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Sharecropper's child suffering from rickets and malnutrition, Wilson cotton plantation, Mississippi County, Arkansas
Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.
William Blake: from Auguries of Innocence, c. 1801-1803
Sharecropper's child suffering from rickets and malnutrition, Wilson cotton plantation, Mississippi County, Arkansas
Son of a sharecropper, Mississippi County, Arkansas
Daughter of a sharecropper, Mississippi County, Arkansas
Sharecropper with his children in front of company house, Mississippi County, Arkansas
Sharecropper, Wilson cotton plantation, Mississippi County, Arkansas
Wife and child of sharecropper, Washington County, Arkansas
Wife and children of sharecropper, Washington County, Arkansas
Wife and child of sharecropper, Stortz cotton plantation, Pulaski County, Arkansas
Sharecropper's son, Ozark Mountains, Arkansas
Well on submarginal hillside farm, Ozark Mountains, Arkansas
Ozark Mountains, Arkansas
Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.
William Blake: The Human Abstract, from Songs of Experience, 1794
13 comments:
These photos speak so clearly that commentary (apart from the Blake, which is genius) would be superfluous. The last company I worked for happened to be the second largest employer in Arkansas. We owned a large DVD manufacturing plant outside of North Little Rock and I enjoyed traveling to Arkansas a lot, although I stayed mainly around Little Rock. There's a lot of beauty there, but even in those urban areas I felt further away from the America that most Americans experience than I did when traveling abroad, even to Asia. People just don't know. "Submarginal" is a scary, hopeless word.
Tom,
Yes, "Some to misery are born," some places "submarginal" ("a scary, hopeless word," as Curtis says, these photos too. Perhaps some resonance here ---
9.10
pale orange light in sky above blackness
of ridge, silver of planet beside branch
in foreground, sound of waves in channel
world given in the following
show, as it is revealed
about each other, that place
sometimes, these people
grey-white of fog against top of ridge,
shadowed green pine on tip of sandspit
Tom - In a future posting on my blog, might I include a link to yours? All of this is assuming I am able to write the piece I have in mind that would connect to your themes and photos. You have done so much to illuminate the parallels between those times and ours, not that many are aware they exist. Whether or not this is something you would approve, you may leave a message as a comment at my blog or use my e-mail address which is there on the main page, part of the profile, I believe. If I do not hear, that will be an answer as well. My thanks for being a voice for those without one. Marylinn
"Tell your ma
Tell your pa
I'm going to send you
back to Arkansas"
Ray Charles
Bill Clinton,
Glen Campbell and the Pointer Sisters and now Andrei Codrescu
56% functional illiteracy
"if you don't do right" Ray said
There's power and glory when people
rise...Curtis, my man, Little Rock
has become cosmopolitan and po is
still po but the Clinton's did do
right by Arkansas
Well, all I can say is, here's to the new Arkansas.
(Question, though, about that list of significant Razorbacks: if it includes a legitimate native Transylvanian, adoptive sons and daughters must be eligible -- so, why isn't Elmo St. Rose on it?)
Would at any rate happily trade the entirety of California, where our present life is so palpably submarginal as to qualify as a bad cracker joke, for a one way ticket to the new or for that matter even the old Ozarks. But first we'd have to start calling the bonded stretcher bearers for estimates, check the permit codes, etc.
as it is revealed
about each other, that place
sometimes, these people
Ah, all these universes...
About plights and delights and the fates of the not-so-greats, however, one can only say that Blake was too right.
Tom,
Yes "all these universes . . . Blake was too right" --
9.11
grey whiteness of fog against invisible
ridge, shadowed green of cypress branch
in foreground, wave sounding in channel
disclosure, as light appears
in such a way that this
looking back at something as
happening, that is, not
blue-white of sky reflected in channel,
sunlit green canyon of ridge across it
On the eve of the rightest wing Republican resurgence in my lifetime it's fitting that you post this Blake poem and these great photos, Tom, showing the kind of damage about to be done.
The world into which I was born in 1950 (rural southern Missouri) and even later in the 50s in rural Iowa looked a lot like this. My family wasn't this poor, but lots of others were, and this is just way too familiar to me.
I wonder if people are really ready to go back, or (more likely) to send millions of others, back to this bleak place.
Thanks, Steve, for bringing the matutinal lucidity. But like Pound's acorn of light, can we hold it?
... as light appears
in such a way that this
looking back at something as
happening, that is, not
This might be the new sixty-four dollar question, Where is the negative dialectic now that we need it? One catches oneself, amid the nonstop bombardment of Meg commercials, already looking back on what has not yet happened but appears fated, and wishing but not quite daring to hope for that miraculous NOT. The prospect of the unthinkable, it seems, has a curious deleterious effect on thought. Yet it's hard to miss the truth of what George all too accurately foresees,
the kind of damage about to be done
leading us
back to this bleak place.
The bleak place our forebears somehow survived...
One of my earliest recollections of a world outside Chicago involves a trip with my father, then a traveling salesman, attempting to sell cardboard boxes in towns like Davenport, and Dubuque, where the river-bottom shacks of the poor, in the shadow of the door-and-sash factory, were overlooked by the houses of the rich on the bluffs above... things hadn't changed much despite the wartime boom, it was just another version of the tenement reality... big city poverty and little city poverty, then and now... an endless night.
Still fatalism has its limits and too it's hard to accept just fading away like an old soldier when one was never much of a soldier in the first place. But as Dr. Johnson said, There is nothing that concentrates the mind like knowing you'll be hanged in the morning. So maybe with dawn's early light there will come a thought.
Tom,
Ah yes, "maybe with dawn's early light there will come a thought." And then again, "the nonstop bombardment of Meg commercials") notwithstanding, maybe not. . . .
9.12
grey whiteness of fog against invisible
top of ridge, green of leaves on branch
in foreground, wave sounding in channel
curved surface, that portion
between points measured
per second, simple as number
of periods, assume that
grey-white fog against invisible ridge,
circular green pine on tip of sandspit
The amazing thing is the resiliance; people went on getting married, raising families to the best of their ability. The genetic imperative in full flow.
Billy,
True, and a reminder that though children may represent mouths to be fed, they also represent hands and arms and backs to lift and bend on the farm. In rural poverty, there is always the factor of "the survival calculus of the poor".
Arkansas 1935, Ireland 1842, or Bangladesh anytime...
"Without resources to secure their future, people can rely only on their own families. Thus, when poor parents have lots of children, they are making a rational calculus for survival. High birth rates reflect people's defensive reaction against enforced poverty."
Peter Rosset discusses this in World Hunger.
The strategy behind the New Deal programs was to put all those population numbers to work.
But now...
Did America say give me your poor?
Yes for poor is the vitamin not stored
It goes out in the urine of all endeavor.
So poor came in long black flea coats
and bulgarian hats
spies and bombers
and she made five rich while flies covered the rest
who were suppressed or murdered
or out-bred their own demise.
E. Dorn, "Prayers for the People of the World", from The Newly Fallen, 1961
Amazing photos. Time travel. And nelygot.
Otto,
Totally nelyglot. I feel like I can turn around and be right back in the Ozarks.
First visiting there c. 1950, I was curious to find everyone had all their "major appliances" (washing machine, icebox if they had one) out on the front porch.
This seems less strange to me now.
(Bewildered quest for a roof over our bowed heads at this moment... another surgery day in the USA... )
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