Girl with a Camera

by Carolyn Meyer

  “I’ll pay you five dollars if you’ll take this to Wrens,” I said, giving him the letter.

  It must have seemed like a small fortune, and the boy leaped onto the bicycle and pedaled away, stirring up clouds of dust.

  I had done all I could, and now there was nothing to do but wait. And hope.

  I went up to my room and took a cool bath and changed my clothes, went back downstairs, and settled in a rocking chair on the broad porch of the hotel.

  The hours dragged by. Not even the hint of a breeze stirred as the sun made its lazy arc across the Georgia sky. I longed to find a shady side of the street and explore the city, but I did not dare leave my post except to revisit the coffee shop for lunch.

  The afternoon passed, and I remained a prisoner, chained to my rocking chair. Around six o’clock Erskine climbed the steps to the porch. “Coffee?” he asked.

  I followed him to the coffee shop—my third time that day—and took the stool next to his at the counter. We ordered. Erskine studied his thumbs. Neither of us spoke. Two cups of coffee arrived, and we drank them in silence. The waitress took away our empty cups. Erskine paid.

  “Quite an argument we had, wasn’t it?” he asked, poker-faced.

  “Um-hmm.” I kept a straight face, too.

  “When will you be ready to leave?”

  “I’m ready now.”

  Erskine called for the bellhop to fetch the bags from my room. I was warning the boy to be careful of the glass jars when a taxi pulled up in front of the hotel and a woman stepped out and joined us. “This is Sally, my literary secretary,” Erskine said offhandedly. “She’ll be invaluable.” Sally was thin and angular with sharp features. Her small, bright eyes swept over me from head to toe. Erskine went off to help the bellhop load my bags into his car.

  When he reappeared, Sally climbed into the backseat, and we drove to Wrens. It turned out to be thirty miles from Augusta, not a half-dozen. In Wrens, Erskine added his luggage to mine, Sally smoked silently, and I made small talk with Erskine’s father, a retired preacher.

  When we were ready, the secretary wedged herself into the crevice between mountains of gear in the backseat. I asked to make one last check on the glass jars with the egg cases, and as I did, the lid of the trunk came down on my head with a painful whack. Erskine laughed—laughed!—and said he hoped something funny like that happened every day. I suppose he thought he was being witty. I should have recognized then that this man would be a difficult traveling companion.

  Heading southwest from Augusta and following back roads, we drove for several hours without anyone saying a word. Erskine reminded me of my father and the long silences that sometimes infuriated my mother. Sometime after midnight we reached a small, nameless town with a small, rundown building that passed itself off as a hotel and was, by some miracle, still open. We booked three rooms with rusted plumbing and threadbare towels. A creaking ceiling fan stirred the humid air. Without bothering to undress, I lay down on top of the faded pink chenille spread and fell instantly asleep.

  It seemed I had scarcely closed my eyes when I was awakened by a pounding on my door. “Rise and shine! Up and at ’em! Time to hit the road!”

  Erskine, it turned out, was an early riser, no matter how late he’d been up the night before. Sally was already supervising the reloading of the car. I gulped some toast and coffee with barely time to brush my teeth, and we were off. We followed dirt roads that wandered through cotton country in which Erskine was completely at home and I felt as though I had just been transported to some foreign land.

  So it went for the next few days. Erskine and I got on each other’s nerves. We argued almost constantly. We were too different. He seemed to think he was in charge of our project and would make the decisions for both of us. I, naturally, assumed that I was in charge of the photography, period, and he would have nothing to say about how I set up my pictures. As he talked to his subjects—a farmer and his wife, say—in the most off-hand way, I lurked in the background with a small camera, trying not to be noticed. I took background shots of crumbling barns, or the interiors of unpainted shacks with newspapers pasted on the walls to keep out the winter cold. I captured small details, such as an abandoned plow. And I photographed the people when they were not expecting it.

