The Hypertext Triomnibus

Wish Books

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tagstriad, difficulty/3, kind/same-subject, kind/same-period, kind/shared-figure-or-motif, kind/oblique-structural

4 min read

Triad 13 of 32 · 2026-10-06 · Difficulty 3 · Same subject, Same period, Shared figure or motif, Oblique/structural

The thread

Three books on 1930s Southern tenancy and the printed wish-images that passed into the tenant house, and the printed book that later passed back. Agee, Cotton Tenants (written 1936 for Fortune, killed, pub. 2013): opens on Lucile Burroughs’s third-grade geography reader, Around the World With the Children; on the Burroughs wall a Peters Shoes calendar girl, ‘Title: Cherie. Subtitle (written twice, in pencil): Lucile.’ (ch. 2). Crews, A Childhood (1978): a boy born 1935 in Bacon County, Georgia, and Willalee Bookatee (son of the Black tenant family on the Crews place) turn the Sears ‘Wish Book’ into a saga of feuds, because ‘all the people in its pages were perfect’ and ‘under those fancy clothes there had to be scars’ (ch. Four). Maharidge & Williamson, And Their Children After Them (1989): the book returns to its subjects; Junior ‘fumed that it made them look like slaves’; Fred Ricketts, nearly blind, ‘kept looking at Evans’s pictures’; Maggie Louise (Agee’s Lucile) read her mother’s copy before her death in 1971; a section opens on a 1941 USDA reader, ‘Round the World with Cotton, found in an abandoned school. Three positions on one motif: visitor (Agee) inventories the pictures, child inside (Crews) rewrites them, return (Maharidge) records the subjects reading their own picture. Crews’s children do to the catalogue what documentary does to its subjects, in reverse: they add the scars. Agee to Maharidge is genealogy; the Crews bridge is built here (neither text mentions the other).

The three books

Notebook

  1. Subtitle, in pencil: Agee’s ‘Title: Cherie. Subtitle (written twice, in pencil): Lucile.’ (ch. 2) and Willalee’s ‘This lady here in her step-ins is his chile.’ (Crews ch. Four). Write your name twice under a commercial image you’ve kept; then the paragraph in which image and name speak. Claim, wish, or correction?
  2. Give the perfect people their scars, then reverse it: Crews, ‘forcing the beautiful people to give up the secrets of their lives’ (ch. Four). Do it to a page of glossy faces; then write a documentary paragraph that supplies the Wish Book the documentary leaves out (Lucile ‘likes school, especially all about the history of our country’, Agee ch. 7). Which hurts more?
  3. The book comes home: write the scene where a subject reads what you wrote. Maharidge’s four reactions (Junior ‘made them look like slaves’; Fred Ricketts ‘so happy that he was a famous man’; Maggie Louise’s silence; Emma ‘I could turn around and write a book on him’) against Agee’s ‘The infiltration of all that has to do with the outside world is slow, verbal, and distorted in transit’ (ch. 8).

Rabbit holes

Links as checked on the day of the reading.

To carry

“The infiltration of all that has to do with the outside world is slow, verbal, and distorted in transit.” — James Agee, Cotton Tenants, ch. 8, ‘Leisure’

Themes

Agee · Bacon County · catalogue · documentary · exclusion of Black tenants · Fortune · Hale County · King Cotton · Let Us Now Praise Famous Men · photography · pseudonyms · return/revisit · scars · schoolbooks · Sears Wish Book · sharecropping · storytelling as truth · subjects reading their portrayal · tenant farming · Walker Evans · wish-image

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