Une saison de coton: trois familles de métayers

by James Agee, Walker Evans (Photographer), Hélène Borraz (Translator)

En 1936, le magazine Fortune, pour lequel Agee travaille, décide de l'envoyer dans l'Alabama afin de décrire les conditions de vie de trois familles de métayers du coton. Agee insiste pour que le photographe Walker Evans l'accompagne et c'est ainsi que les deux hommes vivront plusieurs semaines durant avec les Burroughs, les Tingle et les Fields. Tandis qu'Evans réalise certains de ses clichés les plus célèbres, Agee décrit minutieusement les existences de ces hommes, femmes et enfants, afin que nous en comprenions parfaitement chacun des aspects, qu'il s'agisse du travail, de la nourriture, des maisons, des vêtements, de la santé, de l'éducation ou des loisirs.
Profondément bouleversé et indigné par les conditions de vie ces trois familles de métayers, Agee a produit un compte rendu journalistique qui émeut par sa beauté et sa virulence, une charge contre le capitalisme qui explique, à n'en pas douter, pourquoi Fortune rejeta l'article et qui demeure, de nombreuses décennies plus tard, d'une féroce actualité.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Photography, Journalism, American History, Southern, Historical

187 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 2013

About the author

Noted American writer and critic James Rufus Agee collaborated with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a bleak depiction of rural poverty and posthumously published his novel A Death in the Family (1957).

This author, journalist, poet, screenwriter in the 1940s most influenced films in the United States. His autobiographical work won a Pulitzer Prize.

Life
Born at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six years of age in 1915, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.

Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.

In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.

Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.

In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.

In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six films per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.

Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.

Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.

Reviews

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

"[Ida Ruth Tingle, age four] is possibly the last child they will bring into living, and she is extremely delicate. She dislikes what little food they have but loves chicken and coffee. So, steadily, they have bumped off a long string of chickens to feed her, and she drinks two or three cups of black and parboiled coffee at every meal. Her eyes shine like burning oil and almost continuously she dances with drunkenness."


During the summer of 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, Fortune magazine sent staff writer James Agee to the Deep South to write a story about poverty stricken cotton sharecroppers. At Agee's request, the magazine also hired photographer Walker Evans to assist in documenting the plight of the agricultural workers.

Agee and Evans, age twenty-six and thirty-two, respectively, traveled throughout the South for a month before finally selecting three families in Hale County, Alabama as their subjects. They spent two months with the families taking pictures and collecting impressions and information.

Agee returned to New York, wrote an article that he titled Cotton Tenants: Three Families. The article was rejected by the magazine's editor. Based on the book that Agee wrote about his southern sojourn, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), it became conventional wisdom that it was the unconventional, poetic writing style of the author that had caused the editor to kill the magazine story. And it is true that Agee's only published book at the time was a volume of poetry. However, as later events proved, it was not the article's style that caused its demise.

In 2005, fifty years after the author's death, a typescript copy of the article that he had submitted to Fortune was discovered in his papers. In 2014, it was published in book form, under the same title as the original magazine article.

As it turns out, the article and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are totally different. For one thing, Cotton Tenants was intended to be a long-form magazine article while Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a 400 page book. But the writing style differs, too.

Cotton Tenants is beautifully written, but it is very much the work of a talented journalist who presents his views in a more or less straight forward narrative, but a journalist whose inner poet cannot avoid the temptation of describing "fat-sterned mamas of the hamlet, sweating their sour cosmetics into dough," or sharecropper families, "each family, like filings delicately aligned by a hidden magnet..."


"...they are asleep, generally, before the last daylight is lost out of the air. Frogs, the dark, take over with noise the dampened and lowbreathing world, but upon this house and the effigies within it, and upon each of a million square houses of that country, there is an inviolable silence. A man may wake, coughing in darkness; a child may cry, and be quieted; on the porch, a dog may burst up bellowing from a nightmare and set ten miles of country echoing with his kind; yet these are merely enhancements of a most profound and noble silence: that silence peculiar to the deathlike resting, under the seaweight of deep country night, of people who work."


Adam Haslet writes in the introduction to Cotton Tenants:

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a 400 page sui generis prose symphony on the themes of poverty, rural life, and human existence. Cotton Tenants is a poet's brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice. The former, as Agee himself tells us, is meant to be sung; the latter, preached."

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

**entirely new review

The Tingles have in fact lost a certain grip on living … no longer thinking of what life they have in terms of something in the least controllable from season to season or even from day to day: they welter on their living as on water, from one hour to the next, flashing into brief impulse, disorganized and numbed; never quite clear, for instance, who will cook the next meal, or when. Poverty caused their carelessness; their carelessness brings them deeper poverty.

from the first chapter


the author


… in 1937 – (Wiki)


James Agee (1909 – 1955), novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter, film critic – the latter particularly, in the 1940s. His autobiographical novel (A Death in the Family), published posthumously, won a 1958 Pulitzer Prize.

Agee had some success as a screenwriter in the 1950s, having worked on both The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (released in the year of his death).


In Cotton Tenants, in the Editor's Note, John Summers writes,

James Agee never lacked for recognition as a poet, film critic, or screenwriter. So much more was expected of him, though. He couldn't shake the suspicion that his talent was wasted even before his health wound down. "Nothing much to report," he wrote in a May 11, 1955, letter. "I feel, in general, as if I were dying: a terrible slowing down, in all ways, above all in relation to work." When he succumbed five days later, he was forty-five. It would be three more years before his novel A Death in the Family appeared and won its enduring acclaim. It had been a long time since anyone had mentioned his obscure book about tenant farmers in Alabama, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

the photographer

Walker Evans (1903 – 1975), photographer/photojournalist - best known for his work for government agencies, documenting the effects of the Great Depression. He attempted to make photographs that were "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums.

The photographs that Evans took In the summer of 1936, on his trek into the deep South with Agee, were made into a two-volume album, Photographs of Cotton Sharecropper Families. This album now resides in the Library of Congress.


the book

Agee was writing for Fortune magazine when, in the summer of 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression, he spent eight weeks on assignment with freelance photographer Walker Evans, living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Fortune never published the article which he submitted to the magazine. It was discovered over half a century later (in 2003) among his papers, and was finally published as the book here reviewed in 2013.

Adam Haslett, in his A Poet's Brief (which serves as an introductory essay in the book) describes the book as a poetical call "for the prosecution of economic and social injustice", and notes that Agee somewhere wrote that it was meant to be preached.

