Untitled painting by Kenneth Williamson
IN MY CHILDHOOD MY parents seldom went on vacations or drove cross country. Most car trips were back to their hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas to visit our many relatives who never left. Because we lived in Memphis 160 miles away, our family was more or less out of the loop of the rest of our extended family and we were subtly treated as outsiders, but outsiders who clearly fascinated them with our big city ways and our faster, brogue-ish Memphis accents.
To get to Pine Bluff required driving through Memphis on Lamar Avenue, also known as Highway 78, where as children my brother and I got a bird’s eye view of how the other half lived. We would pass block after block of unloved, blemished tenement buildings, black folks sitting out on lawn chairs on the landings, fanning themselves in the heat of the summer, smoke curling from under barbecue grills set up on practically every floor. Little girls in pigtails and little boys with no shirts on chased each other with playsticks, bouncing balls, running hither and yon, laughing, jumping and having their summer fun, the older girls just lounging around and trying their level best to look cool. I loved to watch them sashay together down the sidewalks, moving slowly and languidly in the heat, their hips doing a tick-tock in rhythm with their ever-present music. Many times I wished I could join in on their fun. Even when very small I understood that these people were poor and did not have some of the nice things I did. To this day I equate apartment living with being poor. I once visited the controversial author Albert Goldman in his Central Park West apartment, one of the most valuable real estate properties in the world. When I left I thought to myself, “Hell, my apartment in Memphis is lots nicer than that.”
As the Graves family crossed the brown, rapidly-flowing Mississippi River into the flat bottomlands of East Arkansas we were quickly removed to a more forlorn, desolate world, observing poverty first hand. In those days there were hundreds of tar paper shacks dotting the farmlands along the highway, black families toiling in their yards, washing machines from a bygone era often doing their duty, sitting on sagging front porches, occasionally a large black cauldron boiling away in the front yard used to wash white laundry. Countless times I saw one of the last vestiges of the plantation era—families picking cotton during the fall harvest, bodies bent double dragging large sacks filled with cotton behind them, hand-picking the cotton bolls and moving up the row, children picking as well as the elderly, everyone pitching in to get the crop in. Those cotton dollars during a good season paid for food and clothes for the whole next year.
At that age I had never done a hard day’s labor in my life. In fact my parents sheltered my brother and me from hard work probably because they had seen too much of it in their own childhoods. My one chore was taking out the garbage. Mom didn’t trust us to do the dishes or clean the house; she did those things her own way. Dad wouldn’t let us wash the car or cut the grass until we were older; he did those things his own way. Watching those families picking cotton looked very inviting to a white child who didn’t have a clue as to the sweat and misery behind a day of picking cotton in the hot sun. Like many such whites, I romanticized those scenes in my mind, always thinking pleasant thoughts when reminiscing about those country drives during my youth. By the time I was a teenager I saw less and less of the cotton picking in Arkansas. It was by then a thing of the past. Mechanization and big agri-business had taken over.
In the 1980s my wife, Katrina, and I were shopping at Memphis’ Greatest Store, Goldsmith’s, which is now a Macy’s. Katrina was an Art History major in college and was attracted to all kinds of art, particularly some of the local artists, many of whom specialized in watercolor painting. One local artist she and many others sought out was Dolph Smith whose rustic Southern barn and wooden shack paintings were much in demand. Such scenes had long been a very tired trope among Southern artists, but Smith was a very inventive colorist, adding unfamiliar and curious hues to what otherwise would have been quite ordinary images. His work far transcended the usual.
That day at Goldsmith’s Katrina and I were both struck by a painting by an artist named Kenneth Williamson, a name we did not know. It was a signed and numbered print and the scene was a slightly abstract watercolor of a black family picking cotton. The influence of Dolph Smith seemed to us obvious and, further, there also seemed to be an influence by another famed regional artist, Carroll Cloar. The painting exceeded our humble budget, but Katrina put it on credit and carried it home, where it still has a place of prominence in her home in the suburbs of Memphis. She also has a print by Dolph Smith and an original painting of his we bought at a yard sale, an unbelievable find.
Perhaps Kenneth Williamson’s painting appealed to some wrongheaded notion of the antebellum South, the “darkies” out picking cotton, ah the good ol’ days. It certainly appealed to the memories I had of driving through East Arkansas as our ’58 Buick sailed through the Delta flatlands. Reading the local newspaper we learned that the artist, Kenneth Williamson, was an up-and-coming award-winning African-American watercolorist, noted for winning a Memphis in May International Festival poster contest where the honored country of that year happened to be England. Williamson had impressed everyone with his beautiful rendering of the London skyline situated along the Mississippi River. A few nobs had complained that Big Ben was in the wrong position, or some such nonsense, but no one else, including the visiting British dignitaries, cared.
Not long after, I was driving down the 1-240 expressway and noticed a huge billboard advertising one of Kenneth Williamson’s paintings. To my knowledge it is the only time in Memphis history that an artist has leased his own billboard to advertise his work. Such advertising does not come cheap.
Months went by and to our horror the morning paper revealed that a man had been found dead in Martin Luther King Jr. Park down by the Mississippi River, wrapped in two sleeping bags with a single gunshot to his head. This was a professional hit, and the body being left in a public park, wrapped in sleeping bags, and with a single fatal shot to the head was meant to send someone a clear message and warning. These people were not playing.
The dead man was artist Kenneth Williamson. To the surprise of no one, the murderers were never found or identified in any way. Today it is still officially a “cold case.” I wasn’t satisfied with what little had been written about the murder in our local papers. I wanted to know more and I thought if the story were compelling enough I might want to write about it. So, I made a few calls to contacts I had in the Memphis Police Department and made an appointment with the homicide detective in charge of the case, John Wilburn.
Homicide detectives are naturally wary of writers they don’t know wanting information on a murder case, but I have a way of putting such people at ease and Det. John Wilburn wound up telling me a whole lot of things that never made it to the local papers.
Williamson, according to Det. Wilburn, was little more than a con man. He hustled people for expensive jewelry and expensive cars and used his very real artistic talents to secure funding to create public artworks for several municipalities and then absconded with the money, never lifting a finger to do the work for which he was paid handsomely. There were warrants out for him when he was found in Martin Luther King Jr. Park.
He was elevated to prominence in the black community by marrying into one of the city’s most regal and celebrated black families, the Sugarmons. He also seemed to flash a lot of money around, far beyond the typical lifestyle of even the most esteemed regional artists. The reason is because he was a drug mule, according to Det. Wilburn, for a notorious clan in Memphis. Apparently Williamson somehow got crossways with the wrong person in the highly regimented regional drug trade and paid for it with his life. When the hit was put out on Williamson, it would have been very easy for him to just disappear and never be found. But the dumping of the body in the park and the single shot to the head spelled it out clearly to those in the know—fuck with us and see what happens.
I have run across several people in the intervening years who knew Williamson, some who knew him well. Very few will talk about him. His murder still scares a lot of people.
But in the white Memphis suburb of Cordova a painting of a black family picking cotton still hangs proudly on the wall of a den that could be featured in Better Homes and Gardens magazine. The painting still has the flavor of the Old South and the feeling of things the way they used to was. Seeing it today I wonder why Williamson decided to make a black family picking cotton his subject. Did he do it purposely to appeal to whites longing for the plantation era South? Was it just a cynical move to gain reputation? Or did it come from his own upbringing somewhere in the Deep South?
It’s a cold case and no one has done any talking in a very long time. And I haven’t seen a family picking cotton in over fifty years. Life moves on.