Children Quote by James Agee

““Kate, the mother of thirteen, is forty-nine; delicately made; her skin creamlike where the weather has not got at it. She is smaller than several of her children. Her legs and feet, like those of most women in this country, are beautifully shaped by shoelessness on the earth. Her eyes, which are watchful not at all for herself but for her family, are those of a small animal which expects another kick as a matter of course and which is too numbed to dodge it or even much care. She calls her children "my babies." They call her mama, treat her protectively as they might a deformed child, and love her carelessly and gaily. An old photograph shows her fiber and bearing as a young woman, and perhaps it is the relinquishment of that unusual spirit, under the beating and breakage of the past two decades, that has made her now the most abandoned of these people: more than any of them, she is lost in some solitary region of her own. She is only half sane.””

— James Agee