The book documents various aspects of the year-to-year lives of three cotton sharecropper families, "tenant farmers" – that is, farmers who work land owned by a landlord, and live in abodes on the land, also owned by the landlord. The families are those of Floyd Burroughs, and of Bud Fields his father-in-law, and of Field's half-brother-in-law Frank Tingle. The latter two men work for two owners (brothers and partners) who live in a small town five miles north; Burroughs works for a landowner named Powers who lives a little closer.



tenants



Frank Tingle
[Tingle is 54; his wife Kate has had thirteen children, six of whom are dead]



Bud Fields
[Fields is 59 and is raising his second family]



Floyd Burroughs
[Burroughs is 31]



and (some of ) their families



Allie Mae Burroughs
[Floyd Burroughs' wife, Bud Field's daughter – one of the Burroughs' five children is dead]



Bud Fields and his family at home




Floyd Burroughs and Tingle children



Elizabeth Tingle
[Frank Tingle's oldest surviving child is 20; her mother, Kate, is 49. Kate "is lost into some solitary region of her own, only half sane" – yet continues to do field work, which she prefers to housework.]




The first chapter, Business, sets out the primary facts about how these families earn money. Here's a long quote, about 350 words:

Burroughs furnishes his labor, and the labor of his family. [wife and four children]

Powers furnishes the plant, the supplies, and the money. That is to say, he furnishes the land, the house on it, the outbuildings, the water supply, the garden plot, the directions on what to plant where, when, and how, the tools, the seed, the mule, half the mule feed, rations money, half the fertilizer and, for the time being, Burroughs's half of the fertilizer.

Burroughs pays off his rent by turning over half the cotton, half the cottonseed, and half the corn he makes. (Some landlords take half of the peas and half of the sorghum, too.)

His own half of the corn, he keeps to bread his family and to feed the mule during the half of the year he has the mule.

Off his own half of the cottonseed, once his half of the ginning fee his paid, he gets the money he lives on during the picking season.

All the money he gets from his half of the cotton is his own, after he has paid back the rations money that was advanced him at eight per cent interest, and any other debts, such as doctor bills, that may be outstanding.

The rest of the money is clear cash money, with which to buy the shoes and clothes that are by that time badly needed; with which to but at least a few pretties for the young ones at Christmas time; and on which to live through the hardest months of the year.

Under this arrangement he is what is known as a halvers-hand, or as a sharecropper.

If Burroughs owned a mule and tools, like Bud Fields, or tools and two mules, like Frank Tingle, he would like them be working on third and fourth, or he would be called a tenant.

Fields and Tingle work under much the same arrangement, but furnish their own seed, and two-thirds of the guano they use (on their cotton) and three-fourths of the soda they use (on their corn), and pay, as rent, only a third of their cotton and cotton-seed and a fourth of their corn.

To give an idea of how the finances go, in Burroughs' case his best year has been $140 clear when all his debts were paid off. The year before that, his worst, he wound up $80 in debt. Most recently he ended up $12 in debt.

The financial details go on. Then the details of the three families, ages, children, number of family members who are dead, voting habits. Votes cast are always for Republicans, though very few are cast. At this time one of the men has quit voting, and another has never registered. Of several women old enough to vote, none has ever remotely considered it.

Eight chapters follow. In each a separate aspect of the lives of the families is reported.


2. Shelter.
"These rooms are not good for living because they are so wide open to cold by winter, to anopheles mosquitoes in the spring and summer, and to wet weather in all times of year."


House of Bud Fields


3. Food.
"Of the vegetables which began life green, there are few. They are cooked with pork when there is pork to spare; they are cooked in lard when there isn't; they are at all times cooked far beyond greenness to a deep olivecolored death."


4. Clothing.
"… poor people, particularly farmers, never throw anything away that has a conceivable ounce of usefulness left in it."


Burroughs' work shoes
see also image of Bud Fields above


5. Work.
"Raising cotton is what they are there for, what they must pour most of their lives into, and why they are alive at all… you should realize that [the work] is at the dead center of their existence. They lean the weight of their lives on one end of a crowbar, that lifts such life as they have on its far end: and cotton and hard land is the crude bight.


6. Picking Season.
"… you are working in sunlight that stands on you with the serene weight of deep seawater, and in heat that makes your jointed and muscled and finestructured bodyflow flow like one indiscriminate oil and the brilliant weight of heat is pilled upon you heavier and heavier all the time and the eyes are masked in stinging sweat and the head perhaps is gently roaring like a private blowtorch, and less gently pulsing with ache… the bag can hold a hundred pounds…"


7. Education.
"… education is all but non-existent, and what passes for it is a more or less organized dispensary of poisons which may or may not take."


8. Leisure.
"… our subject here is the leisure of the tenant farmer: a subject difficult to write of journalistically, since it is so nearly an abstraction."


Sunday singing


9. Health.
"Both Burroughs and Tingle have appendix trouble … An operation would run you into debt and put you out of work: it's wiser to freeze it [using an "ice cap"] and trust to luck


The book finds conclusion in two short appendixes: "On Negroes" and "Landowners".






relation to Let Us Now Praise …

Cotton Tenants and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are, in a very loose sense, the same book. The author is the same, the photographs were taken by the same man (and in many cases are the same photographs); the subjects of the books are similar, even if not quite identical.

There are differences. The former was unknown until the 21st century; is only 200 pages of a small-size book; uses the real names of the families Agee and Evans met; has captions on the pictures.

The latter is considered Agee's masterpiece, almost eighty years after it was published to underwhelming note. It has three or four times as much text; the families are referred to with made-up names; the photos (in my edition, at any rate) have no captions.

To summarize, a quote from A Poet's Brief by Adam Haslett.

"Cotton Tenants … is a good deal more than source material for Let Us Now Praise … The two works are very different. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a four-hundred-page sui generis prose symphony on the themes of poverty, rural life, and human existence. Cotton Tenants is a poet's brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice. The former, as Agee himself tells us, is meant to be sung; the latter, preached."


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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[Betsy Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich states that since 2009, 95 percent of economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent net worth. In 2017, an Oxfam study found that eight rich people, six of them Americans, own as much combined wealth as half the human race.

Cotton Tenants is a report on tenant farmers in the 1930s in Moundville, Alabama—with photos. I skimmed the detailed economic explanation of tenant farming, but picked up enough to realize that this is a look at wealth inequality in a microcosm—the precursor to what is still going on. In Our Revolution , Bernie Sanders writes, “A job is more than a ‘job.’ It is more than just making an income. A job is, in an important sense, how we relate to the world in which we live.” And he has many suggestions about how to create meaningful, sustaining work (one of which is to make workers into owners), none of which apply to tenant farmers. Until reading Cotton Tenants, it never occurred to me that in large part the economy is rigged because workers are responsible for creating products that don’t sustain them, but only sustain the owners of their businesses. Tenant farmers growing primarily cotton on the landowner’s property, instead of food, can’t eat properly! So Agee’s report has some current relevance.

Robert Reich is a better source of the current statistics and explanations about how it’s all working in 2018 (especially his videos), but this book is worth reading for Agee’s descriptions of people. For writers who want to expand their notions about observing and reporting on people, this is a master class. And Walker Evans’s photos are superb.

