Cotton Tenants: Three Families

by James Agee

  Mrs. Tingle prefers the more violent work of the fields, in the hot sun, to housework, because so long as she is sweating and working hard in the sun the rheumatism doesn’t clamp into her joints so bad. She has also had pellagra, for the past ten years, and they have spent a great deal, they have no idea how much, trying to get it cured. The hard time she has eating we have spoken of. Three years ago she was out of her head for a long time. That was when Ida Ruth was a baby. Once she tried to kill Ida Ruth with a chunk of stovewood. She is better now and thinks it must be the powders, that is to say, the yeast. For the past year and a half she has been taking Brewer’s Yeast stirred up in molasses, milk, and water. She still has nervous spells though and they are bad. She can feel them coming on like something terrifying sneaking up behind her and then all of a sudden she sees black and yellow lights busting all around and after that she doesn’t know anything for a while.

  Floyd Burroughs has spells, too, of a different kind. He falls down and foams at the mouth just like a dog and it scares Allie Mae and the children something awful. For a while he was having those spells as often as twice a week. He hasn’t had them though, since they moved to this new place, and it seems to Allie Mae like God must have been on their side and told them to move.

  Allie Mae has the beginnings of a cataract. Mrs. Tingle, her aunt, has one still further advanced and treats it with camphor water. Mrs. Tingle’s mother and one of her aunts went blind with them.

  Allie Mae has bad pains in the stomach from time to time, not at all the ordinary indigestion pains, that frighten her badly: her mother and her grandmother both died of cancer.

  Her father Bud Fields has a skin cancer, in the right shoulder. On the surface it doesn’t look like anything but it has worked down under the collarbone and into the shoulder muscle. He had his choice of have it cut out or treated with X-rays and, in fear for his throat, chose the less tangible treatment. He spent the midsummer in silent and deep terror of death: walked and bummed his way to Moundville and thence was taken to Tuscaloosa for the X-rays; three treatments. The thing that frightened him worst of all was the ether. In extreme nausea you feel like death, and he took that to mean quite literally that he was dying. No one thought to explain, and though he was advised to lie down and get over the effects no one got insistent when, not having warned his wife of any length of absence, he chose rather to get back home as fast as possible. The doctor who had taken him up dropped him still jellified with ether-nausea, at Moundville, to walk the seven miles home.

  Presumably they caught the cancer in time. He was strongly advised to do no work for two weeks, then to come back. The cotton was ready though, and he spent the days picking.

  They were good to him about this cancer: the charge will be only $50, plus the Moundville doctor’s treatments and, likely as not, his transportation.

  Both Burroughs and Tingle have appendix trouble. Tingle lay eight solid days under the ice cap; Floyd used it for three days, late last spring. (Mrs. Peoples came down with appendicitis late in the summer and there was another rush call for Tingle’s ice cap.) An operation would run you into debt and put you out of work: it’s wiser to freeze it and trust to luck.

  Excepting Mrs. Tingle, none in the three families show any signs of pellagra: doubtless the butter and green foods are just about sufficient to stave it off. Whether or not there is hookworm, is hard to say. Charles’s anemic pallor may be a symptom of it, but Charles has been very sick. The halting of Squeaky’s growth may be a result of it; and on the other hand may be some glandular sprain. (William Fields’s abnormal size must be due to the same glandular disequilibrium which produces half the sheriffs you will see in the South.) None of the children were dirt-eaters, outside the normal course of getting down their meals.

