In 1936, the United States was still very much in
the grip of the Great Depression. There
were some positive signs of economic progress in some sectors, but the American
South was still experiencing misery unknown to the rest of the country, to the
point that, in many ways, it was more like a separate country. Fortune Magazine dispatched two famous men to document
southern conditions. Walker Evans was a
famous photographer, known for his work documenting the effects of the
Depression for the Farm Security Administration, the same New Deal agency that
employed Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. James Agee was a critically acclaimed
novelist, poet, journalist, and film critic, most famous for writing A Death
in the Family. For eight weeks, the
two men travelled and lived among several poor sharecropping families in
Alabama, documenting their lives. Fortune
ultimately decided not to publish their work, and it was instead released as a
book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book only sold a few hundred copies and
seemed destined for oblivion. However,
it has since been recognized as tremendously important work, hailed by the New
York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the century. Agee’s prose and Evans’ photographs combine
to present a poignant and enlightening view of men and women whose lives would
otherwise have never been noted. It’s a
moving document of southern sharecroppers and their stories, stories that are
seldom told.
In
2013, more photos and a manuscript from that journey were published as a book
called Cotton Tenants: Three Families. I didn’t know this book existed until now, but I just
ordered it, and I’m looking forward to reading it.
I
first read Famous Men in high school.
I found it in a bookstore’s clearance section. It immediately struck a chord with me because
my mother’s family was a family of sharecroppers and small farmers in South
Georgia. She was born in 1936 on a farm,
and she had an aunt and uncle who continued to work as sharecroppers until the
1980s. In many ways, what I read and saw
in the book was the life that my mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncles had lived. Some of the few family pictures we have from
the 1930s and 1940s would have been right at home in the book. Later, I found a book of walker Evans’ photos
from the same trip called Something Permanent, which even hit closer to
home. On the cover, was a photo of an
iron bed, the same model that then sat in my parents’ guest room, and now
belongs to my brother. It was a Sears
catalog bed, costing about $10 or less around 1900. According to family lore, it was the bed on
which my grandmother and her 10 siblings had all been born.
A
few years later, I made another discovery in the clearance aisle: And Their
Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee,
Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South by Dale
Maharidge and Michael Williamson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for
nonfiction. Maharidge and Williamson
recreate the journey taken by Agee and Evans, going to the same locations and
meeting some of the original families of Famous Men and their
descendants, documenting their lives in the 1980s, long after the demise of
King Cotton. It is an awesome companion
piece, and I’ve read both books more than once, a rarity for me.
If you’re interested in southern
history, agricultural history, or the history of the not-so-famous men and
women who are too often neglected in history’s pageant, I urge you to read
these books and discover Walker Evans’ photographs.
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