Note: This book really is a hybrid report and brilliantly articulate response to the report, written on assignment but never published by Fortune magazine. It’s called a “masterpiece,” but I think Fortune was right to kill it. It’s not a magazine story. Imagine lists of notes written with lots of beautifully crafted descriptions. The literary writing is inspired, the jaundiced analysis is funny, and conclusions are so vivid you can feel Agee grunting (“. . . it is quite as fair to observe that ignorance and slovenliness and the tradition itself are the inevitable products of just one thing: poverty. The music can go all sorts of places, but it comes out here.”). But I suggest skimming whenever you feel like it and savoring Walker Evans’s photographs.

For a comprehensive review of this book, see Howard’s review.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Agee always fucks me up, and here I am again. I’m sitting here smoking, looking at the night sky, with only one thought: why’s it all have to be so fucking hard?

Goodnight, James. ‘Night, friends. To a better world.

[Still · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short but haunting read was originally an article James Agee had written in 1936 as an assignment for Fortune Magazine.
He spent an entire summer in Moundsville, Alabama (20 something miles south of Tuscaloosa) mostly visiting with three sharecropper families.

Agee had a lot to crab about in his article -the living conditions of the sharecroppers -or, as they preferred to call themselves "tenant farmers". He raised holy hell with the editors of Fortune claiming that these families and others like them all over the South deserved more than a mere exploitative piece written on their pitiful lives and unhealthy living conditions.
That article never saw print until the publication of this book earlier this year.
It would however form the basis for Agee's 1941 masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Agee writes at times in a tone that condescends or seems to mock the men who head the three families described in COTTON TENANTS.
He opines on children barely out of puberty and what he sees as their "precocious sexuality" more than once. In fact it becomes tiresome and raises more questions about Agee than it does the impoverished children.
I found his obsessing on a perception of a child's "sexuality" a little unsettling, but hell - call me a prude.

I'm going out of my way here to criticize what are minor imperfections in what is in total the work of a champion idealist burdened with the noblest of intentions: to issue a scathing indictment of the worst in the privileged class which is their readiness to exploit the weak, the powerless - the poor.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 1930's and 40's one did not have to go to another country to find people living in abject poverty, one only needed to visit the cotton belt of the good ol' USA. The plight of share croppers mostly white, but some black families, a generational poverty with no hope of ever rising above nor getting out of debt. Alabama, during the great depression, James Agee, a journalist, follows the work laden life of three families. Woman, who are worn out and look twenty years older than they should, men engaged in back breaking labor, just in the hope of feeding their families.

These started out as a series, but the newspaper never published them. This is the first time these stories have been in print and they have truly made a impact on me. The brief, which the book starts with by Adam Haslett, was also very enlightening. very good book, very eye opening.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

an incredible forbes fortune magazine article, that never got printed. agee and photographer walker evans tour white 1936 cotton south to see how the economy was treating poor ass farmers. turns out they could have visited feudal ukraine or rural mexico and would have been the same picture. fdr finally got help to rural usa, via cooperative electricity, federal ag research and extension, water management, (lbj's 1965 voter rights act), built much needed FEDERAL sourced infrastructure. which we are STILL using today, there has been practically no investment in any of this since 1930's
a neat part of book: agee tells 18 year old woman, who is married to an old poor ass farmer who not only works her like a mule, but does not have sex with her, tells her, you'b be better off having sex with me, walker, and your brother in law, before you go back to your worthless redneck husband. she started keeping a journal after that. she said she could write better and truer than james agee.
maybe somebody will use her journal one day?
agee used this article to write his longer full book "now let us praise famous men" on same topic. this book her though maybe is more thrilling. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

no reports though on blacks or indians here or there. agee said it would just muddle the matter even more. perhaps, but it'd be interesting if he'd've visited and chronicled their lives too.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reflecting on the Great Depression Era: A sensitive homage to the South

At last we are privileged to see and read the initial brilliant journalistic evaluation of the effects of the great Depression on the `tenant farmers' (also known as sharecroppers) in the South as reported by the legendary James Agee (1905 - 1955) and photographed by Walker Evans (1903 - 1975). This `lost' manuscript was Agee's original contribution to Fortune Magazine who sent him on assignment to report on the conditions of the cotton farmers in 1936. Despite the fact that this article with photographs was denied public exposure when Agee submitted it, the core of this work formed Agee's literary masterpiece `Let Us Now Praise Famous Men', surely one of the great American books in our history.

This book maintains a simple look in design and presentation, though the words and images are far from `simple'. In a brilliantly written Introduction by Adam Hazlett we discover `Agee's aim is to excite the reader's outrage by describing the particular disadvantages of tenant farmers in meticulous detail. He begins with their economic plight: they are trapped on their land in a credit system that makes it next to impossible to pay back the debts they keep racking up to their landlords for rent, manure, seed, and the money to feed and clothe themselves.' He later adds `If the crash of 2008 and the protests that followed did anything for us, they made unavoidable some journalistic attention to class power - how wealth in the U.S. breeds advantage, which breeds more wealth and more advantage, not through labor or smarts, but simply as a privilege of already being on the top. This was always true, of course; it has just been hidden in plain sight for a very long time.' The Introduction is a remarkable achievement on its own merits.

But then we reach the writings of James Agee, and they are staggering. `The circumstances, that is to say, out of which and into which the cotton tenant is born; and under the steady raining of which he stands up the years into his distorted shape; and beneath the reach of which he declines into death. The fact that his circumstances are merely local specializations of the huge and the ancient, all but racial circumstance of poverty: of a life so continuously and entirely consumed into the effort merely and barely to sustain itself; so profoundly deprived and harmed and atrophied in the courses of that effort, that it can be called life at all only by biological courtesy: this fact should not be confused and indeed can only sharpen our discernment......Our story, however, is limited. We would tell you only of the living three families, chosen with all possible care fully and fairly to represent the million and a quarter families, the eight and a half to nine million human beings, who are the tenant farmers of the cotton belt.'

The remainder of the book visits the families of Floyd Burroughs, of Bud Fields, and of Frank Tingle. Each family is examined under the topics of business, shelter, food, clothing, work, picking season, education, leisure, and health. Accompanying these harrowing observations are Walker Evans' black and white photographs of all members of these three families. The facts, the struggle to survive, are disconsolate, but Agee also manages to instill the spirit of these wretchedly poor people that not only provided access to even the slightest possibility of survival, but created a sense of quality of heroism. At the end of book are two appendices: On Negroes and Landowners.

This is one of the finest books based on discovered lost documents that has been written and much of the courage and triumph in placing this important part of our history is due to the diligence of editor, John Summers. COTTON TENANTS will likely meet with awards long missing. This is a book that will deeply affect all those who read it.

Grady Harp

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

(nb: I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss)

"Cotton Tenants: Three Families" takes us inside the backbreaking work and soul-breaking poverty of three tenant farmers in 1936 rural Alabama. It is hard to read without a sense of incredulity that people actually lived like this from generation to generation. This is the kind of book that indelibly impresses itself on your soul.

In 1936, Fortune magazine sent staff writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans to report how the rural Southern poor lived. That the assignment came from Fortune magazine during the Great Depression beggars logic: why would a magazine devoted to wealthy capitalists commission an in-depth story about the rural poor? Was it a "there but for the Grace of God go I" sort of thing? Or more Schadenfreude, an arrogant amusement?

