It isn't every day that the New York Times puts Greensboro Alabama on the front page! Here's a charming story on Walker Evans' photographs of rural Alabama, which he made for the WPA. Some made their way into illustrations for James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Reading about Greensboro and Eutaw makes me homesick these days, especially this description:
In Eutaw, where former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s grandfather grew up, the son of a sharecropper, a town square is ringed mostly by covered walkways, the paint of storefronts tattered by rain and heat, a pastiche of faded green, chocolate and pink against a blue sky. “We don’t see many out-of-towners here,” said a man who stopped to ask if I needed directions.
But one cure for homesickness is writing about it–and I'm hoping that soon Stephen Davis and I will finish our empirical study of probate in antebellum Greene County (Eutaw is its county seat). There's some mighty interesting stuff in there–for both social and legal historians.
You may recall we've spoken about Walker Evans' photographs before here in the lounge.