Cotton Tenants: Three Families

by James Agee

  There is a certain stain of strangeness over Junior, too, in the slantwise way he watches you, and in troubles behind the eyes deeper than he can understand: but some of that can perhaps be explained. As the first son, he is thought highly of, particularly by his father, and is pretty badly spoiled. As the second child, the young brother of a stronger and more intelligent sister, his self-esteem receives destruction and his jealousy and hatred nourishment at every turn. He compensates in abuse of his own younger and weaker brothers and of animals; and the unconsciousness of his parents allows him a leeway in this, which will probably result, a decade from now, in one of the unpredictable, desperate young men the South is full of. Junior is eight.

  Charles is four. If he had genius he would be fortunate, for his psychological soil is rich in fertilizing pain. Since it seems probable that he is of subnormal intelligence his situation is merely pitiable. He is a most remarkably unnoticeable child, pale, pretty, weak, and sad. The arrival of his still younger brother forced him out of that strong position of infancy which, thanks to the continuous bullying he receives at Junior’s hands, he worse than normally needs. He cries a great deal of the time: so steadily that the crying goes unnoticed, as would the habituate noise of a nearby waterfall; he indulges in baby gibberish, and shows himself capable of normal speech only under the release of marked and affectionate attention; and he is occasionally possessed of rushes of crafty violence against his infant brother, who quite certainly he hates with all his subconscious heart.

  “The reason why Squeaky is so cute is he’s so little,” his aunt Mary says. He is a few months short of two years old. A year ago last summer he quit growing; that summer’s dresses still fit him tidily. Lively, clownish and amiable, shining with dwarfish vivacity, trotting around on shriveled hind quarters, he inspires sudden love in those whose crippled insides have no need to kill or torture him.

  *The proper generic word is tenant. Northern journalism has made sharecropper an inaccurate cover-all.

  CHAPTER 2

  Shelter

  The land Floyd Burroughs has rented is broken among woods and upon the falling shapes of the hill into stripe and patches. Except for a couple of acres of red land, pretty well uphill behind the house, it is all sandy. He has about twenty-one acres in cultivation: two acres in cotton up on the hill (pronounced heel): about two more dropping from the left of the house to the woods; five more on the fall of land out in front of his house, and out along the ruined road to the right, three more: a little less than twelve acres in cotton. There is an acre in corn out to the left of the house on the far side of a strip of woods; one and a half acres out in front; and on the strips of land out the road nearly four more; and out in the same road, little patches in peanuts and potatoes and watermelon, and a quarter of an acre of sorghum cane. The land Fields and Tingle farm, up on the crest of the hill, rolls more gently and is less broken up. It is all red land. Fields plants about the same amount of cotton, a little more corn, a little less of everything else than Burroughs; Tingle just about twice as much, in the same proportions, and a little bit of hay. They all plant peas in their cornrows.

  About in the middle of its land as among tough distorted petals the Burroughs house stands, about halfway down one hill, facing across its bare stumpy yard (in which blooms one small pink planted flower) that westward face of the hill which smothers in woods and ends in the wandering of a coffee-colored and malarious creek. Squared around the bare hard dirt back of the house are the three outbuildings: the henroost, the smokehouse, the combination stall, hogpen, cottonhouse, corncrib. (Nothing is smoked in the smokehouse: it affords storage for farm tools, sorghum, and shoes and junk too old for use but never to be thrown away.) These buildings could all but be pushed flat by one man who tried hard.

  There is no backhouse. Out to the left of the house, where summer cotton offers concealment, there is a specifically fertile patch on which Burroughs did not bother to waste professional fertilizer. Jokes about mail order catalogues are not in order, because people with so little money do not order by mail. They buy what they can when they can at the local stores, and for sanitary purposes they use leaves, sticks and corncobs.

  Out to the right of the house, caught within palings against the hunger and damage of the animals, is a patch of land a little bigger than a tennis court: this is the garden. Floyd breaks the land: the rest is his wife’s business. Out of paper seed-packets she plants two crops a year: a summer crop of vegetables, a winter crop of collards and turnips.

