(Tree sculpture by Mara Smith, Hotel Anatole, Dallas, Texas)
Over 3000 years ago, in Sumer (Mesopotamia), human beings developed the first form of writing by pressing marks into wet clay to keep track of goods. Numbers led to letters, and written language helped create what we called civilization.
The Sumerians used clay for tablets because it was easy to come by. They were extremely adept at working wet clay, and adorned their walls with sculpture, friezes carved into the brick before firing. This ancient art all but died out last century. There are now a handful of artists in the United States who can do this kind of sculpture, who are bringing it back to prominence. One of them is Mara Smith of Seattle, internationally known for her brick carving. She's my oldest friend, and I'm honored to say I knew her when.
[NOTE: An additional "musing" has been added by Mara, at the end of this post. Also, I have a prior post about Mara at this blog, a section of Ginny Bates, my novel, where fictional Ginny meets real-life Mara in Seattle, found at Meeting Mara.]
(Mara Smith carving her current work-in-progress, Cloud County Historical Society’s Whole Wall Project, Concordia, Kansas)
In the article Brick Sculpture Scores, Elizabeth Keating says "Brick sculptors fashion green brick into as many different images as there are techniques for sculpting. They work with handmade and machine-made brick to create a sculpture. They work beneath (intaglio) or above the surface. They add color and dimension with glazes and textures. They introduce other materials, such as brass and gold, to accentuate the natural beauty of brick and draw attention to its flexibility. They are limited by one thing only--imagination."
(Gecko, now at the Reptile House of Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, Illinois, by Mara Smith and Kris King)
To create a sculpture, the artist must go to where the brick is made. The green (unfired) brick is kept wet, laid out on the ground or stacked in a frame with space left for where the mortar will go. For days, weeks, sometimes months, Mara will transfer what's in her mind to a three-dimensional reality in the wet clay, using whatever tool seems best. When it is done, all of the bricks are removed one by one, numbered on the back, fired, and the image is reconstructed -- hopefully without loss of bricks. It is cleaned and fitted again, then disassembled and shipped to wherever it will live as earth made into art. Mara follows it, and with a mason, she puts it together a final time, gluing it into a whole with mortar.
(Llama, pig, cow and horse details from larger panel by Mara Smith on the Oregon State University Veterinary Building, Corvallis, Oregon)
It's hard work, dirty, physically demanding, with much exposure to the elements. It's also glorious. Here's what Mara wrote me about it:
"When my knife first touched the raw clay it was as though I had always done it. Seems to always be intertwined with some heavy moving and a lot of history.
"The clay is the book where I have found my own history....the story of an end of a civilization and beginning of another. I don't always like to read it..sometimes I'm sure I will not ever again. Yet, it is the study I am bound to. I often consider it like archeology, done with tiny knives and a shovel. Up close, I have smelled the eons of shale of millions of years and the fossils of roses clutched yet in the clay. I walked ancient and gigantic tracks (once with you) and left mine in the shallow seabed of this ancient plain."
(Heron fishing by Mara Smith)
At the time I first met Mara, I knew her as a potter and a painter -- extremely good at both. Since I was 19 years old, I've had her work hanging in my house wherever I've lived. But in 1977, the same year and season I moved away from Denton, the town where we both lived, Mara was chosen to create the brick murals adorning the outside of a fabulous new hotel in Dallas, the Anatole. This catapulted her into fame, and the career she's followed since. Here's her story of how it happened:
"The search committee, which included Hubert Capps & Mark Olson? (reps of Acme Brick/ Denton) sought artists for a brick sculpture commission. Before this,TWU students had experimented with a few sculpture pieces fired at the Denton Acme plant in the past...(the firemen threw out the samples at the brick company because they thought they were just chewed up pieces that caught in their machinery).
"So, Acme asked my ceramics professor, John Brough Miller, if he might be interested in applying for the project. He indicated he had a job and suggested I go down to put in a proposal. I was in the middle of my MFA studies at the time. Of course, keep in mind Dallas is conservative etc. he said.
(Woman surveying vista, by Mara Smith, Hotel Anatole, Dallas, Texas)
"I went down to the Dallas World Trade Center to view their hotel model and asked them the name of the seven various restaurants to be included. Most of them had exotic names like Xanadu. Another commission included very long 50' Indian batik banners to hang inside the atrium. The ambiance was turning cross cultural ie. mythological! I drew up several ideas I matted behind a bricked clear plastic window. I could interchange the sketches in the arched matt for an elegant presentation.
"On 7/7/1977 I went down to the Dallas World Trade Center to make my presentation. Surprisingly, a couple former students (well known sculptors in their own right) had teamed up to do a presentation also. I was able to overhear their talk. I consequently based my own fee on some close adaptation.
