Cotton Tenants: Three Families, Page 3

  What money they get from cottonseed and clear, or fail to clear, in the Fall, doesn’t represent their total income. Between mid-July and late August, and from the end of picking season through to March, the tenant is of no use to the landlord and the landlord is loath to advance money. Unless the tenant has cleared a fair amount (and landlords will tell you that it is extremely rare that they aren’t back asking for a loan for Christmas), there are five or six hot weeks in summer and four cold months in winter when he just has to scratch around. If there is wood on the place he has rented he is as a rule welcome to cut it and haul it to town and sell it; a good price is a dollar a load. There are odd jobs of course, sprayed around all through the countryside—very short-term jobs mostly: there are thousands of tenants in the vicinity, all equally in need of work. Last winter Burroughs had so very little work, weeks going by with nothing at all, and nearly nothing to eat, that his landlord advanced him fifteen dollars or so out of season; an unusual procedure. Last summer, Burroughs was luckier: he and Tingle both: infinitely more lucky than most people they knew of. They got jobs bunching logs, for Burroughs’s former sawmill employer; snaking them, with a mule and tongs, into stacks for the wagons, over at a sawmill about four miles’ walk from where they lived. They got the jobs on condition that they would quit for nothing, not even picking, and would stay on as long as there was work to do. Work started at six-thirty; half hour off for lunch; and ended at five: ten hours, five and a half days a week, for a dollar and a quarter a day. Tingle didn’t even hire a hand for the picking: he has a big family. Burroughs had to hire one either by the day, paying him by the hundred picked, thirty to forty cents, or by the month. He hired him by the month: room and board and eight dollars. It was better that way, too, because on that arrangement a man can’t say “you har’d me to pick cotton”: he is a general hired hand, and must do whatever work comes up. The hired hand was a single man, and that is a sample of the life of a single man. That is one good reason why young men of that class marry young: married, you can rent a farm. And one good reason why they have children thick and fast is that the children are badly needed to help in the fields.

  None of the three men is eligible for relief. There is not enough relief money to carry all the widow-women and old people in the country. None of the three is eligible for WPA work either. That too is for people who have no jobs and they, unlike hundreds in that country less fortunate, and scores of total hard-guys and jerktown loafers, and quite some few dozens of the sons of merchants and landowners who want pleasure-money, have jobs. They would be listed as having jobs if they were able to find no work whatever other than their six months of farming per year. Moreover, landlords feel that a man is spoiled for honest work by getting a little money, say $19 a month, in his hands; quite a little more than any landlord wants to let him have: and when there is any prospect of that, plenty of landlords go to the courthouse and guarantee that so-and-so is well taken care of and that the jobs had better be saved for those who need them. A country official can be counted on to understand. He is, after all, of the landowner’s class himself. That is how and why he has the job he has.

  None of the heads of the families went to War. Burroughs was too young; the other two were busy raising families and cotton. The draft was just at their ankles when the War ended. Neither of them expresses any profound regret.

  Tingle quit voting when the Prohibition went through.

  Fields still pays his poll tax. Barring tobacco and occasional drinks, it is his one luxury. He votes only when there is a Republican to vote for. He does that out of independence and spite. At first they made him trouble, of a mild sort, but they just let him go now. It gives him a lot of pleasure.

  Burroughs has never registered, much less paid a poll tax.

  It has never occurred to any of the women to vote.

  They are as oblivious of country and state as of national politics. In fact most people of their sort appear to feel that those structures of Government are irrelevant if not indeed inimical to them. They are amused at the mules who, unlike the Department of Agriculture, knew that cotton should not be stepped on and plowed under, and they are in general glad of the acreage reduction, which is still pretty well held to, because it brought them less work for the same amount of money. But you get up into the poorest levels of the middle class before you run into anyone who will insist that Rowsavelt has done a lot for the poor man.