  Beyond the garden and a little uphill, about a hundred and fifty yards from the house and just within the sudden cool and darkness of trees, is the water supply: a small but steady spring, shored up in wood. A lardpail, rusted black and split at the edges, hangs beside it on an upright stick: a crock of butter, a jar of milk, stand in the water. The spring is not so deeply cowled beneath the hill that the water is cold and nervy: it is about the temper of faucet water, and it tastes sad on the mouth.

  Ten feet or so below the spring the water is held up again, beside one of those thick and black iron kettles in which farm people a shade more primitive make soap. There is also a washboard, homemade out of a piece of thick pine plank, and here every Wednesday in fair weather Mrs. Burroughs and Lucile do the laundry. (The Fields and Tingles, with a less convenient water supply and less consciousness of dirt, launder less frequently.)

  It is a four-room house: two rooms on either side of a roofed hallway open to the porch on one end, the hard dirt yard on the other. The porch is made of oak so stout it still has a thick hair of splinters. The rest of the house is entirely of pine, stitched with nails into as rude a garment against the hostile year as a human family can wear. Four rooms: more spacious a house than the average. Three of the rooms are quite good-sized, twelve by fifteen feet; and the kitchen is half that size. One of the rooms, however, is uninhabitable: on two sides there is a wide gap between eaves and wall, and on the hallway side several courses of weatherboard have been omitted between the height of the wall and the tall peak of the roof: and there is no ceiling. In this room are stored corn, dried peas, dried peaches, jellies, and canned food, for the winter. The opposite room is semihabitable: no ceiling, the same big gap at the eaves. There is a bed there: no space for it in the bedroom, which already has two: and sometimes the children try sleeping there. On the whole, though, they prefer their pallets on the bedroom floor. 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. To make the roof tight would be no job of patching but of completely relaying the half-inch thick pine shingles. Even the walls are insecure against cold and against slanted storms, though the worst rifts have been papered, or caulked with rags or cotton. Stand there in the darkness of daytime and through walls and roof the sunlight will reach at you in slashes and innumerable stars. The bedroom is ceiled, and one of its windows is screened and can be opened at night. The ceiling leaks only in really wet weather, and badly in only three places. There are two windows to each room, with wooden shutters. Those in the storeroom are nailed shut; those in the opposite room are seldom opened; of those in the bedroom only the screened is ever opened (and the door is buttoned shut at night). The kitchen windows are glazed; and Floyd has roofed the kitchen with corrugated tin. 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.

  The pinewood, its grain stormplaned, stormsilvered, and sharp in the eye as razors, is lovelier than watered silk; a fact which is not appreciated by those whose bare feet smooth its floors and whose bodies revolve through living among the frail cards it lifts against the weather, and whose lives are trapped in it.

  The notable thing about the house, though, is its bareness, which is as
much more bare than nakedness as bone: and the bareness is intensified not only by the lack of furniture but by the rigorous cleanliness of the floors.

  The house was totally bare, of course, when the Burroughs moved in. No landlord furnishes furniture. In the course of living at all, though, even without money to speak of, there is a slow but certain accumulation of possessions: some of them, indeed, are useless and decorative. There are salient items:

  In the front room (semihabitable): one iron bed, drooping springs, two thin mattresses stuffed with cotton, cotton sheets whose texture of coarseness is that of an unwashed floursack, a quilt, a mercerized salmon-colored spread. A dresser with drawers whose handles are missing and a mirror whose quicksilver is corrupting. A Conquest sewing machine. A small table, stuffed drawer (old clothes) jammed against the never used fireplace. Under the sewing machine, the square glass base of a defunct lamp. A settee, “rustically” bent out of withes from which the bark has not been cleaned. A trunk, low, short, and narrow, its rusted tin skin pressed into floral patterns and studded with roundhead nails.

