E Pluribus Pluribus

Those of you under the age of fifty may be surprised to learn that, until about fifty years ago, license plates on cars were nothing more than numbers and letters of one color on a solid background of a contrasting color.

If the backdrop was light, the lettering was sure to be dark, and vice-versa.

Long-distance hitchhikers could easily identify an approaching vehicle and know how far the ride might take them. This was especially helpful to me back when I stood at the intersection of interstates in Portland, Oregon, with two signs: “San Fran” and “Chicago.” Ya, my life was like that back then. A vagabond too long, I was in a hurry to land somewhere where someone knew me.

License plates are like flags. The whole point is to make something immediately clear.

Through the 70s and into the 80s, states gradually made the transition from unadorned plates to colorful works of art. New York featured the Statue of Liberty. Illinois showed Lincoln. Colorado outlined a mountain range, and Wyoming a busting bronco. New Hampshire had the Old Man in the Mountain. Massachusetts was late to the party before it offered us the choice of having a blue whale’s fluke going under.

Today, every state has them, and some states have more than one. Pennsylvania and Florida seem to be in a contest for having the most, and both have plates on which some of the numbers blend in with a multi-colored background. You’ll have an easier time counting the teeth in the mouth of Pennsylvania’s Nittany Lion than you will reading the plate’s number on its back.

Two states with claims to the Wright Brothers show early aircraft. Ohio declares itself “Birthplace of Aviation,” while North Carolina alliterates “First in Flight.” They might yet fight!

I had–I still have–two plates involved in an unlikely controversy:

My unadorned plate on my even less adorned Ford Falcon in the late-70s. They didn’t even spell out the word *North*!

My plate in the early 80s. No doubt it won the award after judges saw one unused or as a sketch, unaware that a screw would be drilled right into Tom Jefferson’s throat.

In the mid-80s, no doubt egged-on by South Dakota’s award-winning Mt. Rushmore plates–or “tags” as they are called out West–North Dakota’s governor assembled a committee to design one. This included representatives from the state’s Chamber of Commerce, its tourism bureau, its Lakota (Sioux) and Ojibwa (Chippewa) and Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara reservations, its universities, its arts council, its newspapers, its this, its that, and so on.

As you might guess, each one wanted to depict his or her thing, and the solution they arrived at was to morph them all into about six that they “included.”

The result may have been fine for a poster on a wall or a page in a book, but for a 6″ x 12″ attachment to moving vehicles, it was so ridiculous that my friend, Randy Bradbury, a reporter for the Bismarck Tribune at the time, told me that it became a heated issue in state-wide elections and cost the governor re-election.

“So hideous, so confused, so incoherent, so bad,” he wrote, that “many people refuse to put it on their cars.” When North Dakotans kept driving with old plates after the announced expiration, the controversy was so hot that not one was stopped and ticketed. Call it a white flag of a tag.

I was visiting there in the summer of ’89, and there were very few “committee tags,” as they were ridiculed, to be seen. Most cars still had the same unadorned plates I had when I lived there in ’78 and ’79. To see what was on the new ones, you had to stand fairly close to a hodge-podge of (if memory serves): Sacagawea, a wagon train, a farmstead, the state capitol, Badlands, and Teddy Roosevelt. (Wasn’t he from New York?)

Honestly can’t tell if that’s a wagon train or the cavalry, or if it’s Sacagawea or some guy who stumbled across the border from Manitoba, a Canadian province with which North Dakota shares a large and very attractive park called the “International Peace Garden.” Also, I think I recall a tractor in there. Or was it Lawrence Welk’s accordion? If you have a magnifying glass handy, let me know.

As Bradbury noted, the largest image was that of a highway, “giving the impression that the only thing to do here is to get the hell out!”

Ah, the memories!

All of them stoked by a flag that has dotted the landscape, including in front of Newburyport City Hall, during “Pride Month.” At a glace it appears to be the Gay Pride Flag that we have seen for years.

But then we notice more: Five more colors angling in from the left in a sideways triangle atop the six primary and secondary colors of the rainbow.

