Down the Rabbit Hole
An August vacation report in which the vacationer kicks up dust with an obsession.
I am supposedly taking two weeks off from America Eats! The problem is I keep falling into one of my many rabbit holes.
This morning I decided that I could be useful by doing something I never do. In this case dust. Quickly bored with that, I moved on to cleaning the glass in the many picture frames around this place. This led to my most beloved photograph that I found for my book, America Eats!. It was taken by Dorothea Lange and, reprinted and framed, it hangs in a prominent place at a level for the viewer to study every detail of it. It portrays a group of middle- to late-aged women sitting on the steps of Wheeler’s Church, a Primitive Baptists church in Gordontown, North Carolina. It’s a July day in 1939, time to clean the church. The women sit primely on the church steps, in flower-printed cotton dresses and sturdy heeled shoes. A few hold straw hats against the summer’s sun. Rush brooms, bucket pails, and scrubbers lean by their sides. It’s plain from some of the women’s faces that they are not thrilled to be photographed by Miss Lange.
Lange shot dozens of scenes at the church. Naturally, for the rest of the morning I scrolled through all of them in the Library of Congress’s photography division. She took a dozen of the cleaning women alone. It’s a very good bet that she took more but these were the negatives the Library held on to.
There are subtle difference in the arrangements, of how the women (and in one case children) were grouped, where they were positioned, who was included in the final shot, and how the church itself was framed. The shutter captures personal interactions: one turns toward the women beside her and says something that makes them grin, hold in their laughter. A trio of women on the top step mark three generations of a family. Near them is the single woman who hasn’t budged from her solitary position: her stern expression tells you what she thinks of this interloper ordering the women about. It’s as far from an expression of christian charity as you can get.
I should have stopped there but this rabbit hole tunnels all the way through the Library of Congress’s vast image collection. And so the afternoon progressed.
Lange traveled down the road a piece to a little hamlet called Hillside and stopped at the farm of a sharecropper. These photographs are much more intimate, a portrait of a family as they went about tending their six acre farm.
Except for a little flower plot by the house, they grew as much sweet potatoes and tobacco as the land would allow.
One of the final photographs captures the family’s sixty-nine years old elder sitting on the porch after a day in the fields. Lange wrote down what he told her after she took his picture, “Land is like folks. It gets tired and needs a rest.”
Having not heard such wise words in a very long time, I climbed out of that rabbit hole, shut off my computer, and went back to trying to do nothing for the rest of the vacation.
Just to emphasize how maddingly interesting this damn hole was, I went on to discover the photography description Lange submitted to the Farm Security Administration Project of the Work’s Progress Administration.
I swear I won’t be back again until September. Until then, be sure to eat a lot of watermelon!
Id sure like to have been with her!
Wow, what a great rabbit hole! Thanks, Pat.