The View from Up Here

I'm nearly finished with And Their Children After Them, by writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson. At first I found it to be a sad story of the fate, fifty years later, of the three families documented by James Agee and Walker Evans in 1936. It was especially hard to read about the circumstances of cotton tenant farmers in Alabama during the depression. It seemed a life of little joy and much hardship, created in large part by the people who owned the land and held nearly absolute power over their tenants' lives.  They participated in a system that was set up, it seems, to keep the farmers using nineteenth-century tools to work land they could never own; diseased, illiterate, barely managing to keep food on the table or a roof over their heads, they were convinced there was no way out.

My first impression of the book was that Maharidge and Williamson (M & W) intended to provide an update to the Agee and Evans book, but as I read on, I saw that they had something more complex in mind for And Their Children After Them. Not only do they bring us up to date on the Gudgers, the Ricketts, and the Woods, but they do so with an up-to-date viewpoint, allowing us a more balanced view of the people and their lives in rural Alabama than was provided by the earlier book.

Not having read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I can only go by what M & W tell me about the work, but it seems that throughout their time in the South, Agee and Evans maintained their outsiders' viewpoint, seeing the tenant farmers' lives as wretched and their only rational choice escape. Despite Agee's decision to live for a time with one of the families and get involved in their lives, he never seemed to change that opinion.

In contrast, though M & W are also outsiders, they seem to try to see things from the point of view of the people they meet, balancing the story Agee tells with stories from the descendants of the original families who provide not only a different view of their parents and grandparents but a different and at times quite critical view of Agee and Evans as well.  The portrait that emerges from the later book is one of respect for the people who manage to survive and even to attain some measure of happiness, despite living through decades of killing poverty.

Yet the story is still largely depressing.  I had no idea how bad it really was and still is in places like Centerboro, Alabama.  Though cotton is now harvested mechanically and thus more efficiently and economically brought to market, the jobs the crop once generated are now gone and the people who worked the land have been forced to move to a city to take primarily low-wage jobs, when they are available. A few have been lucky enough to get some education or training in better paying work, but even they are living on the edge of poverty, dependent on continued employment in uncertain times. 

This book was written in the late 80s when there was a recession similar to ours going on in the U.S., so one can imagine that times are still tough in Alabama for the poor.  I'd like to know how these families have fared, twenty years later.  I wonder if an update exists?  I'll have to check on the internet.

Once I finish this book, I think I'll take another break with a nice mystery: fiction in which good and evil are clear cut and everything works out in the end.

Stay tuned!