The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  She spelled it for me, and she told me it was pronounced properly Vera Dis, although she didn’t mind that I had been saying it Verdus, which was the way Nail Chism had pronounced it too.

  “I have too many eyes,” I thought she said, but she was saying that she had a surplus of the letter i in her name, three of them, and I jokingly called her Three-Eyes when I was irritated with her, which was not often: she was fourteen years older than I, and I loved her dearly.

  Sometimes I’ve wondered if she couldn’t tell this whole story of her growing up and becoming a woman much better than I could do it. What follows I have put into her words, pretending it’s what she spoke to me, but it wasn’t then, that year I first met her, and it wasn’t even over the many years following that I knew her and we would sit endless hours together rocking away on the porch while she told me the whole story of her life. No, what follows is a kind of combination of bits and pieces she told me over the years, and some other things I learned from other people who knew her, and parts of it, perhaps the best parts of it, not from what she or they said but from what she wrote, in her private diaries, which came into my hands after her death many years later. So yes, I will let her tell this:

  That studio, up there in the top of that turret, behind that large northern light. No one (except my father) was ever allowed into it, and it became my cloister, my nunnery, my ivory tower, as well as my autodidactic academy. It is not true, as some newspapers have said, that I was self-taught. But Little Rock High School, a seven-block walk east of my house, offered no courses in art, just as it offered nothing in Spanish, French, voice, or piano. I had begged to be allowed to go off to Arcadia College, an Ursuline Academy for Young Ladies in Arcadia, Missouri; I knew nothing about it except that it offered classes in art and had a wonderful pastoral name; but my father would not let me leave Little Rock. So for most of the years of my adolescence I had to learn art from trial and error and what books I could find or order. At the age of eleven, and continuing until the age of…well, until I removed myself forever from that house, I used that little turret studio as a private place for working out my ideas about the making of pictures.

  My father wasn’t a miser, but he didn’t throw his money around either, and when his children wanted something we had to beg for it and justify it and remind him several times and then promise to do something in return for it. I always managed to get what I needed for my studio: the easel, the palette, the mahlstick, and all the tubes of paint, and yards of canvas, and endless sheets of drawing-paper. Daddy did not approve of the expenditure; he did not want me to become an artist; for that matter, he didn’t want me to “become” anything, other than grown-up…and he wasn’t sure he wanted me to grow up. But Mother had her garden, and she would not let me help her in it. My father faulted her for that, and even yelled at her about it, but Mother would not accept help even from the Negro Samuel with the tender plants that she considered her real babies, in the garden. So the north turret studio was my garden, and the only green in it was what I painted. Daddy hoped I would outgrow it.

  My only fond memory of Little Rock High School was that I achieved popularity among the other girls by painting for each of them an excellent copy of a Gibson girl as a reasonable likeness of themselves. I was the only “artist” any of them had ever even heard about.

  When I told my father that I wanted to go away to the Chicago Art Institute to study art, he was horrified. Or, rather, he was at first very puzzled, because he didn’t know there was such a thing as an art college that would accept women, and then, when I showed him the brochure, he was scornful, and only later, after I had got up my nerve to tell him that I definitely intended to go, did he become horrified. He stormed and shouted. He railed and ranted. He sulked. He plotted: he told my older brothers of my intention, and they, all in college themselves at that time (Matthew had gone to Vanderbilt, Dallas was at Southern Methodist, while Henry settled for the University of Arkansas), filled my ears with stories of college life, how difficult it was, how impossible for the “fair sex,” who were always, if they could be admitted at all, viewed as ornaments, oddities, or odalisques.

  “What’s an odalisque?” Daddy asked my brother Matthew.

  “A concubine,” Matthew explained.

  “Is that what you want to be?” my father demanded of me.

  “If I could be one of the kind Ingres painted,” I told him.

  “Who?”

