I’m accustomed to being seen/not seen as a black person and as a woman, to the various ways strangers would and would not see me. Some positively refused to see me, the youth who ostentatiously looked away. I knew the pleasant enough half smile of women I didn’t know in mostly white places, and the co-conspirator wink-smile of other black women approving my presence and my natural hair, the crinkle-eyed acknowledgment of a sister on the street.
There was also the respectful recognition on the bus or light rail in Newark to say we’re all in the same space, but I’m according you both confirmation and privacy. On the street in places as disparate as Newark and Princeton, as Cambridge and Oakland, there was the closed-in-on-itself-ness of people going their own ways.
And there was the approach of the person who has to greet you in some smallish gathering of picked people but who wants to bypass you for a really important person, not you. I was accustomed to all these greetings and un-greetings, of dismissals of me as not sufficiently consequential and of addressing me as someone who might turn out to be useful to their ambition. I was used to crossing paths with all sorts of people I did not know.
I knew standing out on account of sex-race, not because I’m extraordinary in my own right. And I knew disappearing entirely when disappearance isn’t appropriate, as in a place where Nell Irvin Painter ought to be seen but she’s not wearing her name badge with Princeton on it. This is part of what it means to be a black woman in my country, and I had adjusted to it. Yet I always miss feeling at home. I cherish the times when I’m as one with the people around me—with family, in familiar gatherings, with friends, even with strangers on a train. Solidarity is a feeling I hug when I can feel it.
I knew encounters from the context of race in America. A passage by W. E. B. Du Bois is said often enough to become widely known (like the proverbial literary phrase quoted to you by someone assuming you had never heard it before), but always circumscribed within racial identity. Speaking about black people in America, Du Bois said we see ourselves not only from inside, as ourselves, but additionally, from outside, as objects of other people’s disdain.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body . . .
I knew this from blackness, but it really does apply elsewhere, and so now it was with my age, with me as an old woman. It wasn’t that I stopped being my individual self or stopped being black or stopped being female, but that old, now linked to my sex, obscured everything else beyond old lady. Such was other people’s gaze turned on me as a query. They didn’t know what to make of me as a phenomenon in that place at that time.
There is so much more to me than age. And that so much more got me to art school in the first place. With my energy and excellent health, I routinely refute expectations of the older woman, just as over the years I have grown accustomed to soaring above what was expected of me—me as a black person, me as a woman, me as a person of my generation. Why wouldn’t I be able to go to art school at sixty-four? Being able to go to art school at sixty-four was one thing.
Why I would want to go to art school was another.
Answer: The pursuit of pleasure. Concentrating on what I could see gave me intense pleasure, and seeing what I could make with my own hand and according to my own eye was even more satisfying. Mark making and mixing and applying color contented me deeply, just the very processes of putting line on paper, brush on canvas. Art stopped time. Art exiled hunger. Art held off fatigue for what would have been hours as though hours hadn’t really passed. Pleasure. Satisfaction. Contentment.
Part of it was freedom from Truth. I know some artists create out of a quest for truth that can’t be found elsewhere. Not me. I wanted to create images, to make art that expressed my own mixed-up character, to forge a truer me than one confined by existing categories of sex-race and circulating widely as necessarily true. Yes, yes, I loved all the steps entailed in scholarship, but I reached for more, to take other steps, additional steps, call them side steps, for freedom from evidence-based knowledge of things I could know for sure, things that stood for much smaller as well as larger things, beyond and around the truths of the archive. Fiction. Visual fictions. I wanted to make art. Seriously. And to make serious art unfettered from the mandate that I address larger truths.
Contradiction crouched between my search for freedom and my bent toward serious art. My instincts, my past, drew me toward formal study. And decades in the Ivy League had taught me institutions’ role in gatekeeping and networking. I knew it made a difference where you studied that went beyond what you could learn. I knew all too well that the same artifact, the same utterance, would meet widely disparate receptions according to the institutions attached to them. Institutions conferred not simply knowledge, but also the means to be seen.
On one level, I fancied my pleasure in drawing and painting would not require other people’s approval. I was at a place in my life beyond regard for approval. Or so I thought. Somehow I overlooked the contradiction between my yearning for artistic freedom and my urge to work seriously, that is, on a professional level.
Seriously.
On a professional level.
What weighted terms.
Seriously and on a professional level would mean art school, not merely taking a class here or there and making art for myself and my friends. Art school would mean more than following my own inclinations. It would entail evaluation—judgment—according to already existing criteria. Whose criteria? Other people’s criteria. Other people’s judgment. An awful discord between freedom and other-defined seriousness that I could not yet see. I had little understanding of the potency of good and better as applied obsessively to art schools and to art and to my own art in particular.
I had no inkling of how thoroughly art school would instruct me—teach me, challenge my abilities, and question my sanity. I didn’t know how much I would learn from the young art students beside me. I just knew I wanted to make art and make art seriously.
