard. The choice offered them—go forward or even furtherbackward—seemed unreasonably harsh. Some insisted on barricad-ing themselves in the past, living on back roads, avoiding the mod-ern world. Some others did rise to the challenge, surmountingconsiderable obstacles to join the middle class of America. And mostof the latter did it without abandoning the South for the industrial-ized urban centers of the North. Indeed, about half the descendants,no matter how well or poorly off they now find themselves, livewithin a thirty-minute drive of Hobe’s Hill. All but one lived in theSouth as of 1986, and she hoped to return soon.

The best off among the families remember their roots well, andfear what their heritage says of their future. As Mort Jordan said, ifanother depression were to strike, most of these people would bethe first to bear its brunt, just as their forebears had been the firstaffected by the Great Depression.

Agee, studying the economic stagnation of these families sixyears into the Depression, four and a half years into the bloodlessAmerican revolution we call the New Deal, with its many greathopes, its several false starts, its frequent successes, came to believethat the lives of these people could not, or at least would not, everchange. Agee was wrong about this. Many have changed for thebetter.

But what is success? And how does one measure it? There werereasons—political, economic, social—that the New Deal failed toprovide for the sharecroppers of the cotton South even the marginalhelp it provided for so many others. Had Agee been able to lookinto the future and see his generation’s second revolution, the post-war boom that created a wave of national prosperity never beforeimagined, would he have imagined that those people who had suf-fered the most during the Depression would now benefit the leastfrom the national orgy of industrial and consumer growth? What

lessons can be drawn from our national failure to assure that if allboats were not in fact raised by a rising tide, at least the lowestberthed would not be swamped? And have we made things better inthis latest economic boom of the 1980s? In times past, portions ofour society were left poor, but we felt guilty about it. Now it seemsit is acceptable not only to ignore them but to flaunt our wealth,displaying an obscene national callousness to the suffering of others.There is no other word but obscene to describe a situation in whichtypical annual rents in the major cities are often double what aminimum-wage worker earns in a year. It is obscene when, in a cityas short of housing as New York, an insider buys an apartment foreighty thousand dollars and sells it five years later for half a milliondollars, while increasing masses of the hindmost are driven to hobojungles, underpasses, doorways, train stations for shelter. It is ob-scene when you travel this nation in 1988 as a journalist and listento people tell you they are going to vote for the party on whosewatch a nation of homeless were recruited because, as one man saidwith blunt honesty, “I’m greedy.” Greed, once a pejorative, has be-come the national credo,

Sonny Franks, the painting contractor who naively believedthat his inherited commitment to working hard and honestly, oftenas many as sixty hours a week, would be enough to keep his familyin their thirty-five-thousand-dollar tract home, can now sit in hisrented apartment, looking back at a sixty-hour work week, and readin the paper that the top 20 percent of society gained more wealththan they had during the previous year, and that the same was truethe year before that, and the year before that, and he can wonderwhy the 20 percent that have so much are getting more and why his80 percent, in the middle and on the bottom, are stagnating or get-ting less. He can rightly ask just what the hell more he can do.

I began more than three years ago by driving up the Hobe’s Hillroad, seeking to learn all I possibly could about poverty through thefamilies who lived there. I learned some things regarding the subject,but I cannot say I came to know these people as intimately as Iwould have liked. It was an impossible task to know—much lessunderstand—128 lives, let alone make that understanding intelli-gible to others. About some, I understood virtually nothing. Aboutothers, so little. And even those I thought I knew best—do I reallyknow them? I’ve had girlfriends I thought I knew well, only to real-ize after it was over that I knew nothing, that I’d been lying in inti-

Coda 253

mate embrace with a stranger. Why should I expect to know anybetter people less close, unrelated by blood or marriage?

. iv .

Ail over Alabama, street lamps burn through the mist, illuminatingan unpeopled night. There is no clear conclusion to this, nothingexact, abrupt, easy, just the road, rushing all its wet black miles intothe void between midnight and that hour when the loneliness begsfor the spiritual warmth of the rising sun, but the only glow on thehorizon belongs to a Denny’s.

The only ones out in the night are those who must be there,travelers journeying to distant cities, lone truckers working the high-ways. Warren, Ruby’s husband, is on another run, the reach of hisheadlights weakened by water greeting the windshield. He misseshis Ruby, his eyes lost on the rain coming at him, wondering howtime passed so quickly.