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-the-colors-of-the-new-pride-flag-mean-5189173

The original Gay Pride Flag, or the Rainbow Flag was simple, straightforward (pun or not), easy to identify and identify with since we all know rainbows and the metaphor is easy to grasp. The new version is called the Progress Pride Flag, and you can find websites that explain what each of the now eleven colors represent.

One reason I hesitate to list them is that there is already a version newer than what is flying in front of City Hall. Inside the white triangle is now a yellow triangle with a purple circle. Hard not to anticipate that, before long, a counter triangle will enter from the right with yet more shades to represent the Cross, the Crescent and Star, the Star of David, Buddha, Zen, and whatever Sitting Bull held in his hand when Custer died for our sins.

At what point does the push for inclusion become confusion? Or intrusion?

Let me be clear: I fully support gay rights, marriage equality, and adoption by gay couples. If I avoid using terms such as non-binary, cis, intersectional community, aromantic, and LGBTQ (Or is it LGBTQA now, and is there a plus-sign at the end of it?), it’s for the same reason I avoid words such as appropriate, whatever, utilize, and you guys–and will never use plural pronouns for one person. To me, these are matters of language, not prejudice–what I practice, not what I prefer.

You’ve heard the phrase “tin ear”? The Progress Flag is for people with tin eyes. For the rest of us, clutter does not flutter.

The Rainbow Flag–including bumper stickers and clothing–has always been a welcome sight. Tasteful. Classy. Clear. Like a national flag, it offers a unified overview of whom and what it represents–leaving all the details for the documents it represents.

As all good flags do–and as all rainbows do–it sings E Pluribus Unum. The Progress Flag babbles E Pluribus Pluribus.

You might as well fly a printout of the Constitution in place of the Stars and Stripes. I may call it an eyesore, but, if he’s still with us, there’s a former governor of North Dakota who might like it.

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What a difference a new governor makes! As Bradbury told me, the new gov easily fulfilled a campaign promise to commission one of the state’s well-known artists to create something unified and distinctive.

Oh, what a statement Mother Nature makes!

Architecturally Yours

Anyone telling me that they are going to Chicago for the first time hears me rave about “architectural boat tours.”

Docents taking you along the Chicago River are devoted to details as fine as the tops of posts at the end of bridges that “echo” the designs of buildings as you float past–just as Boston’s Leonard Zakim Bridge echoes the nearby Bunker Hill Monument.

If they are travelling by car or Amtrak from this direction, I’ll also urge that they stop in Cleveland just to walk around downtown, if nothing else, and look at the buildings, the parks, the monuments. Of course, there is more than one something else, most appealingly the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, a glass pyramid shaped as a guitar on Lake Erie designed by I.M. Pei.

Though I never imagined myself an architect, I’ve always appreciated the art no matter what else was going on when I saw it. For all the adrenalin and chaos of the antiwar demonstrations in DC, my first visual association is the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial–itself an architectural tribute to the fellow who designed Monticello and the University of Virginia.

For all the joy of my daughter’s weekend-long wedding party in San Luis Obispo, right up there with the ceremony, toasts, and banquet, is the memory of walking over a small bridge before stopping to read a plaque telling me it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to match the medical center he designed on the other side of the creek:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/40992511@N05/5615422356

When my western friends visit New England, I like to show off our colonial houses, churches, covered bridges, grist-mills, inns, and taverns, as well as Federalist brick homes with columns that make Essex County an architectural feast.

To make them feel right at home, I take them to the many libraries, post offices, and train depots that came later in the 19th Century, very much in the Romanesque, Neo-Classical, and Gothic styles adopted in the American west in real time when first settled.

A bit further away are more recent gems that I include in day trips. Not far over the New Hampshire border is Exeter Academy’s Library designed by Louis Kahn:

Photo by Michael Boer. Other interior shots appear at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261

And there’s the home designed by Walther Gropius not far from the many sites in Lexington and Concord:

Also by Michael Boer with one more shot in: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261

Names such as Pei, Gropius, and Kahn are well known to us dilettantes, and Wright is a household name, so it was something of a jolt when I spotted the cover of a brand new book on which their names were nowhere to be found:

Architects of an American Landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmstead, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces.

