Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe in her early thirties
Text copyright © 2019 by Carolyn Meyer
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Although this work is based on the life of Georgia O’Keeffe, it is a work of fiction. Some names, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used to enhance the story.
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ISBN: 978-1-62979-934-6 (hc)
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955595
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For Deborah Blanche, actor
Taos, New Mexico—Summer 1929
“MISS O’KEEFFE, SLOW DOWN, PLEASE. YOU ARE going to kill us.” Tony spoke calmly, as though he didn’t mind dying.
I was flying down a rutted dirt road outside of Taos behind the wheel of a shiny black Buick roadster. I ignored Tony and pulled the throttle. The roadster shot forward. This was my second lesson, and I already knew that I loved driving fast. I wasn’t going to slow down just because this man told me I should.
“Mabel will be mad if you wreck her auto. She loves it, maybe more than she loves me.”
The Buick belonged to Mabel, Tony’s wife. Mabel was very rich, and she could buy another automobile if anything happened to this one. She’d come to New Mexico from New York. At her house, Los Gallos—“The Roosters”—she made herself the center of attention, surrounding herself with artists and other interesting people. My friend Beck and I were staying in a little guest casita on her property. Tony Lujan, the tall, handsome, broad-chested Taos Indian in the passenger seat beside me, was Mabel’s fourth husband. He was holding my box of watercolors and a sketchpad on his lap. He didn’t talk much.
“Bridge ahead,” Tony said.
I’d been across that bridge—no railings, just some wooden planks laid end to end and a pair of posts—on my first lesson. “So narrow only an angel can fly over it,” I’d told Beck afterward.
“Watch this!” I said, aiming straight for the bridge. “I’m going to thread the needle!”
Tony sucked in his breath but didn’t say a word. We hurtled across, the wooden planks rattling, with only inches to spare on either side. I let out an exultant whoop.
But on the far end I misjudged somehow, and the Buick clipped a post with its right fender. There was a loud crunch, the Buick spun around, and next thing I knew, we were facing back the way we came. One of the rear wheels was lodged in a ditch.
My heart was pumping fast. I looked at Tony. “Not good,” he said.
We climbed out to inspect the damage. The right fender was as crumpled as an old rag, and the bumper hung at a rakish angle. Tony sighed and shook his head. “Mabel is going to be mad.”
“She’s in Buffalo for a month, isn’t she? I’ll have it fixed before she gets back. She doesn’t have to know.” I tried to sound calm, reasonable.
“You were not paying attention, and you were going too fast,” Tony said.
“I know it was my fault.” I walked around the auto again. “What do we do now?”
“We wait.”
We sat beside the Buick. Tony was silent. It was very pleasant, sitting there by the side of the road. The air was cool and fresh. The sun was sinking, bathing majestic Taos Mountain, still snowcapped, in a rosy glow. I retrieved my watercolors from the auto and began a painting, working quickly before the light faded.
I showed it to Tony. “Sacred Mountain,” he said. “Mó-ha-loh in our language. Very powerful. If you stay here, it is because the Mountain has allowed it.”
Eventually somebody from the pueblo came along on horseback. The two men discussed the situation in their language. Then they tied one end of a rope to the saddle horn, the other end to the front bumper. They got behind the auto and pushed, I urged the horse to pull, and the roadster was eased up out of the ditch.
I was more cautious driving back to Los Gallos, my confidence shaken.
Tony said nothing until we pulled up near the shed in back of the Big House. “That was your last lesson,” he said.
“I don’t need any more instruction?”
He shook his head. “You drive very bad. I will not go with you again.”
He walked away. I didn’t know whether to laugh or throw something at him. Beck came out of her studio—Beck was a painter, too. “How did the lesson go?”
“Tony quit. You’re my new teacher.”
“Me? What happened?”
I shrugged. “Just a little problem. I won’t be driving Mabel’s Buick anymore. I’m going to buy my own auto.”
I wondered if what Tony had said was true—that I could stay here if the Sacred Mountain allowed it.
Part I
“I’m going to be an artist.”
1
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin—Summer 1900
THE FIRST TIME I TOLD ANYONE THAT I WAS GOING to be an artist, Lena and I were hanging wet sheets on a clothesline. Linen is heavy when it’s wet, and it took two of us to make sure the sheets didn’t drag on the ground. Lena’s mother was our washerwoman, and Lena was my best friend. I was twelve years old, and she was thirteen and taller than me and had a bosom.
We heaved another sheet over the line. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I asked. The question just popped out.
Lena’s dark eyes flickered over me. “A grown-up lady, I guess.” She squared up the corners of the sheet. I passed her a couple of wooden clothespins from a cloth bag, and she clamped the sheet to the line. “Like your ma, and mine, looking after a husband and a whole lot of children.” I had six brothers and sisters; Lena had eight. Lena shrugged, her skinny shoulders going up and down. “You planning on being something different?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am going to be an artist.”
I felt very sure about that, although I’d only just arrived at that decision. It was like stepping off a train in a town I’d never been to before.