"At some point in the meeting, Trammell Crow let it be known his wife had dreamed a name for the Hotel the night before...The Anatole...meaning of the east. Another name they had earlier mulled over was The Metropole. At once, hearing that word Anatole, was enough to make me feel confident I had the project. Anatolia is the ancient Amazon Kingdom of Turkey...a point seemingly beyond anyone's attention but mine....even though I recall trying to humorously interject several comments to that effect.
"But that word Anatole keyed me and my world of interest in mythology to the project. My view point, of course.The genre was set and I, the anachronist artist, knew I had the project. Indeed, I did. Not even a need for bamboozle. The project was simply the tangent where two world views intersected as the architectural wonder called the Anatole Hotel.
"Now Trammell Crow himself was reputed to have a very mystical bent... although in those days his articulating how that might be translated into art was enough to give us all a brain fog. He was an avid collector of world and Asian art, much of which would be showcased in the atria of the hotel. I was blissfully unaware that Trammell was considered the largest landowner in the US. I was simply thrilled to be a working artist.
"At the same time I had applied and got a teaching position (jewelry) with the Dallas Arts Magnet School. Once I was notified I had the brick commission, I let the school system know I was going with that direction. I never looked back.
"The boxy brick citadel of the Anatole Hotel is beset of seven stories of glass pyramid aligned on a North/South axis. The head of our art departmentt laughed at the design of the hotel....something Capt Nemo might keep his sub in. It was a very unusual architectural feature for Dallas at the time. I loved it...the ancient world was blooming fresh in my own time!"
(Desert spirit sculpture by Mara Smith, Hotel Anatole, Dallas, Texas)
Mara has been a featured artist in Home & Garden TV's Master Artist series. She appears in Placemakers: Creating Public Art That Tells You Where You Are by Ronald Lee Fleming and in the Seattle Arts Commission's Field Guide to Seattle's Public Art, among other publications. She is considered a pioneer of modern brick sculpture by the Brick Industry Association and has carved over 25,000 square feet of brick in her 30 year career.
(Haida frog carving by Mara Smith)
I asked Mara to tell me how she came to art as a life's work. She replied:
"My father enthralled my childhood with tales about his mother Annie Belle. In fact, I was named for her. For me, she was a Texas legend like Pecos Bill and Slew-foot Sue. She wrote verse and did illustrations (I never saw any of the pictures); she was also a crack shot)..a composition book of her poems I have still have and cherish.
"My father would draw model T cars and fish on paper sacks for me when I was little...I would doodle on them and try to copy some of the fish. I impressed myself learning to draw a horse when I was about five. My mother thought it would be a great idea to have an artist in the family (don't know what inspired her on that one, maybe my father's tales about his mother)... I guess I thought artist was a position in the family like aunt or sister. Neither parent had any implication of the consequences of conceiving a child on All Hallow's Eve (which ties in here as the greater impetus).
"My father, Parker, was the youngest scion of many generations of frontier doctors. Annie Belle had met and married the future Dr. C.O. Smith in Sutherland,Texas just east of San Antonio. The town itself was named for Dr. Sutherland (tales of the Alamo). Supposedly,we're related. Two of Pop's brothers, Weston and Olive Sinclair were named after close doctor friends. However, Dr. C.O. suffered an untimely demise on 7/4/1918 leaving Annie Belle a widow with a young son. By the time I entered the picture, our family had surfaced in the side eddies of society where those left behind have to endure. Shortly after the Great War, Texas was still a lot of frontier in any sense of the word. It was there I entered the wheel of time.
"Somehow my youth was an encouragement for my father to enliven me with tales of his frontier folks and travels in the West. He had a knack for making poverty seem like a hunting party.
"And he had a penchant for self medication while encouraging me to read science books on trees, plants, snakes, animals, and diseases...for him it resulted in home brew, for me a lifelong interest in natural herbs and medicines and somehow the shamanistic ambiance inherent in their study. Did I forget to mention my father and grandfather were freemasons?
"I got all this mystical stuff blended up in me before I knew how or when. I'm overlain with a fine patina of Southern Baptist which finally wore off in the long rain of feminism. It got all translated as art...which for me is somehow shamanism. It's what I do...sometimes it's bead work or jewelry, sometimes bamboo, sometimes/a lot of times brick.
(Ganesha shaped in glass by Mara Smith, converted to garden water fountain)
"My favorite art always seem to be dug out of some ruin somewhere..a tile, a sculpture, a gigantic urn, a fresco of intense colors of people and beasts and lords of the heavens, an eccentric flint of the smoking god, women leaping the backs of bulls, all very Sirius. My own works are primitive next to the magnificent imagery yet encased in the layers of our earth. I am some kind of aborigine here and everyday I swear a coke bottle is falling out of the sky to wonder over!"