If we can consider American history as a household, Olmsted is as present as Wright, but his art was landscape. America’s first public parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, and Buffalo were all his design, and most urban parks soon to follow were modeled on them.

His home in Brookline, now a historic site, is also on my to-visit list when a friend arrives from the west, especially one with a camera:

The farmhouse was already there when Olmsted moved in and named it Fairsted. His genius was in landscapes that made buildings seem as if they had grown out of them. His pathways were always curved so that the view of a building would keep changing as you walked or rode along it. Photo by Michael Boer.

But it was the other name on the cover, Henry Hobson Richardson, that piqued my interest. How could I possibly never have heard of anyone that could be paired with Olmsted?

Hugh Howard answers that question in his acknowledgements. An author of numerous books on architecture and design, he set out to “right an injustice”:

Henry Hobson Richardson has been pincered by historical irony. Little known by most people, he is esteemed by many architectural historians as America’s most important architect. He dominated his era, inspired the next generation of designers, and exerted an influence on American building rivaled only by that of Frank Lloyd Wright (who quietly revered him) and Thomas Jefferson. Having written about both Wright and Jefferson, my desire was to help bring Richardson back into the mainstream conversation.

When his agent doubted that a book about a forgotten architect could sell, Howard noted that Richardson’s career began and was shaped by his collaborations with Olmsted. Presto! A dual biography was proposed.

The preface reads like a biography of an expanding nation. Howard offers us the advent of railroad when “the natural cycle of the day gave way to the mechanical” and “technology replaced geography as the chief determinant of whether a city prospered” as context for a fast paced tale of how cities grew.

The desire for parks began as a public health issue as cities grew dense, soon followed by the patriotic desire for Civil War memorials. Both included structures of some kind, and Richardson was Olmsted’s choice. In turn, Olmsted, sixteen years older, became Richardson’s mentor, schooling him (a word Howard uses several times) in how to make buildings look like part of a landscape.

Richardson made his own mark when commissioned to design the new Trinity Church in Boston. A review from the Boston Transcript at the time waxes Shakespearean:

The grand exterior dimensions of the church somewhat prepare one for the spaciousness within. But only seeing can realize the superb beauty of the decoration, rich yet not garish, elaborate and not “piled on,” magnificent in splendors, yet noble and dignified, artistic yet religious and fitting for the place. Its richness is beyond compare, because there is literally nothing like it this side of the ocean. Trinity is the first church in the country to be decorated by artists.

Photo by Paul Shaughnessy who catches himself in the act of shooting with this across-the-street reflection.

Those artists included Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi who, fifteen years later, created the Statue of Liberty. When Bartholdi asked for changes in the design, Richardson gladly accommodated him. Says Howard:

Along with his originality, this was a second important Richardson trait… [H]e found the company of other artists congenial, and his frequent embrace and encouragement of them to enhance his architecture would become a hallmark of his career.

Public libraries were a new concept after Civil War. What few existed before the war were rooms in larger buildings. Setting them in buildings of their own with surrounding landscapes, Richardson and Olmsted set the standard quite high, and many across the country were modeled on what they did in New England. With public buildings and grounds for other civic purposes in Buffalo, Albany, and Pittsburgh, they did the same.

The two were also the first to design train stations according to their practical use. Rather than just another two or three-story block of a building, Richardson designed elongated one-story buildings with roofs that overhung open-air platforms along the tracks, such as the one still in use in Framingham, Mass.

Richardson’s style was the rage for as long as he lived, and on his deathbed in 1886 he regretted he would not see the Allegheny County Courthouse & Prison in Pittsburg and Marshall Field’s in Chicago completed. He thought them his best.

After his death, Romanesque soon fell from favor, but most everything Richardson left behind is now a landmark maintained by municipalities, organizations, and others, including private owners of his innovative “open-plan” homes.

Most are still functioning, and in some, such as Trinity Church, you can view the works of various artists and sculptors. Architects of an American Landscape is loaded with sketches of a lively cast of them, including John La Farge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White, and the Hudson River School with an account of how Frederic Church enlisted Olmsted in the effort to halt the commercialization of Niagara Falls.