  When the country agent came around to explain the mysteries and rewards of the Triple-A, none of them were at all sure they understood him. They have received checks from time to time, but whether they were fully paid off, they have no clear idea.

  One day last August a tombstone drummer spent half an hour approaching Fields. He had no luck but he gave Fields the compliments of the firm, as he left. The compliments were a tinted photograph in a wire frame: that tactfully hale, mildly wardheeler version of the Roosevelt face which was designed to be appropriate to, and which adorns, bars and poolrooms all over the country. The title of the picture was simple: Columbia Marble Works. The whole family looked at it, and said it didn’t look hardly a bit like the drummer, and then decided it must be his boss, and finally, because it was a pretty picture, put it on the dresser, where perhaps in the future some Federal Project Publicizer will spot it, get brighteyed, and flash out some fine copy about the Ikon in the Peasant’s Hovel.

  Fields does, though, know who the President is. The name is Rosenfelt. He has nothing agin him but he wouldn’t talk to him, because he is a highfalutin man.

  Fields is easily the best-informed and most naturally intelligent of the three.

  The world is our home. It is also the home of many, many other children, some of whom live in far-away lands. They are our world brothers and sisters.

  Line them up on their front porches, their bodies archaic in their rags as farm bodies are; line them against that grained wood which is their shelter in three rude friezes, and see, one by one, who they are: the Tingles, the Fieldses, the Burroughses.

  There are nine Tingles: Frank, Kate, Elizabeth, Flora Bee, Newton, William, Laura Minnie Lee, Sadie, and Ida Ruth. There are six more children, but they are dead.

  Frank Tingle is fifty-four. Crepe forehead, monkey eyebrows, slender nearly boneless nose, vermillion gums. A face pleated and lined elaborately as a Japanese mask: its skin the color of corpsemeat. He talks swiftly and continuously as you run downstairs to keep from falling down them; says most things three times over; and clowns a good deal as many sensitive and fearful people do, in self-harmful self-protection. The eyes are shifty and sometimes crazy and never quite successfully crafty: those of a frightened fox with hound blood.

  Kate, the mother of thirteen, is forty-nine; delicately made; her skin creamlike where the weather has not got at it. She is smaller than several of her children. Her legs and feet, like those of most women in this country, are beautifully shaped by shoelessness on the earth. Her eyes, which are watchful not at all for herself but for her family, are those of a small animal which expects another kick as a matter of course and which is too numbed to dodge it or even much care. She calls her children “my babies.” They call her mama, treat her protectively as they might a deformed child, and love her carelessly and gaily. An old photograph shows her fibre and bearing as a young woman, and perhaps it is the relinquishment of that unusual spirit, under the beating and breakage of the past two decades, that has made her now the most abandoned of all these people: more than any of them, she is lost into some solitary region of her own. She is only half sane.

  Mrs. Tingle prefers field work to housework, and her eldest daughters cook most of the meals and take whatever care is taken of the house.

  Elizabeth is twenty, and Flora Bee is nineteen. Most girls that age are married and mothers of at least one child. Elizabeth is stocky, and strong at her work as a man: which is just as well, because she does a good deal of man’s work. Her features and especially the wry mouth and strong chin and cheeks have someth
ing already middle-aged and over-capable about them; her mouth and eyes are desperate, for she has no presentable clothes, and is of white-trash, and sees men seldom, never perhaps on terms of courtship. Flora Bee is more lightly built, a little better-clothed, a little less rooked by work, a little less desperate. She still looks all the way like a young woman. She has a great deal of intuitive graciousness. But she, too, is toward the age when a girl in that country is no longer thought of as marriageable: and the life of a spinster in an impoverished farm family is so ghastly that anything will do for a substitute.

