The Most Famous Story We Never Told - 1 views
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So he goes back again and again to Mills Hill, drawn by a powerful memory that "digs down deep inside your heart and soul." A memory of cotton, of endless labor, of hunger at the end of the day, and of Allie Mae Burroughs, his own mother. We know her too, when she was 27, thanks to Walker Evans: her thin lips, wrinkled forehead, hard jaw, and most of all her eyes, those living eyes that search our own and collapse the span of decades. But one memory, at least, belongs to Burroughs alone: "I can almost hear her calling me home."
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in the summer of 1936, FORTUNE sent writer Agee and photographer Evans south to document the lives of cotton sharecroppers. Their story was to be part of a series called "Life and Circumstances."
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A memory of cotton, of endless labor, of hunger at the end of the day, and of Allie Mae Burroughs, his own mother. We know her too, when she was 27, thanks to Walker Evans: her thin lips, wrinkled forehead, hard jaw, and most of all her eyes, those living eyes that search our own and collapse the span of decades.
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This CNN.money site combines information from CNN plus Fortune and Money magazines. This article by David Whitford of Fortune magazine goes into some detail about the story behind the photograph we are studying this week. The woman in the photo (taken when she was only 27 years old) is identified as Allie Mae Burroughs. Her son, Charles Burroughs recalls what life was like for him and his family during the Depression years. -
This is an article of the return to Hale County, Alabama to speak with the descendants of Walker Evans' famous depression era portraits. In this interview with Charles Burroughs, the son of Allie Mae Burroughs, he describes vividly the backdrop to the famous portrait. The tough life of the depression era is evident in the portrait of 27 year old Allie Mae who looks like hard work has aged her and her eyes well beyond 27 years. -
The son of Allie Burroughs swore he would never do what he's doing right now (an interview)," says Charles Burroughs. Tall and broad with a bald pate and those familiar gray eyes. Blue shirt, khaki pants, aviator glasses. Thick, flat fingers, grit under the nails. He has come reluctantly to meet me after work at a Waffle House in Tuscaloosa. Still angry after all these years at how a writer and a photographer on assignment for this magazine moved into his house when he was just a boy, 4 years old (he remembers the day), and stayed for weeks, and while the family was working in the fields, snooped around in dresser drawers and under beds, and took notes, and took pictures, and shared what they had taken with all the world. James Agee and Walker Evans gave us a lasting image of the Depression; Charles Burroughs and his family got squat. This site lets you in to the confusion and heart ache of the children of Allie-Mae Burroughs, the psychological aftermath the children has endured in their working situations. It also expresses how Charles Burroughs parents worked and just never had a chance, in a mostly African American area, making some 5.50 and dropping to 5.15 and hour if late to work once, or ever have to leave before the line shuts down for the day, to support a family. It also touches on the editors from Fortune who sent Agee and Evans south wanted them to write about poor whites. That they found their subjects in Hale County was more than a little perverse. Most of the county's people, and an even higher percentage of the poor people, were and are African American. This site also gives incite into the black society in this era i.e. - one Yolanda Robinson, who worked in quality control for a seafood company, is a sharecropper's granddaughter and is black. She won prizes for elocution in high school, joined the Navy, married young, and was widowed in her 20s. On her second stint at the catfish plant, had hoped she'd never have to