Sketches, too, of writers and politicians who promoted Richardson’s and Olmsted’s efforts, including Henry Adams, Clover Adams, John Jay, John Ruskin, Robert Treat Paine, and the Sargent family of Boston. Millard Fillmore, Grover Cleveland, and Teddy Roosevelt all have cameos.

The most fascinating sketch was of Orlando Whitney Norcross, whose Boston firm billed itself as “Carpenters and Builders.” Richardson didn’t just hire him but consulted him so closely that Norcross used the “quasi-partnership… to pioneer a new business model.” And so “a new way of organizing a work site” was born, and those who did it had a new name: “Contractors.”

Howard quotes a consulting engineer to explain why the alliance to build Trinity was successful:

Norcross was, in his experience, “ingenious and resourceful and while desirous of making money… ready to subordinate the financial profit to the excellence of results.” For both men, the building mattered most.

That’s the kind of line that makes you nostalgic for a time long gone before you were born. It’s one of many that has me taking closer looks at buildings, bridges, and mills all over New England that I’ve driven past dozens of times.

Just noticed last week that the public library in Woburn, Mass., is so Gothic it seems to say “Enter only if you dare!” This book tells you to dare.

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https://duckduckgo.com/?q=winn+woburn+Library&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

*Post Script: Henry Adams, a leading historian in his lifetime (of the Jefferson/Madison years) wrote a biography of Aaron Burr. His publisher refused to touch it. Sympathy for the Devil. Unclear what happened next, and Howard says only the manuscript was either lost or destroyed, as if Adams had too much else going on to bother with it. Strange to think that in 1880 he published a novel anonymously. Why not the bio? Imagine finding that manuscript!!!

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/hugh-howard/architects-of-an-american-landscape/

Always looking for a bench, always sitting on one end, always leaving room. Photo by M. Boer, who, along with me probably became one of the first two people to visit Fairsted and Fenway Park (speaking of architectural treats) on the same day.

Angel of the Boardwalk

Nine years ago, I wrote a column for the Daily News teasingly headlined: “You may be downsized, but I’m dinosaured.”

Fittingly, I wrote it on the concession counter of the Screening Room while a film entertained a full house. No need for me to be in the booth waiting for cues to change reels with the newly installed hi-tech equipment.

That was the point: I had gone from projectionist to button-pusher.

Soon after it appeared in print, I received this:

Dear Jack: I knew one day I would read your article about the loss of film projectionists. I have a real darkroom in my house that I have not used for several years, and I do miss it. I always felt as if I was creating art when I worked there.
Now just a button and a few clicks and an image is created.
I share your loss, but what will you do now? Are you the button pusher still? Annie and I still go to the Screening Room but we always liked having a different film each week. I hope to still find you in the booth and behind the counter. I look forward to those few exchanges we have.
Let me know what’s going on.
All the best, Pat
And P.S. I did so enjoy those lollipops. 🙂

Lollipops aside, Pat Bashford and Ann Kemp saw every film we played–showing up in Ann’s 1959 Morris Minor convertible, top down weather permitting–until Ann passed away at 77 in 2014. Both were active in an assortment of community groups ranging from books to horticulture, from the Firehouse to the Unitarian Church.

Ann was always friendly but a bit reserved as befits a native Brit, while Pat was prone to jokes and ever-ready banter. A native Ohioan, she was known for the ever-present twinkle in her eye.

In retrospect, Ann may have seemed reserved only in comparison to Pat. Who wouldn’t?

Pat usually greeted me with a wise-crack about my last newspaper column. When I was critical of the mayor, she offered herself as a reference for a job in City Hall. When I attacked the Newburyport Board of Health, she was less optimistic: “Well, there goes your plan to open a restaurant!”

A faithful reader, she was always encouraging: “I read all the columns almost immediately… You should, you know, gather these bright sparkles and put them in a book.” On occasion, she called me “a bullshitter,” a term of endearment among people of Irish descent.

