We Are Looking at You, Agnes
"We Are Looking at You, Agnes" is short story by Erskine Caldwell, originally published 1931 (), included in We Are the Living (1933). The entire story is told as a single interior monologue of the protagonist, a young woman named Agnes. From the way that her family members (father, mother, brother and sister) look at her, Agnes is sure that they know her guilty secret—but never talk about it. As the reader learns, five years before Agnes was sent to Birmingham, Alabama in order to study stenography at a business school, for which purpose her father gave her fifty dollars. Instead, however, she went to a "beauty-culture school" and learned to be a manicurist. Afterwards, Agnes worked as a manicurist in a series of barber shops at Birmingham, Nashville, Memphis and finally on Canal Street, New Orleans—each of a lesser quality than the earlier. In each she found herself wanted for purposes other than as a manicurist, by men who "put their hands down the neck of my dress and squeezed until I screamed" and who afterwards talked to her about things which she "never heard of at home". After some time, finding that she was "making more money on