And Their Children After Them by Dale Maharidge & Michael Williamson

Author:Dale Maharidge & Michael Williamson [Maharidge Dale & Williamson Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609809829
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2019-12-23T18:00:00+00:00

Junior had obviously not changed his mind in the seven years since his mother spoke those words. His wife was there, a kind-voiced woman, sitting by a roadside stand where she tried to sell some used dresses to supplement their income. She tried not to look at her husband and the men he was talking with.

Some fifty years earlier, journalists came and paraded his family’s poverty for all the world to see. It’s now in a famous book. The Gudgers got nothing out of it in real terms. Even if Agee never saw any real money out of the project, he did receive other rewards— professional, for sure, in terms of prestige and respect for having written the book. The Gudgers were put down by the book, this theory would go, but received nothing of substance in exchange for the use of their private lives. Why didn’t anything ever come Junior’s way? If it was up to the Gudgers themselves to demand a bigger share of the pie, rather than wait appreciatively for whatever was thrown to them, then they’d start right now.

On the other hand, he could have used our appearance, if he had wanted to, to correct some bad impressions created by the original book, to make the point that some of the Gudgers, at least his family, were certainly doing better than they had in the Depression. It was hard to say what Junior’s income was from working for the soybean farmer, but in 1978 he had told a writer for Southern Exposure that he was earning $125 for a fifty-hour week working five hundred acres of ground. He had finally come to own some land, a patch far too small, however, to farm. It’s a reasonable guess that his income had gone up in the interval in proportion to the changes in incomes of others through the same period, which would still place his family in a very low income bracket, by national standards. Yes, it is true he is out of abject poverty, and that is a great improvement. But in this materialistic age, it is all relative. It was not that Junior and his wife were dressed in rags; their clothes were old, yes, but nice and certainly still serviceable. The family also had cars to drive, owned a five-room house on half a dozen or so acres. The house was adequate in size, and Junior’s family certainly had a television set and probably the normal American complement of gadgets.

Yet many of the Gudgers are poor by modern standards, and, worse, they know it.

Tolstoy wrote that he often envied peasants for their illiteracy and lack of education. The closer he came to peasants in his later life, the more he said he came to know truth. In many ways, Agee derived the same benefit from his Alabama experience—he found a vision of religion and life through examining the simple lives of the three families. Of course, it should be said that both Agee and

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