Cotton Tenants, Three Families (2013)

by James Agee, photographs by Walker Evans

     Two young men in their late twenties head into the Deep South during the Great Depression, their assignment, for the New York based magazine Fortune, to bring back a story about tenant farmers. Being that they are more artists than journalists, and at the height of their creative powers and idealistic sensibilities, the story they bring back is not the one the publishers envisioned; it is roundly rejected. It would take them five years to bring that article to fruition in the publication of a book, in 1941, entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, regarded ever since as a masterpiece of original journalistic integrity. The present slim volume, Cotton Tenants, Three Families, has been called the field notes to that classic work but it should more properly be called its distillation. It is the unadorned, immediate, first impression of its author, James Agee, whose words mirror the raw beauty of Walker Evans’s now famous photographic journal-

The wife and daughter change into cotton shifts the respective ruin and april of their flesh, only seventeen years apart…sometimes with a weaving of goodnights and then blank silence, they are asleep, generally before the last daylight is lost in the air…and upon each of a million square houses of that country, there is inviolable silence….a most profound and noble silence: that silence peculiar to the deathlike resting, under the seaweight of deep country night, of people who work.

One can only wonder if those two young men asleep on the porch, like anyone’s brothers, sons, friends, having just set out into the freedom and spacious hope of their own youth, ever felt, even for a moment, that lonely seaweight that smothered the families who slept within. Their words and images lead us to believe that they did, proving themselves more than equal to the task set before them; allowing that their own escape was always assured.

The book in its present form was lost to us for 77 years and its history has a compelling story all its own. In the summer of 1936, Agee was assigned to write an article on tenant farmers in Alabama. He requested Evans, then employed by the Farm Security Administration, as his photographer. They spent four weeks in the farming community in July and August, at the height of the cotton harvest. The piece he labored over, with its attending photographs, was never published by Fortune, but they did agree to release it to the author at the end of one year. After another failed attempt at publication, Houghton Mifflin accepted its expanded version as the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in 1941. Although considered a classic, it was and is a difficult book to read, not only because of its subject matter, but its decidedly experimental style.

James Agee died in 1955, two years before his acclaimed work of fiction, A Death in the Family, was published and awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Agee’s daughter and son in law, overseer of the James Agee Trust, discovered the 90-page manuscript among his papers in 2003 while cleaning out his Greenwich Village home. It was donated to the University of Tennessee where researchers realized its importance. Their discovery eventually led to this current publication.

Cotton Tenants is perhaps more a book for our time. Where the earlier volume, at 400 pages, can meander and pontificate, this smaller work is concise and accessible, at half its length. Agee weaves the lives of three families (named here whereas not before) through nine chapters entitled simply, Food, Clothing, Shelter, etc. The chronicle is straightforward, written in clean, simple, journalistic prose, yet with the personable touch of a natural storyteller. One will read:

Breakfast begins at about four, by lamplight which pales as it proceeds. It is a very important meal, particularly to Floyd, because he has the height of an increasingly hot morning to climb, and his morning is eight hours long.

These chapters, though similar in theme and tone to parts of the 1941 publication, are here unembellished and therefore more powerful. One enters each as if it were a scene in a play, or a documentary film, for which the author serves as narrator. And there are passages that defy gravity, of such linguistic aerobatics they take your breath away. If it is still difficult to read it is because it is a serious book that immerses the reader, quite vividly, in the daily life of crushing poverty; a poverty beyond all reason and all hope for deliverance. And yet Agee’s passages and the black and white images captured by Walker Evans reveal something more. There is a certain alchemy at work, the darkness lit by those intangible human qualities of fortitude and affection, that have immortalized these invisible families for all time, ennobling their stark reality with a patina of grace.

Farming can be a noble life, if an exacting one. In 1936, in the Deep South, finding oneself born into the life of a tenant farmer was a life sentence borne more of necessity (and bad luck) than choice. In the spectrum of agricultural work, the tenant farmer lives far outside the industrial, subsidized farming complex; his is not the life of a gentleman farmer, a subsistence farmer, or a migrant worker. Closer to indentured servitude, farming at this level is only a step away from slavery, its freedom no more than an illusion. This is a subject Agee reflects upon, turning its soil over and over again as if preparing an untilled field for cultivation, planting questions like so many seeds.

Cotton Tenants is a wise, profound work that, at its essence, examines the human predicament in all its vast expression. It is an American History lesson taught by two luminous teachers. What other young men sent out into the field, but these gifted two, could have brought back such a haunting story? In the Forward to the 1960 reprint of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans wrote the following of his experience with friend James Agee:

The days with the families came abruptly to an end…The writing they induced is, among other things, the reflection of one resolute, private rebellion. Agee’s rebellion was unquenchable, self-damaging, deeply principled, infinitely costly, and ultimately priceless.

-Janice Riley, 2013.