Knoxville: Summer of 1915
James Agee
WEARE
talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in
the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
It
was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with
one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded:
middlesized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and
early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back
yards, and trees in the yards, and porches. These were softwooded trees,
poplars, tulip trees, cottonwoods. There were fences around one or two of
the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then
a low hedge that wasn't doing very well. There were few good friends
among the grown people, and they were not poor enough for the other sort
of intimate acquaintance, but everyone nodded and spoke, and even might
talk short times, trivially, and at the two extremes of the general
or the particular, and ordinarily nextdoor neighbors talked quite a bit when
they happened to run into each other, and never .paid calls. The men were
mostly small businessmen, one or two very modestly executives, one or two
worked with their hands, most of them clerical, 'and most of them between
thiry and fortyfive.
But it is of these evenings, I speak.
Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight,
shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon
lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started,
and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass,
by the time the fathers and the children came out. The children ran out
first hell bent and yelling those names by which they were known; then the
fathers sank out leisurely in crossed suspenders, their collars removed and
their necks looking tall and shy. The mothers stayed back in the kitchen
washing and drying, putting things away, recrossing their traceless foot–
steps like the lifetime journeys of bees, measuring out the dry cocoa for
breakfast. When they came out they had taken off their aprons and their
skirts were dampened and they sat in rockers on their porches quietly.
It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak
now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them:
22