But most beds are heavy with sleeping bodies lost in dreams.Joe Bridges is in that small white house behind the fruit stand, lyinghalf awake listening to the rain, praying it will continue into thesummer and be enough to make next year’s soybeans grow and savehim from bankruptcy.

Warren’s mother-in-law, Emma, is also alone, without a man,without love, facing the faded blue portrait of Sonny, her son killedin the riverboat accident. She lies curled tight in fear of the storm,and her dreams are of meeting him and Ruby again in that place bythe river, where she can find the love she was looking for that long-ago forgotten summer, from which she awoke one day so much laterto realize it had never materialized, that she had been robbed andhad never known it until that moment. When that day comes, andthey are all reunited, Emma will finally be able to work it out withLonnie and he will be a responsible husband. He will hug her. Andshe will smile and they will all be happy.

The water falls against the roof of the apartment where Emma’sniece Debbie lives. Debbie lies alone, once again separated from herhusband, Ron; she now knows that no one knows anybody anyway.She dreams—not of what she has lost, but of her second grandchild,the love she has found, the understanding she has gained from hermother, Maggie Louise.

And it is another dream, in another city, and Maggie Louise is

254 And Their Children

• • •

there, looking, but it is impossible to see her face. She talks, but notin words. She doesn’t need them. She conveys what she has come tosay, and that is: “I understand.”

And Debbie replies, “Mama, I love you.”

Acknowledgments

Many lives came together to make this work possible. We extenddeep gratitude to Susan Rabiner, our editor at Pantheon who guidedus to completion, her assistant, Akiko Takano, whose astute edito-rial comments were valued, and Gloria Loomis, our agent whostood by through the early days when this book was a most fragileidea. On another coast, we thank Gregory Favre, executive editor ofthe Sacramento Bee, along with its magazine’s editor, Terry Dvorak.The Bee monetarily and otherwise supported much of the early re-search for what became this book. In Alabama, filmmaker MortJordan was a friend and confidant during our many visits, providingmuch insight on the region and the families.

Two journalist friends set aside much of their lives to transcribemy many tapes, and to Ronnie Cohen and Jan Haag I owe much;other friends were early editors and advisors. They include EleanorShaw, Howard Simons, Catherine Warren. Diane Alters, who firstgave us a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1982, is theperson responsible for setting us on our course. While I was at Har-vard, Professor Theda Skocpol opened the door for much of thehistory of cotton and the invention of the cotton-picking machineincluded here.

Michael would like to thank Fearn Cutler, associate art directorat Pantheon, and members of the Bee's graphics department for theirguidance—Ed Canale, George Wedding, and Rick Perry. A specialindebtedness is owed editor Lisa Roberts, who was always encour-aging and yet objective.

And finally, we’d like to say how much we appreciate the peoplewho, if you get right down to it, were most responsible for this andour other work—our parents, Ray and Mary Ann Agee; Steve andJoan Maharidge.

main Characters and places

These are the characters and places most often mentioned in thebook. Most names of people and places have been changed. I havekept the names given the families by Agee, made new pseudonymsfor those born after 1936. There were 22 members in the originalthree families in 1936. In the summer of 1986, 12 were still living.Those 22 men and women and their children gave birth to 116 off-spring still alive, as accurate a number as we have been able to de-termine. All ages, dates, and numbers throughout this book are asof the summer of 1986, unless otherwise noted.

GUDGER CLAN

Debbie a grandmother, thirty-five, who has returned to

school.

Sonny Debbie’s brother, thirty-four, a painter in Mis-

sissippi.

Parvin Debbie’s sister, thirty-three, a bookkeeper, heal-

ing church member.

Maggie Louise their mother, who killed herself by drinking rat

poison in 1971.

Gretchen Maggie Louise’s sister, fifty, who was there

when it happened.

Roland son of Debbie, twelve, who likes school.

WOODS CLAN

Emma retired former cotton farmer, seventy.

Ruby Emma’s daughter, who had rheumatic fever as a

child.

a stepsister of Emma, fifty-two, maimed in anauto wreck.

Ellen

258 And Their Children . . .

Pearl Ellen’s sister, fifty-eight, who took in Ellen’s

daughter after the wreck.