The question is moot, since Fortune killed the story unpublished. The results are awful and spectacular.

The awful part is how these families live. The three families in "Cotton Tenants" are the Burroughs, Tingle, and Fields clans. For three months in 1936, Agee and Evans followed them. No doubt, these two well-fed New Yorkers found the tenant farmers' world as foreign as if they'd stepped off a boat in New Guinea. These families live in a harsh, largely joyless world. The women and children often wear clothing made from burlap flour sacks; one young boy has no shoes, and walks to school with rags tied around his feet to protect him from the cold.

Babies in cotton country had an appalling mortality rate--one family alone lost seven children. There was no Gerber baby food or nutritious formulas and cereals. Babies frequently ate bread crusts soaked in buttermilk. When the mothers nursed, their own malnutrition and nearly constant illness reduced the quality of their milk.

Sickness was common, too: diseases from malaria to hookworms to maladies so unique to the rural poor that most of us have never heard of them plagued these families. Their water came from springs of spurious quality; their food was mostly lard-based biscuits and cornbread, supplemented with sorghum, salt pork, vegetables from their dusty gardens, and fried eggs for breakfast.

During the laborious harvest, one family stored their cotton in an unused bedroom (there were massive gaps under the eaves and in the walls, rendering it useless to sleep in most of the year). As a treat, the smaller children were sometimes allowed to sleep in the cotton piles. Rats also built nests in the cotton, which led to rat snakes joining the party.

The spectacular part of this book comes from James Agee's evocative prose, augmented by Walker Evans's stark black & white photographs. How an award-winning poet like James Agee ended up writing for Fortune magazine, I'll never know, but thank the book gods he did, if only for this assignment. This book's tone is sparer than the duo's legendary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, one of the Twentieth Century's most-celebrated works. Both books are based on this extended visit, however "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" featured Agee's more poetic and sensual voice. "Cotton Tenants" gains much of its power from Agee's more detached, factual writing. The dry images of filthy, dreary life strike at the soul, with occasional lush descriptions of a chance beautiful moment offering reassurance.

Walker Evans's photographs capture haunted faces and derelict houses. One lovely young girl's picture stuck with me. She's looking into the camera with sadness and distrust in her eyes. She and her clothes are filthy, but her hands seem to belong to a different body. Huge and worn, they are a hard-woman's hands attached to a little girl's wrists. Evans shows us the tiny bedrooms and cast-off furniture inside these shacks, and immortalizes the sad faces of children and adults, even sad looking animals.

I read the sprawling and lovely "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" for a college literature class. "Cotton Tenants" describes the same world, only in starker terms. As a writer, Agee's unique gift lay in his rich, sensual descriptions of commonplace occurrences. His tone here is more matter-of-fact than usual, almost like a 1930's newsreel narrator. Both books are brilliant. "Cotton Tenants," though, feels more disturbing, because most of Agee's sentences are simple declarative statements of fact: these families are mind-bogglingly poor. Working that hard for next to nothing is horrible. Their lives are horrible, and their kids' lives will probably be equally horrible.

To adapt that simpler structure to this review...

James Agee's restrained but affectionate narrative puts us into a world that few modern Americans will ever know. Walker Evans locks images of this world into our minds with his amazing, almost-too-clear-for-comfort photographs.

Finally, "Cotton Tenants" is a book you will have a hard time forgetting.

Most Highly Recommended.

[Dachokie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Depressingly Poignant …

This book was reviewed as part of Amazon's Vine program which included a free advance copy of the book.

I’d seen the pictures of the somber-looking farming family assembled on a hastily-made porch throughout the years, but never gave them much thought other than assuming the pictures echoed the effects of the Great Depression in rural America. In other words, a snapshot of how bad life was during those years prior to America’s great economic salvation otherwise known as the Second World War … a slice of Americana. While my decision to read COTTON TENANTS was initially a simple desire to learn the story behind the pictures, I quickly found myself mesmerized by the books grim detailing of three families quietly and diligently trying to sustain a seemingly futile existence.

In 1936 writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans worked on a story for Fortune Magazine about the struggle of three tenant farming families in Alabama. While Fortune never published the article, Agee and Walker eventually put their efforts to print in 1941 when “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families” was published. Evans’ photographs are iconic and haunting enough, but without Agee’s writing, they seem superficial. COTTON TENANTS is the publishing of that original Fortune Magazine article that was killed in 1936. The book represents Agee’s original (fresh) account of how the poor lived in the rural South … along with some thirty unforgettable Walker Evans photos. Although I found it hard to fathom that a 200+ page book actually represents a magazine article, it gave me insight as to how thorough and deep investigative journalism was back then.

The book starts with background of the three families involved. Unlike “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, Agee uses the original names of the families (Burroughs, Tingle and Fields), not pseudonyms. From the onset, it is clear that suffering is simply a way of life for the families; their past, present (and futures) are undoubtedly rife with poverty and tragedy, especially the seemingly needless loss of so many children. Chapters specifically cover various aspects of the families’ lives: Shelter, food, education, work, health, clothing, etc. The misery associated with being destitute comes across quite clearly in each topic covered. The random diet of bland (sparse) food (and plenty of sorghum), the lack of medical/dental attention, the clothing made from seed bags and sharing vermin-infested quarters are simply a way of life for the families. The grueling work of cultivating and picking enough cotton to sustain the lowest of needs is a family affair as even the youngest of the children share in the labor. As miserable as it seems, there is no documentation of whining/complaining … or any real effort to improve their lives; it is as if each family had accepted their fate of being poor. The overall depressing theme is only exacerbated by the lack of emotion amongst the families … there is no sense of love or devotion, just a shared sense of duty/obligation to daily chores. The last chapter describing how black tenant families fared and how they were viewed only echoes another depressing aspect of 1930s life in the Deep South.


The writing is quite vivid and personal; it was easy for me to imagine walking into the homes, visiting the crop-fields first-hand or even sense the degree of filth and sweat associated with picking cotton. Agee’s folksy/colloquial style was a little difficult to navigate through at times and it may be a put-off the some, but his observations are honest … and blunt. The book does an excellent job of providing readers with a straight-forward depiction of how a certain group of people live; there is no hint of phony altruism in his writing. In my opinion, the combination of the Walker’s iconic photos and Agee’s prose are what makes the book complete … separately, they simply don’t provide as powerful an impact or tell the whole story.

COTTON TENANTS was truly an eye-opener and had a profound impact on me as I think about the families and their plight at some point each day. I have already ordered “And Their Children after Them” (a book that follows-up on the families) and plan on reading “Now Let Us Praise Famous Men”. This book certainly differentiates “real” poverty from today’s loose definition of being classified as poor.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sad little muckraking book gives an up-close-and-personal look at three families living as tenants on cotton farms in Alabama in the 1930s. All three families have substantial struggles; one family is still hoping to pull themselves or their children out of abject poverty but the other two families have given up.