  By the fourth day, I had been reduced to tears as many times. I’d always had the habit of weeping when I felt pushed to the wall, and Erskine was pushing and pushing. He believed I was “turning on the waterworks,” as he put it, on purpose, as a way to manipulate him. This was not true. I simply could not bear to have anyone trying to control me, and I reacted by bursting into tears.

  On the fifth day we drove into Arkansas, and the project threatened to blow up. Erskine came to my room to help me carry my equipment out to the car—he was always the chivalrous Southern gentleman in such matters—but instead of picking up my tripod and camera cases, he perched on the windowsill and gazed at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. “Margaret,” he said, “I need to have a talk with you.”

  I was about to pack my toothbrush. “About what?”

  “About what we’re doing. This is not going to work. I think we should forget the whole thing. It’s been a mistake. You go your way, and I’ll go mine. No hard feelings.”

  Still holding my toothbrush, I sank down on the bed. “Erskine, you don’t understand. This book means everything to me. When I saw the Dust Bowl, I began to realize that people are more than just figures in the background. My whole direction has changed. This book is the most important work I’ve done in my life, and I can’t give it up!”

  “You could go on and do it on your own. You don’t need me.”

  “But I do! I do need you!” And there I was, weeping again, huddled on the edge of the bed, my face buried in my hands. Erskine got up from the windowsill and moved toward me. I reached up to him, tears pouring down my cheeks, and he pulled me into his arms and kissed me, my eyes, my wet face, my lips.

  Everything was different after those kisses. I had not realized how strongly I was drawn to him, probably had been from the first time we met. A few weeks before we began the trip I had observed my thirty-second birthday, two years past the deadline I’d set for falling in love. Perhaps that’s what was now happening. My work was changing, opening me up, and apparently so was my heart. I was wary, certain I did not want to be dominated or controlled. But oh, the powerful attraction I felt for Erskine! Now I acknowledged it, even though I knew he was married with a wife in Maine, and children too.

  Sally undoubtedly sensed what was happening between us. We didn’t do anything to hide it, and I had suspected from the first that Sally herself was in love with him. That night in the wee hours she packed up and left our seedy hotel outside of Pine Bluff. We found the note the next morning.

  She couldn’t stand sitting in the backseat, stuck between all our gear, she wrote. She couldn’t stand traveling with the two of us. Maybe one temperamental writer could be borne, or one equally temperamental photographer, but both? Crowded into the same automobile in the middle of a hot Arkansas summer? It was simply too much! She was going home to California.

  From then on, it was just the two of us.

  I admired Erskine’s relaxed, easy manner with the people we met. With his soft Southern drawl, he sounded like one of them, and he knew exactly how to talk to them and ask simple questions about their lives. They trusted him completely from the start.

  But I was different. My accent marked me as a Yankee and an outsider, and people in these parts, the poorest-of-the-poor sharecroppers, didn’t trust “foreigners.” It was an effort for me not to try to arrange everything and everyone. I set up shots to please my eye, rather than to record things as they really were.

  “Slow down a little,” he told me. “You’re coming on like the Vandals and the Visigoths.”

  It took a while, but eventually, because of Erskine, people began to trust me and my camera, too. I knew I was doing good work. We both were.

  Er
skine began calling me Kit. “You look like a kitten that’s just drunk a bowl of cream,” he said, stroking my hair. “It suits you better than Peg or Maggie.”

  I started calling him Skinny, because he wasn’t.

  The two glass jars with the praying mantis egg cases now rode with me in the front seat of Erskine’s Ford. The eggs might start to hatch at any time, whenever the temperature and humidity were exactly right. We were bouncing down a dirt road past fields of cotton when I checked the glass jars and saw the first nymphs wriggle out of an egg case. “Pull over, Skinny!” I ordered. “They’re hatching!”

  Erskine stopped, and I quickly set up my equipment and placed the egg cases on a fence rail. My camera and tripod always attracted an audience, and as I began taking pictures, a dozen or so children appeared out of nowhere and surrounded me. We all watched, spellbound, as hundreds of tiny nymphs poured out of the egg cases, clambering over each other on legs as thin as threads.