  In the bedroom: two iron beds; mattresses, sheets, and quilts as above. Thin cotton-stuffed pallets for the children, rolled up during the day, in the closet. A small table, for the lamp when it is transferred from the kitchen for undressing just after supper. A twelve-gauge shotgun, slung from two forked sticks above Burroughs’s bed. In a closet: miscellaneous clean and dirty clothes, and quilts. Quilts enough to keep warm under in winter except perhaps in really cold nights.

  In the kitchen: a small range. A woodbox. A small earthenware churn. A heavy black iron pot. Black breadpans. A couple of stewpots. A dishpan. A fifty-pound lard tin, containing meal and covered with a wire sieve. A table, covered with worn patterned oilcloth. Skillets, their handles stuck in cracks in the wall. A quite modern safe (cupboard) with a metal-lined bin for flour. Dishes of miscellaneous size and pattern, which are sufficient because the children use bowls or saucers. Knives, forks, and spoons of a metal which imparts its taste to all the food you eat. The stainless steel forks and two stainless steel knives, with black wood handles. A bench. A sealoil lamp. A bucket on a shelf.

  In the hallway, by the kitchen door: an oilcloth covered shelf, waist-high, supporting a bucket, a soaptray, and a small enameled basin. From a nail, a towel: half a floursack. The soap is sometimes toilet, sometimes kitchen, sometimes nil. The Burroughs are unusually cleanly. Not only do they wash their faces, and their arms to the elbow, before every meal, as all farm people do: one by one on their way to bed, in a basin for that single purpose, they wash their feet. It is very seldom that the whole body is washed: when they go to the creek, though, for their infrequent swims, they take along soap. Two more things may as well be noted here: they sleep all in one room, and there is no such thing as privacy, by day or by night; and on the other hand they have uncommon physical modesty.

  In the walls of the bedroom and of the front room, somewhat at random, are driven nails. Here and there, clothes hang from them.

  On the walls are pasted or tacked such items as these: a calendar advertising Peters Shoes, depicting a pretty girl in a red hat, cuddling red flowers. Title: Cherie. Subtitle (written twice, in pencil): Lucile.

  A tinted photograph of a neat, new-overalled, clean country boy fishing. Title: Fishin’. Torn from a child’s book, costume pictures in furry colors illustrating, as you might expect them to be illustrated, these titles: The Harper Was Happier Than a King as He Sat by His Own Fireside. She Took the Little Prince in Her Arms and Kissed Him. Slung by its chain from a nail: a cheap locket depicting Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin, with their respective hearts exposed. Torn from a tin can: a strip of bright red paper sporting a white fish and bearing the legend: Salomar Extra Quality Mackerel. On the mantel: twin iridescent vases. Between them: a saucer of pressed milky glass. On a table: a green glass bowl in which sits a white glass swan. On the dresser: a broken china rabbit; a china bulldog and litter of china pups—Lucile was given them last Christmas. (Folded away for use year after year are the gaycolored, now faded papers in which gifts are wrapped.) For one of the mantels Mrs. Burroughs designed out of white tissue one of those scissored stretches of paper lace which children so enjoy making. But she has just about given up trying to make the house pretty.

  There are also four straight hickory-bottom chairs, a “rustic” straight chair, and a “rustic” rocker. They are moved around as needed. The price of a straight chair is a dollar and a half.

  There are easy-payment stores in Tuscaloosa, which do a good business with people as poor as the Burroughs but less foresighted. More generally, furniture is got at when a family diminishes by death or marriage, or through a barter of needs: everyone, after all, always needs something. One of the beds the Fields got will give an idea of prices: it cost a dollar and a quarter, and it is so crippled they have had to nail the head into the wall to keep it from collapsing.

