Agee at 100: Centennial Essays on the Works of James Agee

Racial Violence, Receding Bodies: James Agee's Anatomy of Guilt

raCIal VIolenCe, reCedIng BodIes: James agee’s anatomy of guIlt James a. Crank Though his championing of the poor, uneducated white southerner is well documented throughout James Agee’s complicated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a reader might rightly question his lack of engagement with the poor, black sharecropper living in the Jim Crow South. While Agee endlessly sympathizes with the white southern tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama, he spends little time discussing the African American neo-slave system that continues under the guise of tenant farming. Though he does describe several African American individuals within Alabama (such as the blues singers who perform for Agee and Evans and the frightened couple near a country church), Agee primarily documents his time with (and sympathy for) three white sharecropping families.1 The omission of the African American perspective in Famous Men is not an anomaly; in fact, the lack of a distinct African American presence throughout much of his work might trouble Agee scholars, especially because in both his journals and letters to his mentor Father James Flye, Agee clearly articulates his anguish over the (mis)treatment of African Americans. Because Agee sympathized with many different ideologies throughout his brief career, his silence on the struggle of African Americans (especially in the South) might be a sign of concern for those who try to reconcile his obvious political sympathies with the views printed in his major works. To understand Agee’s perspective on race, one needs to look instead to his unpublished fiction, journals, and letters as well as his published work to find his tremendous guilt over his lack of involvement with what would later become the civil rights movement; for Agee, it is a guilt that stems James a. cranK ~ 54 ~ largely from his perceived inability to communicate his complicated feelings over the situation between whites and African Americans. While Agee did not publish his thoughts on racial segregation or racism, he did spend a large part of his journals and letters advocating some kind of common ground between whites (specifically southern whites) and African Americans. He divides his sympathies between poor, southern, rural whites and African Americans, but his emphasis on the violent translation of African American political problems to his personal experience suggests that African Americans played a large role in his artistic and personal consciousness. In fiction like A Death in the Family, Agee often presents African Americans as mute and defeated individuals, or as the incomprehensible “other” that resists easy interpretation. Frequently , Agee presents the African American body through a meditation on racial violence. The preoccupation with violence seems to connect to Agee’s reflections on race in unique ways: African American bodies in his fiction are subjects to be tortured and attacked, but instead of focusing on the details of the violence—as Agee often does throughout his fiction— the images of these bodies are always receding. He never quite imagines either the beginning or end of these scenes of violence, instead creating the still image of it for his reader, where the scene is akin to a continually darkening photograph that eventually becomes impossible to decipher. This movement from body to bodilessness for Agee’s African American characters is bothersome in that black characters are frequently not allowed agency and action on their own terms. Instead, they are bodies to be used and discarded by Agee in the work of understanding his own complicated history. Just as Agee in Famous Men uses the tenant farmers’ lives as a counter-narrative to articulate his own identity, in his fiction, he often emphasizes his own guilt-wrecked, ineffectual white liberalism throughout his prose rather than the wounded African American body. Taken separately, Agee’s works parallel that of the tradition of white liberal reformers, southern literary figures whose thoughts on race and racism are termed “southern white racial conversion narratives,” in the language of Fred Hobson.2 Agee clearly felt a responsibility toward African Americans throughout his career. In his letters to his mentor Father Flye and in an unpublished response to an article by Donald Davidson, racial violence, receDing BoDies: James agee’s anatomy of gUilt ~ 55 ~ Agee engages in an ongoing debate over the responsibility of white intellectuals —especially southern ones, as Agee considered himself—to find some kind of solution to problems like segregation and violence. These pieces establish Agee’s views and serve as the backdrop for...