Mary Lee Ellen’s daughter taken in by Pearl, twenty-eight,

now living on her own.

RICKETTS CLAN

Margaret a holdout from the past, seventy.

Garvrin Arlo Margaret’s son, forty.

Clair Bell almost killed in an accident caused by Agee,

fifty-four.

MARGRAVES CIRCLE

T. Wilson Margraves III .. .descendant of the wealthy cotton lord who

ruled over the Ricketts and Woods families.

Joe Bridges a bankrupt farmer who leases the land from

Margraves and will be the last to plow it.

GAINES CIRCLEFrank and Urline

Gaines aged black sharecroppers.

Mrs. Gumbay onetime landlord to the Gaineses.

OTHERS

James Agee and

Walker Evans original spies and instigators.

Mort Jordan amateur filmmaker in Cherokee City and friend

of the families.

Haskew black leader in Waynesville.

PLACES

Birmingham a large southern city of dying industries.

Cherokee City a medium-size Alabama city.

Centerboro V. a county seat, population 4,000.

Cookstown the three families’ town in days of old, still their

town for many who remain, population 1,500.

Madrid a crossroads, near Cookstown, where Debbie

and Parvin were born.

Waynesville a seat for the county east of Centerboro, popu-

lation 4,000.

Parson’s Cove the town of the Gaines family, population sev-

eral hundred.

Hobe’s Hill the clay plateau where the three families lived in

1936, population now zero.

photo captions

. photo page number .

2. Centerboro, 1936; Center'boro, 1986. (Top photo by Walker Evans.)

3. Margaret Ricketts, 1936; Margaret Ricketts, 1986. (Top photo by WalkerEvans.)

4. A crossroads store, 1936; the same store, 1986. (Top photo by WalkerEvans.)

5. Maggie Louise, 1936; Parvin, a daughter of Maggie Louise, 1986. (Topphoto by Walker Evans.)

6. Bud Woods’s home, 1936; the ruins of the same home, 1986. (Top photo byWalker Evans.)

7. Annie Mae and George Gudger, in a 1953 photo by their son Burt Westly,made into a plaque that now hangs on the wall of one of their children’shomes.

8. Margaret, a daughter of Fred and Sadie Ricketts, on a bed with her Bible.

9. Garvrin Arlo, Margaret’s son.

10. Joe Bridges standing in his field of soybeans on Hobe’s Hill, the sameground where Bud Woods planted cotton.

11. Pine trees have been planted in the scarred land near Cookstown wherecotton once grew.

12. Ethel, the widow of Buddy Woods, washes clothes.

13. Family on the porch of their trailer near Cookstown.

14. Man at auto-repair shop, Mississippi.

15. Teenager turtle-hunting in a swamp near the Alabama-Mississippi border.

16. Pictures of Fred and Sadie Ricketts taken by Walker Evans, on the wall ofthe home of their daughter Margaret Ricketts.

