Good Friday Read: "The Morning Watch" by James Agee

Waking before dawn in his boarding school's dormitory, a twelve - year - old boy dresses and hurries to the chapel for his assigned hour of the Gethsemane vigil, Episcopalians' response to Jesus's plaintive question to sleepy apostles, "Could you not watch with me one hour?" On his knees, the boy Richard tries to focus on the crucifixion of Jesus. When the hour is over, he goes swimming with a couple of classmates. [Photos following this article show locations at Agee's actual boyhood school.]

My synopsis of The Morning Watch by James Agee tells only the situation for each of the novella's three chapters; the action happens inside his consciousness, where Agee finds humor, horror, and a religious experience to top the compulsory one.

[Page references are taken from the Houghton Mifflin Company's second printing, 1950.]

The layers of the novella are on display in the last couple pages of chapter one. While Richard dresses silently, two classmates wrangle over a shoe that one threw at the wall (12). One country boy explains to Richard, "Jis trine wake up Jimmy... God All Mighty Christ, can't even wake nobody up in this friggin School --" Bothered by the swearing, Richard resists calling the boy out for it.

If Jimmy told Hobie to shut up and quit cussing Hobie would take it off of him, they were buddies; but by now [Richard] knew enough to keep his mouth shut. He felt uneasy, though, because he was glad he had not sworn. That was like being thankful you were not as other men and that was one of the worst sins of all; the Pharisee.

The boys, late for their duty, rush to the chapel before Richard can put on his shoes:

[Now that], for the first time this year, he felt the ground against the bare soles of his feet it was as if, fumbling among clothes in a dark closet, he had put his hand on living flesh. Even though the ground in this schoolyard was skimmed with dusty gravel, its aliveness soared through him like a sob and lifted his eyes in wonder upon the night (13).

We're in Richard's world, a fraught territory between childhood and adolescence, where he's vulnerable, self - absorbed, and just becoming conscious of a world outside himself. In his first moments awake, he's ashamed for failing to stay awake for Jesus, and also "thankful" that he wet the bed only a little, this time (5). We learn that the boy's father died when Richard was six, that his devout mother sent him to this Episcopal boarding school in the mountains of Tennessee to have "men in charge" of him (42). He watches the other boys and the men in the place for clues to how he should be, as when the boys encounter senior prefects in the chapel, preparing for services. Richard is awe - struck, and wonders about the "hump" between the broad shoulders of the school's star athlete Willard: "It must be a very greatly developed muscle, Richard realized, [yet] he felt there now on his own body and there wasn't even the beginning of a muscle there" (23). After the vigil, he risks telling the other boys "Come on" and striking out alone for the stone cut swimming hole: "He was surprised that he had spoken and the more surprised to hear them following" (93). Almost immediately, he also recognizes that he's scared of them. Undressing to swim, he compares his body's development to theirs -- and they do likewise (101).


Like Richard's qualms about being proud that he didn't cuss, his moral dilemmas are frequent, urgent, and mostly ridiculous. Richard is both afraid to be too good, and afraid that he's not good enough. He wonders why a priest once seemed amused when Richard confessed to picturing an "irreverent" image during the prayer "Blood of Christ inebriate me" (32). Recalling a line in a Lenten hymn, "Perish ev'ry fond ambition," Richard "magnanimously" resolves not to become a naturalist: "I'll never even own a monkey, or be junior tennis champion"(40). Contemplating the crucifix, Richard fantasizes about building a cross in the school's woodworking class and somehow nailing himself to it. While boys and teachers who've bullied him gape in astonishment, his mother weeps, and he imagines saying to her, "Someday, you'll understand." Off to the side, mighty Willard says, "Jesus the kid's got guts" (50).


Agee mediates Richard's stream of consciousness with an adult's precision, but without an adult's ironic distance. The prose is textured and intense, verging on poetry. For example, in a single paragraph that fills three pages, Richard's focus on the head of Jesus, veiled for Good Friday, morphs into Richard's memory of his father in an open casket:

Dead, the word came again, and shutting his eyes he prayed swiftly for his father the prayer of all his childhood, God bless daddy and keep him close to Thee and may light perpetual shine upon him, Amen; and casually, obliviously, as a trout into shadow, the image memory vanished (28).