Agee describes their food (never enough), their clothes (mostly flour sacks), their working conditions (like all farmers, they work hard), their education, etc. Although the children were bright and some of them even liked school, they were held back for grade after grade because they couldn't take the end-of-year exams (they were needed on the farm). The older girls were beginning to realize desperately that they weren't going to be able to marry out of this life; the only boys who were going to court a girl wearing a flour-sack dress were the sons of other tenant farmers. The child mortality rate was high: illness and accidents had killed about half of each couple's children.

The book aimed to tell a grim story, and it succeeded. But I wonder if it told the whole story. The Little House on the Prairie books could have been told much differently if Laura Ingalls Wilder had focused entirely on the hardships of life instead of describing Pa's fiddling or the rivalry between schoolchildren. I want to think that these cotton tenant families had their share of good times as well as hard times.

Reading the book made me think of To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout talked about the country kids making several trips through the first grade, kids who didn't have shoes, and her friend Walter who smothered all his food in maple syrup. The cotton tenants in this book would have been the sort of people Harper Lee went to school with in Alabama--it made their stories more real to me.

I wonder how WWII affected these people, if it did. Being drafted could have offered a way out for some of the boys (if they survived); the girls' prospects may have changed. I wish there was a "Where Are They Now" sort of follow-up. I did find some of the families on FindAGrave.com: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.... (Frank Tingle with links to his children). Somebody managed to buy the Tingles a headstone rather putting them in an unmarked grave, the way the book suggested would happen.

The book blamed the landowners for not providing better conditions and not paying people more. The landowners, in turn, pointed out that the tenants were doing a contracted service for a specified amount of money, and they were all free to leave if they chose. 80 years later we still haven't solved the issue of whether laborers should be paid living wage; nowadays we just blame it on corporations rather than landowners.

Although I found it an educational read, I'm only giving the book three stars because I think it over-sensationalized things.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cotton Tenants is the story of three families struggling as tenant farmers in 1930's Alabama. It is a story of economic and social injustice but also of generational poverty. Originally the "report" was written for Fortune magazine but never published, the unconventional style of the article sited as the reason, the raw content must have been just as unconventional as the style and a factor as well. It is unconventional and it is uncomfortable to read at times.

Agee's style of writing is eloquent but also, because of being written in the late thirties, a bit old fashioned. Evan's pictures are well selected to punctuate the story, not mere illustrations.

I would have liked more of Evan's pictures. An epilogue with research into what happened to the families after the article may have been interesting, however may also have lessened the impact of their story as written. The introduction draws an interesting comparison to a current economic reality of some to the tenant farmers economic reality of indebtedness to the landowner.

Moundville, Alabama is now the site of Moundville Archeological Park (University of Alabama). The dig and museum center around the Native American burial mounds in the area. The images of Moundville on the Internet include a couple of Evan's, but the quaint ones - not the tough ones.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let Us Now Acknowledge that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is not James Agee’s most accessible book. If you’ve always felt like you should’ve plowed through it but inevitably lost steam somewhere inside the forest of his verbosity (and propensity for description) then by all means pick this one up now. A fascinating look at the lives of tenant farmers (and three families) in rural Alabama in the 1930s. The themes which Agee explores here—race relations, labor, poverty and health care—have never seemed more relevant than 2017, and, depressingly, made me question at times if things have really changed that much in eighty years.

[Terry Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The closest comparative work I can think of is the one-act versus the full version of "View From the Bridge." Or, perhaps, to use a very Agee-esque analogy, this is to "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" when the "Eroica" piano variations are to the symphony. But still -- what was Luce, or, for that matter, any editor working for Luce, thinking? That Fortune might ever print this?

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee is a collection of essays on the life of tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama. These are the leftovers, found in the author's estate, from his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

http://pussreboots.com/blog/2017/comm...

[Dotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book of sharecroppers in 1936 Alabama. Agee’s prose and Evans photos bring the story to life. The poverty, ignorance, hopelessness of a time gone by will stay in your mind long after you finish the book.

[Tom]

Good review from NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/bus...

[Steve Petherbridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a student of photography, essentially, this book is narrative put to the photography of Dorothea Lange, who with the onset of the Great Depression, used her camera lens to great and eminent effect to historically document the unemployed and homeless people of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, or Dirty Thirties, defining eras of early 20th Century America. Lange's skill in capturing this realism led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

This book by, James Agee, is in fact a journalistic assignment by him, accompanied by another probably more eminent photographer, Walker Evans. Agee's journalism, in this case, was never published for whatever reason. In my opinion, the graphic nature of the poverty of the three families, described by James Agee, was, perhaps, not in keeping with the America that President Roosevelt was endeavoring to leave behind and Agee felt that any editorial censorship would detract from the realistic reportage.

James Agee was an unknown writer, allegedly disgruntled with and upset by the America of the time, fueled by a deep social conscience, when in 1936 Fortune magazine’s editors assigned him to travel to Alabama for the summer and chronicle the lives of sharecroppers. Agee returned, by all accounts inspired by the subjects he had met and lived with and by the sights he had seen. He was frustrated by the limitations of Fortune's format, perhaps, guided by their targeted readership and a reluctance, by the editors, to alienate them. The subjects of and topics of his trip to Alabama, Agee argued, warranted far more than a single cursory article.

Agee did successfully use his reporting material as the basis and research to create a now famous 1941 book, a masterpiece in fact, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a literary description of the abject poverty in the Deep South, accompanied by starkly haunting photography from one of the master photographers of the 20th Century, Walker Evans. The original magazine article was never published, as Agee argued with his editors over what he felt was the exploitation and trivialization, if not economic and class-ridden enslavement, of many destitute American families, a both black and white impoverished underclass, through whose toil and sweat, undoubtedly resulting in shortened lives, wealth was accumulated by a privileged and powerful few. In the early pages of the now venerated “Famous Men,” he wrote that it was obscene for a commercial enterprise to “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” What readers discover here is what all the fighting was about.

This book, "Cotton Tenants - Three Families" is Agee’s original unprinted 30,000-word article, published in book form after it's discovery in 2003. The article, in fact, sowed a seed in the mind of Agee for writing the aforementioned “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, now his seminal work and contribution to American literature.

The release of this later book, includes the real names of Agee’s subjects, but, was not done so at the time of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, because descendants of the original families were ambivalent about how Agee had portrayed their lives. It is reported that when some of the descendants to the publication of “Cotton Tenants” were advised of the publication in 2003, there was not much protest because everybody knew who they were anyway! Their feelings about having their names used had changed.

To quote from research that I have done: The original subjects of “Famous Men,” Mr. Jordan said, “were embarrassed because it showed them living in squalor.” With time, he added, “what may have been embarrassment or a quandary had turned into a source of pride with some of them.”

“It makes me appreciate my relatives for bearing up under those circumstances and making me appreciate what I’ve got today,” a Mr. Fields, a descendant of the Fields Family in the "Cotton Tenants", said in an interview.