  Down around Greensboro, the county seat, where nearly all the tenants are Negroes, doctors still charge what they did in the horse-and-buggy days: a dollar a mile, not of course including services and prescriptions. The Moundville doctors have come down on their price; one charges five and the other three for a trip to Mills Hill. Why the five-dollar man can get away with it and why Moundville’s third doctor, a young man, has not yet built up much of a practice, is explicable only as many other things in the deep country are: by the power of habit. None of the three families has any clear idea what the state of their health costs them from year to year: we can only assume that it is one of the more reliable drains on the pocketbook, though even Burroughs uses doctors very little. Patent medicines are somewhat steadily used. The Fieldses have a little bottle of pills that cover a multitude of pills of evils: green pills for the liver, white for the stomach, morphine for misery. Mrs. Fields is a great believer in the efficacy of asafetida dissolved in whiskey for almost anything from a bad cold on. Mrs. Tingle knows a great deal about home and woods remedies and exchanges knowledge and the roots of herbs with the Negroes: swampwillow bark for chills; queen’s delight for pellagra; heart leaves for heart trouble; blacksnake root for chills; cottonseed poultices for head pains; snuff poultices for pneumonia; rattlesnake grease or polecat oil for rheumatism (but best of all for that is alligator grease). She keeps a big assortment of roots and leaves on hand ready for immediate use and turns up with advice and offers all over the neighborhood the minute anybody is sick. Floyd and Allie Mae won’t take the teas; Frank Tingle won’t allow a doctor across his doorstep; the Fieldses in this matter as in most others are midway.

  Invariably people work as long as they can stand up to it, and this is as much out of tradition and pride as of necessity and poverty. It is the same with death. Frank Tingle had seven uncles and every one but one died with his shoes on, and that one had one shoe on and died trying to pull on the other one. Tingle and Fields and Burroughs have all taken out burial insurance and all of them have had to let their policies lapse. People use undertakers now more than they used to; it is almost customary. The undertaker’s charge is $25, to take the corpse and bury it. It is seldom that anyone goes in for extras, such as embalming, or a headstone. Women lay out the corpse; everyone sits up with it; women, more especially the older women, wail, and tear their hair at the burial; at either end of the bare clay mound is a driven pine board, sometimes plain, sometimes sawed to the rough shape of an hourglass. Offerings are set in the clay along with ridge of the grave: a horse shoe; or a dead electric bulb; or a pretty piece of glass or china; or a china statuette of a comic bulldog; or a child’s tea set; or a Coca Cola bottle; or mussel shells: sometimes a few flowers. When the flowers are done for, that is likely to be the end of it. Ordinarily people do not travel far during their lifetime; but they move, and abandon, often enough so that there is scarcely more feeling for the dead than for the land they have farmed or the homes they have lived in.

  APPENDIX 1

  On Negroes

  In the interests of keeping the subject as clear as possible the main body of this article is devoted to a study of cotton tenancy in terms of white families only. But one tenant in three is a Negro. There is no space here to do him justice, nor shall that be attempted. In lieu of that, here are a few notes, almost at random.

  You should know to begin with that there are terms on which Negroes and whites in the South have unselfconscious and even friendly relationships. You should know also how easily the Southern white can flare into murder, offered terms he does not care for. The Negro fits into the structure of cotton tenancy as he fits into the structure of Southern labor: as a man the white laborer is born hating and dies hating. The Negro is hated because he is a nigger; he is hated because it is believed that no unguarded white woman is safe within a mile of him; he is hated because he will work for wages a white man would spit on and will take treatment a white man would kill for; he is worst hated, of course, by whites who by the force of circumstance are anywhere near as low in the social scale as he. Needless perhaps to say, he works for what wages are offered him because he has to live, and he takes what treatment is handed him because any objection could mean death. Whi
te tenants who despise him, nevertheless—and they are tenants who have never had the benefit of clarification from organizers—are here and there beginning to conclude that their actual enemy is not the man who accepts lower offers than they will but the man who makes them and forces him to them; and they are able even to realize that should they through any organization attempt to assert themselves, it will be absolutely necessary that the Negroes be in the same organization.

