"Hey Roz what's wrong? I thought you'd be
dancing on the table by now."
She couldn't hold it any longer. "Marty, you know how long I've wanted the Fratt
fellowship. It's the chance of a lifetime, and now I can't even enjoy it on my own. I
thought this was going to be an opportunity to bring my vision to life, to not have to
worry about money and pleasing folks, pull out all those ideas I've been too cautious to
try without worrying about whether it works or doesn't. How am I going to do that, Marty,
if I have to work with someone else and in the same studio? The fellowship guidelines said
absolutely nothing about collaboration." Marty looked at her surprised. He
couldn't be expected to understand her sudden anxiety. He was not an artist, after all,
but an arts activist. Two, as she often tried to remind him, entirely different things.
"Really Roz," he interjected, "It's not full out collaboration, just one
project and a shared studio. Believe me, its more than big enough for the two of you. You
barely have to see each other unless you want to. Trust me."
She tilted her head back and sighed, releasing the last bit of air trapped at the base
of her diaphragm. She aborted her brooding for his sake, although her feigned happiness
would have appeared transparently superficial under anyone else's eyes. But the details
man, reveling in her crumpled smile, chugged down flute after flute of the ginger beer
which sufficed for a toast in lieu of champagne and waltzed contentedly out of her door
and home to Franco, his "of the moment," two minutes before midnight with the
faint gleam of her lip balm tattooed on his cheeks.
She knew she should have been more grateful. Had he not been there to lobby for her,
the council would have given the award to Susan Schraden. She was a veritable poster child
of the current art aesthetic, possessing the perfect blend of a pedigreed family
background, the right education and therewith the license to create strategically
rebellious art which was heralded for its forthright edginess.
Susan Schraden with her wild grey-brown hair and even wilder combinations of makeup and
clothing, looked as if she were in motion even when she was standing still. And though
Rosalind admired her work, paper and fabric collages that seemed almost to dance on walls
compelling even the most alert viewer to blink once or twice. She did not care for the
woman who she had met once at a private reception for a women's art show in which both of
them were featured. Roz's work was just starting to receive attention and she was
painfully self aware in this room of been there-done thaters. They had bumped into each
other at the beverage table, where Roz had gone in search of something to ease her
unsettled stomach. As she held the petite bottle of carbonated water, pouring its contents
gingerly over ice cubes, Susan had approached.
"Roz Kennedy? Susan Schraden, nice to meet you. Saw your work. I like it. It has a
gritty quality, raw energy." She had strung the words together like beads on a
necklace. No gaps, no pauses, no space for interjection or dialogue, just said it
matter-of-factly, no opportunity for response or dispute. Roz had flinched at the words
"gritty" and "raw." Her featured work had been an installation of
carved onyx hands holding lace handkerchiefs she'd been given by her grandmother, a rice
field worker from rural Florida, for whom they had been the only measure of softness in an
otherwise hard life. She had wanted to honor those women, like her grandmother, who had
toiled silently and without accolade to support their families and on a broader scale, the
infrastructure of a country that devalued their internal and external beauty. What, if
anything, was "gritty" about that. But she suspected that Susan, like so many
artists, teachers and critics she had encountered, had not bothered to read the work on
its own merit, but had instead tried to read her. And for them, she with her deep mahogany
skin and untethered mane of wiry braids and twists would always read "gritty,"
"raw."
She had encountered this in college, being the only black woman in her fine arts
classes on a campus where African American presence was already nearly nonexistent. Upon
meeting her, other black students would assume she had just transferred in. I'm not a
transfer student she would maintain. I've been here since freshman year. They would look
at her incredulously and then to her Didi, her roommate, who despite being the black
campus community's unspoken ebony goddess, was also her sole bastion of support.
"She's fine arts." Didi would add. They'd exhale relieved. Fine arts. That
explained everything.
It had been hard to be the only one in the creative arts college that functioned like a
separate institution on a campus better known for the steady stream of athletes it had
supplied the professional leagues than for academic accomplishment. Had she foretold the
isolation she would experience as a result of her desire to pursue art as she grew into
adulthood, she would not have allowed the bewitching sensation of cool wet clay under her
fingers to seduce her the eighth grade summer the community center offered free pottery
classes to the youth living at the project housing site two blocks away. She would have
ignored the scintillating swoosh of liquid across a canvas. She would have aspired to
become a teacher, or nurse, anything that black folks could be with each other.