Lena’s face always showed exactly what she was feeling. She shook her head and frowned. “An artist? What d’you mean, Georgie? What kind of artist you planning on being?”
I hadn’t thought about that part. Were there different kinds? “I want to paint pictures,” I said.
Lena snatched a pillow slip from the basket and flapped it hard. “Pictures of what? Cows? Plenty of them around here, for sure.”
Ours was a dairy farm with tobacco as the main cash crop, like most other farms in this part of Wisconsin. She was right—there were plenty of cows.
“Pictures of people, but not just anybody. Only people who are good-looking.” Gloomy portraits of Mama’s ancestors glared down from the walls in our parlor. I didn’t want to paint anything like those.
Lena’s face, round and plain as a custard pie, collapsed into a pout. “Of me?” she asked in a pinched voice, and I understood that she was afraid she wasn’t good-looking enough for me to paint her picture.
“Of course, Lena! A very nice one of you!”
Her pout faded, a smile broke across her face, and for that minute she was good-looking. Almost. Her eyes were too
close together, and there was no help for that.
We threw the last sheet over the clothesline. Lena propped up the sagging rope with a wooden pole. A breeze came up, and the sheets billowed like sails.
I stepped back to admire a drift of clouds piling up along the western horizon. The clouds had taken on a violet tint that was deepening to purple. “Look at that sky, Lena,” I said. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Nuh-uh. Gonna rain, for sure,” she grumbled, “and we’ll just have to take everything down and then hang it all up after it’s done.”
Lena was right again. We’d just climbed up the narrow, twisty stairs to my tower room when the sky turned the color of wet slate and daggers of lightning slashed through the clouds. We rushed down to rescue the bed linens before the rain broke loose, but we weren’t quick enough to avoid getting soaking wet ourselves.
I was the next-to-oldest O’Keeffe, after Francis; then came four sisters with another brother in between. Our mother said that each of us had been given a different talent, and some of us more than others. My sister Ida, two years younger, was the one Mama decided had the most artistic talent. Every time Ida drew a pretty picture, Mama made a fuss about it. I kept it to myself that I did not have in mind just drawing pretty pictures—I was going to be an artist. There was a difference, and I knew that, even then.
On long winter evenings we gathered in the parlor, and Mama read to us, working her way through all five books of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Sometimes she played the piano and we sang. Mama had taught me to read music and started me on scales and arpeggios, but I wanted to learn to play the violin, because Papa did—he called it a fiddle. He loved to dance, too, and taught us jigs and reels. “It’s the Irish in me,” he said, and I believed I was like my father and had plenty of the Irish in me, too. When I was about seven, Mama found a music teacher in Sun Prairie who taught both violin and piano and gave me lessons for a year. I was quite passionate about both instruments but not about practicing—I either played for hours each day or not at all for days. After the teacher moved away, I kept on with my exercise book for a while and then I stopped.
All but the youngest of us O’Keeffe children trooped down the dirt road to Town Hall School at the edge of our property. Three dozen or so students from neighboring farms attended the dark and dismal one-room schoolhouse. It was old: our parents had gone there as children. Lena and I had shared a desk since the first day of first grade, when I was five and she was six. The teacher, Mrs. Edison, boarded with us during the week.
I was in school because I had to be. I disliked it, but I was well-behaved, so as not to disappoint Mama.
A few years later Mama hired Mrs. Edison’s sister, Miss Belle, to come out from Sun Prairie once a week to give art lessons to Ida and my second sister, Anita (who we called Nita), and me. Miss Belle showed us a book of drawings of balls and pyramids and cylinders, and we practiced copying those shapes. Everybody in Sun Prairie agreed that Miss Belle had natural artistic talent. Just like Ida, I guess. I was about ten and I tried hard, but my drawings didn’t receive much praise. Not like Ida’s.
It didn’t take long for Miss Belle to run out of inspiration. “I’ve taught the girls all I know, Mrs. O’Keeffe,” she said, as if apologizing for not knowing more.
The next year, when I was eleven, Mama found someone in the village with a larger supply of artistic ideas. Twice a month Papa hitched Danny Boy, our best draft horse, to our new John Deere wagon—we always called it “the John Deere”—and drove Ida and Nita and me to Mrs. Sarah Mann’s home in Sun Prairie for lessons.
The walls of Mrs. Mann’s house were white; the furniture was plain, and there wasn’t much of it. This was not like our house, where the parlor was stuffed with velvet settees and carved chests, the walls were papered with floral designs, and crocheted shawls and antimacassars were draped on everything. I liked the plainness, but I did wonder if Mrs. Mann was unable to afford the nice things my mother favored.
She had us sit on benches at an unpainted wood table, gave each of us a box of watercolors, a cup of water, clean brushes, and a sheet or two of paper, and passed around art books with colorful pictures she called “chromos” that we were supposed to copy.
I turned the pages carefully, studying the pictures and trying to understand how the artist could look at a bunch of real flowers or a real tree or a real horse and then figure out how to show its likeness on a sheet of paper. I chose a chromo of a bowl of red roses and tried to copy it, but my roses didn’t look like the ones in the picture. They did not look like real roses either.