2
LEAVING MY FORMER LIFE
Curiosity in my regard, and there was a lot of it, didn’t only come from inside Mason Gross, for generally the kids were cool with whatever. Curiosity came from people of my generation in my soon-to-be former existence. They regarded my new life, my adventure, in the words of some, my “journey,” with envy and hesitation. They identified with my break for freedom but feared their academic or lawyerly selves had already quashed their inner Beyoncé, that the wet blanket of professionalism had smothered their flame. They wondered if they, too, could leave dutiful, controlled professional personas and fling themselves into a new, hypersaturated, Technicolor—no, RGB color-coded—artistic life of creativity and apparent abandon. I had yearned like that before actually walking away. Professing admiration for my bravery, my friends asked how I did it and hoped I would send back a report.
Why do something different? Why start something new? Why did I do it? What made me think I could begin anew in an entirely different field from history, where, truth be told, I had made a pretty good reputation? Was it hard leaving a chaired professorship at Princeton? I didn’t think so. No, I thought not. For a long time, my answers, even to myself, were simple—too simple by far.
I said, because I wanted to.
Because I could.
I knew from my mother I could do it.
My smart, small, intense, beautiful, disciplined little mother, Dona Irvin, administrator to author, held the key to my confidence. To a very great extent, she still does. The so much more of myself beyond my sex, race, and age that I cherish is rooted in my family, in my father the gregarious bohemian, who had taught me to draw decades ago, but even more in my mother, who, starting over at sixty-five, blossomed as a
n older woman, transforming herself into a creator in her own right after a lifetime as a shyly dutiful wife and mother. As an older woman she cast off the strictures of a lifetime—well, some of them—and took to wearing red or white with her dark skin and taking the bus overnight to play slot machines in Reno.
My mother had never written a book before sixty-five. She had started her career as a school administrator late, after the civil rights movement opened opportunities for an educated black woman, and she had grown professionally. She overcame crippling shyness whose stutter made the telephone her monster. At a liberating feminist retreat at Asilomar, near Monterey, she reclaimed her own name, Dona, after decades of letting other people correct her. Yes, people tried to correct her pronunciation of her own name, “DOH-na,” and talk her into accepting the more easily recognizable Donna, “DAHN-na.” At the Asilomar retreat, she put a stop to that and made people call her by her own name. And she started writing in earnest.
ALWAYS A TERRIFIC writer of letters and reports, she’d never attempted a book. After Asilomar, she found strength within to pull it off.
She devoted ten years to researching and publishing her first book, The Unsung Heart of Black America, about the middle-class black people she knew as close, long-term friends in the United Methodist Church we attended in the 1950s and early 1960s in Oakland, a work the fine and generous historian John Hope Franklin blurbed.
It took me years to sense the bravery, the sturdy determination her metamorphosis demanded, for she was tougher than I could see during her lifetime. I knew she delved deep to express herself with unadorned honesty. Hard for a woman. Doubly hard for a black woman. Triply hard for a black woman of a class and a generation never wanting to let them (meaning, mainly, white people) catch even a sidelong glimmer of remorse.
Suppressing doubt and never washing dirty linen in public came naturally to my mother. A public that was black and wore the beloved faces of her friends awaited my mother’s writing as an upstanding black person. That public’s expectation of her as a black author discouraged her speaking as an individual whose identity exceeded race. She felt that pressure and wrote her first book as a black woman, never losing sight of race in America. Yet there was more to her.
It took her ten more years to write and publish her frank and funny memoir, I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old. Just pause for a moment and imagine the guts and good humor needed to use that title, to admit to looking good, and to write the word “old” and apply it to herself.
I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old.
People used to say that to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me.
I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old, 2002,
Dona Irvin photo by Ron Carter, 9" × 6"
In her memoir she went on to claim herself as a unique individual, racialized, gendered, but with much more to her than race and gender. She wrote as a daughter of two parents in conflict on the most intimate level. The conflict stayed within the range of ordinary human misbehavior—the usual adultery and betrayal—but talking about that exceeded the vocabulary of race alone. Hard to do in the USA, because it’s hard to describe black humanity beyond race and so easy, practically an automatic response, to interpret a claim of individuality as treason to blackness. It’s as though individuality, the pride of white Americans, virtually what it means to be white but not a Nazi or Klansman, belongs only to them; as though a black woman speaking as an individual, not speaking as the race, must be backing away from blackness. My mother had to find words to claim both uniqueness and blackness. But find those words she did. Dona was working on a website about vigorous old people of many races when she died at ninety-one, not at all ready to leave.
Looking at her, identifying with her when I was sixty, I figured, hell, I could do that. I could do something new in the quarter century or more still before me, even starting from close to scratch. My mother’s example made me think I could lay down one life and pick up a new one.
I HAD BEEN a youthful artist, and for years I carried a sketchbook and drew all the time. I drew (but have lost that sketchbook) in Bordeaux, France, on a junior year abroad. I was still drawing when I lived in Ghana with my parents in the 1960s in my early twenties. The three drawings on the following page, pencil on paper, were in my sketchbooks there.
