At a white sharecropper’s grim house in Alabama, Agee noted an empty powder box displayed in a decorative, almost sacred fashion on a mantle in the house of a sharecropper:

THE ARISTOCRAT OF FACEPOWDERS

And

Slung awry by its chain from a thin nail, an open oval locket, glassed. In face of this locket, a colored picture of Jesus, his right hand blessing, his red heart exposed in a burst spiky gold halo. In the other face, a picture by the same artist of the Blessed Virgin, in blue, her heart similarly exposed and haloed, pierced with seven small swords.

If the Gudgers realized this was Roman Catholic, they would be surprised and shocked and they would almost certainly remove it. It is interesting and mysterious to me that they should have found it anywhere in their country, which is as solidly anti-Catholic as the Province of Quebec is Roman.

In Evans photographs, Lincoln Kirstein admired the “purely protestant attitude . . . meager, stripped, cold, and, on occasion, humorous.”

As I pasted my commentary, my haloes and roses, on the black-and-white images of the Great Depression, I wondered if I was Catholicizing that Protestant attitude? The hordes of poor unwashed Catholic immigrants that the nativists feared had indeed reproduced at an amazing rate and changed the face of America. And so had the developments of the civil rights era, postmodernism, hip-hop, the way rappers sampled classics in their remixes—audacity was American; property rights were all-American. What happened when these two American things clashed?  There really was no pure product in American culture; audacity, cross-pollination, and theft in the name of love made things new and impure.

Incidents in my personal life, the decorative impulse, my own strong urge to light votives for souls, and to tell funny stories—that was part of what I was doing—Romanizing the austere —adding funk, and Tin Pan Alley, to the silence of the images. Did that make them Jewish, or African?

An amateur historian of Yiddish theatre and vaudeville tells us about something he recognized, obscurely, in a tune that Irving Berlin wrote for a Yiddish musical before he became famous for Tin Pan Alley tunes. Yes, that was the tune that became God Bless America. First it had been a Yiddish ditty.

The pure products of America—do they exist outside of the homes of the Daughters of the American Revolution? Their children and grandchildren make love to the sounds of R & B, and they sing God Bless America as if they own it.

My brothers and sister and I are the product of a kind of mosh pit of the major immigrant cultures of the early twentieth century, Irish, Italian, Jewish—cultures that built and changed America, as America changed them.

“The jumble of life . . . rosettes on rosettes.” Violence, desire, neglect and chance. Hybrid vigor.

When Evans brought his photos back to Fortune for magazine layout with Agee’s text, the editors removed some bedbugs from the picture of the Gudgers’ marriage bed.

Evans made them put the bedbugs back.