Painting had been her first love. But this passion had met an untimely death her first
year of college when, upon announcing that they would be spending the next two weeks
studying what she called the "primitive painting of central Africa," her Methods
in Acrylics teacher remarked in front of the class, "Based on what I've seen of your
work so far, Rosalind, this will be second nature for you."
She felt her face crack. Felt herself hot and conspicuous. That would not be her last
painting class but it would change forever the way she felt about it, compelling her to
find another medium, one less likely to betray her, one less available to interpretation,
less dialogical. She needed something that could absorb her codes, that would allow her to
create layers of meanings and identities, separate, alternate, yet meaningful and
authentic. She found her refuge in sculpting. She found it somehow less vulnerable than
painting, which was for her, by its nature, more prone to interruption, to supposition.
Sculpting to her was like inventing a secret language. She could pour into a block of
stone or metal her hidden thoughts, her substance, the goodness and badness of who she was
and what she had seen and see it take shape. Move gently, slowly, from nothing to
something. She would tell these forms her most unsayable words, burying them in the belly
of these orbs with their muted and blended shapes. She would bury feelings inside like
brittle old maps to long lost treasures, displaced but not forgotten.
When she wanted a response to her story she wrote poetry. Not because of some facility
or talent she felt she had, but because she knew that the only way she could tell her
truth was to write it down and read the words in order, verbatim, any other way, was too
risky. So came the poems, long grocery list pieces that helped her locate her
unspeakables, to find the truth of herself, and dare reveal it to others.
She started reading first at Borsodi's, an unpretentious coffeehouse just off campus,
which had for some unknown reason, become the unofficial outpost of the black student
union and where open mike poetry forums were held every other Thursday. The thought of
reading aloud, of drawing attention to herself had terrified her. She could not stand
before her peers, all impeccably brown, all impeccably dressed, most of whom managed to
afford name brand finery on the tightest financial aid budgets. She was not one of them
after all. She was "fine arts," and not only that, she was given to wearing
thick wool socks with her sandals, which according to Didi, was probably her most
offensive cultural transgression. Black poets, she learned could be forgiven their
eccentricities. In the black community many had indeed attained iconic stature, but black
sculptors, even the more celebrated ones, like Catlett, Savage, or Barthe had not been
afforded first page status and thus none of their sins forgiven.
She had been moved one night by a syrupy thick mug of extra strong coffee and the
hypnotic words of the onyx eyed poet who read during the first set, to enter her name into
the hat and to actually read the words she had hidden for so long, a piece less poem than
confession. Not everyone could hear it and those that did, could not hear everything but
it had been an encouraging start nonetheless. She had seen a few heads nodding at times
their understanding. Alas, she possessed a language that others knew, and she felt that
moment, more woman than shadow.
She began to write and read more and more finding it increasingly gratifying. Her
senior year, when a few of her teachers began speaking to her about graduate school, she
contemplated giving up the sculpting. She enjoyed the sense of community she had found as
a poet.
Even Didi and her friends had stopped teasing her about her sock/sandal combination and
her defiantly uncombed hair. She could go to school for writing. The school in Providence,
she had met a few students there, after winning a regional poetry prize and touring for a
giddy two weeks during winter break all over New England. She could be, they assured her,
the next hot thing. Her poetry spoke to a nameless sixth sense they claimed,
unidentifiable, but real all the same. She almost believed them, could see the
possibilities. She knew it would be easier, less isolating more immediately fulfilling
than pursuing sculpting, but she like her grandmother was a woman destined for hard work.
In the end, she had as she knew she would run back to the stone, the wood, the metal.
They had known her, had given her solace long before she wrote her self as language and
sound. In the small cold studio she was allotted as a graduate student in the master of
fine arts program, she turned herself against all things audible. No chattering friend to
fill the silence, no radio, no borrowed record player, she even took down the lyrical wind
chimes nailed outside the window. She told herself instead to the forms and they
responded. Slowly bringing her recognition. Galleries approached, intrigued by her
intensely quiet pieces. She became.
But she never forgave the art for the isolation. Never forgave herself for her distrust
of the world of art and more implicitly, her distrust of herself as an artist within it.
She was not one of them, and yet that was how she knew herself. She had chosen their side,
she felt, at the expense of so much.
Susan Schraden was one of them and she knew it. She paraded the status as if it were her
birth right. How would they speak to each other? What would they have to say? She would
not understand Roz's parallel narrative, the made it by the sweat of my brow, skin of
my teeth and still fighting my way off the ropes version. Or would she?
She picked up the crumpled strip of paper, where Marty had written the woman's number
and turned it over and over in her hands. The first three numbers were sevens. It figured. |
