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Defeat.
It is written across the face of the once great land, in all the brittle shells of towns that once were, in all those little-town eyes that wait (but for what?), and in the cemeteries, the abandoned sharecropper fields, the vine-covered shack on the Burgandy land where Maggie Lousie and her children last grew cotton. That home still stands, valiant and silver against thirty empty seasons of frost and sun, containing fragments—the last straw sun hat she ever wore out in the cotton, a pair of high heels—all rotting, rat-chewed, faded. It is going the way of the gin down the road, abandoned in 1977, finally, to rust, pigeons, vandals.
It is no surprise some of these people react negatively to the outside world, that Junior Gudger sat on his porch in 1969, even before his sister committed her ultimate act of rebellion, and vented his fury. He was holding a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the first he had ever seen, it is said. He fumend that it made them look like slaves.
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Dale Maharidge (And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South)