Department of Agriculture Photographer, 1943

by AMELIA L. WILLIAMS

Fields of blue flax dance with bees, fuzzing 
the August horizon. Old Joe Tipton 
guides his Shire to mow. Nannie used to pull 
flax by hand, yielding long fibers for cambric 
and lace. Now we cut for linseed oil, cig
papers, banknotes. Lady photographer 
from New York been following us all week. 
Mostly silent. Finally shows us prints
from her field darkroom, talks a little—
long words like “fortitude.” But her pictures 
tell our lives all right: the Modlin sisters, Sallie 
and Jessie—peering out from broad bonnets, 
squint in the hard light, working a flatbed 
trailer heaped with body-sized retted bundles 
laid back into the fields to dry like rows 
of graves. Me and Rachel Schoot in hot, heavy
filtration masks, working the scutching machine, 
grabbing straw to spread for combing. 
Making pictures for a living—working woman 
like me, but no children. She says, “maybe someday.” 
Now her USDA checks go to her mother’s 
TB sanatorium in the Ozarks. While we make
straw into gold for the government archives.