A year later, it is time to make decisions in the studio. It has been photographed exactly as he left it, each table surface a still life of his artist’s practice, each palette a painting unto itself. Key Jo has sorted paintings according to size, dusted and labeled all 882 of them, plus the sketches, and the photographs, and the small metal sculptures.
We will put aside unused supplies to sell to art students and give to artist friends: rolls of pulpy paper, unopened tubes of fine oil and acrylic paint, tables and chairs and two-by-fours and PVC pipe and wire and glue guns. Coconut shells and the woven rush mats called mishrafat for cooling roasted coffee. And then I will figure out what to save in a few labeled boxes that will read “Daddy’s studio,” for the kids to do something with or not one day.
Anticipating throwing away his paintbrushes makes me queasy. They are somehow biological, his DNA in the brush fibers. I find a box of the very best paintbrushes, which are made of sable. I learn they have a natural taper, which forms a point that painters prize. Some brushes are made of squirrel, some hog bristles, some of faux camel hair—for camel is too woolly and curly to make a good brush—ox, pony, and goat. Ficre and I never talked about this, but as I learn about paintbrushes I chuckle, for I know he knew everything I am now learning and know he found it fascinating. It feels like there is so little he did not share that he knew, but of course each of us is infinite. The qualitative hierarchies of paintbrushes is something I learn from him after he has died. He is not here to teach me, but I would not have learned it without him.
The sable is a species of marten. Every contemplation of Ficre is a foray into learning something I did not know before. My friend Elena, who I have not seen since Ficre’s passing, comes through town. She reminds me of the first night Ficre and the boys and I went to dinner at her house and how Ficre got blissfully lost in the maps in their antique atlas. He was man of maps and atlases; he was a cartographer and a cataloguer; he was a squirrel with nuts in his cheeks.
He would have known about the various animals that are used to make paintbrushes, and have had preferences. He was a connoisseur, I am an epicure. Connoit: to know. Epicureans take pleasure like no others, but are materialists. I am sometimes a sybarite. And surely, attachment is suffering.
The paintbrushes, I feel, contain his DNA, and so there feels something wrong about throwing them away. But I cannot keep them; they are stiff with paint, certainly unusable, unlovely though interesting.
I have long been obsessed with the story of the frozen woolly mammoth, how scientists used a blow-dryer to thaw him and extract DNA from his fur. Now I read they have found liquid blood inside a 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth. They will extract the DNA and eventually fertilize and plant an egg inside an elephant.
I want to know every single thing about woolly mammoths. I have to find a paleontologist. Knowing more and more, though, can block the passageways to feeling.
Ficre’s DNA is everywhere in the studio, and in the paintbrushes he held for so many hours.
We can neither save nor harvest it. There is no frozen sperm. And anyway, the being we would clone would never be Ficre.
I tell Elena; I saw the body without him in it; I know there are souls and bodies are just bodies; I saw his body after the soul had left and understood that our bodies are vessels the souls visit.
And then they go where?
Or are they finished? Are our bodies unique hosts?
Every day I hear music he would have loved. Today it is Esperanza Spalding’s “Apple Blossom,” and as I listen closely I realize it is about a man whose lover has died. The refrain:
Now he stands beneath the apple blossoms
Every year where they used to go walking.
And he tells her about the summer and the autumn,
The winter in his heart,
And their apple blossoms.
We used to walk together in Grove Street Cemetery, where he is now buried, where I will one day join him, and sometimes sit beneath trees and speak quietly and carefully about important things just between us. “Winter in his heart” seems the truest and most literal description of how my chest feels from weeping for him.
After the studio, I clean deeper in the never-ending house, facing it bit by bit. I clean my pantry cabinets and find expired baking supplies: Ficre was excited about the bread-maker that Amy and Joanne gave us, so in his fashion became a bread-making amateur expert. He bought two brands of yeast and powdered milk solids. He read how to make sourdough starter. He bought wheat and white and rye and spelt bread flours, rice flour to experiment with gluten-free bread for Amy and Joanne’s daughter, Marina. I throw all the expired flours away. They smell ever so slightly rancid, but not unpleasantly so. They smell biological. I am reminded that grain is alive, a host for bacteria. Things grow and live in it.
And then, more things go, the makings of confections he will never prepare.
Away, almond paste, for the marzipan-apricot tarts he promised.
Away, date and beet sugars.
Away, unsweetened coconut, which seems to have turned to grit, with which he made his ethereal shrimp barka, the stuff of legend.
As I purge, upstairs my student Kathryn downloads literally thousands of CDs from his studio and loads them onto something in outer space called a cloud. All the music he listened to, his sonic DNA. Kathryn was in the lecture class “African American Art Today,” to which I returned a week after Ficre died to deliver a final lecture. Somehow I wrote it; I needed to write it, and go to them, my beloved community of students for thirteen intense weeks, and deliver their last class of the semester. After the lecture, each one of them lined up and solemnly shook my hand, or hugged me. Not one broke down and neither did I; they conferred their strength to me; they held me aloft.
Here is how I ended that lecture:
“Don’t forget to feed the loas” serves as an entreaty or opening salvo and refrain in Ishmael Reed’s great novel Mumbo Jumbo. The phrase articulates the imperative to remember to honor the deity-like ancestral forces that guide us through our contemporary lives. The offerings on their altars may be fruit or flowers, chicken or wine; when taken metaphorically, offerings may also be found in the form of art and the calling of names that honors our dead and keeps them near.
This is Jason Moran’s “Cradle Song.” Listen carefully: (I played it). “Cradle Song” appears on the album “Artist in Residence,” which was recorded shortly after the pianist’s dear and influential mother died of cancer, a relatively young woman. “Cradle Song” is an elemental solo that sounds something like a mature student’s variation on a simple piano exercise, perhaps a variation on a Chopin etude before the student has learned it well enough to play it fully fluently. It includes the recorded sound of intense pencil writing. According to Moran, this is meant to represent his mother’s writing and note-taking during his music lessons when he was a child. This very very small quotidian sound—the presence of his mother’s hand—is called back into the music, called across the line between life and death and in that sound, she is present. The sound of the writing is the second instrument on the recording; the piano solo is, then a duet, with the mother who was by her son’s side as he learned to become a piano player. If the presence of the mother taking notes by her young son’s side is what moved him forward and accompanied him as an apprentice, its sound on the recording is what enables him to make music after she has died.
Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.
It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.
And so the black artist in some way, spoken or not, contends with death, races against it, writes amongst its ghosts who we call ancestors. We listen for the silences and make that art. “Don’t forget to feed the loas,” Ishmael Reed wrote, and so by making art we feed the ancestors, leave water and a little food at the altars we have made for them, and let them guide the work. We listen; we hasten to create.
Survivors stand startled in the glaring light of loss, but bear witness.
The black folk poets who are our ancestors spoke true when they said every shut eye ain’t asleep, every goodbye ain’t gone.
That is the context in which I met Kathryn. For these last months she has dozens of times asked, how can I be helpful, at home, in the studio, in my office at school.
So now, day after day she comes here with two huge iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts, one for her and one for me, and goes up to her station, puts in her earbuds, and cheerfully downloads the music for hours in a row, working her way through each box, learning this man she never met but who she now knows through his paintings, his space, his music, and his family: everything he left on earth.