  “They look like little devil horses!” cried one enchanted boy. Some of the “little devil horses” began eating their brothers, a habit that bothered Erskine but didn’t trouble the children.

  The surviving nymphs went back into the jars, and for the next several days I recorded each stage of their development from tiny nymph to full-grown mantis, shedding their exoskeletons and forming new ones as they continued to grow, perhaps as many as ten times, until they reached adult size. It had been so long since I’d worked on my children’s book about insects that I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoyed photographing the natural world.

  At the end of August Erskine and I were back in New York. We’d accomplished what we’d set out to do, but there was still more to be done. We talked about returning to the South—we just weren’t sure when. I’d finished my photo-essay on the life cycle of the praying mantis for Life, and I’d signed an exclusive contract to work for the new magazine.

  That fall Harry Luce handed me an assignment, to appear in the first issue: photographing the Fort Peck Dam under construction along the Missouri River in Montana.

  “They’re claiming the dam will be the largest of its kind,” said Harry Luce. “I hear it’s a monster. President Roosevelt’s idea for giving jobs to upwards of a thousand jobless men.” He looked up at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “Keep your eye open for something that might make a great cover. And while you’re there, take a look at the shantytowns that seem to be springing up everywhere. You have two weeks.”

  I packed my equipment and prepared to leave as I’d done many times before. But this time was different: Erskine and I had fallen deeply in love, and going away was harder than I’d expected. It was quite a new sensation for me, and he made no secret of how much it bothered him when I said good-bye to him in New York and headed out alone for Montana.

  24

  Roosevelt’s Dam and a Flood—1936

  MY DESTINATION WAS THE BRAND-NEW TOWN OF NEW Deal, named for the president’s program to help the country recover from the Depression. I rented a tiny spare room in a schoolteacher’s trailer and went to work.

  The dam was an almost impossibly enormous engineering project. I set up my camera to photograph it with two workmen in the foreground, looking no bigger than my thumb, to suggest the dam’s mammoth size. This was the kind of work I’d done many times before, so different from the book I was working on with Erskine, but still exciting.

  The dam was made of compacted earth pumped up from the river bottom. I photographed the earthworks and the equipment that was creating it in the early mornings when the light was good. In the afternoons, when the light was too flat to take pictures, I explored on horseback the area that would become a water-filled reservoir when the dam was completed. But in my off-hours I wandered through the ramshackle town, stopping in at the Bar X and the Buck Horn Club where men and women of New Deal passed their evenings. I’d learned from Erskine how to talk to people, earning their trust, before I shot pictures.

  Some of the men didn’t much like having a camera pointed at them and let me know it. “Whoa there, little lady, how ’bout you just put that camera away, there’s a good girl.”

  The taxi dancers, girls who were paid to dance with the fellows who asked them, didn’t like it either.

  “I don’t want my mum to see my picture and know what I’m doing,” one girl told me, turning away to hide her face. “She thinks I’m a secretary.”

  “But you’re not doing anything wrong,” I said. “A dance is just a dance.”

  “Don’t try to tell her that. She’d think I was no better than one of them ladies of the evening.”

  If someone objected, I put away my camera, but if no one did, I kept shooting.

  I received a wire from Wilson Hicks, Life’s picture editor back in New York. He wanted to include a section to be called “Life Goes to a Party.” The deadline for the first issue was approaching. Did I have anything they could use? I wired back that I had just what they might be looking for, and along with photographs of the dam I shipped off pictures of New Deal night life—the drinkers, the taxi dancers, even the waitress’s little daughter perched on the bar at the saloon. Hicks may have been surprised by the photographs I sent, so different from anything else I’d done, but he used them for the first “Party” feature.

  My photograph of the dam was chosen to be the cover of the inaugural issue of Life. It hit the newsstands on November 19 and sold out within hours. The printers could not keep up with the orders.

  I loved working for Life. I loved Skinny. There were problems.

