A Fourth of July Picnic Under the Live Oaks

An American flag on a stick stands at the upper left of the crowd. Above it, the dark, leaning trunks of live oaks fill the top half of the frame, their limbs hung with Spanish moss. Through the canopy, a pale sky shows in patches. Beneath the trees, in dappled shade, a gathering of perhaps thirty Black people sit and stand around long tables covered in white cloths. Some are seated on benches; others stand behind the tables; a few are in motion. The cloths hang down over the edges of the tables, and the bench legs sit in the grass.

The women wear printed cotton dresses, several with white or straw hats. One woman at the right wears a white wide-brimmed hat. The men are in shirtsleeves and trousers; some wear jackets and hats. In the right foreground, a man stands with his back to the camera in a pale blue short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, hands behind him. On the tables are dishes and a large metal pot or pail set on a bench at the centre. A wooden sawhorse or trestle is under one table end. A small child in a light garment sits on the ground at the centre foreground, facing away.

Behind the gathering, a field of tall green crop reads as corn, and beyond it more trees. At the far right stands a bare wooden post. The foreground is rough grass in full sun, crossed by the shadows of the oak limbs. There are no buildings, no vehicles, no road, and no lettering in the frame.

One slide from July 1939

The slide is a 35-mm Kodachrome transparency, made in July 1939 by Marion Post Wolcott, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. The Library of Congress holds it in its FSA/OWI Color Photographs collection; the record carries the title 'A Fourth of July celebration, St. Helena Island, S.C.' and marks the image as public domain. The record names no person in the frame. It gives no exact day, no spot on the island, and no name for whoever spread the cloths and set out the dishes. It does not say what assignment brought Wolcott to the island, or what the photograph was meant to document. It does not list the names of the people in the slide, nor say whether they were neighbours, church members, or kin. What the record does say is that the photograph belongs to a series from the same event; other frames in that series carry the words 'picnic' and 'celebration' in their titles. The slide is one of those frames, and its mount darkens the edges of the picture.

The live oaks, the tables, the flag on its stick

The month is written in the crop and the cloth. Behind the tables, the field stands tall and green, a corn crop in July on an island off the South Carolina coast. The live oaks are heavy with moss, the way they are all summer; the grass in the foreground is bare and sunlit, its rough blades crossed by hard-edged shadows. The photograph keeps the holiday in dappled shade, with the bright field at the back. July at its height can be like this: everyone under the trees, the sun on everything else.

The frame shows the picnic, and it does not show much else. The crowd fills the middle of the image, from the child in the foreground to the people standing at the back; the edges of the frame cut them off mid-gesture. There is no building to say what community this is, no road to name a route, no vehicle to indicate how anyone came. The post at the far right is bare wood; it might be part of a fence, but the frame does not reach far enough to say. The record gives no location on the island, so the field and the moss and the post are all the geography the picture offers. Outside the frame are the things a photograph leaves out: the water that surrounds St. Helena Island, the surrounding marsh, the other directions a crowd might face, the sound of the holiday, the smell of the food, the heat of the day. The photograph cannot show the sound of a spoon against a dish, or the weight of the air, or the mosquitoes. The flag is a small rectangle of red, white, and blue cloth fixed to the end of a stick.