We took our little paintings home and showed them to our mother. “Lovely colors, Ida,” she said. “You’ve captured the horse quite well, Nita.” Then she glanced at mine and frowned. “Rather unusual, Georgie.” Mama doled out praise as if her supply was limited.
Nevertheless, she put my painting of the roses in a carved wooden frame and hung it in the parlor next to a painting that Grandmother Totto—Mama’s mother—had done of two plums and one by Grandmother O’Keeffe of moss roses. While they were alive, my grandmothers had painted bright pictures of flowers and fruit and outdoor scenes. Both of them had died when I was younger, but their ghosts hung around everywhere, like their pictures.
“Strong ladies, those two,” Papa used to say. “You’re a lot like them, Georgie.”
Mama and Papa were married because of those two strong ladies. The O’Keeffe and Totto families had once owned farms next to each other. Papa was only ten when his father died, but he left school to help his brothers run the O’Keeffe farm. After a few years he grew restless and struck out for the West. Meanwhile, down the road, George Totto, a Hungarian count with four daughters and two sons, went back to Hungary to collect money he believed was owed him. My grandmother had to figure out how to survive while the family waited for him to return. The two boys were too young to be much help, and it cost too much to hire extra farmhands. After the longest time Grandfather Totto still hadn’t come back, and no one knew what had happened to him. The two women put their heads together and arranged for a Totto daughter, twenty-year-old Ida, to marry an O’Keeffe son, Frank, who was thirty-one by then, merging the two families and the two farms and solving their problems.
It always bothered me that my parents named me Georgia Totto O’Keeffe for a man who’d deserted his family. But I never asked why he hadn’t come back or why they’d given me his name, and they never explained.
Grandmother Totto’s sister Jennie had come to help with her fatherless nieces and nephews. After my parents married and their first baby, Francis, was born, Jennie moved in with them, and she stayed on as one after another of us arrived. I was next, followed by Ida, Anita, Alexius, Catherine, and Claudia. Auntie played with us and did all the things that Mama was too busy to do, like letting us ride her handsome carriage horse, Penelope. We called the little mare “Penny-lope.”
Auntie taught me to sew outfits for my family of dolls, and even when I was very young I knew how to cut the cloth and make small, neat stitches. But more important than what she taught me to do was how she made me feel. I believed I was Auntie’s favorite, and that mattered because I knew that Francis was Mama’s favorite: he was a boy and the oldest. Francis, of all of us, was most like our mother, tall and thin with Mama’s delicate features, dark eyes, and long, thick eyelashes. Quiet and studious like her, too. Our father was burly and broad-chested, outgoing and hearty. “A doer, not a thinker,” Mama said.
Anything Francis could do, I was determined to do as well as he did, or even better. I raced him on the way to school and taunted him when I won, which I often did. And I wouldn’t stop bragging when I got better marks than his, which I often did too. Francis was short-sighted, and I teased him by pretending to see things that weren’t really there.
“Look at that bird, Francis!” I’d say, squinting up into the empty sky. “A raptor, and what’s that he’s got in his claws?” Nothing, of course. There was no raptor either. W
hen my brother figured out that I’d fooled him, he’d clamp his jaw so tight that he’d turn red in the face and refuse to talk to me for two or three days until I apologized. Then, as soon as I could, I’d do something like it again, just to get his goat, and it always worked.
“You mustn’t be jealous of Francis,” Auntie chided me. “He’s a boy and the oldest, so of course he gets the lion’s share of attention.”
“I’m not jealous!” I insisted. “I don’t mind at all.” But that wasn’t true. I did mind. What about the lioness’s share? Nobody ever talked about that!
The truth was, I pitied Francis for his short-sightedness. How awful it must be, I thought, not to be able to see the world clearly, always blurred. But pity didn’t keep me from tormenting him.
My sisters claimed that I was the spoiled one. I insisted on doing things my own way, which had to be not like what my sisters were doing. When they braided their hair, I let mine fly loose. When they wore ribbons, I refused. If they wore black stockings, mine had to be white.
“That Georgie!” they said, making sour faces. “Always has to be different—her and her crazy notions!”
In a big family like ours, if you wanted something you had to figure out a way to get it on your own. Papa had built a tower onto one corner of our farmhouse—I guess he, too, liked things that were different—and I wanted the room at the top with the big windows that faced north and west. You could see sunsets and storms coming in and stars blinking on. I declared that I must have it all to myself because I deserved it. Ida and Nita, who had to share a room, insisted that it was not fair—Ida loudly, Nita quietly but persistently—and that we should take turns. Auntie tried to keep the peace, but I raised such a fuss that they gave in, although they never entirely stopped complaining. Auntie squeezed in with the two littlest ones, Catherine and Claudia, called Claudie, who were too young to protest. No one was allowed to come up to my tower room unless I granted permission. Boots, our black and white cat, spent most of his time with me there. I never wanted to leave it.
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