Aware

When I was at Millsaps, one of my most favorite people was a guy named Jerry Jeff Berry.  An unusually brilliant guy; he had one of the most unique perspectives I've ever known.

As a teenager, he once tried to climb to the top of Kentucky Fried Chicken on North State Street because he wanted to touch the giant bucket on top--an impulse I completely understood.  Like many things he and I climbed in our youth, that roof wasn't meant for climbing, and he fell off, resulting in a coma that lasted for several weeks.  When people asked him what it was like being in a coma, he said: 

"One day, you'll open this eye.  The next day, you'll open this other eye.  The whole time, you're never really aware if you're aware."

I thought that's such a perfect description of my own life, of my perspective on life:  I'm never really aware if I'm aware.  

Many years later now, I don't know if that condition ever really changed.  At least now I'm aware that I'm not really sure if I'm aware.  

He had a pretty remarkable career after Millsaps, which included, for a short while, selling mattresses.  I thought, for a guy who questioned reality after falling off Kentucky Fried Chicken, providing people with something soft to land on must seem like such an utter act of kindness and wisdom.  

"Take this, my friend; you'll never know when you'll need it."

The Branches of God

People sit in the same spot on the same pew they first chose fifty years ago.  It's been some time since this was the kind of church anyone attended to be fashionable or impress anyone.  We sit between the governor's mansion and the state capitol, and that's the kind of place we have in the history of Mississippi, never the seat of power, but close enough to it to have an influence, a reminder to those who do make the law to be just, and remember the example of the Christ.  The pastor who would have baptized me resigned his post rather than bar the door to people who were not white.  Another pastor became a Christian when he met Nelson Mandella while they were both in prison.  Pastors leave our church to become bishops and teachers.

In her pews, I have sat behind governors, lieutenant governors, senators, congressmen, lawyers, doctors, and professors of every sort, the rich, the poor, indigent, indulgent, athletes, old, young, hale, the infirmed (both mentally and physically), infants, immigrants, centenarians, artists, actors, musicians, mentors, companions, fellow travelers, friends, lovers.

They practice words they've said ten thousand times before:
     Praise God, from whom all blessings flow
     praise him all creatures here below

Look not with your eyes but with your heart at the people in the pews, and you'll see green tendrils grow from their fingers and their feet and their mouths and their ears, through the pews reaching out and to and through each other, some branches decades old, some the bright green shoots of youth, a mat, a net, a mesh, holding each to the other, through the years, through their lives, even when they're absent for many years like I was.  They become a broad, ancient, wide-reaching tree in the garden of God.

The branches and tendrils reach out from each other through the windows and doors, out into the city and countryside, taking root in the homeless and the hungry, the young and the old, the harried and the orphan, the forlorn and the forgotten.  They reach out to places of music and art, philosophy and discourse, broadening the reach and scope and influence of this old tree, seeking any human soul it can touch, and heal, and improve.

A church isn't a thing you sit in; it's the people you sit with.  It's a place people go to connect together, making themselves stronger and extending their reach out into the world.  You can't see them, but the branches of God are all around you, reaching for you in your greatest despair or proudest victory.  Sit very still, close your eyes, and feel the roots, the tendrils, and the branches reach out from you to the souls around you.  You are the branches of God.

My Life In Colors: A New Palette

I'd rather buy paints than candy.  It makes me happy.  Artists paints are similar to candy.  Bright colors, creative wrappers, and arcane and mysterious manufacturing processes fans whisper about.

A palette is a physical object.  A board or a slate, often depicted with a thumb hole in one end, upon which an artist piles their colors, waiting for a brush.  Canvas, Paint, Brush: that is art, it comes in many forms.  

Artists use the physical palette in one form or another, but they use the word to describe the collection of colors used to create a particular project.  Once you expand the definition from "canvas" to "project," then you start incorporating things like interior design, lighting design, stage and beauty makeup, fashion, and more.  Since I'm pretending to be an artist, that's the definition I'm going to use.  Since I've always pretended to be an artist--of palettes, I've had many.

Before we knew what wavelengths were, or prisms or rods or cones, some ancient person much smarter than I invented the color wheel using camel urine, berry juice, and mud.  They recognized that with three colors: red, blue, and green, you can create every other color.  In theory, that's all you need, three hues, plus white and black, to create value among the hues.  Artists laugh at this.  Nobody has just five colors.  There are hundreds of light gels and thousands, tens of thousands of paints and pigments and dyes.  The longer you create art, the more of these you accumulate.

My very first palette was a set of eight Prang primary pressed crayons.  Primary crayons are the ones as thick as your daddy's finger, in theory, easier for little ones to manipulate.  My mother asked my own daddy to bring home a case from his job at Mississippi School Supply Company, so she could donate them to my church's Sunday school.  She gave a pack to me and a pack to my sister before putting the rest away for church.  

