1915: Knoxville
james agee’s childhood
We are 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: middle-sized, gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and
early nineteen hundreds, with small front and
side and more spacious backyards, 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 next-door 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 thirty and forty-five.
A family is a unit composed not only of
children, but of men, women, an occasional
animal, and the common cold.
—Ogden Nash, 1950
trickling the right forearm and the peeled-back
cuff, and the water whishing out a long loose
and low-curved cone, and so gentle a sound.
first an insane noise of violence in the nozzle,
then the still irregular sound of adjustment, then
the smoothing into steadiness and a pitch as accurately tuned to the size and style of stream as
any violin. So many qualities of sound out of one
hose: so many choral differences out of those
several hoses that were in earshot. Out of any
one hose, the almost dead silence of the release,
and the short still arch of the separate big drops,
silent as a held breath, and the only noise the
flattering noise on leaves and the slapped grass
at the fall of each big drop. That, and the intense
hiss with the intense stream; that, and that same
intensity not growing less but growing more
quiet and delicate with the turn of the nozzle,
up to that extreme tender whisper when the water was just a wide bell of film. Chiefly, though,
the hoses were set much alike, in a compromise
between distance and tenderness of spray, (and
quite surely a sense of art behind this compromise, and a quiet deep joy, too real to recognize
itself), and the sounds therefore were pitched