The sensation of "aliveness" in the ground that lifts Richard's eyes to the sky is Agee's hint of a spiritual presence in Richard's life informed by, but outside of, his childish religiosity. Post - vigil, as Richard leads the boys to the stone cut pool, they pass a chicken coup, where Richard sees "how the big rooster darted his vigilant head and shuffled his plumage: in the silence before daylight a priest, vesting himself for Mass" (93). Then one of the boys hurls a rock at the rooster who "chuckled with terror."

At the swimming hole, Richard has three experiences that take him deeper than his vigil did into the death, resurrection, and redemption that the day represents. On the way there, the shell of a locust, sharp claws dug into the bark of a tree, sends Richard's imagination far into thoughts of dinosaurs, of when he might have seen the locust during its life, and, finally, seeing its back split, he thinks of how that pain must have been about the same as crucifixion (100). Diving into the cold water, Richard's exploration of the quarry's bottom becomes a prayer:

O Lord let me suffer with Thee this day, he prayed, his lungs about to burst; and took hold more firmly. You got no right, his own voice silently told him, you got no right. No right; but still he fought off his need for air.

When Richard emerges, almost too late, "I could have died, he realized almost casually. Here I am! his enchanted body sang. I could be dead right now, he reflected in sleepy awe. Here I am! (106). He turns his face from the boys so they won't see his "unexpected tears," and, identifying with the suffering of Jesus, "crying for tenderness and thankful wonder, [he] gazed steadily into the beating sun." Moments later,

a snake more splendid than Richard had ever seen before was just achieving a sandstone ledge and the first heat of the risen sun. In every wheaten scale and in all his barbaric patterning he was new and clear as gems, so gallant and sporting against the dun, he dazzled, and seeing him, Richard was acutely aware how sensitive, proud and tired he must be in his whole body, for it was clear that he had just struggled out of his old skin and was with his first return of strength venturing his new one (107-108).

Seeing "his princely elegance," Richard feels "almost worshipful delight and awe." Spoiler alert -- with two twelve year old boys at a stone quarry, the snake's story doesn't end well, but Richard, going in close to put the creature out of its misery, earns the boys' respect and returns with its blood and venom on his skin.

Died and reborn through a baptism, redeemed by the blood of a "prince" in the "risen sun" -- Richard has come through The Morning Watch. Agee was cagey about his own faith. He did attend the St. Andrews Episcopal School outside Sewanee, TN, in 1926. Among his very few publications is a posthumous collection of letters to Father Frye, evidently the model for the sympathetic priest in Watch. The prologue to his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family is a mixture of memory of security and love when both his parents were alive, and a prayer of thanksgiving that they were somehow all alive on this earth together. Did he stay connected to the church? I don't know; but The Morning Watch is suffused by a sacramental view of the world, Richard's thoughts and experiences all part of an ongoing conversation with a loving Creator urging his growth.

Photos from Agee's Boarding SchoolMy friend Gene Taylor, who loaned me his copy of The Morning Watch, revisited the campus of St. Andrews Episcopal School, Sewanee, TN during the first week of June 2019, and sent me several photos, printed below. Here are his comments: One is of the dorm that James Agee lived in (and my home during my Junior year as well as this weekend), one is of the main chapel and another is the small Our Lady Chapel where the Morning Watch takes place, and the last is the reservoir.

Of Related Interest

• See my essay about the universality of Agee's memorable, sweet and acutely painful memory of early childhood "Knoxville, Summer 1915," prologue to A Death in the Family 07/14/2017
• Although I've just read The Morning Watch this month, the book's synopsis captured my fervent evangelical imagination in 1975, and I now recognize that a boy's effort to try to feel the religious devotion and contrition that he's supposed to feel is what lay behind my words and music for Four Candles, an Advent cantata that I spent several years writing in my twenties and thirties. Read the text of that in my post of (12/02/18).