  When Southern New Dealers and liberals and indeed anyone critical of the South and interested in improving matters there insist how important it is that the work be done by those who Understand the Ways There they are to a certain extent dead right: an Understanding of the Ways is an almost indispensable advantage, deprived of which you are all but certain to pull incredible bloomers. But since by that understanding they also mean an understanding which will not Make Trouble: since they mean that the Race Problem should be treated sympathetically and a hundred per cent ineffectually: their opinion is only just so good. If the Christian Millennium could be initiated as simply as a President opening a baseball season, all would be well. As it is, the South is involved more deeply and tragically than pure reasonableness and understanding can extricate. No white Southerner is responsible for his ideas of the Negro and his place nor even for the dangerousness of his reflexes against the Negro, since essentially they are actuated by a subconscious but nonetheless mortal fear. And no Negro is responsible for the gigantic weight of physical and spiritual brutality he has borne and is bearing. And it is tragic that irresponsible persons should brain each other. But it seems quite inevitable that that, sooner or later, is what any beginning of a solution will come to.

  There are white tenants quite as bad-off as the least-fortunate Negro tenants. There are Negro foremen, Negro overseers, Negro small-farmers, and even Negro landlords. Generally speaking though, the Negro is a lot worse off, on the land, than the white man. Consider the status of the white families written of here. It is not too hot. Then take away the garden. And the hog that is killed for winter meat. And the cow. And reduce the amount of corn and peas and sorghum. And add a general tendency, among landlords, to enjoy cheating a Negro who, used to being cheated, enjoys getting away with everything he can; and make a vicious circle of that. Add also the amused encouragement the landlord gives, in the course of friendly kidding, to bastardy and the breakup of families. Add those tones of whining or clowning servility which most favorably impress most landlords and which most thoroughly destroy personal integrity. Add the often sincere yet always curiously measured kindness of landowners in cancelling a nigger’s debt, when it is hopeless enough; in helping him out of jail, when it is only a razor fight or something else more characteristic of a Negro than any assertion of his human rights: for which the reward is anything between a beating and a murder. Keep on adding in one detail after another, and you get a creature so certified for disease, so lacking in possibilities of self-respect, so starved, and so abysmally ignorant, that you can scarcely wonder how few Southern whites are capable of thinking of the Negro as a human being.

  Venereal disease is thick among them. Salvarsan was for a while provided by the State at a cost of nineteen cents a shot; now it is back at its customary drugstore price: $1.50 a shot; which is prohibitive to most Negroes and to many whites. Malaria flowers as richly on their blood as on white. The skins of many are rusty with what can be merely ill health, and what can be pellagra. By the thousands they are reduced, in the winter, to a diet precisely short of death by starvation. Since they are thickest in the land first settled, and cleared by their race, firewood is in many places scarce. In the south half of Hale County last winter, the worst in ten years, it was all but nonexistent. They are terribly susceptible to pneumonia. The floors of their houses are low to the ground in the wet cold winter. They are much too ignorant and much too habituated to the idea of work to take to their beds in time. One Negro in Marion, Alabama, who happened not to be an exaggerative type, told of sixteen farm Negroes within his acquaintance who died of pneumonia last winter. Their babies die off like flies in autumn. They use midwives and conjure women for birth and sickness, partly out of mistrust of doctors, partly out of superstition, partly out of poverty. The midwife’s charge is five dollars or barter. Sometimes a baby is given as pay. One Hale County midwife objected at length when she got paid the fourth baby in a row from the same mother.

  To say that they are carefree is simply asinine. To say that they are distinguished for their joy in living as clearly as whites of the corresponding class are distinguished for slowness and sadness in living is simply true. That they are rich in emotion and grace and almost supernaturally powerful as beings, is hard not to see. They dress in a sense of beauty no other American people approaches; they are creating perhaps the most distinguished American lyric art of their time; the “non-creative” are sympathetic to art and to delicacies of feeling and conduct as the general white people have not been for three centuries; they love with a lewd grace and fall out of love with a frankness that few Western whites can have managed since the time of St. Paul: and in short it is somewhat difficult to believe, in the course of watching a few thousand of them going through the alienated motions of their living, that they are not in several important respects not merely an equal but a superior race: and that what they have gone through during the past few generations has not contributed so much to that superiority as nature ever did, and as much as intelligence ever can.