An eight-color pack of crayons had three primary colors, three secondary colors that result from mixing the three primary colors, plus white and black.  In theory, all you ever needed.  Pressed crayons were thicker and harder than the molded crayons you got from Crayola.  They lasted longer and, used properly, could make bolder colors.  My sister, who would grow to be much more brilliant than I, mostly chewed her crayons.  I guess it was a bit early to start her with crayons.  Looks like candy--must taste like candy.  Her deductive reasoning was in order, but at two, she lacked life experience.

I was beyond happy.  I could now do what my brother did, and my brother, he created magic with his fingers, and he did it all the time.  That story ultimately didn't have a happy ending, but it had an immaculately beautiful beginning.

My next palette was a birthday present.  A pack of sixty-four Crayola crayons in a box with a sharpener.  The crayons were smaller than the ones I had before, but, oh, the colors!  Daddy regularly brought home packs of manilla art paper from work.  We needed it.

My next palette came the year I graduated from Mrs. Nelson's kindergarten to Casey Elementary School.  I didn't know it, but this was also the year that the Justice Dept. took control of Jackson Public Schools to force them to integrate and integrate immediately.  That's not a happy part of the story.  Jackson schools split in two, public and private, which meant the public schools would be slowly starved of funds that went to the private schools.  Our schools split apart and never reconciled.  I'd like to mend that one day.  If I could discover how.

At Casey, I received an eight-pack of Prang eight-ounce real tempera paints.  These also came from Mississippi School Supply, but this time they were paid for.  Our top salesman Doby Bartling sold to Jackson Public School, and our entire class got one.  Our teacher had just had a baby, so she went to the bathroom a lot.  On the fourth day of school, when the teacher was out, Francis Wilson broke out her pack of Prang paints and began painting at her desk.  Everybody said she'd get in trouble, but she didn't.  Mrs. Keys just said, "it's not time for that, honey." and put them away.  

At Casey, it was discovered that there was something wrong with how I read.  They were also forced by the men in Washington to change our teachers constantly and nearly double our enrolment so students could be bussed in.  Busses that were met by protesters with signs I didn't understand.  Those are other threads for other stories, though.

My next palette was a ten-pack of Testors model enamel paints.  They came in a box with possibly the worst paintbrush I've ever owned and included three primary colors and three secondary colors, white and black, but now adding silver and gold.  Their target was not manilla art paper but Aurora movie monster model kits.  Over the years, I accumulated more enamel paints for models than kisses from pretty girls.  I'm not saying the two are related, but they probably are.

My next palette stemmed from the monster model kits but went in a very different direction.  From the back of Dick Smith's "Monster Maker Handbook," I ordered sticks of paramount grease paint. If you've never used grease paint, they are precisely that: grease with colors mixed in.  I don't recommend it. Modern theatrical makeup is formulated completely differently.  My plan was to become the next Lon Chaney.  That job ultimately went to Rick Baker.  Baker had a twelve-year head start on me, making the entire contest completely unfair.  When it comes to two-dimensional and three-dimensional art, there's nothing Rick Baker cannot do.  I find that I can distinguish between his work, Tom Savini's, StanWinston's, William Tuttle's, and Dick Smith's, before seeing the end credits roll on the movie.  

Not long after this, Mother decided it would be ok to try and develop my artistic abilities.  Every girl I knew was forced to take piano from one little housewife or another, so I suppose she thought that painting was acceptable for me under the same conditions.  In those days painting, in one form or another, was very fashionable among Jackson housewives, producing many remarkable artists far better than me.   

For my first real art teacher, Mother chose not only a popular housewife but the daughter of my grandfather's best friend.  Alice O'ferall Riley taught oil painting in a frame and art shop in Fondren, where Fondren Public is now.  There she gave me a list of eight Grumbacher oil paints and three brushes, which I could charge to my dad at the store.  In those days, you could charge almost anything to my dad at any store, a privilege I primarily used to buy hardware of all sorts that my father never had use for from Montgomery, nutritional supplements and vitamins from Beemon, and the occasional Izod shirt from Billy Neville.  Choosing a two-generational family friend as my first art teacher was the very first of very few signs that my parents might approve of my life as a pretend artist, as long as I didn't take it too seriously.

For Christmas, I began asking Santa for paintings from my mother's friends and visits to their studios.  From this, I collected paintings from Jackie Meena, Edwina Goodman, Yvette Sturgis, Sudi Manning, and more.  In this period, I also wrangled a few visits to the studio of sculptor Katherine Speed but never collected any of her works.  They were too big.

