1
" Maggie Louise sat in a hardback chair, holding her baby brother, Squinchy, and her eyes fell upon Agee. There was something about the eyes of Maggie Louise that caught him the first time they met. They were 'temperature less, keen, serene, and wise and pure gray eyes,' Agee said, and they seemed to look everywhere and see into things. To look into the eyes of Maggie Louise was 'scary as hell, and even more mysterious than frightening,' said Agee. She knew she'd like him and he her. "
― Dale Maharidge , And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South
2
" There was, however, a fundamental difference - namely, that Maggie Louise, at least at that point in her life, had the ability to be satisfied, which, while different from being happy, is essential in finding contentment. In this regard, there may be two kinds of people, or perhaps, more accurately, two extremes, and if so, Agee and Maggie Louise represented them. "
― Dale Maharidge , And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South
4
" No one lives on Hobe's Hill today. Only a few abandoned shacks remain. The land has greatly changed. When Walker Evans took his pictures, it was a grand, open place, full of cotton. Now forest has reclaimed the land. There is still some field, planted in soybeans, and this provides some sense of how things once were. These soybeans, as well as those down by the main highway, were planted by Joe Bridges and his son Huey.
Amid the soybeans, the ground is stony, and the water-starved beans grow with more courage than success. This same dust was breathed by Fred Ricketts as he plowed behind the seat rump of a mule fifty years ago. He and his children stared at this ground as they chopped weeds and, later, hunched over the long rows to pick. They knew this same sun, this silence, the awful loneliness of this red plateau.
The heat dulls the senses. Even sulfur butterflies, those neurotic field strutters, are slothful. The whole South seems under a hot Augustan pause--all the highways blurry beneath the burden of hear, be they four-lane marchers, two-lane winders, single-track dirt poems. From this hill, it's hard to imagine life going on in this hear anywhere across the six hundred miles of the South, in any of those terrible little towns... "
― Dale Maharidge , And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South