Her obituary appeared in Newburyport just this weekend following her passing at the home of her son in Western Massachusetts two weeks ago, and it illustrates how and how often she offered such support:

Throughout her life, Pat closely befriended many women, who found in her a steadfast source of strength and joie de vivre, and an exemplar of wisdom, fair-mindedness, and independence. She forged these friendships wherever she lived, and more than a few were with former students. Most of her friendships lasted until the end of her life, stretching back fifty, sixty, and even seventy years in some cases. Her unforced enthusiasm for others was remarkable. So many of Pat’s friends will miss her nearly as much as her sons will. Even those who met or knew Pat only briefly were touched by her kindness, perception, and sparkle.

Pat’s lifelong passions were the visual arts, which, as we sometimes forget, includes theater. When she lived in Reading for some 25 years, she performed, directed, and designed sets for area theater groups. Her performance in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth won the 1987 New England Theater Conference Best Actress award.

The obituary is full of surprises if only because Newburyport knew her for just the last two decades of a nine-decade life. By that time, photography was foremost in her efforts and attention as she offered exhibits and mini-books with titles such as Courting Nature’s Bliss and The Life of Water.

Indeed, it was the water surrounding Plum Island that drew Pat and her camera to move here. In her own words: “Water sustains us, surrounds us, soothes us, feeds us and works small miracles with our emotions — calming us, thrilling us, frightening us.”

For all that, the photo of hers that has most intrigued me–and was coincidentally chosen to accompany the obituary (link below)–is of a Plum Island dune between the waters of the ocean and the estuary. Many times have I started and stopped along that walk at Parking Lot Three to find the exact spot and recreate for my own eyes Pat’s “Boardwalk Angel.”

When I told her, she was amused: “That would make it ‘Boardwalk Devil’.”

Her last years in Newburyport were not easy. Numerous friends–some half her age, if that–would take her places, but she missed the close companionship of Ann. And along with octogenarian and nonagenarian aches and pains, she took an occasional fall:

Dear Jack, what a delight to see you today and am so sorry I couldn’t stay to visit.
Congratulations on becoming a grandpa. I hope your visit will be just what you desire.
I loved reading your columns. I didn’t get the [newspaper] all of the fall for I was in a rehab center for 7 weeks (!) and then had home PT and OT and a nurse for another 6 weeks. The fall disappeared; I missed half a year all because I don’t know my left foot from my right. But I start out patient therapy next week and hope soon to put the walker in mothballs and me on the road again…
Come by again when you get back and let’s have a chat. I miss talking with you..

As you can tell, I had dropped in unannounced, a whirlwind of last minute visits before getting on a plane to meet my new grandson in Los Angeles. But Pat welcomed that. And she also warned off a visit when it might be a problem for you:

Dear Jack, If you feel like coming out in this icky weather, I am home this afternoon. I’ll even make you a cup o’ tea!
If you don’t wish to slog out, I’ll be here another day. Haven’t given up the ghost yet.😊
Love, Pat
P.S. The door is open, just walk in and up the stairs.

As I recall, that was the visit for which I brought her a collection of eight or nine Tootsie Pops–a dozen would not tolerate the elastic band I used to make it appear as a bouquet–which she so enjoyed at the Screening Room, two per film.

“Love Pat.” Who couldn’t?

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Lot 3 Boardwalk Angel: https://sites.google.com/site/travelswithpat/

“Pat acquired her first camera as a teenager soon after World War II, a gift from her father that she owned all her life.” From: https://www.hampshirecremation.com/post/patricia-ann-bashford-1929-2021?
And from a friend in Seattle who knows far more about photography than I: “I don’t know a lot about Rolleiflex cameras like the one shown in Pat’s hand, but they were highly prized. Several of Imogen Cunningham’s and Vivian Maier’s self-portraits show similar twin-reflex Rolleis (often backwards since shot in a mirror).”

Ann Kemp: https://obituaries.newburyportnews.com/obituary/ann-kemp-772762221

Portrait by Marilu Norden, most of whose work is of the American Southwest (which may explain the earrings): https://marilunorden.com/paintings/

Painted on Downtown Walls

Been years since I travelled overland west of the Mississippi.