  There is about the younger children, about their skin and eyes and hearing and emotions, such an unsettling burn and brilliance as slow starvation can only partially explain. They are emotionally volatile as naphtha; incredibly sensitive to friendliness. You will possibly get the feeling that they carry around in them like the slow burning of sulphur a sexual precocity which their parents fail either to discern or to realize the power and meaning of: and the idea is somewhat borne out in the tone of their play together, and in the eyes of William, who is twelve, and in the wild flirtatiousness of Laura Minnie Lee, who is ten, and in the sullenness and shyness, flared across like burning sedge with exhibitionism, of Sadie, who is nine, and in the flirting even of Ida Ruth, who is four. A stranger who shows them any friendliness, they meet and surround with the superhuman, millennial sweetness of Polynesians. They sleep mixed, and casual of nakedness. Some idea of that strangeness and obliviousness of the family which has helped to land them in the fix they are in, you may get from their treatment of Ida Ruth. She is possibly the last child they will bring into living, and she is extremely delicate. She dislikes what little food they have but loves chicken and coffee. So, steadily, they have bumped off a long string of chickens to feed her, and she drinks two or three cups of black and parboiled coffee at every meal. Her eyes shine like burning oil and almost continuously she dances with drunkenness.

  The Tingles have in fact lost a certain grip on living which the Fields still hold, if feebly and without much interest, and of which the Burroughs, who are a generation younger, are still tenacious. The Tingles no longer think of what life they have in terms of something in the least controllable from season to season or even from day to day: they welter on their living as on water, from one hour to the next, flashing into brief impulse, disorganized and numbed; never quite clear, for instance, who will cook the next meal, or when. Poverty caused their carelessness; their carelessness brings them deeper poverty; disease runs in among them, free as hogs in a garden: and so the intermultiplying goes on, in steady degeneration. That they have been translated into a gayety, a freedom and fearlessness with love, and a sort of sea-floor ultimacy, which the two other families do not enjoy, is definitely worth noting: it is possible to conceive of other paths to salvation which are a little better credit to civilization, and a little less ruinous of human beings.

  Bud Fields, Kate Tingle’s half-brother, is fifty-nine, and prefers to say he is fifty-four. He is raising his second family. Of his first, the wife and two children are dead. Two sons work halves near Moundville; another is in a CC Camp near Bessemer. His daughter Allie Mae is married to Floyd Burroughs. His daughter Mary, eighteen, has been two years married to an elderly carpenter. Last summer they moved to Mississippi, where they will farm on halves: he couldn’t make a living in Tuscaloosa.

  When Fields was fifty-one, cancer ate his wife and what money her good management had saved them into the grave. Three years after her death he married again and started farming all over, in the worst of the Depression. He married a young woman named Lily Rogers who had two common-law children by a man back in the hills. He took over one of her children, a little girl named Ruby, and they have had three more: twins, of whom one has died, and a daughter. Mrs. Fields is on her way with another child now.

  Fields is slenderly built and no longer strong; a finely shaped head; pale blue eyes whose glitter, like splintered glass, is perhaps a survival of the morphine he was addicted to (and which he broke through whiskey) in the years after his wife’s death. He is easily the most intelligent of the three men, skeptical and reflective; and under other auspices would easily have become a dramatic critic or at least a club wit.

  His wife Lily comes of casual, strongly sexed, definitively poor people: a combination which automatically brings a bad reputation in that country. Her stepchildren still resent her. She seems to be unconcerned, and unhurt. She is strong as a mule and loves to plow, but her husband disapproves of women plowing.

  Ruby has porcelain skin, red hair, lashless red-brown eyes. She is eight years old; observant of people, sophisticated in her deductions, sexually precocious, and deeply attached to her mother. William, who is also called Doogin, is three years old and huge for his age. The mad face of a Jewish lion cub. Deep histrionic and comic intuition and inventiveness. Lillian is a year and a half old. Silent; flesh like biscuit dough; big blank blue eyes and curly mouth set between fat cheeks. The archetypically uninteresting case of baby face.