Ghana gave my Bay Area eyes, squinting into a bright blue sky, a whole new palette, a landscape and architecture and people in clothes and rioted textures and colors. Something grew on every surface: bushes, flowers, or mold, or all of it all at once. The California Bay Area that I had left was a beautiful but eucalyptus-gray place, foggy in the morning, dryly sunny in the day, with mostly light-colored people.
In Ghana I moved through a humid world of tropical contrasts and color-wheel hues. The dirt was Venetian red, the trees and grass Hooker’s green. White buildings, red tiled roofs. Cadmium red bougainvillea climbing whitewashed buildings and cascading over fences and walls, some topped with menacing shards of broken brown glass or black wrought-iron spikes testifying to class tensions barricading the wealthy against the grasping poor. Together, this colorful landscape and the very black people in white and spectacular clothing altered my vision of everyday life.
Ghana Drawing of Girl, 1964–1965,
graphite on paper, approx. 10" × 8"
Ghana Drawing 3, 1964–1965,
graphite on paper, approx. 7 ½" × 10 ¼"
Ghana Drawing of Man, 1964–1965,
graphite on paper, approx. 10 ¼" × 7 ½"
In Ghana I taught French in the language school and gave the news in French on Ghana Radio for a year. I can still hear the drums
Boom boom boom Boom Boom
announcing, “Ghana calling!” I began graduate study in precolonial African history at the Institute of African Studies before a coup d’état deposing Kwame Nkrumah ended his nascent African socialism and sent us Afro-Americans, including Maya Make (later Maya Angelou), to Egypt, to Europe, and, for us Irvins, home to California.
After the first coup d’état in Ghana in 1966, I completed my MA in African history at UCLA. After UCLA, a year of rattlebrained, youthful follies too embarrassing to mention, I ended up at Harvard for a PhD in history. I quit smoking. I wrote a dissertation that became my first book, published by—ahem—Alfred A. Knopf. Many books and professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton University followed.
I was a whiz kid, tenured and promoted at Penn in three years and promoted to full professor at Chapel Hill in another three. In the early days of my career, I never questioned my ability to do well in my field. I loved history, loved research, loved writing—I still love history, love research, love writing. I published books at a regular pace: Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976), The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979), Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (1986), Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (1996), Southern History Across the Color Line (2002), Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (2006), and the Penguin Classics editions of Narrative of Sojourner Truth and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And there were fellowships (Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, etc.), scholarly societies (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Antiquarian Society, etc.), and honorary doctorates (Dartmouth, Yale, etc.).
I don’t want this to sound effortless, for it was all a lot of work, a hell of a lot of dedicated work. Good work, I mean, work that felt good to me, for writing history gave me enormous pleasure.1 Over the years, though, images made their way into my writing of history.
Visual art’s gravitational field had renewed its pull decades before my mother had reinvented herself as a writer. Still, I cannot shrug off my change of field as simply a matter of time. It took place step by step, as I was writing history.
My history wr
iting tugged me toward art over the years. I used a photograph I had taken as the frontispiece of my second book, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, and I wrote about the photograph as a meaningful image, not merely an illustration. Then came the “Truth in Photographs” chapter in my fourth book, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol, on Truth’s self-fashioning through photographs. Self-fashioning is the ways people present themselves to the outside world—what they wear, how they talk and stand, the props they hold or regard. For Truth, this meant wearing the sober clothing of women who spoke in public and holding knitting or her grandson’s photograph in the portraits she had made to sell to her admirers.
I spent hour after hour preparing that chapter in the abundance of Princeton’s Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, where the art books fill four levels and you can sit comfortably for hours with the history and criticism of photography. In Marquand I learned the rhetoric of the image and critical seeing.
I illustrated Creating Black Americans with fine art. Though it’s a narrative history, Creating Black Americans gave me an introductory course in African American art history. There was, I discovered, more good art by black artists than I could ever cram into one book, even limiting the art to subjects bearing on history. None—okay, very few—of those artists figured in the art history I would study in art school.
The books I wrote weren’t art history, but each one took me beyond text into new visual archives. I loved working with images; I loved learning new history and new artists. This was not like my first undergraduate experience in art.
BACK IN THE 1960s I had studied art at Berkeley, had been an art major and drawn a couple of covers for the campus humor magazine. My art major ended with a C in sculpture, a C I earned by not doing any work. Why should I have to work at sculpture? I reckoned, like the kid I was, that talent should ensure success. I saw talent and talent alone as the crucial ingredient. Therefore exerting myself would make no difference. What kind of reasoning is that? Dumb, kid reasoning. I didn’t know how to work on learning sculpture, and I didn’t know any professional artists to show me a way. On the other hand, my academic family applauded my writing, not only something I knew how to work at, but also the mastery of one of the hallmarks of a cultured American. This counted in my family’s blackness.
Old In Art School Page 2
