Worlds Apart

James Agee’s elegiac essay memorializing a summer evening in Knoxville did nothing to make me feel better about the preceding essay by James Wright, which distressed me so. Wright’s descriptions of Jim Crow days were disquieting and Agee’s poetic paean to his tranquil life only heightened the realization that those two worlds existed in orbits that seldom came in contact. The blacks probably knew more of the white world, which they serviced, but whites probably knew little of the black world.

Agee’s essay is the prologue to his famous novel A Death in the Family, in which he draws heavily from his life. I have read this essay before and loved its lyricism and poetic influences and its evocation of the calm that pervades a quiet neighborhood as the day draws to a close. There is a sense of community and continuity in Agee’s retelling of the familiar, mundane ritual of those who live in his neighborhood. Everything is orderly, routine and little menacing intrudes on this perfection. Sounds and things, like the noisy tram, are imbued with a certain magic that beguiles the young child through whose eyes the essay unfolds. But that quiet and charm of the evening is tinged with something not said—that even in a city like Knoxville there are the cinder yards where life was hard and much different. In other words, there’s a disconnect between Agee’s portrayal of life and that of Wright’s.

It was a probably a coincidence that Agee’s essay came right after Wright’s harrowing account of his life in the book, but the juxtaposition of the two was perfect. Even though Agee is not black, I am glad that in class we read Agee as part of a group of essays black essayists for it brought into sharp focus the injustices recounted in theirs. Where Wright’s essay focused on his search for jobs and the difficulties he encountered because of his color, the men in Agee’s were all gainfully employed and belong to the same social strata—white, lower-middle class office workers or small businessmen.

Reading about the tranquility of that Knoxville summer evening only heightened the sense of frustration of violence and day-to-day humiliations that black people faced Wright documents Wright’s documentation of the violence and of living Jim Crow exposes the falsity of popular conceptions of the easy life in the South. He makes it clear that he never knew this Edenic South that Agee evokes in his essay. It made me wonder if Wright happened by Agee’s neighborhood would he feel the same dread that he described so well in his essay:

“Negroes who have lived South know the dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In such a simple situation as this the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.”

Where Agee saw only the beauty, Wright would have seen the menace, cruelty and the ugliness of Jim Crow. He probably would have hurried thorugh the neighborhood, before someone noticed his intrusion and beat him to make sure he would remember never where his place was—among his own kind.

Through Wright’s telling it’s easy to see the inner feelings of the black experience of prejudice and what it took to survive as shown in the elaborate ritual that had blacks never thanking a white person for a courtesy because then it maybe construed as expectation or as Wright wrote, “to have said: "Thank you!" would have made the white man think that you thought you were receiving from him a personal service.”
The contrast in the language of the two writers also highlights their differences. Agee’s writing is vivid and poetic; his words are carefully chosen, precise and imagistic as seen in his phrasing of the night becoming “blue dew.” There is foreboding too, but it’s subtle and there is affirmation of the continuity of life throughout. Wright’s essay beats with a faster pulse of frustration, as he breathlessly recounts his anecdotes, each affirming the institutionalizing of Jim Crow.