The tale of the unpublished article began in 1936 when Fortune editors grew interested in tenant farmers and assigned the task to Agee, then a staff writer in his late 20s. At the time Agee was on leave from the magazine, living in Florida and allegedly trying to repair his marriage.

Agee insisted that the magazine hire Walker Evans, who at the time was working for a New Deal agency.

When Agee returned to New York with his journalistic work and graphic knowledge gathering from Alabama, he discovered that "Fortune Magazine" had changed its editorial direction. Its infamous publisher of the time, Henry R. Luce, was under pressure to pander to investors, who might help finance his newest venture, "Life Magazine"! It is unclear exactly what Agee submitted to "Fortune", but Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University professor who wrote “The Publisher,” a Luce biography, said: “It was not Luce who did not publish the article. It was Agee who never produced an article that could be published in Fortune.”

Whether or not Agee delivered an article to "Fortune", he did write one, as proven here! Paul Sprecher, Agee’s son-in-law and overseer of the James Agee Trust, with his in-laws, found the manuscript in 2003, while cleaning out papers in the basement of the Agee family’s Greenwich Village town house. (Agee had died in 1955.) Sprecher said he “didn’t find it particularly noteworthy” and thought “it was just a draft for "Famous Men". “At the time", he said, he was more interested in what looked like a draft of “The Night of the Hunter,” the famous 1955 film for which Agee wrote the screenplay.

However, Mr. Sprecher said that once the family donated the papers to the University of Tennessee, researchers there realized the manuscript’s historical social significance.

Permission to publish a 9,000-word excerpt from the article was granted in the March 2012 issue of "The Baffler". Collaboration then followed, between the James Agee Trust and Melville House, to publish the article in book form. The only editing changes were to incorporate the handwritten notes made by Agee on the original 90-page double-spaced manuscript.

In a review of “Cotton Tenants,” illustrated by Evans’s great photographs, the critic David Whitford commended a work that he had previously assumed was “unpublishable as magazine journalism.” He noted that the book form provided a window into the ambitious and unconventional journalism being written by the young James Agee for "Fortune Magazine" at the time.

“It’s an extraordinary example of what magazine journalism is capable of,” Mr. Whitford said. “That kind of journalism is just unsustainable now.”

While “Cotton Tenants” feels like a rough draft to a far more monumental venture like “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Summers believed that this was part of the strength of Agee’s piece.

“He’s got this kind of romantic moral outrage from what he is seeing,” Mr. Summers said. This was apparent from my reading of the book.

As I said at the start of this critique the book is the descriptive narrative of the famous photography of Dorothea Lange. A great historical record. Realistic. Sad. Tough lives lived under unbelievable conditions of hardship, abject poverty, malnutrition and deprivation. These people and their peers contributed to the building of modern America to no small degree.

[Óscar Brox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interrumpida por su prematura muerte, la obra de James Agee siempre parece demasiado corta, marcada por sus colaboraciones cinematográficas con John Huston y Charles Laughton y por su sensible mirada sobre el microcosmos familiar. El impulso editorial llevado a cabo a principios de siglo, sin embargo, nos ha permitido escarbar en el trabajo del escritor norteamericano hasta encontrar sus raíces. Escritos sobre cine, novelas y narraciones periodísticas que, ante todo, describen un temperamento poético y moralizante a la hora de dar cuenta de la realidad y la cultura, de las vidas que a duras penas sobreviven en los márgenes y de las minúsculas emociones que captura la costumbre más asentada. Algodoneros, el libro que edita por primera vez en castellano Capitán Swing, podría ser un prólogo para su novela de 1941 Ahora elogiemos a hombres famosos. Podría, en condicional, porque esta crónica elaborada para Fortune, y nunca publicada, es algo más que una introducción; una mirada, condensada en las andanzas de tres familias de arrendatarios de Alabama, a la pobreza y a la desesperación en tiempos en los que América todavía pensaba con las manos. Un recorrido ilustrado por las fotografías de Walker Evans tras el que aguarda una sincera reflexión sobre la condición humana.

Agee estructura su crónica a partir de aquellos temas que definen (o dan cuenta de) nuestra vida en términos generales: dinero, salud, cobijo, educación, ocio, trabajo o comida. Así, cada capítulo comprende uno de esos términos y su aplicación sobre las tres familias, los Burroughs, Tingle y Fields. Hasta aquí el orden o la organización que podríamos intuir como propia de un texto periodístico, pues nada más arrancar el relato Agee se deja llevar por cada imagen capturada y la honda impresión que le ha producido. Sabemos que esa parte de Alabama es una de las zonas más económicamente deprimidas del país, donde las tasas de natalidad y mortalidad caminan parejas y los ciclos vitales responden a las exigencias de la cosecha. Aquí se está en edad de criar hijos cuando apenas frisamos la adolescencia y pasados los cuarenta se advierte el declinar de un cuerpo demasiado castigado por el tiempo y las duras condiciones del territorio. Por tanto, los gestos, las intuiciones, incluso la precocidad sexual, saltan a la vista del hombre de ciudad que encuentra en esos grupos humanos los vestigios de un ordenamiento social casi decimonónico.

La escritura de Agee nunca abandona su tono vocacionalmente moralizante y su acabado poético, ese que le lleva a describir la alegría salvaje de la hija menor de uno de los arrendatarios como si de un animalillo se tratase, mencionando sus cuartos traseros en lugar de sus piernas. En parte, porque no se limita a ofrecer un testimonio, sino que, como si se tratase de un etnógrafo, busca entender y asimilar esos ritos y tradiciones, ese sistema de vida que define acertadamente como una mezcla de feudalismo y capitalismo, con un terrateniente y con las necesidades económicas que hipotecan el futuro familiar. De ahí, pues, la entrega de Agee a la hora de detallar cada elemento y cada palmo de las casas, del vestuario y los giros lingüísticos de sus habitantes; la mirada de Floyd Burroughs o la lentitud de los hijos, la pelagra y las terribles caminatas de kilómetros con los pies descalzos; la dificultad para proporcionar una educación -casi todos abandonan la escuela tan pronto sus brazos son requeridos para la cosecha- y sueños; la comida a veces abundante, a veces mínima, según la lleves a la boca con un cucharón o con el mismo dedo; el ocio y el capital, las novelas baratas que pocos pueden leer -porque no saben o por degeneración macular no tratada por falta de recursos- y las invenciones infantiles que preservan un cierto poso de inocencia; o la ropa cosida con sacos, raída y pobre, que contrasta con el escrúpulo higiénico de las tres familias.