(City gate for Newcastle, Washington, carved by Mara Smith)
Mara's art can be found in the following locations:
Hotel Anatole, Dallas, Texas
Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, Illinois
Seoul, Korea (Dragonhill Hotel atrium)
Van Nuys, California (Milken Community Center)
Lexington, Kentucky (Meade County Bank)
Reading, Pennsylvania (Meridian Bank & Trust)
Lynnwood, Washington (Civic Justice Center)
Mesa, Arizona (Arizona Historical Society Museum)
San Mateo, California (Nordstrom Mall entry)
Wymore, Nebraska (St. Peter's Lutheran Church)
Corvallis, Oregon (Oregon State University Veterinary Building)
Mansfield, Texas (Independent School District administration building)
Stephenville, Texas (Tarleton State University student center)
Spokane, Washington (Veteran's Memorial, Greenwood Cemetery)
Mutual Materials, Parkland Branch (commercial entry)
Newcastle, Washington (city gateway)
Tukwila, Washington (city gateway)
Coos Bay, Oregon (bank)
Bend, Oregon (city hall)
Shelton, Washington (clock tower)
Buffalo Grove, Illinois (shopping mall entry)
Bellingham, Washington (fire station entry)
Kalispell, Montana (private residence)
Ocala, Florida (horse farm gate)
Redding, California (private residence)
Bellevue, Washington (outdoor kitchen)
Issaquah, Washington (Street of Dreams)
Eastern Washington (deer preserve outdoor barbecue)
Wenatchee, Washington (apple orchard wall)
Benton, Washington (private fireplace)
Bainbridge Island, Washington (development entry)
Mill Creek, Washington (Swan Lake development)
Currently she's about to head back to Concordia, Kansas for a project for the Cloud County Historical Society (article about it is here, photos are below). To contact Mara, write her care of Architectural Murals in Brick, 339 N.W. 82nd, Seattle, WA 98117 or call 206-789-2838.
(Current work-in-progress, side view of Cloud County Historical Society’s Whole Wall Project, Concordia, Kansas)
(Mouse tucked into the end of a brick, Cloud County Historical Society’s Whole Wall Project, Concordia, Kansas)
UPDATE -- "Aboriginal" Mara dropped me a note this morning with additional musing on art:
"I transitioned from pottery to brick on the day I received my first brick commission for the Anatole Hotel. It's the same medium, just bigger tools and more tonnage. It's easy for me to use the brick as a grid system...I can take a one page sketch and blow it up in my head...no, by folding the sketch up in parts and fencing off the areas to carve into their sections, I can easily sort out the sculpture.
"Brick is modular. Broken pieces are easy to replace. The art can be any size from a single brick to miles of brick, if any would spring for the commission. It can be shipped nationwide on regular trucking, no special sized hauler needed. Carving in brick suits itself to any style from pure geometric abstraction, to folk art, historical or thematic representations, to even simply crude or children's expressions.
"Brick is good value...it will last hundreds of years. In fact, long after we are all dust, civilizations in the future are most likely to recover information about our days and times from pieces of clay, brick, tiles, stone, or glass. Seeing the ancient monuments carved in brick were a large inspiration for me. Brick ornamentation is one of the oldest forms of sculpture on the planet. I had no clue carving brick was available as an artform when I applied for the Anatole commission. I had seen the carved gates of Babylon in history books...that I could carve in the same medium was not even in the realm of imagination until that day....
"Maybe a dozen people carve brick full time in the United States, maybe a few dozen more on some part time basis. This has been the same for nearly thirty years since I began carving brick. Few, if any of brick sculptors today are less than 50 years old...maybe a good dozen brick plants, to be generous, facilitate the art in the US today.
"Of all the art I like the least is art theory sold as art. Second to that is really bad tourist crafts sold as art...but at least,it was some poor smuck trying to make a living....
"My advice for young artists: study every art technique you can and yes, I know, computers are a great medium. I love them. But long after the virtual works poof back into their various photons, art actually created will continue forever. Study comparative anatomy, botany, chemistry, geology, literature, writing techniques, and the ever necessary business and budgets of money. One needs money to buy enough supplies to keep being creative! Best of all, remember art is a rarity, yet the necessary glue and polish that keeps the human condition civilized. It takes an artist's courage to live on imagination and leap year after year into the unknown."
(Mara Smith, left, and Catharine Magel, artists of the Concordia, Kansas brick carving project currently under way)
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
MARA SMITH: BRINGING ANCIENT ARTS ALIVE -- UPDATED
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
AS I READ MY EMILY DICKINSON...
(Authenticated Emily Dickinson circa 1846 and newly discovered Emily Dickinson circa early 1850s -- click on image to enlarge)
As I stated in a post two days ago, the newly online website Common-Place, sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society in association with the Florida State University Department of History, has a treasure trove of previously published articles now available for the self-directed reader of history. I want to draw your attention to another pair of items there, both concerning Emily Dickinson.
The first fascinating read is the first-hand account of how Philip Gura, an American Studies professor and collector of early photography, found and won on eBay for $481!) the second known adult photograph of Emily Dickinson, one taken at the height of her creative arc. In How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: An Adventure on eBay, Mr. Gura takes us through the process of suspicious discovery, acquisition, and slow authentication of this astonishing photograph.