In college, my art career peaked for a while.  Lucy Millsaps taught me acrylics, which worked similarly to oils but were somewhat easier to use and considerably less expensive.  She also taught me drawing with pencils and inks.  Although the school taught figure drawing, Lucy suggested I take from BeBe Wolfe, who taught it after hours using live, full-on nekkid models.  Rowan Taylor sat on the art horse next to mine.  I guess he decided to add drawing to the list of the other million things he could do better than me.  I made it almost all the way through the course before we used a model who I knew socially.  That was awkward.  She was pretty, but weird.

After college, I decided to put art away and be serious about life for a while and go to work for my Dad.  That wasn't such a great decision.  If I had kept the art and tried to do both, it might have gone better, but that's water under the bridge.

After my father died, I returned to Millsaps, looking for something I needed that needed me in return.  There I found my new teacher: Brent Lefavor.  Brent taught ground I'd already covered, like color theory and makeup, but he also introduced me to the world of painting with light.  That's not only a whole new palette but an entirely new way of thinking about color.  I'd learned to make art with paint and printing and now light itself!  That made me very happy.  Like Lucy, Brent taught me something more important than the art itself.  They taught me to live as an artist.  How to deal with this torrent inside yourself that made you want to be an artist. 

The happiness didn't last for reasons that are really complicated, but it ended with me going into a cave and staying there for many years.  No art, no friends, no life, no light.  

I think what I learned in those days was that, for an artist, living without art can break you.  Break you into little pieces that don't know each other.  Fortunately, my pieces did find each other again and pulled themselves back together again, like some sort of reverse hydra, 

Living in the world of creation again, I'd been drawing again and outlandishly, letting the world see my writing for a few months when I saw a sign on the wall.

"Watercolor lessons--1:00--Activity Room"

I'd tried watercolor before, but I didn't like it.  It didn't like me, rather.  Watercolor painting doesn't behave like other forms of painting.  It doesn't behave at all.  You don't really paint with wet-on-wet watercolors; you negotiate with them.  Still, nearly every painting housewife I knew worked in watercolor.  Jackie Meena painted enormous ones across the street from my childhood home.  I'd watched Wyatt Watters paint several times.  He paints in public like it's nobody's business.  I'm not sure how he does it.  More importantly, every morning, I passed by three Edwina Goodman paintings, paintings she made while her mind and her body were slipping away from her, paintings I would have been happy with at the height of my mental and physical abilities.  "What can it hurt to try?"  I thought.

Having not painted for real in almost twenty years, having a brush in my hand was incredibly energizing.  These were my friends.  They remembered me.  I've already posted a copy of that first painting.  I'll post it again.  Looking at it now, there are twenty things I think I could have done better, but doing it made me very happy.  

Maybe I shouldn't have been afraid of watercolor all those years.  Maybe I had to be ready for the experience.  After thinking about it for a while, I decided I wanted to do this for real.  That meant shopping.  

First, I'll need the actual physical palette.  For watercolor, that means something either nylon or vinyl with divots around the edge, which watercolorists call "wells," where you squeeze butterbean-sized portions of paint, hopefully in some sort of order.  The paint comes out of the tube a thick cream, but it will dry pretty rigidly.  It doesn't matter if it dries because you wet your brush to activate it anyway. 

As for the paints themselves, there are dozens of brands of watercolor paints, including three companies I used to represent at Mississippi School Supply.  I wanted something a step above student grade but a step down from professional.  Professional paints can be rather expensive, and at the end of the day, I'm just a beginner in this medium.  I decided to go with Winsor Newton, one of the oldest, most respected manufacturers of paint, without being the most expensive.

Building my starting palette, I'm falling back on the color wheel taught to me so many times, most recently by my beloved Brent Lefavor.  I thought about ordering just three colors and seeing if I really could make every color from them.  I slept on that for a couple of days, but ultimately decided that would be showing off, making me a jerk, and denying me all those delicious tubes of candy-colored paint.   

There is such a thing as "true" primary colors, as measured by their wavelengths using a special kind of Spectrometer.  Pigments don't really work that way, though.  Pigments use either natural or artificial chemical sources (some of the natural ones are bizarre) mixed with a binder they approximate "true" colors.  Winsor and Newton makes three grades of watercolor, the professional line, the student line, and the hobby line, they call "Cotman," which I'm using.  According to Winsor and Newton, their best approximation of the primary colors is 346 Lemon Yellow, 660 Ultramarine Blue, and 502 Permanent Rose.  There's also something called a six-color system, but let's stick with the basics for right now.  