  When I gave up my dream of the Chicago Art Institute and instead actually began to make plans to apply for admission to the University of Arkansas, and needed my father’s signature on the application, he flatly refused and said he’d rather see me walking the streets. I did not particularly want to go to Fayetteville anyway; in that year, 1904, the University offered only two courses in art, both taught by a woman whose specialty was penmanship. At the last minute before the opening of the fall term, I applied for and was accepted at Conway Central College and Conservatory of Fine Arts, a women’s school in the college town of Conway, less than two hours by train from Little Rock. Somehow I got my father to sign the papers, perhaps by my promise to come home every weekend. And I did: I caught the 4:15 every Friday afternoon and went back on the 6:45 every Sunday P.M. The house went to hell during the week. I tried to persuade Cyrilla to assume my duties as manager of the household, but Cyrilla, while willing, wasn’t constitutionally strong enough and wasn’t able to give orders or instructions to Samuel and Ruby. Daddy kept complaining that the house was going to hell.

  There was one teacher, Miss Opaline Dearasaugh, at 4-c F.A. (as it was called, pronounced Fourcie Effie), who was reasonably talented at drawing and could impart the rudiments of watercolor technique, so my time there wasn’t entirely wasted. But I reflected that the hours I spent in travel, going home every weekend, could have been better spent doing my homework and polishing my drawings, or, at worst, accepting one of the frequent invitations I received from the young men at Hendrix, a Methodist college in Conway. Most of the girls at Fourcie Effie were enrolled there because of its proximity to Hendrix, where they hoped to find an eligible swain. It did not take me long to discover that my classmates were less interested in the fine arts than in men, and that all of the girls were indeed ornaments, oddities, or odalisques.

  Our first assignment in Miss Dearasaugh’s class was to do a self-portrait, and I’ve shown you the pastel I did in the mirror and have kept, and which you have called, I thank you, beautiful. I took no great pride in my features, but men—or boys—seemed to be quick to notice me…although slow to do anything about it. A Hendrix premedical student named Jason Sample stopped me on the sidewalk in downtown Conway and introduced himself and apologized for his forwardness and asked me to allow him to be my escort for the Hendrix Christmas cotillion. I smiled sweetly and thanked him and declined, not on the grounds that I didn’t know him and hadn’t been properly introduced by a responsible party but that I didn’t know how to dance…which was true. He smiled engagingly and told me that he didn’t either, that the two of us could watch the others and use the event as an excuse to get acquainted, because all he wanted to do was learn my life’s story. I smiled again and said that my life had no story. “Then I would like to start its story,” he offered—and I loved that, the way he said that, and I wanted to say, Oh yes I’d love to go with you to the Christmas cotillion (any of my Fourcie classmates would have given an arm to have been invited), but I said that since the cotillion was on a Saturday night and my presence was required in Little Rock each weekend, I would have to forgo the kind invitation. Any other young man, after half an hour attempting such persuasion, would have abandoned the effort, but Jason Sample persisted, and at length I admitted that it just might be possible for me to get out of the trip to Little Rock, and the next day I wrote my father (I could have waited until the weekend and spoken it to him, but I thought a letter would be more effective) and told him I was going to the Hendrix Christmas cotillion. My father did not reply, nor did he mention it
when he saw me that weekend, and I wondered if he had received the letter. I waited, and two more weekends went by without mention of the letter. As I was leaving Little Rock the weekend before the cotillion, I said simply, “I won’t be home next weekend.”

  “Yes you will,” my father said.

  “No I won’t,” I said, and I was not. I went to the cotillion with Jason Sample, and I loved it. But Daddy came to Conway the next day and told me he was taking me out of school. And he did.

  In the months and months following, Jason Sample wrote to me several times and asked if he could come to Little Rock to see me. I attempted to discourage him and told him it was unlikely that we could continue to see each other. He wanted reasons, he demanded explanations, and all I could do, eventually, was ignore him. Alone in my turret studio I was learning more about art than I had in Miss Dearasaugh’s classes, and I did not miss Conway at all; it was such a provincial village compared with Little Rock.