Both the previously known version and the new photo shown above are also featured in my prior Emily Dickinson post on this blog. My post also has other highly informative links to Emily's life and work.
As a genealogist as well as armchair historian, I've been deeply interested in old photographs for decades and have taken more than one course in how to best utilize them. There are now excellent online resources available to help you date photographs, identify photographers, preserve and conserve early images, and differentiate between type of early photos, including daguerrotypes, calotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cabinet cards, stereographs, and wet-plate prints. With regard to my own family, I was able to prove a date of migration for one branch of my family using backgrounds employed by local area commercial photographers from another branch of the family. 
(A nursery door at the Evergreens. Courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Museum: the Homestead and the Evergreens. Amherst, Massachusetts)
A second Dickinson-related article is by art historian Katharine Martinez, titled The Dickinsons of Amherst Collect -- Pictures and their meanings in a Victorian home. Her opening paragraphs explain:
"Entering the Evergreens, the home of Austin and Susan Dickinson, the brother and sister-in-law of Emily Dickinson, is akin to experiencing an archaeological site. Members of the Dickinson family lived in the house continuously between 1857, when it was built, and 1943, when Austin and Susan's daughter Martha died. Elements from the 1850s are still there today, along with other household objects and artwork chosen and arranged in subsequent years—creating, in effect, layers linked by networks of meanings and associations.
"The Evergreens was home to a family whose members expressed themselves, their ideas, values, and feelings through furnishings, artwork, and household objects. Looking at photographs of nineteenth-century interiors and visiting historic houses like the Evergreens challenges us to explore the relationship between objects and their owners. While much has been written about how people interact with their material world and about how domestic objects were 'expressions of sensibility,' I am particularly interested in understanding just how nineteenth-century Americans interacted with and assigned meaning to the growing body of images available for their consumption. Austin and Susan Dickinson's home is an ideal place for this sort of inquiry."
In his wonderful sci-fi novel Time and Again, Jack Finney posits a theory of time travel playing on the notion that time is not linear but, rather, all time is occurring simultaneously. If this is so, it should be possible to slip from one time to another. Finney's book achieves this via self-hypnosis on the part of extremely imaginative individuals who immerse themselves so completely in the artifacts and mind-set of another era that they are able to escape the "persistent illusion" of our own experience and acquire the illusion of a past time. As someone with an imagination on steroids, and a fascination for the past, I'm drawn like a tractor-beam to this possibility. If I show up missing, you might look for a message scrawled by me on the papers left in Emily Dickinson's attic bedroom.
(Drawing of Emily Dickinson as a child)
THE POPULACE'S SWELL AND RESPONSE
When I lived in San Francisco, I worked for a urologist in Chinatown whose specialization was what he called "electile dysfunction". Most of his reports involved takng a painful personal history from a patient, injecting the guy's penis with a dose of papaverine and slipping a little tissue paper sleeve over his penis to see if he would get hard enough to tear the paper. After what sounded like a brief, cold discussion, the unfortunate man would be sent home, if he was lucky, with a monster woody and the reminder if it was still there after four hours to go to the emergency room. Since many of his patients arrived via public transportation, I felt their anguish on being signed out.
I also felt for the women who might have to ride pressed up against them on BART or Muni.
This doctor's dictation was sprinkled throughout with glib talk of elections. I always think of him on vote day. Here's hoping we all have a good election.
Monday, March 3, 2008
PORTRAYING AMERICAN SLAVERY
(Broadside, dated Charleston, 24 November 1860. Courtesy of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library)
The newly online website Common-Place, sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society in association with the Florida State University Department of History, has a treasure trove of previously published articles now available for the self-directed reader of history. I'll be recommending several gems in posts to come. I'm beginning with a series of articles published in July 2001, entitled Representing Slavery: A Roundtable Discussion.
I especially recommend the essay by A.J. Verdelle, The Truth of the Picnic: Writing about American slavery. Her bio here states "A. J. Verdelle is the author of The Good Negress (Chapel Hill, 1995), for which she was awarded a Whiting Writer's Award, a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University, a PEN/Faulkner Finalist's Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose fiction."
In her stunningly relevant essay, Verdelle states "Slavery and its aftermath are human drama still unsettled. Administrators, timekeepers, civil servants, guardians of the state try to revise our understanding of the period and its outcomes. An effort to convince us that the drama is over rages. Some of us insist, and rightly so, that we are now in this drama's second act, we have not moved beyond the raised curtain, we are still in shock at what we have finally seen."
Also in the Representing Slavery roundtable discussion are the following essays:
Confronting Slavery Face-to-Face: A twenty-first century interpreter's perspective on eighteenth-century slavery", by Karen Sutton, a historical interpreter in the African-American Programs & History Department, Division of Historic Presentations, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
The Birth of a Genre: Slavery on film, by David W. Blight, who teaches history and black studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, 1989), and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). He has been a consultant to several documentary films, including the PBS series Africans in America (1998).