  Burroughs has some animals, too: a heavy yellow rooster with a fierce eye and an androgynous voice; a clutter of obese hens whose bodies end dirtily, like a sheaf of barley left out in the rain; a number of neat broilers, and a few quilty, half-dressed chicks. A couple of guineas whose small painted heads and fluent bodies thread these surroundings like a dream. A sad, darkbrown, middlesized dog named Rowdy who, though he looks like André Gide, is as intensely American a type of dog as Burroughs is a man. Two longlegged, rusty young hogs for which Burroughs paid his landlord $9 when they were shoats. A cow, tethered from spot to spot in the green stretches, for which Burroughs gave a fifty-dollar grafanoler. Her calf. A small white pup named Sipco. A half-grown, reptilian black cat named Nigger. A nameless adolescent tiger-cat, that just took up with them. A rented mule, which is on hand only between March and July and during the picking season. In a way, the whole place is possessed by animals. Wasps whine threadily from their nest under the hot peak of the roof; rats skitter and thump and gnaw, and fight the cats; the hens tread the bare floors on horny feet; sharpen their bills on the boards, their eyes blue with autoeroticism; the broilers dab and thud at the mealy dung which the pup and, weightily, the youngest child, have delivered about the floor; the dogs and cats are gathered in by the odor of food among the bare feet under the kitchen table, Rowdy apologizing for getting his ribs kicked in, perfectly in that manner which has moved man to call the dog his best friend.

  The Burroughs have been working for Fletcher Powers only for a year. For three years before that they worked for the Tidmore brothers, and they lived in the house the Fields family now occupies. It is a less spacious house: smaller rooms, and only three of them. Half the house is constructed in a way more characteristic of that country, perhaps, than any other: the walls are vertical planks a foot wide, with laths tacked on the lengths of the cracks. The Fieldses’ windows are glazed and curtained. The stove has supported two families and it is assumed that the rigors of another moving will end its usefulness. There is an iron ice cream chair with a homemade seat of new pine. There is a tin-framed mirror over which certain fanciers of the antique would have nocturnal emissions. There is a pot of tinstemmed paper flowers. On the bedroom wall is a blunt officer’s sword in a rusted scabbard: it was supposedly used by an ancestor of the present Mrs. Fields. On another wall is a picture, from some inexplicable magazine, of little Barbara Drake and of John B. Drake III of Chicago, who at four or five has already achieved the poisonous expression which in due time may serve to abash traffic officers, panhandlers, and even the legal managers of jilted showgirls. Caption: The Little Drakes. The water supply is a spring, sixty feet down the steep clay bank out back. No one who uses the spring seems to have very good health. The water-getting contraption is a lazyboy: a windlass, a stoneballasted bucket on a wire, a frayed rope innumerably broken. You have to wind with one hand and guard with the other to get the bucket uphill. There is also a cow named Mooly who would as soon kill the young ones as not and who, one day last winter, knocked Mrs. Fields down and stomped on her, cutting her shins badl
y and bruising her from head to foot. There is also a red hog, so hungry it fumbles, with its jaws, at the tail of a kitten too dizzy with hunger to move.

  The Tingles live in what was once a farmhouse. There is a shade tree, and a flowering bush out of the bare yard. There are three rooms on one side of the house, like a dumbbell flat: there is another across the open hallway. The windows are glazed, screen-less, closed at night. The house is extremely dark, partly with the set of the windows, partly with the absorption of smoke, and partly with a rich patine of grease and dirt so labored into its once whitewashed surface that sweeping and scrubbing affect it as lightly as if it were iron. The walls are heavily decorated with calendars and other ads. The kitchen table and its oilcloth have absorbed grease and corn and corn-sweat to a degree which extends a globe of nausea thick and clinging as oil. The bedding, the clothing, and the people are insanely dirty. The drinking and cooking water are caught off the roof and stored in a cistern. How sound its walls are is of some importance because a hole in the porch, not far away, is used for nocturnal convenience. This cistern water must be used sparingly: even so it sometimes runs dry; did last summer. The laundry is done at the spring down behind Fields’s house, a third of a mile and a steep hill away. So the laundry is done seldom. There are dogs, Queenie and Sport, very lean and hungry but fatted as compared to the trembling back kitten, whose skin is ridged raw along the bones. There are roosters named Bud and Floyd; hens named Lily and Alliemae; a cat named Hazel who is big enough to get what food she needs. Late last summer the Tingles blew themselves to a new washbasin. Before that they had been washing in a hub cap. Tingle has boasted, laughingly, that he has not bought a bar of soap in five years: but that is doubtless an exaggeration.