by Ron Hall
“Yes, yes, I understand,” he slurred, smiling and wobbling a little as he ushered me out his front door. “Trust me.”
Back at LAX, I called Deborah. “Great news!” I said. “I met a collector out here who’s going to sell the Russell and send us the money.”
Deborah sounded guarded. “What’s he like?”
I hesitated, not sure an accurate description would be helpful. “Well . . . his name is Barney Goldberg—”
“Did you get a receipt or a contract?”
“No . . .”
“You do have insurance on the painting, don’t you?”
“No . . .”
“Are you crazy!” she unloaded into the phone. “This sounds like a scam! You go back to that house and get that painting!”
“It’s too late,” I said, suddenly exhausted. “I’m out of money, and my plane is leaving in a few minutes.”
I hung up and flew back to Fort Worth, guts churning. The next day I began trying to call Goldberg, to get a receipt at the very least. But each time I dialed, long unanswered rings sang through the line, mocking me across the miles. I called every day for forty-three days and never reached him. As the ninety-day clock wound down, Mr. Crowfoot began phoning me almost daily to remind me of where to send his check. Nerves ate twenty pounds off my bones.
On the forty-fourth and final day, I called Snookems again, this time from the bank, and he finally answered.
“Where have you been, and why haven’t you answered your phone!” I yelled.
Poopsie . . . ,” he said in a mild reproach. “I’ve been in Hawaii.” He pronounced “it “Hi-wah-ya.”
“Don’t give me that Poopsie crap! Where’s my money?”
“Check your account,” he said calmly. “I wired it to you a couple of days ago.”
I put him on hold and called down to Jean in bookkeeping, who informed me that $40,000 was sitting in my account, having been wired there by a Mr. Barney Goldberg.
Relieved beyond belief, I punched up Snookems again, thanked him, hung up, and broke into the creeping sweat that usually follows a narrowly avoided car crash. And yet . . . on a single painting, I had just cleared a profit nearly equal to my annual salary at the bank. Within a few days, I was planning a new deal with Snookems. A few weeks later, I quit the bank. And a few months later, the money started rolling in.
12
As newlyweds, Deborah and I were just your basic Sunday-go-to-meeting Methodists. We parked ourselves in the pews most Sundays, and definitely every Easter and Christmas, since in those days it was still the widely held opinion that only hell-bound heathens—and possibly lawyers—skipped church on Easter and Christmas. We kept up that pattern until 1973 when some friends from a Bible church invited us to their home for a six-week “discussion group” about life.
As it turned out, we had actually been labeled “lost,” “nonbelieving,” and “unsaved,” possibly because we had no fish stickers on our cars. (Which reminds me of one friend who, though newly “born again,” retained the bad habit of flipping off other drivers while barreling down the road in her Suburban. Even with her newfound religion, she couldn’t control her middle finger, but according to her husband, the Holy Ghost prompted her to scrape the fish off her bumper until her finger got saved.)
Unsuspecting, my wife and I joined the discussion group at the Williamsburg-style home of Dan and Patt McCoy. Dan was an ex–TCU football player who was six-foot-five and 275 pounds, so when he invited us to his house, I was afraid not to say yes. That first Sunday night, we were surprised to find exactly forty people—twenty couples, we found out later, divided equally into “saved” and “saved nots.” Patt had set out an attractive buffet—brownies, lemon bars, coffee, iced tea—but strangely, no one so much as grazed. I’ve since deduced that it’s always a trap when you don’t get to eat until after you hear the talk.
We introduced ourselves around and listened for an hour while a fresh-scrubbed, close-cropped man named Kirby Coleman addressed the whole group on the burning questions of existence: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What happens when we die? Quite frankly, I thought Kirby looked too young to know any of the answers.
After the group talk, he tracked us down at the buffet table. “Are you a Christian?” he asked Deborah.
He may as well have asked her if she was a human being. “I was born a Christian,” she replied, insulted beyond belief.
