Cotton Tenants: Three Families by Agee James

Author:Agee, James [Agee, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781612192130
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

Speaking generally as well as of the Burroughses, the work clothes of the grown people become them as their own skins do. In their Good clothes they look stiff and shy, like orphans at a party.

Lucile’s mother dresses her carefully in the idiom of the little girl she is ceasing to be, and a “respectable” little girl at that: she will never have to wear what Ruby, far less the Tingle children, wear, and the psychological imprint is going to be strong on her, and not entirely fortunate. Excepting one or two flimsy skirts of sheeting cotton she wears dresses made of store cloth, of gay though faded colors, and with some style of cut, sashed, and ruched out behind like a pulley: and beneath, the floursack clout which appears to be the standard lingerie in that country. She and the other children are customarily barefooted from early spring through the fall and, with all serious respect to the dangerous relationship between bare feet and hookworm, it is nevertheless true that a good deal of tripe has been written on the matter. To say that these children can’t afford shoes is true. It had better be added, though, that they would refuse to wear them if they could afford them: also, that summer shoes, in a warm country, are as useful as neckties for polar exploration: also that for growing children new shoes have to be bought each fall whether or not the old are worn out, because they are outgrown. Only two considerations make this subject serious at all: one, again, is the hookworm; the other is the fact that some children can’t be afforded shoes for winter, go to school with their feet wrapped in sacks, or for that same reason stay at home.

Junior wears overalls every day of the week and Sunday, too, blue and store-bought. All summer his feet are a flycrawled, festered crust of sores: bites scratched and dewpoisoned, and swollen to their worst in dog days, and disinfected by coaloil and turpentine: the routine summer status of the feet for a country boy his age; the routine medicine for all minor injuries. (Perhaps it would be well to reconsider the shoe question; but bear in mind how normal and unnoticed this is.) Charles has some yellow, home-made overalls, but more of the time he wears a faded, twopiece blue-and-white suit caught together at the waist by four big buttons. Squeaky has a whole flock of dresses which no doubt come in handy for future babies (and no doubt have done so for Charles; some of them even for Junior). The best he has is a town-bought, very Nursery job with pink flowers and white rabbits printed on a blue ground, all laundered quite pale. The dressing of babies up to three or so is very simple, and is uncomplicated by genital genteelism. In hot weather they often go naked as jaybirds. The dresses are short and bell-shaped, usually split down the back with a single button at the nape.

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