In 2003 I delivered a car to Los Angeles, Amtraked to Seattle, took a leisurely ride with a friend in his van to Minneapolis/St. Paul (including Wyoming’s matter-of-factly-named “Oh My God Highway”), and got back on the train to Poughkeepsie where my car was waiting to take me home.

In 2005, I made it to Louisville, and in 2008 to Chicago. Both of those included weekend stays in Akron with family, and from there who could resist a short trek north to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland?

Those trips are like postscripts to numerous cross-country drives in the ’90s and late-’80s. Before that, during my Prodigal Son years starting all the way back in the Ford Administration, I was able to spend days, sometimes months at a time, in one place. Long enough to receive mail in the capitals of three states–Colorado, North Dakota, and Oregon–though some of it would be forwarded to Brookings, South Dakota, where I lived on three different occasions during those seven years.

In retrospect, Brookings served me as a retreat. Each time I left one of those capitals, I landed back in that modest college town. As unlike as college towns and full-sized cities may be, I noticed something in common that took me by surprise.

Before I get to it, notice that every other place named above is a city. As small as Bismarck to as large as LA, from the rust of Northeast Ohio to the lush Pacific Northwest, from staid St. Paul to raucous Lou’ville. They all have that same thing I never noticed until I moved to Denver and, out of necessity, became a street-musician. As someone working outdoors, moving from place to place downtown, I was bound to notice:

Wall murals.

More specifically, the murals often included a scene of musicians jamming in a park, at a block party, or on an outdoor stage. What made me take note was the ethnic make-up: The guitarists and fiddlers might be anyone, but–apart from Native Americans in groups of their own–the drummers were always Black and Hispanic while the wind players were always Asian and White.

As I say, this was a previous lifetime, and perhaps things have changed. There’s nothing racist about the images, as a good time was being had by all. And all were clearly enjoying each other’s company (and accompaniment) in each one I ever saw.

Moreover, I myself was an example. A white flautist who frequently played with an African-American drummer who wore robes and bright colors that may not have been noticeable in Havana or Kinshasa, but which I’m sure increased our take in Denver’s historic Larimer Square. Not only that, but I saw it in other cities in both planned events and spontaneous gatherings–both in the murals and in the actual events and gatherings: Black and brown percussion; white and yellow wind.

We all know or know of so many exceptions to that rule that it is hardly a rule at all, perhaps something peculiar to those of us who play in streets and parks, who form impromptu gatherings. Perhaps the murals that have been painted on downtown buildings since the Carter-into-Reagan years have desegregated urban music as depicted on downtown walls.

That was when most of my jam sessions included Native Americans on drums and guitars. Since then, at King Richard’s Faire, I’ve jammed with numerous white drummers; an Ecuadorian piper occasionally joined me in downtown Salem; and it was an African-American flautist (half my age, I might add) who taught me how to play Mozart’s “Turkish March.”

Next time I trek past the Mississippi, or past the Hudson, I’ll be looking to see if the muralists have caught up to us.

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A detail from a wall of the Lafayette Building in Detroit taken in 2008. The building has since been demolished.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/71288712@N00/2342588854

Go Tell It on the Canvas

On one of those scorching days last week, a friend and I scrapped our plan to take a long stroll aside Portland’s Harbor looking at lighthouses and opted for the air-conditioned Portland Museum instead.

She had heard rave reviews of a traveling retrospective, David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History, so we both donned our coincidentally salmon-colored hats for the sake of shade on the way to see the work of an artist neither of us had ever heard of.

When we found ourselves staring at a painting of a couple who were also wearing salmon-colored hats, we wondered if he may have heard of us.

Driskell’s Farmer and His Wife bears as little resemblance to us as to American Gothic, but it does recall Grant Wood’s iconic, much-loved, often-parodied portrait–an undeniable reminder that no matter how diverse our looks, no matter how distant our homes, our food is shared.

In this, and in many of Driskell’s depictions of African-Americans, similarities as well as differences are not measured in black and white, but in colors. In one flip moment, I called Driskell “Picasso with far more detail.” My friend added “and color.” Could have added “and relevance,” but with Driskell, that goes without saying.