  By accident, in conversation, Daddy’s boss Henry Worthen learned that I was interested in art, and he arranged for me to meet his “daubing cousin” Spotiswode Worthen, who was a legendary Little Rock eccentric, a strange old man in his seventies and virtually a recluse. Apparently, Henry Worthen was in charge of Spotiswode’s financial affairs, and he thought it would be “useful” if his “unemployed” cousin agreed to give “lessons” to the daughter of his vice-president. Spotiswode Worthen had not given lessons during the previous twenty years, nor had he made any sort of social contact, and I remember how terribly rusty his voice sounded at our first meeting. He wasn’t an unkind man, and he knew much about the entire history of Western painting up to but not including the time of the Impressionists, who, he felt, were demoralizing the visual culture of civilization. Do you know the Impressionists, Latha? No? Well, they had revolutionized the art of that time, but Spotiswode Worthen had no use for them. The last great painter, he believed, had been Fantin-Latour—a mediocre academic hack—but Bouguereau—a somewhat more talented hack—remained “promising,” although he was in the last year of his life (Bouguereau, not Worthen, who would live two more years).

  Spotiswode Worthen was the first “real” artist that I had ever known, although the few paintings of his that I was permitted to see did not impress me, except with their technical facility. His style was…oh, what can I call it if you don’t know art? His style was constipated. It was hard and dark and fecal. Yet it was smooth and slick. But I tell you, “Spot” Worthen could paint! More than paint, he could draw. His paintings were actually just colored drawings, the colors reserved and drab. In his first lesson he made me sit for three hours drawing, with nothing but a lead pencil, a single egg. In the second lesson he moved the egg from the tabletop to the windowsill, into the direct sunlight, and made me spend three more hours with it. Sometimes I thought that I must be cackling or clucking in my sleep.

  Well, I spent two years, three times a week, receiving assignments and criticisms from Spot Worthen. I never asked my father, or Henry Worthen, what tuition was being paid to the man, who always dressed and smelled as if he were penniless. On my own I did bright watercolors of the Little Rock parks and the Little Rock townscape and the view of the river from Spotiswode Worthen’s studio, but my teacher did not appreciate these; he was scornful of “views.” His studio and living quarters were in an antebellum warehouse fronting the Arkansas River, down on Markham Street, half an hour’s walk from my house. The north windows had a fine vista of the muddy river and the picturesque village of Argenta on the opposite shore, but it never was a subject for him. The human figure, he told me, contained heavenly horizons more sublime than any landscape. He parked me in front of endless plaster casts of torsos and elbows, noses and knees, ankles and navels.

  Once I asked my sister Cyrilla to pose for me without her clothing, and she was willing, but her figure was so scrawny and limp that the result, when I showed it to my teacher, curled his lip in scorn. “Use a mirror,” he suggested, and I followed his suggestion, in warm weather, spending many long hours at a dresser, studying and drawing the full front view of my own naked body. When I showed the drawings to Spot Worthen, I was surprised (and maybe a little pleased) to see that his aged, wan cheeks actually blushed.

  “Good,” he said. “Certainly good. Continue. But notice…” and he pointed out the various muscles I had missed or slighted.

  He did not give me art history lessons as such, that is, no instruction in appreciation of the great artists of the past, but occasionally he talked about theory, and about the great masters (B.F.L., I came to call them: “before Fantin-Latour”). “Do you know why all of the great painters have been men?” he asked me once, and without giving me a chance to point out that Artemisia Gentileschi, Marietta Tintoretto, and Judith Leyster, to name only three, were female, he said, “Because only the male has a body which is charged with divine afflatus.” Modesty prevented a sarcastic comment I could have made on that, and I kept silent as he went on to explain how the female body is a lovely and graceful subject, analogous to soft, slow music, but only the male body was truly heroic, capable of grand mordents and cadenzas. The great Michelangelo had a good reason for making even his nude females look masculine.

  One day toward the end of my second year of study with Spotiswode Worthen, he impetuously swept his hand against the plaster cast I was drawing, knocking it to the floor, broken, and yelled, “Tate!” and summoned the black youth who sometimes came to the warehouse to clean it. He was a young man, perhaps not as old as I (I was twenty), tall, not dark-black but light-brown, and frightened, or clearly uneasy, in my presence. Here in the Ozarks, where there are virtually no Negroes, you would never understand how delicate the relationship between black men and white women must be. He took off his hat and held it in his hand as he bowed his head to Spot Worthen and waited for orders.

  “Do you have a dollar on you?” Spot Worthen asked me.