Seeing Slavery: How paintings make words look different, by Alex Bontemps, who teaches African American history at Dartmouth College. His book, The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), was recently published by Cornell University Press.
Hearing Slavery: Recovering the role of sound in African American slave culture, by Shane White and Graham White. Shane White is an associate professor and Graham White an honorary associate in the history department at the University of Sydney. Together they have written Stylin': African American Expressive Culture From Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca: 1998) and have half completed The Sounds of Slavery, which will be a book and a twenty-four-track CD.
EARLY MONDAY MORNING
Sally Field called me tonight to urge me to vote for Hillary on Tuesday. An hour later, MoveOn.org called to request my vote for Barack. Both calls went to my voice mail because I was watching Extreme House Makeover, with yet another National Guard soldier stuck in Iraq so long his family is in serious trouble. He was a big guy, looked to me like he might be part Native; they had one son around ten who was charmingly feminine and a younger son with autism. Ty got him back from Iraq for a week, and his wife was toughing it out until she realized at the end of the week she'd have to say goodbye to him all over again. The soldier kept it together until he saw the mantelpiece, something he had rescued from an 1850s farmhouse which had stood on the piece of historic Virginia land he'd managed to buy before he got called up. He put his hand on the gorgeous old wood of that mantle and bawled, I mean seriously let go.
Toby Keith showed up to give the guy a Ford pick-up and sing a concert for a roomful of National Guard troops and their families. Everybody was fighting tears, including me. Here's the thing: They all said, over and over, how proud they were to fulfill their duty, that they were fighting over there so we could be free here. I know they believe there's a connection between our liberty and the disaster in Iraq: They fucking have to. It would be just too fucking much for them to realize how grievously Bush lied to them, has used them as nothing more than toilet paper to further his fortune and his wretched ego.
Even after we get them home safe, how are they going to face having been used in such a manner? I think Bush may have single-handedly broken the U.S. military. The only people who will volunteer now are those who are in such denial they won't make intelligent soldiers, those who are criminals/right-wing hate trainees, or poor people with no other alternative -- and desperation doesn't usually make good soldiers, either.
Whoever gets elected, are they really going to have the ability to stand up to the corporations and roll back tax cuts for the rich, pour that money into disability pensions and health care and social services for the growing masses of our walking wounded? Will a Democratic take-over of Congress make things enough better?
Here's something I noticed on David Letterman Friday night, the show where Hillary made two or three pre-taped appearances that were funny and proved her to be a good sport: During Dave's monologue, he made a long series of jokes about McCain, took some swipes at Bloomberg and Nader, whacked at Hillary a few times, but not a single joke about Barack. I realized I've not heard him, ever, make a joke about Barack. There was a segment a while back where Barack did a Top Ten list, but Dave doesn't have a shtick he does about Barack. I don't think this means he's a Barack supporter; in fact, I think the hands-off attitude is a bad sign. He was hands-off about Bush, too, eight years ago.
Here's something else I've noticed: A lot of feminists my age are drawing a parallel between the current white-boy bashing of Hillary over Barack and the period after the Civil War when blacks gained rights (temporarily, let's not forget, they got sold down the river really quickly) but all the women who worked so hard for abolition had to wait another sixty years for the right to vote. I see a deep anger settling in with the resignation that we still cannot get a woman elected President. I remember when women left all the various movements at the end of the sixties to say "us now, us first". I won't stand by and let us repeat the mistake of forging a wave that doesn't include all those underrepresented -- but I honestly won't mind it if we return to "us first". All the meanings of "us".
Sunday, March 2, 2008
GINNY BATES: PAN SCRAPINGS
Sometimes I prime the pump for working on a chapter in Ginny Bates, my novel-in-progress, by writing scraps or vignettes that I pile up at the end of the manuscript, not sure where to insert them yet (if at all). Today I'll share with you a few of these crunchy little morsels. Great with cream gravy.
Sometime during the 1990s
When Ginny got home from her dentist appointment, she heard Allie's raised voice from the study saying "Doris Day is NOT a dyke, Myra! I'll give you Kim Novak, okay, and Joan Baez sleeping with Janis Ian, but Doris Day has been married to four different men, some of them for a long time!"
Myra said "Cover."
"She had a son! People do not have children for cover!"
"Joan Crawford did."
"Joan Crawford adopted her kids. And she didn't do it to prove she was straight, she did it to try and prove she was human."
When Gillam and Carly are around 12, circa 2003
Allie was at the espresso machine, making iced coffees for those who wanted them. Chris was tossing a salad of just-picked cherry tomatoes, bibb lettuce, steamed baby carrots, little rounds of fresh mozzarella, big garlicy croutons of day-old bread, and one of Ginny's herb vinagrettes. Myra was slicing previously-baked yams which she was then going to drizzle with spicy peanut sauce to grill outside, along with the tuna and turkey burgers. As the smell of the cutting board filled her nostrils, she remarked "Always reminds me of Ginny." Chris looked at her, and Myra said "Baked yams. Mostly -- although sometimes she tastes like raw cashews."