Winsor & Newton doesn't really suggest secondary colors, and they don't make really simple, "green, violet, and orange," so I had to look around at other sources.  Ultimately I chose Viridian Green 696, Mauve 398, and Yellow Ochre 744.  All of these can be made warmer or cooler, mixed with a primary color, and lighter or darker using lamp black 337 or Chinese white 150.  

There is no such thing as a perfect starter palette.  I'm not terrible at mixing colors, so I should be able to make anything work.  Brent made us match color swatches using whatever was in the paint cabinet before, so I figure I can do this.  This, by no means, is the end of my paint shopping.  In a year, I probably will have added at least two or three times as many tubes, not to mention as many masks and friskets.  This is a new adventure but a very familiar one.  My life is in color again.  

Ancient History My Youth

I've read fifteen, maybe twenty books about the civil rights movement, particularly when it comes to what happened in Mississippi.  A really disturbing thing happens when I do this: these books, they talk about people I've met, people I know, and sometimes people I know or knew really well.  Events happen within organizations, and sometimes physical places I know, sometimes really well.  This wasn't ancient history.  This was my youth.  MY youth.

When I go to Millsaps now, I see kids wandering around thinking about each other, or games, or their books, or their supper, and I think, "do you know what went on here?  Do you KNOW?"

Every single book talks about Millsaps and Tougaloo.  Every single one.  More than Ole Miss, most of them.  They almost never mention State or Southern or Belhaven, but always Millsaps, and more often than not Galloway.

I'd like to say that my school and my church were always on the side of right and good and love, but they weren't.  They resisted.  They sought the moderate path.  I can say that both broached the color barrier considerably earlier than their neighbors.  I don't mean breached, either.  They broached it; they pierced this great vessel of hate and let gravity and time widen the orifice, every moment a pain to some and a celebration to others.

Whenever racial matters came up, dad would wince a little in pain.  No matter what he chose, no matter what he did, someone was going to make a hateful phone call to him.  Someone was going to apply pressure on him to do what they wanted and threaten to do something to hurt the school.  Both sides.  To other people, I'm sure it looked like his face never changed, but I could see it; my mother could, as did my brother, my sister, Rowan, Deaton, and Wingate.  There were signs.  Dad could never be a civil rights hero.  He had to be moderate.  He had to maybe not please both sides but appease them.  The moderate path is not a heroic one, not outwardly,  but inwardly; you're facing pressures and assaults from all sides that have to be maintained without overtly offending anyone.

George was just the opposite.  He was still moderate but never stoic.  He was bombastic, always.  He said, and I heard him say it, "We follow every law, every rule, every goddamn regulation with regards to race."  What he didn't say, but was very clear by his actions, was, "BUT, we will deal with almost anything else.  We will not draw attention to Millsaps with this kind of strife."  In his mind, he was protecting us.  To many, that made him an asshole, a cultural fascist, but I think he was ok with that.  In his mind, he was putting his body between the school and what might hurt it.  He was strong enough to take the heat himself.   

What George knew, what I've come to understand, is that in issues of cultural evolution, the majority never see those who seek change as heroes; at the moment, they're the villains, and only through the lens of history do they become heroes.  In the moment, you don't want to be the guy who resists change either.  You might be a hero in the moment, but history will paint you a villain.  Consider Ross Barnett.  He was a hero in the moment, but what is he now?

George was a little guy, but he was strong, and when he hunkered down, nothing would move him.  Not even my dad.  That's the moderate path, though.  You're a stone in the stream.  You let the water flow over and past you, but you resist it, slowing its force, protecting the weaker creatures living in the lee side of your life.  

I'd love to say that George and my dad were firebrands for social justice in the civil rights movement.  I'd love to say they were revolutionaries because history makes heroes of revolutionaries.  That's not the case, though.  In that moment, in that day, they had to protect what was and let the waters of revolution and change flow around them to their destination.

I'm proud of the place Millsaps and Galloway hold in the history of Mississippi and the revolution of the civil rights movement.  It wasn't a straightforward path, though.  There were times when we resisted and times when we let the water flow through, and we were always among the first to reach the goal of change but always criticized for not being THE first, although we sometimes were.

Traditionalists hate moderates, but sometimes revolutionaries hate them even more.  They want to burn down the world and rebuild it with their philosophy, but that's not always the best path.  There are people living in the homes revolutionaries want to burn, and it's the moderates who shelter them while the world changes.  You don't become a hero.  Nobody builds statues to moderates, but you serve the future and the past and shelter the present, which is a much more difficult task.

Conservatives build dams.  Revolutionaries plow deep channels to let the water charge past with destructive force.  Moderates build meanders and baffles in the stream to stop the flood but let the water pass by us into the sea.  Conservatives hate us.  Revolutionaries hate us. But the water gets to where it needs to go with as little damage as possible.