In narrowing representations of American culture through visual art to a manageable topic for a conversation there is a focus on art that records and represents individuals and groups of people or movements within our culture that to the majority of Americans are invisible and marginalized. While it seems oxymoronic to think of visual art as a representation of something invisible, a whole range of American art includes marginalized, disenfranchised, and often invisible people, groups, and events in our culture.
On the “invisibility” chart, if invisibility can be measured by degrees, sharecroppers are the least visible of the individuals, groups, and events that I have chosen to feature in my unit. No one speaks more poignantly of the invisibility of a subculture of society than James Agee speaks of sharecroppers in his documentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
And some there be which have no memorial: who perished as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. (Agee, 13)
Agee and photographer Walker Evans lived with two sharecropping families, the Gudgers and the Ricketts, in Alabama in the summer of l936 and crafted a photographic and written record of sharecroppers’ daily lives. Their publication, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, including Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs and Agee’s riveting descriptions of the families with whom they lived, is a memorial to this aggregate of humanity that struggled and toiled from dawn to sunset, and sometimes past, to eek subsistence from the earth. Evans’s photos are witness enough to the grueling toil, the poverty, and the resignation in the eyes and body language of every subject he photographed. With Agee’s richly descriptive text piled on, it is almost more than a person can bear. Agee writes:
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs: the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game. A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it, and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly be able to bear to live. (Agee, 14)
If these marginalized, disenfranchised people are remembered anywhere, it is in the pages of this documentary that was such a condemnation of humanity, that allowed people to live this way, that Esquire Magazine, who commissioned the collaboration, declined to publish the results.
Each family, the Gudgers and the Ricketts, tended a vegetable garden, but their daily labor, while Agee and Evans lived with them, was picking cotton for the men who owned the land. One of the photographs that I will make into a slide is of Fred Ricketts poised, in his raggedy clothes, before a cotton field; slung over his shoulder is the long slender bag that he will drag up and down the rows behind him as he fills it with one hundred pounds of cotton. Another photo that I will make into a slide is of eight-year-old Pearl Gudger, dragging the long, slender bag and leaning into the row, bent to pluck the cotton from the open burrs whose gores are stiff with sharp points that will prick even the deftest fingertips.
Students can find, on the Internet, a wealth of photographs of sharecroppers laboring in the fields, leaning into the cotton plants, and dragging the bags along behind them. What cannot be conveyed in photographs is the sun beating down, intolerably on the heads and backs of the pickers. An excerpt that is an effective complement to these two photos is Agee’s description of the physical torture of it:
Meanwhile, too, you are working in a land of sunlight and heat, which are special to just such country at just that time of year: sunlight that stands and stacks itself upon you with the serene weight of deep sea water, and heat that makes the jointed and muscled and fine-structured body glow like one indiscriminate oil; and this brilliant weight of heat is piled upon you more and more heavily in hour after hour so that it can seem you are a diving bell whose strained seams must at any moment burst, and the eyes are marked in stinging sweat, and the head, if your health is a little unstable, is gently roaring, like a private blow torch, . . . (Cawelti, 67)
Agee describes, in his chapter, “Money,” the rigidly structured economic arrangements that the sharecroppers have with their landlords, that leave no opening for escape.
Gudger has no home, no land, no mule; none of the more important farming implements. He must get all these of his landlord. Boles, [his landlord], for his share of the corn and cotton, also advances him rations money during four months of the year, March through June, and his fertilizer.
Gudger pays him back with his labor and with the labor of his family. At the end of the season he pays him back further: with half his corn; with half his cotton; with half his cottonseed. Out of his own half of these crops he also pays him back the rations money, plus interest, and his share of the fertilizer, plus interest, and such other debts, plus interest, as he may have incurred. What is left, once doctors’ bills and other debts have been deducted, is his year’s earnings.

Works cited:
1. Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
2. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1991.
3. Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Knopf, 1990.
4. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. 1976. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.
5. Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.