Chris's cheeks went red, but after a couple of moments, she said quietly "Sima's like fresh oysters."
They both turned and took at Allie, who was keeping her back toward them. Chris grinned and Myra shrugged, going back to her slicing. But then they heard Allie say, very softly, "Lemony."
Everybody burst out laughing just as Ginny came in from the deck where Edwina was poking at coals in the barbecue. Ginny said "The grill's ready", then asked "What's so funny?"
Myra set down her knife so she didn't slice off a finger and said "I'll tell you later." She dressed the yam slices and handed them to Ginny, who already had the platter of fish and meat. Sima walked by them in her swimsuit, heading for the pool. Ginny followed her, saying "They may be up to something."
"They generally are" replied Sima, opening the door for Ginny. After they were outside, Chris asked Myra "Do you tell her everything?"
Myra rinsed her knife and said "No." They all cracked up again.
As Myra began washing her hands at the sink, Carly came zooming down the stairs and said to them "You haven't seen me!", then dashed outside to the carport. In a minute, they heard a flush upstairs and Gillam clomped downstairs. He went straight to the trash can, tied the bag shut and hoisted it over one shoulder, then picked up the recycling box precariously in his other hand and walked to the carport door.
Myra turned around to look at Allie and Chris, eyebrows raised. They all stood expectantly, ears turned toward the carport. Myra heard Gillam set down the recycling with a clank, and apparently lift the lid on their big grey rolling bin. There was an almost simultaneous "Yaaahhh!" from Carly and then a high-pitched, blood-curdling scream from Gillam. Everybody in the kitchen was leaning on the counter, helpless with laughter, when Edwina poked her head into the house from the deck and said "You all hear that?"
"It's the boys" called Allie, and when Carly came back through, they all high-fived him. His face was red from excitement.
"Were you down in the can itself?" asked Chris.
"Yeah. Gotta scrub my hands, but man, you shoulda seen his face!" crowed Carly. Gillam appeared behind him.
"You will pay" he said in an ominous tone, but he was grinning from ear to ear.
"I didn't know you could still hit notes that far up the scale" said Myra. He punched her shoulder and trailed Carly out to the deck, where Carly was re-enacting his prank.
During a Feminist Fund meeting, circa 2006
"You know, I'd like to sometimes print our brochures with Spanish first, English second -- I mean, why should primarily Spanish-speakers always have to turn to the back to get something directed at them?" said Myra.
After a pause, Ginny said "Okay. Good idea."
"And I know we've gotten it translated into Mandarin and Tagalog, but I think we're missing the segment who speaks Cantonese, aren't we?" continued Myra.
"I don't know" said Sima. "Is the written language distinct from the spoken?"
Ginny made another note. "We'll find out."
Myra continued in an argumentative tone -- Ginny wondered what was bugging her now -- "Used to be, folk music didn't shy away from being in something other than English. And a few dykes did that in women's music, without dumbing it down for us. But seems like nobody dares to write in Spanish any more.
Chris suddenly burst into song:
Hay una mujer desaparecida
Hay una mujer desaparecida
And the junta
And the junta has all her clothes
She is sneezing and FREEZING..."
Myra howled with laughter. Ginny and Sima had frozen looks on their faces, even after Alveisa and Allie began chortling. Myra reached across the table and grabbed Chris's hand, as if she was holding on to keep from falling over. When she could speak again, she said "Oh god, that reminds me of Albatross. Remember how hysterical their cartoons were?"
Chris was grinning from ear to ear. "Holly Nearandfar, yeah, and Phyllis Shitfly -- "
"And Betty Frypan -- " Myra was losing it again.
"My all time favorite" said Chris, "was that one with the picture of the uptight white ladies, like from a Virginia Slims commercial -- there were two of them, identical, talking to each other, and the one on the left says 'Do you smoke after you have an orgasm?' and the one on the right says 'I don't know, I never looked'." Myra began pounding the table, and Chris leaned back in her chair, laughing wildly.
When Gillam is around 15
After dinner, the Chris and Sima sat at the table with Ginny and Myra, drinking tea and talking. The kids went upstairs. After a bit, Gillam came back down in his swim trunks, heading for the pool. As he passed through the kitchen, they could hear him singing under his breath:
My anaconda don't want none
Unless you've got buns, hon
You can do side bends or sit-ups,
But please don't lose that butt
Ginny stared at Myra in disbelief and said "Did he just sing what I think he did?"
"Don't ask me" said Myra, "I'm famous for misinterpreting lyrics."
Chris chuckled and said "The first time Myra heard 'View from Gay Head' she thought Alix was singing 'Where there's no peanuts between us friends'."
But Ginny had heard that story before. She was grinning with an expression that made Myra say "What are you thinking about?"