17. Margaret Ricketts’s feet.

18. Home near Centerboro.

19. Margaret Ricketts’s living room.

20. Garvrin Arlo and his wife, Jeannie Kay.

21. Trailer near Cookstown.

22. Sonny Franks, the only son of Maggie Louise, at work.

23. Sonny, the youngest son of Annie Mae and George Gudger.

24. Emma, the daughter of Bud Woods.

25. Ellen, the youngest Woods daughter.

26. Debbie, a daughter of Maggie Louise, and her son, Roland.

27. Linda and Barbara, great-grandchildren of Annie Mae and George Gudger.

28. Dogs greet visitors at home next door to Margaret Ricketts’s.

29. Taylor’s Big City store, Cherokee City.

30. Child on motorbike, Cookstown.

31. Abandoned car, Alabama-Mississippi border.

32. Ruins of Foster family home, Hobe’s Hill.

33. Mobile-home church, near Jefferson.

34. Frank Gaines on the porch of his home in Parson’s Cove.

35. Urline Gaines, wife of Frank.

36. The daughter of Frank and Urline Gaines.

37. Man outside a roadside diner, Mississippi.

Photo Captions 261

38. A one-hundred-year-old former sharecropper on the porch of his homenear Parson’s Cove.

39. Century-old former sharecropper.

40. Resident of Waynesville.

41. Child in Parson’s Cove.

42. Basketball players, Parson’s Cove.

43. Man plowing, Mississippi.

44. Church service, Mississippi.

45. Young boy after church service, Mississippi.

46. Men waiting for a ride near Parson’s Cove.

47. Frank Gaines’s work boots.

48. Spring from which many residents of Parson’s Cove draw their water.

49. Sherman Parson draws a drink from the spring he and his neighbors de-cided to improve.

50. Store, Parson’s Cove.

51. Interior of store. Parson’s Cove.

52. Home near Waynesville.

53. Retirement home, Mississippi.

54. The river near Cookstown.

55. Former ferry crossing at the river in Parson’s Cove.

56. Vicksburg, Mississippi.

57. Fisherman near remnants of a paddlewheel riverboat, Mississippi River.

58. Mississippi town.

59. A new mobile home being delivered, on a highway near Birmingham.

60. Cherokee City.

61. Church on the highway leading to Jefferson, Alabama.

262 Photo Captions

62. Town square, Waynesville.

63. Window display, Waynesville.

64. Dusk, Temple City, west of Centerboro.

65. Convenience store in Cherokee City.

66. Night spot, Waynesville.

67. A dairy, Centerboro.

68. Church near Parson’s Cove.

69. Church south of Centerboro.

70. Roadside sign north of Mobile.

71. Watermelon seller near Temple City.

72. Abandoned cotton gin, Madrid.

73. Interior of abandoned cotton gin in Madrid.

74. Roadside sign on the highway to Birmingham; abandoned store nearCookstown.

75. Used-car lot, west of Centerboro.

76. Chicken Mart, Cherokee City; plastic deer and trailers, near Centerboro.

77. Martin gourds, Cookstown.

78. Wobbly Hill, the road north from Centerboro to Cookstown.

79. Kudzu on the Hobe’s Hill road leading to the original homes of the threetenant families.

80. Church and graveyard, near Shady Grove.

Dale Maharidge is an award-winning reporter for the Sacra-mento Bee. In 1988 he was a Nieman Fellow at HarvardUniversity. Michael Williamson is an award-winning Beephotographer; his work has appeared in Life, Newsweek,Sports Illustrated, Time, and other major publications and haswon numerous awards, including the World Press Photo andNikon World Understanding Through Photography awards.

Both have traveled on assignment widely, including trips toCentral America, the Philippines, and across the United States.Together they wrote Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of theNew Underclass.

BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

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(continued from front flap)

WAYNI

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cropping that had been arranged for allof them.

Here also is the bittersweet story ofMargaret Ricketts, competitor to her ownmother for her father's affection; the sur-prising survival of Clair Bell, the child whomeither Agee or Evans accidentally put into acoma, whose death Agee expected andwhose life he prematurely memorialized; thediary of sweet Emma Woods, who said ofher marriage to a man she did not love, "Iwas like the old boll weevil, just looking fora home "; the sadness of Ellen Woods whowhen asked if she was the Ellen of the earlierbook, replied, "What's left of her." It isalso the story of the Rust brothers, whofought a losing battle against InternationalHarvester to ensure that the mechanicalcotton picker they had invented would beused to aid the tenant sharecroppers, notfurther destroy them.

For three years, from 1985 to 1988, jour-nalist Dale Maharidge and photographerMichael Williamson returned to Alabama.They spoke with all twelve survivors of theoriginal family members, as well as with overa hundred of their descendants. Nearly allwere willing to talk about what it meant togrow up in the pain and poverty of the ruralSouth, both while cotton was king and Inthe years since.

Jacket photos by Michael WilliamsonJacket design by Henrietta Condak

5/89 Printed in the U.S.A.

Advance Praise for AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM

• I •

A stunning sequel to the James Agee-Walker Evans classic. Let Us NowPraise Famous Men. It is at times astonishing, at all times deeply moving/'

— Studs Terlcel

A fascinating piece of Americana of the eighties." —Cornell Capa

Director, International Center of Photography

Michael Williamson and Dale Maharidge

Dale Maharidge is an award-winning reporter for the Sacramento Bee. In1988 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Michael Williamsonis an award-winning Bee photographer; his work has appeared in Life,Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Time, and other major publications andhas won numerous awards, including the World Press Photo and NihonWorld Understanding Through Photography awards.

Both have traveled on assignment widely, including trips to CentralAmerica, the Philippines, and across the United States. Together theyauthored Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass.

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