Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

This is not a photograph of me.

It is a photograph of another Southerner known by a pseudonym, another parent caught in a love triangle.

In 1936, author James Agee and photographer Walker Evans toured rural Alabama, intending to write a magazine article about the lives of white sharecroppers.

The article grew to the proportions of a book, published in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Just as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives had used text and photographs to raise public awareness about urban poverty, so did Agee and Evans seek to put a human face on those scraping a living as tenant farmers during the Great Depression.

Agee was an empathetic and highly subjective writer. This helped readers to appreciate the textures of rural life. But some faulted Agee for speculating about the inner lives of those he encountered—particularly for ascribing sexual longings and frustrations to his subjects.

This photograph, by Walker Evans, portrays a thirty-one-year-old cropper identified as George Gudger, husband of Annie Mae and father of four.

He was also, as Agee saw it, smitten with longing for his wife’s eighteen-year-old sister, Emma, who shared a bed with the couple in their two-room shack.

Agee—who, along with Evans, stayed with the family—was a little smitten with Emma himself, as revealed in these passages:

I am fond of Emma, and very sorry for her, and I shall probably never see her again after a few hours from now. I want to tell you what I can about her.

She is a big girl, almost as big as her sister is wiry, though she is not at all fat; her build is rather that of a young queen of a child’s magic story who throughout has been coarsened by peasant and earth living and work, and that of her eyes and demeanor, too, kind, not fully formed, resolute, bewildered, and sad. Her soft abundant slightly curling brown hair is cut in a square bob which on her large fine head is particularly childish, and indeed Emma is rather a big child, sexual beyond propriety to its years, than a young woman; and this can be seen in a kind of dimness of definition in her features, her skin, and the shape of her body, which will be lost in a few more years. She wears a ten cent store necklace and a Sunday cotton print dress because she is visiting, and is from town, but she took off her slippers as soon as came, and worked with Annie Mae. According to her father she is the spitn image of her mother when her mother was young; Annie Mae favors her father and his people, who were all small and lightly built.

For the past two years, Emma has been married to a man who is moving her to Mississippi. Annie Mae does not approve of the union; Emma is none too thrilled with it either. But the sisters are resigned to it, as Emma prepares to return to her husband.

She doesn’t want to go at all, and during the past two days she has been withdrawing into rooms with her sister and crying a good deal, almost tearlessly and almost without voice, as if she knew no more how to cry that how to take care for her life; and Annie Mae is strong against her going, all that distance, to a man who leaves her behind and then just sends for her, saying, Come along now; and George too is as committal over it as he feels will appear any right of business of his to be, he a man, and married, to the wife of another man, who is not kin to him, but only the sister of his wife, and to whom he is himself conconcealably attracted: but she is going all the same, without at all understanding why. Annie Mae is sure she won’t stay out there long, not all alone in the country away from her kinfolks with that man; that is what she keeps saying, to Emma, and to George, and even to me; but actually she is surer than not that she may never see her young sister again, and she grieves for her, and for the loss of her to her own loneliness, for she lovers her, both for herself and her dependence and for hat softness of youth which already drawn so deep into the trap, and in which Annie Mae can perceive herself as she was ten years past; and she gives no appearance of noticing the clumsy and shamefaced would-be-subtle demeanors of flirtation which George is stupid enough to believe she does not understand for what they are: for George would only be shocked should she give him open permission, and Emma could not be too well trusted either. So this sad comedy has been going on without comment from anyone, which will come to nothing: and another sort has been going on with us, of a kind fully as helpless. Each of us is attractive to Emma, both in sexual immediacy and as symbols or embodiments of a life she wants and knows she will never have; and each of us is fond of her, and attracted toward her. We are only strangers to her, but we are strange, unexplainable, beyond what I can begin yet fully to realize. We have acted toward her with the greatest possible care and shyness, yet we have also been open or ‘clear’ as well, so that she knows we understand her and like her and care for her almost intimately. She is puzzled by this and yet not at all troubled, but excited; but there is nothing to do about it on either side. There is tenderness and sweetness and mutual pleasure in such a ‘flirtation’ with one would not for the world restrain or cancel, yet there is also an essential cruelty, about which nothing can be done, and strong possibility of cruelty through misunderstanding, and inhibition, and impossibility, which can be restrained, and which one would rather die than cause any of: but it is a cruel and ridiculous and restricted situation, and everyone to some extent realizes it. Everyone realizes it, I think. to such a degree even as this: supposing even that nothing can be helped about the marriage, supposing she is going away and on with it, which she shouldn’t, then only of Emma could spend her last few days alive having a gigantic good time in bed, with George, a kind of man she is used to, and with Walker and me, whom she is curious about and attracted to, and who are at the same moment tangible and friendly and not at all to be feared, and on the other hand have for her the mystery or glamour almost of mythological creatures. This has a good many times in the past couple of days come very clearly between all of us except the children, and without fear, in sudden and subtle but unmistakable expressions of the eyes, or ways of smiling: yet not one of us would be capable of trusting ourselves to it unless beyond any doubt each knew all the others to be thus capable: an even then how crazily the conditioned and inferior parts pf each of our beings would rush in, and take revenge. But this is just a minute specialization of a general brutal pity: almost any person, no matter how damaged and poisoned and blinded, is infinitely more capable of intelligence and of joy than he can let himself be or than he usually knows; and that are in others to fear, to assume and take care for, if he would not hurt both himself and that other person and the pure act itself beyond cure.

The orgy Agee imagines would not take place. On the morning of Emma’s departure, George, Annie Mae and Emma sat through a quiet breakfast.

Whether he would kiss Emma goodbye, as a sort of relative, was on everybody’s mind. He came clumsily near it: she half got from her chair, and their bodies were suddenly and sharply drawn toward each other a few inches: but he was much too shy, and did not even touch her with the hand he reached out to shake hers. Annie Mae drawled, smiling, What’s wrong with ye George; she aint’t agoin’ to bite ye; and everyone laughed, and Emma stood up and they embraced, laughing, and he kissed her on her suddenly turned cheek, a little the way a father and adolescent son kiss, and told her goodbye and wished her good luck, and I took him to work in the car, and came back.

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James Agee
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men