  APPENDIX 2

  Landowners

  The Southern landowner, the keystone of the social and economic structure of the rural South, is an almost inconceivably subtle and complex problem. We can hope in this limited space only to make a very few general things clear about him which by some odd chance seem not to be clear.

  He is not something done up in gum boots, a blacksnake whip, and a gun. He is not something rigged out in a black string tie, quotation from Horace and Stark Young, and a set of Maxwell House julep strainers. He is neither Simon Legree nor Old Cuhnel Chahteris nor is he likely to be whatever is meant by a Southern Gentleman but he is, strange as it may seem, a provincial, bigoted, powerful, and essentially innocent human being who in all his mind and heart and flesh is soaked in believing, beyond any need for conscious or even much unconscious hypocrisy, the things which a human being in his economic and social and historical situation would be bound to believe. There is not room to go into these beliefs, either. It must suffice to say that they justify him, in his eyes, in his position and livelihood and in any conceivable ramification of his relationship with his tenants. Within his structure of belief he has room to be “good” and “honest” or “evil” and “ruthless” or just an indifferent mixture. Generally, like any other member of society as it is today, he is an indifferent mixture. It must never be forgotten that it is neither his vocation nor his joy to cheat or intimidate or squeeze blood from his tenants. He is the owner of more or less land, farmed by tenants and planted to cotton, and it is his business to make as much money as he can. There, as elsewhere, that invariably and inevitably entails the harming of human beings far beyond the poor power of good or evil intention to help much or much further to harm: and there, as elsewhere, it by no means inevitably entails the deliberate misuse of human beings. It is safe to say that the average landlord’s relationship with and, even, treatment of his tenants is, on the purely human or consciously moral plane, several degrees more personal and, even more just and friendly, than the relationship between, say, the average manufacturer and his employees.

  It is further safe to say that he thinks of his tenants, white or black, neither exactly as he would think of human beings nor exactly as he would think of his mules: he just thinks of them as tenants, and thus treats them, and thus demands that they act and treat themselves. It is also safe to say that he is more fully at ease with Negro than with white tenants and therefore, in a certain sense, likes and even “treats” them better. Here follows some direct and some indirect quotations
of an assortment of landowners, ranging from big-time to small-time:

  These people, these tenants, get everything they need: land to farm, a house to live in, food to eat and plenty of it, clothes to cover their nakedness. We loan them money for whatever they need it for; we advance them their fertilizer; I want to ask you what they’d do without us. They get schooling, too, and who pays the taxes for that? It’s the landowners that pays them. Moreover they don’t risk a thing on the crop; it’s the landlord that runs the risk. Yes, they get all they need, and they’re contented, all of them but a few soreheads who think the world owes them a living, and they don’t want any better and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had it. They are every one of them ignorant, they are most of them shiftless, and they are nearly all of them improvident. When they get a little money they spend it like water on pretty clothes, or liquor, or on autos if they have enough. There’s not one in a hundred of them that had any idea of the value of money, or any idea of saving. There’s not one in any hundred who could run his own farm, unsupervised, into anything but ruin. There is not one in twenty who would want to try. Of course there are landlords who take an unfair advantage of their tenants, just as there are dishonest businessmen in any business: and so, too, there are tenants who are in a bad way. You can in fact find just whatever you are looking for. But what these Northerners write about it is just a big pack of downright lies, that’s all. Anyone that stays in the South long enough to learn the ways sees how it is.

  All this talk about mistreatment of tenants. Sure, maybe they is some of it here and there, they’s sons of bitches in ever walk of life. But I can tell you if you lined up a hundred of them in a row that was bad off and sure enough found out about them you’d find ninety-nine of them was bad off through nobody’s fault but their own, because they was ignorant, and because they was shifluss. Their people was tenants before them, and their people was tenants before that.