So, yes, I did finally transcend my art-school unsettling and move past pathetic insecurity. When others overlook or turn away from my art I no longer feel belittled. But transcendence has not come once and for all. So many times I had freed myself from the gaze of others, from their judgments and expectations of an artist so ill-suited as me, only to lose sight of myself as I am and return to self-doubt. Thanks to an interview with Journalist Zahra, I grasped a solution that still works.
Zahra joined a stream of visitors to my Newark Ironbound studio. We talked for hours in a conversation that turned, as such conversations do, from my talking about me and my work to my listening to her talk about herself. I’m not eighty years old yet, but younger women already consult me for advice on getting through this life. Lamenting American society’s hostility toward black women, in particular toward black women with dark skin, like hers and mine, Zahra trembled distress. She judged herself a little darker than me, a difference I could not see. Zahra, with roots in the Caribbean Islands, was able to calibrate fine gradations of skin color, an ability I missed out on growing up in California. I recognized her anguish, though my own version replaced skin color with age. I sought to assuage her pain.
I gave Zahra advice against my own wisdom. I usually don’t give people advice before they ask for it specifically, because people don’t usually want advice. They want to complain. I gave Zahra advice anyway. I told her she absolutely must not see herself through other people’s eyes. Great advice.
Zahra needed that advice. She might even have heeded it. But let’s be candid here. The person who needed to hear and to heed that advice was me.
I did hear. I did heed. I grew up into who I am as no other. This is not something I could do just one time and have it work forever. Like artists the world over, my bayoneted, hand-to-hand struggle against insecurity and for self-confidence never ends. I have to take my own advice and shoulder my armament every single day. Every single day, not only to close the eyes of disparagement, but also to stop my ears against adulation.
Not to see myself through other people’s eyes.
To remain what the gurus call centered. When practiced every day, this works, more or less, with regard to myself and my own artwork of artist’s books so far outside popularity. And also to accept as part of my practice my day job of talking and commenting that grows out of my career as a historian.
I’m an artist who lives and works in Newark, New Jersey, an artist whose other—not, as I once said, former—lives as a historian and as a daughter are still crucial parts of me. I am a wise old person, not a hot young artist, not a young anybody with a young anybody’s future before me. I know the value of doing my work, my work, and keeping at it. I do keep at it—in the pleasure of the process of making the art only I can make.
Serious artist? Yes. I make and show my work regularly. Professional artist? Yes, I get paid for my work. An Artist artist? Probably not, probably never, because I still do other things. Do I miss not being An Artist artist? Yes, a little. But not enough to live my life any other way.
As for my father, so integral a part of my art-school experience, turning ninety-five brought transformation as his depression lifted. He and I could sit and talk like old times. My father had support beyond what Glenn and I could offer: monthly visits from the deacons of Bethany Baptist Church, mature black men in dark suits and dignity. The Bethany deacons reconnected my father to men like himself as no others could, and they reminded him of truth from his youth, that god is good. During my father’s last years in assisted living in West Orange, New Jersey, life was good.
My father died as I was finishing up this book, a peaceful passing after years of turmoil. He could not last forever, though almost ninety-eight meant a very long life, nearly forever. He had always said he wanted to die in his sleep in his bed, to which my mother expressed horror at the thought of waking up next to a dead body. She died first, so no such waking up. He died alone very early in the morning. Dead in his bed, my father looked as he had looked transitioning, eyes closed, mouth open, only no longer breathing. Was that how death looked? Later, on a slab in Perry Funeral Home, we saw the real, the colorless, closed-mouth look of death, the soul departed.
My father, like my mother, wanted to be cremated. I respected his wishes, so Perry Funeral Home sent him to the crematorium wrapped up with a copy of his favorite painting, The Banjo Lesson, Henry O. Tanner’s tender chiaroscuro depiction in lemon yellow and cerulean blue of a grandfather teaching his young grandson to make music. My father’s ashes rest in peace along with his beloved Tanner.
My father had seemed to have died several times before rebounding. Every time he seemed to be leaving, we grieved. Each time his recovery allowed us a reprieve, again and again and again. Surely, by the time he died and did not recover, we were pre-grieved. In the first weeks of after-death paperwork, that almost seemed to be so. Then it was so not the case.
Glenn and I fell into absence’s pit whenever my father crossed our minds, whenever we passed Exit 10 to West Orange, when one of his favorite sayings came to mind or something that particularly pleased or annoyed him turned up. My father’s death drained my strength and ruined my voice. It knocked me down for a month before I could get off my couch and resume my life.
I resumed my life. I made art again. With art school behind me and my father safely dead—safe with my mother—I live and work in Newark, New Jersey.