By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
Another Shady Grove cemetery that transports me to Alabama in July 1936.
On a sultry August Sunday I drove up on Shady Grove Methodist Church.
Seeing it resurrected James Agee’s “Shady Grove, Alabama, July 1936,” his description of a cemetery in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, text by Agee and photographs by Walker Evans.
Agee and Evans spent the summer of 1936 working and living among three white sharecropping families deep in desperate poverty. The families didn’t want these better-dressed, well-fed strangers among their midst.
The men, however, respectful of these plain folk and in a strange way finding them noble, nonetheless made themselves a home among them. When their work was done, they told one family, the Tengles, it was time to leave for good.
Elizabeth Tengle recalls that moment.
“They said they was leaving and wouldn’t be back. Every one of us cried. They were so good to us, you know. They told us not to cry. And Ruth told them, she said, “Yore going to leave and ain’t never gonna come back?”
I can never forget the sentiment parents engraved on the headstone bearing their six-month daughter’s likeness.
“We can’t have all things in life that please us. Our little daughter, Jo Ann, has gone to Jesus.”
All this heartrending beauty came about when Agee worked with Farm Security Administration photographer, Walker Evans, to produce a feature for Fortune magazine. The mission was to document the reality of three white sharecropper families in Alabama in an exposé about the effect of the New Deal on Southern poverty during the Great Depression.
Fortune rejected the 10,000-word manuscript as Agee refused to change anything. Finally printed in 1941, it sold 600 copies and was remaindered. If you’ve not read the book, you should. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is considered one of the greater American nonfiction works of the 20th century.
At least read “Shady Grove, Alabama, July 1936”. Excerpts for your consideration . . .
THE GRAVEYARD IS ABOUT FIFTY by a hundred yards inside a wire fence. There are almost no trees in it: a lemon verbena and a small magnolia. It is all red clay and very few weeds.
Some of the graves have real headstones, a few of them so large they must be the graves of landowners . . . on one of these there is a china dish on whose cover delicate hands lie crossed, cuffs at their wrists, and the nails distinct. On another a large fluted vase stands full of dead flowers, with an inch of rusty water at the bottom. On others of these stones . . . there is something I have never seen before: by some kind of porcelain reproduction, a photograph of the person who is buried there. I remember one well of a fifteen-year-old boy in sunday pants and a plaid pullover sweater, his hair combed, his cap in hand, sitting against a piece of farm machinery and grinning. His eyes are squinted against the light and his nose makes a deep shadow down one side of his chin. Somebody’s arm, with the sleeve rolled up, is against him; somebody who is almost certainly still alive: they could not cut him entirely out of the picture.
Another is a studio portrait, close up, in artificial lighting, of a young woman. She is leaned a little forward, smiling vivaciously, one hand at her cheek. She is not very pretty, but she believed she was; her face is free from strain or fear. She is wearing an evidently new dress, with a mail-order look about it; patterns of beads are sewn over it and have caught the light. Her face is soft with powder and at the wings of her nose lines have been deleted. Her dark blonde hair is newly washed and professionally done up in puffs at the ears which in that time, shortly after the first great war of her century, were called cootie garages. The image of her face is split across and the split has begun to turn brown at its edges.
Agee concludes “Shady Grove, Alabama, 1936” with the Lord’s Prayer
James Dickey told me something I hold onto. He was referring to commercial work versus the precious work dear to a writer’s heart almost always done in the most difficult of circumstances:
“I sold my soul to the Devil by day but earned it back at night writing my poetry.”
Whenever I am in a cemetery I remember Agee and Evans. I know they earned their souls back from whatever commercial rubbish they suffered. I read that after the Bible, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was Jimmy Carter’s second-favorite book. I get that. And the souls in Agee’s cemetery? They live on in my mind.
