On James Agee’s Cotton Tenants, by roundabout means.
Whether or not you’ve been keeping up with the Confederations Cup I’m sure that you’ve at least heard something about the massive riots that have accompanied it. I will assume that you know nothing about the cup and give you a brief rundown: Brazil will be hosting the 2014 World Cup. The Confederations Cup is kind of a trial run to prepare for the big show next year; to see how things run from stadium to stadium, city to city, etc. So why all the civil unrest in Brazil? Brazilians are supposed to love soccer, right? They do, but what they don’t love is the amount of money their government has spent on these stadiums for FIFA (an estimated 12.4 million USD). Could not this money have been more wisely spent, say to better the shabby educational systems, or to lower the public transportation fares, or perhaps build upward of ~100,000 homes for the vast number of poor in their country? These are the questions being asked by the Brazilian populace and one can hardly blame them when people living in ditches fall asleep to the lights of stadiums like stars. There are a lot of things this money could have been used for, but let’s be honest, helping the poor is not nearly as sexy as watching Italy’s Pirlo floating around with Mario Balotelli in a billion dollar stadium to the roar of the earth’s upper in rapture. There is no telling how many peasants Balotelli has personally put in the ditch with his Maserati.
So while we alleviate our sense of societal injustice by throwing a couple of coins at the Salvation Army bell-ringer or buying our delicious fair trade this and that, there is in mass a people group (world wide) being subjected to every variety and variation of poverty. Charity is great for the wellness of ones’ subjectivity or ‘soul’ and should be encouraged at every moment, but to think that these social problems are going to be solved on an individual case by case is ignorant. If we are to even get close to solving these issues a system must be put in place of the global capitalist one that perpetuates the subjugation of a class/’s for the benefit of another. Do we seriously love soccer so much that we are willing to sacrifice human lives for it? Baseball? Football? All the ‘goods’ we dump exorbitant amounts of money into keep others from having the most basic of needs: shelter, food, and clothing.
Shelter, food, and clothing. These are the most basic needs that poet James Agee wrote about in his article for Fortune magazine in the 30’s. This article was never published, got shelved and forgotten. Melville House has now published it under the title Cotton Tenants. This can be seen as a precursor to the book he’s most known for, Let Us Know Praise Famous Men. Melville House Press did a wonderful job with this book; nice size and feel, sexy cover, and it is full of Walker Evans’ stunning photos.
Why is it important for us to read this book now?
I’ve recently had the opportunity to sit down and talk with my grandfather about his childhood, youth, etc. This is sort of a rare situation in that he was surprisingly candid about how poor his family was, something which still stings him with embarrassment. You see, he grew up in a sharecropping family in Dumas, AR. I read Cotton Tenants a week before this talk with my grandfather, and though I’ve heard a good deal of his growing up from my mother, I’ve never quite grasped just how desperate it was until having read Agee’s account. Agee looked into the lives of three tenant families with a ferociously piercing eye and put down his account so that we might make some connection to the destitute. Read this book as it was meant to when it was written. Agee asks us to look around us and ask the hard questions. Can we not spend our money to help those who cannot help themselves? The picking yourself up by the bootstraps argument fails as soon as you say it to someone without boots.
When Agee called our society “a dizzy mixture of feudalism and of capitalism in its latter stages” he now speaks this to our globalized society. Riots are kicking off everywhere. There is a reason for this; the tenants are greater in number while the lords are fewer.
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