  Miss-Mary, Lily’s mother, dresses with an unusual eye for show and color; watches you out of crazy-crafty eyes, and uses language extraordinarily, calling (for instance) babies coons and chicks sings. She looks rather like a derelict member of the Cosmopolitan Club. Since her husband was killed in a crap game she has “made her home” among her relatives. She is the sort of woman the children of Nice people shout after in the street.

  Floyd Burroughs and Allie Mae Fields married when he was twenty and she was sixteen; about the average marrying age. They have been married eleven years and had five children. Maggie Lucile, Floyd Junior, Charles Bafford, Martha, and Othel Lee, who is called Squeaky. Martha is dead.

  Floyd Burroughs is thirty-one, his features just a little exaggerated beyond that square-chiseled head which the commercial artist Leyendecker sets up as Goodlooking, his build a little stocky, his height medium. He looks bigger than he is because he stoops, as tall men do. He does not look, yet he seems, old enough to be the father of plenty of more softly bred men of his age. His eyes are a clear, ignorant, and somewhere dangerous yellow, quietly studying you. He moves slowly and strongly, in a gait shaped to broken land, and like many people who cannot read or write he handles words with a clumsy economy and beauty, as if they were farm animals drawing open difficult land. He is ordinarily grave, with a ballast rather of profound unrewarded fatigue than of mentality; and gentle, not with the premeditated gentleness of the Christian but with the untraditional gentleness of a large animal. He is capable of murderous anger; and capable also of amusement, over clumsiness embarrassed by pain and over the broader kinds of sexual comedy. He likes to get drunk but can seldom afford to. Down in the creek, whenever he can get company, he swims rambunctiously, turning wild somersaults from the bank and clamping his nose in one hand as he smacks the water. His body, which would otherwise have been very conventionally handsome, is knotted into something else again by the work he has done; and his skin, alarmingly fair beyond the elbows and neck, is cratered and discolored by the food he has eaten and the vermin he has slept with.

  Allie Mae is twenty-seven. She inherits the sharp, fine features and the wiry slenderness of her father’s people. In no way neurasthenic, she nevertheless takes very little interest in living. Within her natural intelligence you may discern the features of a drowned intellect. It is easier still to see the steady destruction of an all but beautiful woman; the hard, lean nature of her living has drawn the skin more closely round the bones than need be, and diet, plus the mischance of her own chemistry, has rotted the front teeth out of her upper jaw. Her arms and legs and body are not yet taken out of the shape of a slender comeliness and her walking is joyful to watch, but as she nurses her child you cannot fail to notice how shriveled and knottily veined the breast is; and her hands, when you notice them, are startling: it is as if they were a couple of sizes too large, drawn over what the keen wrists called for.

  The appearance of full-blown enigma is infrequent, unexp
ected and arresting; and it always deserves attention. It happens to reside in the eyes of this eldest child, Lucile, and it is doubly arresting because continuously she uses her eyes to watch into the eyes of other people, quite as calmly as death itself, and as cluelessly, too. Probably she is studying you, without either pity or unkindness, but there is no reason to be sure even of that.

  Any definitive mystery is interesting to speculate over, and thoroughly useless to. These eyes, and whatever is behind them, wear a somewhat more describable creature: a wide forehead; very straight, square-bobbed blond hair that falls over the sweated face; a serene, Scandinavian cast of features, more resolute than conscious resoluteness can be; a sturdily slender, callipygous body, still childish but already subtly blown towards the new dimensions of puberty. She is ten; works in the fields; helps her mother; minds the two smaller children; goes to school and does well there. She still swims in nothing but a pair of aged drawers, but hides her scarcely-discernable breasts within the contraction of her shoulders and upper arms; her mother still makes her dresses halfway to the hips; she is advanced in consciousness to that stage at which a child dislikes its name. Her mother and father are determined to manage it somehow so that she can go all the way through high school. She wants to be a schoolteacher, or a trained nurse.