  “I think I may have a dollar,” I declared.

  “Give it to him, and he’ll pose for you.”

  “I’m not certain I want him to pose for me,” I said.

  “Because he’s a nigger? They make good models. Velázquez, Copley, Géricault, they all used niggers. Your Edmonia Lewis did a lot of niggers, although she made ’em look like burr-headed whites, but what can you do in white marble? Give him the dollar.”

  The epithet did not make me flinch; in Little Rock in those days everybody called them niggers; I myself had sometimes referred to Samuel as “our nigger.” But except for Samuel, a loyal old family servant, I had never been in a room with a black man before, certainly not one, as this one was now doing, at Worthen’s command, removing his clothing. Before Tate removed his trousers, however, Worthen whispered something into his ear and handed him a rag, a long strip of bedsheeting, and pointed toward the part of the studio that was Worthen’s living quarters. Tate went in there and returned a minute later wearing nothing but the strip of cloth wrapped clumsily around his hips. Worthen made adjustments to it so that as much as possible of the pelvis was revealed without sacrifice of decency, then he commanded me, “Draw.”

  I drew. For a dollar the black youth posed for three hours, never seeming to tire. He was extremely muscular, and his taut skin glistened with sweat. I did a front view, a side view, a back view, and an “action” pose of him holding a broom overhead as if it were a sword. The next time I came to Worthen’s I did details of the muscles of the latissimus dorsi, the rectus abdominis, the gluteus maximus. I devoted a whole afternoon, once, to his hands, getting the ligamentum carpi volare just right. I drew him asleep, or pretending to be. I drew him stretching and bending and twisting and throwing. I drew him, or tried to catch him, falling and leaping and running and jumping and kicking. I spent almost forty dollars on the Negro, and once when, accidentally, the loincloth slipped down without his notice or Worthen’s (the old artist had taken to sleeping through these sessions), I drew also what it had concealed, fascinated with the structure, although my face
was so hot my eyes watered until I could hardly see.

  That one drawing was my undoing. I kept it in my portfolio in my studio at home, along with the hundreds of other sketches of the Negro. Occasionally my father climbed up to my studio, and he was the only other person permitted there. Once when he came up for a visit, I had a group of the drawings spread out on the floor and was reviewing them.

  “Jesus Christ, Viridis, who is this nigger?” he asked.

  “His name is Tate Coleman, and he is Spotiswode Worthen’s janitor and occasional model.”

  “Model? You mean he stands around like this with his clothes off?”

  “When he’s asked to.”

  “With you watching him?”

  “That’s how I did these drawings, Daddy.”

  “You drew these pictures?” He began to pick them up, one by one, and then to drop them, as if they were contaminated. He took my portfolio and opened it and exclaimed, “How many times did you do it?” I had momentarily forgotten about the one improper drawing, or I would have sought to stop my father’s ransacking of my portfolio. By the time I remembered, it was too late. He held the offending sketch at arm’s length and emitted a long whistle with his pursed lips. Then he said, not to me but to himself, “Yep, they’re long, all right.” Then he asked me, “Did you have to rub it to get it to be that long?”

  “Daddy!” I said.

  He ripped the drawing in two. Then he ripped it in four. Then eight, and into tiny fragments. He threw his handfuls of torn paper into the air and they drifted down like snowflakes. “Why don’t you give up this art foolishness and take up a nice hobby? Have you ever thought of riding? Would you like to have a horse?” I shook my head. “I’m getting you a gelding,” he said, and he walked out.

  To preserve all of the art I had completed up until that point—several portfolios and a number of canvases—I hid it in the attic. My father removed all the rest of the contents of my studio, locked it, and bought for a high price a chestnut Arabian gelding, which I named Géricault after a famous artist who painted horses, although the groom, servants, and everyone else called him Jericho. Spotiswode Worthen had to go to a hospital. I sneaked away from my riding lesson to visit him there. The old artist was very ill and could scarcely talk. I said I was sorry I’d had to discontinue my lessons with him. I had learned a lot, I said. I was very grateful. It had been a meaningful experience for me. Nothing that I had ever drawn had been as interesting as the body of Tate Coleman.