Among our favorites was Let the Church Roll On. My friend smiled and nodded when I told her it would make a fine Christmas card. It was a half-joke, but I’d have been more on point calling it a fine greeting card. The painting captures the history of Black churches so completely that you can hear the music out its windows. We welcome that year-round.

*Homage to Romare*, 1976. “One of my heroes of the Southern experience is a Black artist, Romare Bearden” DD

If there’s a recurring theme in Driskell’s work, it’s the split face. Many of his paintings have one; several have two. Many of his faces are vibrant on one side, dull on the other. Joyous on one, ghastly on the other. Enraged on one, scheming on the other. They may look like jesters or ghouls from an earlier century, but they document all that James Baldwin and other Black writers claimed, all that Dick Gregory and other Black comedians attacked, and all that Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights leaders warned of:

The need to wear a facade for the outside world, the need for Blacks to repress themselves. Not to mention the implied expectation of the rest of us for them to do it, as if who they really are does not matter. As if “comfort zone” is a euphemism for white privilege.

And then there are the landscapes, many at night, and still-lifes. Just as colorful and just as Cubist, they give the conscience a break while aiming at curiosity. The landscapes have suns and moons you don’t notice unless you survey the field or forest in the foreground with some care. The sun then sets in surprise; the moon rises as reward.

Meanwhile, you and your friend may debate if that’s a zucchini or a bottle of dish soap to the left of that bowl of apples. Or are they lemons and limes?

My favorite was “Gabriel.” When I admitted to my friend that I couldn’t make sense of it, she told me to step back, and there it was: The horn, more sax than trumpet, stretched from a musician in a pose more like Miles Davis and from a face puffed more like Louis Armstrong than the figure atop the church in Salt Lake City.

The archangel has a special place in Black culture and lore, something that I learned while teaching an American literature course years ago. The textbook included playwright August Wilson’s Fences which has a character named Gabriel–played by Mykelti Williamson in the 2016 film adaptation. For years, long before I ever heard of “critical race theory,” introducing young Americans of all backgrounds to Wilson’s work was as urgent to me as waking them up to Baldwin’s Fire and King’s Letter.

Today it is why I write of David Driskell, an artist who clearly knew us.

“I am the quilter that my mother was. I am the builder, the gardener, and farmer that my father was. In my biblical subjects, I am the preacher that my father and grandfather were. I am a sophisticated country bumpkin.” DD
Original photo by Frank Stewart

David Clyde Driskell, born in Georgia, 1931, and schooled in North Carolina before earning degrees at Howard University, Catholic University, and the Netherlands Institute for the History of Art, died last year of COVID. He had a long relationship with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture which began in 1953, and occasionally taught at Bowdoin, not far from a studio he kept in Falmouth, Maine.

David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History will be at the Portland Museum of Art through September 12.

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https://www.portlandmuseum.org/driskell

All photos by Carla Valentine of South Portland, except Gabriel, found at shopbaiaonline.com, and this:

Why was Gabriel my favorite? Well, there I was 42 years ago standing on rocks on the Standing Rock Reservation near the border between the two Dakotas with the Missouri River barely visible in the background. I was so much older then. Photo by Michael Boer.
https://onewe.wordpress.com/

A Problem We All Live With

To take the slogan “MAGA” literally, we have to imagine what it looked like. We white folk might imagine the wholesome gallery of Norman Rockwell paintings we grew up with: Saying Grace, Freedom from Want, The Runaway, Home from Camp, After the Prom, Courting Couple at the Midnight Border, Fishing Trip, Playing Checkers, and many more that keep reappearing to this day on placemats, greeting cards, advertisements.

But it would not be a full gallery.

Over the past few years, I’m not the only white Boomer who has seen Murder in Mississippi or The Problem We All Live With for the first time during the advent of Black Lives Matter. After the initial shock, we would do well to remember that all those most popular paintings listed above–plus dozens more where they came from–are ample proof that white lives have always mattered.