“But are you saved?” he pressed. “Are you certain you’re going to heaven?”
Deborah put one hand on her hip and pointed the other one in Kirby’s face. “Well!” she said. “My daddy paved the parking lot at the Snyder Methodist Church, and that’s good enough for me!”
Deborah Hall had had just about enough of Mr. Kirby Coleman—so much so that we went back to tussle with him again the next week. And the next. And the next. Each Sunday evening, the discussion funnel narrowed further, from general philosophizing about life to pointed evangelization. After five weeks, I had it figured out: If you hadn’t accepted Jesus by the sixth Sunday, you were probably going to hell on Monday. So, on the last night after we went home, I told Deborah I was going to pray the sinner’s prayer Kirby had told us about.
“I don’t see the point,” she said. “How could I have lived this long, been in church all my life, and still have to do that? It doesn’t make any sense. Besides, it just seems too easy.”
So I prayed without her, asking God to forgive my sins in the name of His Son, Jesus. Deborah, however, cross-examined the gospel like a prosecutor on a federal case. And it was eventually the lawyerly arguments in books by C. S. Lewis and Josh McDowell that convinced her Christianity could stand up to her intellectual rigor. Finally, she prayed the prayer, too.
That’s how the Jesus wave that swept across college campuses in the 1960s caught us in the suburbs before it slipped out to sea. I guess we were pretty good at the whole Christian thing—or maybe we were bad at it—because we managed to alienate many of our old college friends. With our new spiritual eyes, we could see they didn’t have fish stickers either, and we set about saving them from eternal damnation with all the subtlety of rookie linebackers. Looking back now, I mourn the mutual wounds inflicted in verbal battles with the “unsaved.” In fact, I have chosen to delete that particular term from my vocabulary as I have learned that even with my $500 European-designer bifocals, I cannot see into a person’s heart to know his spiritual condition. All I can do is tell the jagged tale of my own spiritual journey and declare that my life has been the better for having followed Christ.
13
On the land where Hershlee lived, there was three or four plantations all run up next to each other like patches on a quilt. That meant there was three or four men that worked the black folks, different ones on different parts a’ the cotton. But to us, they was all the Man. When I was eighteen or nineteen, one of em gave me my own place a ways down the road from Hershalee. I was feelin pretty good about it, a man and all that, even though my house was really just a two-room shack. I didn’t know no better. I thought I was movin up. My place was built right up near a sycamore tree, so it had some shade in the summertime. I had a bed, a table, two chairs, and a potbellied stove all to myself. Had my own outhouse, too. I thought I was livin high on the hog.
Used to be the thinkin in Red River Parish that there wadn’t nothin lower than a sharecropper. There was, though, and I was it. There was a crack I fell through and others with me, ’cept I didn’t know it at the time. See, there was croppers, and there was the children of croppers. Most a’ them was croppers, too. But some of em, ’specially them that never learned how to read or figger, stayed on the land, workin for nothin but a place to live and food to eat, just like slaves. Oh, there was an understandin—that we still owed the Man. I knew he still kept books at his store and penciled down everthing I took out the door on credit. There just wadn’t no way to pay it off, ’cause the Man didn’t weigh the cotton no more. I knew I owed him and he knew I owed him, and
that’s the way it stayed.
Here was the damnable thing about it: Before Abe Lincoln freed the slaves, white folks wanted their plantations to run self-sufficient so they made sure their slaves was trained up to do plenty a’ jobs. That’s how come there was blacksmiths and carpenters, shoemakers and barbers, and slaves that could weave and sew and build wagons and paint signs and such. By the time I come along, though, that wadn’t true no more. All them kinda jobs was white jobs in the South, and the only kinda jobs for colored folks was workin the land.
But after a while, even that started to dry up. Around the time I was three or four, white planters started buyin up tractors, which meant they didn’t need so many colored hands to make their crops no more. That’s when they started forcin em off their land. Whole families with little children. Daddies and mamas that didn’t know no other life, didn’t know nothin but how to make a crop for somebody else, forced off, sometimes at the point of a shot-gun. No money. No place to live. No job. No way to get one.