  One fact could not be changed: Erskine was married but separated from his wife. At first we tried to keep our love affair a secret, but soon everyone guessed. I had given up the Fifth Avenue studio when I could not afford it any longer and moved into an apartment on East Forty-Second Street. Erskine kept a room at the Mayfair Hotel on West Forty-Ninth, but we were together constantly—unless I was away on an assignment. And that created tension. I loved him, but I valued my work every bit as much as I valued him.

  Margaret’s dramatic photograph of Fort Peck Dam was Life magazine’s first cover.

  Erskine was not used to being with a truly independent woman, and it rattled him. I felt that he wanted to tie me down. When he brought up the subject of marriage, I always put him off. I didn’t want to marry him—I didn’t want to marry, period— because I knew deep in my bones that marriage didn’t suit me. I had a different kind of life, a life built around my work, and that was how I wanted it.

  “Darling, you already have a wife,” I reminded him. “You’re married to Helen, remember? So there’s no point in even discussing it.”

  “Of course we can discuss it! And we ought to! I’ll get a divorce, and then it will all be settled.”

  I didn’t believe marriage would settle anything. Still, he kept bringing up the subject, and I kept refusing to discuss it.

  In January of 1937, two months after Life’s first issue, the Ohio River was inundating Louisville, Kentucky, in one of the most damaging floods in American history. My editor dispatched me to cover it. I had an hour to get ready.

  Erskine was dismayed. “You’re leaving again, Kit? When will you be back?”

  “When I’ve finished shooting,” I said over my shoulder. I was busy making sure I had enough film, enough bulbs, enough toothpaste. I was already thinking about my new assignment.

  “I wish you weren’t going,” he said, hovering nearby. “I miss you when you’re not here.” We had been together as a couple for months by then, and he still seemed distressed when I went away.

  “I miss you, too, Skinny, but this is what I do. You know that.” I finished packing and snapped my bag shut. “The taxi’s waiting. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

  Erskine helped carry down my gear, the cabbie loaded it into the trunk, and I jumped into the backseat. Erskine leaned in. “Don’t I even deserve a kiss?”

  “Of course, darling,” I said. I admit it was not much of a kiss. “I’ve got a plane to c
atch.”

  As the driver pulled away from the curb, I glanced back and saw Erskine standing forlornly on the sidewalk, hands plunged into his pockets. I felt uneasy, leaving him like that, and I was about to order the cab to turn back, so I could kiss him properly. But then the cab turned the corner, and I was headed for the airport, away from Skinny and bound for Kentucky.

  I was on the last plane to land at the Louisville airport before it was submerged along with most of the city. But how would I get into town with my camera and equipment when everything was surrounded by floodwaters?

  I spotted a rowboat and stuck out my thumb.

  “Where you going, miss?” shouted one of the rowers.

  “Downtown to the newspaper office.”

  “We’re not going that far, but we’ll take you as far as we can.”

  I scrambled into the boat next to supplies of food and water they were taking to a neighborhood that was marooned. Along the way the rowers stopped to rescue people clinging desperately to tree branches or perched on floating bits of furniture. I was afraid to unpack my cameras for fear the boat would be swamped. But I couldn’t think of the excellent picture possibilities I would miss.

  When a good-sized raft came along, the rowers flagged it down. Struggling to keep my gear from getting soaked, I clambered from the rowboat onto the raft and managed to take pictures of floodwaters surging through the streets. At the offices of the Courier-Journal, exhausted reporters who had descended on Louisville to document the disaster were sleeping on desks or on the floor, and I crept among them, snapping pictures of them, too.

  As the floodwaters began to recede, I grabbed my camera and went out on the streets. I found a relief center where clothing and supplies were being doled out. Dozens of Negroes waited in line with empty sacks and buckets in front of a gigantic billboard proclaiming, WORLD’S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING. A smiling white family in a shiny new car—father, mother, two children, and a pooch—grinned beneath the slogan There’s no way like the American Way.