Ginny took Myra's hand and turned to Sima and Chris. "One time when we were all at the beach, and Gillam was around 8 or 9, we were sitting at the campfire singing and Myra began this folk song from her childhood, 'Old Joe Clark'. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the first time Gillam had heard it, but it was the first time he understood it, when she got to the stanza
I don't give a damn for old Joe Clark
And I'll tell you the reason why
He blows his nose in old cornbread
And calls it chicken pie
Gillam's face showed sick comprehension, and he just turned and puked, right there on the sand. Well, he was sitting next to Myra, so she of course turns the other direction and pukes too. And then, when she tries to dig a hole and get rid of her mess, she vomits again. Allie and David were in helpless hysterics. I got up to help her out, and she fled for the house, Gillam behind her."
Chris and Sima were laughing hard. Myra looked queasy, but said "I remember that evening, turned out well in the end. Me and Gillam read Mistress Masham's Repose together until we fell asleep."
Chris, chortling, said "That reminds me of when he was a little younger, and you'd all just gotten back from Galveston. He always came back with a strong Texas twang, remember?, soaked up whatever accent he was around, and it would last a week or so. So, he was playing with his Legos in the living room, singing to himself, and the tune was familiar -- Guantanamera -- but the words were oh so wrong. I finally realized he was singing
One ton of 'maters
Ah'm eating one ton of 'maters"
All four of the women began shrieking in hilarity and turned to look through the glass wall at Gillam. He had reached the end of a lap and stood up in the shallow end to catch his breath. He saw them focus on him simultaneously, laughing like maniacs. He mouthed at them irritably "What?!!", then heaved himself backwards and began swimming to the other end.
Copyright 2008 Maggie Jochild
REDEMPTION CAFE AU LAIT
(Image from Stella Marrs)
Pete Seeger as a teenager toured the American South with his father, a musicologist. Charles Seeger's original intention was to bring classical and "advanced" music to the backwaters of the U.S. What he, and Pete, discovered was that every region of this country already had advanced, intensely rich musical traditions. They became instead the indoctrinated, and Pete went on to mine the traditional folk music of black and white rural Protestant culture for decades. He brought that value system, woven into every line and bar, to more than one generation of young people, creating a mythos and world view that still is the bedrock of what we call progressive ideology.
One of the themes is salvation and redemption. The forces against us may be overwhelming, but we shall not be moved. We shall overcome. We will ascend to the mountaintop, and we will find a way to all live together.
Though the cities start to crumble
And the towers fall around us
The sun is slowly fading
And it's colder than the sea
It is written "From the desert
To the mountain they shall lead us
By the hand and by the heart
They will comfort you and me
In their innocence and trusting
They will teach us to be free"
But who is the "they" in these lyrics?
Boomers were the generation who said "Don't trust anyone over 30". We WERE the Youth Generation. The sad fact is, we've not given up on that image of ourselves -- what we see when we look in the mirror is not reality. And while we still view one another as "young at heart", if we're being charitable, we do not extend that generosity to the generations who have come up after us. We do not respect or trust our descendents, so we cannot turn to "the children" for salvation. Not OUR children.
But the endemic racism of white America has another group of children we look to for innocent understanding and forgiveness: Black people. Our culture pays lip service, at least, to the full humanity of blacks, but does not grant them maturity. Part of the reason we are so uncomfortable with the idea of leadership from blacks (and women) is because their second-class citizenship is commensurate with that of children -- they may be good-hearted but you don't give them the keys to the car, right?
Yet to blacks, in particular, white America has allowed a second role, covert and profound: prophet. We expect them to be our conscience (as long as we control where that conscience focuses). Playing our Magical Negro, they are Whoopi Goldberg as maid, Queen Latifah as babysitter, Will Smith as caddy, who while cleaning up after us and our children also impart wisdom and, eventually, spiritual salvation. We revere Dr. King, now that he's dead, because he talked to us about his "dream" that included us. We didn't love him so much when he was alive, of course, leading marches and demanding real change, but he makes an acceptable prophet now.
Deep down, we want to be forgiven. We want redemption. But we want the Supernanny version, someone who comes to our house a few times, figures out how to get the kids to behave while we maybe shed a tear or two, slap a schedule up on the wall, but the basic rule of adults over children and father über alles doesn't get challenged. At the end of the hour, Mary Poppins can safely move on. A check-in a short time later shows the magic fix still in place. Nobody's returning after a year or two to a scene where the 10-year-old girl has threatened to tell her teacher about how daddy is fucking her at night and he's taken a double-aught to them all, saving the last shell for himself.
So, while we're primed to the notion of a Black Savior, someone who, if the subject of reparations came up, could be counted on to make an earnest joke of it, offending no one, still -- it has to be someone who isn't totally Black. Not the descendent of slaves, for example. We don't trust they can really forgive us, not when we've barely acknowledged four hundred years of atrocity and the shit that is still going on. I mean, our inability to deal with our racism stems in large part from our hopelessness, because we believe what happened here is not actually forgiveable, is it? And we certainly don't want to put power in the hands of blacks who are clearly the descendents of house niggers, folks who know how we operate but have chosen (after emancipation) to stay separate from us.