Like I said before, there was about twenty colored families, ’bout a hundred souls, on the Man’s plantation, each of em workin a plot of land for him. But slowly, over the years, the Man made em leave, till there was maybe only about three or four families left.
All I knowed was my life: For nearly thirty years, I sweated in the Louisiana sun, fightin off snakes, workin the earth till harvest, and pickin that cotton one boll at a time till my hands was raw, growin my own food, choppin wood all winter long to keep from freezin to death, startin all over in the spring. That ain’t no bad life if your labor is for your own land. But it wadn’t. And I don’t guess that kinda life would be bad if it was somebody else’s land, and you was gettin paid. But I wadn’t. Most folks these days ain’t got no idea what it’s like to be that poor. Me and the other folks on the plantation was down so low we didn’t own nothin ’cept the tin can that hung on our britches so we could get us a drink. We didn’t even own the clothes on our backs, since we got em at the Man’s store and hadn’t really paid for em, according to him.
After Uncle James died and Aunt Etha moved away, I didn’t have no close family but my sister, Hershalee. And after her husband died, she didn’t have no croppin deal with her Man and I didn’t have one with my Man. He put me up in that little shack, gave me one hog a year—not two no more—and I worked three hundred acres for him. Never weighed in no cotton. Never got no paycheck. Ever once in a while, the Man’d slip me a few dollars, maybe five or six times in all them years.
It got to be the 1960s. All them years I worked for them plantations, the Man didn’t tell me there was colored schools I coulda gone to, or that I coulda learned a trade. He didn’t tell me I coulda joined the army and worked my way up, earned some money of my own and some respect. I didn’t know about World War II, the war in Korea, or the one in Vietnam. And I didn’t know colored folks had been risin up all around Louisiana for years, demandin better treatment.
I didn’t know I was different.
That might be hard for you to believe. But you go on down to Louisiana right now, and take a drive on down the back roads in Red River Parish, and you might be able to see how a colored man that couldn’t read and didn’t have no radio, no car, no telephone, and not even ’lectricity might fall through a crack in time and get stuck, like a clock that done wound down and quit.
I’d been seein ’lectric lights burnin in the Man’s house since I was a boy, but I was still livin by coal-oil lamp in a shotgun shack with no runnin water. What happened to me was, I got real discouraged. Felt like I wadn’t good for nobody and wadn’t ever gon’ be able to do no better.
I knowed there was other places. I had heard my brother, Thurman, was out in California stackin hisself some paper money. So one day, I just decided to head out that way. Didn’t think about it much, just walked out to the railroad tracks and waited for the train to come a-rollin. There was another fella hangin around by the tracks, a hobo who’d been ridin the rails for a lotta years. He said he’d show me which train was goin to California. When that one slowed down to roll through town, we both hopped on.
I guess I was about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old by then. I never told nobody I was goin, so I guess I still owe the Man for all them overalls I bought on credit.
14
I was thirty-two years old when I paid $275,000 for a Williamsburg-style house in an upscale section of Fort Worth. That was a pile of money and a lot of house in 1977—especially in Texas. Dark red brick with white columns supporting a gracious balcony and a Mercedes parked out front. My art-dealing career had taken off, and we began living the society-page life. I was building my business, and Deborah was the supportive wife.
Large charities came knocking, and I often donated $5,000 paintings or hefty gift certificates to raise money at silent auctions, hoping to lure wealthy bidders to my gallery. We attended $1,000-a-plate black-tie charity balls, and Deborah and I got our picture in the paper, raising champagne glasses under starry lights.
But she couldn’t quite get her mind around the logic of that kind of philanthropy.
“We pay $2,000 to get in, and half of that goes to pay for the decorator,” she said. “And the dress I wore cost $2,000. Why don’t we just send in a check for $4,000 and stay home? The charity would make more money that way.”
“It’s good for business,” I said.
