Agee,
J. (2013). Cotton Tenants: Three Families. New York: Melville House.
A family’s struggle for survival can mean a lot of
things. Agee tells the story about the lives of people that the world doesn’t
seem to care about. These three families of the story belong to Bud Fields,
Frank Tingle and Floyd Burroughs. They live in a land called Mills Hill, in
Hale County, Alabama – a world where nothing is wasted and what is used may
seem to the human eye to even be waste itself. None of us have ever used corn
shucks as toilet paper. Our roofs may leak but we have one over each room of
our homes. We have never worn clothing until it has fallen off of us. Shoes are
not something we buy for our children or ourselves if we make a profit within
that year.
The details given about the lives of three families
in the story will give you a more somber understanding of poverty in the South
during the Great Depression. The poor tenant families in Alabama lived in a
social system that neglected them and an economy that used them, despite their
efforts. Northern journalism called this tenant system the sharecropping
system, but it perhaps deserved another name – a name that would show this
flawed system for what it was and help us all see it for its exploitation of
those stuck in this system with no other options or choices to earn a
livelihood. Families struggled to make a profit – their debts grew and some
years their profits were between $12 -15. The families worked incredibly hard
on a daily basis but their hard work seemed to be for nothing because they were
among those at a disadvantage from the start.
As Agee writes “a
civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a
civilization which can only exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage;
is worthy neither of the name nor of the continuance. And a human being whose
life is nurtured at an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other
human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as is, is a human being
by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm,
the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea” (p. 19). The landowners
though believed that the tenants who worked for them had everything they needed
and in fact their service to these tenants was indispensable. However, the
readers can decide. The information presented here in this non-fiction work
alongside 30 historic photos by Walker Evans tells a truly painful history of
three families living in poverty and struggling to provide basic needs for
their families. All three were cotton tenants, but all three were human and
deserve our sympathies. And while reading allow your mind to fathom that these
three families were not poor enough to
receive support from the government or work from the WPA…
James Agee wrote for Fortune and originally published a story on this topic in 1941
called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
This report Cotton Tenants was
thought to have been lost. Agee wrote this after a visit to Alabama in 1936 in which
he explored the poverty there and it was not found until after his death (“Melville House,” 2013).
By doing so Agee takes us back to a time where we can learn and appreciate the
struggles of those before us. Reading about the struggles of those in poverty
will help all readers appreciate their own circumstances a little more. This is
highly recommended for all public libraries and any reader who appreciates
historical reports, or one who wants to take a walk through history and
experience a truly remarkable depiction of poverty and its impact on the
ordinary man.
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