Lesson to be drawn here may be boiled down to a dozen words as clear and direct as any Rockwell illustration: White people have an “again” in “great again.” Black people do not.

Then again, there has been no lack of history regarding the immigrants from Europe denied their children and grandchildren.

“For God & Country”

If you never heard of Juneteenth or what happened in Tulsa in 1921, don’t feel bad. Born and raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts, I never heard of the city’s 1912 labor strike until I left to attend Salem State College 22 miles away.

While there were strikes in dozens of American factory towns a century ago–a history that is absent from textbooks commonly used in American schools for reasons I’ll summarize below–Lawrence is among the Labor Movement’s three landmark events, partly because it was the birth of Bread & Roses, a labor tradition observed to this day.

Closest I came to knowing my native city’s history while still there was as an 11-year-old who marched with his 7th-grade Catholic class, hands holding rosary beads, clasped in prayer before us in a parade called “For God and Country”–a re-enactment of the parade 50 years earlier held by those who opposed the workers whom they believed to be communists and atheists.

Imagine if, in the year 2070, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are dressed up and given props to march under the banner “All Lives Matter”–or maybe “Law & Order”–in an observance of what is happening today.

As improbable as that may sound, it is no more of a distortion than the glorifying statues that many of us want taken down and moved out of public view. Might say that such a march is as much of an imposition on the public–or indoctrination regarding children–as the statues and flags. (Unlike a book that can be opened or kept shut, debated or agreed upon, remembered or forgotten.)

But the parades last just a day. The statues and most of those Confederate flags are every day, 24/7.

As kids, of course, we didn’t know any better and enjoyed the excitement of walking the length of both of downtown’s main drags, waving at our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, all of whom seemed to find offices with large windows above the stores.

Highlight of the day was meeting and shaking hands with the US Attorney General and his hulking younger brother who was a candidate for Massachusetts’ open US Senate seat in 1962, a seat left open when their older brother became the first Catholic US president.*

Will children 50 years from now have a chance at such memories? Will children today have the pleasure of greeting AG Barr and, say, the Georgia Republican who is favored to win a US House seat with television ads that show her cocking the trigger of an automatic rifle? (Since this was written, she won the primary and is expected to win easily in November. She’s an enthusiastic advocate of QAnon and has the endorsement of the Republican president.)

Look Away, Look Away

If there was a consensus among the many comments I heard and read last week, it was a regret that so much of American history has “just slipped away.”

But it didn’t just slip away. It is deliberately excluded from textbooks that are marketed coast to coast. For the sake of sales, publishers have to meet the requirements of the large, unified school districts, which tend to be in the south and ultra-conservative. One criterion in Texas–the largest district in the USA–is that nothing can be critical of the free market system.

The Labor Movement is, therefore, absent from most history texts. Slavery is often mentioned in a single paragraph that tells us most all slaves were treated very well and were quite happy. Yes, these are deep red states, but the book is marketed nationally, so, in effect, Texas and Georgia and a few others determine what is in the texts that are then made available to the entire country–at a lower cost than more detailed and accurate texts that are doomed to far less acceptance.

Another criterion calls for the exclusion of writers who had any “suspicious” contact with the Communist Party. Here’s one battle that the otherwise defeated and disgraced Sen. Joe McCarthy won, as Texas and other districts adopted his list to sanitize both history and literature texts. Since Jim Crow was still the law of their land, African American authors naturally met with Communists and others in the hopes of changing that law. Hence, the criterion effectively banned all African American authors through the era of Civil Rights and continues to ban those before Civil Rights to this day.**

All while statues of military heros of an army that betrayed and fought against the United States–many of whom owned slaves who were never treated humanely–remain standing for all to admire and for many to enjoy as backdrops for their smiling selfies.

–30-

*Two years earlier, St. Augustine’s Elementary School celebrated his election. As I recall, we did it in part as a victory against discrimination. There were no Black students in the school, or adults in the neighborhoods, to remind us that it was, at best, a partial victory.

**The 1996 film Lone Star, set near the Alamo, includes a scene with teachers describing the textbooks they are issued and the demoralizing effect they have on Hispanic children:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116905/