What we want is a Black Savior who is descended from the Mother Continent, who is part us, who talks only of hope and change but not retribution or confession. Redemption Cafe au Lait.
Let me state here, adamantly, I do NOT believe this is who Barack Obama is. I don't believe this is how most African-Americans see him, or some insightful white folks. But when you have his most ardent supporters unable to come up with a single policy or achievement of his, just that starry-eyed "He stands for change and unity", well, we're dealing with a cultural myth. I think it is likely that Obama's strategists, and the man himself, has been smart enough to play into it, to know what could be exploited. It's what politicians do, and he's no different from anyone else in that regard.
He DOES have excellent policy, a good record, and a firm stand on relevant issues. The problem is, I don't think most of the white folks who are attaching themselves to his wagon are being swayed by his concrete leadership.
(Here's a link to the issues page of his website, and for those of you already decided to be his supporter, there's a wealth of information on how to do it intelligently at Jack and Jill's How to Canvass for Obama Toolkit.)
I voted for Bill Clinton, twice. I was fortunate enough to have a friend in Arkansas, a strong liberal, who educated me about his moderate playing-for-approval tendencies in advance. Plus I know bubba-speak (the real thing, not the evil Bush version) when I hear it. Thus, I wasn't swept away by his talk of hope. He was definitely the best of the alternatives, and I'd vote the same way again, given the same alternatives, in a heartbeat. Yet it was charisma that won his elections. He was an intensely popular President, with approval ratings in the 80-90% even during the impeachment era. I'd like to remind all you white liberal boys of this, especially those of you so infected with Clinton Derangement Syndrome that Hillary makes your vision go red: Silver-tongued rhetoric of hope and redemption handed Bill the keys to the White House.
I'll be voting for Obama, it looks like. I think he will lead us out of the desert (by which I mean Baghdad) and he'll appoint a new Supreme Court Justice who is not in the tradition of Roger Taney. That alone will be radical good. And when he turns out to be primarily a politician, with flawed process and corruption within some of those his inner circle, I'll weigh that against his character and, likely, go on being his supporter as the rest of you start looking for the next quick-fix. The same holds equally true for Hillary Clinton, and I'll vote for her just as gladly.
Here's a couple of things I keep in mind.
First: The era of the 60's and 70's, against which Ronnie Raygun and the Christian Right lashed back, produced the revolutionary ideas that gender and race, like class, were not biological realities. Instead, they are cultural constructs. As such, they are open to utter revision. The Panthers proclaimed "Black is beautiful." The Redstockings announced "Biology is not destiny." And all sorts of groups began winnowing out identity with the goal of transformation, not just of themselves but of the entire culture.
The response was to attack identity politics (if it wasn't your identity being promoted) and, eventually, an economic onslaught designed to make it so hard to survive economically that most people's attention would be occupied with earning a living, not social change. Make some bucks off any popular theory or art of change, commercialize it, and render it ineffective. It worked well for over 20 years.
But Bush, the eternal fuck-up, and Cheney, the sociopath, went too far. Now people are casting about for a new way to make sense of it all without having to actually Change. Not change the way masculinity is revered, not change the hidden reality of white supremacy, not change the lockbox of religion.
The writing is on the wall, however. Peak Oil is upon us, the polar caps are melting, and no matter how much porn you flood onto the internet, no matter how many immigration laws you pass, no matter how diligently you attack strong women on websites or coopt black men into the world of drugs and woman-hating rap -- being white and being male are not going to remain at the top of the pyramid. You can either walk down of your own accord or get tossed eventually. Partial credit will not be awarded.
Moses led his people out of Egypt. But they had to wander the desert for 40 years before reaching the Promised Land. Why the delay? Because Moses, and everyone in his generation who had been enslaved, had to die first. Their conditioning, which they had through no fault of their own, must not be allowed to pollute and alter the Promised Land.
So, the next time you feel a visceral reaction to that deep voice talking of change, with the swell of music behind it, ask yourself: What change are you assuming he means? Then consider all the change that scares you down to your bones, and (if you've got the eggs), consider embarking on your own path to redemption: One where you don't get forgiven before you've done your work.
And the work involved is not ours to design. Pete Seeger suffered almost 20 years of blacklisting and severe economic hardship because he refused to testify before HUAC. He resigned from The Weavers, who had had the number one record in the country, because they decided to do a cigarette commercial. He found a way to have a good life in the desert, all the same. And his most famous song of all ends with "When will we ever learn?"
(lyrics above are from Rhymes and Reasons by John Denver; memoir from Pete Seeger is from the recent PBS American Experience documentary about his life, The Power of Song; thanks to Doc and Diamante for the editing)
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