Cuando uno lee Algodoneros, entiende mejor cierta literatura rural de los Caldwell y Faulkner, los ritos propios y los ritmos vitales que se preservan aunque la vida se abra camino. Al aterrizar en Alabama, Agee tiene la sensación de penetrar en un rincón perdido donde cada elemento familiar mantiene un ordenamiento completamente distinto, desde la administración del dinero hasta el mismo diseño del hogar, con toda la familia durmiendo en la misma habitación (sin preocuparse por cuestiones como la privacidad, el pudor o la desnudez). Pero también adquiere conciencia de una parte devastadora del presente, la que continúa rezagada, impedida, ante los avances y capturada por una pirámide laboral en la que le corresponde la parte más baja. Una situación a la que Agee da voz no solo a través de estas familias, también de la población que capitaliza la mayor cantidad de arriendos: los negros. Una tesitura que Evans congela en los tablones de las casas, en la hierba salvaje de los porches y en los rostros ignorantes, desgastados y devastados, de unos agricultores atrapados en su supervivencia diaria (no son pocas las veces que el relato de Agee se interrumpe para advertir que tal vez alguno de sus protagonistas no sobrevivirá al próximo invierno).

Una de las virtudes de James Agee radica en su habilidad para sintonizar con el fondo moral de cada material con el que trata. En Algodoneros, la denuncia tiene tanta importancia como la descripción, el retrato humano tanto como el impacto económico. Se diría que es la clase de escritura capaz de extraer una lectura crítica sobre el feudalismo de los terratenientes del Sur a partir de los rasgos de una jornada a lomos de la desmotadora, en la recogida de kilos de algodón que efectúan pacientemente sus arrendatarios. Lo que diferencia a esta crónica breve de tantos otros ensayos es el raro fulgor humano que desprende cada palabra, como si, frente al débil cobijo que proporciona su estructura familiar, Agee se arrogase la obligación de proteger en su escrito a sus protagonistas; de darles esa pizca de eternidad que la vida les robará tarde o temprano. Por eso se hace tan imprescindible la lectura de un texto como este, porque cada página respira una verdad destinada a permanecer en el olvido.

Publicado en Détour

[Angelique · Rating 3 out of 5]

En su libro Aisthesis, Ranciere habla de este reportaje bajo uno de los mas bellos y acertados títulos de la critica literaria- el de "El resplandor cruel de lo que es". En este, define, en principio, la particularidad que gravita en el trabajo de Agee. En Cotton Tenants se dan sucesivas rupturas- tanto en el contenido, en el tratamiento de los temas, como en su forma y presentación, afirma. ¿Rupturas con que? No solo con el periodismo tradicional, que pregona la síntesis, la focalizacion en un tema particular y su pertinente desarrollo, sino tambien en la manera de percibir una realidad que nos es ajena, la manera de narrar esa otredad que nos enfrenta. Por un lado, Agee, sostiene Ranciere, posee la necesidad de decirlo todo. No centrarse en una parte. No pactar con alguna insignificancia que le de veracidad a su relato y su presencia como periodista. Por el otro, en este impulso a no dejar recoveco sin palabra, Agee se encuentra con la limitación del lenguaje. No hay posibilidad de traducir el resplandor cruel de lo que es. Por lo tanto, esta imposibilidad y la necesidad de sobrellevarla hace que el texto este sacudido por una metamorfosis constante. Por momentos, posee la rigurosidad sintagmatica propia de la lengua. Y por otros, se emborracha de insignificancias, de datos azarosos, de una poética que circunda como una cicatriz la realidad que menta, y mediante el contraste de la herida abierta, abre la percepción de los lectores y los adentra a un mundo solo intuible en sus diferencias, pero lo suficientemente drásticos para despertar la conmoción. Ranciere dice "Agee ve en cada cosa un objeto consagrado y una cicatriz". Allí esta la clave del cambio radical que propone este reportaje. La existencia de mediada, y aun asi, condensada, de una realidad reducida al tuétano, tan frágil como un traje de plumas de un emperador tolteca.
Como se habrá notado, coincido en la lectura de Ranciere, tanto que la previa no fue si no una interpretación de su texto sobre el texto que nos invoca. Sin embargo, debo notar que por momentos está poética cae en la tentación por romantizar y neutralizar, líricamente, la realidad de la otredad. Por momentos hay cierta vista por encima, cierto inexplicable centrismo de la voz narrativa. ¿Puede ser eximido un reportero de su condición de voyeur? Quizá el texto adolece de sus condiciones de posibilidad, y estas objeciones son estériles, por que demandan una objetividad imposible. No puede anularse al espectador- sino, no habría película. No puede anularse la subjetividad en todo recorte periodístico, puesto que se lo volvería inerme y abúlico. No hablo de eso. Hablo de ciertas maneras que aparecen, de pronto, y nos sorprenden. Como el hecho de que la población negra no posea nombre alguno para los reporteros. O sus interpretaciones acerca de las supersticiones que creen infantiles en los granjeros. O ciertas cuestiones que, peligrosamente, acercan consideraciones a un determinismo ambiental, muy común en la época para los pensadores materialistas, si, pero que sin embargo no es del todo excusable. Pese a todo esto, la lectura del texto es drástica, y cumple con sus pretensiones. Demuestra la presencia de la muerte en todos los recodos de la vida de los granjeros. En sus múltiples transformaciones. Como tedio. Como alienación. No hay vida dentro del espíritu de los granjeros, ni posibilidad de belleza. Y sin embargo el texto condensa una estética propia, se alimenta de esa rusticidad en carne viva de la vida de los campesinos. Ese desnivel, esa correspondencia asimétrica posee cierta justicia monstruosa. La perpetuación de las imágenes queda focalizada en un elemento que jamás podrá ser percibido por quienes lo provocaron. Apenas un resplandor abre el foco, pero el resplandor es cruel. Y lo cruel es lo que es. Lo que no puede ser de otra forma. Lo que el lenguaje apenas traduce, trastoca. Esperando que alguna vez, quien lo lea, piense en la necesidad en otros términos. En la necesidad como lo primordial que es que fuese de otra forma.

[Mommalibrarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a magazine article written for Fortune Magazine in 1936 and never published until this book. It was the first result of the on site research James Agee undertook in the rural south. Later he wrote now Let Us Praise Famous Men using this background. The writing style is formal, reporterly but also sometimes poetic and not in a manner that appealed to me. When the 27 year old mother and her 10 year old daughter prepare for bed he writes: "they wash their feet with modesty, they retire into that room where six sleep in no privacy, and undress. The wife and daughter change into cotton shifts the respective ruin and april of their flesh." To describe overcooked vegetables he writes: "winter greens which, again are cooked to the texture of shoetongues." Every shoe tongue I have ever encountered has been pretty firm; leather or canvas. I think he just wanted to add a flourish even if it did not make sense. I don't think an adult reader would find out anything new from this book and the style would put off anyone younger.

[Lauren Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's James Agee and Walker Evans, for heaven's sake, so it could hardly be less than 5 stars. This is the piece Agee eventually turned into Forbes, after being hired to write about sharecroppers. It was never published, although Agee's masterpiece, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, was later published. This long read piece came out a couple of years ago and although it doesn't have the near-manic incendiary fire of FAMOUS MEN, it is a gut-wrenching unforgettable read. Agee's compassion and despair are on every page and Evans's photographs retain every ounce of their soul-searing power. If you haven't read FAMOUS MEN, you might wish to start here, and then graduate to the larger work. This is a far more controlled piece and does without some of the passages in FAMOUS MEN I suspect Agree wrote drunk. Each has its own incandescent beauty, however, and each deserves to be widely read, especially in these days when understanding the 'other' and compassion seem in low supply.

[Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brief version of Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Can't say I prefer one to the other. Cotton Tenants is pretty straightforward reporting, whereas the other is a prose poem of over 400 pages. Both books are enhanced by Walker Evans' breathtaking photographs.
In the long book, Agee uses fictional names for the families he studied and a supplies a much need list of names. In the small book Agee gives the characters their true names.
For those who become as taken as I have been since first meeting the work in my late 20s, there is yet another book on the subject I highly recommend: And Their Children After Them. It won the Pulitzer for non-fiction in 1990 and is a study of what happened these folks. The most heartbreaking being that of Lucile Burroughs (the 10 year old Louise Gudger in the longer book) who committed suicide when she was 45 by drinking rat poison.

[Correen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I selected this book, not because of the narrative, but rather because of the pictures by Walker Evans. The photography is beautiful and greatly enhances the reading. I also enjoyed the writing by James Agee.
It is interesting in its presentation of information about the three families. Agee provided some context for understanding the lives of the families.

[AR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! It's sad to think that I have family who were likely described here. This helps my thesis research, and, more importantly, it gives me a better perspective on how hard their lives were.

[Tim Hainley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, things were really awful in the South early last century, but finally everything changed, and it became a bastion of fairness, progressivism, and equality, right? Right???

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The photos are phenomenal in this matter-of-fact book about the every day life of three poor southern families. Made me feel like a big, fat privileged Northern.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is beautiful, but the structure and the straight informative style are not my cup of tea. Thank god for the new journalism movement...

[Jimgosailing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had been on my TBR list when I came across this; I pondered if I should read this, that it would repeat what I would find in Praise.

But Adam Haslett in his A Poet’s Brief that introduces this book allayed my concerns: “Cotton Tenants, published here for the first time, is a good deal more than the source material for …Praise. At first blush, it is tempting to view what follows in this way because much of the physical description and some of the organizing principles of the report are carried through into this book. But the two works are very different. …Praise is a four-hundred page sui generis prose symphony on the themes of poverty, rural life, and human existence. Cotton Tenants is a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice. The former, as Agee himself tells us, is meant to be sung; the latter, preached.
And the message is unsettling. ‘A civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy of neither of the name nor of continuance.’ Those who are willing to benefit from the disadvantage of others are ‘human being[s] by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.’” (19)

This reminds me of the FDR passage from his 1937 inaugural address: “The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

As Haslett writes “Here is Agee: ‘The essential structure of the South is, of course, economic: cold and inevitable as the laws of chemistry. But that is not how the machine is run. The machine is run on intuition, and the structures of intuition are delicate and subtle as they can be only in a society which is not merely one thing but two: a dizzy mixture of feudalism and of capitalism in its later stages.’ …why it persists you have to understand the ‘structures of intuition,’ the daily modes of being, the fears and aspirations that allow it to continue, that permit dehumanization to be perceived as natural law. The small-time capitalism of the landlords maintains itself partly on the vestiges of feudal deference given by farmers stuck on their land. This uneasy relationship is managed by the shared intuition of white supremacy. The white farmers Agee profiles may be poor, but there are black farmers who are even poorer and more abjectly treated than they are. It’s part of the structure of sentiments helps to hold the economic hierarchy in place.”

What Haslett writes is a concise summation of the world on which Faulkner based many of his stories, though it leaves out one component: adoration of the Civil War.

But Agee presents an in-depth exploration of three cotton tenant families, describing the relationships, the work, the housing, the food, the education, and their health. And it’s an appalling indictment. And not so just through modern eyes, today’s eyes, but the eyes of Agee from nearly a century ago.

“It is perfectly true that a tenant, if he is out of debt, is no slave. He is free to move from man to man and place to place.” (40). That’s a big if. Tenant farming is a partial step away from slavery, with share cropping a partial in-between step.

“The odor of the house is a complex of pinewood, woodsmoke, pork, lardsmoke, corn, lampsmoke, and sweat, and the sweat is a distillation chiefly of corn and lard and pork. Flesh stewed in these odors year after year gets beyond the reach of bathing; the odor stands out of the fibers of newlaundered clothes.” (72)

Haslett asks why we should read a piece of rejected journalism seventy-seven years later, asserting the “agricultural arrangements it describes are gone…” (21). I’m not so sure such arrangements are gone.

You can look up tenant farming on line and find that it still exists. I had direct exposure to it, in a manner, in dealing with chicken growers who provide hundreds of thousands of broilers to the chicken processing plants to which they are beholden. They sign an exclusive contract with a processor who provides them with the chicks, the feed, the nutrients and they are not allowed to raise birds for others; come harvest time, the plant provides a catch crew, the DOAs upon arrival at the plant, mind you, are counted against the grower even though the birds all along are owned by the plant. And if the grower doesn’t like the terms of the contract, well, tough; they’ve already sunk thousands of dollars into building chicken houses (to the specifications of the processor) and would have to run the risk of a different processor contracting with them, and are they likely to do so with someone who’s had difficulties with one of their brethren processors?

This essay was not published at the time it was written. My guess as to why it wasn’t published is not that it looked at tenant farmers, but that it included too much about the land owners and other upper class whites who were not portrayed in a positive light.

I don’t think this books paints a vivid enough portrait of how grueling the work really is, especially in the heat of the summer. And the working hours in agriculture are long, particularly during harvesting season, but unlike their urban, suburban, and townie counterparts, agricultural workers do not get overtime pay, no time and a half over forty. This was a compromise FDR made in getting the New Deal Fair Labor Standards Act passed (minimum wage, overtime, child labor) which initially allowed agricultural work to be completely excluded from the FLSA in order to secure the votes needed for passage of southern congressman and senators (some have asserted this was racist given its impact on blacks); it wasn’t until 1966 that minimum wage applied to agricultural workers (and for a while at a lower minimum wage than what nonagricultural workers received).

And this fits with my reading of Faulkner, particularly As I Lay Dying, as he explored characters at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. It’s easy to see the Bundrens in this book.

[reading completed 8/27 but placed here for grouping]

[Larry Kloth · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans were commissioned by "Forbes" to report on the condition of tenant cotton farmers in Alabama. They centered on three families, the result of which was the classic "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." The literary experiment that is that book was not what "Forbes" wanted, and they rejected the manuscript. There was another result of Agee and Walker's time in Alabama: "Cotton Tenants" which was the kind of straight reporting "Forbes" was looking for, but also rejected because of its content: the unflinching account of the grinding poverty and hopelessness established and perpetuated by tenant farming.

This manuscript was unknown for fifty years. Its recovery and publication make it another important document chronicling the Great Depression, the problem of poverty in America, and the attitudes and circumstances that cause it.