“Really? How much have you made?”
“Well . . . none, yet.”
During those years, I spent a week of every month in New York, where I eventually developed a strong partnership with a dealer named Michael Altman, who is still my partner today. About four times each year, I traveled to Paris, squeezing first-class, five-star jaunts to Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Florence in between. I bought and sold expensive art, met private clients, schmoozed gallery owners and museum buyers, and managed to sneak in skiing, wine-tasting, and chateau weekends.
We stayed in Fort Worth until 1986, when I thought I’d outgrown it, then moved to Dallas where I thought I could make even more money in art. We moved into a perfectly good million-dollar home in the Park Cities that we tore down to make it nicer, painting it a color that complemented the red Jaguar convertible I parked in the driveway. The Park Cities was a wealthy enclave where the local newspaper, Park Cities People, periodically published a list of best-dressed ladies, most of whom spent at least $200,000 a year on clothes. I didn’t mind that and would probably have been proud to appear on such a list. Deborah was, of course, appalled.
We put our children in public school. Regan spent her early years religious, pledging never to listen to rock music. Back then, she was a sharp dresser like her mom, but as a teenager, she shunned anything that smacked of wealth. At sixteen, she preferred clothes from the Salvation Army resale to anything from a mall and yearned to be a freedom fighter in South Africa.
Carson grew up a kid with a big heart, one always tuned toward God. We loved his little-boy sayings, like the one he used to describe feeling extra tired. “Mommy,” he’d say, “I ran out of strong.” In high school, he was an all-state wrestler at 103 pounds. In fact, he was a model child, except for the time when, after a little taste of liquor in his senior year, he nearly destroyed his room with his “Best Camper” paddle from Kanakuk Kamp, where all good Christian boys go.
In Dallas, I threw myself into my work, traveling more, striving for more international market share. I changed cars like I changed Armani suits and tired of each new toy I acquired as quickly as a toddler on Christmas morning.
Deborah, meanwhile, plugged into God. While I pursued the material, she plunged into the spiritual. While I dedicated my life to making money and spent a few minutes parked in a church pew on Sundays, she spent hours at Brian’s House, a ministry to homeless babies with AIDS. When I stormed Europe impressing billionaires with my art savvy, she stormed heaven, praying for the needy. My passion was recognition and success. Her passion was to know God.
And so we pursued our separate loves. It didn�
��t take long before our separate loves did not include each other.
Billy Graham has managed to maintain his integrity for decades by following a set of hard and fast rules designed to keep married men from doing something stupid. One of Billy’s rules is: Never allow yourself to be alone with a woman who is not your wife.
I should have listened to Billy.
In 1988, while on a business trip, I found myself sitting in the Hard Rock Cafe in Beverly Hills, across from the kind of woman who seems to grow indigenously in California, right alongside the palm trees: willowy blonde, blue-eyed, a painter, and much younger than I.
If the subject had come up over lunch, I probably would have pinned my reason for being there on a loveless marriage. Deborah and I had faked it pretty well for about five years: the affluent Christian couple still so in love. Deborah, I learned later, was sure I loved art and money, but not sure I still loved her. I was sure she loved God and our children, and fairly certain she could just barely stand the sight of me.
But the subject of Deborah or the kids or the fact that I was married-filing- jointly never came up over lunch. Instead, there was chilled wine—white, and too much of it . . . a meaningful pause . . . in the eyes, the sparkle of invitation. Dancing toward the edge of the cliff and sizing up the distance to the bottom.
I would have liked to have thought I swept this woman into a hotel room with my wit and rugged good looks. The truth was, she was more interested in what I could do for her art career. It is a sorry fact of my history that if it hadn’t been her, it would’ve been someone in Paris or Milan or New York City, anyone who gave me a second look, because I was looking, too—for a way out.
I remember for three or four years secretly wishing Deborah would divorce me because I didn’t have the guts to divorce her and corrupt the “Mr. Wonderful” image so many of our friends had layered over me like a holiday window cling.
